Everything Changes (10 page)

“Sorry I’m late,” I say, hoping we can leave it at that, but alas, we cannot. Bill won’t let such manifest disregard for his Tuesday Production Meeting go unchallenged.

“Zack,” Bill says, still looking down at his notepad. “These are your colleagues. They’re all very busy, as busy as you. And yet, they all take time out of their hectic schedules to attend the Tuesday meeting. Because it’s important. And because, as their boss, I demand it. Updating each other, sharing our respective triumphs and challenges, transforms us from a group of disjointed entrepreneurs into a formidable team. Because our separate experiences become a greater whole, a collective memory upon which we can all draw when we go out into the field. Your colleagues have taken time out of their busy schedules to be here for you, and the least you could do, as a member of this team, is to return the favor. I think,” Bill finishes, finally looking up from his pad, which creates the illusion that he’s been reading this little speech, “that you owe us all an apology.”

“Hence my opening statement ‘Sorry I’m late,’ ” I say.

Bill frowns. “Very well, Zack. I’m not going to press the point, because I know you’re under some pressure right now. Why don’t you bring us up to speed on the Nike situation.”

I tell the group about the wrong-colored swooshes, and Hodges’s unwillingness to take the fall for his screwup, leaving out the fact that I’ve been avoiding Hodges’s calls, since the middleman never lets a call go unreturned. There follows a brief question-and-answer session between Bill and me that feels like a skit at one of the Spandler Management Seminars the head office sends us to at Holiday Inns around the country, Crisis Management 101 over complimentary doughnuts and coffee.

“Who’s the vendor?”

“Qingdao Target.”

“What’s our leverage? Anyone else here have major projects going at Qingdao?”

No one in the room does. I know all this already.

“What’s our exposure if we make Hodges the hero?”

“All told, somewhere in the area of fifty grand,” I say, “not including the expedited shipping costs.”

“Has he projected any orders after this one?”

I sigh. “It’s a test program.”

“Damn.” Bill is thoughtful for a moment. “Is Hodges a good guy to have in our corner?” No conversation with Bill is ever safe from the stray sports analogy.

“Hodges is an asshole.”

Bill inhales sharply. “Come on, Zack,” he chastises me in a hollow voice that suggests it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that our offices might be bugged by the client, little ladybug-size transmitters with microscopic swooshes on their undersides.

“I’m sorry,” I say exasperatedly. “But don’t you ever get tired of bending over for the Craig Hodgeses of this world? You have this whole network of systems you’ve created—you’ve practically buried us in systems—all designed to avoid this very scenario, to make sure it never happens. So what the hell is the point of it all if we have to take the hit when it’s someone else’s fault?”

“I take issue with that, Zack,” Bill says hotly. “I don’t bend over for anybody. I’m just looking for the most fiscally responsible solution for us. That’s my job. Our job. We are professionals. You don’t piss away a major account because you happen to be of the opinion that your client contact is an asshole. In the grand scheme of things, fifty grand might be a drop in the bucket, a small price to pay for holding on to Nike. All I’m saying is, we don’t want to be penny-wise and pound-foolish here.”

“No, we certainly don’t want that,” I say with maybe just a soupçon more irony than I probably should.

“Zack,” Bill says, slowly removing his glasses and assuming a deliberately false avuncular tone. “Do you have a problem?”

Every instinct tells me to back down. I should let him take me through this exercise, this middle-management masturbation, answer his questions, and quietly take his direction. I’m disrespecting him in front of his entire department, which he doesn’t deserve and which will further compel him to assert his authority with force. A bad career move, any way you look at it. But today they’re going to stick a tube through my dick and into my bladder, and while I’ve never had that done before, I’m fairly certain I’d prefer to have my eyeballs cattle branded, and that spot on my bladder wall may very well have some genuine life-changing implications, so sue me if I’m having a hard time thinking consequentially about much else. And he did ask, after all. “Yes, I do, Bill,” I say, getting to my feet. “I have a big fucking problem. I am sick and tired of kissing the asses of poorly educated, lazy pencil pushers, of ignoring the principle and paying for the indolence and incompetence of others, all in the name of making the goddamn sale. When did being right become worthless, and being at fault irrelevant? We eat shit on a daily basis, and I worry about the long-term effects of so much fiber in my diet. I may be nothing more than a middleman, but goddamn it, I’m a professional middleman, and there should be a certain degree of dignity and fair play that goes along with that!”

