The End of the Book

by Porter Shreve

He finished his glass of wine. “Are you?”

  “That’s a rotten trick.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’ll answer the question, but you have to promise that you will, too.”

  “Okay.”

  He was close enough that he could see the wheels of gold in her eyes. “I’m happiest when I’m looking forward,” he said. “And lately I haven’t had much to look forward to. So, there. I answered your question.”

  “I shall be equally brief,” she said. “I’d like to tell you I’m as happy as I’ve ever been. Yet I have no one to share it. And that makes me wonder if I’m happy, after all.”

  The waiter came. The bill was settled. And that night, while Margaret was off at Hull House learning photography, George rummaged through an old box and found the notepad he used to carry with him everywhere. He turned back to spring 1896, when he was eighteen and the future lay before him like so much open track.

  13

  When I brought over lunch on May 1 and my father didn’t show up at his apartment, his voice saying I might not see you tomorrow kept coming back to me. I even stepped out on the balcony and looked down toward the river-walk, but he hadn’t jumped, no sirens were closing in, and I scolded myself for imagining he’d ever do such a thing.

  Headed back to work, I saw him stepping out of a cab. One foot, two foot, cane, launch. He never took taxis, so I had to ask, “Where have you been?”

  He paid the driver and held his hat against a swift breeze. “I sold the Mercury. Grand theft auto, more like. Those lug nuts at the used-car lot—they fleeced me, then couldn’t be bothered to ferry me home.”

  I was shocked by this development, but tried not to let on. “I thought driving was your new form of exercise,” I said.

  “They should have taken my license long ago. It says all you need to know about the State of Illinois that I’m still on the road.”

  “Not any more, apparently.”

  “That car was a needless expense. I can get around fine.” He looked bowed and pale, even thinner than usual.

  “I left some grape leaves and hummus in the fridge,” I said. “I can follow you up, if you’d like.”

  He put a shaky hand on my shoulder. “I appreciate the solicitude. Really, I do. I’ll tell you what. You can get the door. That would be a help.”

  So I let him into the building, and we parted ways. I felt at once relieved that my father was no longer driving and uncertain of what would come of this.

  At the office, I was surprised to find Dhara waiting in my bullpen. She was talking to Eddie Hartley, who sat on the edge of my desk in a green-and-yellow John Deere T-shirt and an experimental beard that made him look like a shepherd in a seventh-grade nativity play. “Lord Byron,” he said. “We’ve been looking for you. Late lunch?”

  “I get my work done.” I usually put up with his banter, but the very sight of him, his bony ass on my desk, his Red Wing boots kicked up on my chair, made my eyes sting. “Do you mind?” I said, and he hopped down, his uncapped curls flopping over his brow.

  “You should be thanking me.” Eddie jiggled the mouse on my desk, and the screen stayed blank. “You left your computer on, dude. Less of a gentleman might have switched your keyboard language to Icelandic or dragged porn sites into your startup menu. I shut you down to protect you from sinister forces.”

  “I’d like to think my team members are more mature than that.”

  “Who are you kidding?” Eddie said. “Every workplace is a den of prank-sters. No one’s above the fray. In the Oval Office, at this very moment, the president of the United States is sitting on a whoopee cushion.”

  I turned to Dhara, and was happy to see that she wasn’t smiling. Perhaps the puckish charms of the engineering manager had finally worn thin.

  “I’ll leave you two alone,” Eddie said. Then he bent down a little so he and Dhara were eye to eye, and in the most earnest voice, as if he were playing two characters and had just done a quick costume switch, he asked, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Dhara nodded. “I’m fine. I’ll get over it.”

  After Eddie disappeared, I asked what was wrong.

  “So much for Silicon Valley,” Dhara said. Her eyes were red and she was sniffling. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen her cry. “I didn’t even make the short list. I came back from lunch to an e-mail: three lines, from the marketing manager’s secretary.”

  “I’m sorry, honey. I’m stunned.” In fact, I could hardly believe that one of the stars of our office had been shut out so soon.

