Fresh Complaint

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  “Piasecki said something interesting to me today.”

  “Who?”

  “Piasecki. The accountant. From work. He said it’s unbelievable that Jimmy doesn’t give me health insurance.”

  “I’ve told you that.”

  “Well, Piasecki agrees with you.”

  Stephanie closed the magazine. Then she closed the oven door and turned off the gas. “We pay Blue Cross six thousand dollars per year. In three years, that’s a new kitchen right there.”

  “Or we could spend it on heat,” Kendall said. “And then our kids wouldn’t abandon us. They would still love us.”

  “They still love you. Don’t worry. They’ll be back in the spring.”

  Kendall kissed his wife’s neck once more as he exited the kitchen. He headed upstairs, first to use the bathroom and, second, to get a sweater, but as soon he entered the master bedroom he stopped in his tracks.

  It wasn’t the only master bedroom of its kind in Chicago. Across the country, the master bedrooms of more and more two-salaried, stressed-out couples were looking like this. With the twisted sheets and blankets on the bed, the pillows either mashed or denuded of their pillowcases to show saliva stains or spew feathers, and the socks and underpants littered like animal skins across the floor, the bedroom was like a den where two bears had recently hibernated. Or were hibernating still. In the far corner a hillock of dirty laundry rose three feet in the air. A few months ago, Kendall had gone to Bed Bath & Beyond to buy a wicker clothes hamper. After that, the family had conscientiously tossed their dirty wash into it. But soon the hamper filled up and they’d begun tossing their wash in its general direction. For all Kendall knew, the hamper might still be there, buried beneath the pyramid of laundry.

  How had it happened in one generation? His parents’ bedroom had never looked like this. Kendall’s father had a dresser full of neatly folded laundry, a closet full of pressed suits and ironed shirts. Every night he had a perfectly made bed to climb into. Nowadays, if Kendall wanted to live as his own father had, he was going to have to hire a laundress and cleaning lady and a social secretary and a cook. He was going to have to hire a wife. Wouldn’t that be great? Stephanie could use one, too. Everybody needed a wife, and no one had one anymore.

  But to hire a wife Kendall needed to make more money. The alternative was to live as he did, in middle-class squalor, in married bachelorhood.

  * * *

  Like most honest people, Kendall sometimes fantasized about committing a crime. In the following days, however, he found himself indulging in criminal fantasies to a criminal degree. How did one embezzle if one wanted to embezzle well? What kind of mistakes did the rank amateurs make? How could you get caught and what were the penalties?

  Quite amazing, to an embezzler-fantasist, was how instructive the daily newspapers were. Not only the lurid Chicago Sun-Times, with its stories of gambling-addicted accountants and Irish “minority” trucking companies. Much more instructive were the business pages of the Tribune or the Times. Here you found the pension-fund manager who’d siphoned off five million, or the Korean-American hedge-fund genius who vanished with a quarter billion of Palm Beach retiree money and who turned out to be a Mexican guy named Lopez. Turn the page and you read about the Boeing executive sentenced to four months in jail for rigging contracts with the Air Force. The malfeasance of Bernie Ebbers and Dennis Kozlowski claimed the front page, but it was the short articles on A21 or C15 detailing the quieter frauds, the scam artists working in subtler pigments, in found objects, that showed Kendall the extent of the general deceit.

  At the Coq d’Or the next Friday, Piasecki said, “You know the mistake most people make?”

  “What?”

  “They buy a beach house. Or a Porsche. They red-flag themselves. They can’t resist.”

  “They lack discipline,” Kendall said.

  “Right.”

  “No moral fiber.”

  “Exactly.”

  Wasn’t scheming the way America worked? The real America that Kendall, with his nose stuck in Rhyme’s Reason, had failed to notice? How far apart were the doings of these minor corporate embezzlers and the accounting fraud at Enron? And what about all the businesspeople who were clever enough not to get caught, who wriggled free from blame? The example set on high wasn’t one of probity and full disclosure. It was anything but.

