“George!” she exclaimed, then glanced about, as if to be sure they were alone.
Her self-consciousness only emboldened him. “Remember what you told me in your parents’ library, how you might be in love with me? Well—” He advanced the ring toward her, and heard himself say, “I have no doubt that I’m in love with you.”
She looked away, and he followed her eyes to the wall where, presiding over the occasion, in frozen judgment, were the portraits of Alfred Lazar and his wife, Harriet.
“So that’s what you wanted to show me?” George asked.
“I guess your surprise trumps mine,” she said.
“Well, Margaret? Will you have me?” He knew he couldn’t keep this up much longer, this show of authority and confidence. He remembered how as a boy he used to test his balance by walking on the railroad tracks that ran alongside the New Willard House. This moment gave him the same feeling, as if he might lose his footing, or a train might barrel out of nowhere and lay him flat.
Margaret fixed her gaze on the portraits of her parents—one blasé, the other imperious. With her gloved hand she brushed curls away from her forehead. “Have you talked to my father about this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you asked for my hand?”
“Was that the expectation?” George was teetering. He knew little of the social codes of Margaret’s class.
“So you haven’t made an official request?”
“No,” he exhaled, figuring all was lost.
“Why don’t you talk to him now? He’s right here.” She pointed to the portrait. “Go on.”
And so George did. He asked the oil painting of Alfred J. Lazar for his daughter’s hand in marriage. When he had finished speaking, Margaret said, “There, see, he approves, just as I suspected.” Then she smiled and pulled off her long white gloves. She put out her left hand, and as if by reflex George slipped the diamond ring onto her finger.
5
Everyone wanted to work for Imego. At the main campus in Silicon Valley, where Dhara and I went on business three times a year, employees had all the perks they could imagine: cafeterias serving gourmet meals; snack rooms stocked with fresh fruit, candy, protein drinks, and cappuccino; gyms; a swimming spa; decompression capsules; on-site masseuses and physicians; day care; language classes; laundry; dry cleaner; a twenty-four-hour concierge. Workers dressed purposefully casual and the techiest engineers got loose in Chuck Taylors and Battlestar Galactica T-shirts, and, though the sun rarely kissed their skin, cargo shorts. Imego knew that to keep the children happy work had to feel like fun, so we had fire poles and slides connecting floor to floor, foosball, pool and ping-pong tables, video games and lava lamps in primary colors, and along each wall, whiteboards where the inspired and punchy alike jotted down formulae, graphs, and assorted nonsense like the quote I could see from my office desk that day: Spandex: It’s a privilege, not a right.
Dhara loved Imego and couldn’t understand why I called it The Cruise That Never Ends. On the nights when she came home at 1:00 a.m. and I was in bed struggling to keep my eyes on a novel I’d been trying to read for a month, I asked her how many hours she’d worked that day, that week. I could understand what kept the engineers haunting the hallways at three in the morning, talking embrangled algorithms. But I worried that Dhara racked up hours just to be noticed or because she preferred to be at work rather than anywhere else. When she got hired out of Ohio State’s business school she bought the apartment where we lived now, not because Harbor City was an architectural landmark or in the heart of downtown, but because all she had to do was take the elevator to the lobby, walk a single block up State Street, turn left, and there she was, at the glass gates to the mother ship.
I asked Dhara once if she wished she’d been around at Imego’s initial public offering, when twenty-five-year-olds woke up instant millionaires, and she said no, if she’d gotten that rich she might have cashed out early and started her own business, but it would have been a mistake to leave such a company. It’s like family, she’d said, then asked me, What would you do with all that money? And though I was pretty sure I would get a good robe and slippers and dust off A Brief History of the Fool, or begin writing a real novel, I said I’d quit and figure things out from there.
