Sleuthing Women

by Lois Winston

  I clicked on “About the Center” and got “This Site Is Under Construction.” I tried “Key Services.” Again, “Under Construction.” Impatiently, I clicked on others: “Re-tirement Lifestyle Coaching,” “Private Consultations,” “Individual and Couples Counseling,” “Re-tirement Lifestyle Seminars.” Each time, I kept getting the prompt, “Under Construction.”

  Very frustrating. I checked the clock again. It was now four forty-five. Not much more time left to fool around with this.

  One more try and then I had to get off-line and start dinner.

  I clicked on the only heading I hadn’t tried, “R.A.T.”, which turned out to stand for “Re-tirement Aptitude Test.” This time I got a list of questions which were to be answered and then emailed to Dr. Rhodes for evaluation. “Pretend you are being interviewed for a new job,” he suggested. “But this time you are interviewing yourself. You now have the opportunity to hire yourself to do something you really want to do.

  “How do you adjust to change? How do you measure your self-worth? What is your idea of time well-spent? What is your definition of success? How do you see yourself in the next ten years?

  “On a scale of one-to-ten, with one being the highest, rank the following as being important in your life: Financial security, a solid family life, social interaction, giving back to the community, professional satisfaction, living independently, good health, spousal interaction, being in charge of a situation, positive feedback.”

  I scrolled down a little further and found a separate test for spouses whose husbands were facing retirement, the Re-tirement Aptitude Test for Spouses (R.A.T.S.).

  “This is great,” I said to the girls. “He gets the fact that wives could have problems when their husbands are suddenly around the house all the time with nothing to do.”

  I was ready to fill in the R.A.T.S. questions when I realized there was a catch to all this. If I emailed my test to Dr. Rhodes for his feedback, I had to pay an up-front non-refundable eight-five dollar registration fee (via credit card) to have him evaluate my answers.

  Jim would never go for that. He was forever lecturing me on the dangers of cyberspace and credit fraud.

  I was about to log off when I realized there was a “Contact Me” icon with an office address and phone number. I couldn’t believe my luck. Dr. Davis Rhodes had an office in Westfield, only five miles from here.

  I needed to think this through. Maybe when I was cooking dinner, I’d come up with a strategy to entice Jim to make an appointment with Rhodes. One way or another, I wanted Jim to check out this website.

  ~*~

  “Honest to God, a brownie troop is run better than that place.” Jim burst through the kitchen door and slammed his briefcase on the black granite counter. “You won’t believe what that idiot did today!”

  My Beloved was home from the office, and even more agitated than usual. Obviously, something had happened after Jim’s “exciting news” phone call.

  I took a deep breath and considered a variety of responses. None of them seemed likely to diffuse the situation, so I fell back on the tried and true method I used whenever our kids, Mike and Jenny, came home from school upset about something that happened on the playground—a food diversion.

  Instead of offering Oreos and milk, however, I pulled out some grownup guns.

  “I just finished cutting up fresh vegetables, Jim, and there’s ranch dip in the refrigerator. I also warmed up some homemade clam chowder. Why don’t you fix yourself a snack and have a glass of that nice merlot while I finish grilling the salmon?”

  “Don’t you want to hear what happened today?” Jim asked testily.

  “Of course I do, dear.” As if there were a way I could avoid it. “But why don’t you tell me when we’re sitting down at the table and I can give you my full attention? Right now, I really need to keep an eye on this salmon. You know you don’t like it too well-done.”

  “I’m going to wash my face and change. But just let me tell you this— I don’t know how much more of this I can take! I’ve decided to go to the human resources office tomorrow and look at my retirement options!”

  With that dramatic announcement, Jim stormed out of the room and headed upstairs.

  Oh, boy. This was even more serious than I thought. He had never threatened to go to the human resources office before, no matter how much he complained about the agency.

  That meant I only had tonight to put my plan into action.

  Quietly, so Jim wouldn’t hear me, I called Nancy on her cell phone. “Thank God I got you,” I whispered.

  “I was just about to go out and show a client a house,” Nancy said. “Some people are so inconsiderate. They think Realtors are at their disposal twenty-four hours a day. This is some young yuppie with big bucks who…”

  I cut her off before she could get into one of her familiar tirades about the trials and tribulations of being a real estate agent.

  “Nancy,” I whispered again.

  “Carol, I can hardly hear you. Why are you talking so softly?”

  “I can’t talk any louder,” I hissed. “And I have to make this quick. Jim just got home and he’s threatening to go to the human resources office tomorrow to look at his retirement options.”

  “Oh, God, that’s awful. What are you going to do?”

  “I’ve been thinking about what Mary Alice said at lunch. Maybe a retirement coach would help Jim and me. I found someone I think would be perfect. But I need to get Jim to look at his website tonight, and I need him to think it was his idea. Can you help me?”

  “Sure, I’ll help you. What do you want me to do?”

  “Can you call me here in about an hour?” I asked. “Will you be through with your client by then?”

  “I’d better be. And if I’m not, I’ll just go out to my car and use my cell for a minute. What do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing. All I want you to do is listen to me. I’m going to tell you all about this retirement counselor’s website I found, and talk loud enough so Jim will overhear me.”

