The Last Good Day (6 page)

THESE ARE TIMES THAT TRY MEN’S SOULS—AND MINE TOO!
said an Instant Message from Lisa Chang, who was adjusting her frames without looking at Barry.

“So, what do you suggest?” asked Ross Olson, with the kind of cool equanimity that only the most experienced senior managers can muster when bereft of any ideas of their own.

“I think we cut and run,” said Steve Lyons, mouth pulling down at the corners. “I’m thinking we put out an announcement that we’re reorganizing and looking at layoffs, and then we quietly change the location of our shareholders meeting to someplace like Missoula so people will have to work to get at us. Look at Disney. Didn’t they do it in Kansas City a couple of years ago because it’s the birthplace of old Walt or something?
Yeah, right.
They just didn’t want to talk about that little European theme park adventure.”

“I don’t think layoffs are the answer.” Barry shook his head. “We’ve only got thirty people to begin with. I don’t think you make a company grow by having the senior vice presidents act as your bike messengers.”

“Bharat, what do you think?” asked Ross Olson.

“I think we have to back-channel this as much as possible.” Bharat slumped down in his seat. “Set up private meetings or conference calls with Mark Young as quickly as we can and try to quietly make our case that the stock price is stabilizing and that he should cut us a little slack. Because I have to tell you guys, my father came over here from New Delhi and drove a cab in Queens for twenty years, and he got held up at gunpoint about once every other week. So my top priority is not going out in a blaze of glory. My top priority is survival.”

“I’m thinking we could have Mark barred from the meeting,” Steve Lyons said. “He doesn’t actually own the stock he’s trading, so technically we’re on solid ground.”

“I think that would be a
serious
mistake,” Barry spoke up, flexing his right hand impatiently.

Everyone stopped thumbing their BlackBerrys and looked over at him. Lisa Chang took off her glasses, revealing the bright unspoiled plain of her face.

“I think if we have him barred from the meeting, it just gives him more credibility,” Barry said, raising his voice. “He can still go after us in the newspapers and on the Internet. And trying to keep him out just makes it look like we have something to hide.”

He let that thought simmer on the table for a moment.
I STILL VOTE FOR DIPLOMACY,
said an Instant Message from Bharat.
ANYBODY GOT A PROZAC?
asked one from Lisa a moment later.
SECOND THOUGHT, MAKE THAT A CORIDAL.

“Well, I for one am not relishing the idea of a showdown in front of our shareholders,” said Ross Olson with a mild Virginia twang that made him sound more like a gentleman farmer than the research scientist he once was. “Clearly there are things we could’ve done differently in the last year, especially in the Alzheimer’s market, and we’re going to get called on them.”

“I don’t have any problem with confrontation,” said Barry, arm flung over the side of his chair. “Listen, if he’s going to make accusations about our mismanagement, we ought to be ready with the rapid response. When I was a prosecutor in the Bronx, I learned that if you’ve got a witness with a problem, you damn well better tell the jury about it before opposing counsel does.”

BUT I WENT INTO GENETICS TO
AVOID
ALL THIS,
Lisa Instant Messaged him.

“Look, I didn’t want to say anything about this”—Steve Lyons leaned forward, cracking his knuckles anxiously—“but I had a conversation the other day with a friend of mine who’s at one of the major pharmas—I don’t want to say which one—but he fairly intimated to me that they might be willing to enter into a package deal to buy up some of our patents and research so we could get out of this with maybe some of our skin intact …”

“You’re talking about everyone selling their stock?” Barry stared at him incredulously, noticing for the first time that Steve’s head was shaped vaguely like a bent knee.

“At least we could end up with something,” Steve said. “No one wants to be sitting at their desk when the roof falls in.”

“Well, the hell with that.” Barry sat up, still waiting for everyone else in the room to start yelling.

“No disrespect, Barry”—Steve cleared his throat—“but you really haven’t been a businessman long enough to see what happens in a serious downturn.”

“But is this what everybody else wants?”

Barry looked from face to face at the conference table, forcing each person to meet his eye, noting the uncertainty in everyone under thirty and the exhaustion in everyone over forty.

