Shining City

by Seth Greenland

  “The Chinese love card games, did you know that? I’d be in pig heaven. I’m already in Gardena a few nights a week, playing poker in the clubs. You oughtta come with me some time.”

  “I’m not a gambler.”

  “No kidding.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Marcus, look at you. Married to the same woman, what, fifteen years? Same job almost since you got out of school. Hey, I’m not saying it’s wrong … but you should think about China.”

  “I am thinking about it.”

  “You don’t want to go. I can tell.” How could Atlas tell, Marcus wondered? Was it that painfully obvious? Marcus didn’t want to ask. He watched Atlas line up his tee shot. “Would you take your family?”

  “Absolutely,” Marcus said.

  “I’d like to be somewhere Plum couldn’t ask me for money.” Atlas began his backswing. Reaching the apex, the club glided down and—CRACK!—the ball shot off the tee traveling high and far from where the two men were standing. Marcus turned his attention from the flight of the ball to Atlas, who was smiling enigmatically. Marcus couldn’t tell whether his friend was thinking about his golf shot or savoring the prospect of moving five thousand miles away from his ex-wife.

  Atlas didn’t discuss Plum for the rest of their nine holes, although he did bring up China several times, encouraging Marcus to at least go for a year. Yes, civil liberties were nonexistent, their attitude toward baby girls reprehensible, and what they had done to Tibet unconscionable, but they had the most dynamic economy in the world and what was so great about Van Nuys? Marcus said he would take it under advisement, which was what he usually said after Atlas began a speech with the phrase as your attorney. After hitting a rare good tee shot on the sixth hole, Marcus brought up the subject of Ripcord, asking Atlas how long he thought the store could last. Atlas shouldered his bag for the walk up the fairway and audibly sighed. He told Marcus he had no idea, but hoped the end would come soon.

  “Last week Plum asked me if I’d be willing to put more money into it. I said hell, no. I’m your ex-husband, goddammit, and business is slow.” Atlas hiked up his pants. “You know what my biggest case is right now? I’m defending some pissant USC sophomore who killed a fantail goldfish in a campus pond as part of a fraternity initiation. Shishkebabbed the damn thing on a skewer.” Atlas shook his head in dismay, not so much at the fate of the fish as at his own situation. He had made his bones as a lawyer in the mid-nineties when he successfully defended a former flight attendant named Cricket Bulger who had married a much older man worth nearly forty million dollars. When the man died, his middle-aged son had paid a visit to Cricket, during which he attempted to dissuade her from claiming an inheritance. She shot him with the gold-handled gun her husband had thoughtfully provided before he died. She hired Atlas, who convinced the jury the stepson intended to rape her. The seamy nature of the crime, combined with the large amount of money involved, created a media feeding frenzy, and when the trigger-happy stewardess hired Atlas his profile skyrocketed. That the dead man had no history of violence or sexual assault made his victory all the more remarkable, and for a brief period Atlas was one of the better-known members of the Los Angeles bar. In his middle thirties at the time, he expected a major career to grow out of the Cricket Bulger trial, but it never materialized. If it had, Marcus sometimes reflected, his friend would have been recreating with the captains of industry at the Bel Air Country Club instead of with a factory manager on a public course in the Valley.

  Marcus watched as Atlas lined up a long putt on the ninth hole. He wanted to talk more about the opportunity in China and the fear that he was trying to overcome in taking it. He was scared of Jan’s reaction should he decide to push this, and he was scared to relocate his family to an unfamiliar place, much less a different country. But his fear was overcome by his embarrassment: Admitting trepidation about this was simply too emasculating. So he watched as Atlas missed the putt, the ball rolling long by about a foot. Atlas tapped the ball in, and his round was over. Marcus had a fifteen-foot putt to attempt. He took two practice strokes with his putter, remembering to keep his shoulders relaxed and to bend his knees. Then he hit the ball. It rolled toward the hole but lost momentum and came to rest nearly two feet short.

  “You gotta hit the ball,” Atlas said.