  When Kendall was growing up, American politicians denied that the United States was an empire. But they weren’t doing that anymore. They’d given up. Everyone knew about the empire now. Everyone was pleased.

  And in the streets of Chicago, as in the streets of L.A., New York, Houston, and Oakland, the message was making itself known. A few weeks back, Kendall had seen the movie Patton on TV. He’d been reminded that the general had been severely punished for slapping a soldier. Whereas now Rumsfeld ran free from responsibility for Abu Ghraib. Even the president, who’d lied about WMD, had been reelected. In the streets, people got the point. Victory was what counted, power, muscularity, doublespeak if necessary. You saw it in the way people drove, in the way they cut you off, gave you the finger, cursed. Women and men alike, showing rage and toughness. Everyone knew what he wanted and how to get it. Everybody you met was nobody’s fool.

  One’s country was like one’s self. The more you learned about it, the more there was to be ashamed of.

  * * *

  Then again, it wasn’t pure torture, living in the plutocracy. Jimmy was still out in Montecito, and every weekday Kendall had the run of his place. There were toadying doormen, invisible porters who hauled out the trash, a squad of Polish maids who came on Wednesday and Friday mornings to pick up after Kendall and scrub the toilet in the Moorish bathroom and tidy up the sunny kitchen where he ate his lunch. The co-op was a duplex. Kendall worked on the upper floor. Downstairs was Jimmy’s “Jade Room,” where he kept his collection of Chinese jade in museum-quality display cases. (If you had criminality in mind, a good place to start would be the Jade Room.)

  In his office, whenever Kendall looked up from his Tocqueville, he could see the opalescent lake spreading out in all directions. The curious emptiness Chicago confronted, the way it just dropped off into nothing, especially at sunset or in the fog, was likely responsible for all the city’s activity. The land had been waiting to be exploited. These shores so suited to industry and commerce had raised a thousand factories. The factories had sent vehicles of steel throughout the world, and now these vehicles, in armored form, were clashing for control of the petroleum that powered the whole operation.

  Two days after his conversation with Piasecki, Kendall called his boss’s landline in Montecito. Jimmy’s wife, Pauline, answered. Pauline was his latest wife, and the one with whom he had found marital contentment. Jimmy had been married twice before, once to his college sweetheart, once to a Miss Universe thirty years his junior; Pauline was age-appropriate, a sensible woman with a kind manner, who ran the Boyko Foundation and spent her time giving away Jimmy’s money.

  After talking with Pauline a minute, Kendall asked if Jimmy was available and, a few moments later, Jimmy’s loud voice came on. “What up, kiddo?”

  “Hello, Jimmy, how are you?”

  “Just got off my Harley. Rode all the way down to Ventura and back. Now my ass hurts but I’m happy. What’s up?”

  “Right,” Kendall said. “So, I wanted to talk to you about something. I’ve been running the house for six years now. I think you’ve been happy with my work.”

  “I have been,” Jimmy said. “No complaints.”

  “Given my performance, and given my tenure here, I wanted to ask if it might be possible to work out some kind of health-insurance coverage. I’ve—”

  “Can’t do it,” Jimmy answered. The suddenness of his response was characteristic: it was the same kind of wall he’d put up all his life, a defense against the Polish kids who’d beat him up on his way home from school, against his own father, who’d told Jimmy he was a good-for-nothing who would never
succeed in life, and, later on, against the vice cops who harassed the studio where Jimmy manufactured and sold his dirty magazines, against every business competitor who had tried to cheat him, and finally against the hypocrites and holier-than-thou politicians who undermined the First Amendment and wildly expanded the rights covered by the Second. “That was never part of your package. I’m running a nonprofit here, kiddo. Piasecki just sent me the statements. We’re in the red this year. We’re in the red every year. We publish all these important, foundational, patriotic books—essential books—and nobody buys them! The people in this country are asleep! We’ve got an entire nation on Ambien. Sandman Rove is blowing dust in everybody’s eyes.”

