The Egg Code (7 page)

“I think I’d make a good impression. I’m just out of college, see, and I’m really interested in work and . . . work-related activities.”

“That’s great.” She hesitated, seeing her husband’s stern face. You said
what
? “I don’t know if he can help you out with that.”

“I mean, I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ve got skills like all get out. You betcha.”

“Honey, you look like a raving lunatic.” Lydia brushed his scalp with her fingers. “Where’s my comb? People will think you’re demented.”

Bored already, Donna began to drift away from the couple. “I’ll see if he can spare a minute or two,” she said. Waving goodbye, she snuck through the crowd and followed an escort down a ramp to the backstage door. A fat woman dressed in tight dungarees stood just inside the entrance, swinging a flashlight, casting a bright arc across the carbon-black wall. Donna blinked as she moved toward another beam, then another, lights swaying like a team of illuminated pendulums, wildfires leading her to him. Opening the door to an unmarked dressing room, she found her husband alone, reviewing the words of his speech. He stepped away from the mirror. “Honey.”

“I brought you your scarf,” she said, drawing it out of her pocket.

Stark lights hid Derek’s dark eyes under a heavy shadow. His nervous hands ran across the countertop, finding a bottle of prescription pills. “I’d rather have some warmer weather.” He twisted the bottle open. “Think you can help me out?”

“What?”

Disappointed, he wadded his tongue against his lower lip. “Never mind. It was a joke. You didn’t get it.”

“Tell me.”

“I was saying, if you could . . . change . . . the weather. Oh, I don’t want to be here. I
don’t
want to be here.” Leaning away from the mirror, he blinked at his own tired reflection.

“So, come home with me.”

He looked over his shoulder. “You know I can’t do that,” he said. “The promoter is squeezing me for everything I’ve got, and don’t tell anyone I said that.”

This was what she loved about her husband—his bitterness. The rest of the world knew the man’s easy side, but the darkness belonged to her alone. Drawn to it, she stepped across the room and pressed the scarf against his cheek.

He backed away. “Don’t,” he said. “That thing’s filthy.”

Donna laughed, then squeezed the scarf and held it in her fist. “How did this get so wrinkled?” she asked, touching his sports jacket. It looked old and out of style, something a college professor might wear.

“It was my father’s. He wore it around the house. Like Glenn Gould. With the hat and the long coat. Even in the summertime.”

“Which one is Glenn Gould?” she asked, thinking,
Personal assistant? Legal secretary?

“He’s a piano player,” Derek snapped. “Look, do me a favor. Take a quarter, there’s a soda machine at the end of the hall, can you get me a Canada Dry? Just a Canada Dry, nothing else. I don’t think my throat’s going to make it.” He gave her a coin and slumped against a post in the middle of the room, already exhausted.

Donna’s fingers closed around the quarter. She repeated the words to herself—
Canada Dry
—and left the room. Out in the hallway, she found the soda machine and dropped her money into the slot. A motor inside the machine grunted, pumping freon in and out of the refrigeration unit. Smiling, she pressed the button marked Sprite, then pulled the cold can from the base of the machine. It opened with a satisfying
crack—
metal shearing metal.

Break

1989

After sixteen years of marriage, Derek and Donna had finally decided (he’d decided and she’d gone along with it) to move out of Crane City. Big Dipper Township offered every luxury Derek had denied himself until now: clean country living, a huge house on the water, no neighbors, a decent school system (not that it mattered anymore). To Bartholomew Hasse, the decision represented much more than that. Derek had no idea what he was getting into. Kay Tree lived nearby; not Kay herself, but Kay’s daughter, and that was bad enough. The battle between the old and the new had started to shift. By the end of the decade, he’d seen the Internet grow from a small, academic enterprise to something more pervasive, more tied to the world economy. The federal government was interested. And now Derek! This was a betrayal. Trapped in Hedgemont Heights, he needed a new acolyte.

Whenever they’d discussed it—Derek sitting on one end of the dining table, Donna and her father on the other—the same issue always came up. Derek had received an offer from the Gloria Corporation to conduct a series of lectures—the usual corporate rah-rah he’d been dishing out since the seventies. Drunk on three glasses of wine, he snarled, “Gimme a break, Bart. I could care less about the GC. I’m just trying to do a little consulting work.”

Bartholomew kept silent as Donna argued on his behalf. “My father has given you so much,” she said, glaring at her husband. They’d all dressed up for dinner; with her thick brown hair stacked high, a pair of pearl earrings dangling from her chewy little earlobes, she looked privileged, easy to damage. “You owe him everything. Your career. Me.”

Derek zeroed in on his wife; he’d hardly touched his lamb steak, which was served in a fancy green pesto sauce by Bartholomew’s live-in cook. “You agreed that the move would be good for us. Do you think that I don’t care about our marriage?”

