by Jon Michaud
Walking back to the house, Thomas considered with some amazement just how screwed up things had gotten. Miscarriage, layoff, and now he found himself a pseudo-stepfather to Clara's pregnant niece. What would that make him in relation to her child once it was born? Pseudo-stepgrandfather? Did they have greeting cards for that? Deysei had been living with them for almost two weeks now and so far, it had not yet been as bad as he'd feared, but it was only a matter of time, he knew, until something else happened, some new complication that would make them all wish Deysei had never moved in. There was always this kind of kicker in every dealing with Clara's family. They agreed to meet you at an expensive restaurant and then announced they were broke. They borrowed your car and returned it with no gas in the tank. They asked you to look after their teenage daughter and then revealed that she was pregnant.
Thomas bypassed the front door and proceeded to the driveway, where the Odyssey was parked. He got in and backed the van out. At the corner, he turned left on Irvington Avenue, passing the discount gas station that served as his barometer of the economy—and thus, his employment prospects. If the price of a gallon of regular had gone down, all was well. If the price had gone up, there was reason to be worried. He'd submitted several job applications in the past few weeks and so was disappointed to see that the plastic numerals atop the faded blue filling station sign showed an increase of three cents a gallon.
Putting this omen out of his mind, he motored into the center of Millwood and parked in the municipal lot. Just off the main street was a florist's shop, where he bought a bouquet of flowers—a spray of irises and snapdragons. He got back in the van and drove out to the far side of town, ascending the hill to the lower slopes of South Mountain. Carved into the gently graded base of the hill was Newstead, a neighborhood of multimillion-dollar homes, the beginning of a swathe of wealth that continued south and west through Short Hills and Summit to Morris County.
Thomas parked the Odyssey in front of a mock Tudor mansion complete with exposed beams, cross-hatched windows, and mushroom-shaped chimney pots. He walked along the paved walk-way to the front door, looking at the neighboring houses as he did so. The street was deserted. People who lived in these houses either went to work early or enjoyed the privilege of not having to work at all. Thomas had come to see one of the latter, who was a widow to one of the former.
On his way up the path he couldn't help but notice that the FOR SALE sign planted in the lawn now had a CONTRACT PENDING banner attached to it. This house had been a place of respite and escape from his troubled year. He pictured her, Melissa, his mistress, sitting in the kitchen right now, reading the paper, the long, tanned length of her arm revealed by one of those sleeveless tops she liked to wear in the summer. He imagined her looking up as he rang the bell and walking through her house toward him. He understood now that he had come here too often, dropping by unexpectedly whenever he had an hour to spare. And it wasn't always for some quick satisfaction against the kitchen counter or a make-out session in her sumptuous living room. More often than not, he was happy just to be near her, to shadow her as she worked in the garden, to sit with her for a few minutes while she watched something on TV, to enjoy the kind of stress-free pleasure he rarely felt in his own home. It was like dropping in on the life he might have with her, a tantalizing prospect. Let's go see what I'd be doing right now if I married Melissa.
That is the way it had been throughout the spring and summer until, in August, Melissa had informed him that her period was late. The irony of it, coming after Clara's latest miscarriage, was not lost on him.
“What are you going to do?” he had asked her.
“I'm keeping it. The question is, what are you going to do?”
A few days later, her period arrived and, he thought, the catastrophe was averted. But Melissa saw it differently. “Baby or no baby, I need an answer from you, Thomas. Are you going to be with me? Are you going to leave your wife?”
He cradled the flowers and rang the bell and stood back on the brick porch expectantly. Moments later, Melissa's shape became visible through the translucent pebbled glass of the front door, just as he'd imagined. The door unlatched and there she was, saying, “Somehow I knew it was going to be you.” The cold front of air-conditioned interior air flowed onto him, evaporating the sweat on his forehead.
“Hi,” he said. He leaned in and kissed her. “You have time for a quick cup of coffee?”
She smiled and shook her head. She was leaning on the open door in such a way that he could not see her left arm and leg. What parts of her he could see—the right arm with its Wonder Woman–like silver bracelet, the right leg encased in a pair of blue linen capri pants, her head, with the short strawberry-blond hair and blue-gray eyes—were as enticing and appealing as ever. He noticed that she was wearing a pair of those rubber gardening shoes that had become so trendy that year. They looked terrible on her and obscured her pretty, pedicured toes.
“Have you thought about what I said last week?”
“Yes,” he said. “I've thought of hardly anything else.”
“And,” she said, swinging the door toward him a fraction of an inch. “Do you have an answer for me?”
He looked past her for a moment, into the house. Right behind her was the living room, which was darkened, but, beyond that darkness, he could see into the kitchen, which had a skylight and was flooded with the summer sun. The kitchen is where he'd hoped to be this morning.
“No,” he said.
“Not yet.”
“OK,” she said. “Then I'm afraid I don't have time for coffee this morning, Tom. And I can't accept those flowers, no matter how beautiful they are.”
“Come on,” he said. “It's not easy.”
“I know it's not easy; it's not easy for me, either,” she said. “But I need an answer. Come back when you have one, sweetheart.” And she closed the door. It was not quite a slam, but abrupt enough to sound like a rebuke.
