Crazy Sorrow

by Vince Passaro

  The wife, Marta, was sharp-boned and neurasthenic, with extravagant taste. It was, apparently, an open marriage though George heard only about Burke’s exploits, never Marta’s. She looked as if she might once have been a tigress in bed but now—skeletal, leather-brown from too much sun, heavily made up and lacquered and processed—the idea of her reenacting such moments struck George as horrifying beyond the possible boundaries of the kinky; she’d passed through John Waters territory and was on her way to Blake’s woodcuts for The Inferno. On the other hand… Having once thought of her this way he could never again think of her without a light-flash of jagged pornography. He would look at certain features: her overly managed feet, for instance, tan, tendoned, veined, and pedicured to a childlike cherry red; her small breasts, which hung below her gym-hardened pectorals and, as she was often braless, her tack-like nipples. He could imagine her—and imagined Burke liking her—in latex, growling and wielding a whip.

  * * *

  IN THE OFFICE the next week, Burke said: Do you still care if you kill a squirrel? Driving? Run one over? I used to care but now I live in the suburbs and I’m tired of the motherfuckers. They’re everywhere.

  Do you actually aim for them? George said. Do you go after them?

  Not in the Silver Cloud I don’t, of course not.

  He had actually purchased the Rolls from the old TV show. Spent a fortune bringing it into prime condition.

  The 735, maybe. Just kidding. No. I just realized the other day, one ran in front of my car, the BMW. I was on my way over to the Y to play basketball, the squirrel didn’t get run over, but I went to brake, to steer, and I realized I didn’t give a shit so I just drove. What the fuck are they always scampering across the street for? What is that? Can’t they go by tree limbs and electrical wires the way they used to do and as God intended them to do?

  That’s harsh.

  Very harsh, Burke said. But liberating. Oh my god. It’s so liberating.

  Own it, said George.

  I do, Burke said. I do. I own it.

  Burke’s ideas: the music. He was listening, rather compulsively, to Gould playing Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, struck particularly by the first movement: Allegro ma non troppo.

  He loved the phrase and wanted a coffee drink: allegro ma non troppo. George’s job was to figure out how actually to present this drink. A little strong a little sweet a little rich. The signage. The friendly explanations and background: what the fuck are we talking about? Well… this. One sign for the windows on introduction:

  ALLEGRO MA NON TROPPO:

  According to the Grove Dictionary of Music: An Italian phrase used in music signifying a tempo that is lively but not too much.

  According to us: a coffee drink perfect for afternoons. A doppio half-caff espresso, a half teaspoon of sugar and a teaspoon of sumptuous heavy cream. With a complimentary almond biscotto. Perfetto—ma non troppo!

  They paid forty thousand dollars to Grove for world English rights, all variations on this one-purpose use. Oh, how the sales and franchise teams wanted biscotto changed to biscotti. Oh, how they all clamored.

  Burke backed George. It’s biscotto, he said. Otherwise we’d have to give them two. We use the words correctly or we don’t fucking use them at all.

  Speaking of which, he said to George, there are no degrees of perfect. Either it is or isn’t.

  That’s the play, said George. It’s a little joke, a tease.

  Hmm, Burke said.

  Plus the U.S. Consitution, George said. You’ll recall that it cites our efforts to form a more perfect union. So tell it to Madison.

  Hmm, Burke said. Actually it’s not clear Madison wrote that.

  Burke was an American history buff. It was part of his political ambitions.

  The preamble, he said, came out of what was called the Style Committee, I think. Very modern touch, the Style Committee. I’ll have to look it all up.

  Perfetto—ma non troppo!’s days were numbered.

  And, in short order, sales and George’s own marketing people got their way, the products people developed a cellophane packet of two super-mini biscotti and so they were able to restore their precious i. Of course that didn’t last. The drink proved just popular enough to keep on the menu, morphing over time into the simple allegro. They abandoned the free biscotti altogether. An allegro was essentially a half-caff double espresso (doppio) with your choice of warm dairy (not steamed), and you then added your own sugar. A soy allegro with Allegra. It was a nightmare if you actually cared.

