It wasn’t Wabi Sabi anymore. Sometimes yin and yang is really just black and white. Or oil and water.
I finished my birthday meal and stood in the darkening garden, watching almost four decades disappear behind me and nothing but fog ahead. When first cultivated in America, tomatoes were originally called “love apples” and were considered to be mildly poisonous.
Like love.
Book 3
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Rather than return to the city on Labor Day evening, I decide to take a 7 A.M. train on Tuesday and head straight into the office. Part of my reasoning is that I wanted to avoid the post-holiday Monday-night rush. But the bigger part is I couldn’t face getting into yet another argument with Brent. I’d had a fairly relaxing birthday weekend while he stayed in the city, and I just couldn’t face returning home to his to-do lists and exasperated sighs at my lack of productivity.
“Call me.”
Brent’s text message comes through at 9:32, just as my train is pulling into Penn Station. I don’t want to call. I’m already late for yet another agency meeting about how to save our giant airline client. The price of fuel has more than doubled in the last few months, and the already strapped airline is being forced to cut corners. One of those corners is rumored to be advertising—which means our agency. As someone who flies fairly frequently, I suppose I agree that if an airline has to cut corners, I’d prefer it to be from the marketing budget rather than, say, rivet allocation.
But the text’s brevity conveys its importance. Since we’re barely communicating at all, two words speak volumes.
I climb the stairs out of Penn Station and stand in a sliver of warm September sun.
“Hey,” I say after Brent answers on the second ring. “What’s up?”
“I got a pink slip.”
“What? Really?” I’m actually more surprised that he used the phrase “pink slip.” Who uses that anymore? Where does it come from? Did Martha really walk around the office with a little pad of pink paper, pausing at everyone’s door to neatly inscribe “you’re fired” on individual slips?
“It’s a bloodbath,” Brent says. “Rumor has it that there’s another dozen or so going down today, and more during the week.”
“Wow. That’s terrible. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Brent says in his normal, cool MBA/MD tone. “It’s not like I didn’t see it coming.”
It’s true. Even though we really hadn’t talked about it, we’d both seen it coming. The constricting economy had been especially rough on media companies like Martha’s. Ad sales had been plummeting, her television show was losing ratings, and stores that carried her merchandise were reporting steep losses. There’d been several layoffs already. And since “Dr. Brent” wasn’t directly tied to any one revenue stream, it was only a matter of time before the company began questioning its commitment to Brent’s initiatives. In the face of declining profits, Martha Stewart is not the kind of woman to utter, “At least I have my health.”
Brent explains how the news was broken to him by the publisher of one of Martha’s magazines. They gave him the option of continuing to write his articles and appearing on Martha’s television and radio shows as “Dr. Brent.” The company still wants to have the veneer of health. Which, I suppose, doesn’t surprise me. As long as everything looks well in Martha Land, everyone else will think that it is.
“What did Martha say?” I ask.
“She’s not here.”
“You mean you just spent two days with her, flying on the jet and eating meals together, and she never mentioned that you were going to be let go the minute you got back to New York?”
“Martha doesn’t really handle layoffs.”
I find myself growing enraged. While we may have been drifting apart, I still can’t help but want to defend him against others.
“That’s not right. I’ll be interested to see what she has to say to you.”
“I suppose she’ll come by later in the week,” Brent answers. “I’ve got a lot of projects under way that I’ll have to figure out how to have someone else handle.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?” I ask.
“Nah. It’s for the best, really. The stock is plummeting. I’ll never get anything done here in the long run.”
“Okay.”
“See you tonight.”
“Brent, wait…You there?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry about this. I really am.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“Love you.”
“You too.”
When I hang up the phone I start to do the calculations in my head. We’ve been good savers. We have our emergency fund. We’ve always been very careful to budget so that we could get by on only one of our incomes. It would be tight, but we’d survive. Financially, at least.
But I also feel more trapped now, as I suspect Brent does too. I’m certainly not going to part ways with someone who’s just lost his job. We’ve been together for almost ten years. We can survive a little longer together. At least until he gets back on his feet. He’s an MD with an MBA from some of the most prestigious schools in the country. He’ll probably wind up making even more money. At which point he’ll dump me for his twenty-year-old executive assistant.
We were going to have an even harder time faking perfection now than ever before. But at least now we didn’t have to worry about Martha coming to visit to rub it in.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
September 18: The Dow loses one-third of its value.
September 23: It loses even more.
October 5: The stock that Brent had received for the past two years’ bonuses has lost 87 percent of its value.
“Wow, these apples are pretty deformed,” Brent says, holding one up to the sun.
“Well, it’s their second year being organic,” I answer. “The bugs have really had time to entrench. It doesn’t matter anyway. We’re pressing most of ’em.”