  They were done playing by nine o’clock. Since there was no point in going to the factory, Marcus drove home, mulling his future in the slow-moving morning traffic.

  With Bertrand Russell nestled at his feet in the kitchen, he dialed the number of the main office and asked to be connected to Mr. Primus. Roon picked up the phone.

  “Ni hao.”

  “What?”

  “That’s hello in Mandarin. We move like the wind here, pal. What’s up? I’m in a meeting.”

  “I’m not going.”

  After an uncomfortable pause, Roon said “Jeez, Marcus, I’m not sure you’re making the best decision for your family.” Marcus knew the concern he sensed in Roon’s voice hid a less altruistic agenda. Now this titan of commerce would have to find someone else to run the plant in Guodong. “Are you sure? It’s a hell of an opportunity.”

  “I know, I know. It’s just that …”

  “China, Marcus! It’s the future!”

  “Is there some other kind of situation in Los Angeles you might have …” he asked tentatively.

  “What? Like another job?” Roon laughed, as if Marcus’s question was preposterous.

  “You’ve got a lot of companies, companies I probably don’t even know about…”

  “I need you in China. That’s where you fit in the big picture.”

  “But I can’t go. Are you sure there’s…”

  “Before I offer the job to someone else, I’m going to ask you one more time, because I don’t want another guy stealing your bacon. I’m trying to do you a favor here.”

  “I just can’t.”

  “Marcus, when I hang up the phone, the job is gone. I’m trying to take the company public and I’m trimming everywhere right now, so, this offer? There’s nothing coming after it. You say ‘no’ and … oh, come on! Are you sure?”

  Taking the company public? That was the first Marcus had heard of this plan. How much wealthier was that going to make Roon? How much more could he accumulate? Marcus thought about his family’s financial situation. He needed to work, clearly, but not in China. Trying to tamp his resentment down to a less mind-bending level, Marcus said “What about severance?”

  “I’m willing to give you a thousand dollars for each year because I’m a nice guy and we’ll round it up. So that’s what…?”

  “Fourteen thousand dollars.”

  “It’s a lot more than anyone else is getting.”

  “Are you kidding me? I’ve known you my whole life!”

  “You should reconsider and come to China.”

  “I should get at least a year’s pay for severance.”

  “It’s costing me a lot of money to move the operation overseas. The guys who do these deals go over the financials very closely. I don’t want to have to do any explaining to them. If you want a personal loan, maybe we can work something out …”

  When Marcus hung up, the silence was all-consuming.

  Chapter 5

  The heat that summer was peeling the bark off trees. The sun pounded the hills and canyons mercilessly. The valley floor was a kiln. The old air conditioners in the house heaved like they were on a death march, so Marcus usually walked around in nothing but gym shorts, putting on a T-shirt if he needed to do an errand. Jan would go to Ripcord most days. Nathan attended a nearby YMCA day camp where the kids took salt pills and looked for shade. Lenore traveled to Boston and New Jersey, visiting Jan’s sisters, and was gone for most of the summer. Marcus could only mow the lawn once a week, and after having cleaned out the garage he had very little to do other than wait for the mail to see if anyone had responded to the hundred and fifty résumés he’d sent out.

>   No one did.

  To escape the heat, Marcus would take Bertrand Russell to Leo Carrillo State Beach in Malibu, where he would sit under an umbrella, stare at the sea, and wonder how his life had come to this. There were no dogs allowed, and Marcus lived in fear he would be served a summons. But in his one piece of good luck, this flouting of the rules escaped detection. He kept up his golf game with Atlas, who regaled him with stories of the killing he was making in sports betting. As they trudged up and down the hot fairways, Marcus had to listen to how Atlas had devised a system whereby he could divine how professional tennis players would do in a given match, based on some incomprehensible algorithm no one else had discovered. Marcus wondered whether his friend had become delusional, until the day Atlas arrived in the Woodley Lakes parking lot driving a new Porsche.