My tirade is greeted with a stunned silence, and you can hear every molecule in the room look up to see how deeply I’ve put my foot into it this time. I certainly didn’t mean for it to come out as a call to arms, but goddamn if the rest of the account execs aren’t nodding in appreciation. There’s even a faint smattering of applause, but Bill quashes that by bringing his fist down like a gavel on the table and getting slowly to his feet, and I can actually see him anxiously scanning his mental database of clichés to find one appropriate to this discussion. “Listen, Zack,” he says, apparently giving up. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, and there might be a forum to debate our policies and strategies when it comes to issues like this, but this is not it. You need to calm yourself down and focus on the issue at hand. This is no time to take your eye off the ball.” Sports analogy number two, if you’re counting, which I am. “It’s just business. You can’t take it personally.”

“Apparently, I can.”

“Well, regardless of what you think of Hodges, he’s still your client, the Spandler Corporation’s client. Remember the rule of the three Cs. Crisis plus Communication equals Control. So be a professional and return the man’s calls,” Bill says sternly. “Work it out.”

I sigh deeply, already regretting the whole conversation. They’ll be talking about this all day now, exaggerating it to everyone else in the office, wondering if I’m poised to go postal like Clay. My standing in the burnout pool has no doubt just risen considerably. Come to think of it, I might want to take some of that action myself. “I’ll call him,” I say.

“And you touch base with me after you speak to him, okay?” Sports analogy number three, and we have a hat trick.

“Will do.”

He starts to say something about there being no problems, only opportunities, but I walk out of the room before he can finish. I can hear him shouting angrily after me as I run down the hall, and I know I should have stayed, but I’m thinking that life is just too damn short to listen to any more of this crap.

Dr. Sanderson holds up something that looks like a miniature plumber’s snake and describes the horrific procedure he’s about to perform. “It’s called a cystoscopy,” he says. “Basically, we enter the bladder through the urethra, and the camera here gives us a full view of what’s going on in there.”

I’m having trouble paying attention, because at the moment a young, dark-haired Hispanic woman is cradling my penis in her latex-gloved hands. She begins slathering something onto it, pulling slightly on me as she does so, and I am terrified at the possibility of an erection. If it can happen on the subway, or sitting innocently at my desk, why not here? I’m reclining on an examination table, legs splayed, completely naked but for the flimsy gown the physician’s assistant handed me right before she began handling me. She is deft and professional, and I wonder what impact, if any, spending her days handling limp, cowering penises might have on her sex life. Get that thing away from me, honey. I’ve had quite enough today, thank you very much!

“That’s a topical anesthetic,” Dr. Sanderson continues. “Once it takes effect, Camille will administer a local and we’ll do the procedure.” He looks at me. “Are you feeling okay?”

“I usually get kissed first,” I joke lamely.

Camille’s smirk says tell me one I haven’t heard.

Only once I’ve been laid fully back with my knees spread does it sink in that the cystoscope will be inserted into my tiniest of holes. A low terror starts to build in me, and I begin to tremble involuntarily. “Don’t worry,” Camille tells me unconcernedly. “You’ll barely feel it,” which is easy for her to say, since it’s not her genitals into which she’s poised to plunge a nasty-looking metallic syringe the length of a small baseball bat.

Dr. Sanderson finally steps in, and I lay my head back and squeeze my eyes shut. “I’ll need you to relax,” he says. If so, he’s in for a disappointment. “Try to release your muscles, like you do when you urinate,” he tells me. I take some deep breaths and suddenly feel a hot pinch. “Good,” says the doctor. “We’re in.” My eyes remain resolutely shut. I am firmly committed to not seeing what’s happening below. It’s bad enough just hearing the sounds of his manipulations as he adjusts the cystoscope and flips on the TV monitor.

“I feel like I have to urinate,” I say after a few minutes.

“I’m filling your bladder with water,” he informs me. “I need to expand your bladder wall so that I can see everything.”

“I’m not sure I’m going to be able to hold it,” I say.

“Try,” he advises me. “It’ll only be for a little while.”

After a few minutes, Dr. Sanderson nudges my leg and tells me to open my eyes. At some point while my eyes were closed, Camille took her leave, and it is now just the doctor and me. I become conscious of a puddle forming on the protective paper beneath me on the table. “Don’t worry about that,” the doctor says. “It’s just excess water.”

I have a glimpse into the continuous indignities of long-term medical care, the exposure, the clinical manipulation of your most intimate parts, the private by-products and secretions that will pour out, uninvited, for all to see. And all the while, the doctor looming above, unhurriedly doing his work, waiting until the last possible instant to share any findings with you.