With Brent having wrapped up most of his work at Martha, he’d been spending more and more time at the farm. I’m both jealous and a little angry. He’s living my fantasy. As he was always so fond of pointing out, it was my dream to move to the country full time. While I know this is not what he wants either, I can’t help but feel resentful. While I’ve been in the city trying to hold the advertising agency together in the face of a global economic meltdown, he’s been up at the farm canning five times as many tomatoes as last year, along with pickles, pumpkin butter, pear sauce, pickled green beans, and mashed pumpkin for Thanksgiving pies. To me, these chores would seem like a vacation. But to Brent, they’re boring. Plus they don’t involve social interaction. To Brent, a day without a business meeting is like a day with a business meeting is for me.
If there is an upside to the situation, it’s that Brent is using his time to grow the Beekman business. Now that he can work on it full time, he has less to nag me about. I have no idea whether we’re going to even keep the Beekman, but for now at least it keeps him busy. In his first few short weeks of unemployment, he already has a new business plan involving cheese, confections, home decor, and garden supplies. He’s using all of his media contacts to get us even more PR than ever.
Except there are fewer and fewer orders.
If we superimposed a chart of our revenues over a chart of the Dow, I suspect they would match up perfectly.
“Well,” Brent says, “we’ll have to find a few perfect apples for blog pictures.”
Even though our sales have fallen, traffic to the Web site has exploded. A lot of out-of-work people are sitting at home with nothing to do, I suppose. Not that this helps us in any way. We don’t make a cent unless people buy something.
“What constitutes ‘perfect’ in your mind?” I ask.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I know…like a Martha photo.”
“People like to see perfect things,” he says. “It’s aspirational.”
“I thi
nk right now this country could use a little less aspiration and a little more perspiration,” I say. “Aspiration is what got this country into credit card debt and underwater subprime mortgages.”
“You’re one to talk.”
Here we go again.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve spent thousands of dollars putting in your heirloom vegetable garden, and your French canning jars, and native perennial flowers for the garden,” Brent says.
“But those are valuable things. It’s better than spending money on gas-guzzling cars and McMansions.”
“No, instead we bought a real mansion.”
It was true. Were we as guilty as the rest of America for getting the country into this financial mess? We weren’t like the suburban house flippers I see on HGTV who took out some crazy Rube Goldberg mortgage. We got the standard thirty-year fixed delayed gratification of the American dream that our ancestors bought into. We also paid cash for a four-yearold used Ford pickup, not a Hummer. Instead of eating out every night, we lugged fifty pounds of our own vegetables back into the city each week. Plus we still wound up putting the appropriate percentage into our savings account each month. At least we did until Brent lost his job. We’re not supposed to be in financial jeopardy according to the news. We did everything the right way.
It seems no one is immune to the downturn—even Martha. With over 90 percent of her wealth reportedly tied up in her own stock, she’s lost nearly 84 percent of her net worth. Not only that, but according to her blog, both her houses in the Hamptons and in Bedford were struck by lightning the week after Brent and many of his colleagues had been laid off. To add to her string of bad luck, a Web site reported that Martha learned that the man she’d called her boyfriend for a decade had become engaged to a Swedish model in her twenties. And that Martha first found out about it from a gossip site.
Brent, the consummate businessman, harbors no ill will about his termination. Had he been in the CEO’s place, he’d have made the same decision. MSLO, like all media companies, is hemorrhaging money.
But I can’t help but wallow just a little in schadenfreude for Martha’s recent misfortunes. She never once e-mailed or called Brent after his layoff. In all my years as an employee, and later as a manager and partner, I have never let a terminated colleague disappear without privately acknowledging her or his contributions, and offering to help in any way that I could. For a woman who has publicly lamented her lack of friends, it’s hard to believe that her sixty-nine years of human interaction haven’t illuminated the cause.
But it’s hard to dwell too long on unpleasantness on a bright fall day at the Beekman. Even our relationship troubles seem to have melted away a little.
“This one looks pretty decent,” I say, holding up one of the apples off of our Golden Delicious trees for inspection. “If we shoot it from this side.” I hold up the unblemished side for his inspection.
“It has that little warty, crackly thing there,” Brent says, pointing.
“That’s hail damage.” After noticing the strange defects on many of the apples a few weeks earlier, I’d researched their origin online. “It doesn’t affect the taste. It’s going to be on most of them.”
“Maybe we’ll just retouch it out,” Brent says.
“I’d rather spend the afternoon making the tarte tatin than retouching photos of apples.” We’ve planned for our weekly “How-To” blog entry to be a step-by-step photo slide show of the method for making the classic French dessert. And, since it’s a beautifully warm Indian summer day, we’ve invited some of our friends to come by and share dessert and coffee on the porch. It will probably be the last outdoor entertaining we do for the year. Of course it will all have to be perfectly documented for the Web site, just like all of Martha’s parties. Well, maybe not exactly like her parties. Hopefully our guests won’t skulk around, bitching about us behind our backs.
About a dozen people show up for our “impromptu” dessert party on the back porch. We haven’t seen many of them for several months, having sacrificed our social life all summer as we chased the chaos of building the Beekman brand.