MELISSA HAD BEEN his last client, the final job for BiblioFile, before he'd been laid off. Thomas continued to view his time there as halcyon, more so with each passing week of unemployment. He still recalled, with anguish, the winter morning he'd been summoned to his supervisor's office. Broadly speaking, there were three kinds of employees at the company: the programmers, or “techs”; the librarians, or “knowledge managers”; and the salesmen, or “money guys.” Thomas's supervisor, Anderson, was a former tech who'd risen to the executive ranks. Thomas knew that people (including Clara) thought of him as a geek, but Anderson was a geek of a different magnitude, a geek's geek.
Anderson's office was bland and not large—not corner. You wouldn't know about Anderson's family from his desk; only his wedding band told you he was married. There were no honey-moon pictures, no kids' drawings. On the wall, in a chrome frame, was a certificate of merit from the corporate headquarters in Kansas City, and on the desk—its centerpiece and conversation starter—was the motherboard from Anderson's first computer, a Commodore 64. The strip of circuitry and soldered metal had been ripped out of its casing and mounted on a lucite base, like some ancient Sumerian relic. Thomas had once made the mistake of asking him about it. For twenty minutes, Anderson had recalled the details of the machine's life—its purchase, its central place in his teenage years, and its ultimate obsolescence and replacement. Those circuits had carried his first attempts at machine code and he was sentimental about them the way others were about their Dick and Jane books.
“Come in, Walker,” said Anderson. It was January 3, the second work day of the new year.
He went in and sat on one of the cold, metal-framed chairs before Anderson's desk.
“We have a new job for you. It's a little unusual—a solo project. But before I get into the details, there's something I have to discuss with you.” Here Anderson paused and adjusted his wire-frame spectacles. “As you know, there have been great improvements recently in machine-generated indexing and taxonomies. Increasingly, the role of the knowledge manager
s on our staff is to monitor the programatically generated databases rather than to do indexing by hand. The feeling among the folks in Kansas City is that a dedicated librarian is no longer needed on each of our major projects. Henceforth, librarians will be asked to work on multiple projects simultaneously.”
“Sure,” said Thomas, still not suspecting where this was going. “I used machine indexing on the Rutgers job last year.”
“And with good results, I might add,” said Anderson. He cleared his throat. “What it also means, Walker, is that we need fewer knowledge managers on our staff. Each office has been asked to eliminate one position. I'm afraid that the position New York is eliminating is yours.”
Thomas felt a low-voltage current course through his shoulders and down his arms. With difficulty, he swallowed. “I'm being fired?” he asked.
“Not fired,” said Anderson. “Laid off.”
“Why me?” asked Thomas. There were four other librarians in the New York office and he knew he was a better worker than at least two of them.
“We figured that the only fair way to do this was by seniority. You have the shortest tenure with us.”
“But Chen and I started at almost the same time.”
“Chen was hired three months before you. It just took us a little while to sort out his visa. Besides, in addition to his MLS, Chen has considerable programming experience. I'm sorry, Walker, there's no nice way to do this. It's not personal and it's no reflection on your work, which has been more than satisfactory. We'll be giving you six months' severance pay and a package that also includes a fund for retraining. I strongly suggest you use that time and money to improve your programming skills. If you can learn to write code, you can punch your own ticket.”
Thomas looked at the motherboard on Anderson's desk. He wanted to throw it out the window behind Anderson, wanted to watch it explode into pieces on the Midtown pavement below. “I'll bear that in mind,” he said.
“Good. Go see Mindy Evans in HR tomorrow. She'll give you all the details and there will be some paperwork for you to sign. Now, the job I mentioned is something we think you'll be perfect for. The technical requirements are relatively modest and you'll have the resources of the programming and Web design departments at your disposal. The client is a widow who wants her husband's library cataloged. It's in your town in New Jersey, which is one of the reasons we thought of you. You've been doing a lot of traveling for us lately. We hope it will give you a chance to seek other opportunities and also see some more of your family.” What Anderson didn't know was that Clara was, at that time, pregnant again—just six weeks along.
Thomas had heard that BiblioFile took on private libraries, but he had never worked on such a project himself. He was given a primer for estimating job costs and dispatched to the site, told to take the rest of the day off after he made his visit. He was distraught. He had pictured himself working at BiblioFile for decades, maybe one day rising to the executive ranks in the New York office—when Anderson was inevitably promoted to the inner cabal in Kansas City. On the train ride out to Millwood, he called Clara.
“Those shits,” she said. “I can't believe those bastards. Are you all right?”
“I don't know,” he said. “I feel like I need to rethink everything. Start from scratch again. They kicked me in the nuts.”
“Take it easy, Thomas. You'll find another job. No problem. They'll regret it. When's your last day?”
“In about six weeks,” he said. “They're throwing me a bone. I'm going to be cataloging a library in Newstead.”
“In Millwood?”
“Yes.”
“Well, at least you'll be near home,” said Clara. “Promise me you won't worry too much? Please?”
“I'll do my best,” he said. “But I really don't know . . .”
“Man, what timing. We only just found out that I'm pregnant.”
