Apex Hides the Hurt (5 page)

“Winthrop sounds nice,” Jack said. “Sounds distinguished. I mean look around this bar, the history. But I think Lucky is up to something with his idea. I mean this is the twenty-first century. Sometimes you got to catch up with what’s going on.” His watch clinked as Jack rested his arm on the bar. It was an expensive watch, and made its way into the script: poking out of the sleeve of his sweater, it told Jack what he was working for, and what he had achieved.

“It is a homey little place, though,” Dolly said. “We came a day early to look at property,” she informed him, grinning away.

“I’m not saying it’s not a nice place to raise kids, honey. I’ll tell you, brother, where we are now, the housing stock has gone through the roof. We go out to see a place from the newspaper—”

“—or our realtor drives us out there—”

“—and what you’re getting for the price is a damn bungalow. There are these retirees who try to get ten—”

“—twenty—”

“—times what they bought their houses for thirty years ago. Move to Florida with that money. But for a couple like us—”

“—bedroom for each of our kids and a guest room at least—”

“—it doesn’t make any sense.”

Muttonchops offered his back to them, obviously eavesdropping despite the occasional cover gesture, smearing a cloth across a glass, turning labels on bottles face out. He wondered what he would have made of their little back-and-forth if he hadn’t been looking into their faces, cataloging every twitch. Their tag-team wrestling match with the domestic world. It was in the little gestures that he found the true meaning of what they were saying, in what their hands darted toward, in how their eyebrows and lips tilted, dipped, and scurried about their faces. It was there he saw the honesty.

In the old days, these were his Great Unwashed, the clueless saps who came to his names and connotations seeking safe shores and fresh starts. Try This, it will spackle those dings and dents in your self. Try New and Improved That, it will help keep your mind off the decay. But he didn’t feel that warm old happy feeling of condescension in the bar that day. He hadn’t felt it for a long time. All he felt now was envy. These people had expectations. Of the world, of the future, it didn’t matter—expectation was such an innovative concept to him that he couldn’t help but be a bit moved by what they were saying. Whatever that was.

“And the schools.”

“School system going to pot. Do you know in some classes they have kids who don’t speak a word—”

“—of English—”

“—the English language. Mangling it. Now, I heard how Lucky just gave a heap of money to the little elementary school here. So you can see what he’s trying to attract.”

“Right,” he said.

“When I first heard about this conference last year, I thought, that’s the middle of nowhere. But look, XMB has moved down here and I went to college with their CEO and he sings the praises. Listening to the guy, fuck. Barbecuing. Never flipped a burger in his life and he’s barbecuing. Just barbecuing. Added 30 percent to his workforce and at a fraction of what it would have cost back west. Hell, I’d be barbecuing too, hours I put in.”

She shook her head. “He’s always at the office.”

“Working those hours. XMB and Ambiex last year, but this year there’s a whole new bunch coming down to check this place out. You gotta think, if it’s not us, it’s gonna be someone else and the plum spots’ll run out. From a fiscal point of view it makes sense if you can get around the thing of picking up stakes.” He slapped his palm on the table and startled everyone. “If they want to change the name of the town to bring things up to date I say let ’em. I think Lucky’s proposal is a great idea. Bottom-line-wise.”

“Did you come up with the new name?” Dolly asked.

“Not me, the company I used to work for. And it’s not the new name yet—it’s only a proposal. There’s been a little controversy in town over whether or not it’s appropriate. I’m here to arbitrate, you might say.”

“I think it fits.
Winthrop
—that’s a bit old school, don’t you think? Three martini lunches and cholesterol and all that?”

“I think it’s quaint.”

“Her father owns a bank. This is his kind of place. You should have seen our wedding.”

“Oh Jack.”

“The ice swan alone.”

“Jack.”

“Okay, okay. Well I think your company does good work. I think New Prospera is a great name.”