He didn’t have to do this, he told himself. He didn’t have to give up the corner office he’d had at Bowman, Wallace, Fisher in San Francisco. He didn’t have to give up flying around in private corporate jets or meeting clients in Aruba. He didn’t have to give up the chance to make seven figures annually and maybe buy a villa in the South of France someday.

Except, of course, he did. He did because he’d given five years of his life to defending Brenner Home Care from charges that its products caused everything from migraines to serious birth defects. He did because that case had been a dog from the moment he opened the first file. He did because a mother in Marin County had a baby born without eyes after she’d used Brenner’s “environmentally tested and safe” Virulant pesticide. He did because he’d spent those five years filing motions, asking to get subpoenas quashed and evidence suppressed, trying to wear down the plaintiffs, muddy the issues, and turn clear-cut liability into murky ambiguity. He did because no matter how much he insisted to Lynn he was just an officer of the court giving the client the representation he was constitutionally entitled to, he found himself gradually starting to suffer from some of the symptoms he was denying the existence of in his papers. He did because just two weeks before opening arguments were finally scheduled to begin in the long-awaited trial, he found himself almost driving off the road in his leased Lexus with a blinding migraine.

It was a minor miracle that he’d managed to pull off a last-minute settlement for under $1.5 million. But for a month afterward, he felt oddly chastened and depressed, as if he’d lost the case. But then he’d brought Lynn on a trip back to the city, and Ross, a straight shooter who’d been a senior vice president at Brenner, took them out to Windows on the World to talk about this new drug company he was starting. Of course, Barry jumped at the chance to be part of it. Not just because he wanted to stay back in the east, where his kids were born and his mother-in-law was sick. Not just because Bill Brenner was a horse’s ass. Not just because of the headaches and the photos of the little boy with fleshy protuberances where his eyelids should have been. But because he wanted to have someone to throw the ball to. To play on a team again, even a losing team. Just to be in a room with young people throwing up ideas instead of shooting them down. And he could still see a half-dozen bridges stretching across the two rivers below like pearl strings as he clinked glasses with Ross and toasted the bright promise of their future.

“Look, I was doing okay as a lawyer in the old slip-and-fall trade.” Barry shot his cuffs with a touch of self-mockery. “But do you remember what you said to me that night at Windows, Ross? You said, ‘Let’s cut the crap.’”

“You had to remind me.” Ross stared out the window, toward the blue gap where the restaurant had been.

“You said, ‘Why are you wasting your life defending somebody else’s stand for selling bad hot dogs? Let’s go out and make something. Let’s be entrepreneurs. I know these demented kids from MIT who are doing these crazy experiments with monkeys and Alzheimer’s. I can get my hands on some serious venture capital. All I need are some equity partners who are willing to take a chance. Come on. Do you want to miss another revolution?’”

He saw everyone at the table cast their eyes down, contemplating how they’d gotten to this spot themselves. “I convinced my wife to let me put two thirds of our savings into this company,” said Barry. “If I’d done that for some flimsy little dot-com that opened on a Wednesday and closed on a Friday without ever making anything except an IPO, then that would be fine. I’d deserve to go fuck myself, if you’ll pardon the tautology. But I thought that we were putting together something real.”

“They’re gonna turn the lights out on us.” Steve Lyons shook his head, sun reflecting dully off his oddly flat scalp. “I’ve got half my savings tied up in this company. I’d like to see at least some of it again.”

“I’d hate to tell you how much I had to borrow.” Bharat sank down another inch or two in his seat so he was almost looking straight up at the ceiling. “My father’s going to kill me.”

“Yeah, but you’re not even married, Bharat,” said Steve, sniping across the generational lines from a distance of twenty years. “I’ve got two kids going to college.”

I’M MAXED OUT ON ALL MY CREDIT CARDS,
said an Instant Message from Lisa.
ANYBODY WANT TO BUY A POOR DESTITUTE MIT GRADUATE DINNER AT ODEON?

“Well, I have no interest in just folding my tent and slipping away in the night,” said Barry, ignoring the flare of acid indigestion in his stomach at what he hadn’t told Lynn. “Do we have a drug that works or not?”

“I believe we do,” said Ross.

“Then let’s tell them to go to hell and make our case. I say I get in touch with Mark Young and tell him to back down or he’s looking at a major lawsuit.”

THIS IS TOO MUCH TESTOSTERONE,
said the Instant Message from Lisa.
HELP ME. I’M DROWNING.

