Cocktail Hour (7 page)

Then Margie died and he was gone: MIA at the office, significant delays in response to emails and phone calls, projects stalled. Sharon started covering for him, turning on the light and his computer in his office, making things up when queried, hoping no one knew. One day, when he had missed another important client meeting, she went to his house in New Canaan. She looked up where he lived on the office directory, which listed addresses as well as contact numbers, and drove over intending to give him a piece of her mind, fed up with being the one left holding the bag, especially now as it was becoming more and more obvious that he wasn’t around or even working from home.

When she got there the house looked abandoned. The mailbox was half-open and starting to regurgitate all the letters, bills, and catalogs that had been stuffed into it. There was a pile of plastic-bagged newspapers on the front door step. The lawn hadn’t been mowed and was filled with the bald-headed sentinels of dandelions gone to seed. Stopping on the flagstone path that led to his front door, she considered turning around and going back to the office, forgetting about it, but then she remembered Alan and all the times he’d slapped her on the back when she pointed out something they could do to improve a study and said, “You’re good, Sharon. You’re really goooood. Damn!”

She carefully kicked aside the landslide of newspapers in order to get to the door and rang the doorbell, the old electric ding-dong sound muffled inside the darkened house. She peered through the glass panes on either side of the front door, but saw only an empty gray-shadowed hallway containing a narrow table pressed against the wall with an empty vase centered on it. She wrapped her arms around herself and looked back at the yard. It was early October and the day had been warm, but now it was cooling quickly as the sun slid down in the sky and made long orange stripes on the ground between the trees.

Just then the door opened and Sharon turned her head and saw Alan. Actually it was someone much older than Alan, maybe a brother who resembled him, and he was clearly ill. He stood in the door swaying and staring at her with red eyes, his mouth loose and wet looking, his face gray. The man mumbled something unintelligible.

"Hello. I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm looking for Alan Duffy? This is the address listed for him in our office directory," she said, speaking in a loud voice in spite of herself, knowing that not all old sick people had hearing problems, but unable to stop her own rude habit.

The man blinked and shook his head. He mumbled again and then cleared his throat, making a loud phlegmy noise.

Sharon resisted the urge to turn down her lips in a moue of disgust. She could swear he'd said something like "me" when he'd mumbled.

He wobbled on his feet and said, his words audible now, "What are you doing here, Sharon?" He slurred the s in Sharon.

"I'm sorry? Do I know you?"

He leaned against the doorframe.  "Do I really look that bad? Oh, God...I just..."

She stared.

It was him. Alan, her always-together boss. Well, except at the company's annual holiday party in December and the family picnic in June. Then he always drank too much, talked too loudly, wrapped his arm too familiarly around Sharon, before Margie finally collected him and bore him off, his face contrite after she'd whispered in his ear.

This man was more than a little drunk. He was leaning heavily against the door now, and his face was that of someone dying of poison. And Sharon knew exactly what kind of poison it was: gin, his favorite libation.

Staring at him, she wavered. She could walk away right now. Wash her hands of this. It wasn't her problem. His family could help him.

But then she remembered: there wasn't any family to help him. The couple never had children, their own parents were long dead, Margie was an only child, and Alan's older brother was ill and in assisted-care living. And she couldn't walk away, not after he'd been so supportive of her while she was going through her divorce, covering for her, looking the other way when tears uncontrollably appeared in her eyes, telling her to take the day off when she was at her lowest.

"Oh, Alan. What have you been doing to yourself?" she said, choking out the words and trying to steel herself.  But it was hard to do. She had a weak mutinous stomach, an easily disgusted nature, an obsession with tidiness and order, and whatever lay inside the house, inside this poor shambling mess looking at her through the still-closed screen door, would surely push every button she had. She took a deep breath and forced herself to reach for the screen door handle, pulling at it and feeling as if it weighed a ton, a mammoth oak door rather than a featherweight aluminum-framed screen.

What came after was even harder. The house had been clearly well-tended at one time, but now it was littered with abandoned finger-printed glasses and dirty plates on almost every surface, the cute red-and-white kitchen repulsive with its rotting stinking garbage and piled plates in the sink as well as encrusted pots and pans on the range. She kept stepping on intermittent scatterings of broken glass on the floor and when she opened the door to the closet-like pantry, large empty gin bottles and plastic tonic bottles that were piled there rolled out and under her feet.

The worst was Alan, who had fought her at first when she started to clean up and fought even harder when she found the remainder of his stash of gin and began pouring the bottles out in the kitchen sink. When she was holding the second bottle upside down over the drain and watching the sharp-scented liquid glitter down into the basin, he grabbed her arm and she had turned on him, screaming out all her fury and pity and disgust, unable to stop herself, even when his face and body crumpled down onto the floor and he heaved below her, sobbing. At last she relented, put down the bottle and sank down beside him, tentatively patting his convulsing back. In that moment she realized that nothing would ever be the same again between them, that they were no longer simply supervisor and employee.

Things turned around after that day. Alan started seeing a therapist, quit drinking – albeit briefly – and finally returned to work a month later, an official brief leave of absence having been approved. They started meeting occasionally for dinner after work, Alan issuing the invitation and Sharon accepting with trepidation, not wanting to get any more involved than she was. Their dinners were usually in the brightly lit diner, Frannie’s, across the road from the entrance to TMB's office complex.

