The Pursuit of Other Interests: A Novel (7 page)

Charlie’s lips tightened.

“May I ask, how did they, your family, take the news?”

“What?” He shifted positions in his chair.

“The news, your family.”

“Actually, they took it very well.”

“How did your life partner react?”

“Who? You mean my wife?”

“If that’s who your life partner is, yes.”

Charlie paused. He couldn’t work with this guy, he would ask to be reassigned. “She’s fine. My life partner was very understanding. Extremely supportive.”

“She sounds like an amazing woman.”

“Well, she
is
my life partner.”

Ned stared at him. “Yes.” He cleared his throat. “Does she work?”

“Yes. No. She used to be a nurse, for years, but when we moved, she quit. I was traveling so much, she had to stay at home to be with our son.”

“Hmm,” Ned said. “So you’re both not working?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.”

“What’s wrong? What’s the problem?”

“No problem, just digesting information.” He jotted something down. “Anyway, telling your life partner, your wife, is without a doubt the most difficult thing you can do. People tend to forget that when one partner gets fired, the other one really is getting fired too. He or she suffers too. That’s why I’m relieved to hear she took it so well. Many spouses have a very difficult time with it and problems arise.”

“What do you mean? What do they do? Do they leave their husbands?”

Ned’s face puckered up. “That happens. Unfortunately, yes.”

“How often does that happen?”

“I’m not exactly sure.”

“Give me a rough idea. What, one out of three, one out of four, what?”

“I don’t know specifics. Enough times that it’s a concern.”

Charlie chewed on his bottom lip.

“But those marriages were probably in bad shape to begin with,” Ned added.

Charlie chewed harder.

“Anyway, I can take you on a tour now.”

“I can’t now.” Charlie tapped his watch. He simply had to get out of this office and away from this person. “I have to go.” He stood again.

“Are you sure? I was hoping you could stay for lunch. We have a nice little deli downstairs, wonderful soups. We can talk there.”

“Can’t. Maybe next time.”

“Well, when can we expect to see you again?”

“Soon. Very soon.”

As Charlie was making his way back out, down the hall, he shuddered at the office’s blandness: battleship-gray carpet, eggshell walls, painful fluorescent lights. Someone had managed to position a few potted plants in the corners of the hallways, all of which seemed to be in various stages of death. Overhead, he heard forced, stale air humming from the vents. His mind flashed back to his old office, the marble floor, the winding staircase, the German art, and he walked faster.

By the elevators, he ran into a tall, silver-haired man holding a briefcase. The man pushed the button twice and then turned toward Charlie.

“You the new guy?” His face was ruddy and intelligent and he had on a tailored blue suit. If Charlie were casting a commercial for a bank or brokerage house, he would have had him on the short list for the role of wise and benevolent chairman.

“I’m new here,” Charlie said. He focused on the elevator doors.

“Who’s assigned to you? Who’s your caseworker, your babysitter?”

“Ned Meyers.” He gestured with his head at the glass doors of the office behind them. “I just met him.”

The man smirked. “Ned. He’s mine too.” He extended his hand. “I’m Bradley Smith.”

“I’m Charlie Baker. Ned mentioned you.”

“He did, did he?” Bradley chuckled for some reason, his smile a flashbulb. “What did he say?”

“We didn’t talk long. He just mentioned you.”

This seemed to disappoint Bradley Smith. He put a hand in his pants pocket and jingled some change. His smile disappeared. A few seconds later the elevator doors slid open and they both got on.

“Actually, Ned said you were well connected.”

This cheered Bradley. His smiled returned, brighter than before. “What line of work were you in?” he asked.

“I’m still in it. I’m in advertising. I was with DiSanto & Herr.”

“Another marketing guy. We’ll be in the same group, then.” He jingled more change. “I headed up marketing at the Bank of the Midwest.”

“Oh, sure. I know the place.” Charlie was pretty sure Bank of the Midwest didn’t exist anymore.

“What do you think of Rogers so far?” he asked.

Charlie shrugged. “I was only there for a minute. Everything seemed fine.”

“It’s not a bad place. Beats working.” They both laughed too hard at this, then continued staring at the flashing floor numbers.

“How’s the advertising business right now?” Bradley asked.

“Little tight.”

“It will turn around.”

“It will.”

“How long have you been out?” Bradley asked.

“Just a week. Not even.” The elevator was extremely slow. “How long have you been out?”

Bradley’s smile faded again and Charlie thought he heard the air leave him, a wistful prairie wind.

“Two years,” he said. “Two years next month.”

The elevator bounced when they hit the ground floor.

In the daytime, their house was a still and fragile place. The kitchen was breathless, the living room apprehensive, the family room watchful and waiting. Drifting through the empty rooms, Charlie felt he was upsetting the natural order of things, disturbing the cosmos. He was an intruder, his presence illicit. It was early afternoon, the middle of a workday, and he should have been anywhere but home.

