The Fearsome Particles (9 page)

It was Sandy’s mention of working alone that made him aware, just then, of the silence. Without the constant whirr of his computer’s fan next to him and the usual drone of ringing phones and hallway chatter from the twenty-seven staffers on the second floor, the offices of Spent Materials had taken on an ethereal air, the apprehensive quiet of something forgotten, left behind. As he became conscious of it, Gerald’s thoughts wafted off until they settled, again, on Vicki.

As much as he’d been worried about her lately he was aware of a doubt in the back of his mind, faint, like the slip of smoke from a dud match, as to whether his concern was wholly authentic. He had to admit the possibility that being concerned
for
her really wasn’t the same as being troubled
by
her. Being infuriated, in fact, that none of his qualms or issues connected to Kyle, to her, to the house, to the cat, seemed to register with her. It was
one thing to think, Oh, my wife is becoming strangely distanced from reality and maybe I should do something; it was another to think, Where the hell is my wife when I need her? And it was at times like these that Gerald, with as much guilt as resentment, wondered whether he was really the man Vicki should have married. Whether, ideally, she should have found someone more … lighthearted. If it was an issue of character, that universe of a man’s own, unique promise as a father and husband, then the question was whether his was expanding or contracting. If it had ever, once, seemed limitless, Gerald feared that the elastic gravity of his potential was now snapping back on itself, and that if it continued as it was, it would one day be nothing more than a hard, dense nut of miserableness.

There had been a moment during their wedding reception at the Glenbridge Yacht Club – it was a panicky moment triggered by a flash of disappointment on Vicki’s face as word came that his best man, Milt Landrow, typically drunk, had fallen into the marina – when he wondered whether they were truly suited to each other and he found himself asking why she’d agreed to marry him.

“Because,” she’d told him, “I am hopelessly optimistic.”

Would she be happier now if she’d spent the last twenty-one years with someone less inclined to think of that as a failing?

“So,” said Sandy. She had freed some pages from her folder and held the topmost sheet by its corner, ready.

“Yes.”

“My
crazy
idea.”

He crossed his legs tight and leaned back. “I can’t wait.”

She ran the fingertips of one hand down the side of her face, her clear-painted, elliptical nails drawing away unseen stray hairs. “Well, let me start by saying the fact that I’m here, talking to you, shouldn’t be any kind of reflection on Trick. I mean, he’s really busy.” She emphasized “busy,” and in so doing, Gerald noted, seemed to de-emphasize it. “He’s going non-stop with details, all day, every day, putting out ad budget fires and trade show fires and sales meeting fires. He doesn’t have the time to play around with ‘what-if’ scenarios like this. But that’s okay because – between you and me? – this kind of big-picture strategic development thinking is what I really enjoy doing.” She’d been bearing down on this last phrase the whole time, Gerald realized now, and her voice rode up when it hit the word
enjoy
like a ski jumper leaping into the frosted mist.

“So,” Sandy said again. She glanced briefly at her sheet, then frowned up at him with sudden intensity. “As a man, not as an executive at Spent Materials, but as Gerald Woodlore, what do you worry about?”

He brushed at a knee. “Many things.”

“Let me put it this way,
who
do you worry about?”

He kept his gaze steady; he knew what she was getting at now. “My family.”

“That’s exactly right. Of course you worry about your family. You worry about them for all kinds of reasons. You worry about them getting hurt in an accident, you worry about them getting sick.” She seemed to be trying not to smile through her seriousness, but she obviously felt things were going well, the smile was creeping through. “And you worry that there’s
nothing, absolutely nothing you can do to prevent something bad from happening to them.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“It
is
true!” In her enthusiasm she slapped the table, which startled both Gerald and, apparently, herself, because she drew back, blushing. “Sorry,” she said, clearing her throat, “it’s just I’m really excited about this idea.”

“That’s okay. Take your time.”

She looked at her sheet for a moment; her fingers seemed to be trembling and this was perhaps why she laid the paper flat. “But Mr. Woodlore,” she began again, “Gerald, what’s not true is that you can’t do something to keep your family safe.” She pressed her eyes shut, and opened them. “A better way to put it is that there
is
something you
can
do.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“One of the major sources of human illness – and you could probably say the main source – is bacteria, dust, pollution, and other foreign particles in the air. Would you agree with that?”