  He went off on a tear, anathematizing Bush and Wolfowitz and Perle, but then he must have felt bad about avoiding the subject at hand because he came back to it, softening his tone. “Listen, I know you’ve got a family. You have to do what’s best for you. If you wanted to test your value out in the marketplace, I’d understand. I’d hate to lose you, Kendall, but I’d understand if you have to move on.”

  There was silence on the line.

  Jimmy said, “You think about it.” He cleared his throat. “So, since I’ve got you, tell me. How’s The Pocket Democracy coming?”

  Kendall wished he could remain businesslike. But he couldn’t keep some bitterness out of his voice when he answered, “It’s coming.”

  “When do you think you’ll have something to show me?”

  “No idea.”

  “What was that?”

  “I’ve got no answer at the moment.”

  “Look, I’m running a business here,” Jimmy said. “You think you’re the first editor I’ve had? No. I hire young people and swap them out when they move on. As you may choose to do. That’s how it works. No reflection on the job you’ve done, which has been first-rate. I’m sorry, kiddo. Let me know what you decide.”

  By the time Kendall hung up, the sun was setting. The water reflected the gray-blue of the darkening sky, and the lights of the water-pumping stations had come on, making them look like a line of floating gazebos. Kendall slumped in his desk chair, the Xeroxed pages of Democracy in America spread out on the desk around him. His left temple throbbed. He rubbed his forehead and looked down at the page in front of him:

  I do not mean that there is any lack of wealthy individuals in the United States; I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property. But wealth circulates with inconceivable rapidity, and experience shows that it is rare to find two succeeding generations in the full enjoyment of it.

  Kendall swiveled in his chair and grabbed the phone. He dialed Piasecki’s number and, after a single ring, Piasecki answered.

  “Meet me at the Coq d’Or,” Kendall said.

  “Now? What about?”

  “I don’t want to discuss it on the phone. I’ll tell you when you get there.”

  This was how you did it. This was taking action. In an instant, everything could change.

  In the fading light Kendall walked from Lakeshore up to the Drake Hotel and into the street entrance of the bar. He got a booth in the back, away from the guy in a tux playing piano, ordered a drink, and waited for Piasecki.

  It took him a half hour to arrive. As soon as Piasecki sat down, Kendall stared across the table and smiled. “About that idea you had the other day,” he said.

  Piasecki gave him a sideways look. “You serious, or just playing around?”

  “I’m curious.”

  “Don’t fuck with me.”

  “I’m not,” Kendall said. “I was just wondering. How would it work? Technically.”

  Piasecki leaned closer to be heard over the tinkling music. “I never said what I’m about to say, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “If you do something like this, what you do is you set up a dummy company. You create invoices from this company. Then Great Experiment pays these invoices. After a few years, you close the account and liquidate the company.”

  Kendall worked to understand. “But the invoices won’t be for anything. Won’t that be obvious?”

  “When’s the last time Jimmy checked the invoices for anything? He’s eighty-two, for Christ’s sake. He’s out in California taking Viagra so he can bang some hooker. He’s not thinking about the invoices. His mind is occupied.”

  “What if we get audited?”

  This time it was Piasecki’s turn to smile. “I like how you say ‘we.’ That’s where I come in. If we get audited, who handles that? I do. I show the IRS the bills and the payments. Since our payments into the dummy company match the bills, everything looks fine. If we pay the right taxes on income, how is the IRS going to complain?”

  It wasn’t all that complicated. Kendall wasn’t used to thinking this way, not just criminally but financially, but as his executive pour went down, he saw how it could work. He looked around the bar, at the businessmen boozing, making deals.

  “I’m not talking about that much money,” Piasecki was saying. “Jimmy’s worth, like, eighty million. I’m talking maybe half a million for you, half a mil for me. Maybe, if things go smooth, a million each. Then we shut it down, cover our tracks, and move to Bermuda.”

  With burning, needy eyes Piasecki said, “Jimmy makes more than a million in the markets every four months. It’s nothing to him.”

  “What if something goes wrong? I’ve got a family.”

  “And I don’t? It’s my family I’m thinking of. It’s not like things are fair in this country. Things are unfair. Why should a smart guy like you not get a little piece of the pie? Are you scared?”

