by Jeff Hobbs
And now that two years had passed since their wedding, and it was 2003 and he was coming up on thirty and he’d committed himself to a life in which the only sign of progress was leaving the energy and noise and bustle of the city for quiet Sunday mornings with nothing to do, David Taylor had made certain adjustments to his dreams.
What was even more sad to Samona—and what made her feel enough sympathy to forgive him over and over—was that this readjusted dream was a minor variation on the life his father, Patrick Taylor, had lived. Waking up each morning to a wife who kissed his cheek, pretending it was someone else’s cheek, as she handed him a thermal coffee mug that he would drink on his way to the hardware store; the shitty little time share on Lake Michigan where they spent long weekends during the summer doing nothing; the beers shared with men his father trained himself to like at the bar two blocks from his store where he watched Cubs games before heading back home to read to his little boy in bed; on Saturdays he would take his son to the movies or teach him how to throw a baseball.
But David Taylor had promised Samona that he was going to make sure the dream ended differently than his father’s. There would be no other women. He was not going to get drunk in front of his kids. There would be no separate checking accounts. There would be no screaming fights followed by separations followed by begging forgiveness followed by two months of being polite and outgoing to his wife followed by the inevitable regression into anger and resentment. His son was not going to walk in on David Taylor while he was performing cunnilingus on the nanny in the room next to the pantry.
Samona was sympathetic to her husband’s sadness and undercurrents of self-loathing (for which he compensated by pledging to take care of her and direct-depositing $3,500 into her HSBC checking account on the first and fifteenth of each month), but she didn’t want to be his redeemer anymore. She didn’t want to be his charity or his mirror or the object of his frustration anymore, and yet she was too accustomed to being with him and too afraid of the alternative to allow their already moderately unstable marriage to dematerialize any further. And it hit her while brewing a skim-milk latte with Splenda that the only way to save them had nothing to do with redecorating and dinner parties and other minor distractions.
It had everything to do with not being dependent on him anymore.
Except this required her to be dependent on him one more time.
After Martha went home from the final dinner party, David Taylor walked in to find Samona watching a cable-on-demand movie about a woman who dresses like a man in the conservative South and the girlfriend of the abusive town hick who falls in love with her (or something like that), which he vaguely recognizes because Hilary Swank won an Oscar for embracing what David considered the movie’s hard-core liberal humanism.
“What are you watching?”
“A movie.”
“Any good?”
“It’s okay.”
In the kitchen David poured himself a tumbler of Grey Goose and noticed the dishes left over from the “dinner party” his wife had thrown that night. Pathetic. When he was placing the bottle of vodka back into the freezer he saw that there were two packs of Marlboro Lights on the top shelf. He decided not to ask about the cigarettes because he was tired. And then he sat down next to her and tried to absorb the movie that was flashing across the flat-screen TV.
“It started an hour ago,” Samona informed him. “You’re not going to get it.”
“I wasn’t going to ask any questions.”
This exasperated her. “What’s the point of watching something if you don’t know what’s happening?”
“I can figure it out.”
“You missed all the backstory. It’s not going to make any sense.”
“Then I’ll just sit here with you.”
She switched the movie off with the remote.
He stared at the TV screen, confused. “Don’t you wanna watch it?”
“Jesus Christ, David. It’s not even that good.”
He sipped the vodka, and then thought what the hell and drank it very fast. She stared at him. He was aware of this and also that he wanted another drink. He sighed heavily to make a point.
“Oh, I know—they’re all long days, right, David?”
She sat back on the couch and didn’t know why she was shaking.
David put his hand on her shoulder and massaged her neck.
Samona pulled away.
“So.” He sighed. “What is it tonight?”
“I feel like smoking,” she said.
He could only half argue—that’s all he was up for. “Since when have you been buying cigarettes?”
“Stop it.”
She walked into the kitchen and pulled a pack from the freezer and then David followed Samona out onto the tiny balcony. It was so small they could barely fit on it together.
(Had the balcony held the promise of being a romantic notion when they first moved in?)
Cigarettes were so expensive now, David was thinking. Something like ten dollars a pack. He did the arithmetic of being a pack-per-day smoker and felt dizzy.
David heard Samona say, “It’s too cramped out here.”
“Do you want me to go inside?”
“Go inside if you want to go inside.”
“I want to stand here with you.”
She shrugged.
“May I have a drag?”
She shrugged again as he took the cigarette from her.
He exhaled and started coughing.
She thought she was going to scream.
“I know,” David Taylor was saying. “I’m dull. I’m limited. I can’t help it.” Samona turned to him. “Do you think that? About me?” David asked.
“No. I don’t think that about you.” She paused before turning away. “I think that about us.”
And then Samona told David about Martha’s idea.