  In some ways a typical product journey at Brown & Co. The corporation formed its personality and then, from personality, its style, over time, just as a person might. This was Burke’s theology. From this grew what he called a culture. What George didn’t say was the company’s culture was essentially Burke and his fantasies of twentieth-century white mercantile wealth, writ large by people like George, who understood how to write it. Why one chair worked and another didn’t. Why the workstations with the library lights with green lampshades. At least they didn’t have oil paintings of hunting dogs and stags and such. The art was more post-Impressionist. The Upper West Side version of oil paintings of dogs and horses. There was a sentimentality, George didn’t mind calling it that but wouldn’t have so named it to Burke, about a life of cultured ease that was at the core of Burke’s vision of himself and of his company. It didn’t go with the destroyed bathrooms or the peanut butter and honey in the squeeze tube, not exactly, but those things were never permitted to encroach dangerously. Personality altered slightly over time, it matured, it developed, it responded to the world, it was sensitive to history. Burke actually spoke in these terms. Of course throughout the years the company’s style changed, it had to. To be in the world and to remain appealing demanded that; but it changed manageably, consistently, and always, always, in keeping with the corporation’s true and firmly guided, muscular personality. So you could say—it was true—that culture evolved. But it evolved—here Burke was insistent, though George said his insistence was contrary to the evidence—it evolved along the lines of its original moral formation.

  We have shareholders, George said. That’s now our moral formation.

  No, Burke said. No no no—the shareholders are sharing—that’s the word, sharing—in something that has a prescribed moral shape, a set of principles, they know this or ought to. It’s in all the paperwork, the prospectuses. It gets repeated. It’s part of the mantra.

  This was how he slept so well, rose at five, and worked out in his gym. This belief that what ought to be actually was.

  Watch the fucking bankers, George said. The fund managers. They don’t know shit from moral shapes and sets of principles.

  * * *

  ANNA HAD FOUND an online dating site, on Nerve.com, more sophisticated and openly sexual than the usual. Yet—still—listing after listing, the guys wanted to spend Sundays reading the paper, walking in the goddamned park. She had decided that anyone who put that shit in his profile was just out, executed for banality. Was there not one guy who wanted to spend Sundays fucking? What had happened to men?

  She went on some dates in Williamsburg. You could see the retail money machine coming in, the new restaurants, as destructive as napalm in the jungle. The problem with Williamsburg, she told one of the hipsters, who was her age but playing it eight years younger: One either lives in some kind of solidarity with the poor, or one is against them, an enemy. They are not specters, or colorful characters, or badges of one’s bohemianism. They are human beings with distinct lives united not by custom, institution and choice, like other communities, but by the fact that all the forces of a monied society have been arranged against them, with predictable and deadly results.

  He objected of course. She had already given up on him.

  They are colorful characters to you, she said. Or pains in the ass, depending on how much urine you have to smell, depending on your mood and on how mad and intoxicated and intrusive one
or another of them chooses to behave toward you. You are not one of them even though you’ve decided to share their space, take up their space in fact, import the expensiveness that will follow you your whole life. They are prisoners on this street and you are not.

  * * *

  NATE HAD MOVED up to New York in sixth grade, and it would be a while before they felt comfortable letting him go down to DC by himself on the train. Marina came up once a month—usually on a Friday morning train, returning Sunday; and more than once, probably a dozen times though neither would have wanted to count up the occasions, she and George met in hotels at midday. She had a career that was moving forward and, she told George, a series of chalk-striped lovers, guys who felt in tune with the universe on days they were wearing the same color tie as the president. None of them interested her for very long. Her career interested her and that was enough. George and she had known from early on that they couldn’t live together but they’d known too that they still very much liked fucking each other, a pastime they had yet to give up, despite the quality of an extended coitus interruptus it had given to all other affairs of the heart over those half dozen years.