What a pretty dream, I was thinking now, in our first week back to work after the New Year. If only I had that cash on hand I wouldn’t have worried about taking on another twelve hundred dollars a month. Dhara’s ultimatum left me no choice but to rent my father the apartment on the thirtieth floor of the east tower, across from our place. From our frozen balcony I could look down on his room. You wanted to keep an eye on him, Dhara said. Now you have your wish. With a pair of binoculars and a lot of time on my hands I could have played Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.
Tomorrow was the big move-in day, so I was distracted and restless at work. I’d been on the phone all morning with the rental office and the movers and my father, who would be driving the Mercury here—or at least that was the plan. I had tried to talk him into selling the car, but he said What’s next? My body for science? I wouldn’t have put it past him to get to the signs for I-55 and decide to head south toward St. Louis, then down along the great river, to Cape Girardeau, Memphis, through Mississippi, all the way to New Orleans, where someone would find him on a park bench in Jackson Square.
I would have gone to Normal and driven him myself, but I was off the road that week because we were having a videoconference with the poobahs at corporate HQ, and we’d all been asked to stick around. Dhara knew I had little desire to rise in the company. I was happier traveling the flatlands and daydreaming than I was pasting on a smile at work, where the hipness was purchased and I was forever reminded that I was an old-economy, creative-writing flake who couldn’t tell his OS from his El Torito. And everyone knew that I wouldn’t have been hired were it not for my popular wife, who moved with ease between the techies and the sales force, exerting all the charm of an innkeeper’s daughter.
Dhara was good enough to swing by my desk to say the meeting had been moved to the cafeteria. Since her promotion, she and I worked on opposite ends of the floor; I was the lone generalist thrown among software designers who were fine-tuning the mobile-book-search project; Dhara headed up the sales team, who unlike the vainglorious engineers at least saw Imego for what it was—the world’s wealthiest advertising company. As much as the techies liked to think they were driving the future, they forgot that the purpose of their eighty-hour weeks, the end result of all their striving, was to bait as many people as possible to click on those little ads.
I was following Dhara toward the stairs when we ran into engineering manager Eddie Hartley. A trust-fund kid from Rhode Island whose full name was Edward Billington Hartley III, he wore the uniform of the working class: Carhartt boots and a Stag Beer cap—It’s smooth…. It’s dry—pulled tight over his unruly curls. He was cheery and coltish and an unabashed flirt. He’s part boy, part wolf, I told Dhara once. Jealous? she’d said, the color rising in her cheeks.
“Lord Byron,” he greeted me. He had nicknames for everyone in the office. “Did you catch my quote of the day?”
“Was it something about Spandex?” I indulged him.
“That’s right.” He grinned at Dhara.
They had a laugh about the movie Hackers, traded some choice lines, while I tuned out. Eddie took the fire pole down to the cafeteria, Dhara trailed him, and though I was loath not to use the stairs because this was a job, not kindergarten, I slid down, too.
“Look at Lord Byron work the pole,” Eddie applauded.
Phony S.O.B., I wanted to say.
I followed them to a table to settle in for the meeting.
Onto the video screen came the company’s CFO, a more impish Mister Rogers and one of the few Imegoers who wore a tie. “Hello, Chicago,” he began and got right to the point.
I’d spent all weekend trying to convince Dhara that with the markets in a tailspin I shouldn�
��t sign a yearlong lease when my father could stay in our apartment for free. But she stuck to her warning—It’s him or me—and said Imego stock was well above three hundred dollars a share. Half what it used to be, I reminded her. But now it seemed I had reason to worry, as the CFO was telling us that in light of current circumstances the company would be cutting back on perks. A few months before, the Tuesday tea and Wednesday chair massages had abruptly disappeared, and complaints had been heard around the microkitchens that inventory wasn’t what it used to be.
The CFO trotted out an array of mixed metaphors. We’re headed up a rocky road, but we’re going to wade through it. Even the leader of the pack has to tighten his belt once in a while. But after the screen went blank, one line stuck with me and with everyone else in the room: We need to be more efficient, and in this time of fewer resources we’re going to have to feed the winners and starve the losers.
We all looked around wondering which of us fell into which category.