He raised his mug to New Prospera. That’s one vote for you.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

When he accepted the assignment, the clients gave him a packet on the competition. Sometimes it was important to know what you were up against. Sometimes it didn’t matter at all. At any rate, when asked about how he came up with the name Apex, which was often, he always kicked things off with a brief preface drawn from the information he received that fateful day.

In the promotion materials for the Johnson & Johnson Company he got the lowdown on the creation of Band-Aids. The year was 1920. The place, New Brunswick, NJ. Earle and Josephine Dickson were newlyweds. He was a cotton buyer for Johnson & Johnson, she was a housewife. He worked for the country’s number-one medical supply company. She cut herself. Repeatedly. Every day it seemed. She was clumsy. She had household accidents. Through the modern lens, he told his audience (a comely young lady at a bar, poised sophisticates at a dinner party, a dentist), he interpreted the young lady’s constant accidents as sublimated rebellion against the strict gender roles of her time. He’d attended a liberal-arts college. Perhaps she wanted to be a World War One flying ace, or a mechanic. He didn’t know. All we have are Band-Aids, he said.

Every day Earle would come back from work to confront his wife’s wounds, cotton wadding and adhesive tape in hand. He pictured her through the screen door, offering her latest domestic tragedy for his inspection when Earle came back from the office, red-eyed, anxious, what the heck, let’s throw in a trembling lip. After a while, Earle decided to take himself out of the equation. He placed gauze at regular intervals onto a roll of tape, and then rolled the tape back up again. That way, whenever Josephine had one of her little cries for help, she could help herself, and if she happened to slice herself while cutting off a patch of tape, well what could be more convenient. Earle of course mentioned this innovation to his colleagues, and the rest was history and brand-name recognition, was Band-Aids, competing brands of adhesive bandages, was Apex, his toe.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

New Prospera
. If he lifted the whelp by the heel he’d find the birthmark of the Fleet clan. Albert Fleet’s shtick consisted of resurrecting old nomenclature motifs just before they were about to come back into vogue. Old hound dog sniffing, he had a nose for incipient revival. The good ones always came back, the steadfast prefixes, the sturdy kickers. When you counted them out,
Pro
- and -
ant
would stumble back to the top, bruised and lacerated but still standing, this month’s trendy morphemes and phonemes lying at their feet in piles. Everything came around again. Languages were only so big.

He had effectively killed off
New
when New Luno hit it big, and at the time everyone warned him that it would look like he was merely chasing a trend, and that sort of thing was beneath him. Anywhere you looked that year, something was New. But success shushes those kind of accusations. If Albert was lugging New back onto the scene, you better brace yourself for a full-blown renaissance. New was new again.

Prospera
, that could have come from anybody on the team. Had that romance-language armature, he was pretty sure it was a Spanish or Italian word for something. What it meant in those languages, that was unimportant, what was important was how it resonated here. The lilting
a
at the end like a rung up to wealth and affluence, take a step. A glamorous Old World cape draped over the bony shoulders of prosaic
prosperity
. Couple a cups of joe to clear the head, anybody in the firm could have come up with that one. Everyone a suspect.
Prospera
left no fingerprints on its gleaming surface.

New, new, new money, new media, new economy. New order. New Prospera. He reckoned it would look good on maps. Nestled among all those Middletons and Shadyvilles.

It wasn’t that bad a name, certainly no masterpiece. When—if—he returned to work, his office would be waiting. They still needed him.

How much did he need them?

That second night in Winthrop, Old Winthrop, he went to sleep at a decent hour. He drifted off reminiscing about the tools of his trade. He drifted off thinking of kickers. Somewhere in the night he had a nightmare. Rats bubbled out of the sewers, poured out of gutters and abandoned buildings. Making little rat noises. They were everywhere, and he knew that even though they wore the skin of rats, they were in fact phonemes, bits of words with sharp teeth and tails. Latin roots, syllables to be added or subtracted to achieve an effect, kickers in their excellent variety, odd fricatives, and they chased him down. They finally cornered him in an old warehouse and he woke as they started nibbling on his vanished toe, which had reattached itself as if it had never been lost.