“So,” I say. “What do you see?”

Dr. Sanderson frowns. “Hard to say,” he says. “There’s definitely a small mass there, just off the bladder wall. I’d be surprised if it’s cancerous, but still . . . We’ll do a biopsy, just to rule it out.”

And even though I’d been steeling myself for continued bad news, I realize at this moment that for the most part I hadn’t really bought into the possibility. But now he’s used the words “mass” and “biopsy,” and I can feel an icy chill expanding upward from my hyper-clenched bowels. On the bright side, at least it’s too late for me to wet myself.

I clear my throat. “When you say you want to rule it out, do you mean that in a ‘we’re living in litigious times and you need to cover your ass’ kind of way, or is it more like a ‘that mass looks like it may very well be a malignant tumor, and procedurally, a biopsy is the next step in diagnosis and treatment’ kind of way?”

The doctor turns away from the screen to look at me. “Listen, Zack, I understand your concern. The odds are highly against someone your age, with your medical history, having bladder cancer. But what I see in your bladder is something that shouldn’t normally be there. That concerns me, and we need to figure out what it is. I’m sorry I can’t give you a more concrete answer right now. As hard as it is, you’re going to have to just believe in the odds and wait to see what we find out.”

“I understand all that,” I say. “But off the record, what’s your gut?”

“My gut?”

“You see this stuff all day. You must have a gut reaction.”

Sanderson exhales slowly. “My gut is, I shouldn’t be seeing something like that in someone your age and I’ll feel better when I know what it is.”

“Thanks,” I say. “That wasn’t remotely helpful.”

“Even if it does turn out to be a cancerous or precancerous growth, you should be advised that in most cases it’s highly treatable.”

“Great.” For a guy who’s been doing this as long as he has, he is staggeringly clueless. I don’t want to hear “treatable,” because “treatable” means it’s something, and even if it can be cured, or removed, or whatever the term is for cancer, it won’t change the fact that it was there to begin with, that my body betrayed me by allowing this to happen, that I’ll never feel safe in my own skin again. Where’s the silver lining in that? I’m like Craig Hodges and his stupid purple swooshes, donning my blinders when it comes to reason and rationale, only interested in hearing that the problem isn’t really a problem.

He performs the biopsy right through the scope, cuts a microscopic piece of tissue right out of me. I feel another hot pinch, this time in the depths of my belly, and the slightest convulsion, and then it’s done. Now that the scope has been in me for a while, I’m dreading its removal, imagining the slow, sickening drag as he pulls it out, but the anesthetic is still working and I barely feel a thing. Afterward, I piss for what feels like five minutes, the stream vibrating oddly through my numb instrument. There’s a lot more blood now, but I’ve been warned by the doctor to expect that for a day or two after the biopsy. I dry off with a towel and get dressed again. I examine my genitals carefully, but everything seems to be just as I left it. The doctor warns me that in addition to the blood, I might experience a mild burning sensation when I urinate over the next few days. If the pain or bleeding continues after that, I should give him a call. He’ll have the results of the biopsy by Friday, and I should try not to worry about it. “Statistically speaking,” he tells me again, “the odds of someone your age having bladder cancer are very slim.”

Maybe so, I think as I ride down in the elevator. But do those odds still apply once you’ve already established that there’s a biopsy-worthy mass lurking in there? Somehow, at this point I think we’re dealing with a whole other set of stats, and while I’m not interested in hearing them, I’m fairly certain that they would be somewhat less encouraging.

The instant I turn my cell phone on, it starts to beep and flash the message icon. I have three urgent messages from clients who need to hear back from me first thing in the morning. When you’re a middleman, everything is always an emergency. The last message is from Hope, wondering where I am. Since it’s just about six, I decide to surprise her at her office. I cut over to Fifth Avenue and then downtown through the Fifties, to Rockefeller Center. The sidewalks are swarming with the after-work crowd, grimly staring ahead, talking on cell phones, or taking in the questionable merchandise in the hodgepodge windows of immigrant electronics shops.

I wait in the lobby at Rockefeller Plaza, leaning against the wall as I watch the exodus pour out of the elevators, the men in their upscale, corporate-casual outfits, the women looking as if they’re all headed to an audition for Sex and the City, dressed to titillate in aggressively short skirts, expensive haircuts, and designer shoes that clack authoritatively against the marble floor.

