“Yannick. Hey, finally. You’ve been MIA all afternoon.”
“Yeah, sorry. I had a family thing here.”
“Everything okay?”
“It’s fine. It’s fine. What do you need, John?” He’s up on his feet now and pacing the yard. It’s hard to keep still when he’s taking these calls. Without some kind of movement to diffuse his irritation, it builds and stagnates. He’s been fighting against his irritability for months. But it’s a war of attrition and he’s losing.
“Growth projections. I was talking it over with Christy and we’re both still a little stumped on some things. We’re looking at your sales pipeline and we just don’t see enough leads to generate the kind of growth you’re projecting. Looks to us like you’re overestimating things. So I wanted to go over that with you. I think that’s where you and I left off.”
“No. No, that’s not where we left off, John. We already looked at the leads. Like we already looked at every single element of the growth projections. More than once.”
“I understand, Yannick, it’s just—”
“John, I need you to listen to me now. We’ve been over this ten times already, okay? We’re not gonna make it eleven.”
On his return trip across the small yard, kicking at pebbles in the rock garden, Yannick notices Karen out on the patio, signalling to him.
“Right, right, but—” says John.
“So look … we just need to sharpen our pencils now. We need to find a way to move forward. Because look, to be honest, my patience is starting to wear thin with you guys.”
Karen’s wrap-it-up hand motions become more urgent the closer he gets to her.
“I think we’re all eager to move forward, Yannick. But—”
“Let me call you back in five minutes, John. Okay?” He hangs up before hearing a reply.
“Vinegar deal?” Karen asks when he arrives at the patio.
“Yeah. Fucking idiots.”
“But it’s gonna go through, right?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure it will.”
“You know, I was doing some calculating. And if that does go through, and if you keep earning at this pace, we could be at seven or eight million in a few years.”
“I’m stopping at five. We said five.”
“We floated five. But we didn’t realize you’d be making money hand over fist like this. It’d be insane to quit when you can make this much a year. And—”
“We said five. Five is enough.”
“But what if it isn’t? Why not just put in an extra few years and be sure, right? In case something comes up. It’s just something to think about, isn’t it?”
Yannick looks down at her toenails, painted a light blue. Her toes change colour every week.
“Mom says the A/C in her room isn’t working.”
“It works just fine in that room.”
“She says it’s not working. Can you check it before she goes to bed? If she’s too hot, she won’t be able to sleep, and if she doesn’t sleep, I’ll have to hear about it all day tomorrow.”
“I’ll check.”
“And I know we said Camerini for dinner, but Mom wants to eat in.”
“Fine.”
“But we don’t have anything here.” They never have food on hand. Not meal-type food. With the exception of holiday feasts, they haven’t cooked dinner in years. The cupboards house only cereal and instant oatmeal and crackers. The fridge only milk and condiments and leftovers. And bone broth. “Can you pick up some sushi?”
“I gotta work, Karen. Can’t you go?”
“Mom wants to discuss the floral arrangements for the reception again. She’s having second thoughts on the camellias.”
“Isn’t it too late to change something like that?”
“Probably. Look, Yannick, it’s not like I want to spend the night in flower discussions. I don’t even care much about the flowers. But it’s important to her. What am I supposed to do?”
“Get UberEats then.”
“No, Mom thinks the drivers steal the food.”
“Call Joly. Tell her to hit Miku on the way home.”
“I did. She says she’s eating at Louise’s.” In her bare feet, Karen takes a few steps toward the tomato plant that she bought at the start of the season, now dried out and fruitless, because neither of them is any good at gardening. She flicks the brown leaves and frowns.
“Fine. I’ll go,” he says. He performs a quick scan of his body to determine his degree of impairment. He studies the tomato plant; it stays fixed in his field of vision. No blurriness. No spins. He’s satisfied. A slight buzz is working through his limbs, but it’s nothing he can’t shake off. It’s only been three drinks. “So what do you want?”