  “Yes,” Kendall said.

  “If we do this, you should be scared. Just a little. Statistically, though, I’d put the chances of our getting caught at about one percent. Maybe less.”

  For Kendall it was exciting just to be having this conversation. Everything about the Coq d’Or, from the fatty appetizers to the Tin Pan Alley entertainment to the faux-Napoleonic decor, suggested that it was still 1926. Kendall and Piasecki were leaning conspiratorially together, like a couple of old-time gangsters. They’d seen the Mafia movies, so they knew how to do it. Criminality wasn’t like poetry, where one movement succeeded another. The same scheming that had gone on in Chicago eighty years ago was going on now.

  “I’m telling you, we could be in and out in two years,” Piasecki was saying. “Do it nice and easy and leave no trail. Then we invest our money and do our part for the GDP.”

  What was a poet but a guy who lived in a fantasy world? Who dreamed instead of did. What would it be like to do? To apply your brain to the palpable universe of money instead of the intangible realm of words?

  He would never tell Stephanie about any of this. He’d tell her he’d been given a raise. Simultaneous with this thought was another: renovating your kitchen wasn’t a red flag. They could do the whole interior without attracting attention.

  In his mind Kendall saw his fixer-upper as it would be a year or two from now: modernized, insulated, warm, his children happy, his wife repaid for everything she’d done for him.

  Wealth circulates with inconceivable rapidity …

  The full enjoyment of it …

  “OK, I’m in,” Kendall said.

  “You’re in?”

  “Let me think about it.”

  That was sufficient for Piasecki for now. He lifted his glass. “To Ken Lay,” he said. “My hero.”

  * * *

  “What sort of business is this you’re opening?”

  “It’s a storage facility.”

  “And you’re?”

  “The president. Co-president, actually.”

  “With Mr.”—the lawyer, a squat woman with thatchlike hair, searched on the incorporation form—“Mr. Piasecki.”

  “That’s right,” Kendall said.

  It was a Saturday afternoon. Kendall was in d
owntown Oak Park, in the lawyer’s meager, diploma-lined office. Max was outside on the sidewalk, catching autumn leaves as they twirled to the ground. He ran back and forth, his arms outstretched.

  “I could use some storage,” the lawyer joked. “My kids’ sports equipment is crazy. Snowboards, surfboards, tennis rackets, lacrosse sticks. I can barely fit my car into the garage.”

  “We do commercial storage,” Kendall said. “Warehousing. For corporations. Sorry.”

  He hadn’t even laid eyes on the place. It was up in the sticks, outside Kewanee. Piasecki had driven up there and leased the land. There was nothing on it but an old, weed-choked Esso station. But it had a legal address, and soon, as Midwestern Storage, a steady income.

  Since Great Experiment sold few books, the publishing company had a lot of inventory on hand. In addition to storing them in their usual warehouse, in Schaumburg, Kendall would soon start sending a phantom number of books up to the facility in Kewanee. Midwestern Storage would charge Great Experiment for this service, and Piasecki would send the company checks. As soon as the incorporation forms were filed, Piasecki planned to open a bank account in Midwestern Storage’s name. Signatories to this account: Michael J. Piasecki and Kendall Wallis.

  It was all quite elegant. Kendall and Piasecki would own a legal company. The company would earn money legally, pay its taxes legally; the two of them would split the profit and claim it as business income on their tax returns. Who was ever to know that the warehouse housed no books because there was no warehouse?

  “I just hope the old guy doesn’t kick,” Piasecki had said. “We’ve got to pray for Jimmy to stay healthy.”

  When Kendall had signed the required forms, the lawyer said, “OK, I’ll file these papers for you Monday. Congratulations, you’re the proud new owner of a corporation in the state of Illinois.”

  Outside, Max was still whirling beneath the falling leaves.

  “How many did you catch, buddy?” Kendall asked.

  “Twenty-two!” Max shouted.

  Kendall looked up at the sky to watch the leaves, red and gold, spinning down toward the earth. He tucked the papers he was holding under his arm.