“For our purposes, all right.”

“If we include viruses?”

“All right.”

She moved to a second page. “Now, our premium washable furnace filters do a pretty good job of collecting a lot of those particles as they go through the heating and cooling systems of the typical family’s house.”

“Down to half a micron anyway.”

“Better than most, certainly. And we promote that by advertising the particle-capturing ability of our filters with the slogan, ‘Fil-Tru gets what gets in.’ ”

Gerald hoped that Sandy would soon move away from telling him what he already knew. He wished for that, and signalled his yearning for that by shifting in his chair and blinking like a man struggling to sustain his interest.

“I can tell you want me to get to the point.”

Oh, she could be a dream employee.

She pushed the first two pages aside. “The point is, we’re not struggling to sustain market share in filters, because there we have a defined image. Our customers see our filters as helping them keep their families safe. Where we’re struggling is in our window screens, because what do our window screens actually do?”

“Keep out bugs.”

“Do bugs make us sick?”

“Mosquitoes can.”

With her eyes closed she nodded very rapidly. “Yes, yes, you’re right. Mosquitoes.”

“Flies. Flies can spread germs.”

“Yes, all right, but every window screen on the face of the earth keeps out flies and mosquitoes.”

“Well –”

“I mean that keeping out flies and mosquitoes is no big deal. It’s nothing! The stuff that hurts us, hurts your
family
, is way smaller than that, right? Exhaust from diesel trucks, fatty soot particles from your neighbour’s barbecue that mutate genes in mice, atmospheric dust whipped up from Outer Mongolia or some horrible nuclear test zone somewhere – all these tiny particles you can’t even see just zoom through that screen as if it wasn’t there. They come inside. You can’t stop them! You can’t
control them!” She was sawing the air with a flattened hand, her hair flying. “They come in, like they’re on some covert operation, and who knows for sure that viruses like
SARS
or
worse
aren’t riding some of those particles like terrorists on a bus? And once they’re inside, what’s our defence? All we can do is hope that one day, eventually, they’ll get caught in the furnace filter. And until that day,
who knows
what harm they could do.”

She stopped to catch her breath. And turned the page.

“But those tiny invaders can only hurt us if they get inside, right? So what we need, what
you
need to help your family stay safe, is some way to keep those particles, those deadly, fearsome particles, out.”

“How do we do that?”

Sandy took a deep breath. Looked right at him. “Put filters on the windows.”

Gerald gave nothing away. “Filters on the windows.”

“That’s right. Instead of window screens, you cover every window in the house with a great big air filter.” Her thin mouth moseyed into a smile.

“The whole window?”

“Yes!” cried Sandy. “No half measures, no compromises! Every window, completely covered!”

“But, there’s no such thing as a transparent filter.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Well, I think it does matter, Sandy. If you put filters over the windows, people won’t be able to see outside.”

She slapped the table again, deliberately, and leaned toward him with a volcanic glare. “What matters more to you, Mr.
Woodlore, the health and safety of your family or … a
nice view?”
Then she sat back, aflame with triumph.

The deserted offices of Spent Materials seemed to ring, church-like, as the passion of Sandy Beale hovered o’er all. Gerald’s mind was working on myriad fronts. To Sandy, he said, “What about natural light?”

She didn’t hesitate. “They’ll be translucent.”

He scratched his chin. “Our furnace filters are too thick to install in windows.”

“Compress them.”

Here’s where he had her. “But compressing the filters would diminish their filtering ability.”

She smiled again. He was starting to not like it as much. “So, you agree,” she said, “that you would want the best possible air quality protection covering your windows.”

“I think –”

“You accept that a high-density air filter, made of woven translucent fibres, would be a more effective safeguard against particle invasion than even the best window screen.”

“What we –”

“And you admit that without such protection, the family you love is vulnerable.”

He put his hands up. “Okay, Sandy, this is a really interesting idea, all right? And I’m impressed with your willingness to, not just think outside the box but, you know, crush it.”

Her heat subsided a little, and her expression turned demure. “Thank you.”

