End Vision, page 12
The voices from Cara’s office became suddenly clear. Her door had opened.
“I saw him. You see what he’s up to,” said Cara. “If you can, approach him and see what he says about it.”
“I will.”
They moved down the hallway toward Andrew.
“And you can’t come back here. We can’t meet here,” said Cara.
“O.K. I’ll go to the RF&M offices as soon as they open and contact him.”
They stood at the front door. They had not noticed Andrew sitting in the darkness of his cubicle. He didn’t recognize the man. The man could have been Cara’s age, but he looked much older. Black hair. Black Tom Selleck mustache. Heavy. Tanned leather skin.
“Don’t come back here,” said Cara as she closed the door behind him. She stood for a moment, sighed, and rubbed her temples. ‘Disheveled’ was the word that came to Andrew’s mind when he looked at her. A weight seemed to drop from her posture. Andrew felt incredibly self-conscious. Something about watching a person who didn’t know that they were being watched made him feel dirty. He took a sip from his mug, set it down heavily on the desktop and pretended to work on his computer. The sound must have startled Cara. She gasped, and Andrew met her gaze. The intensity in her face shifted to a feigned amusement.
“Andrew. My God. You scared the shit out of me!”
Andrew remained behind his computer. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone was here.”
“What are you doing here so early? It’s six in the morning…”
“It’s six forty-five. I’m just trying to catch up on a few things since I’ve been gone,” he lied.
“That man… He’s a friend of mine,” she said. “He’s going through a rough patch and needed to talk.”
“Aren’t we all.”
They looked at each other, draped in an uncomfortable silence.
“Why don’t you come on back to my office.”
“O.K. Let me finish up here, and I’ll head back.”
Cara disappeared down the hallway. Andrew finished his mug. His stomach now settled, he reached for the paper bag and took a few small pulls from the bottle then finished with a long drink of water. Taking two circular peppermints from his desk drawer, he quickly crunched one, swishing the minty spit as he chewed. He threw in the second mint, wiped his brow with a napkin, and surveyed the state of his dress. His jeans were thick with dried beer. Thank God he was wearing a brown shirt, but even he could smell himself, which was always a bad sign. A few sprints of fabric deodorizer later, he rose and made his way to Cara’s office.
Cara Carson never took ‘no’ for an answer. She prided herself on being a successful woman in a man’s world. She didn’t take any shit. And, when it was called for, she would tell a person straight to his face, “I’m not going to take this shit.” Or, “I’ve been fucked too many times to pretend you’re not trying to fuck me now.” She also knew that silence could be a woman’s best friend, and she chose wisely the battles she fought publicly.
Cara liked to tell the new young female employees at VerMas Media the story of how, when she was a ten-year-old girl, while swinging during recess at her conservative midwestern elementary school, a boy named Teddy Bryant — she could still remember his name — forced her from the swing. He wanted to swing, and even though it was her turn, she was just this small blonde girl, and so he took the swing from her while she was having fun on it. She had brooded over it to anyone who would listen, for days...weeks, even. She had told the aides at recess. Her teacher. She even tried to complain to her principal, Mr. Buttermen, but could never get past the office secretary who told Cara that the battle she was fighting was as old as time…just to let it go. And so Cara dropped the battle from public view; she was even nice to Teddy Bryant for years.
With high school came sanctioned athletics, pep rallies. The football players, idols of worship, sat in the center of the gymnasium floor. The girls high kicked in miniskirts, pompoms held high as they rallied the crowd into a frenzy. Football in the midwest was a religion, and Teddy was the quarterback on a winning team. Untouchable. Cara watched all this take place, and it fed her hatred.
The summer between her freshman and sophomore year, Cara’s body grew tall and filled out in smooth curves, plump roundness. She now had flowing blonde hair. Her male classmates started being nice to her. All of the boys in her tenth grade class made fools of themselves in their efforts to talk with her. Junior boys, too, and even some seniors. Some called her home phone at night after supper as her family sat around the living room watching Vanna White walk back-and-forth in body-hugging evening wear on Wheel of Fortune. She didn’t understand it. But her mother knew. She told Cara to be careful, that boys only wanted one thing. If she wasn’t careful, she would have to go to school out of town like the Miller’s daughter.