“Well, I'm sure I'll be able to find something before the baby comes.”
He got off the train and went to the Odyssey, which was parked in the station lot and drove to Newstead. All joy had been sucked out of his world. Here he was, in the darkest, coldest part of the year, a little tired and wrung out, about to be unemployed, squinting toward spring and rubbing his hands together for warmth. It was the third day since a moderate snowfall and a cold snap had combined to put a crust of ice on everything in the region, which only added to the sense of gelid torpor.
He parked in front of the house, next to the two-foot-high alpine ridge the snowplows had left along the length of the road. Up and down the street, discarded Christmas trees lay half-submerged in the roadside snowdrifts, their branches poking through the snow like fingers. Walking the salted flagstone path, he became self-conscious about how much he resembled a door-to-door salesman: suit, overcoat, briefcase. He would not have felt so conspicuous in the reception area of a bank or the lobby of a high-rise office building, but here, a mile from his own home, he was the victim of something close to embarrassment. He already felt unemployed, already felt as if he were begging favors. Pausing, he glanced up and down the street at the wintry, socked-in houses and gave a little snort to reassure himself. Who would even be looking?
The door was answered by a young, attractive blond woman wearing white jeans and a white woolen turtleneck, the weave of which was just loose enough to show the white outline of her bra. Thomas assumed she was the widow's daughter. “Hello,” he said. “I'm Thomas Walker, from BiblioFile.”
“I'm Melissa Logan. Come in,” she said, and extended her hand. She had long, warm fingers and the strong grip of a tennis player or golfer. Even now, in the middle of winter, she displayed the solid, season-defying tan of someone who spent time in warmer climes. Thomas imagined her flying in from Sanibel or La Jolla to comfort her desolate mother. Melissa allowed him to pass through the entry hall into a formal living room formidably turned out in neoclassical style. Two years after he and Clara bought their home, they were still furnishing it, and every time he saw a room like this—a finished idea with a coherent style and a tasteful palette—he realized how far they still had to go.
“The library is this way,” Melissa said, closing the front door and gesturing at a passageway off the living room. The motion pulled the sleeve of her turtleneck down her forearm, and Thomas saw a chunky silver bracelet emerge from the flared cuff. These rich girls and their distinctive jewelry, he thought. At the end of the passageway there was a large room lined with books and furnished with a Stickley desk and two wood-paneled filing cabinets. It was cozy but decidedly masculine in its details. The bust of someone he didn't recognize—not the usual Shakespeare or Beethoven—stood on the desk. Maps and portraits of generals on horseback decorated the walls. Prussians, thought Thomas, for no reason. Hessians. A vitrine nearby contained weapons and military accessories. At a glance, he saw a Samurai sword, a long-nosed revolver, and a brass field glass. Automatically, he began scanning the shelves. The bookcases were expensive built-ins, with slide-out browsing tables and good lighting. He saw a biography of Bismarck. Or maybe it was a book about the battleship Bismarck, because next to it was a book about the Graf Spee and another about the Tirpitz. Already he was free-associating, thinking about index terms, moving away from the disappointment of the morning. At least there was still pleasure in his work. Phrases drifted into his mind: pocket battleship, Allied shipping lines, Scapa Flow. What would the proper sequence be? Naval Vessels—Germany—Twentieth Century? Second World War—Battleships—Germany? Taking the book from the shelf, he checked the copyright page, but it was in German and he couldn't make heads or tails of it. He flipped to the seam of glossy photo pages in the middle. There was the Bismarck in dry dock being constructed. There was the Galahad, one of its victims. There was the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal with its cloth-winged biplanes. A map showed the pursuit of the Bismarck across the seven seas to its final standoff in the Rio Plata. The sound of Melissa seating herself behind the desk startled him and he looked up from the pictures.
He'd assumed that she had gone to fetch her mother. Maybe the mother was still too distraught to conduct business.
“Ah, sorry,” he said, slipping the book back into place. He picked up his briefcase and moved to one of the chairs before the desk.
“Military history,” Melissa said. “That was my husband's passion.” She paused, as if caught in a fib. “More than a passion,” she said, with the same pained and bemused condescension that Thomas had heard from women all his life when discussing their husbands' pursuits and interests: hunting, stamp collecting, rock climbing. Whatever it was, the wife had to endure it, like a pre-existing medical condition or a thorny set of in-laws. Thomas's own father was an amateur astronomer. Copies of Sky and Telescope and the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society had piled up in the basement of his childhood home. Many times in his youth, his father had woken him in the middle of the night to show him some comet tracing its once-a-century trail across the heavens, or a lunar eclipse, which was inevitably obscured by an overcast sky. The scale of time and distance involved in astronomy and the optical leaps required to participate in it were too daunting for Thomas. He needed something more immediate. His own experience with marriage was that these kinds of interests became increasingly developed and intransigent the longer you were together. It was a way of differentiating yourself, of holding on to an identity within the marital unit. A fiancé with passion for old wars might not have seemed such a problem to tennis-playing Melissa when she was engaged, just as his own mother, a needle-pointer and knitter, might have downplayed his father's interest in the heavens.