The Up and Comer (34 page)

Out of nowhere, I saw another woman. She was older looking and tall, thin as a swizzle stick, with alabaster skin and white hair pulled back tight behind her ears. I had never seen her before in my life, and there she was standing over me. She was neither happy nor sad. I was looking up and she was speaking to me. I could barely hear her.

"You must be Philip," she was saying.

"Yes," I answered.

The woman reached out her hand to me, and there was something tucked between two of her fingers. It was also white, and it was small and rectangular. Slowly, I took it out of her hand.

"My name is Evelyn Simmons," the woman said, her voice echoing, "and I've been retained as the listing agent for this apartment."

I was no longer dreaming.

In fact, I had awakened to a nightmare.

I was lying there in bed wearing nothing but my boxers and unable to remember ever taking off my clothes. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I gradually focused on what turned out to be her business card. It announced Evelyn Simmons as a real estate agent with the Pickford Group. They were a Manhattan outfit that dealt strictly in two-comma properties ($1,000,000 and up).

Evelyn jiggled a set of keys in her hand. "Sorry about letting myself in like that," she said, "but I was instructed to do so."

She didn't say by whom, nor did she need to. I knew all too well whose name was on the title to the loft.

She continued: "I've come to look around the place so we know what to list it at. It shouldn't take too long."

She had to be fucking kidding me.

More or less, that's what I was thinking. As groggy and hungover as I was, it quickly occurred to me that that was exactly what Lawrence Metcalf would hope I'd be thinking. He was probably sitting snug in his Greenwich home at that moment, looking out on the water, a big Bloody Mary in his hand and his Precious still lying comatose in her old bedroom upstairs from the two Ambiens she had needed in order to fall asleep last night after crying her eyes out. Yes, Lawrence Metcalf wanted me to throw a fit, wanted me to toss his real estate agent out on her bony ass. He knew perfectly well that an angry man dug his own grave that much faster.

I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

I looked up at Evelyn Simmons after finishing with her business card. "Take all the time you need," I told her with a disingenuous smile.

She nodded and stole a quick, uncomfortable glance in the vicinity of my boxers. That's when I saw that I'd been hanging elephant the entire time.

I got up, put on some pants, and did my best to ignore my morning houseguest, who was walking around with a clipboard and making notes. When she was leaving ten minutes later, I was pouring myself a cup of coffee.

"You had a nice place here," she said, strolling by me. "Too bad."

Too bad?

Had Lawrence Metcalf really told her what had happened? I doubted it. Her line was spoken more like someone who had seen a news broadcast. Or, perhaps, had read the morning papers.

Ah, yes, the tabloids.

After showing Evelyn Simmons of the Pickford Group out, I threw a sweatshirt on and headed to the nearest newsstand, eyes down all the way. There was a chance the story had fallen through the cracks, I tried to tell myself.

I was far from convincing.

"Affair Turns Deadly" was how the
Daily News
put it. Other than spelling my first name with two
l
's instead of one, they essentially got the facts right. Accompanying the brief story was a picture of the entrance to the Doral Court. While I didn't think such publicity would damage the hotel's reputation irreparably, I did surmise that it would put a real crimp in their extramarital-affair business.

Meanwhile, the
Post
had their own unique spin. "Fatal Love Triangle" was their headline. What's more, they had managed to scrounge up photographs of all three of us, positioning them, accordingly, in a triangle. How ingenious. While Connor's and Jessica's pictures looked to be recent, mine was apparently lifted from my Dartmouth yearbook. To the casual observer, it must have looked as if Jessica had been robbing the cradle with me. As for the story itself, it said that she and I had "reportedly" been caught in the act by Connor. Given that
the act
was what Connor had actually wanted us to do in front of him, the old adage seemed proven once again. Truth was always stranger than fiction.

I had taken the papers back to the loft and read the stories there over a breakfast of aspirin and more coffee. The lone consolation was that in both papers' opinions, I wasn't front-page news. That distinction went to Donald Trump, who, as the pictures of him showed, had fallen down while dancing with some supermodel at a swank benefit. "Thump Goes Trump!" declared the Post. "The Fall of the Donald" announced the
News.

I was steps away from throwing both papers in the trash when I got to thinking about my parents — how they had kept a scrapbook of both me and my brother while we were growing up. Any time either of their two boys made it into the local paper, the entire article would be clipped and pasted into this brown fake-leather album that they proudly kept on display in our den. From time to time I'd catch one of them flipping through it when they thought no one was around.

I wondered if it had ever occurred to my parents that the news wouldn't always be good.

Eventually, I'd have to break it to them.

THIRTY-FOUR

Sitting around in the loft while trying to avoid every mirror was starting to take its ignominious toll after two days. A truck would backfire out on the street and I'd hear the gunshot. See Connor falling to the floor. Feel the weight of his body in my arms.

While I had always thought of my life as anything but routine, oddly enough it was the absence of the little things that were, in fact, my routine that underscored the severity of what had happened. The morning shave. Picking out a suit. Matching a tie. All so mundane, and yet all so reassuring. I never would've guessed. Not having to do any of it had become one of the more unsettling indicators of how much my life had suddenly changed. And would keep on changing.

I decided to call Jack.

Maybe I was forcing the issue. If I was, I didn't care. Should my days as a senior associate at Campbell & Devine be numbered, I wanted to know. Sooner rather than later.

Like I said, I was a terrible waiter for things.