That night, as Cara gazed at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and rubbed and prodded and poked at her body’s new features, a realization clicked in her brain. She had something everyone wanted. She could leverage this new image to get the things she wanted. It was a basic tenth grade economics lesson: supply and demand. There was only a small supply of girls with a body like hers, and a large supply of high school male doofuses banging around on each other in hormonal rage. Her eyes opened. It was as if she was seeing the world for the first time: the magazine ads with semi-nude women slowly drinking from a thick phallic Pepsi bottle, head tilted back, hands cupped gently on the bottle’s base, eyes squinted tight in orgasmic pleasure; television commercials in which the sound of an ice-cold Coors Original opening in the hands of a man drew pretty women in flocks. Aphroditic models sold clothing in magazines, on billboards. Everything women did in the movies. Secretaries had to wear heels. Even female news anchors had large breasts and looked lovingly at their male co-hosts and through the television screen to an unseen audience of watching eyes. In sitcoms and even cartoons, tall, thin, voluptuous housewives raised children, cooked, cleaned, and put up with the shenanigans of their obese, abusive, struggling, alcoholic husbands.
In her own reflected image, Cara had finally seen the power her body held. The women before her had made unfathomable mistakes by giving the image of their bodies away to men in order to sell. Not that she thought there was anything wrong about women selling their bodies. It was allowing men to be the beneficiaries of their commodification that displeased her. Cara decided then that she would take control of her own image.
The next day at school she walked right up to Teddy Bryant’s locker, the quarterback, to put her new theory to the test. She talked to him and laughed and pushed out her new chest and touched his arm; she played with her hair and looked him in the eyes as she drank from her Pepsi. Later that night, Teddy pulled up in a black T-bird in his heavily-adorned letter jacket to take her to the movies to see Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a live action fantasy film in which animated characters and people coexist and every single man wants to fuck a big-tittied cartoon character...who is married to a rabbit. This movie proved to Cara that she was onto something. If a real-life, living and breathing man would murder other real-life, living and breathing men just to get the chance to sleep with a curvaceous cartoon red-head who willingly slept with a fucking rabbit, what would they do for her?
Teddy and Cara left the movie in good spirits, but for different reasons: Teddy because Cara had placed her hand on his upper thigh, Cara because Teddy had seized-up in nervous tension when she did.
Teddy took the long way home that night. The headlights from his brother’s T-top Camaro lit the caliche road. Journey’s “Faithfully” blared on the radio. Teddy asked if Cara wanted to park. She did. He pulled the Camaro off onto a side road beside a corn field.
He was eager and inexperienced; he didn’t lean in for a kiss, he dove. His famous football hands encroached on Cara’s body. He fumbled with her shirt. He audibled over to her pants, but was intercepted by Cara’s hands. “Wait,” she had said. “You first. I want you to go first.”
Teddy paused then removed his shirt.
“Your pants, too. I want you to get naked for me.”
Teddy was unsure.
“Then I’ll get naked for you.”
He kicked off his sneakers, unlatched his belt, pulled his jeans and underwear down in one fluid swoop. He sat naked in the dark before her. Steve Perry had reached to the ooohhh, ooooohhhh, oooooohhhh section of “Faithfully.”
Cara pushed on the dome light.
“What are you doing?” Teddy asked. “Turn it off. It's your turn.”
Cara didn’t move a muscle. She saw him. All of him. A large grin spread across her face. She had stripped him bare. She began to laugh, a small chuckle that built in intensity.
“What?” shouted Teddy Bryant, Football Star, covering his naked torso with his arms. “Turn it off! It’s your turn now! Don’t look at me! What are you laughing at?”
“No,” Cara replied. “It was my turn, and you took it. You took my turn. So here you go, you can have your turn now.”