  Burke, like Shrike harassing Miss Lonelyhearts, called Marina that succubus and spoke of George’s diminished life force.

  Marina settled on a hotel for a while, for two or three visits, and then moved it around; she preferred the very good ones. She loved sex in hotels; whereas for George, something about good hotels sent him spinning in a different direction: he walked into a nice hotel suite, and within minutes found himself thinking either of prostitutes or suicide. The first worked for her.

  After the sex, one day in 1999, Marina in her robe, they were drinking the wine he’d brought. George was rubbing his wrists and she said, I have to go out and get you a new shirt.

  Things had gotten dramatic.

  There’s time, George said.

  She was sitting on a red upholstered chair, wearing the hotel’s pale gray robe, black hair, red lips, one foot beneath her, like she was a painting. Her hair a little wild, her eyes dark and burning, a low warm fire. Her free leg hung down, brown and bare. It was likely because of this face and that leg that George had not been able to sustain any other serious relationship for the prior decade. A sadness began to fill him like air coming into a balloon.

  How are you keeping your tan? George said. Given it’s, you know, February?

  I’m spending a lot of time down south, she said. Down south, between them and among other professionals involved in the profitable domination of the place, meant Mexico and certain nations in Central America—Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, nobody had much to do with Nicaragua anymore, or Costa Rica, either, for opposite reasons; and the northern part of South America—Colombia, Panama, as far down as Peru in George’s case. For all the countries south of that, one used their names: Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay. North of that: down south.

  Are you still a sixteen? she said.

  What?

  Your shirt size, you’re a sixteen, I recall. Thirty-four sleeve.

  Depends on the store. Sometimes a sixteen and a half. Where are you going?

  I don’t know, she said. Paul Stuart?

  Then sixteen will work, he said. Then: Paul Stuart, the hotel suites—where is it again that you get all your money?

  From you, she said. Don’t you remember? I sold all that Brown stock at the height of the market, back in summer ’98 I think. Anyway, I have it in municipals now. A nice steady three percent tax-free. Easy to cash out.

  Later they arrived at the apartment, she in her Washington suit, he in his New York suit. She looked a little plump in those suits, not in an unappealing way, but it amused him because she didn’t look that way naked.

  Nate came into the hall, saw them.

  They have been fucking, he said in a singsong.

  Jesus, Nate, George said. His mother took off after him: he dashed down the hall and slammed the door to his room.

  That was nice, she called to him. That was very nice. I’m glad to know you have that kind of soul, that you’d say that. About your mother. You’re not even thirteen.

  The door popped open. You didn’t deny it! Door closed again.

  I’m going to kill him, Marina said.

  It pleases him, George said.

  What? Who can even think about that, their parents having sex?

  It means we’re close, we’re almost a family.

  Ha! That’s a laugh.

  * * *

  GEORGE SOMETIMES STILL took the subway to work. That Monday, Marina gone, he saw an empty ad rectangle on the subway, just a white board, someone had written in block capitals:

  WE ARE BEING LIED TO…

  On his Palm Pilot, he had a file from the office—a story about Burke. The communications VP must be walking around like a rooster.

  Brown and Co. founder and CEO, Steve Burke, started in the coffee business with a van and a stack of stolen, lidless takeout coffee cups; his great lament now, on the cusp of a new millennium, is his woeful position in the list of richest people in the United States. This year he was ranked thirty-second but, he says, he would like someday to break into the top ten. He knows he never will.

  “Banking, software, and health,” Burke says—everyone calls him Burke. “These are the only real growth industries. And very few own enough of health to get into those reaches of the list. So it’s hedge fund and software kings all the way.”

  He goes on, in what might be called his mercantile-philosopher mode:

  “Wealth at this level is a story, a fume, a tantalizing odor. It’s a set of symbols and fantasies. It’s a magic number before which special twigs, gathered by shamans at dawn, are burnt with precise rituals and little known prayers.”