“I’m hitting the trough,” Eddie said. “This winner’s gotta eat. Anybody with me?”
Dhara got up, but I stayed where I was. Somewhere along the way I’d lost my appetite.
On moving day I kept sneaking out of the office for fifteen minutes at a time to monitor the progress at my father’s apartment. Imegoers whispered that cutbacks could be around the corner, so I wasn’t about to make myself scarce when Big Brother might have been watching. Word around the ping-pong table was that recruiters would be the first to go because of the hiring slowdown. Engineers assigned to newer projects would migrate to more established ones. The software designers in my bullpen convinced each other their work was secure; too much money and too much hype had gone into Imego Books already. I had enough to worry about, so I assumed my job was safe.
During one of my quick escapes I checked the voice mail at home to retrieve Lucy’s number. Dhara hadn’t got rid of it, but I wondered if she wanted me to delete or save the message. If I erased it she’d assume I’d called and was back in touch, but if I left it the reminder would always be there. I decided to press delete and hope the subject would just go away. Lucy’s voice hadn’t changed, still high-pitched and a little quavering, girlish for someone now past thirty. “I’m trying to reach Adam Clary. I hope I’ve got the right number,” she said. “It’s Lucy. Lucy Youngblood. If you get this message it would be great if you’d call me back.” She left her number—617, still a Boston area code—then hung up.
I took a breath and dialed, but the call went to voice mail after a few rings. I’m away from the phone right now, she said. I, not we. I couldn’t imagine she was still single, bright and attractive as she was, but I remembered the last time we spoke she complained that it was tough out there for a Harvard girl. Though she grew up, like me, in gosh-golly Indianapolis, and would have seemed right at home at a bake sale, she’d said that mentioning her job or where she went to school had a chilling effect on conversation. She regretted not dating in college, because at least back then she lived in the same building, shared meals and classes with other singles who didn’t find the word Harvard intimidating. I knew in part why she’d told me this: We went out through her junior year; she’d fly back and spend weekends in my dorm room in Bloomington, and I made a couple of trips to Boston as well. She burned the days with me, in other words, when she could have found someone else.
Now I wondered why she was calling me. We hadn’t spoken in five years. Was she married? Engaged? I doubted she had any idea about Dhara beyond the we and us on our voice mail. I decided to leave a message. “This is Adam,” I said. “Haven’t heard from you in a long time.” I gave her my cell-phone number so she wouldn’t try me again at home, then hung up assuring myself I’d done nothing wrong.
By the end of the day, my father’s furniture was in place; I’d paid and tipped the movers and was lining his shelves with books. He directed me from the couch with a green umbrella printed with the logo of the bank that seized his house. “Don’t bother with alphabetical. I’ve got my own system,” he said. “Handle with care, Mr. Internet. Some of those books are more valuable than you know.”
When he first accepted my offer he seemed melancholy and fatalistic, but arriving at Harbor City seemed to have got his vinegar up.
“Why won’t this couch go flat against the wall?” he complained.
“It’s not the couch.” I blew dust from the spine of an ancient copy of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology and explained that the walls were curved because the building was round; the elevator shaft ran up through the core, and the apartments fanned out from there, like petals from a stem.
“Well, it’s an absurd design. Completely impractical.” He tapped the umbrella on the parquet floor. “Who wants to live in a round building?”
To impress Dhara once, I read up on Harbor City, so I knew that the architect didn’t like square apartments because In nature there are no right angles. “He thought cylindrical high-rises were more efficient.”
“A lot of good that did the Tower of Pisa.” My father looked around, no doubt for further flaws. “And the balcony—it’s a suicide trap. I guess you weren’t thinking of Wing when you signed me up for this aerie.”
The orange tabby, Wing Biddlebaum, crouched in an empty box.
“He’ll be fine,” I said.
“Does he look fine?”
The cat’s ears were clamped to his head, and when I met his eyes he gave a long, plaintive meow.
“He has acrophobia,” my father said.
