The Ultimate Exit Strategy, page 2
A year later, in honor of her new restaurant in Cincinnati, Spike colored her flat top platinum and had both nipples pierced with heavy gauge, stainless steel rings. The nose and the eyebrow jewelry followed that summer, and I began to feel as if people were staring at us, at her. Spike assured me that she liked for people to notice her, but anonymity would have been my own lifestyle choice, the discreet, assimilationist darkness of the closet with the occasional out-and-proud summer trip to Provincetown or San Francisco. Through all of this, I continued to envision a bland middle-class existence, sweetened to perfection by the lovely extra disposable income my Gold Rush deal money would bring – another Kate Spade bag, a few more pairs of Via Spiga shoes.
Until now it had been easier to file away my objections to Spike’s evolving persona with the rest of the somewhat unsatisfying circumstances of my life than to proactively court the drama of change. Now, a fair proximity to wealth gave me a little tickle that my life ought to be much better than it was and soon. The Gold Rush deal was the trust fund fate had denied me – not nearly enough to retire, but a little nest-egg to fall back on – at least one more collar button blown wide open in my stiflingly buttoned-up existence.
To my ever increasing horror, all Spike had been able to see in this good fortune was investment capital for her restaurant chain. She’d fantasized about Spike’s New-Style Cafes sprinkled with my money, growing into a regional franchise, her up-scale answer to Big Boy’s poised for an haute cuisine boom in the farm belt. Now, after years of hemming and hawing, weekend rendezvous and airport reunions, I had spent that past few days explaining why, when the buyout went through, I didn’t want to move back to Blue River and be Spike’s wife and business partner. Spike maintained sullenly that what this really meant was that I didn’t want to be her partner at all, and I was beginning to recognize she was absolutely right.
What I wanted to believe was that there was a new, better girlfriend out there to replace the increasingly unsatisfactory Spike. But standing at my not quite middle-aged crossroads, all the good ones really did seem to be either married or straight.
Naomi’s most recent cigarette bobbed and dipped as she counseled me, “Women are just like CTA buses – miss one and another will be along shortly,” giggling, “one where you can get a seat.” It was easy for Naomi to say – she always drove to work.
Since I’d left (or been left depending on who told it) by my long-term lover, Emily Karnowski, years ago now, you could have populated two or three lesbian support groups with my embittered exes. I was staring down an endless procession of Friday evenings spent with Curve magazine in self-abuse. And over and over again, I blinked – petrified at how easy it had become to imagine that having someone (namely Spike) was better than having no one at all.
Time was running out and the laws of gravity seemed incontrovertible. Women’s bodies have the asset lives of cars – Lexus to Geo – it’s all depreciation once you’ve left puberty. So, here I was, the bulletproof quality of my twenties replaced by an eerie comfort in discussing elective cosmetic surgeries. The lines in my forehead and at the edges of my eyes were coalescing into the ugly inevitability of looking every second of my age – thirty-five in only a few short years.
Sure, I’d watched Naomi mature into the best middle age had to offer: that crisp, impeccable, self-assurance of the forty-ish dyke matrons you passed slouched in Business Class on your way to Coach – the gray in her hair colored agelessly away and the three-hundred dollar, Jil Sander slacks hanging tastefully off of her gym-tight haunches. I was looking at the future and I didn’t want to go there – at least not alone.
“My God, you know, you can’t have everything,” Naomi was saying of my troubles with Spike, I thought a little too facilely, “but, Virginia, I just don’t think you’re getting enough here.”
She was promising, in true Naomi Wolf form, that with sufficient commitment to what I wanted, life really could be like Burger King – my way. Freed by Xanax from any anxiety about her behavior whatsoever, these days Naomi was Naomi-squared. “Why don’t you just cut the bitch loose? Anyone could see you’d be much happier.”
But happier, in my book, was still a long way from happy.