Rather than celebrate Augie’s birthday at the zoo, he had decided to head back to Wilton. He remembered that Donna spent most Fridays volunteering at that community place. Frequently, she was out until eight or even nine o’clock, so he thought he’d take a chance. He also thought that if she was home, he would go ahead and tell her, and be done with it.

Making his way through their house, on his way upstairs to his office, he was struck by how spacious and aggressively furnished their home was. Their huge kitchen still managed to look crowded, with its granite-topped island, Sub-Zero refrigerator, separate wine refrigerator, and a small flat-screen TV that flipped down from one of the cabinets. All of this was surrounded by quarter-sawn oak cabinetry that he had picked out from a catalog because Donna couldn’t make up her mind.

The kitchen flowed into an equally large family room that was dominated by a fifty-two-inch flat screen TV, an imposing leather chair and ottoman, two couches, and an area the Realtor referred to as a reading nook. This nook was lined on three sides by bookcases and overlooked their backyard, which, he realized, was the size of Tara.

He stood by the window and counted the trees; there were four fully grown and expensive-looking trees and a number of smaller, presumably cheaper ones. There was also an expansive deck that a Cessna could safely land on. He observed the trees, wondering if and how they affected his tax bill, then slowly made his way into the living room, where he stopped in front of a bookcase filled with photos: Kyle riding a bike on their old block; the three of them at Disney World, all wearing Mickey Mouse ears; the three of them standing on the front porch of their old house, Kyle in a black and white Little League White Sox uniform, Donna proudly beaming. Their wedding photo, Donna glowing, beautiful. There were no pictures of them in this house, he noticed. None. The picture-taking had evidently stopped a few years ago.

He wandered over to the black Steinway baby grand piano. Over Donna’s protests, he had purchased the piano with the full intention of mastering it. Though he had never taken lessons or played an instrument of any kind, he believed that, being creative, he possessed innate musical talent and that this $20,000 piano would unleash it. He imagined entertaining guests and friends with Bach, show tunes, Beatles songs at lively parties and gatherings, everyone crowded around. Though Kyle had taken a few lessons, Charlie had never learned to play, losing interest in the piano soon after it arrived. He plunked one key and listened to its lonely, high sound, a lost note, reverberate throughout the room. He decided it was a metaphor for something, and moved on.

In the front hallway, he scooped up the mail that lay scattered on the floor by the door slot, then walked upstairs. For some reason, they had five bedrooms, including a master suite complete with a once-used fireplace and the requisite Jacuzzi in the bathroom; a warm and brightly painted sitting room, where he had never seen anyone stand, much less sit; and his office with a skylight, a definitely too-large desk, a new computer, and another once-used fireplace.

He sat down at the immense desk and attempted to check his e-mail at the agency. As expected, his access was denied. He next checked his voice mail and was surprised to discover that it was still connected. He had one message, from Nick Coston, a small manufacturing client based in Wisconsin, telling him he had heard the news and wished him well. I know you’ll be fine, Nick said. Rather than heartened, this message opened a hole in him. Being an object of sympathy was a new experience for Charlie. He hung up the phone and began reading the mail.

There was a letter from Dr. Pamela Getty, family therapist. This was the marriage counselor Donna had wanted them to visit. She had scheduled a meeting a while ago, but Charlie had a last-minute conference call and had missed the appointment. He skimmed the letter,
we’re still hoping to reschedule
, then placed it aside and addressed the bills.

There was one from the landscaping company for $2,000, an orthodontics bill for $700, an electric bill for $345, and a $2,800 bill from the John Byrnes Sleep Apnea Clinic, which he had attended two months prior in an effort to improve his sleep habits.

He dropped those bills in a pile, picked up another, and examined it. This one, for $1,213, was from Tony DeAngelo Plumbing. Other than a brief description,
ongoing work to correct water flow
, the bill was short on details. The amount didn’t concern him as much as the ongoing part. To the best of his knowledge their water was, and always had been, flowing just fine. He got up, marched down to the hallway bathroom, flushed the toilet, and ran the water in the sink. Everything seemed in order. He repeated this process in all of their bathrooms before returning to the office, sitting back down, and staring out the window at their peaceful, expensive yard.

Money was going to be a problem. A big problem. Apparently, unlike their toilet water, it was steadily flowing out of their house like a turbulent river. The levee, his job, which had kept the whitecapped torrent in check for years, was gone. If they didn’t economize, the floodplains would be swamped and lives lost.

He pulled out a yellow legal pad from a drawer and wrote
The New Frugality
across the top in dark, meaningful letters, which he then underlined to make even more meaningful. He next drew several columns for various cost centers and marked them accordingly:
Shelter
,
Food
,
Utilities
,
Insurance
,
Miscellaneous.
For the first time ever, the Baker family was going to have a budget that would be honored, followed, adhered to. This budget would not be optional.