It was early morning. The sun was up somewhere, rebuffed by clouds. Still raining. He went to the bathroom and when he came out he noticed the envelope that had been shoved beneath the door.

The client had agreed to his conditions.

He was back to work.

TWO

HE LANDED APEX
because he was at the top of his game. The bosses would call him into their office to chat, to reassure themselves, to count the lines on his brow as they ran an idea up the flagpole. One day he stifled a burp and his pursed lips put an end to Casual Fridays. The other folks in nomenclature came to him with their problems, they bought him cocktails and he offered obvious solutions to dilemmas. He wasn’t exactly taxing his brain. He didn’t squander names that could have been used for his projects. What he gave them were slacker names. He lent out malingerers.

He attracted clients through word of mouth. Some clients he passed off on younger, hungrier colleagues and e-mailed apologies. He was all booked up. His generosity increased his estimation in the eyes of the lower ranks and his exclusivity won him still more clients. With the assignments he did take, he was getting faster and faster with his naming. He wasn’t at the point where he could just look at something and know its name, but the answer generally came quickly and he had to sit on the name for a couple of days and pretend to ponder long and hard, or else he’d look superhuman. When he walked down the halls of the office sipping water from a paper cone, hip boots would have been a plus—he waded through a palpable morass of envy. He expected some sort of comeuppance for his efficiency. None came. In fact he was bonused repeatedly. He expected the great scales of justice to waver, for certainly his expertise was upsetting some fundamental balance in the world. There was nary a waver or a twitch. Until Apex.

His life outside of work, that was going pretty fine, too. He hadn’t met that special someone but he went out a lot, made reservations at approved restaurants. Occasionally he extended a hand across the table to spark a soulful gaze. Friends of his set him up with their sisters. He had a kind of vibe he projected. Wage earning. Self-actualizing. Nice catch. A local magazine picked him as one of the City’s 50 Most Eligible Bachelors. He got some mileage out of that and hit the town with new credibility. This is my face, his manner seemed to say. For the photo shoot they had him sit on a gigantic blue pill, because he had named a popular blue pill, and he wore a fine designer suit that he was not allowed to keep. The writer made a few jokes of the what-the-heck-is-a-nomenclature-consultant-you-might-ask variety. One thing about his job, he had conversation starters for sure.

His new apartment was great. There was an extra room he didn’t know what to do with so after a year he got a pool table and an aquarium. He bought exotic fish for the aquarium from a specialty store. Occasionally they ate each other. There were all these fins at the bottom of the tank. Conversation starters for sure. From the balcony he could look down upon the city and think he owned it. And perhaps that feeling was in the mix when he came up with Apex. He looked down on everything. It was all so small.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Seems like old times, he said to himself, cozying up to the desk after avoiding it for two days. “A History of the Town of Winthrop” opened with a painful crinkle. He would be prepared for his meeting that afternoon. He was a professional.

He skipped around, and after a few pages of stuff like “that famous quality of generosity that distinguishes the Winthrop family” and “Once again, the Winthrops came to the rescue in a time of need,” he checked the copyright page and confirmed his suspicion. The book had been commissioned by the Winthrop Foundation. He relaxed. He’d always rather enjoyed corporate pamphlets. They did not tax his attention overmuch. You always knew how they were going to end. Winning over the town librarian for sympathetic press wasn’t too much of a task, he figured. A set of leatherbound Shakespeare would do it. He wouldn’t get the inside scoop, but maybe he didn’t need it.

The Winthrops made their fortune in barbed wire, not too bad a gig at the end of the nineteenth century. Land grants, land grabs, you needed something cheap to keep everything in, and keep everything out. “With the zeal of a true American entrepreneur, Sterling Winthrop found customers among the region’s farmers and homesteaders, who delighted in the inexpensive alternative to costly timber. Even the railroad enlisted the aid of Winthrop’s fine wire to keep its lines free and clear.” Innovative product, niche market, sure, sure. He jazzed his fingers on the desk excitedly. This was something he could understand. Not exactly what he was looking for, however.