“Do you want to hear some real troubles, Virginia?” Waiting two beats for effect, Naomi puffed a long exasperated breath. “Chief of Criminal Prosecutions. I’ve been circling that old man’s carcass for years now, smelling retirement and when he goes I think they’re going to give that job, MY job, to Luther Payton.” She was looking vaguely ill, “Oh, yeah; you know him,” murderously rolling the tip of her cigarette against the side of the big round ashtray in her lap.
I recalled having met the good-looking, machine-liberal, Black man. A Cook County State’s Attorney like Naomi, from a well-connected family, ironically much like Naomi’s, Luther Payton was frequently photographed alongside the Mayor – Washington, Sawyer, Daley – whichever mayor happened to need photographing for the Sun Times with an upstanding citizen at some African-American community fund-raiser.
“Old lucky Luther,” Naomi was bitching, “right place, right time, right color – just dark smoke really,” blowing out her acrimony. “There’s nothing to him. I’m getting way too old for this,” she announced as if it were a recent decision.
I was watching myself in her picture windows: the short coarse hair still mostly black, my laugh lines forgiven in the blur of the faintly reflected image. Maybe Naomi was right about Spike and making the happiness I deserved in my life, and maybe, certainly, with the help of the Gold Rush deal, I still had plenty of time to get every little thing I wanted.
“Let’s face it,” Naomi had fallen into a kind of rhythm of complaint, “we’re just plain getting old.”
“Who cares?” I said, “Honey, we look great.” I thought there were worse things than being who we were. 1 still looked great. “You look fine,” I told Naomi, “honestly.”
“A minute ago I looked great,” she allowed. “That’s just how it goes – every year the praise gets fainter.”
Grant Park fountain was all lit up below us, a lovely view. I tipped the bottle in Naomi’s direction, but she wagged her finger churlishly, “I’m not having anymore,” considering her glass with reproach. “It makes me puffy.”
“You know,” I said, “you’re as young as you feel.”
“Well, I feel puffy.” Naomi’s laugh had brittle edges. “You know, the Dems’ll probably want to run him for Circuit Court judge next year. HA. He probably doesn’t even want to be Chief if he can be a judge.” She tipped up her glass at that cheerful thought. “Waste not, want not. Who knows if I’ll ever get Chief? With my luck they’ll decide it ought to be a Black slot or something.”
I was thinking you never know about people. Even people you think you know.
“Fuck you,” I offered, which Naomi found not even in the least off-putting.
“Which brings me to Spike –” she was saying. “I mean, God knows, there are enough real problems in the world, and if this were one of them I’d be the first one to say, go on and worry yourself to death. I’d encourage you but as it is, you know, chop chop, time to move on, girl.” She looked at me with expectant self-satisfaction. “So, am I always right or what?”
II
I began that week by stepping into the puddle of puke my cat, Sweet Potato, had hacked up onto the rug beside my bed. My head on crooked and my gut still brimming with unmetabolized designer scotch, it was shaping up to be a terrific morning.
From the top of the refrigerator, Sweet Potato slow-blinked his love as I sauntered down the hall, stepped in and trailed another sticky pile of his leavings from the bathroom threshold to the lavatory. I had overslept, among other disasters, and so, was about an hour and a half late for work, a habitual tardiness that had dogged me for most of my tenure at the third-tier investment firm of Whytebread, Greese, Winslow and Sloat where I was employed (at least for the moment) as a stock analyst.
It had been a romantic kind of notion just out of business school to sell advice for a living – expert advice I would hasten to add when explaining my career to single women at cocktail parties – an almost glamorous way to pay the rent. Now, on a bad day Whytebread was my albatross, the last shiny, six-inch finishing nail in my red, velvet-lined, bourgeois coffin; and short week or no, that Tuesday had all the makings of a very bad day.
