14
It takes more effort than I care to admit to ignore the boisterous group and refocus on my wife. Mia looks down at the table and pulls her hands from mine. She wipes a second tear away and studies me as if she’s never seen me before. “That trust is for the boys, not us. We will not be touching it,” she says.
“Of course. No problem,” I say. Why not just agree with her for the time being? I need to calm down, I must calm down. It’s time to order. We need to talk about food, and enjoy ourselves. I open my menu and read intently. “Are you hungry? I’m starving. They have fabulous veal parmesan, I hear. Oh, and for you, look at all of the entrée salads. So much to choose from.” That’s the gift of life. Choices. So many. You make a mistake, and you pivot. You move on. Like Lois, just a mistake, and now I’m with the woman I was meant to have children with. Everything else is just background noise.
The waiter glides up to our table, carefully avoiding making eye contact with me and instead, focuses his attention on Mia. He should. She’s beautiful, my wife.
“Ready to order?” the waiter asks.
“I’ll have the salmon salad, no salmon, please,” she says to the waiter.
“Yes, of course, madam. Some risotto perhaps? Vegetarian?” he says. If the waiter finds this order as ridiculous as I do, it doesn’t show on his face. This guy just doesn’t have a sense of humor, not at all.
“Please, and thank you,” Mia says.
“May I be of any other assistance?” he asks. What’s with this loaded question? I mean, he’s a waiter. Assistance?
“No, I’m fine. That’s all,” she assures him. Her eyes are shiny but there are no tears rolling down her cheeks.
Asshole. Who does he think he is?“I’ll have the veal, and a house salad to start,” I say, holding my menu in the air. He takes it, without looking at me, and walks away. I hope he understands he is losing all possibility of a tip.
I look around the elegant restaurant, white-linen-draped tables now filled with sparkly diners, women wearing their finest dresses and jewelry, men looking the way men look at all restaurants of this nature: the same from a distance. Up close, that’s when you can tell the thread count of the fabric, the cut of the jacket. Waves of polite conversation and bursts of laughter wash over us as we sit in silence in our corner.
How do you get backed into a corner in your relationship, you ask? I’m sure you’ve never been here before. Ha! Typically, it begins with small misunderstandings, insults not forgiven, if you will. And then the negative feelings build like a child’s block tower. One block placed a little too far over, and the whole thing comes tumbling down. For my part, I believe I’ve been fair and forgiving. I try not to hold on to things, I place my blocks quickly, to complete the metaphor. But frankly, it’s easy for me. I always know what’s coming in the chess game of life. You need to be thinking several moves ahead. Always.
Take, for instance, when the boys were younger, Sam a newborn and Mikey a little over two. Both still in diapers. Now, those were the crazy days, harried times. I’d stroll in from work—coming home straight from the office on most days, missing important client happy hours—to help out. Mia would just glare at me, dark circles under her eyes, and hand me one kid or the other. She looked horrible, really horrible. I was tempted to have my mom come help, but I knew that would mean I’d opened the door for Mia’s mother to come, too, with her nosy disapproval, and we couldn’t have that. I needed them to stay in New York, continuing to build their empire. So, instead, I was there for Mia as much as possible. Did she ever thank me? Nope. Did I hold it against her? Of course not. But there was no way we were going to add a third kid to the mess we’d created. I was helping us both out with that by saying no to another baby. She had gone crazy or something.
Now, I could hold that time against her, you see. But I don’t. I have let go of all those messy, annoying years. But she is holding something against me right now. It’s uncharacteristic. It’s un-Mia-like, and I don’t deserve this, not at all. She sits across from me now, not as a woman who is backing me into a corner. Her demeanor doesn’t fit her words. Instead of looking angry, she simply looks sad. As if it were I, not her, who precipitated this turn in our evening, which of course is ridiculous. This is all her fault.
She turns away from me and faces the window, looking out toward the water, her back to the rest of the busy room, her lovely face in profile to me. She appears to be wiping a tear, but I cannot be certain. She focuses her attention on whatever is just outside the window of the restaurant. I know, of course, the lake is out there, dark and brooding, and the lighthouse with its ever-bright warnings.
But as I look more closely, my face almost touching the glass, I see an outside deck, a terrace of sorts, with tables and chairs. I suppose during nice weather and certainly during the day, the restaurant expands with outdoor seating. A deck the restaurant must use once the summer season is in full swing. Tonight, there is nobody out there.
I look back at my wife. Mia is smiling now; I see her face fully reflected in the glass, the candlelight illuminating her white teeth, her small nose, her glistening eyes. But why is she smiling? Does she see someone or something that I don’t out there?