“No, Derek, I don’t think that.” She was crying again.
Tactics
, thought Derek.
Ignore it
.

“Well, all right then.” Satisfied, he went back to his dinner. Between bites, he pointed at the old man with his knife. “I won’t let this guy ruin everything. We’ll go to the country. He can’t hurt us there. He’s too old to make the drive.”

Bartholomew smiled at Derek’s bluster, at the pigheadedness of it all. Big Dipper Township was only an hour away, and the Hasse family had many servants. Chauffeurs. Messengers. Strongarms. Then there was Donna. She would be faithful. She would not forget her old home. Bartholomew might have kept her sheltered in her youth, but at least he’d made her take driving lessons.
You never know when you might not
have a man to depend on
, he once told her, thinking mainly of himself.

“We won’t talk about it anymore,” Derek said. He ate aggressively, chewing with his mouth open. “We’re moving. And tomorrow morning I’m going to call those people up at the Gloria Corporation, and I’m going to take that contract.”

Finished with his dinner, Bartholomew folded his napkin and left it on the table. This kind of nasty chatter had been going on for months now. There was no point in talking anymore. He’d already made his decision. The Hasses were a family of craftsmen. They’d built their legacy out of print and paper, going all the way back to the time of Gutenberg—five centuries’ worth of profit and protest and inky hands. That line would not be sold out to an invisible organization bent on dismantling the great tradition with their elusive grid of fiber optics and subterranean pipelines. Nothing would change. Information would remain something physical, something you could
touch
. Bartholomew would see to it.

IV

Another Not-Very-Good Marriage

The Tree with
Four Trunks

1998

When the folks from Gloria presented Derek with the pin back in 1989, his first thought was, Hmmm, well, attractive, but what is it? He could never understand the logic behind these corporate logos. He remembered the Lake Charles Human Resources Center from whatever year it was, seventy-something. Those were the folks who’d tried to make a fortune renting out physical-fitness trainers to oil companies and the like. Modeled after the old Japanese business notion—you know, the company that works out together works well together. Didn’t fly in America. Anyway, Derek got some good money out of them for a few years; in fact, they were his first really big contract, not counting the few local engagements he’d managed to book through his father-in-law. He could still remember their logo, a massive torso bench-pressing a skyscraper with each hand. What was their slogan?
Get a lift out of your
business? Move your butt, not your bottom line?
No, it was the whole
We
Can Work It Out
concept, with the Beatles tune as the tie-in. Not a bad idea—would’ve worked if they’d spent a little more time shoring up their resources, then waited another year to go public. But the Gloria insignia was different. It wasn’t abstract. It was too intricate, too strange for symbolism. This object existed somewhere in the world.

A tree, that’s what it was. The fella from Gloria told him it was an elm and Derek took his word for it. Fan-shaped leaves grew together in a bunch: could’ve been anything—a maple, an oak . . . hell, even a cactus. What Derek noticed—what he was
meant
to notice, clearly—was the trunk. Trunks. Four of ’em. Almost like a Masonic emblem. Staring at the pin on this September afternoon in Big Dipper Township, he wondered if he’d joined a business or a brotherhood.

Come to think of it, those endless battalions of Gloria liaisons
had
been rather persistent about persuading him to honor his final commitments. He’d been firm about saying no, but they’d been equally firm about sending progressively higher-placed representatives south from Ann Arbor to convince him not to quit the gig so thoughtlessly. Derek was a legend in the business. No one liked to see him go. Still, no amount of money was worth the pain he felt every time he hosted an employee retreat or kicked off another three-day motivational weekend. All those faces looking up at him, their mouths forming desperate phrases, Heal us, Make us whole. The freaks of the world would just have to understand. Having left his wife, Derek now imagined long trips, sudden disappearances. So typical, the wayward husband who heads north to the Yukon, never to be heard from again.

This was probably the best solution overall, this tiny flat, still within screaming distance of his old house. The smallness of the place appealed to him. The spartan environment would help him to focus on the new book. He would keep the walls bare as well; the diplomas and honorary degrees would stay in their boxes. The books, too—thirty-eight of them, ranging from the 1973 first edition of
The Father and the Son,
all the way up to the latest compilation,
The Skye’s the Limit,
dreadful thing, all rehashed junk from Derek’s mid-eighties heyday. Remember
How Do I Like Me Now?
Oh, and what about
Why Does It Hurt When I
Do This? . . . Don’t Do That!
, or
Love, Hope, and Twelve Other Really
Big Words?
A thick cardboard box, sealed once with staples and again with masking tape, would hide them all. That alone would solve half of Derek’s problems. The other half was another issue. Modern technology was making it hard for a man to walk out on his wife. Whether he traveled to Tibet or just two blocks down the road, Donna would find him. Magnanimous in his betrayal, Derek hoped that by staying in town, he might at least save her a few bucks on the long-distance bill. He could do that much for the poor girl.