  I thought fast. “Maybe I’ll pretend that you’re calling me about the website. I don’t know. I’ll figure out something. The important thing is that I’ll sound so excited that it will pique his curiosity. Hopefully. All you need is to call me in an hour and let me babble away. Okay?”

  “Consider it done,” said Nancy. “It’s five forty-five now. I’ll call you at six forty-five sharp.”

  “Thanks. You’re terrific.”

  Well, I had a plan, sort of. But whether it would work with my spouse in such a foul mood was anybody’s guess.

  Jim stomped into the kitchen, dressed in his favorite baggy gray sweater and a pair of paint-stained sweat pants. Ordinarily, I would have been prompted to make a snappy comment about his clothing of choice, but tonight I had more important things on my mind.

  “So tell me what happened at the office today, dear,” I asked as I poured Jim a glass of wine.

  “You know, if we’re having salmon tonight, we really should be drinking a white wine.” Jim took a sip from the glass I had put in front of him. “Hmm, this is pretty good. Did Mike recommend it?”

  Our twenty-five-year-old son Mike had become the family authority on all things relating to wine choices as well as the latest in mixed drinks. No, he wasn’t a recovering alcoholic. He was a budding entrepreneur. Right after he graduated from college three years ago, Mike took off for the warm weather and bright lights of Miami, Florida. He’d taken a bartending course over the summer of his junior year, and supported himself with a variety of bartending jobs for a few years. Jim and I used to joke privately that Mike’s bartending degree had turned out to be more useful to him than his four-year diploma from college.

  Then Mike had the opportunity to buy into a new martini bar in South Beach. Jim and I talked it over, and agreed to lend him the fifty-thousand dollars he needed to become a partner. But we made it clear, in writing, that this was just a loan, and drew up a contract, which we a
ll signed, detailing the terms of repayment.

  The bar was renamed Cosmo’s by Mike and his partners. They added cosmopolitans to their drinks menu, and completely redecorated the bar with a Cosmopolitan magazine theme. The walls were now adorned with covers from magazines going back to the mid-sixties, when Helen Gurley Brown had taken over the editor’s job, to the present. It was incredible to see how the publication had changed over the years.

  I especially got a kick out of Cosmo’s as the choice of the bar’s name because in 1974, for one year, I had worked at Cosmopolitan magazine in the copy department as a fact checker. I still have all the old magazines with my name on the masthead—in very small type, of course.

  Mike claims the bar name is just a coincidence, but I secretly believe the name was chosen in my honor. A mother can have fantasies, right?

  Jim was proud as punch that Cosmo’s had become such a success, and when the time came that Mike had enough money to start paying back the fifty-thousand dollar loan, we decided to keep some of our money in the bar and be “silent partners.” Mike and his partners were now thinking of expanding Cosmo’s to another site in the New York metropolitan area.

  “I haven’t heard from Mike this week, have you?” I said, my hackles rising ever so slightly at Jim’s obvious lack of faith in my wine choice. Jim drank jug wine from a jelly glass for years. And I can’t count the number of dinner parties we’d hosted where he poured cheap wine into a Waterford decanter and put it on the dining room table, so guests wouldn’t realize what they were really drinking. Lots of puckered lips in those days.

  I took a sip of the wine myself and swirled it around in my mouth. “This merlot is pretty smooth, isn’t it? I saw it advertised on The Food Channel. It was only twelve dollars a bottle. We can switch to a white wine with the fish if you want to.”

  I plated the fish, added some steamed asparagus and a baked potato, and set the repast in front of my husband. He seemed to be slightly mellower than when he’d come home from the agency, which I took as a hopeful sign.

  “Now,” I asked with wifely concern as I joined him at the kitchen table, “what happened at the office today to get you so upset? You sounded so upbeat on the phone.” When you weren’t giving me grief about being out of the house when you called.

  Bad mistake. I’d just calmed him down, and now he was even more agitated than before.

  “That was then. And if I’d been able to reach you, Carol, you’d already know the first part of this.” Jim attacked a piece of asparagus on his plate.

  “Do you remember two years ago, when Gibson Gillespie was honored by the Public Relations Society of America with the Silver Anvil Award for Excellence?” he asked me. “Of course, Jack Gibson was still alive then, which is why we got it, I’m sure.”

  I nodded my head. The award had been presented at a fancy formal dinner in New York at the Waldorf Astoria, and Jim and I had both gone. Naturally I wore black, the official color of New York parties. I remember I dieted for a month to get into the dress. And I haven’t worn it since.

  “Well,” Jim went on, gesturing with his fork for emphasis, “those days are gone forever. And it just makes me so angry. Mack is running the agency into the ground.” He paused to take a sip of wine, then slammed the glass on the table. I winced as some of the wine spilled onto the place mat.

  “Today, we got a new client,” Jim said. “That’s why I called you.” He glared at me. “But you weren’t here.” He waited a minute to see if I’d respond, but I didn’t. I’d learned in over thirty years of marriage that some battles weren’t worth fighting.