  “Maybe we should go to the snuggle room,” she said. “I don’t want people to see me like this.”

  The snuggle room was the only secluded spot in the office—the joke was that if you were searching Imego and wanted privacy, this was the last refuge. Around the corner from the whiteboard and tucked away, it had pod chairs and deep sofas and was sectioned off with room dividers made of frosted glass. People seldom used the snuggle room except to catch up on sleep or to clamp on giant headphones and listen to electronica.

  With the place to ourselves, we settled into a comfortable couch. “I know how competitive Imego is,” Dhara continued, “but seriously, not even to make the first cut? I built the Books program here, remade the Marketing Department.”

  “It’s absurd,” I said.

  “Do you think it’s because I got my MBA at Ohio State?” She dabbed at her eyes with a Kleenex. “If my mom hadn’t been sick, I would have gone to Stanford or Berkeley. I could have been out there making contacts years ago.”

  I wanted to say You wouldn’t have met me, but I knew this wasn’t about us, and the best thing was to keep quiet and listen.

  “I wonder if it’s a flyover thing. I’ve seen my share of anti-immigrant bias, but anti-midwesterner? That would be a first,” she went on. “Do you think they have a point? If you were calling the shots at one of the world’s most desirable companies, would you hire some rube who grew up in a motel in Dayton, Ohio?”

  “Yes, I would. And you’re no rube. You’re the smartest, most driven person I know.”

  “You’re just saying that.” She sank farther into the sofa. “Maybe the flyovers are just that—a vast flatness under the clouds.”

  “From our balcony we can see the Sears Tower,” I said. “Chicago is anything but flat. It’s always been a hub of daring and innovation: We invented the skyscraper. We split the atom—”

  I cut myself off because Dhara wasn’t up for a booster speech. She was doing something completely unlike her: indulging in self-pity. “Maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe I’m looking for any excuse not to face that simple fact.”

  Still, Dhara continued working long hours, even though she said there was no one left to impress. The nation’s unemployment rate had reached a twenty-five-year high; the economy had lost three million jobs already in 2009, and the year wasn’t halfway through; and at Imego the first layoffs had begun, not in Chicago, but in similar “backwaters,” as Dhara called them. I reminded her that the company had let go of only two hundred people worldwide and still had five hundred job postings. “We’re growing, not shrinking,” I tried to assure her, but she pointed out that sales and marketing people were more vulnerable, since advertisers weren’t spending like they used to.

  Privately, of course, I was relieved we weren’t going to California, and I had to admit I’d been in denial about the possibility. When Dhara had applied, I was certain she would get the job; at the same time I never allowed myself to imagine our packing up a truck and driving across the country, deciding what to do with my father, finding a tiny apartment in the Bay Area, settling in to a new life. The prospect was too overwhelming.

  Besides protecting her own job, Dhara went out of her way to protect mine, which I wouldn’t have known had I not run into Eddie Hartley one day. Or, rather, had he not literally run into me. It was toward the end of May, the winter behind us, spring rains tapering off, and Eddie had begun to ride one of those sel
f-propelled skateboards—ripsticks, they were called—not only to work but around the office. I must have stepped into his path, because before I knew it he had crashed into my hip and lay crumpled at my feet.

  “Whoah!” He bounced up like a jack-in-the-box. “Lord Byron! Sincerest apologies!” He picked up his board and gave an exaggerated bow.

  “Do you have to ride that thing in here?” I hissed.

  “Time is money,” he said. “It gets me from A to B twice as fast.”

  “Seriously, Eddie, how old are you? Thirty? Thirty-five?”

  “I know, I know.” He adjusted his Stag Beer cap. “You’ve been upset. I heard about your dad, and I want you to know I’m sorry—all of us around here are pulling for him. My grandfather died of heart failure last year, so I understand.”

  “Just watch where you’re going. Okay?”

  “Hang in there,” he said, and loped off.

  When I confronted Dhara that night, she told me I should be thanking her. “You have to admit you’ve been playing with fire, taking two-hour breaks, leaving early. Everyone knows there’s a slowdown at the Library Project.”