  Are you going to start giving your money away, he is asked.

  “I have to,” he said. “It’s deeply corrupt not to. Just help me get my mind off this list first…” Burke laughs.

  “Actually that’s not it,” he says. “I’m looking for the right thing. We have a foundation and right now the foundation focuses on helping the people who plant and grow and pick the coffee we sell. A lot of those people are living right at the edge and if they go down we go down. If the workers all leave—the young people are going to the cities—if the children of the farmers abandon the land or sell it to commercial developers, we go down. So it’s a close-focused operation.”

  One essentially aimed at Brown and Co.’s continued profitability, he is reminded.

  “That’s true too,” he said. “Now I feel like a sinner being reprimanded, quite sternly, by the local preacher.”

  Burke lives in a large house in Connecticut, gets driven to work daily in a deep green BMW 700-series sedan, has a wife and a grown daughter, and says he is studying Buddhism.

  Studying Buddhism? George said.

  Well yeah, I’d like to. I’m thinking about it.

  Plus you want to make the ten-richest list? These things go together?

  Human beings are paradoxical, Burke said.

  I’ll say.

  Burke seemed in a good mood, a mood George attributed to the article, which was well done and—most crucially—about him. He looked good in the photograph, it managed to hide what could be severe and gaunt in his aspect.

  Burke said: Look the other, the list, I’ll never make the top ten obviously, those are all finance and tech people, not retailers. But it’s about winning. It’s about being at the top. And people knowing it. Even now, they bow. I swear, literally, I watch them, they lower their upper bodies, visibly, when I approach them in a room. I find this both insane and gratifying. Then they stand up straight again, as straight as they can, in order to measure up. I love all that. Call me craven.

  You’re craven, George said.

  But I want not to love it, Burke said.

  Thus you’re a craven Buddhist, George said.

  Now you get it, Burke said.

  So we’ve reached the point where the fac
t of merely having a conscience makes you a religious seeker, George said.

  This made Burke look sour. George put his hands up.

  No, no, not the face. Don’t give me the face. I’m teasing. I admire your conscience, I really do. Not many men in your place have a conscience. I admire you. You know this. I wouldn’t work here otherwise.

  Now Burke looked happier. CEOs were like toddlers, George had long ago concluded; he’d been grateful he’d had one, a toddler, to guide his way in dealing with the larger corporate world.

  The wisdom of Burke: You couldn’t really unset the thing, dial it back to have it be less profitable. Especially once it went public. Systems were in place. Every point earned on invested capital, above what they did in increased demand on the product, i.e., higher sales, came by cutting something somewhere, finding a way to increase the margin by some decimal point of a sliver, which writ large, eventually across more than twelve hundred stores, amounted to real money. Eventually you looked at labor costs. You had to. The banks forced you to and the market forced you to… the whole system, the whole gigantic American consumer capitalist machine, was focused without deviation on suppressing wages, avoiding taxes, and lowering the cost of goods. No wonder the whole fucking country was falling apart.

  23

  The year had turned to 2000 and they’d all survived the date-change calamities. Anna knew she should have been happy with her new job. She should have been excited. Aren’t you excited, her friends said. Yes it’s great I’m really looking forward to it… Yes, it was time. Time for a change. Ha ha ha. I really felt it was time to make a move. Why not. Not having money wasn’t a moral condition that was improving me ha ha ha.

  To make a move toward money. Real money. That moral condition thing, she wasn’t so sure. Every molecule in her body was dreading it. A high-powered job, chief of the compliance office, on the sixty-second floor of the WTC—she should have been excited. Her friends said, Aren’t you excited?—meaning this is your social obligation, to be excited—to endorse and internalize, to authenticate and affirm, this choice you’ve made! To allow this choice and the life you will build around it—your home, your vacations, your clothes, whom you date, the restaurants you go to and the objects you buy—to define you. And your affirmation will help us to continue to affirm—because we must affirm, again and again and again!—our own choices.