  As the summer raged on, the Ripps’ home-equity loan dwindled to nothing. Credit card debt began to swell. June passed, then July. Days spent surfing business sites on the Internet, reading daily papers and ancient philosophical tracts in coffee shops, and working out at a health club where his membership was about to run out. One blazing afternoon, Marcus pumped away on a stationary bicycle beneath a bank of televisions, heart racing, perspiration running in rivulets off his face, haggard from lack of sleep. The screens were tuned variously to CNN broadcasting pictures of a desert war, a soap opera, and a financial show hosted by a middle-aged bald man who appeared to be in the throes of advanced dementia. Marcus sensed that this man, despite the wildness in his eyes, was like Roon, a ruler, a conquistador, someone to whom the Gods of Unbridled Money had revealed tantalizing truths in a language he, in his penurious condition, could never hope to understand. Even with the sound off, Marcus could not take his eyes off this avatar of wealth and acquisition. Why was this man so obscenely successful? How had he so assiduously avoided the slave model? He preached a non-emotional, even amoral program for teasing money out of the market. He bragged about investing in firearms stocks, pornography, and tobacco—the provenance of the money had no inherent meaning, only the money itself. And why not? His mantra was this: Someone’s going to get rich; it may as well be you!

  Marcus drove home haunted by the television host’s sweaty face. He was drinking a glass of tap water in his kitchen—having cancelled the water delivery account the previous month—when he received a phone call from Dal-Tech, a defense contractor in Sun Valley. There was a job opening for a procurement manager. Did Marcus want to come out there and talk about it? He asked what the job paid and, when he was told it could be anywhere between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars, depending on the level of experience, he scheduled an interview.

  Five months removed from savoring a lamb chop hors d’oeuvre in the ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel, Marcus found himself in the decidedly less enchanting precincts of Sun Valley on a blistering, smoggy August day. Jan had suggested that he do affirmations to get into a positive mindset, and though he laughed when she described how they were supposed to work, he was willing to do anything if it would make him appear a more attractive and less desperate candidate. Thus, he spent the ride repeating I am a fine executive and a good manager and those who work for me like me and trying not to feel like an idiot. It actually did seem to put him in a sunnier mood, and by the time he was parking in the vast lot at Dal-Tech, a huge complex in the hot shadows of the ragged Verdugo Hills, he felt a rush of confidence.

  “How do you feel about working on a technology that kills people?” Les Claymore asked. Les was the head of human resources at Dal-Tech. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt and squeezed a handgrip as he spoke, which made the muscles of his forearm bulge disconcertingly. He appeared to be in his forties. Marcus guessed his striped tie was a clip-on. There were several family pictures on his desk, and the photographs, blonde and smiling, looked like they came with the frames. Marcus had told him about working at Wazoo and the Praying Presidents line of toys. Les liked the sound of the product, and Marcus told him he already felt like he’d been a government contractor. Les did not laugh.

  “A factory is a factory,” Marcus said, forcing a smile.

  “But it’s different when you’re really working for the government,” Les said. “I’m a Christian, belong to Church of the Redeemer over in San Dimas, and as a Christian, I personally wrestle with what we do at Dal-Tech. I don’t kid myself. We’re building systems that rain shock and awe on our enemy, yeah, but sometimes the innocent die, too. And I have to ask myself—is that what Jesus would want? Is it?” He paused here. Apparently Les was waiting for an actual answer. Marcus thought before he spoke. The job had good benefits.

  “I don’t know.” Marcus would not be caught in this man’s trap, because he sensed something was going on, a hidden agenda of Les Claymore’s designed to ferret out anyone who didn’t pass a particular litmus test. He believed Les was trying to get him to say the wrong thing.

  “Jesus would understand, Marcus. He wouldn’t like it, but he would understand. We’ve prayed on it here in our Lunchtime Worship Group, and this is what we believe.” When Marcus said nothing in response, Les rose and stuck out his hand. “Okay, buddy. Thanks for coming in.” Taking the cue, Marcus got out of his chair and was treated to his interviewer’s iron grip.

  “Are you meeting with a lot of people?” Marcus didn’t want to leave just yet. Although he really did not like Les, he truly needed a job and this was the only interview he’d managed to get.