I’d arrived at work, three burnt pieces of raisin toast and a sardine-style bus ride later, crawling from the elevator into Whytebread’s gracious wood-paneled lobby. The heavy oak and gold-tone clock behind the receptionist’s console warned that the time was well after ten, and the veins in the marble floor seemed to dance sadistically in the east light that roared through the big, lobby windows. My hangover headache still an integral part of my physical experience, I felt ungently spit out by the Chicago public transportation system like a gristly piece of meat. Still, I’d had the wit to duck my head as I skirted past the child receptionist, Pamela, who had, today, gotten herself dressed so as to suggest aspirations towards kiddy porn. Pamela, with her sharp, little black-lined eyes and convenient position by the door, was the worst kind of company informer on tardiness or early departure.
Being a repeat offender on both fronts, I had learned to fear her notice. More so these days, because with the Whytebread-Gold Rush merger, layoffs were looming. It was only prudent to cut a conscientious figure while management was still shuffling around the names on the body bags. Failing prudence, that morning I had chosen stealth, as Pamela was fairly autistic in her examination of her pink telephone message forms. Nearly home free, around her desk and through the side entrance door, I was stopped in my slippery tracks by the sight of some unfamiliar suits – plain-clothes police officers. I could tell because one of them, Cassandra Hope, was a long lost trick from my uniform and authority fetish period. She and the other one, a forty-something looking white man whom I had never seen before, were taking turns talking at Herb Symon.
Herb was Whytebread’s administrative VP, a title designed to dress up the fact that despite his impressive tenure at the firm, he had been passed over for genuine laurels of leadership so many times that management didn’t know quite how to blunt the slight of it anymore – and still, he wouldn’t leave. There was nothing to do but dress him up.
Herb was a “lifer”, the kind of company man who is destined to find himself working for people he’s hired as trainees once upon a time. Stoop-shouldered and spreading at the gut, with each sally from the cops, Herb’s body language seemed to droop incrementally. But it was the sight of Cassandra that held me with my hand on the door handle, gawking for who could say how long – too long as the time allowed by the cipher lock combination expired and the rattle of my pull on the secure door roused Pamela from the intricacies of her message pad.
She eyed me, frowning, and paused momentarily in her telephone mantra of “Whytebread, Greese, Winslow and Sloat” to push aside the Madonna-esque headset microphone at her chin conveying, with only the ominous expression in her narrowly-set pig eyes that I was now swimming neck-deep in shit.
“He’s been looking for you, Virginia.” Pamela indulged just enough of a smile to let me know she was enjoying this gambit.
He was my boss, Tom Zemluski, aka The Irishman, who couldn’t have cared less really when I arrived. Rather, The Irishman, so nicknamed for his love of a lunchtime Martini, was completely the kind of guy who liked to keep note of the odd infraction, a club to wield at bonus time when you were arguing how you were paid too little and he was arguing how you were lucky to be paid at all.
On my very first day of employment, The Irishman – Zemluski as I respectfully called him then – invited me to a welcome lunch at The Berghoff Restaurant near Whytebread’s offices. He had laid out the old-world practice of the Berghoff waiters who literally bought their orders from the kitchen, reselling the meals at menu prices to the dining room patrons. The double-book rigors of this financial arrangement, with exacting Germanness, kept even a single veal chop or strudel from going unaccounted for.
The Irishman, who had started in the mailroom about a million years ago, saw himself as Whytebread’s bulwark against the tendency of cocky, young, MBAs to cost the firm money and prestige. “I’m here,” he assured me, “to make sure you don’t screw up.” You, being punctuated with a signature poke of his index finger at the air just in front of my chest. In the time I had worked at Whytebread, The Irishman had shown himself to revel in the errors of his juniors as if chewing our asses was his singular life purpose.
He took these pleasures catch as catch can, so I could only imagine what was in store if The Irishman had expended the energy to be looking for me in particular on the emotional equivalent of a Monday morning – just like those scenes in the horror films where you cover your eyes to no avail because it is clear to anyone over the age of five what bloody pictures accompany the flesh-slashing sounds of the knife-fingered killer.