Gertrude Sanders, master of the librarian arts, channeled the pioneer zeitgeist with flair, aplomb aplenty. No equivocating for Gertrude. “Where others saw untamed wilderness,” she enthused, “Sterling saw endless bounty and prime opportunities.” Underdeveloped land, in the modern jive: a lowly parking lot where high-rises deserved to tower. The river provided a way to move the goods. And the place was empty. Mostly. “After winning over the area’s main inhabitants—a loose band of colored settlers—Winthrop opened up his factory and started producing his famous W-shaped barb, which can still be seen all over the county. Grateful for this fresh start, they passed a law and named the town Winthrop, after the man who had the courage to dream.” Attracting a labor force to the town, building a community, all the usual Town-in-a-Box starter-kit stuff. Had Gertrude ever tired of the Dewey decimal thing, she would have been a shoo-in for a marketing job back East.

All that hokum. He continued to flip around. If they had created a law to change the name of the town, that meant there must have been a name to change it from. No point going to the trouble of rebranding unless there was something to rebrand. He needed to know what it was. He learned a few things, as his fingers journeyed where silverfish feared to tread. He learned about the strange mosquito plague of 1927, which ended as swiftly and mysteriously as it started, leaving none unwelted. A nearby pond was home to a very rare frog, celebrated and documented in scientific journals. A chilling woodcut confirmed the amphibian’s most celebrated characteristic—an almost human gaze that could only be described as “pleading.” He was about to return to the beginning when a familiar voice kicked in his adrenaline. After a single exposure, he had developed a Pavlovian response.

“Housekeeping!” She loosed her little fury against the door.

“I’m okay!”

“I need to get inside!”

“I’m okay!” he repeated. He marveled at the ridiculousness of this response, but kept his fingers crossed.

“You are preventing me from doing my job!” The two black stalks of her legs interrupted the light from beneath the door. It occurred to him that she might have an organic defect in her brain. But then she bellowed, “What are you doing that is so important!” and he decided that her problem probably claimed provenance in both nature and nurture.

He resolved to wait her out. She appeared to sense this, employing a primitive, animal awareness, growing quiet save for her quick, shallow breathing. “I will return!” she said after a time.

An hour later he was in the lobby, on the lookout for his ride. The desk clerk had called up to inform him that Mr. Winthrop would pick him up at noon. Actually, the clerk had used the word
fetch
. He saw the scenario plainly. The white-haired scion, heir to a barbed-wire empire, dispatches the limo and receives him in a smoky drawing room. That Winthrop gaze lasers in on him when he enters, but what the man is thinking exactly cannot be determined. They pose in the burgundy club chairs. Over the man’s shoulder, beyond the window: the rolling estate, sprawling, undulating, alive with force. Winthrop complains about gophers, proposes solutions, and such are the tribulations of his world, eradicable by pesticide bombs. Over brandy fresh from decanters, the old dog makes his case for the Winthrop name, for tradition, for the old ways which are the best ways. His guest wears out the knees on his pants from spontaneous fits of genuflection.

So went the narrative he concocted in the lobby of the Hotel Winthrop. The job still had its paws on him. Dipping a cup into reservoirs and tasting the waters was part of the gig. If he could swallow it, the rest of the world would, too. Nomenclature consultants were supposed to have universal stomachs.

He closed his eyes, and realized the extent of his trepidation. Meeting Winthrop was no problem. He knew the type. But he was back on the job after so long, and his fingers trembled. He made them into fists in his pockets.

The desk clerk said, “Sir.”

He limped out. The black Bentley crouched at the curb like a big lazy bull. A white head with little white hairs steaming off it emerged from the driver’s side. “Hey, nice to meet you,” the driver said. “I’m Albie.” Albie wore a faded red jogging suit. Sweatbands sopped heartily at his wrists and forehead. He got the impression that Albie had just finished a few laps or had been chased by a creature. Albie said, “Hop on in.”