  “I don’t have to tell you that,” Les said, trying to lighten the mood and failing miserably. When he saw that Marcus’s expression didn’t change, he said “Yes, we’re talking to several candidates.”

  “The job has full benefits?” Marcus knew the answer but was not giving up easily.

  “Yes, it does. Okay, Marcus, thanks for coming in.”

  Marcus wrote a thank-you note to Les after the meeting, enclosing an article about isometric exercise, a gambit he picked up from a book he’d bought called Reinvent Yourself: A Guide to Finding Work When You’re Over Forty. He never heard from Les again. In the next month, he had interviews at a manufacturer of pressure-sensitive adhesives, a burglar alarm factory, and a concern that made mesh guards for fluorescent lights that were sold to prisons. All of them paid badly, and none of them went any better.

  Marcus and Jan were cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. School had resumed several weeks earlier, and Nathan was doing his homework. Lenore was in her bedroom with an eye-pain-induced headache. Marcus had attended a group meeting for potential salespeople that day at Pep-Togs, a purveyor of cheerleading uniforms. When he told Jan he’d left the meeting early, she asked why.

  “Because I can’t do that on commission, cold-call people … I can’t make enough money doing it to justify the time.”

  “Do you have a plan?”

  “Do I have a plan? Yeah, I have a plan. My plan is to get a job.”

  “Do you know how much we owe? With the home-equity loan and the credit cards and everything?” Marcus knew the debt had been growing and believed nothing was to be gained by obsessively monitoring its increasingly vertiginous spike.

  “How much?”

  “Almost eighty thousand dollars.”

  The deep fear engendered by that figure was bowel-shaking. Not ten or twenty, which were manageable numbers, or even forty, angst-producing but still within the realm of Marcus’s comprehension. Eighty thousand rumbled in his gut, slapped his face, broke his nose. The number was on the high side of his worst suspicion. But he did not want to show belly, so he simply said: “Okay.”

  “Okay? All you have to say is okay?”

  “Why don’t you get a job?” She looked at him, stricken, and he immediately regretted his words. His suggesting that she get a job broke the unspoken treaty between them, the one that declared he would not do anything to undermine Ripcord. She had poured a great deal of herself into that project and was deeply invested in its success. Her expression told him he had overstepped his bounds. But he felt a hopelessness wellin
g in him that freed his tongue.

  “I have a job,” she said.

  “It isn’t working.” That was the first salvo. Now the volley: “We need to get real about the situation we’re in. You never should have gone into business with Plum, who has no idea what she’s doing. The woman is a failed artist, not a retailing expert. We need to cut our losses.”

  Having managed to control her rising vitriol, Jan regarded him with a dark look. He sensed they were about to have one of those macro-marital conversations that always ended badly, the kind where external pressures threaten the union to a degree where one or both spouses, reacting overemotionally, contemplated calling a lawyer. But Marcus would not back down. He stared at her, equally darkly, and didn’t break eye contact. A major conflagration was threatening, one that clearly presaged separate bedrooms later that night. Marcus suddenly realized that he had forgotten to take air into his lungs. When he inhaled, he noticed a familiar scent wafting through the kitchen, something he had not smelled in a long time and was incongruous in the current context: marijuana.

  “Do you smell pot?”

  “The doctor prescribed it to my mother.”

  “He prescribed pot?”

  “For the glaucoma.” She said this matter-of-factly, implying that the treatment was so well known it had been on the cover of Newsweek, and if Marcus was going to be this egregiously uninformed there was nothing she could do.

  “You weren’t going to discuss this with me?”

  “Discuss what? The woman has a disease. She smokes dope to manage it.”

  “There’s a kid in the house,” he said, as if that should settle the matter.

  Marcus respected Jan enough not to simply overrule her as a male prerogative. So he crossed his arms and breathed in again, noticing as he did so that the sweet smell of the cannabis had become more pronounced. “Have you thought about what you were going to tell Nate if he asks whether Grandma’s a pothead?”