The Job (29 page)

“Man, what’s your wife doin’, running away from you at a time like this?” Debbie said.

“What’s been happening is not exactly her fault,” I said.

“I mean, it takes two to blow a marriage, doesn’t it? And I haven’t exactly been the easiest guy to be around recently.”

Thankfully, we didn’t dwell too long on the state of my marriage, as Phil really wanted to vent a lot of rage about Mr. Ted Pc-tcrson.

“That white-bread, preppy piece of shit,” he said.

“The guy comes across all Mr. Brooks Brothers, Mr. Fairfield-fucking-County-but at heart he’s just some vengeful goombah. I know hit men who’ve got more morals than this clown. I don’t like saying it, boss, but you should’ve-” “I know, I know. I was trying to do the right thing.”

“What did I tell you at the time? You can’t play nice and noble with an unethical fuckhead. You should’ve let me make that call.”

Debbie asked, “What are you talking about?”

“Fugedaboudit,” Phil said and dropped the subject. When we reached Grand Central, Phil insisted on dragging us to the bar of the adjoining Grand Hyatt Hotel for a final drink. Four hours later-when, underneath the table, Debbie began to stroke my thigh with her hand-I decided it was time to call it a night. So I stood up and said, “Listen, folks, I got to go. Again, I can’t thank you enough for making it up to Hartford….”

Debbie staggered to her feet.

“If you’re goin’, I’m goin’. I gotta get home to Raul.”

I reached into my pocket for my wallet.

“Phil, lemme help out with the damage….”

“Your money’s no good here,” he said. Then, scribbling a couple of numbers on a paper cocktail napkin, he said, “Here’s my number at my brother’s office. You need me, you know where to find me.”

Standing up, he gave me a hug and shoved the napkin into the breast pocket of my jacket. Outside the hotel I hailed a cab. As I was opening the door for Debbie she grabbed me by the arm, giving me a tipsy smile. “

“Ride downtown with me,” she said.

“I’m wasted, Debbie. Beyond wasted.”

“Drop me home, it’s not out of your way, then you can take the cab ‘cross town. I’ve got some stuff I wanna say.”

Reluctantly I climbed in after her, determined to remove her hand from my thigh if she began to stroke it again. I had enough problems right now.

Debbie gave the driver her address and we headed south. Then, reaching into her purse, she pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to me.

“This is for you,” she said.

I opened up the paper. It was ac heck Made out to me. For forty-five hundred dollars.

“What the hell is this, Debbie?” I asked.

“You know what it is.”

The check swam in front of me. I was drunk.

“Really, I don’t.”

“The money you gave Faber Academy for Raul’s tuition….”

“I didn’t give the school money. It was CompuWorld….”

“Mr. Allen…”

“You really can call me-” “Okay, okay, Ned. A couple of nights ago I was at the school. Some parent-teacher thing. And I got talkin’ to the bursar, who’s actually an all-right guy. Anyway, he told me that Spencer-Rudman called him up a couple months ago, making this big stink about the letter you signed saying CompuWorld would guarantee the money I owed the school. And when he told them a guarantee’s a guarantee, they said, yeah, yeah, yeah, they were gonna honor it, but you had no authority to write that letter. And you were gonna get stuck with the bill. The shits did stick you with the forty-five hundred, didn’ they?”

“Debbie…”

“I know they did… ‘cause I got this new friend, Paula, up in accounts. Yesterday morning, before you called, I got her to pull your file, look up your payout. I got to tell ya, Mr. Allen … Ned … I cried when she snuck me the letter they wrote you.”

I stared down at the check.

“It wasn’t exactly me playing fairy godfather, Debbie. They decided I was going to be Mr. Charitable.”

“Yeah… but the thing is, you didn’t fight it. And you didn’t make me feel bad by letting me know….”

“Not my style.”

She put her hand over mine.

“I like your style.”

I gently removed my hand and tore the check in two.

“I knew you were gonna do that,” she said, then added with a laugh, “But that’s not why I wrote it.”

We fell silent. Then Debbie said, “Thank you.”

As directed, the cab stopped at Nineteenth and First, right near one of the dark entrances to that 1950s Lego-labyrinth of middle-income housing called Stuyvesant Town. There were a couple of seedy-looking characters loitering on the street.

“How far’s your building?” I asked Debbie.