He took Ned’s advice and addressed the issue of food and shelter first. While their shelter costs were fixed—there was no negotiating their immense mortgage and preposterous taxes—he thought there might be some wiggle room in what they spent on food. He had no idea what they currently were paying for food, but he was sure they could spend less. They could clip coupons, buy generic items, stop ordering out, skip meals, get themselves invited to other people’s homes. Donna would have to become more creative in the kitchen, make do with less costly cuts of meat, canned foods, Spam, generic things in white boxes.

Inspired, he wrote
$100 a week
in the food column. When he realized that this came to a little more $14 a day (less than half his daily parking costs on days he had driven to the office), he decided to increase it, first to $125 a week, then to $150, and finally to $200. Then he pushed the legal pad aside because he realized that he had no idea what he was doing and put his head down on the desk.

He felt a growing need to gather himself, regroup. As Ned had predicted, he was experiencing a mood swing, slipping from benignly despondent to psychotically angry. He was mad at Helmut, then Marken, and then his parents. They were both high school teachers and they never should have let him go into advertising, he thought. Never. They should have steered him into their profession. He had the potential to be a modern-day Mr. Chips, beloved, admired. He would have worn spectacles and turtlenecks. Schoolgirls would have had crushes on him, future authors would have dedicated books to him. Advertising was a horrible and shallow business, full of horrible and shallow people.

He once again turned his anger back at Helmut, then Marken, then Trainor, his client at Southwest who had fired them, then, finally, inevitably, himself. He was hardly blameless in all of this. He should have worked harder, used better judgment, finished at least one Lincoln biography and mastered diplomacy. Maybe Charlie could have learned something.

He stood up and walked over to the bookcase, looking for a book on Lincoln. He carefully searched all six shelves, found dozens of self-help books, three biographies of Elton John, another biography on the life and times of Vanna White, but not a single Lincoln tome. He wondered where they all were. Probably still at the office. Marken was probably poring over them now, committing speeches to memory. He sighed, picked up the book on Vanna White (he had made a mattress commercial with her years ago), then silently put it back.

He felt the room closing in. He did several deep knee bends. He did fifty of them, until the blood was roaring behind his ears and he was sweating. He sat back down and, still breathing heavily, dug into his briefcase for the materials Ned Meyers had given him.

Among other things, there was a workbook on building résumés that sell; a binder designed to organize your business contacts; and a thin paperback book,
Coping with Job Loss
, by Thomas J. Murphy, a former publishing executive who, according to the back flap, had been fired twelve times over the course of his successful career. He leafed through the book, pausing to skim a chapter on depression, then another on guilt. While looking for some words of advice on rage and revenge, he came across a chapter entitled “Informing Your Life Partner”:

The book urged the use of “message points”:

Message points. Charlie leaned back and considered this concept. When and how to tell Donna had been weighing on him. He had envisioned taking her to a restaurant, having a nice, relaxed meal, and then, after nine or ten drinks, telling her about getting fired in an off-handed, casual by-the-way. Exactly what he was going to tell her, though, was a concern. He didn’t want to alarm her about their finances or the fact that he was a fifty-year-old man looking for a job in a recession. He also didn’t necessarily want to admit that he had failed. The book was right: how he handled the conversation was critical.

Inspired, he whirled around in his chair, turned the computer on, and began typing.

MESSAGE POINTS TO DONNA
  (WHILE AT A NICE RESTAURANT)

He paused and reviewed the list. Then he added a few more.

He stopped. Then:

Then:

He read over the message points, put his head back down, and closed his eyes.

Later that day, after he had finished accomplishing absolutely nothing in his office, he made his way downstairs to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and studied its contents. With the exception of a bottle of mustard, some orange juice, and a small plastic container of cherry tomatoes, it was empty. He was wondering how he could somehow combine these ingredients to produce a hearty and tasty meal when he heard someone cough. He jumped, turned. Kyle was standing a few feet behind him, an outrageously overstuffed backpack slipping down his shoulders.

“Jesus! You scared me.”

“Hi.”

Charlie shut the refrigerator and walked over to the island. “What are you doing here?”

Kyle shrugged. “What are you doing here?” He had his hands in the front pockets of his jeans and was slouched over.

“What do you mean? I’m home, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why? Because I live here, that’s why. I came home early. I was in a meeting and it ended, so I came home. Sometimes it works like that.”

Kyle nodded. He seemed to accept this explanation as plausible. He opened the refrigerator and stared into it. Even leaning forward, he looked incredibly tall.

“How tall are you?” Charlie asked.

“What? I don’t know.” He continued to look into the refrigerator.

“About how tall?”

“Six-two.”