Karen ignores his question. “The showing at Louise’s house went terribly, by the way. In case you were wondering.”
“Oh shit. Sorry, I forgot to ask. It’s been busy.”
“The place reeks of weed. And she was home. She knew I had the showing scheduled. I told her to be out of the house. But she was there, hanging out on the back deck. Like, what is that?”
“She’s not working now, so I guess …”
“Why isn’t she working?”
“Well … she quit her job.”
“How do you know that?” Karen’s tone turns sharp, and some neuron in Yannick’s brain fires off a warning signal.
“Joly mentioned something,” he says.
Karen’s eyes don’t leave him, they don’t even blink. “Still. She can’t leave the house for an hour? So it’s not awkward when I bring prospective buyers by? I like Elliott, I really do. He’s easy to deal with. But Louise … she’s … a piece of work.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I think she stayed home on purpose,” says Karen. “Just to screw with me. She seems like that kind of person. I feel like she hates me for some reason.”
“It’s her childhood home, Karen. I wasn’t crazy about my parents selling the house either.”
“Yeah, but that’s you. How do you know she feels the same way you did?”
“She said—”
“So you talked to her? When?”
Shit. One drink too many. As he watches Karen’s form curved over the plant, his vision jogs. Her body seems to fracture, just slightly, just for a second, before he forces his senses to realign. Concentrate. “She called once … to talk about Joly.”
“About Joly? Why? What’s wrong with Joly?”
His warning neurons are shrieking now. He should’ve shut the fuck up. “Well … it’s been a rough couple of months for her, right?”
“Has it? But she got that job. I thought things were going well.”
“Yeah, I meant with the breakup … and with the—” He chokes on the word abortion while it’s still germinating in his throat. He neglected to tell Karen that Joly was, and then quickly wasn’t, pregnant. How well would she have taken that news? His idiot sister knocked up by accident. The baby promptly discarded. All of that against the backdrop of the fertility failures that are slowly fraying Karen’s nerves.
“With the … what?” she asks.
“Just with the Ben split. She really liked that deranged communist.”
“She’s better off without him.”
“Of course she is. But I’m not sure she knows that.”
With a last look at the plant, a look coloured with sadness or maybe disdain, Karen nods. “I already called Miku. They said twenty minutes.”
Yannick downs the last sips of his drink and listens to the voices in the kitchen pick up again. He slips inside to pick up his keys and gets back to work before he’s even in the car. “John,” he says into his phone. “Where were we?”
8
“WHAT DO YOU think of this shirt?” Anosh asks from the doorway of Yannick’s office. He’s eating an apple, really going to town on it, chomping at the crunchy flesh. Anosh has read that one piece of fresh fruit in the morning keeps men virile. It’s extremely fucking annoying. Every morning
this month it’s been one kind of hand fruit or another. Bananas. Peaches. An ordeal with a blood orange that resulted in bits of peel all over the carpet and sticky shit all over Yannick’s desk.
Last month it was smoothies.
Anosh spreads out his arms for Yannick to gaze upon his shirt in all its glory. The collar is stiff, very starched. It’s an expensive shirt. And it’s blue. Beyond that, Yannick has no opinion.
“It looks fine,” he says.
“Yeah, of course it’s fine. But is it too muted for Blitz? The detailing is subtle. Might not play so well in dim lighting.”
“I don’t give a shit about your shirt, man.”
Since Anosh shed his last girlfriend in the spring, he’s been a pariah at the clubs, at parties, anywhere he expects there might be women of a certain age and build and look who might be willing to sleep with him. He’s a menace.
“You don’t take pride in your clothes, Yannick. It’s ridiculous, how you walk around in relics like that.”
Yannick has to look down at his shirt to remind himself of what he’s wearing. It’s the plain white shirt Karen forced him to retire yesterday. Two complaints about it in as many days. Maybe he’ll just toss it for good. “This shirt is fine. It’s respectable.”