“Halfway to the river,” she said.

That settled the matter. I pushed some money through the cabbie’s window.

“I’ll walk you to your door.”

We said nothing as we headed into Stuyvesant Town. When we reached the door, she said, “Come inside, see Raul….”

“I’m really fried….”

She dug out the key from her purse and opened the front door.

“It’ll just take a minute. Anyway, don’t you want to see where your money’s going?”

“Just a minute, then,” I said-but I was really talking to myself.

The apartment was on the ground floor. It was very cramped, very thrown together. Old sagging charity shop furniture. Foldout drying racks filled with freshly washed clothes. An elderly television and VCR. Raul’s school paintings Scotch-taped to the walls.

There was a tiny alcove off the living room, furnished with a bunk bed. On the top bunk lay the snoring figure of Debbie’s mother. Raul was asleep in the lower bunk. Long, curly black hair, perfect unblemished skin, a slight hint of a smile as he slept. An angelic innocent.

“He’s beautiful,” I whispered. Debbie nodded in agreement.

“Time to go,” I said. We stepped away from the alcove. I moved to kiss her good night on the cheek. But suddenly we were all over each other, my hands in her hair, on her breasts, up her skirt, the two of us stumbling backward toward a doorway, collapsing on her bed, my brain sending out danger signals, the signals being drowned out, her hands grabbing my shirt, a final faint admonishing voice inside my head: This is insane…

Fade to black.

Daylight. A shaft of daylight, to be exact, sneaking through a tiny gap in the blinds. I opened one eye. A serious mistake. The light hit the optic nerve, sending an electrical charge of pain into the deep recesses of my skull. I opened the second eye. Bang. Crack. Wallop. Now my head felt as if it had been cleaved by an ice pick. My mouth was Sahara-dry. My eyes felt puffy, my face bloated and greasy. And, for a moment or two, I found myself wondering, Where the hell have I crash-landed?

And then I noticed that I was naked, lying next to an equally naked Debbie Suarez. She was comatose, snoring deeply. I felt that free-floating horror, known to every man or woman who has woken up, on the morning after, to discover themselves in a place they shouldn’t be, lying next to someone they shouldn’t be lying next to. And though I could try to blame the booze, the lateness of the hour, the emotional burden of Ivan’s death, the heat of the moment, and any other excuse you care to mention, the fact remained: This was a fuckup of my own making.

I glanced at my watch: 7:12 A.M. I had to get out. Fast. I sat up in bed and, as quietly as possible, lowered my feet to the floor. As my toe touched the frayed carpet, I noticed (with immense relief) a spent condom on the floor-and, with a bit of mental effort, vaguely remembered Debbie interrupting the impassioned proceedings to dig around in the drawer of her bedside table for a Trojan.

The used condom was the good news. The bad news was revealed to me by the mirror on the wall next to her bed. There was a small but unmistakable hickey on the right side of my neck, and a few discernible scratches near my throat. Thank God Lizzie was still in L.A.” and would be there for at least another week. Because it was pretty clear what activity had led to these scars.

My clothes were in a crumpled pile by the bed. I scooped them up and slinked into the bathroom. My suit looked as if it had been balled up and used for an impromptu basketball game. I dressed quickly, spread an inch of toothpaste on my forefinger and rubbed it around my gums in an attempt to rid my mouth of its rank morning-after taste. Then I snuck back into the bedroom. Debbie was still down for the count, and I was deeply relieved. Quite frankly, I didn’t know what to say to her. Except oops.

I slowly crept to the bedroom door, gently opened it, then shut it behind me. Only ten steps separated me from the front door of the apartment. I heard Grandma’s thunderous snoring coming from the top bunk. Like a thief terrified of setting off a hidden burglar alarm, I tiptoed my way across the living room. Then I heard a voice:

“Can you spell discovery, please?”

I spun around and there, sitting in the apartment’s little breakfast nook, was Raul. He was dressed in Power Rangers pajamas,

digging into a bowl of Sugar Pops. He had a schoolbook opened, and was doing some homework with a small stub of a pencil. He was a big kid for a six-year-old. I put my finger to my lips and approached him.

“What was the word?” I asked.

“Discovery,” he said loudly.

“Let’s not wake your grandma.”

“Discovery,” he whispered.

“I’ve got to fill in the sentence, Thomas made an interesting…”

He mouthed each letter as he wrote them into his workbook.