After about fifteen minutes, Hope emerges with two women I don’t know, the three of them immersed in laughing conversation. She looks magnificent as always, in dark dress slacks and a light, formfitting cardigan. I watch her for a few seconds, reveling in the grace of her walk, the swing of her hair, and the furtive and not-so-furtive glances she elicits from the men she passes. Observing her in this manner, I feel a rush of pride and inevitable skepticism. I still can’t get over the fact that someone this beautiful would have any use for me. It occurs to me that Hope might have made plans, and will not appreciate my spontaneous arrival, but when she sees me, her face brightens gratifyingly, and she charges across the lobby to give me a kiss.

“What are you doing here?” she says happily.

“I had an appointment in the area,” I say.

“Fantastic!” She kisses me again in a rare public display of affection.

“You’re in a good mood,” I say.

“And why shouldn’t I be?”

I could give her a reason or two. At this point, she remembers her two friends, who are now hovering behind her with anticipatory so-this-is-him grins. “Oh, sorry,” Hope says, stepping out of my embrace. “Zack, this is Dana and Jill.”

Nice to meet you, heard so much about you, congratulations on the engagement, isn’t it so exciting? Under Hope’s watchful eye, I smile and charm to the best of my abilities, wishing that I were taller and better dressed, more for her sake than mine. After all, I’ve already gotten the girl.

As we walk uptown, I find out what has her so excited. “I’ve been asked to help catalog a private collection for the nineteenth-century group,” she tells me. “It’s the first time they’re sending me alone.”

“That’s great,” I say. “Where’s the collection?”

“In London.”

“London, England?”

“The very same.”

“When do you leave?”

“Tonight,” Hope tells me animatedly. “I’m heading home right now to pack and get a cab to the airport. Isn’t it insane?”

“Yeah,” I say. “How long will you be gone?”

“I’ll be back Friday evening. That will give me all day Saturday to rest up for the party.”

Hope stops walking and looks at me. “What’s with you?”

The anesthetic has now completely worn off, and it feels like someone jammed a knitting needle into my crotch. “I had a procedure done today,” I tell her.

“What kind of procedure?” she asks, concerned. I tell her about the blood in my urine and the cystoscopy, but leave out the part about the biopsy. “Turns out it was nothing,” I say offhandedly.

“Well, you needed to be sure.”

“Yep.”

Hope takes my hand and smiles. “Well, I was going to suggest a bon voyage quickie at my place, but it sounds like you’re not up for it.”

I nod, shuddering at the thought of intercourse in my current state. I suspect it would be something akin to putting my penis through a meat grinder. I think about my near infidelity at the WENUS gig, and thoughts of poetic justice and divine retribution run briefly through my head. “I’m not,” I say. “Thanks for the thought, though.”

“Why don’t I get us a cab,” she says. “You drop me off, then go home and rest.”

“Okay.”

In Manhattan’s Darwinian traffic sprawl, only someone who looks like Hope can get a cab so quickly on Fifty-third and Park. I collapse into her on the seat, and she puts her arm around me, rubbing my back sympathetically, while her perfume puts up a valiant but futile struggle against the redolent stink of the driver’s body odor.

As we ride uptown, I tell Hope about my father’s return. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” she demands.

“I don’t know,” I say. “It just didn’t seem real.”

“What’s he like?”

“I don’t know. Still a mess, I guess.”

She nods. “Well, did you invite him to the party?”

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

“He doesn’t belong there.”

“He is your father,” she says. “Don’t you think I should meet him?”

“Trust me, you don’t want him there,” I say.

Hope gives me a look, and seems poised to say something, but then doesn’t, choosing instead to give me a soft kiss on my neck. “Well, you have a few days to think about it, I guess.”

The cab drops her off in front of her building, on Eighty-ninth and Fifth. “ ’Bye,” she says, and gives me a long hard-lipped kiss. “You get some rest.” She pats my crotch gently. “I expect the both of you to be in top form when I get back.”

“We’ll do our best.”

“I’ll call you from the airport.”

I tell her I’ll miss her, but by then she’s gotten out, and the taxi door slams on me in midphrase. As the cab heads west through Central Park, I wonder whether I’ve done the right thing, not telling her about the biopsy. She was on such a high about the London trip, I didn’t want to spoil her mood. She wouldn’t have been able to go off to London knowing that I’m sitting here on pins and needles waiting for the results. Still, I feel bad that I didn’t tell her. Or maybe I feel bad because I suspect she might have still gone anyway.