  “So you’re selling out my privacy to protect the bottom line. That’s the Imego spirit!” I took out my iPhone and checked the time. It was nine o’clock, and neither of us had even thought about what to have for dinner. I collapsed on the sofa and tossed the phone onto the coffee table.

  “Do you want to lose your job?” Dhara sat next to me.

  “No, but I don’t like the Eddie Hartleys of the world knowing my business.”

  Dhara put her hand on my knee. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Then, as if on cue, as if to mock the rare event of my wife apologizing, my iPhone started buzzing, and there, in front of both of us, Lucy’s number lit up. Dhara was looking right at the phone, and I let it ring once, twice. Very coolly, she said, “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

  “Why should I?” I asked.

  “It’s Lucy, right? Go ahead. Feel free to pick up.”

  “I don’t want to,” I said as the phone continued to vibrate the table.

  “You don’t want me to hear your conversation? What are you trying to hide?”

  “I have nothing to hide.”

  “Then answer the phone!” Dhara was almost yelling now.

  But by the time I reached it and held it to my ear, the call must have gone to voice mail. “Too late,” I offered.

  “Too late is right,” came her reply. She sprang to her feet, rushed into our bedroom, and slammed the door behind her.

  I stood there pleading for fifteen minutes. She said nothing. I tried to turn the knob, but it was locked. When not a sound came from behind the door I began to worry. We had two balconies—one off the living room and one off the bedroom—and it crossed my mind she might jump. Imego had turned her down for the only job she wanted; her marriage was in a rut; her mother had died, and she was estranged from her father. I slid open the living room balcony door and peered around the corner. She was sitting in our bed, flipping through a magazine. What was wrong with me?

  The fridge was mostly empty, but I did manage to pull together an omelet.

  “I made you dinner,” I called, but she wouldn’t answer. I kept trying—to no avail—then ate half the omelet while pacing at the bedroom door. After rinsing the plate, I remembered the hex key from our utility closet and picked the lock.

  “Dhara—” I stepped inside the bedroom.

  “Don’t even.” She kept her eyes trained on her Dwell magazine. “I’m not talking to you. You can stay at your father’s tonight.”

  “I can explain.”

  “I’m not listening.”

  “I’ve only talked to her that once.”

  “Get out.”

  “I have no idea why she’s calling,” I said.

  “Adam, if you don’t get out of this room right now—”

  “I’ll bring the phone in here, and you can listen to the conversation yourself—”

  “You’re lying!” She threw the magazine across the room, and it landed at my feet, the pages splayed to a two-page spread of a beautiful outdoor hearth.

  “Dhara—”

  “Get out!” She shot up and headed toward me.

  I stepped out of the room and closed the door.

  I did stay at my father’s that night. Grabbed my toothbrush and iPhone, some stray clothes from the front closet. I took the West Tower elevator down to the lobby, the East Tower elevator up to the thirtieth floor.

  He answered the door in a tattered paisley bathrobe and slippers. “What’s the occasion?” he asked.

  “Trouble at home.” I held up the toothbrush.

  “That bad, eh?” He had an old book under his arm, which he slid into the valise sitting on his desk. “How about I make you a drink?”

  “Do you have something other than Diet Coke and rum?”

  “My mixer is Diet Rite. It’s my Rite of Devotion,” he said. “Not everybody’s taste, apparently.”

  He took two wineglasses and a dusty Côtes du Rhône from a cabinet. He said the bottle had been a retirement gift from his department chair, but he wasn’t a wine drinker and had no occasion to open it. He looked in every drawer for a corkscrew, and when he found one I popped the cork and poured us each a glass.

  “To marriage.” I raised a toast.

  “Yes, singular, not plural.”

  “I should object to that,” I said. “If it weren’t for your third marriage, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “To your first, and my third. Cheers.”

  We clinked glasses and sat down on sofas across from each other.

  “Tell me why you’re here?” my father asked.