Teddy Bryant, Stealer of Swings, sat naked and dumbfounded. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “You’re a crazy bitch, you know that? Get out! Get out of the car!”
Cara grinned. “I will not. You will get dressed and we will go home.”
“I’m not taking you anywhere, you psycho. Why would I do anything for you?”
Cara pointed at Teddy’s naked crotch, at his shocked, scrunched-up penis. “Because of your little dick,” she said. “You don’t want the whole school to know about that little dick, do you?”
Teddy got dressed and drove her home.
At seven a.m. sharp, employees began filling the VerMas Media offices and taking their posts in front of computers. They poured in with their lattes, cappuccinos, americanos, coffees, teas, bagel sandwiches, breakfast burritos, energy bars, power green juices, and smoothies; filed in wearing earbuds wirelessly connected to devices pumping out every genre of music imaginable, from baroque choral arrangements to steam punk, music streaming just for them through a VerMas operated digital music service based on their individual tastes; but mostly, everyone just listened to the Top 40.
While Andrew sat inside Cara’s office, the building gradually came to life. He calmly sipped his mug and waited for hera to begin. She sifted through stacks of papers, pausing on occasion and raising her eyes to his.
“Now, they were just right here,” said Cara. “The notes I had for Texas. I don’t know where they could have gone.”
The mustachioed man’s cologne still hung heavy in the room, and Andrew was thankful for it. The feeling of doom he had walked in with earlier this morning had subsided, and he felt the warm blanket of content and confidence that comes with straight rum. The muscles in his body loosened, and his mind no longer dwelled on how badly he felt, or the panic that always followed multiple days of heavy drinking. That feeling of waking up on a steeply-sloped cliff held in place by just the smallest amount of friction, each movement and thought a weight pulling his body closer and closer to the edge. The nausea, the diarrhea, the shakes and sweats. The anxiety of a prairie dog moved too far from its hole. The hours spent thinking about what he’d possibly done or said or texted while not wanting to know what he’d done or said or texted. The agoraphobia. Although these things were all still alive and well in his soul, they’d been temporarily postponed for a more convenient moment in time. When that time would be, Andrew did not know; but it would certainly be sooner rather than later.
He slouched comfortably in his seat, the way he’d seen junkies do in the movies after removing the belt from their arm, and watched Cara. She was still pretty enough. He’d probably fuck her if the opportunity presented itself. He was allowed to think this way again now that Shelly had kicked him to the curb. Would she be in today? Would she say something to him? Chances were that she would just operate outside of his realm. Either way, he thought he could handle whatever she threw his way. He felt like he was O.K. enough now to be seen by her.
“Here they are,” said Cara, placing a page of handwritten notes on the desk.
“Is your friend a cologne salesman?” asked Andrew.
“What?”
“Your man friend from earlier. Does he sale cologne or something?”
“Yes, Andrew. He is a cologne salesman,” she responded, annoyed. “Should I give you his number? It smells like you could use it.”
The grin fell from Andrew’s lips. He sat up, lowered his head, and sniffed.
A sadness appeared in Cara’s eyes. “Andrew, you look and smell like dogshit. Like a dirty bar.”
“Yah, uhh…”
“I know the last few days have probably been rough on you, but it is not cute or becoming of you, this look. What have you been doing since Monday?”
“I’ve mainly been drinking at the Silver Turtle…”
“Where?”
“The Silver Turtle. It’s a little dive off Vermont.”
“Jesus, Andrew… Where are you staying? I’m guessing Shelly didn’t take you back?”
“I never went back to the apartment. I’ve just been crashing at a motel for the last few nights.”
“Well, that’s too bad...but you need to get it together. You leave for Amarillo on Saturday morning. Tomorrow. I’m forwarding over your boarding passes now.” Cara clicked a few keys on her phone; a second later, Andrew’s phone chimed. “There you go,” she said. She leaned back in her chair and looked hard at Andrew. She seemed deep in concentration. “I’m going to say something, and I want you to take it to heart. You look like a bum. You look like you crawled out of a dumpster.”