  “I wanted to tell you that we were hired by Reynolds Consulting Group to do a big campaign about their selection by Fortune magazine as one of the top hundred companies to work for in the country. Our whole agency staff sat in a meeting for hours and listened to Mack list all the reasons why Reynolds was singled out for Fortune’s top one hundred list. The company offers its employees compressed workweeks, telecommuting opportunities, free lunches in the company restaurant, on-site day care, a whole list of things designed to build employee loyalty. Very impressive. Reynolds thinks of its employees as friends who look out for each other, and the company’s thriving under that approach, even in this weak economy when other corporations are cutting back.”

  “It sounds like a wonderful place to work,” I offered, not really sure where he was heading with this.

  “Of course it’s a wonderful place to work,” he exploded at me. “That’s why Fortune selected them. But Mack had the nerve to compare their corporate culture to the current one at Gibson Gillespie. He actually had the gall to say that it isn’t the nature of the business that makes a company great. It’s the management. That excellence starts at the top and then trickles down. He went on and on about how things have only changed for the better at the agency since he took it over; how he trusts employees to do their best and doesn’t micro-manage; and how he always tells the employees they’re doing a great job. What a crock! All the young flunkies at the meeting clapped and clapped for him. I thought I’d throw up!”

  The veins in Jim’s forehead were pulsating now.

  “But you haven’t heard the best part. You won’t believe this. Guess where Mack was in the conference room while he was conducting the staff meeting.”

  “Why, Jim, I would assume he was in his usual seat at the head of the conference room table.”

  “Wrong! Mack was lying flat on his back in the middle of the conference room table. He’d hurt his back in a parasailing accident over the weekend and had to either lie completely flat or wear a back brace. He looked like a damn centerpiece. All he needed was an apple stuck in his mouth and he could have been a stuffed pig. It was absolutely ludicrous. “And that’s when I made up my mind to go to the human resources office tomorrow and discuss my options. I can’t continue to work in a place that’s run by a jerk like that.”

  THREE

  Q: Why do little boys whine?

  A: They’re practicing to be men.

  Jim was so preoccupied with the goings-on in his office that the rest of the dinner conversation required no response at all from me. Just a few sympathetic nods of the head now and then. And an occasional “Oh, Jim.” By six thirty, he was in his favorite place, sprawled in front of the flat screen television in the family room, remote control in hand. He was switching back and forth between The NewsHour on public television and The Weather Channel. No network news shows for him.

  I had already booted up the computer in my office to make it easy to access Dr. Rhodes’s web page. Subtle, right?

  Promptly at six forty-five the phone rang.

  “Jim,” I called from the kitchen, “can you turn the television volume down a little bit, please? It’s Nancy.”

  “What?”

  “I said, please turn down the volume on the television. Nancy’s on the phone. I can’t hear her with the television blaring.”

  “Okay, okay. But don’t be too long.”

  “Nancy, can you hear me?” I whispered.

  “Yes. The client’s already left. Do you want me to respond at all?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Let’s just play it by ear. Here goes.

  “Nancy, what’s up?” I said in my normal voice. “You sound upset. Oh, you’re not upset? You’re excited?”

  Pause.

  “What? Yes, I’ve been thinking about lunch today, too. All that talk about retirement coaches sure was interesting.”

  Pause.

  Nancy giggled. “It’s fun hearing you conduct a monologue, Carol.”

  “Oh, you went online to do some research about retirement coaches?” I asked, my voice getting louder. “I didn’t realize that you and Bob were talking about retirement. What did you find?”

  Pause.

  “Really? There’s a retirement coach right here? Oh, in Westfield. What’s his name?”

  Pause.

  “Dr. Davis Rhodes? Does he have a web page? It’s called what? Re-tirement S
urvival Center? Catchy name. Are you going to tell Bob about it?”

  “Is Jim buying any of this?” Nancy whispered.

  “I can’t tell,” I whispered back. “But it’s very quiet in the family room.”

  Pause.

  “Why, Nancy, no wonder you’re excited,” I said in a more normal tone of voice.

  Pause.

  “Yes, I guess if you plan ahead, retirement really isn’t such a scary thing after all. Let me know if you and Bob decide to go see this Dr. Rhodes.”

  Pause.

  “I have to go now,” Nancy said. “I hope this worked. Let me know, okay?”

  “Yes. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Bye, Nancy.”

  I hung up the phone. My palms were sweating. I certainly was no actress. I was sure that Jim saw right through my whole performance and ignored the conversation entirely.

  I waited for a few minutes, and rinsed a few dishes to put in the dishwasher. The suspense was killing me. Then I decided there was only one way to find out.

  “Jim,” I called, “where are you?”

  “In your office. I’m on the computer. Come on in. There’s something I want to show you.”

  Play it cool, I told myself. I tried to keep my face expressionless when I walked into the office.

  “I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation with Nancy.” Jim gave me a knowing look. “Which, I suspect, is exactly what you wanted, right?” I started to deny it, then glanced down at the computer and saw the Re-tirement Survival Center web page on the screen. “Jim, I…”

  “After all these years, I still don’t understand why you always use such underhanded methods when you want me to do something. Just ask me. You know I’m always open to what you have to say.”