The backseat was filled with grocery bags. A laundry-detergent spout poked out, the frilly plastic end of a bag of bread, celery stalks. “Why don’t you hop up front,” Albie offered, “and move a few of these things.” Albie knocked a cut-up supermarket flyer off the seat, and last week’s paper, and an ice scraper.

He climbed in, good leg first, and tried not to get his wet feet on the flotsam below the seat. “You can just shove that stuff under the seat,” Albie said.

He shoved and settled.

“Bum leg?” Albie asked.

“Bum leg.”

Albie nodded. “Been raining like this since you got here, huh? You must be bad luck or something.” The man smiled. “Albie Winthrop,” he said.

He shook the man’s hand. Moist was the word.

They pulled out and a little dribble of coffee sloshed out of the Grande Admiral in the cup holder. Cheap plastic cup holders were not standard issue on Bentleys, he gathered, inspecting the weird little monstrosity gaffer-taped to the dashboard. Where the consumer comfort industry failed, Albie stepped in, and some time before, apparently. There were a bunch of old brown stains on the carpet. He resisted the urge to lean over and check how many miles were on the car.

Albie smiled. “Got back into town this morning,” he said, “or else I’d’a come by before to meet you.”

“Lucky told me you were off racing your boat somewhere?”

Albie’s head bobbed. “Not my boat, no, aw,” he cackled. “Haven’t had a sailboat in a long while. My old buddy Percy’s boat. I’m first mate whenever he goes out. ‘First mate Albie reporting for duty, capt’n!’ ”

“Oh,” he said.

They drove a ways. The few people out on the street shuffled under slickers and umbrellas but Albie recognized them nonetheless, waving out the window excitedly and shrieking, not caring if the rain got inside. The people made their greeting motions, shook umbrellas in their direction, and trudged on. Whenever Albie passed a car, he clapped twice on the horn at the other driver and bobbed his head. “Everybody knows me,” Albie explained. “I’m everybody’s uncle.”

The people honked back or ignored him. There’s that crazy bastard again, is how he decoded these brief exchanges.

“That’s old Frank’s son,” Albie said as a red SUV zipped toward them. Albie honked and Frank’s son swerved, startled. “Frank was our foreman for many years,” Albie explained. “He came up from the floor. Started on the floor with the Bessemer and moved up.”

“That right?”

“Shoot. Never worked anywhere else. That’s his house over there. Went there for a barbecue once. Guess you don’t barbecue that much in the city, huh?”

“Hadn’t noticed.”

“Don’t barbecue much at all, I guess.” Albie honked at a station wagon. “Hey! Mason! Hey!” And there was almost an accident.

He deliberated and then decided, yes, the Winthrop family spread qualified for estate-hood, and with a few wings to spare. They drove through an iron gate that took them past a low stone wall and wound their way up the driveway. Feral hedges clawed the car. As they approached the house he was reminded of good-for-you public television shows where there were always a lot of goings-on in the servants’ quarters. But there were no more servants. No signs of life besides them in fact, until they got around back, and something crunched as the car slowed. They inspected the damage. The Mighty Wheels was now yesterday’s toy, mashed to yellow-and-red bits beneath the front tire. “Aw, will you get a load of that,” Albie groaned. “The tenants in the guesthouse, the kids leave all their stuff around.” He shook his head.

It was always a perplexing event, he found, to help people put away their groceries. You never know where the other person’s system of grocery placement connects and diverges from your own. The cabinets and drawers are avenues in a maze. One man’s sponge nook is another man’s soup hutch. So he leaned against the refrigerator and watched Albie unpack the week’s shopping, limiting his contribution to two bag-carrying trips from the Bentley to the kitchen. He had calculated that it would require five trips to unload the car, so he exaggerated his limp to keep his trips down to a pat and optimum two.

“Have you eaten?” Albie asked, folding the last paper bag flat. “I’m going to make some hot dogs.”

“Sure.”

“I usually boil them, but if you want I can put them in the toaster. Put it on
broil
.”