The Ultimate Exit Strategy, page 3
I’d have given even odds as to which of the two of us was more discomfited by Cassie Hope’s visit. For me it had the makings of a cringingly uncomfortable meeting, as once from deep in the marching throng of the Gay Pride Parade, I had heard someone call out my name, “Virginia.” Amid the homemade bar floats covered with dancing men in falsies and bad party dresses, the voice was unmistakably familiar: “Virginia Kelly?” an old college girlfriend came at me from across the barricade at Fullerton Street. Far less attractive than I would have liked to remember her, buck-toothed, buck naked, she was painted green. The rest of the raucous crowd rolled past as she stepped, like from a horror movie, out of her contingent – Fairies? Friends of fairies? Elves? Who could tell?
All I knew was that she had hailed me loudly in a way that was impossible to slip away from, “It’s been ages,” and I could only agree politely that of course we should get together soon, writing her phone number on a day-glow pink paper flyer advertising a dance – something that I wouldn’t mind losing just as soon as she in all her freaky, naked greenness had retreated back into the frightening Mardi Gras-like mass.
That morning, I was reading Cassandra’s expression for any sign of social terror, as if I might be a bit of naked, green history she wanted to forget. Dressed in a pilling navy suit and a dingy silk blouse overdue for the cleaners, I’d hardly put my best foot forward that day. There was a wide, long ladder of a run, climbing up my calf from my commuter’s tennis shoes to my kneecap, in the panty hose that seemed fine when I’d left the house, but now were inescapably black. And I was having a bad hair day. Even so, after a moment of apparent disorientation, Cassandra had not dodged my gaze. She’d recognized me even in my dark glasses and, in the course of her nodding sagely with Herb Symon at the floor, distinctly smiled, sliding her eyes briefly up to mine, and mouthing, “Later,” as I’d passed through the side door into Whytebread’s offices.
The rusty cogs in my brain were grinding slowly, so I had pressed my combination into the cipher lock and proceeded halfway down the blue-gray pastel maze of fabric-covered associates’ cubicles towards my office before I had begun to wonder what Cassandra’s “Protect and Serve” ensemble might want with Herb. It seemed best to puzzle this out in the lunchroom where I felt I could hide until I had marshaled sufficient emotional resources for a meeting with The Irishman.
III
Justin Collier barely grunted back when I good morninged him on my way to a suitably quiet corner of the lunchroom. He was squatting caveman-style, surveying the open refrigerator. I watched as his hand moved thoughtfully through his blond hair, from the fridge, to the hair, to the fridge. Justin absently groomed himself like a handsome, yellow cat as he peered at the metal shelves.
One of Winslow’s chosen, I owed my favored relationship with Justin to gayness – his, which was secret and apolitical, his sexuality a discrete tattoo that he could display, or not, depending on the audience, and mine, which though hardly obvious could not have been impossible to guess.
Justin had come out to me unexpectedly after a company-wide golf outing the year before, the intimacy of his disclosure feeling like a weird reward for playing so passably in our foursome, a fact that surprised nearly everyone including me. My 18 holes of serially serendipitous shots were almost as shocking as his admission – the fact of it, not so much the content as I supposed I’d already known in some unconscious way about Justin. It was a sense I couldn’t pinpoint and sought to rationalize in little ways. Hadn’t I sometimes heard a sing-song cadence in his straight man’s voice, a fey undercurrent that gave him away to me, the way you might get the idea that a voice on the phone is Black, apropos of nothing that has been said, a persistent conviction of inconclusive origin?
He’d confirmed it and in coming clean, Justin cautioned, “I’d prefer it that this not become a subject for shared discussion,” somehow negating the reality of what he was telling me, even as he said it. It was a smiling threat, I imagined, lest I begin to think his admission leveled our positions at the firm.
“So you’re passing then?” I made a nervous joke.
“Aren’t you? Isn’t everybody in some way or another? This can be our special club.” Somehow I’d known that Justin liked clubs – the more limited the membership the better. He’d laughed.
I’d laughed then too, eager in whatever affiliation he might propose, hungry in my own way for his proximity to Winslow’s ear.
