A Perfect Wife and Mother

by Peter Israel

  I almost ask, Whose name is Zoe?

  “Zoe,” she repeats. “Zoe Coffey. Your new daughter. Zoe Elizabeth Coffey. What’s wrong? Don’t you like it?”

  “No, fine. It’s a fine name. Zoe Coffey. It even rhymes.”

  “I love it,” she says.

  “Look, honey, it’s been a horrendous day. They’ve put you through the mill. You need to get some rest now. I guess I’m a little tired too, and I still have to go home, check on Harriet and the kid.”

  “Do you think I should take the Demerol? I’m hurting awfully.”

  “Of course you should.” I bend over, kiss her. “You do whatever you want to do. And I’ll be back, first thing in the morning.”

  I read it to Penzil over the phone, the minute I get home. It—the operative clause in the agreement—says:

  Coffey will be free to develop his own accounts (“The New Accounts”), which will henceforth be considered his in exclusivity, provided, however, that Coffey agrees not to trespass on any of the Company’s pre-existing accounts or relationships.

  “Is that new language,” Penzil asks after I’ve repeated it, “or a new concept?”

  “New? It’s out of fucking left field! Totally!”

  “What exactly does it mean to you?”

  “What do you mean, what does it mean? It means what it says: ‘Coffey agrees not to trespass on any of the Company’s pre-existing accounts or relationships.’ For Christ’s sake, the stuff I sell? Big Bears? It’s pretty sophisticated, Joe, high-ticket. It’s not for your average pigeon. Do you know how many customers there are, worldwide? Shit, if I can’t ‘trespass on pre-existing accounts,’ which means anybody The Cross did business with before, which means anybody I did business with before, then who the fuck am I supposed to sell to? Georgie’s cousin Millie in Houston?”

  “Now calm down, Bear. Are you telling me you had no inkling this was coming?”

  “Joe! They’ve been diddling me for two whole months, you know that! It’s been like pulling teeth, getting the paperwork out of them, and there was this detail to negotiate, that to decide, and Gamble was away, or Gamble’s been too tied up, or—”

  “But this is substantive, Bear. This isn’t just a detail.”

  “No shit, Sherlock! Joe, I had everybody lined up, all my old customers! They knew that. They knew I was talking to them right along! What they’re doing now is putting me out of business!”

  Even as I say it, I hear Holbrook in my ears. Expand your customer base. He’s been saying it for weeks, that I can’t rely solely on my Shaw Cross contacts. And God knows I’ve been trying.

  “Maybe it’s just a negotiating tactic,” Penzil is saying.

  “Negotiating tactic?”

  “Maybe somebody—Gamble, I don’t know—woke up at the last minute and realized they were giving you the store for no good reason. Maybe somebody said, ‘Why the hell are we paying Coffey a full commission on house accounts? It’s going to cost us a fortune.’ Maybe they figured the only way they could back off was to hit you with a worst case and negotiate their way out of it when you blew your cork. Maybe—”

  But it’s not a negotiating tactic. Suddenly I get it, the whole picture. They’ve just dropped the other shoe.

  For the last week or so, my phone has gone progressively dead. Mulcahy, first. No, Mr. Mulcahy isn’t in the office, he’s away on vacation. Where? On some island in the Caribbean. But can’t I call him there? I’m sorry, Mr. Coffey, the phone service down there is practically nonexistent. But Mr. Mulcahy will be calling in once a day, do I want to leave a message?

  I leave a message. He doesn’t call. Maybe I’d have thought it unusual—time was Gerry Mulcahy wouldn’t go to the john without calling me first—and left it at that, but then it happened again. This one out sick, that one also on vacation.

  In early December?

  Of course I noticed it! But I didn’t have time to focus. Once Georgie’s due date arrived, and the baby still hadn’t dropped, she hit this deep depression. She’d been flat on her back mostly—Dubin’s orders—and now, I could tell, she was scared shitless. I’d hear her calling for Harriet, and when I went upstairs to see how she was doing, Harriet would be leaning over her, over the bed, and she—Georgie—would say something like, “I’m hanging in there, Larry,” in her small voice, “I’ll be okay,” and I couldn’t tell her anything about what was going on. I couldn’t concentrate. I just couldn’t focus!