“It’s terrible. You were looking much better yesterday. Good crisp fabric. Classic cufflinks. I hate to see this regression.”
“Yeah, well where am I going tonight? Nowhere.”
“You should rethink that. How often is Baby Bourque in town?”
“Doesn’t matter. We’ve got the baptism rehearsal. It’s not gonna happen.”
“You’re missing out, man,” says Anosh. He bites hard into his apple, spraying the juice onto Yannick’s desk, and he takes a seat. “So where are we with John?”
“We’re where we should be, I think. I spent two hours on the phone with him last night. But this guy … I don’t even know what to say. Fucking retarded. Straight up.”
“Well speaking of retarded … you missed some choice candidates yesterday.”
“Nothing to work with?”
“One guy I dinged because he has a fiancée.”
“Uh-huh.” Fiancée is a red flag. Fiancées tend to make demands on time, and what they’re looking for is an associate on whom they can dump hours and hours of evening and weekend work.
“The woman might be all right,” says Anosh. “Seemed halfway competent at least.” There was only one woman among the eleven interviewed candidates over the last couple of weeks. Industry average. “But she’s twenty-eight. And married. How smart is it to hire a twenty-eight-year-old married woman?”
The conversation hits a break then, because, through the open office door, over Anosh’s shoulder, Yannick catches sight of Adam, team boss, barrelling down the hallway toward them. The wide swell of his gut swings from side to side as he moves. He does not look happy. But his facial expressions have been appearing way more extreme ever since he went off the Peesh (Propecia, the hair-loss drug) and embraced the male-pattern baldness he’d been artificially staving off. The effect is unsettling, but Yannick respects the decision to make the change. He’d like the balls to go bald. He’s been on the Peesh himself since he was twenty-four and first felt fistfuls of hair come out in the shower. Nope, no way, not happening, he thought then. He’s already a few inches shorter than he should be (topping out at just 5’8) … he can’t be short and bald. Who would take him seriously? But he’s more established now, just a few years out from retirement, and people do take him seriously. Besides, there must be risks to prolonged use. And bald doesn’t have to be the end of things. Enough guys out there are making bald work. He’s been floating a theory (a self-serving theory) over the last year or so that women actually love bald men, prefer them. They perceive a confidence in the decision to expose the scalp. Even Lou, who loves a good head of hair, who loves to pass her fingers through his hair in that way she has, where he feels like her fingertips are drawing out threads of tension, one after the other, so that he doesn’t suffocate inside this giant tangled knot, even she once, years ago, confessed an almost irresistible attraction to the bald Bush-era White House Press Secretary. Yannick could catalogue everyone Lou has ever expressed an interest in.
“Oh good, you two idiots are both here,” says Adam by way of hello. “Let me ask you something, why don’t we have any movement with Steingruber Vinegar? What the fuck have you guys been doing?”
“We’re working on it, Adam,” says Anosh.
“But they’ve got this third-party guy holding shit up,” says Yannick. “He just doesn’t understand what he’s doing. It’s … staggering.”
“Are you kidding me?” Adam bellows. “So get him on the goddamn phone! And explain to him whatever the fuck it is that he doesn’t understand!”
Yannick hasn’t been screamed at much since he started working here. Back when he was still in investment banking, working eighty-, ninety-hour weeks, the screaming happened all the time. It’s been less frequent at Goldstone, a rarity since they made him a senior vice president, but the top bosses still like to make him eat shit sometimes.
“I did get him on the phone. I was on the phone with him for two hours last night.”
“And?”
“I think it’s sorted now.”
“You think it is? Or it is?”
“He assured me we were sorted.”
“It fucking better be sorted. If this deal doesn’t go through because of some third-party bullshit, I’m gonna blow my brains out. We’ve still got a boatload of environmental issues coming at us. Mark and Isaac already set up a call with us about environmentals tonight. And I want both you idiots in on it. Six o’clock.”