Justin had woven a tireless, ass-licking willingness to stroke authority into success. If his rapid (and maybe undeserved) rise through the sales ranks to his present post of Marketing Director rankled some of our less generous colleagues, to me he was holding open the door of an exclusive club – and all I wanted was to go inside.
“Any excitement this morning?” I was asking to tell, aching to show the inside track promised by Cassandra’s whispered later. Disappointingly, Justin could not be interested. He remained fully engaged in removing every item from the open refrigerator and laying them out on the floor behind him. “Fuck,” said Justin, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He’d lost his bagels, the information conveyed on a steady draft of frigid air.
“Is it cold in here?” Ellen Borgia glared her way past Justin to the little faux butcher-block table where I sat imagining what could have brought Cassandra Hope to Whytebread’s lobby, and visoring my hand above my forehead to reduce the million or so foot candles of overhead fluorescent lunchroom illumination to an environment nearly approximating normal daylight. I considered with relish it would be a sexy crime that engaged her, something sordid – drug possession, spousal abuse, or best yet, incest.
“Are you cold?” Ellen was hugging a Wall Street Journal in her armpit. She might have arranged to be warmer, but she was barefoot – rather, stocking foot – what she called her “toes-free” look. This was the latest in a series of strange pronouncements, a battery of herb potions and the elimination of all wheat and potatoes from her diet-postured craziness, another bizarre attempt to provoke management to rashness. I didn’t say anything. No display by Ellen Borgia could surprise me.
Management, too, had held to stony silence on shoeless Ellen’s wardrobe peculiarities – never mind the battered pair of Tretorn tennis shoes she kept in her desk for the walk to the El. Ellen’s sex discrimination suit filed over a year ago with no resolution in sight – litigious or settled – would need to be resolved as a condition of the Gold Rush deal. It had them all biting their tongues on advice of counsel, although I’d seen Herb dropping thumbtacks in the hall.
“Are you cold?” Her voice was steeped in irritation. Justin was ignoring the comment she obliquely directed at him. Ellen rubbed the arms of her shirt-dress in emphasis. A thin, yellow silk affair, it was printed with black spiral doodads that were doing their own special part in making my eyes hurt. The sheer, navy hose gave an enviable blue sheen to her chalky legs.
My own stockings were still regrettably black, at odds with the blue of my suit and the brown of my shoes – and a little bit thick as well. I was promising myself that as soon as I could bear the full light of day I would venture out to Marshall Field’s. Somewhere beyond the low grade pounding in my head, the refrigerator motor began to work, softly humming.
“What’s with that?” Ellen jerked her head at Justin and I repeated that he’d lost his bagels, though lost was not likely the word.
Whytebread had an ongoing problem with theft, mostly big-ticket items – newly ordered laptop computers, telephones – but it wasn’t all together unusual for food to go missing from the communal refrigerator – bagels, Lean Cuisine frozen dinners, Le Croix sparkling water brought from home. For months, someone had been raiding the stash of Hostess Snowball cakes that Herb Symon had cached in the crisper.
“Well, does it have to be so cold?” Ellen was marching towards the refrigerator as if her purpose was to make it warmer. When she was nearly standing over him, Justin rose, turning as she reached past his nose to slam the refrigerator door and open the freezer in one rapid, hostile motion. “Maybe these are yours.” Ellen dropped the bag of frozen bagels she’d produced on the floor near Justin’s wingtip shoe. Her lips were pursed in a tight red line across her face that might or might not have been a smile, but under no circumstances a well-meaning one.
“Oh?” Justin round-eyed the frost-covered bag in stupid surprise as Ellen poked at the plastic with her toe, the nails of which showed magenta through her sandal-foot hose. “Shit.”
“Nice mouth, Collier,” Ellen chirped.
“Nice mouth?” His voice had recovered to sophomore irony and his face formed an identical expression of dislike. Stooping to pick up the bag, Justin narrowly avoided being kicked. “Funny, I think I’ve heard the same about you, Ms. Borgia. It is cold in here?” He had belled his cheeks maliciously, blowing hard into big, cupped hands, and rubbing them together. “You’re right, I feel just like a Popsicle.”