“I think, though, as a product” – he reached out and patted her papers lightly – “it has some big issues.”

“But –”

“I just don’t see the retailers and the contractors and the window manufacturers we work with accepting the principle that people are going to give up the ability to look out their windows in order to breathe cleaner air.”

Sandy huffed. “I
gave
you the rationale. You make people choose – health or beauty.” She snatched up a piece of paper and waved it in the air. “You show people enlarged pictures of the stuff that’s coming into their houses. Humungous ugly alien-looking things. Then you say, ‘Do you want your new baby breathing this just so you can watch the sunset?’ Okay, so some people will choose the sunset, but you know what? If we do this right, they’ll feel guilty about it.”

Gerald sighed as he shook his head. “It’s too out there. It’s too big a risk.”

She studied him for a moment, and then her gaze fell to the table. “Look, you’re absolutely right” – her voice had taken on the palliative texture of a cello – “it would be a big gamble. I mean, it’s an opportunity to take ownership of a value, like Ford tried to do with ‘quality’ and Smith Barney did with ‘hard work.’ Spent Materials could own ‘protecting your family’s health, above all.’ But there’s no doubt, it’s the kind of risky, go-for-broke move that would only be made by a company with nothing to lose.”

Sandy lifted her face toward him, and Gerald feared then that he knew what she was getting at. He feared that he had received exactly the message she intended to convey. He hadn’t had a chance to finish his own analysis of the market share
percentages, and now Sandy’s expression told Gerald he didn’t need to.

“We’re at the bottom,” he said.

She held up two fingers, then spread out her whole hand. Two … five. Two and a half per cent.

“You know this for a fact?”

She nodded solemnly. Two and a half per cent. Gerald felt the acid in his stomach foam up like beer in a warm bottle. He did everything he could, paid attention to every operational detail in order to keep the company running smoothly, and it galled him that it wasn’t enough. It galled him that Trick Runiman would attempt to slip this leper of a number by him and imagine he could do it. But it galled him most of all that his instincts had warned him a problem like this was developing, and he hadn’t done a damn thing about it.

In his frustration Gerald pressed back in his chair and craned his neck so that he faced the suspended ceiling, and was not surprised to see, in the amber light of evening, a few, brazen motes of dust larking in the air. To be aware of a thing was, he well knew, to be plagued by it.

T
he Lightenham Avenue house gave off whiffs of banking. Or perhaps more specifically, international finance. Vicki wanted to be sure, though, and she still had an opportunity to change her mind. Showings wouldn’t begin for another ten days, and though she’d selected and had delivered many of the necessary furnishings based on her early banking/finance impressions, few of these pieces were in place. She could order back the movers tomorrow morning and make wholesale replacements if she deemed it necessary. If at the last moment she picked up something, say, insurancey.

For Vicki, staging a house was a process of graduating insights. It wasn’t, as too many people believed, simply a matter of pushing around hunks of furniture according to some mythical decorator’s code, distributing a few tasteful knick-knacks and calling it a day. Her work was more serious than that. She was dealing in the representation of ideal lives, creating precedents
for contentment. And to do that, Vicki felt, she needed to understand whose happiness she was bringing to life.

Her first step was to suss out the character of the house she was staging, and thus the category of its likely buyer. In this case, she had already ruled out media ownership, which was a big one always to be considered, and anything to do with professional sports. No hockey players, in other words, would be buying the Lightenham Avenue house. There were two reasons for this: first, Avis Nye had few hockey players among her clientele (or, as Avis pronounced it, “clee-on-tell”); hockey players were the province of Vanrey & Donlan’s honey-haired Meredith Patrick. And second, Meredith would not be traipsing hockey players through the Lightenham Avenue house because it was not made of big blocks of stone. Hockey players might be content to let their wives rule over a home’s interior, but they would drive their throbbing Humvees and Ram trucks past any house that from the outside failed to look sufficiently hewn. It was the sweet distinction of 146 Lightenham Avenue to be constructed from carefully aged Portuguese brick of a warm, mustardy hue and it was this, Vicki felt, that pointed toward ownership more rarefied than men who wielded long sticks or large satellite dishes. It said to her money, in one of its less adulterated forms.