“Six?” says Yannick. “Oh. Um …”
“Oh what? That’s a problem for you?” says Adam.
“No. It’s just … I’ve got a family thing.”
“Oh yeah?”
“It’s the kid’s baptism rehearsal. That’s tonight.”
“Sure, sure, why not just take the rest of the day off then? Or the rest of the week? Do you even work here anymore, Yannick?”
“Okay, relax, Adam. I’ll be here.”
“I sure as fuck hope so,” says Adam, and with those kind departing words, he barrels back out of the office.
So … that’s how that goes. Yannick won’t be out of here before eight-thirty. Maybe nine. He’ll miss the rehearsal and the dinner afterward. He’ll miss the whole thing, and that … well, that is going to be a problem.
“On the upside,” says Anosh, still chewing on his half-finished apple, “if you can’t make that baptism thing, you might as well Blitz. Am I right?”
9
SMOKY SUMMER AIR hangs thick over the city, and up here, on the rooftop patio at Blitz, the night is balmy. Yannick and crew have bottle service going tonight. They’re drinking top shelf vodka. The sting barely registers.
But Yannick’s drinking more than his share of bottle one, drinking quick and hard, because he doesn’t like rooftop patios. He particularly doesn’t like this corner booth Baby Bourque has procured, one at which every seat lands somewhere along the very edge of the roof. He keeps looking over the tempered glass railing behind him, feeling a pull to tip backward, to somersault through the air and crash into the concrete five storeys below. It’s not just that the urge is sharp, it’s that it lingers, it’s persistent. And it keeps him tense. So he drinks more. Which doesn’t actually do anything to dampen the urge, but does dampen his concerns over the urge. Alcohol is really not so unlike religion: both make the user a little more comfortable with the idea of imminent death.
Karen wasn’t happy to hear that he wouldn’t be coming tonight. “Find your own goddamn dinner then,” she said before she hung up on him. But she’ll get over it. He had to work, what else could he do? She wants her five, or six, or seven million.
Across from him, the Bourques are squabbling over brands of vodka. The brothers look alike (just a year apart), but Baby Bourque came
out better. Like all the genetic kinks were worked out on Bourque, the elder—the asymmetries of the nose and mouth, the too-low placement of the eyebrows. Their shared features make more sense on Baby Bourque’s face. But he’s aged, too, since Yannick last saw him about a year ago. Dubai must be working him hard.
To Yannick’s right, Anosh is flirting with the blonde waitress. It’s just the four of them tonight—Dave bailed, roped into some function with his fiancée, something to do with their wedding next month in Hawaii. Yannick doesn’t want to go to Hawaii, not for the weekend. Packing up the family for that trip is going to be a pain in the ass. Dave’s fiancée is a pain in the ass herself. She’s made Dave unreliable. He never comes out anymore.
“Great shirt,” the waitress says to Anosh.
“You like that? Feel it. The thread count is insane.”
The waitress pinches a piece of the fabric on the arm between her thumb and index finger and she rubs.
“Nice, huh?” says Anosh.
She laughs as she pours out the last few ounces of vodka among the four of them. She shakes the empty vodka bottle and says, “You boys want another?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely we do,” says Anosh.
“Celebrating something tonight?” she asks.
“Life,” he says.
“Well, that’s always worth celebrating.”
“Hey, bring us some water, too,” says Bourque, the elder. “Sparkling. With some lemon wedges in it.”
“Water, sure. Anything else?” She waits for all their heads to shake no before she disappears into the crowd on the patio.
The moment her back is turned, Baby Bourque smacks his brother’s shoulder. “Jesus, do you have to do that?”
“Do what?”
“‘Water. Sparkling. With lemon wedges.’ It’s fucking embarrassing.”
“Why? I want sparkling water. With some lemon wedges in it. Why shouldn’t she bring me that if that’s what I want?”
“Because she’s over there thinking you’re an idiot.”
The Towers of Babylon Page 24