“This big,” Ellen curled a pejorative pinky finger at the wall of his chest, stepping back unsteadily from his advancing bulk – a big, wide, salmon-patina, brick wall in an attractively contrasting power tie.
“Brrrrr.” Justin blew into his hands again, the sound of which seemed to push Ellen back the remaining distance, across the room where she made herself conspicuously busy at the coffee machine and in the cupboard above the sink.
“Asshole,” Ellen hissed to me as Justin left the room, a loser’s request for commiseration I wasn’t inclined to give. I thought to myself, mean and practical, what did Justin always say? Why side with the losers? Besides, Ellen had started it, unnecessarily. Why side with the stupid against the powerful?
Ellen had special venom for Winslow and it seemed, by extension his cronies, old grudges brought from past professional lives, for which I could never seem to get satisfactory explanation. I’d asked Justin once what it was with Ellen and Wes. He’d laughed and leered. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
“Do you want some tea?” Ellen asked, her voice a little too bright in the attempt to resuscitate conversation. “It’s herbal.” She had made a production of bringing the box to me at my table, straining cheerfulness.
But I pretended I didn’t notice, gamely reading the festively decorated cardboard box aloud. It said: Diet Daily, with advertising copy proclaiming ALL NATURAL, ORGANIC. Ingredients: Garcinia combogia extract, choline and inositol, L-carnitine and chromium picolinate. Except for rosehips, cayenne pepper and “natural flavors,” Diet Daily sounded like a chemistry experiment.
“It’ll drop your weight just like that.” Ellen made prophetic snap of her fingers. She was twiggy enough herself to do testimonials for eating disorders. But I was just declining the miracle beverage when Herb Symon’s shiny head appeared in the doorway – just his head at first, which he turned, very quickly, to the right and left as if he were intending to cross a busy street.
He walked in, rubbing the pink skin on the back of his neck, and just stood for a few moments when he’d reached the center of the room before he even registered that he was not alone there scratching himself.
Noticing Ellen and me, Herb frowned, announcing “All hands meeting,” as if to say that was precisely what he had come here to tell us, “half an hour in the big conference room.” Herb made to go, but then he didn’t, frowning harder, as he peered past Ellen and me at the refrigerator door. “What’s that?” He was walking and looking squinty-eyed at what I then saw was a newspaper clipping. It was attached to the refrigerator in among the homemade fliers offering used boats, cars and vacation homes for sale, held to the smooth white metal by souvenir magnets that colleagues brought back in business triumph from such exotic parts as Cleveland, Ohio and Appleton, Wisconsin to signify we now had clients in these thriving metropolises.
There was a picture above the bold, block type of the Tribune obituary, a picture of Winslow, a tan and natty sailor, dressed for what might have been the Mackinac race, his thin, fair hair fluffed up by some unseen wind. The text below began simply:
Chicago financier, Wesley Winslow, (45) dies unexpectedly of flu …
At the bottom of the article there was a neatly typed yellow Post-it Note, which read: “I will repay.”
IV
Ellen Borgia was gasping beside me – a shock I shared inaudibly, unsure of whether the writer was promising Winslow vengeance or taking it, and stupidly trying to remember how to breathe. I was not especially incapacitated by sadness, rather I felt a strange whump of realization that left me teary and winded as if I’d been punched in the stomach, the shock resolving after a few moments into a disbelieving swell of nostalgia. Wes was a fixture on my professional landscape, which like my lovers and my hometown I expected to deliver no surprises. Wes was a tree that had stood for a long time and was suddenly gone, leaving a conspicuous emptiness where the eye anticipates it, reminding your mind of the memory.
I could still recall Winslow at the podium in the shareholder’s meeting, a fuzzy dreamlike image, but maybe not so much due to the shock of his death, but rather to my own condition. A lot had gone on that afternoon and I was not at my most observant.
In the close thick air of the meeting room I had felt as if Mr. Sandman were mugging me with a baseball bat, this courtesy of a long, well-lubricated lunch. My head lolled first onto one shoulder and then the other; and my chin flopped down against the boat neck of my red silk de chine blouse, encouraging drool.