He quickly understood how serious she was.
“But—” he started, buzzed by the cigarette.
“I’m supposed to be moving forward,” she pleaded. “Don’t you understand that?” Then she said three things very slowly.
“I want to do this.
“I need to do this.
“Let me do this.”
David spoke. “How are you going to finance this…” What did she say it was? A printing fashion house? What?
“Martha’s looking into getting a loan. Or maybe equity from an investment.”
“But Martha can’t get that kind of money. And she doesn’t have the collateral.”
“But…”
He waited for the inevitable. It only took a moment.
“You do.”
The cigarette buzz quickly faded. David Taylor scanned the building tops that surrounded them. They were still on the balcony. He was looking toward Queens and he was thinking about a house he had seen on a Web site that was in a New Jersey suburb. David Taylor could give his wife her career. He could take the money that he had been putting away for a house along with the bonus he would be receiving in December and he could give it to Samona and she could rent a space and start a business.
David Taylor thought: This development would push my plans back two years.
Maybe three.
David Taylor thought: That should be more than enough time for her to fail.
The inevitable failure of Samona Taylor’s dream would become the beginning of David’s dream.
“I can move on this,” he said. “But there’s something I need from you.”
She was taking a deep breath. She was looking at him, wide-eyed. She was clasping her hands together tightly.
“What do you need?” she said. “Anything.”
“I want you to write a business proposal.”
“But I just told you what the business is.”
David sighed. He sighed the same way Samona had sighed so many thousands of times. He enjoyed the serenity the sigh gave him. He stood a little straighter and became a quarter of an inch taller.
/> “But if I’m going to invest in this—and that’s what it is: an investment, pure and simple—then I want to see the figures, I want to see the designs, I want to see a budget, I want to see a client list. I want a trajectory. I want to know what you two are capable of before I commit anything.”
He punctuated this by sighing again.
Samona nodded as if she understood what he was talking about.
“It’s very standard,” he assured her.
“I’ll call Martha tomorrow. We’ll get something together fast.”
“Just make sure it’s completely thorough. You should learn as much as you can before plunging in. That’s something I can tell you from experience.”
The next morning, Samona met Martha at Così with a laptop and they wrote their Printing Divine business plan for David Taylor.
At the same time, David Taylor made the call to his accountant asking him to transfer his savings into an active assets account.
It was a very easy thing to do.
23
From: James. [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 4:20 PM
Subject: (no subject)
Lost my fucking job. Cutbacks. Have check for you. I think.
PS Don’t know if you’ll get this. Leonard—fucking—Company sometimes screens emails with the word fuck and this one has it twice. No, three times.
New email: [email protected]
I received the same message from the Yahoo! address.
A few days later I went to James Gutterson’s apartment in the void of Murray Hill—nondescript apartment buildings that looked as if they were designed by not very imaginative children. A Starbucks or Così punctuated every corner. Laundromats surrounded the Morgan Library & Museum.
It was two in the afternoon. I rang the buzzer before static screamed over the intercom and the door clicked open. I was starving. I was so broke that I could barely afford a bagel at the corner deli. I was going to collect the Leonard Company check from him and immediately deposit it into my near empty Chase account.
James was wearing sweatpants with MH (Men’s Hockey) stenciled on the left thigh, and he was pulling on a sky-blue T-shirt with the number 32 emblazoned on it as he opened the door.
“My happy home,” he said wryly, ushering me in.
As we passed through the kitchen I noticed a number of items scattered across a small Formica table: a few cartons of Post-it notes, pens, a plastic paperweight in the shape of a hand flipping its middle finger, various manila envelopes, and a mouse pad with the Edmonton Oilers logo on it.
We headed toward the living room where Outkast’s “Hey Ya” poured from two six-foot-high Dunwood speakers that framed a huge entertainment center (TV, VCR, DVD player, CD player, Xbox). A long red sofa was packed into the room directly across from it. A bright red-and-yellow poster of Che Guevara covered one entire wall over a bookshelf that was crammed with pictures of various hockey teams to which James Gutterson had belonged as well as the trophies and varsity letters James Gutterson had accumulated. There was also a dartboard hanging near a cluster of framed photographs of a family composed entirely of men except for a tiny, robust woman. They all had the same wide face and wore hockey jerseys.
“You don’t have any pot, do you?” James asked me, falling onto the sofa with a grunt. “Or some blow, maybe?” His eyes widened with the thought of it. “I know it’s early but fuck.”
“Sorry.”
He sighed before assuring me, “Don’t worry. I know someone.”
I motioned to the Che Guevara poster and said playfully, “What’s this, James? Are you a closet communist?”
“No.” he replied, deadpan. “I’m Canadian. I just picked that up for eight bucks in Times Square and thought it looked cool.” His face turned forlorn. “That was back when I had eight bucks to spare. Back when I was all excited to move to this fucking pisshole.”