“Cats aren’t afraid of heights.”
“Tell that to your local fire department. Never heard of a cat stuck in a tree?”
“I’m sure he’ll be fine.”
“You should have seen him walk up to those sliding doors. That’s a three-hundred-foot drop. Wing got vertigo in his tracks.”
“Most people want the balcony,” I said. “This whole design—the way the apartments open up—it’s supposed to feel like a movie theater. When you walk onto those great balconies it’s like stepping into the picture. There you are, above it all, the whole city at your feet.”
My father thrust his umbrella toward the ice-encased balusters. “You want to go out there? Be my guest.”
“Wait till spring and summer,” I said. “You’ll thank me then, I promise.”
The idea of my father expressing anything like gratitude was my own private running joke. Forget that I’d bailed him out, moved him here, and become his de facto guardian. He wouldn’t have thanked me if I raised Sherwood Anderson from the dead, set him up in the apartment next door, and made him collaborate on volume two of the great biography that never was.
That first week I went to my father’s place at every opportunity, made him an appointment with a Chicago cardiologist, brought him healthy dinners from Whole Foods that he called too bland, too spicy, meager, crapulent. Over the first couple weekends I helped him unpack but felt as though we were making little progress. I wondered if he was putting his books and papers back into boxes, little by little. He complained all the time that he couldn’t find this letter or that first edition, and I told him if he’d only finish moving in he might see where everything was. I can see it now, he said. It’s riding in the back of a truck headed to the McLean County landfill.
I wasn’t sure whether he resented me for my intervention or if he had been calling for it all along. How could a mortgage lender take him in so thoroughly when he’d spent the first seven decades of his life inveighing against the credit system? I wondered if he stopped making payments because he was out of money or for some other confounding reason. When he lived in the walk-up by the Normal depot he had a landlord around to make sure he paid rent. But I couldn’t imagine even my father allowing his bills to gather on his desk and then slide to the floor unopened. And why didn’t he call my brothers or me when the bank came after him? I could have said it was stubborn pride—it wouldn’t be the first time—but he followed the news, and knew what would happen if he didn’t
send those checks. Bob Jagoda had given him every opportunity, yet he hadn’t gone through with renegotiating his mortgage. Perhaps a part of him had wanted all this to go down. Maybe he hoarded discarded objects and filled his walls with random old portraits to create the illusion of company, of life. And clattering around in that house, the shut-in from whom young neighbors kept their distance—Don’t play in his yard—only increased his isolation. Was the foreclosure sign a distress signal, a flag of surrender? I wondered if I’d ever know.
It was in the middle of one of these unpacking sessions that Lucy called my cell phone.
My father was going through old papers, his desk already a sloping heap.
Lucy sounded out of breath. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you back right away. I’m in the process of moving.”
“Me, too, as it happens,” I said. “My dad just moved to Chicago. I’m in his apartment right now.” Across the room he lowered his glasses and peered over the rims at me. Though I was only in a long-sleeve T-shirt, I slid open the balcony door and stepped outside so he wouldn’t overhear. The wind whipped across my face and whistled into the phone. I tucked my free hand under my arm and huddled in the corner to try to stay warm. I was thirty stories up in the Windy City on an overcast, ten-degree afternoon.
“That’s a coincidence,” Lucy continued, “because guess where I am?”
“You must still be in Boston.”
“Last week, yes. This week, no. I’m in Chicago. I just settled into an apartment in Lincoln Park. I was calling to see if you’d lend your brawn, but I realized it was too much to ask, so I got some pros.”
“So you’re here. Right now. How about that?” I paced the balcony.
“I got a job at the University of Chicago Press,” she said.
“Great. That’s amazing.” I could hear the ambivalence in my voice, clear as my own breath forming a cloud and disappearing. I peered over the railing at the gray mosaic of the frozen Chicago River, and felt vertiginous—at the thought of my father looking down from this balcony, of Lucy less than a mile away. “So tell me about the job.”
The End of the Book Page 6