“That I had to find out from Reggie Bergman. This is what pisses me off, Derek.”

“You could have just dialed my publisher. I’ve got the same listing.”

“Oh, you know I never call those people.”

“Well, that’s your problem, not mine.”

Derek held the receiver against his chin as he shuttled dishes from the study to the kitchen. The telephone cord snarled and kinked around the jack; Donna’s voice crackled with every shake of the loose connection.

“There are some things that Reggie Bergman doesn’t need to know.”

“What, that I’m here two days and you’re already getting me on the phone? This is not secret information, Donna. This is something Reggie could’ve worked out on his own.”

“You’re turning him against me, aren’t you?”

“He’s my agent. He has nothing to do with you.”

“Friends for how many years? How many dinners have I supervised? Menus planned, seating arrangements . . . the seating arrangements alone, I’ve spent a year of my life figuring out where to put Reggie at the table.”

“Yes, I’m a horrible person. I owe you everything, Donna, I really do. My career, the house. Even my bad attitude.”

“Don’t say those things.”

A plastic teacup fell from his arms and bounced without breaking against the floor. The cup was part of a child’s play set needlessly purchased in the optimistic summer of 1983; not wishing to deprive Donna of her good china, Derek had assembled his kitchenware out of such odds and ends.

“Don’t say what things?”

“Don’t say those things in that tone of voice.”

Giving up with the dishes, Derek focused on getting off the phone. To him, his voice sounded steady and reasonably self-possessed. To her, it sounded cold, premeditated: his television voice, she once would have said with love in her eyes.

“So what you object to is my tone, my sarcasm. The fact that I’m actually trying to be serious doesn’t matter.”

“You’re so sure of yourself. So sure this is what you want.”

“I’m not, honey. I’m not sure of anything. This is something I never planned for. Feeling this way. Feeling apart from you. Looking at you and wanting to go away.”

“You’re killing me.”

“Yeah. That might be what I’m doing. I don’t know, Donna. I don’t feel like I can talk to you about it. Not for a while, anyway.”

“When, then? I’ll be forty-eight years old in a week. I’m just supposed to sit here and stare out the goddamn window?”

“I’m trying to think of something profound to say. It’s not coming.”

“It’s all got to be on your time, doesn’t it?”

Donna wandered across the brick patio, pacing a crooked line between the beach and the back of the house. The reception on her cell phone sounded clearer out here than it did indoors.

“Donna, it’s like this. I’m in a position where if I say one thing, you’re going to think, ‘There, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,’ but if I try to explain it, then it’s going to sound like—”

“I don’t care what it sounds—”

“—like I’m so noble, I’m doing the noble thing, and this is just because I don’t want to hurt you.”

“There’s something wrong with saying I love you?”

“Yes, there is. In this situation it’s very counterproductive. This is where we are, I’m not going to renege, I’m not going to rationalize it or ask for your pity because I don’t want it. It’s just . . . I did what I did and it’s over and I’m not going to give you any more ammunition to fire back at me.”

“You made a commitment when you married me.”

“Yes, I did.”

“You made me give up my entire life, and now, at this late stage, I’m not equipped to start over and suddenly be an independent woman.”

“Jesus, Donna, you make it sound like you’re two years old.”

Donna continued down to the edge of the water. The loose sand under her feet was hard to walk on, and she was wearing the wrong shoes for it.

“This is our world, Derek. Couples! All our friends are married, they all have kids—which is another thing you couldn’t do—and now you want me to face that whole nightmare by myself. The divorcée. There she goes.”

“It’s been done before.”

“Not by me it hasn’t. I want my family back!”

“Good God. Did I do this to you? I never would’ve married you if I thought you’d become so goddamned
clingy
.”

“You never would’ve married me if it wasn’t for my father, and you know it. I was the big prize, part of the arrangement, and I’d like to think that over time we grew to love each other, but I guess I’m wrong.”

“You’re not wrong. I love you desperately, Donna, and I want you to drop off the face of the earth.”

The line went dead. Donna sat for a minute, shoveling the sand into little humps with the heel of the telephone. She imagined Derek trapped inside the receiver, a snared beast. Carried away, she saw herself lofting the phone into the water, Derek sinking to the bottom, naked and huddled against the flood, braids of colored wires hanging from the walls of the chamber, water rushing through the perforated mesh, round holes, portals, gushing shafts of foam. Catching herself, she tugged on the antenna and pressed a button marked LT. The phone rang once, then chirped and picked up.

“Donna, sweetheart,” Lydia said, once she’d finished hearing her friend out. “Here’s what you do. Let me hand off my list of activities. We’ll split it up. You do half and I’ll do half. You’ll feel a lot better.”