But Ross Olson, who’d led an artillery company in Vietnam, was already nodding as if hearing the call to battle again. Bharat sucked his lower lip and stared at a fixed point between the ceiling tiles, beginning the long march from reluctant engagement to steely determination. Chris, Amy, and Joel—from Operations, Marketing, and Sales, respectively—who’d been sitting there quietly like an audience at a play, began to message one another with growing animation on their BlackBerrys.

“So, what do you all say?” asked Ross Olson, turning to the table at large. “Do we stay the course or bar the door?”

“Stay the course.” Barry raised his hand.

“I guess, stay the course,” Bharat said reluctantly, closing his eyes as if bracing for impact. “We’ve gone this far; I’m not even sure I can still find my way home.”

Chris, Amy, and Joel, all under thirty and Ivy League graduates, looked up from their BlackBerrys and nodded in a daze, as if the verbal mode was archaic and unfamiliar to them.

“All right, all right.” Steve Lyons threw up his hands. “I guess I wasn’t really serious anyway.”

IS THERE ANYTHING MORE SHAMEFUL THAN THE MAN WHO LACKS THE COURAGE TO BE A COWARD?
Instant Messaged Lisa.

Yes,
thought Barry, without touching his own device.
A MAN WHO GAMBLES WITH HIS FAMILY’S FUTURE AND LOSES.

5

“ANYWAY,” SAID LYNN’S
friend Jeanine Pollack, “the
pool.
”

“I didn’t realize it was such an ordeal.”

“It shouldn’t’ve been. But they were out there for
days
with the backhoe, and then all of a sudden, they’re in my kitchen, tracking dirt on the floor, saying, ‘We hit bedrock; we’re gonna have to blast.’”

The two of them were having lunch at Charlie’s Blue Skylight Café, one of the half-dozen small upscale restaurants that opened on Fairview during the boom a couple of years ago. Charlie Borrelli, an old high school friend of Lynn’s, had installed an espresso machine, painted the walls butterscotch, and put 1950s jazz on the sound system and goat cheese salad on the menu, making it a kind of refuge for the Volvo-driving dissidents rejecting the tyranny of the Starbucks around the corner. To add a little local atmosphere, Lynn had loaned Charlie six of her early black-and-white town scenes to put up on the walls. But nowadays, the restaurant was mostly half-empty, with Stay-at-Home Moms sneaking conversation over sleeping babies like prisoners in adjoining cells and Downsized Dads perusing the
Wall Street Journal
at the back as if every unemployed minute wasn’t weighing on them.

“So, what did Marty say?” asked Lynn, moving her camera bag onto a chair beside her.

“
Martin
is working late every night, trying to put out the magazine.
Naturally.
So, what am I going to do? They say meet this guy at the foot of your driveway at six-twenty tomorrow morning with thirty-six hundred dollars in cash. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ Lynn, I swear he looked like one of the terrorists.”

“Oh, come on …”

“I’m
serious,
”
said Jeanine in her raspy throaty voice, Peppermint Patty with a Marlboro habit. “This is like a month and a half before the eleventh, but who knows? Maybe it was a practice run. He’s this swarthy little guy with beady eyes and snaggly teeth. ‘Don’t worry, lady. I take care of everything.’”

“He’s the dynamite guy?”

Jeanine, normally preternaturally blond and cheery with bright blue eyes and a snub nose, got a hooded hunted expression as she nibbled on her cheddar-and-prosciutto omelet. “I have to be careful”—she lowered her voice—“because we didn’t get all the permits. So he’s out there blasting away. Mr. FBI-Watchlist Pool Man. And every time he sets off a charge, the whole house shakes a little. I hear the Williams-Sonoma china rattling in the cabinet, and I’m thinking,
Great, I’m going to lose every plate in the house.
”

“I thought they weren’t supposed to blast that close.”

“They
aren’t.
The dishes were fine. But you know what I found after they were gone? My lawn: covered with dead animals.”

“What?”

“On my honor.” Jeanine raised her right hand, as earnest and wide-eyed as a Girl Scout again. “Woodchucks, gophers, hedgehogs. It was like Jonestown for rodents. They didn’t even look hurt that badly. I think half of them may have just had heart attacks.”