The Pursuit of Other Interests: A Novel (20 page)

“Are you sure he’s okay?” Mr. DeAngelo asked. “Why is he all wet?”

Donna ignored his questions. “I’m going to get my checkbook. I’ll be right back.”

Charlie stayed there, holding on to the wall and taking deep breaths, while Donna raced upstairs. Between gulps of air he said, “This is consumer fraud. I’m calling the Illinois attorney general.”

“Give him my best.”

When Donna returned, she handed Mr. DeAngelo a new check. Charlie pushed off from the wall and pointed at the white-haired plumber when she did this. “I don’t know how you sleep at night. You’re a damn thief!”

“And you have a very big mouth,” Mr. DeAngelo said. He folded up the check and slipped it into the front pocket of his shirt. Charlie then thought he winked at him, but wasn’t sure.

“I saw that!”

“Saw what?”

“Fuck you!” Charlie yelled. “Fuck you, you slimy crook!”

Charlie thought he had gotten the last word in and was proudly turning, chin up, toward Donna to gauge her reaction when he felt the wind kick out of him. Apparently, Mr. DeAngelo had punched him in the stomach. Charlie instantly crumpled to the floor, unable to breathe.

Donna deftly jumped in front of Charlie’s writhing body and yanked the door open wide. “Get out of our house,” she said to Mr. DeAngelo.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Baker. I just don’t appreciate being called—”

“You have no right to punch my husband. Now get out, please. If you don’t go now, I’m calling the police.” She said all of this in an even, matter-of-fact manner that made her threat seem all the more real.

“You’re right,” Mr. DeAngelo said, “I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t have done that.” He looked down at Charlie, then extended his hand in an attempt to pull him up off the ground. Donna seized his arm, though, and said, “Don’t touch him. Just leave. Leave right now.”

Mr. DeAngelo looked at Charlie one last time and said, “I apologize for any inconvenience I may have caused,” then shuffled out, his head down. Donna waited until he was in his car before closing the door and sitting down on the floor next to Charlie’s head.

“He’s gone?” Charlie asked. The chest pains had disappeared, but his stomach ached.

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

They were both quiet, then Charlie said, “You think I’m pathetic, don’t you?”

“A little.” She was staring straight ahead at the door.

“You think I’m obnoxious too?”

Donna didn’t say anything.

“And I’m selfish and self-centered and all those other things.”

She remained quiet.

He reached over and took one of her hands. “I’m going to change,” he said. “I promise, I’m going to change back to the person you married. But you have to help me. I don’t know how to do it. All I know is that I can’t do it alone. So can you help me? Can you? Can you try?”

Donna held on to Charlie’s hand, but continued to stare blankly at the front door.

“Donna?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Donna, please. Can you try?”

“I don’t know,” she softly repeated. “I’ve been trying for a long time now.”

Over the next week or so, things at home remained Scotch-taped together, Donna and Charlie tiptoeing around each other like polite strangers, saying please and thank you, commenting about the weather, Kyle, and the state of the toilets, which were once again, inexplicably, running fine. It wasn’t clear what their next steps would be; they each seemed to be waiting for the other to make the first move and present the blueprint of the future of their marriage.

For his part, Charlie proceeded carefully, walking around on eggshells, afraid he might do or say something that might send her fleeing. He decided to push questions about Mr. Lighthouse aside for the time being and instead busied himself with research on marriage-saving, reading the only book the Wilton Memorial Library had in on the subject,
Road to Recovery
(1977) by Dr. David J. Prioletti, “a.k.a. The Father of Love.” Dr. Prioletti’s central message was to communicate, communicate, and communicate, then make “vigorous” love. This advice was obvious but worrisome because other than the occasional polite comment, Donna and he were hardly speaking, and sleeping in separate bedrooms.

They were doing a very good job of getting in each other’s way, however. With both of them home now, the house was suddenly crowded. Despite being married close to thirty years, they had no domestic rhythm, no routine to fall back on, no defined division of labor. Donna had spent decades running the household, doing the wash, the shopping, paying the bills, and raising Kyle, while he was away. Now he was back and neither one of them knew what to do with him.

His attempts at helping with the house work were futile and counterproductive. If he wiped down the counters, she would quietly wipe them again. If he swept the floor, he would find her sweeping it soon afterward. Before he emptied the garbage, she would check the garbage can and remove any recyclable items.

He tried his hand at rearranging furniture. He hoped this would underscore his willingness to change, as well as his renewed commitment to his family and home. It started in the reading nook, where he impulsively moved a leather chair from the window over to a bookcase. This switch allowed for a better view of the yard, he reasoned. After he was done, he sat in the chair and stared out the window, pleased with himself. He thought Donna would appreciate his initiative. If she did, however, she kept it to herself, never commenting.