  And now this! This isn’t the beginning of a negotiation. This is the end of one!

  Penzil is saying something about legal remedies. Penzil thinks that, provided everything I say is true and documented, I have the basis of legal action, with damages. Penzil is asking me about my paper trail.

  “I don’t give a flying fuck about my paper trail!” I yell at him. “I want Gamble by the short hairs!”

  “Now calm down, Bear.” That’s what he keeps saying, over and over, that I should calm down. Keep cool. Nothing rash. It’s late, I should sleep on it. We’ll talk about it in the morning. Am I taking the 7:12? He’ll meet me on the platform. Above all, I should calm down.

  I calm down enough to know that, for once, I don’t want Joe talking me out of anything.

  Even back in November, well before my phone went dead, I may have smelled a rat. This was when the Great White had Schwartzenberg running interference for him, and I had a draft of an agreement (without the no-trespassing clause), but every time I tried to pin Schwartzenberg down, I got stuff like, “You know him as well as I do, Larry. He’s got to be hands-on,” or, “Leon says just go ahead and set it up, we’ll pick up on the details later.”

  So that’s what I did. I set it up. For two fucking months.

  But I also stirred up the ashes a little.

  The Aquarium had been damn near decimated on Bloody Wednesday. The Great White cut a wide swath through the ranks generally, but Big Bear’s troops tasted the sword almost to a man. It made no sense. Even Howie MacFarlane, for Christ’s sake. If anyone didn’t deserve it, it was MacFarlane. Do you know what the poor bastard’s doing now? He’s driving a taxi, while his résumé sits in a pile on a hundred or so desks. I’ve told him, “I hope to hell you don’t find anything. Just sit tight till I get my act together.”

  Everybody I talked to, when I was still going in, mornings, said, “Yeah, it’s tough, but you know the score, Bear. It’s the times. We’re all bleeding.” Meanwhile, I was told to give over my accounts temporarily to some four-eyed young nerd who’d been parachuted in off the trading desk, and I said to my customers, who thought The Cross was playing some kind of joke on them, “Just hold on to your money, guys, the Bear’ll be up and running come January.”

  After a while, though, I stopped going in. It was too much of a downer. One day a hero, the next a bum, because not only did the survivors treat me like some kind of leper, so did people I ran into who’d been put out on the street.

  “It stands to reason, Bear,” MacFarlane explained. “In their eyes, you came out smelling like a rose. For all they know, you sold them down the river.”

  “But that’s a crock!” I protested.

  “You and I may know that, but …”

  “Do you? Do you know that?”

  “Yeah,” he said, but with about as much conviction as a caterpillar trying to cross Fifth Avenue in rush hour.

  Still, it was MacFarlane I turned to in mid-November.

  “Come on, babe, I need your help,” I told him on the horn. “You’re still pretty plugged in at The Cross, aren’t you? I want to find out what the fuck’s going on.” I alluded to the runaround I’d been getting from Schwartzenberg, but beyond that, the sentiment on the Street was that The Cross had overreacted on Bloody Wednesday and no one knew why, not even Holbrook. Sure, as Holbrook pointed out, in a privately held company only a handful of people know the real numbers, but even in a quiet market, which was the understatement of the year, was there any way The Cross could actually be losing money? Only making less, ma
ybe. And even then …?

  “You’re right about one thing, Bear,” MacFarlane reported back—this was late in the month. “Something definitely is going down, only nobody at my level knows what. As far as what you said, it’s true, the Great White’s been out of the office a lot, and when he’s there, he’s mostly closeted with a handful of people.” He named them. All the inner circle, plus Harvey Cross, who was the last of the Shaws and Crosses and something of a joke inside the company. “Also,” MacFarlane went on, “people I talked to say he’s really been chewing ass. Even more than usual. Up one side and down the other. They say it’s Armageddon time, like he’s trying to milk every last nickel from the operation before the roof caves in.”

  “But why?”

  “Who knows? Do you suppose it could it be some kind of investigation?”

  “What kind of investigation?”