  I didn’t want to get into it, but I was fresh from my banishment so couldn’t help opening up. Though I didn’t say we’d been thinking about moving to California, I did tell him that Dhara had been rejected for a job she’d wanted, and that I was on thin ice at work. I said that Lucy had re-surfaced after many years and I’d met her a couple of times behind Dhara’s back. “Somehow she seems to know. Maybe she’s been checking my cell phone,” I said.

  My father sipped the wine. “Blech!” He winced.

  I took a taste. “Seems fine to me. What do the sommeliers say? Earthy, with cherry and pepper notes?”

  “I’ll soldier on, then.” He swilled the wine in his glass. “Let this be our unholy communion.”

  I didn’t know what he meant by that, but later I’d remember it as a kind of harbinger. “Anyway, Dhara is thinking the worst. But I’ve done nothing wrong. Lucy and I have some common interests, that’ll all. She’s into books; I’m into books. There’s not much more to it than that.”

  “You’re meeting an old flame, whom your wife wants expunged from the record, if not the earth,” my father said. “You’re telling yourself she’s a friend, forgetting how you used to lust after her with the desperation of a starving polar bear. And the memory of that lust or love, animus or intimacy or whatever mad concoction it was, still lies within you, like a dormant virus. Merely seeing her again might trigger a full-blown disease. Your wife has reason to worry. You should be more worried than you are.”

  When I wasn’t willing to admit that he might be right, he cited his own life as an example. “I had to reach this state of bodily and psychic deterioration to have the long view and be able to say I made mistakes. Someone else’s story would have done me little good, but perhaps you will be wiser.”

  Over the years I’d come to know the cautionary tale that was his life, but usually from my mother or relatives. I couldn’t remember hearing it in my father’s own voice, at least never at length. He had been at the University of Chicago for a year before coming home to marry his high-school sweetheart in Marinette, Wisconsin, the summer he turned nineteen. He and Gladys lived in Chicago through college, and he stayed in the city another four years writing catalogue copy for Montgomery Ward, just around the river bend from this apartment. In 1957 they moved to Ann
Arbor, where he enrolled in the graduate literature program at the University of Michigan, and within three years Gladys had given birth to Michael. It was around this time that my father fell in with the Students for a Democratic Society, who were just springing up on campus. Their internal education secretary was a political science master’s student from New York named Rachel Gold. She smoked Tiparillos and kept a copy of C. Wright Mills’s “Letter to the New Left” in the pocket of her thrift-store blazers. When my father got his first tenure-track job he left his wife and son and set up house with Rachel a short walk from the Oberlin College campus. “But don’t cry for Gladys,” he said. “She and Michael were better off without me.” They moved home to northern Wisconsin, Gladys settled down with a paper-mill worker, and Michael grew up plotting his escape from the same small town his father had once fled.

  Rachel would come to know a similar restlessness. In 1966 she became pregnant with Eric, and a few months later married my father at the Lorain County courthouse. After the positive reception of Sherwood Anderson: Volume One, she made him go on the market. “I was happy at Oberlin—best job, best students I ever had. We lived forty miles from Clyde, Ohio, Anderson’s hometown. Even in 1968, with the world blowing up, I could still feel what it must have been like to live in a place like Winesburg a hundred years before. Maybe I dug in against the pull of Rachel’s wanting to get to the action.” But the best he could do was Indiana University. And Bloomington was no Berkeley.

  Rachel lasted a year and a half in Indiana. “She brought the war to the home front, all right,” my father said. “You should have heard the way that woman could curse and carry on. She was a hard-liner, and I was a floater. She wanted me to do teach-ins, join the strikes and protest marches, and when I would only go so far she called me a closet conservative.” He met my mother at the IU library, where she worked in Special Collections, and though he didn’t say as much, I was thinking she provided a refuge from the Rachel wars. Unlike Gladys, she had an advanced degree and was devoted to books; unlike Rachel, she understood the Midwest and could see both sides of an issue. Her temperament, too, fell somewhere in between, and for a while she provided a grounding force. Not the “twin flame” of my father’s revisionist memory—she was sensible, orderly, repressed; he was obsessive, scattered, unrestrained—but the best match he found in a checkered romantic career.