“Something funny?” I ask. Her mood, if I am reading things correctly, was angry and now sad. Smiling does not fit. My wife twitches in her seat, and then turns and faces me. Did she jump in her chair? Did she forget I was here?
“No, nothing,” she says, and she is no longer smiling. “Paul. What are your plans? If you haven’t been offered a job at any advertising agencies around town, which I suspect you won’t be, then have you branched out? Looked for other opportunities?”
Apparently she wasn’t listening when I told her I have many options. I don’t like that the conversation has shifted to me not working in advertising—the industry we both love—away from me forbidding her from working in advertising. My headhunter informs me I do have an offer on the table, fromColumbus Citymagazine of all places. That was the call this morning, the one that meant we got a later-than-hoped-for start to our day. My headhunter is excited and believes this is the “perfect fit.” But my headhunter is an idiot if he thinks this is remotely the right kind of job for a man of my business stature.
The magazine would give me the title of Chief Revenue Officer, which sounds made up and probably is. The sales force—all ten people—would report to me. Yes, you can call it what it is. I’d be a sales manager for a city magazine. This is not what I want to do. It is far beneath my skill set. If I must, I will take this job. Put a huge spin on it to anyone who asks and then find something suitable. I don’t want to do this, put this lowly job on my résumé. But I can take it, if I must. It’s just that there is so much money sitting across from me, why should I have to stoop so low?
“I have looked, and interviewed. As I said, I have several offers I’m weighing. I will negotiate them all and select the best package. I’ll announce something soon,” I answer. My champagne glass is long empty, and I need a drink. With the waiter both ignoring and hating me, I will most likely be devoid of a beverage for the remainder of this miserable meal. I scan the restaurant, the tables nearest to us and make eye contact with a young, stout woman who is the waitress for the next table over. She nods in acknowledgment of my wave, as if she’ll be right over. Hopefully, our waiter hasn’t warned her off.
“So that’s your plan, then?” Mia says. Her arms are folded across her chest, and she’s leaning forward, like a principal at school who has called you into her office so you can create your own punishment. Who would comply with that? I wouldn’t. “Your severance, if you received any, has been gone for a while. Our accounts are all almost empty. You don’t feel any sense of urgency?”
This meal will go on record as the longest dinner ever. I fight the urge to check my wristwatch—it’s a sleek Apple Watch but if I don’t turn my wrist exactly the correct way the display remains black and I must quite obviously push a button on its side to illuminate the damn time. I long for the olden days of watches that simply told you the time. I wonder where my old Nashville watch is. Unfortunately, I never did get the bloodstain off the band.
It’s fine. I already know time is moving as slowly as my youngest son when you are waiting for him to complete a task. I appreciate patience is a virtue and applaud those who have it, as long as they stay out of my way. Here we are, though, the money/job question. But it’s fine. As noted, I have been expecting this.
“I did receive some severance, as a matter of fact,” I say. That is a lie. When you’re fired, you don’t receive much. They gave me two months’ pay as a token gesture. Whatever. You just get called into the idiot HR woman’s office and told you are fired. Your things are packed up into boxes by strangers. Security guards escort you out of the building as if you were going to go postal or something. As if you knew you were to be fired and had brought a gun with you. But you didn’t, because these people are sneaky. No, they don’t give you warnings, I suppose, so you can’t bring a gun and blow off the head of the droopy-eyed, twelve-year-old-looking head of HR. I hate HR people. I never really had closure with mine, come to think of it.
She sat behind her desk, pointing to the chair in front of her. Her name was Rebecca More. The entire space behind her was filled with potted plants, like an untamed nursery, and smelled like fertilizer. The plants blocked the window so the effect was a perpetual cloudy day. This was not, of course, our first meeting. She had called me in almost three months earlier to inform me that a coworker had filed a harassment claim against me. I had been stunned. Two reasons. First, her outfit. I mean, we were supposed to be the top advertising agency in the region and this woman was wearing, I kid you not, something straight from Kmart. Black polyester pants, a light pink blouse that barely stayed closed over her gigantic breasts. Her droopy eyes were accented by black cat-eye shaped glasses. I almost started to laugh, thinking the creative team had tricked me into a television commercial shoot right here in our offices. Rebecca More could not work at Thompson Payne. She wasn’t cool enough.
“Sit down, Mr. Strom,” she said, motioning toward the white leather chair. I sat, playing my role.
“Call me Paul,” I said, pouring on the charm. I looked around her office, trying to find the creative team’s hidden cameras behind one of the potted palms. Any moment one of the young guys from that department would appear, his hair pulled back in a ponytail, and say, “We got you, man.”