They’d sit in the florescent-glaring light talking shop and eating comforting homey dinners of pot roast swimming in muddy gravy or Thanksgiving-style turkey-and-fixings brightened with globs of red jellied cranberry sauce. After the initial feelings of obligation wore off, Sharon grew to enjoy and then even anticipate these dinners, appreciating Alan’s insights into their organization and the people that worked there. He was brilliant, really, and never stumped or scared by the stupid machinations of upper management, always knowing the way to wiggle out of trouble and doing it with style and panache. He became her go-to, her tower of strength in the carnage of corporate America.

That tower of strength now sat in her office’s guest chair, still slowing shaking his head, the ragged sound of his breathing having abated.

“Alan? You’re scaring me here,” she said, surprised to hear a wobble in her voice.

He sighed and sat back in the chair, his face having returned to its usual coloring. He looked up at the ceiling and shook his head again. “This place really blows me away. It really does.”

“What? Please tell me what’s going on.”

He finally looked at her. “Well, I’m gone. Larry just told me, caught me before the meeting. They're going to do it tomorrow; along with all the others they're giving the heave-ho. The old Friday cardboard-box exodus," he said, and narrowed his eyes. "I should have known  it. Seen it coming. Another reorg. Lots of young tireless talent banging down the door. And I’m a dinosaur. A good dinosaur, a deeply talented one who isn’t the slightest bit humble about it, but a dinosaur nevertheless. An old man with a fat salary they could cut in half. And they just did. So, it looks like I’ll be taking up golf after all.” He tried, unsuccessfully, to smile.

Sharon felt as if the floor had just dissolved underneath her chair, a pin-wheeling helplessness. Alan, gone? “What! No! Are they kidding?” 

“No, they’re not. I’m being retired. But that’s not the worst of it. Not for you. Old pencil-neck is stepping up and into these colossal shoes,” he said, and then let out a little puffing sound of mirthful disbelief, smiling at the irony.

“Bob Crandall?" she said.

He nodded.

"Bob! No. Way. He'd be a horrible team leader. He can't even play nice with the team when he's just a member of it. And of all people." Sharon realized she had picked up her pencil and was gripping it in her sweaty hands so hard it would snap in a minute. She put it down and folded her hands on top of it.

Alan leaned back, put his hands behind his head while stretching his legs out and crossing them at the ankle. It was as if he was doing some poor imitation of a relaxed person. "I know. I could've gotten rid of him, should've. I don't know why I didn't, especially after all of you complained. I'm getting soft in my old age. Felt sorry for the guy. Another reason to send me off to graze the pasture. Or play golf on it wearing ridiculous plaid pants."

"I just can't believe it. Who would promote Bob?  He’s got the personality of a…paper clip. A smug paper clip. A paper clip with delusions of grandeur. And he's only been here a year!"

"Hey, keep it down. That door's not soundproof."

Sharon glanced at the closed door and leaned on her elbows before putting her moist hands over her face, her fingertips massaging her eyebrows where a headache was starting, a pinched pain of exhaustion and shock. She spoke through her fingers, "I know. You're right. I just can't believe it. And he's not just a paper clip, he's a last-name-caller."

"Hey, Wozniak," Alan called.

She laughed in spite of herself. "Stop! Agh! I swear I might smack him the next time he calls me that." She whipped her hands away from her face and shook them out in the air on either side of her head.

"Ah, well. You better get used to it. There aren't any other big market research firms around here, nothing like this place. You'd have to go into the city."

"Can you imagine the commute? It would be three hours each way, what with traffic and then the train. And the money for the train…and the parking! It's so expensive. No, I'm staying here."

"You better get used to Bob then. Hey, it's not that bad: the rest of the team's intact. And you're one of the best here. I'm sure he'll grow to appreciate you. I, on the other hand, am clueless about what I'm going to do all day, golf jokes aside," Alan said, letting out a gruff non-laugh. "I'll have to figure something out."

She looked at Alan. How she depended on him. He was her safety raft in the stormy sea of TMB. Now she'd have to swim alone. Her team was a good one, but they all looked out for themselves ultimately.  Things just weren’t going to be the same, and she hated that, hated change more than anything. Intellectually she understood and accepted that change was part of life, but emotionally she rejected it with every particle of her being. Why couldn’t things just go along as they were?

But it was more than just the safety and comfort of the status quo – she’d miss Alan being there at the office. Her job was fun in a large part because of him and his honesty and humor. She tried to imagine Alan at home every day, retired, and came up blank. The golf jokes really were just that. He wasn't going to be the guy taking up tennis or golf and joining the local country club. An intellectual, Alan's main hobbies were passive pastimes: reading and listening to music. But you couldn't read and listen to music all day. You had to do something with yourself, something interesting.

Sharon had an idea and straightened. "What about school? Taking some classes?"

Alan raised a furry gray eyebrow at her. "Classes? Maybe. Eh, who knows. What are you doing tonight? Want to get dinner? Maybe we'll go someplace else other than Frannie's this time; I could use a drink."

“Oh, God.”

“What?”

Sharon slumped again, leaning heavily on her elbows. “Chelsea invited me out for drinks with the girls,” she said, making quote marks in the air at the words "the girls". “And I actually said yes. Now I really don’t want to go.”