  “Beats me. Who would it be? The IRS? SEC?”

  “Did anybody say that?”

  “No. But the people I talked to said Gamble’s become a bug on documentation. Everything’s changed. The way it is now, they say they’re up to their armpits in paperwork.”

  I wondered, at the time, if MacFarlane was playing cat-and-mouse with me but decided he was just a smart kid guessing, the way I used to guess when I was in the Aquarium. I’d always been careful to protect him from certain things I either knew or suspected. If he was guessing right, I thought, maybe it explained a lot of things. But not, I also thought, why they were jerking me around. If they were jerking me around?

  And then my phone went dead, early December.

  And now Penzil’s talking about paper trails and telling me to keep calm. Sleep on it.

  Yeah, Runt, and if pigs had wings …

  18 December

  I’m calm enough to get myself up in time to catch the 6:48, where I don’t know a soul. I call Georgie from the World Trade, tell her I’ll be late getting to the hospital. Something’s come up and I have to stop by the office first. Then I ride up to the thirty-ninth floor. I’m determined to beat Gamble to his desk.

  I even beat Annabelle Morgan. I walk into the Great White’s inner lair, shut the door behind me, sit in his fucking chair. I’m still sitting there, a little after eight, when he walks in.

  Black briefcase in hand. Elegant son of a bitch, except for the white socks. Why the white socks, everybody wants to know? The Aquarium wits have always had a field day with the white socks, but as far as I know, nobody’s ever dared ask him, at least and lived to tell about it.

  He stops cold when he sees me there. His mouth goes open a little and his shaggy eyebrows up. Then down. It just isn’t something you do at The Cross: occupy the Great White’s throne.

  “Well, Larry,” he says, noncommittally, “what are you doing here this early? What’s up?”

  “Don’t let me get in your way, Leon.” I stand. “Come on. Sit down.”

  I have the agreement out on his otherwise polished desk top. It’s open to the relevant paragraph.

  “Sit down, Leon,” I repeat, ushering him. I stand next to him, pointing at the agreement. “Have you read this?”

  “What’s this? Oh yeah, our deal with you. Of course I’ve read it.”

  I didn’t notice Annabelle Morgan come in behind him, but here she is, tall and chic and surprised as hell to see me.

  “Hi, Larry,” she says. “How—”

  “No calls for the minute, Annabelle,” the Great White interrupts. “Just leave the door open, thank you. Now Larry, I—”

  “Have you read this part?” I say, pointing again. “‘Coffey agrees not to trespass on any of the Company’s pre-existing accounts or relationships’?”

  It can’t be news to him. He reads it anyway, and then I can see the wheels turning, like he’s choosing a reaction off some inner menu. He picks “Grunt” first, a short sound. Then his head comes up, his hand combing the mane of white hair, and he studies me. The beginnings of a smile at the corners of his mouth. Then, no smile.

  “You know, Larry,” he says, “you think you run the most efficient organization in the world, bar none, and then something happens and you realize it’s a crock. I told Vic, ‘Coffey’s going to shit a brick when he sees this, you’d better talk to him first.’ Hard to believe, but I take it from the expression on your face that he didn’t? That he just gave it to you, without explanation? Is that correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  Vic is none other than Victor Schwartzenberg, Chief House Counsel of The Cross.

  The Great White is shaking his head.

  “What a fucking comedy of errors,” he says, disgusted. Then he booms out: “Annabelle?” Then thinks better of it, tells her to forget it when she appears in the doorway. And back to me: “You want to know what really happened, Bear? I didn’t read this myself until last week. Of course, I spotted the omission right away. I said to Vic, ‘For Christ’s sake, the way you’ve drafted this thing, you’re giving away the store. We can close the fucking doors, Coffey’s going to own us.’ Obviously, that was never our intention, much as we want the deal with you. It was just bad drafting. I told Vic to talk to you about it, but come on, Bear, admit it, we go back too far together. You didn’t really expect us to let you cherry-pick our customer list, did you?”

  I stare down at him for a minute. I said: “Dynamite try, Leon.”

  His eyebrows go up again.