At night, he would lie awake in the guest room and try to read Lincoln biographies. He took some comfort in the fact that Lincoln too had a troubled marriage. His wife, Mary, was a lunatic, prone to tantrums, depressions, and wild spending sprees. Abe persevered, however, and Charlie initially drew strength from this until he realized that, if anything, in his own marriage, he was the Mary, and Donna the Abe. This conclusion did little to help him sleep.

Still, he knew he had to earn his way back into the family, so he did try. He packed a lunch once for Kyle, offered to help Donna write the annual report for Bright Day (she said she could handle it), and raked the leaves in the backyard.

He thought he was making progress until the day he tried to move their bed. It was a huge king-sized bed and it was too close to a window. After analyzing the layout, he decided that it needed to be repositioned by an interior wall. With winter coming, he thought it made sense to be as far away as possible from the window and stiff neck–producing drafts. Unfortunately, as he was moving it, he broke off the brass headboard. It fell off its hinges and lay crookedly half on and half off the bed frame. When Donna returned from the grocery store about half an hour later, she found him trying to jam it back into place. She watched him do this for a few minutes before quietly reattaching the headboard and then helping him move the bed back near the window.

“Thanks,” he said when they were finished. He hoped that the fact they had accomplished something together was a step in the right direction.

Donna busied herself with straightening the bedsheets.

“We probably couldn’t function here without you, you know,” he said.

Donna managed a tight smile and puffed up the pillows. She looked worn and tired and for the first time Charlie realized that he wasn’t the only one not sleeping at night.

“Glad to have you back,” he said, trying to sound cheerful.

Donna said nothing. Instead, she shook her head.

“What’s wrong?”

Donna tossed a pillow off to the other side of the bed.

“What did I say now?”

“I wish you wouldn’t say things like that.”

“What? That we’re glad to have you back?”

Donna smoothed a pillowcase. “The only reason you want me back is because you lost your job,” she said. “That’s the only reason you’re glad to have me back.”

“That’s not true,” he said. “That’s not true at all. How can you even think that?”

Donna shook her head. “Once you get a new job, you’ll vanish again.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Yes, you will. You’ll go.”

“Don’t talk to me about going anywhere, okay? You’re the one who took off to Maine to screw another man!”

The last sentence just came out and he immediately regretted saying it. But it was too late. Donna threw a pillow against the headboard and left the room.

The next day, he decided it might be best to return to Rogers & Newman. He didn’t like leaving home, he was worried Donna might disappear again, but he felt it a necessary move. His severance pay was ending soon and he urgently needed to get the job search in motion. Besides, his marriage-saving efforts were obviously leaving something to be desired and he thought it might be wise to lay low for a few days and regroup.

His first morning back, he set up shop in the salami office and placed a call to the Wizard, leaving a voice mail and apologizing for not sending in his résumé. He then fell to work developing the second issue of
The Charlie Update!
Undaunted by the response the inaugural issue had received—other than Susan Goldman’s rude message, it had been virtually ignored—he wanted to give it at least one more shot.

He added his perspective on some industry news gleaned from
Advertising Age
, as well as a critique of the new Bud Light campaign, which he thought weak. In an attempt to upgrade the look of
The C.U.!
he then spent close to two hours wrestling with the font and format. He wanted it to look as much like the front page of
The New York Times
as possible. Eventually he gave up on this, though, and sent it off looking more like a church bulletin than a newspaper.

This completed, he finally confronted his résumé. It was still too long and, he feared, confusing. After reviewing it, he deleted a small section pertaining to his awards, then decided to put the section right back in. Awards were important, he thought. They validated a person’s work, gave it weight.

He continued to fiddle with the document for a while, growing increasingly frustrated. He thought it a belittling task, having to sell himself like this, like everyone else. He still didn’t think a résumé was necessary. He had close to thirty years in the business, thirty years, and he was well known and respected. His work spoke for him, not two pieces of paper.

He eventually clicked off the résumé and checked his e-mail, hoping for some response to the latest
Charlie Updates
. He had but one message, from Scottie Frandsen, a member of the Super Sixteen list. They had worked together for years and Charlie knew him as a man with a sense of humor. If anyone appreciated the spirit and tongue-in-cheek nature of
The C. U.!
, he would. He quickly opened the message:

Charlie’s cheeks burned with embarrassment. He could not believe this indignity, this insult! He had been Scottie’s manager for three years, they had worked together on the toilet paper account, a very high-profile piece of business. While Charlie had always treated him fairly, during his last year at the old agency he had sensed a growing resentment from Scottie over the attention the campaign—and Charlie—had received. He wondered if this note was a way of evening the score.