Everyone has gathered on the porch, and I shuttle between the groups of friends and neighbors taking “candid” pictures for the blog. Our friends know the drill and do their best to look natural. They’ve grown used to posing for the Web site. In the last six months we’ve enlisted nearly everyone in the town for some sort of project for Beekman 1802. If not to work making and wrapping the soap directly, they’ve been asked to open up their homes for blog entries, or to be interviewed by journalists to whom we’ve successfully pitched Sharon Springs/Beekman stories.
Doug and Garth are dressed in neatly pressed autumn flannels, and Michelle is wearing a chic peasant top. Heidi, the manager of the American Hotel, crosses the porch toward me. Spending most of her days surrounded by the whirlwind of Doug and Garth has made her equally quick and acerbic.
“Where have you been?” Heidi asks, pausing to hold her plate up to the camera for me to take a better shot.
“You’re a local. You should know,” I answer, angling in with the camera for a luscious close-up of the tarte on her fork. “We’ve spent the last three weeks trying to preserve every last tomato before the frost hits.”
“If you were really like the locals,” Heidi says, “you would’ve been down at the bar having a drink with a trunk full of Del Monte and a garden full of tomatoes rotting on the vine.” She adjusts her plate. “Did you get a good shot of that apple sliver on the edge there?”
I zoom in on the close-up.
“Can I get a shot of you leaning on the porch railing with the plate? The sun is perfect.”
She maneuvers herself between two other guests, leans against the porch pillar, and stares just over the camera lens.
“How’s this?” she asks.
“Great. Perfect. Hold it.”
I snap away. I hear Brent behind me, talking with some neighbors about…yep, Martha. She’s become as ubiquitous a topic as the weather around here.
“Are you and Brent doing okay?” Heidi asks.
“Sure, why?” I answer, trying to cover my surprise.
“I dunno. No one saw you both all summer. And now Brent’s spending all his time up here alone.”
“No, everything’s fine. I’ve just been really busy at work.”
“Okay, my thigh is numb,” Heidi says. “And I’m out of pie.”
“It’s tarte tatin.”
“You say ‘tomato,’ we say ‘tomater,’” Heidi quips. “Did you make it yourself?”
“Yep.”
“It’s good stuff.”
“Really?”
“You didn’t taste your own pie?”
I realize that I hadn’t. The tarte had taken the entire afternoon to make. I probably could’ve made it in an hour and a half or so, except for all the photos. Wash, snap. Peel, snap. Slice, snap. Caramelize, snap…
I head back into the kitchen to grab a piece for myself. The kitchen is still filled with the scent of baking; my mouth salivates. I also hadn’t eaten lunch or dinner, I realize. Nor a single bite of any of the apples we’d picked all morning. We were so consumed with inspecting them, trying to discover the “perfectest” one. Except for the small number we needed for the tarte, we’d sent the other bushels of apples with a neighbor to be pressed at Sharon Orchards.
On the kitchen table, the platter that held the tarte is empty, save for a few picturesque crumbs.
Brent’s and my annual apple-picking weekend has passed by and I haven’t had a single bite of an apple.
Brent insists on cleaning up after every party before we go to bed. In his mind, I’m sure he’s worried that someone might drop by for breakfast and see the mess. But as we walk our guests to their cars, Brent seems kind of distracted. When the final taillights vanish out the driveway, I turn back toward the house. Brent doesn’t follow.
“Whacha doin’?” I ask.
“I think I’m gonna go
for a little walk.”
Brent’s not the type of person who goes for little walks. No more than I can picture Martha simply taking a stroll to nowhere.
“Okay,” I say warily. “Don’t let the coyotes get you.”
It takes me nearly an hour and a half to clean the kitchen. I start worrying about Brent after about a half hour, and by the hour mark I was planning on calling all of the local hospitals like I’d seen done in Lifetime movies. Except that there’s only one hospital in a fifty-mile radius. If Brent had somehow been hit by a passing car, he wouldn’t have even made it to the hospital yet.
I hear footsteps on the porch. Brent passes by the kitchen window in front of me, throwing a shadow against the counter. I hear him take his shoes off, one by one, by the door. Clunk. Clunk. He enters.
“Where were you?” I ask. He looks strangely blank.
“I was just weeding some. In the garden.”
“At ten o’clock at night?”
“It’s a full moon. Or nearly.”
He crosses to the refrigerator and takes out a small bottle of Diet Coke. Diet Coke is his secret shame. It goes against everything he preaches, but he can’t break the habit.
“You know, the weirdest thing just happened,” he says. He’s holding the refrigerator door open so I can see his face.
“What?” I ask, leaning against the sink. Weird things don’t happen to Brent. He doesn’t allow them to.
“I was kneeling in the garden, weeding,” he says, “and then I just broke down crying.”
This is weird. Weird enough to actually frighten me a little. In the almost decade we’ve been together, I’ve never seen Brent cry. I’m the dramatic one. He’s the autistic robot MBA MD.
“What were you crying about?” I ask tentatively.
“I dunno,” he says, taking another swig of Diet Coke. I believe that he actually doesn’t know. He’s mentioned to me in the past that the only time he’d shed a tear in his life was when his father passed away.
The Bucolic Plague Page 20