  “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

  “I mean that two months ago almost to the day, you made me an offer. You, not Schwartzenberg. You were putting me in business for myself, you said, your Number-One Seller. The next day, I started talking to these same customers you’re now telling me are off-limits.” I name names, ticking them off on my fingers. “I’ve been talking to them ever since, Leon, and you know it. You’ve known it all along. Some of them are your best customers. You talk to them all the time. You could have stopped me any time you wanted to.”

  I’ve just called him a liar, pretty much, and I expect him to react in kind. He doesn’t, though.

  “You’ve got it wrong, Larry,” he says evenly. And nothing more.

  “You knew it all along,” I repeat. “For Christ’s sake, you’ve been stringing me for two whole months, using Schwartzenberg as your front man. First it was this, then it was that. He had to talk to you, you weren’t here, you were out sick, you were in Timbuktu. I’ve been busting down the fucking doors to get the final deal out of you. So finally, yesterday, I got it. Right up the ass. And let me tell you, Leon, this is no oversight. What kind of jerk do you take me for? You—”

  “Let’s stop wasting our time,” he interrupts. “There’s only one way we’re going to resolve this.” He half-stands. “Annabelle!” he shouts at the open door. “Get me Schwartzenberg. I don’t care where he is, what he’s doing, I want him in Here.”

  We wait a minute or so. He starts pulling papers out of his briefcase, a signal, I suppose, that I’m in his way, but I don’t budge. Then Annabelle Morgan sticks her head in the door. Surprise, surprise: no Schwartzenberg. As far as anyone knows, he’s en route to the office.

  “Then get him on his car phone,” the Great White tells her.

  “I don’t think he drives. He takes the train.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Then, to me, “Well, if you want to stick around, Larry, we’ll talk when he gets here. There’s no point going any further without him.”

  “I can’t stick around,” I say. “I just—”

  “Oh, that’s right, I almost forgot!” Brightening, big smile, standing. “Congratulations, Bear! It’s a girl, isn’t it? Everybody okay?”

  He holds out his hand. I don’t take it.

  “Let me ask you something,” I say. “Who told them to stop talking to me?”

  “Who told who to stop talking to you?”

  I list the names for him. “For the last two weeks, I haven’t been able to get through to a single one of them. They won’t take my calls, they’re gone, they’re in Timb
uktu, too. It’s no coincidence, Leon. It’s a fucking stone wall.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

  “Oh, come on, this is Larry Coffey you’re talking to, remember me? The Big Bear? Somebody told them to stop talking to me, and don’t tell me it was Schwartzenberg, for Christ’s sake, I wasn’t born yesterday. It was you, Leon. You’re the only one they’d have taken it from.”

  For just a second, I’ve got him. I can see his lips working, spreading his cheeks, the jaw muscles clench. It’s the big boil inside, the Great White on a rampage, and I’m supposed to back off and crawl under my rock.

  But I don’t back off, and once again, I can see the wheels turning as he controls himself.

  “Let me talk to you as a friend for a minute,” he says. “We all get a little paranoid sometimes, say things we don’t mean. You’re going through a rough time, Bear, don’t think I don’t understand it. Big changes in your life, and your wife just had a baby, that’s enough to drive any man crazy. I’ll tell you what I’m willing to do. If you can’t hang around today, let me talk to Vic, see if there isn’t something we can do to ease the pain. We’ll work something out. You call him whenever you can. I’ll tell him he’s got to see you right away.”

  “If that clause stands the way it’s written,” I say, pointing at the agreement, “then there’s nothing to work out. Tell me straight, Leon. Does it stand?”

  “Of course it stands. It has to.”

  Just like that. I guess it’s his cool that unnerves me. I feel as though somehow I’ve blown the situation. Or maybe, though it’s taken me two months to wise up, it’s that he’s fucking me, and there’s not a goddamned thing I can do about it.

  “Tell me one thing, Leon. Why didn’t you just fire me in October? Wouldn’t it have been easier? Or were you just trying to save another severance package?”

  “I told you at the time. You’re far too valuable to this company.”

  “Only now you’re putting me out of business?”

  “I think you’re grossly underestimating your own capabilities.”