The more he thought about it, the more he believed it was. He never liked Scottie. Scottie was an ad agency stereotype: he wore wrinkled black clothes, had a goatee, and kept a bottle of Grey Goose vodka in his freezer. He fought back the urge to send this poseur an appropriate response (
I was the toilet paper account. Don’t ever forget that. And Grey Goose sucks
) but opted instead to merely delete his name from the Super Sixteen list. Afterward, he reflected on his shrinking list.

He couldn’t understand why Victoria McHugh, someone who had worked with him for years, whose wedding he had attended, hadn’t bothered to respond. Ditto for Steve Larson, a research geek from the Ad Club, who once listed Charlie as a reference when he was applying for a job at Leo Burnett; and Sally Hart, a media buyer he had hired; or Ellen Ryan, or Susan McDonnell, or Vicki Foreman, or Laura Dihel. None of them had written so much as a word acknowledging his situation. None. He felt abandoned. Had he no friends at all? What had happened to them? In the old days, people were always calling him, always asking him to lunch or coffee. One year, the last year at the old agency, he was invited to
four
different Christmas parties on the same night. Four!

As he was drowning in a wave of self-pity, Ned walked in wearing a sharp blue blazer and a well-pressed pink shirt. He looked sternly at Charlie before speaking.

“Well, well, well, look what the cat dragged in,” he finally said. His voice had an edge to it.

“Hi,” Charlie said.

“Well, well, well,” Ned repeated.

“What’s wrong?” Charlie asked.

Ned shut the door. “Don’t what’s-wrong me.”

“What are you doing? I’m in the middle of something here.”

“Where have you been? You’ve been gone for more than a week.”

“I’ve been at home. Why? What’s wrong?”

Ned glanced back at the door and put a hand in the side pocket of his nifty blazer. “You know what’s wrong!” His voice was a loud whisper. “You’ve left me here all alone to…to…deal with the fallout.”

“Fallout?” It was only then that it occurred to Charlie what Ned was talking about. “You mean that desk thing? Tamales’s desk?”

“Yes, that desk thing.”

Charlie sat up, concerned. “I hope you didn’t tell anyone about that, did you? That was really stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was nuts.”

“Of course I didn’t tell anyone! Our little secret is still safe. But it’s been hard around here. Very hard. That whole escapade caused quite a stir. Tamales went on a witch hunt. He wanted someone’s head.”

“Don’t worry about that midget.”

“Easy for you to say. Jason called me and asked me quite a few pointed questions. He was very suspicious. Do you know that we broke the desk? The top was cracked. We cracked it. That was a very expensive desk. They were considering filing a police report. A police report, Charlie!”

Charlie swallowed. Being arrested for flipping a desk over would add new meaning to the word frenetic. He couldn’t believe this. “You didn’t bring my name up, did you? Please tell me you didn’t mention my name.”

“It was your idea! You practically forced me to do it.”

“I didn’t force you—” He stopped here. “Listen, I’m sorry. It was stupid. The whole thing.”

Ned appraised Charlie for a moment. “Anyway, you’re safe. We’re safe. No one saw anything. Let’s just keep mum about it. It’s in the process of blowing over.”

Charlie relaxed. “Tamales deserved it and more. Much more.” He sat back in his chair. “What was his reaction? What did he do? Was he pissed?”

Ned spoke petulantly. “I really don’t remember.”

“Please tell me. I need to hear some good news today. Tell me he was outraged. Tell me he screamed.”

Ned straightened his pink shirt collar and avoided Charlie’s eyes. “I don’t recall.”

“Please tell me.”

“Well,” Ned said. He stepped closer to the desk. “If you really must know, he actually did scream.”

“You’re kidding! He did?”

“Like a woman in labor. And then he ranted and raved.” Ned paused. “And then he began throwing his arms about…like a complete idiot.”

This news was a tonic to Charlie. “Ha!” He clapped. “That’s great.”

Ned smiled, his whole face transforming. His next words came out in a gush. “It really was, I must admit, it really was. You should have seen him. His face was all red and his eyes bulged out like an insect’s. I wish I had a camera. He kept repeating, ‘This is my office, my office!’ in his annoying, fascist voice. He had to sit in a cubicle all day. A
cubicle
!”

Charlie clapped again, loving every second of this account. “A cubicle! Ha! Perfect! Perfect!”

“Next to Walter!”

“No way! Unbelievable! That’s like sitting next to a Porta-Potty.” Charlie pumped his fists, this time in triumph. “It gets no better!”

“It was a special moment, it really was.” They both laughed insanely.

“I wish I had been there,” Charlie said. He laughed some more and pounded the desk, very glad now that Ned had come into his office; very glad to just have Ned around.

He eventually calmed down and shook his head, then took in Ned’s blazer. It was a radical departure from his usual Mr. Rogers attire. He glanced down at Ned’s shoes and noticed he was wearing new black wingtips. “Are you going to a funeral or something?”