The ache was palpable. It was in the stale air that smelled like marijuana, and it was in the family photos and the molding dishes piled in the kitchen sink, and it was in James Gutterson’s bloated face and thin, unwashed hair. The bouncy Outkast tune only intensified the ache.
Since sitting down would only be an invitation to engage James Gutterson in a conversation, I decided instead to feign interest in his vast collection of DVDs (Slap Shot, Youngblood, Bull Durham, North Dallas Forty, Remember the Titans) but when I got to the porn titles I pulled back from the shelf. “Hey Ya” looped around for a second time. I turned toward James. My stomach made an audible growl.
“Fuck it,” Gutterson moaned with a wave of his hand. He leaned back into the cushions and draped his forearm across his face. “Fuck it, fuck them, fuck you, fuck me, fuck all. Just…fuck.” His chest rose and fell as he glared at me and said, “I wish you’d at least brought some pot.”
All I wanted was the check. “I didn’t know about the cutbacks until I got your e-mail.” And then I suddenly flashed on David. “What about Taylor? Did he survive?”
James Gutterson’s face curled up into a grotesque, fleshy mask. “You would have thought that David Taylor would have stood up for me.”
“How do you know he didn’t?” I asked.
“Because David Taylor was making a lot of the decisions,” James said. “Let’s just say he was very instrumental in weeding out the twenty-first floor.”
I didn’t say anything—I knew better than to interrupt as he leaned forward severely.
“And it doesn’t even bother me that I got fired. I mean, it does, but it doesn’t. No, what bothers me—what really bothers the shit out of me—is that he knew who was getting fired and he never warned me. I had to get the news in an e-mail. Now that’s fucked up. That, my friend, is the punishable offense.” I breathed in at those words and the thought of James Gutterson doling out punishment. “And then they locked my computer, took all my files, and wouldn’t even let me keep a fucking stapler.” He sighed and continued to stare at me. “You think I got a call or a note or anything from David Taylor?” An extended pause, and then, “No, because David Taylor was too busy doing his thing in the conference room.”
“What?” I blurted out.
James just replied, “You think I look like someone who would steal a stapler?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
He paused, sizing me up, then broke into a smile. “I think you’re a good guy,” James said. “If you weren’t you wouldn’t be here right now. But David Taylor. You want to know the problem with David?”
“You know what, James? There are probably a lot but—”
“No, I’m talking about something that you can’t fix.” His smile became a grimace. “He can’t laugh at himself.”
James was right. This was a key component in the makeup of David Taylor. He didn’t have the necessary faculties. Yes and?
He moaned again. “Aw, fuck it. What am I whining about? Millions of guys—Americans—are out of work. But at least I’m a Canadian!” He looked up and seemed to see me for the first time. “You want to sit down?”
“I’ve been sitting all day.”
“You know what? The last time I took off my skates—after a real game and not that corporate-bonding shit—but that last time I took off my skates I knew that something was wrong. It was like alarm bells in my head.”
“Alarming you of…what, James?”
“Life!” He seemed offended that we weren’t connecting. “And how it’s never gonna get any better than a hockey game!”
James Gutterson started droning on about Thunder Bay and the thickness of the lake’s ice and how sometimes it broke and you fell through but one of your friends would extend their stick and pull you back onto the ice and the game kept on going and how simple it was to skirt around the holes and the deep black water, and how that’s all he’d been thinking about: childhood games on the ice. You knocked people down and they got up. You fell and someone reached for you. You shot,
you scored. By the end of winter the sheet of ice covering the lake was a collage of brown bloodstains.
“What have I learned since coming to New York?” he asked. “No one is ever gonna reach out their stick to help you. You are on your own, my man. And the David Taylors of this world will let you sink and drown and freeze without blinking an eye. And if you’re lucky? Maybe you’ll float back up in the spring.”
That was James Gutterson’s story and he was sticking to it.
As soon as his lease was up on the apartment in Murray Hill, James was heading back to Thunder Bay, back to his roots, back to his brothers. One of them ran a small tech firm servicing lower Ontario. Another one owned a landscaping business and lived down the street from his parents. And at the end of the day James Gutterson—the only son who had escaped Thunder Bay and gone to school in the States (all the way to Cornell) and made good on the promise—was now going to recross the border, where he would probably coach a junior league ice-hockey team in Alberta while starting (what James Gutterson euphemistically called) a “financial service” company.
I asked what that meant.
“Like, tracking down debtors for credit-card companies and making them pay up—with interest,” he explained.
“Sort of like…a bail bondsman?” I asked innocently.
“No,” he deadpanned back. “Financial services.”
“Hey Ya” started again.