There in the plush First Chicago conference room Whytebread had rented for the occasion, Wesley Winslow was going to talk about my future – about everyone’s future really. Laying out, in glorious detail, Gold Rush Investments’ offer to buy Whytebread, all blue sky and easy long green. Rupert Dean had taken a front row seat, predictably close to the action. He had sandwiched himself between Herb Symon and Jon Patel, a guy who sat cross-legged on the toilet in the men’s room so he could listen to conversations that were none of his business. Among the fifty-odd heads, Rupert was twisting his around as if he couldn’t bear to miss even one meaningful eye contact.
Ellen Borgia pretended to shoot at him from across the room, her hand bent into the figure of a gun. Allison Price was tittering girlishly. As Ellen took aim again at the back vent of Wesley Winslow’s charcoal-gray suit jacket, she caught my eye and winked. Allison tittered some more.
The firm’s first female analyst, Price was minted before investment research was fashionable. Now she was a kind of a historical exhibit, a reference point for a certain time and sensibility. In her broadcloth shirts and silk ties, she seemed to acknowledge, if not happily, then willingly, that her engagement with change had ended in 1985. Her life was static and her life was Whytebread. Twenty-odd years at the firm had gotten Allison close to fifty years old with nothing to show for her efforts, but a bowl-shaped, graying hairdo, a wardrobe of mannishly-cut, tropical-weight woolen suits and a starter house in Winnetka, which she shared with six elderly Siamese cats. I was hoping that life would deal me a better hand. At least I only had the one cat.
“Tell yourself a joke, girlfriend?” Justin Collier slid into the empty seat next to mine, leaning close to dish Wesley Winslow’s outfit. He let his arm relax across the back of my chair. “Can you believe it? All the money on the planet and the man still looks like he came off the rack at Sears.” Justin’s breath was warm in my ear. “My God, do you think his wife knows he goes out looking like that?”
I said I didn’t think Trisha Winslow was the type to lay out his clothes. More likely Winslow dressed her. His blonde wife looked as if he had all but thought her up in the image of a society matron. But even perfectly draped in her snake-hipped, designer knits, somehow Trisha Winslow made an uncomfortable caricature of leisure class grace, a pale anxious figure carried along awkwardly in Wes’s splashy professional wake. On her own she was definitely lacking something, not class, but contentment, a noblesse oblige that wasn’t for sale at St. John. No. Winslow’d had better luck grooming Starr D’nofrio with whom he had replaced his old secretary, Camille Guiterrez, about four months ago. Gone was the baby blue eye shadow, gone the hair of three separate colors – platinum, yellow and ragged, dark brown roots growing in. Starr was dignified – reborn as an ash blonde, the continuous open-mouthed crack of her Juicy Fruit gum forever silenced. Starr had even put down her cigarettes, I thought, imagining herself very nearly suitable in the lore of the 1950s movie to be the executive secretary who marries her older, richer, daddy of a boss. Because whether or not Trisha was the type to lay out Winslow’s clothes, we all knew that Wes was hardly the type to spend much time at home waiting for her attention. He’d proven that at the last Christmas party.
Wes was smoothing his hair and neatening the lapels of his full cut suit on his way up the aisle that divided the chairs in the meeting room, apparently unaware of the dilapidated state of his wardrobe. The wide yellow stripes of his tie were broken up by thinner ones of blue and red, a pattern likely named by its catalogue merchant for some long forgotten British army regiment.
“I’ll bet that’s not the only thing Miss Trish has stopped laying.” Justin snorted a laugh. “I mean, it’s tragic, really, just look at that tie.”
Wesley Winslow made long strides towards the podium, an entrance rendered only a little less impressive by the slight stoop to his shoulders. What I thought Justin didn’t quite understand was that Winslow didn’t have anything to prove to the likes of us – his financial presence was large and pedigreed enough that it didn’t much matter what he wore. He was Whytebread’s walking billboard sign, a founder’s great-grandson, peddling trust and dependability to clients in the Heartland where pink shirts were still a little suspect, balm to the double-chinned bank and trust officers in Rockford, Illinois that, even if he was a little peculiar in his diet and tighter-stomached than most, amid the crush of racy, Italiante investment bankers, Wes Winslow was still one of them. Whytebread was still their kind of firm.