“I’ll tell him you’re just now in. Ten thirty six, my …” Pamela tossed her head as she turned to consult the clock. “Late night?” Before I could answer she was throatily back at her headset: “Mr. Rostow, I’ll have to give you voice mail.”
During my apprehending by Pamela, Cassandra Hope and her colleague continued in hush-voiced assignation with Herb on the opposite side of the lobby. The interaction was serious enough to make three deep, unattractive lines in Cassie’s forehead.
Aside from this minor blemish, however, Cassandra Hope looked miraculously pulled together, especially if my own appearance was any sort of barometer for what “fashion don’ts” were possible after a long weekend in the middle of transitioned wardrobe weather.
Since she’d left me, someone had taught Cassandra how to dress – someone with very good taste indeed. Under her crisp, pale trench coat, I could see she was as nicely turned out as anyone who might normally frequent Whytebread’s lobby; and she had straightened and coifed her hair into an attitude achievable only by a Black salon and six hours on a Saturday afternoon – the confluence of lye, water, and some really excellent auburn highlighting, a Dutch boy bob. Even her jewelry looked real – at least from a distance.
Herb Symon, by contrast, was less attractively composed. He was practically painted over with that sweaty-pitted look, a Yeoman who doesn’t want any trouble on his watch. Herb had a good bit to feel sweaty about. His dubious distinction as the head man’s Girl Friday was at risk now owing to Wesley Winslow’s recent rise to president of the firm. Wes had his own favorite lap dogs and whipping boys. Included nowhere on Winslow’s radar screen was the pot-bellied, balding Symon, Mr. Quick-As-Anything to explain to a new acquaintance that his name was spelled with a y (rather than “the Jewish way”). Rupert Dean, Justin Collier, and other younger Turks, not Herb, could be expected to rise with Winslow’s ascent – or as Ellen Borgia called it, his coronation.
Two years ago, Wes had stepped over Herb and a pack of other hopefuls to the top of the firm where his uncle August Madsen had been Chairman for as many years as I had been alive. Wes brought his own special cronies, a certain peculiar obsession with physical fitness and a free-floating contempt for women as reported by Ellen Borgia who kept an ear to the ground for such things.
Her diary chronicled the abuse she’d endured: inadequate bonuses, missed promotions, untoward remarks by her male co-workers, but had, to date, surprisingly failed to mention that men at the firm called her “The Popsicle,” reportedly “cold as ice with a stick up her ass,” possibly the only actionable one of her allegations. When I had started at Whytebread she suggested by way of sisterly advice that I maintain the same procedure, reporting complaints in a weekly letter to management, which August Madsen had addressed by taking Ellen out to a nice lunch every couple of months and letting her vent, making occasional special bonus payments to recognize her work. He had, in short, patronized her like a small-town doctor proscribing Valium to a slightly hysterical spinster who in his opinion needed nothing more pharmacological than a good lay. My door is always open, dear. To me the prescription seemed worse than the disease.
Madsen’s dubious attentions, however, had served to keep Ellen on a fairly even keel – knowing and apparently believing that Maddy was always prepared as he said, “to discuss the reasonable concerns of the firm’s ladies.” Uncle Madsen, at least, had taken the time and energy to patronize her. But his nephew, Winslow, had ignored her notes. And anyone who ignored her, Ellen advised, could be no good news to the odd Negro associate, destined in her mind’s obvious order of things to be in all worlds less than herself.
Even fresh out of business school, I hadn’t been green enough to harbor hopes of race and gender inclusiveness in financial services. This, presumably, was why banking paid so much better than social work.
Pamela was singing with cheerful enthusiasm into her headset, performing, “Whytebread, Greese, Winslow and Sloat,” like the jingle for a new improved brand of laundry detergent. Herb twisted at the ends of his hair. Thin and white, it hung in a longish fringe below his ears, as if he were trying to make up at the bottom for what was missing on top. The longer the cops kept talking, the more Herb looked like worry would take what little fuzz remained on his pink melon head.