“Yah, alright...I was actually feeling pretty good.”
“Let me be the first to tell you, you are not good, Andrew...Listen, I like you. You seem like a good guy, considering. I get it. I know this business. I know men. I know how men behave. I’ve also seen better, stronger, prettier, more important men then you just up and disappear into a bottle. They get sad...they get their big egos hurt. A man’s ego is a fickle thing. They start drinking more and more...they start drinking in the morning.” She pointed at Andrew’s mug, and he smiled slyly. “And poof.” She spread her balled hands up and out toward the ceiling. “No more. They disappear. They lose their jobs. They lose their friends. They lose their families, their money, their homes. The lucky ones who don’t die get to dry out in jail.”
Andrew nodded. He knew the lecture well. He’d heard it before. “My father drank himself to death,” he said in a moment of honesty. “Cheap whiskey.”
“So you know, then, what I mean.”
“I do.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Andrew.” He could tell she meant it. Cara took in a deep breath and let it out in a loud sigh. “Very well. Are you able to talk with me for a second about Texas?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Andrew sipped from his mug. His bulwark was failing him. Maybe he didn’t look as good as he thought he did. What would he do when it no longer worked? “You look disappointed.” He felt like a child.
“You’re going to keep drinking that?”
“It's too late for today. Now is not a good time to stop.”
Cara shook her head and took her notes. “You and Patrick will leave tomorrow morning from LAX. Arrive in Amarillo Saturday evening. I didn’t know if you still had family you wanted to stay with, so Jenni booked two rooms at an Extended Stay for the two of you. If you would rather stay somewhere else, just cancel the room. That will be fine...honestly, I think staying with family would be best for you, but do what you need to. Patrick has put together a checklist that you guys will need to get started on. I’ll let him brief you on that. You might check with him about that today.”
“What will y’all be doing here while we are gone?”
“We have to get the L.A. crew together: film crew, director, casting… all that. You shouldn’t worry about it. That part is autopilot for us.”
“Who will be working on that?”
Cara leaned back. “Ask it.”
“Huh?”
“Just ask it, Andrew… If it will make you feel better.”
“What will Shelly be doing?”
She smiled. “Shelly will stay here at the office. She needs to start designing the ad campaign. I’m going to have her sit in on casting. But she will eventually have to go to Texas, Andrew. So whatever needs to take place so that the two of you can be in the same space needs to get taken care of. Get back together. Don’t. I don’t care. But you will have to come to terms with the fact that you will eventually be working with each other again.”
“Yah.” His mug was running low, which made him more anxious than the thought of dealing with Shelly. He stared at the piles of papers covering Cara’s desktop: receipts, notes, schedules. Stacks of multi-colored sticky notes. Manilla folders. Mugs filled with pens instead of rum. Envelopes torn haphazardly and fringed, toothlike, across the seals. “Yah, I get that.”
“Very well, then. What else do you --” Cara’s question was cut short by Journey playing from her phone. She answered quickly and under her breath. “What, Teddy?” She paused, shaking her head. “O.K., then. Just have them upload and print the files...No. I don’t want them just sent to me...I don’t care if that is easier...I want them in hard copy as well...Tell the doctor they are for me...Listen, I’ll call you back. I’m in a meeting. Just upload them into the system, have them ready for the update, and have them printed off. O.K...Hold on one second.”
Cara’s expression sobered. She put her hand over the phone’s mouthpiece and looked at Andrew. He could tell the meeting had reached an end. “If there is anything else I can do for you, Andrew, please just email me. I have to take this.”
He nodded and stood while Cara impatiently waited for his exit. As he turned toward the door, the liquor awoke in his body, and he stumbled, knocking a stack of folders to the floor.
“Goddamnit,” Cara hissed.
Andrew dropped to his knees and began sorting the papers back into the manilla folders. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I tripped.”