“I don’t want to do all that. Actually, right now I feel like bringing a bottle of wine upstairs and sitting in the bathtub all night.”

“Don’t start drinking. Worst thing you can do. Activity. We’ll have lunch. Tomorrow.”

“That sounds nice. But not in town. Let’s drive down to Vega. He’ll walk in and I’ll lose my appetite.”

Lydia hated hearing Donna whine like that. That’s all it was: whining. Everything Lydia said, there was a purpose, a clear statement of intent. You obeyed, you didn’t obey, that was up to you. Call it her Washington upbringing—this need to dart in precisely defined directions. From her mother, she’d inherited a certain impatience for womanly virtues; Kay
mattered
in a way that most women did not.

Driving along a straight country road, Lydia conducted herself with a mechanized efficiency, each limb doing its own thing. Neither hand touched the wheel as she reached over to flip through the pages of the script in Simon’s lap. The script was heavily annotated with instructions scribbled in Lydia’s own hand, directions to slow down and enunciate. Simon’s mouth moved, skimming the words.

“Your husband—let me say it, darling—your husband is a bastard.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“I don’t even know if it’s true. It’s just a thing to say. He’s gone, he’s a bastard. That’s just the way you’re going to have to look at it from now on. Otherwise, what? You’re sitting there in love with a man who doesn’t care.”

“You really think he doesn’t care?”

Lydia sighed, flipping back to the beginning of the play. The sound the pages made reminded Simon of stage wind—the director standing between two curtains, waving a bright sheet of aluminum, his face conveying a look of terror, willing emotion to the kids in the chorus. Eyes dark and empty, he stared at the script as the car shot over the expressway. The monologue was about a fifteen-year-old delinquent growing up in Tennessee in the 1870s.
Having lost two brothers in the Civil War,
the character considers his love for Rachel McCree, the alchemist’s
daughter
. Interpreting the lines, Simon decided to use his dumb voice.

“Look,” said Lydia, “you need the speech. I need to give you the speech.”

“What’s the speech?”

“The speech is not for the phone. The speech is for one-on-one only. Tomorrow. Until then, I’ve got to go. You wouldn’t believe.”

“Lydia, I envy you. Your beautiful son.”

“My beautiful son is sitting right next to me and he’s learning his audition piece, and I swear to you, Donna, if he doesn’t get a callback this time, I’ve already got an open letter to the town council all typed out and you can look for it on the front page.”

“God. See, that’s what I mean. You’re so committed to Simon’s well-being.”

“Shit, we’re in the parking lot and he hasn’t even done his makeup yet. Goddamnit! Donna, I’m hanging up.”

“Tomorrow, at—”

“Gotta go!”

Lydia parked in front of a giant, lozenge-shaped structure of steel and reinforced concrete. There were no other buildings around, only brown fields and a long, straight road running east to the highway. Hatchbacks and station wagons waited in the lot, with empty spaces left in between, as if their owners were suspicious or afraid of each other. Lydia dropped the phone and a mess of keys into her purse and rolled out of the driver’s seat. Simon followed his mother past the other cars, leaving fuzzy hand-prints on the hot metal and glass. She glanced up at the building— klutzy fifties architecture, orange and mint-blue paneling, paper-doll chains taped to the windows. Amateurs, she thought, shaking her head. No one respected the glory of the theater anymore.

About thirty kids had showed up for the auditions. The high turnout was understandable, given the rumors of talent scouts from Hollywood, each tale prompting visions of instant, catch-free success. A large basement room served as the rehearsal site, a dark place with varnished walls and a hard green carpet poorly glued to the cement floor. Lydia stepped on the boy’s heels, steering him by the shoulders, showing off all the angles. The other mothers frowned at her, and she returned the look. She went way back with these people, and for the most part the relationship had not been a happy one. If they objected to her assertive tactics, it was only because they were not aware how much was riding on her son’s success. How could they be? They were provincials, strictly small-time. Even the director was little more than a third-string hack. Peter Wayne Zachary: yeah, there’s a name to remember. Barely thirty, he was—in Lydia’s opinion—far too young for the job, although his quite blatant homosexuality did have a certain risqué charm. It angered her, how he encouraged even the most inept of her son’s rivals, those Hedgemont Heights brats who compulsively auditioned for everything in the tri-county area, their résumés designed by a team of professional consultants. The mothers were the worst. Jewish bitches in pantsuits of black cashmere. Glorified whores drowning in their own sense of entitlement. They, like the director, did not respect Simon’s unique gifts. His look was too eccentric, his delivery too distinct. There were only a few people in the business whose talents matched Simon’s own. Sydney Pollack, maybe. The guy who did
Rain Man
. But not this Fuck.