I could picture Donna sitting outside of Jack's office when I dialed. As she spoke to me she was pretending not to know anything and doing a lousy job at it. The giveaway, in between her gum chewing, was that she was far too polite.

When she told me to hold the line, I expected the next voice I'd hear to be Jack's. Instead, Donna came back on. "He wants you to come in at the end of the day, around six-thirty. Can you do that?" she asked me.

I could, I told her.

For not having actually talked to me, Jack had managed to tell me plenty. The first thing he had told me, by scheduling our meeting after hours, was that he wanted there to be as few people around the place as possible when I arrived. That seemed to jell with the second thing — that the nature of our discussion was such that he didn't want to get into it over the phone.

At six-fifteen I caught a cab up to the office.

There was no wink this time. When I got off the elevator and passed the portrait of Thomas Methuen Campbell, his serene gaze seemed a little more on the forbidding side. I could feel his eyes following me. I thought about what Jack had once said and I wondered if he had indeed "consulted" Campbell about my situation. Surely it met the prerequisite of being a tough decision.

The floor was nearly empty. What sounds I could hear were from offices far off the main corridor that led back to Jack. As I got closer I could see that Donna's desk was vacant. By then, she was most likely on the "Big-Hairy Ferry" back to Staten Island. I knocked on Jack's partially open door. "Come in," he told me.

The same leather-inlaid desk sat between us, only now — pardon the symbolism — it felt a lot wider. Screw the small talk. Jack wasted no time in doing his shuffling of some papers and getting down to business.

"I've always been straight with you, Philip, and I'm not about to stop now," he began, retaining much of that same subdued expression from when I had last seen him. "It's simple economics, that's all, and as if I couldn't figure that out on my own, Lawrence Metcalf was all too pleased to spell it out for me. In a nutshell, it goes something like this. If you stay, a lot of business goes. If you go, a lot of business stays." Jack shook his head. "That's some father-in-law you have there."

"Had
would be more like it," I corrected him.

Jack nodded in agreement and went on. "I like to think that I'm capable of standing on principle. As for what that exactly means, I don't know. What I do know is that I'm responsible for the livelihood of every person at every desk out there behind you. That said, it doesn't leave me much of a choice… doesn't leave me much of a choice at all."

I
realized the other day that we're all at the age now where we can really only rely on our instincts and intellect in order to succeed.

"Are you firing me, Jack?" I asked.

When you think about it, from the ages of, like, twenty-eight
to...
oh, let's say thirty-four, we're all kind of just out there without a net.

"Only if you don't resign," he said.

I
mean, when we're older than that, odds are we'll have collected enough experience
—
personal, professional, what have you
— to
get our asses out of almost any jam.

"I guess that doesn't leave me much of a choice either," I said.

And when we were younger, let's face it, nothing really too significant was expected of us, precisely because we didn't have any experience.

"No, I guess it doesn't," he said. "I'm sorry, Philip."

But those in-between years
—
right now
—
that's when we're really on our own.

"So am I," I said softly.

We traded our good-byes, brief and stiff lipped, and I was about to leave when I realized that there was one more thing. A small favor from Jack — that he would keep Gwen on at the firm, find a slot for her no matter what.

"Of course," he told me.

I walked out of his office, seeing no one as I headed toward the elevators. Then, around the last corner, I heard it. The low-pitched machine-like buzz. I recognized it instantly. Shep and his wheelchair.

There was no long, drawn-out conversation. No awkward silences. No pitiful attempt at compassion. Shep simply rolled to a stop and peered up at me.

"Look at it this way," he said. "At least you can fucking walk."

We both smiled.

I shook his hand and told him that I'd keep in touch. "Bullshit," he said with a chuckle. I knew I always did like him.

* * *

The next morning, with the pantry and Sub-Zero near empty, I ventured out of the loft and walked to the corner deli for an egg sandwich. On the way back a short man tapped me on the shoulder in the middle of the sidewalk. He had
disinterested third party
written all over him.

"Philip Randall?" he asked.

"Serve 'em over," I said.

Which was precisely what he did. Divorce papers. Tracy had wasted no time in filing for the dissolution of our marriage. Outside of maybe paying the electric bill, our assets were to be frozen from that point on. What would follow was sure to be the bulldozer approach, named appropriately for how no legal stone would be left unturned in order to render me broke. All engineered by that same guy holding a Bloody Mary out in Greenwich. By the time the discovery phase alone of the divorce was completed, my legal bills would rival the gross national product of a third world country.

"Have a nice day, Mr. Randall," said the short man with a smirk.

"Fuck you very kindly," I replied.

THIRTY-FIVE

Fact: the moment a guy gets kicked in the balls is not the moment he begins to feel the pain. There's a slight delay. A period of limbo during which the brain is almost in denial. It's receiving all the messages, but it seems unwilling to respond in immediate fashion.

I was aware of all that had happened. I simply wasn't processing it. As I walked back home with those freshly served divorce papers in hand, however, everything seemed to register at once. It was life catching up to me. Life telling me —
 
shouting, if you must know — that upon further review I was nothing more than veneer. Coating. Spread thin and destined to wear through. I was wifeless, jobless, and if Lawrence Metcalf had his way, soon to be penniless. There were no two ways about it.

I, Philip Randall, had lost my shine.

And it hurt like hell.

I wanted to blame Tyler. Without him this whole damn mess would never have happened. I wanted to blame Connor. Why on earth did he have to take out that gun? But in the end, what I wanted and what I
needed
were two very different things. Because what I needed was to accept the truth. There was no one to blame other than myself.