“What discovery did Thomas make?” I asked.

Raul stared down intently at the workbook again, and read, “

“Thomas was going on a…. How do you spell journey?”

“How do you think you spell journey?”

“J-O-R…”

“J-O-U-R…”

“J-O-U-R-N-E-Y.”

“Good spelling,” I said, squeezing his shoulder.

“I’ve got to go.-..”

“Are you Mommy’s friend?”

“Yeah, I’m a friend of your mom’s.”

“Are you going on a J-O-U-R-N-E-Y?”

“I’m going to work. Please tell your mom I’ll be in touch.”

“My name is Raul. That’s R-A-U-L. How do you spell your name?”

“N-E-D.”

He gave me a shy smile.

“Later, Ned.”

“Later, Raul.”

I hopped a cab across town. It was 7:48 by the time I reached my building. A fast shower and shave, a change of clothes, a cup of coffee, a handful of Raw Energy vitamins, and then a sprint uptown in time for the eight-thirty punchin at PC Solutions. I dreaded to think about the greeting I would get from the Jellyfish. Eighteen units was the punishment for missing work on Tuesday (not to mention being docked a second day’s pay). I’d have to do a lot of closing between now and Friday afternoon if I wanted to have a job next week

I turned the key in our door and was surprised to discover that it wasn’t double-locked. When I swung the door open, I heard the sound of running water from the kitchen. Then, with a growing sense of alarm, I saw a small overnight bag to the immediate right of the door.

Lizzie was back.

My first instinct was to run-to quietly back out the door, hit the fire stairs, and vanish from view until my war wounds healed. But in my panic, I stepped away from the door and it slammed behind me.

The kitchen tap suddenly went silent.

“Ned?” Lizzie yelled from the other room. I reached for the door, but before I could open it, she was standing in front of me. She was wearing a business suit, having obviously just arrived off the red-eye from L.A. She seemed bewildered as to why, having just arrived, I was now clutching at the door handle. Then I turned fully around and her face suddenly tightened-initially with shock, then anger, then desperate hurt.

I watched as she caught sight of the scratches and the dime-sized hickey on my neck. But most of all, I saw her register my terrible guilt.

She closed her eyes and shuddered. Then she opened them again-and the look on her face was now one of pure despair.

“You asshole,” she whispered.

“Lizzie, please…”

“Fuck you,” she said and marched into the bedroom. I raced after her, but the door slammed shut in my face. She locked it. I rattled the handle, banged the door with my fist, begging her to open it, telling her I could explain everything… even though I knew there was no explanation for what I did. Except complete and total stupidity.

After about three minutes of banging and pleading, I slumped to the floor, feeling spent and genuinely scared. The bedroom door suddenly opened. Instantly I was back on my feet.

“Lizzie, you’ve got to let me try and…”

Then I saw that she had a suitcase in each hand.

“Sweetheart,” I said, “please don’t leave.”

She dropped the suitcases at my feet.

“I’m not leaving,” she said.

“You are.”

“Hang on a minute….”

“I pay the rent now; I pick up all the bills, so if this marriage is ending, I don’t see why I should leave….”

“This marriage is not ending.”

“You’re right. I was using the wrong tense. It’s over.”

“Darling… ,” I said, trying to touch her shoulder. She swatted me away as if I were a wasp.

“Don’t you goddamn touch me….”

“Okay, okay,” I said, trying to lower the emotional temperature.

“Could we just sit down and talk-” “Talk? TALK?” she screamed.

“You screw someone else and then you want to talk about it?”

She went storming into the living room. I followed.

“It wasn’t like that. Nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened? You can actually stand there-covered in evidence-and tell me nothing happened? Get out of my life.”

I began to sob.

“I was drunk, I was stupid, I was all over the place after the business with Ivan, I didn’t mean-” “I don’t want to hear your bullshit excuses, Ned….”

“At least give me the chance-” t “Give you the chance? After I got your message about Ivan, I dropped everything and flew cross-country all night-because I thought, “Okay, he deserves the chance… we deserve the chance.” And what do I discover?-that my piece-of-shit husband doesn’t even have the aptitude to tell his floozie not to bite his neck.”

“She’s not ‘my floozie’.. ..”

“I don’t give a shit who she is, what she is. We are finished.”