The Ultimate Exit Strategy, page 5
He was incongruously divided, the calm slow voice and the wildly sweating face, belonging to two separate people. The sweaty one had taken to wiping himself down every few minutes, swabbing a rapidly waterlogged handkerchief across his forehead. The calm voice kept chanting Winslow’s all-purpose capitalist mantra, “Diversity. Liquidity.”
Leaned back in the soft lumbar-supportive conference hall chair, I was meditating on the message, investing that buy-out money in the bull market of my fertile imagination. I’d been watching it grow into my future life of early retirement, until somehow the sweat running down Winslow’s cheeks didn’t seem to matter. I had hypnotized myself with the smell of the future and the sound of his well-modulated voice.
I almost didn’t notice when it stopped, Winslow’s drone replaced by the disorderly sounds of people scrambling. When I finally registered that something was very wrong, a thin, green film the color of Justin’s suit was spilling over the side of the podium and the guys in the front row were swearing as they pulled chunks of half-digested spinach greens out of their hairpieces. Rupert Dean, having rushed the stage at Winslow’s early signs of distress, was helping Cal Fraiser to maneuver Wes to the door. Most everybody else seemed to be in complete, collective shock, although Starr D’nofrio had taken this opportunity to finish pushing back her cuticles.
Herb Symon had made an immediate motion for adjournment and no one saw the need to vote.
V
“Forget for a gol-darn minute there are police in the lobby.” Now in the lunchroom at the corner of my eye, I could see Herb’s lower lip quivering like an angry child’s. He snatched at Winslow’s obituary from the refrigerator door and crumpled it in his hands. “Can’t you just give the man a little respect?”
A piece of broken magnet went skittering along the hard linoleum floor and I couldn’t stop turning the Post-it Note over in my head, I will repay, both Ellen and me still gaping at the place on the door where the paper had been.
Around the firm, feelings about Winslow were, had been, (I had corrected the tense in my mind), resoundingly mixed. Barring affection, Winslow had commanded at least respect, a grudging admiration for his business machismo and a whole-hearted enthusiasm for the physical vigor he paraded on the “sports wall” in his office.
The wall was a collection of signed photos, various Bulls, Bears and Blackhawks, interspersed with pictures of himself in rugged action poses: Wesley Winslow sailing the Mackinac, running the Chicago Marathon, fly fishing in hip-high waders and a faded khaki sun hat. These provided ready-made topics for ass kissing, Whytebread’s coin of the realm. I couldn’t have said who might have had the chutzpah to post and dis Winslow’s death notice. But at least, I was consoling myself, I knew now why The Irishman had been looking for me.
* * *
“I will repay?” It was a kind of small talk really. At the news of Winslow’s death, I was babbling to fill the space in the room with some sound besides the hoarse little puffing noises coming from Herb. “That’s heavy huh?” I said to Ellen, nervously giggling.
“No. That’s Roman’s.” Alcee Couteau, an ancient Black man with skin that shined like worn brown leather had an age-hoarse voice that went with the picture. He scowled, fixing me with sepia, red-rimmed eyes like a Weimaraner dog’s, but there was nothing sleepy about the man. Couteau was sharp like his suit and his matching vest. He was carefully presented like the blocked fedora hat that perched on his withered, gray head, a dapper bent that for fifty years had made it seem right to call him Mister Couteau, even though he only ran the mailroom.
“Romans.” Preaching from the doorway in a bawling tenor, Mister Couteau interjected himself into the room cane first.
“Oh, Jesus,” said Herb.
“Romans 12:19. I will repay. Vengeance is mine saith the Lord.” Couteau inclined his head sourly in my direction as if this knowledge gap were confirmation of my lack of character.
It was not the first time I had disappointed him. Early on in my tenure at Whytebread, Couteau noticed me in the hall, introduced himself and seized upon my professional standing – not a secretary or one of the seemingly legion Filipino research associates. He’d decided I was a fine example of the advancement of our Colored young people, claiming me with a parental familiarity, the way any adult on the block could take me to task when I was a kid, and, in the ways that I didn’t fully meet the ideal of The Race, gently improve me with a variety of heckling suggestions posed as friendly observations. Shouldn’t you be getting to school? Such a pretty girl if she’d just stand a little straighter. Alcee fretted on my unmarried status so relentlessly that I had come to worry he had his son, Ned, in mind for my suitor, a slack, surly Brother, five years my junior, who, after dropping out of University of Illinois-Chicago, had come to work for Couteau in the mailroom, a temporary arrangement that had continued now for over ten years.
Couteau would bawl at me down the hall, “How come you’re not married yet? You come on to Sunday meeting with me, girl; and I’ll find you a good, Christian man.”
I was too young, too smart, too fast to be caught, ready, clever-tongued excuses that were nonetheless warily respectful of my elder. He had read in my carriage somehow, good home training, assuming deference to age without question. He had, of course been right, that my upbringing would make me fear the shadow of my parents in Alcee’s disapproval, needing Couteau as their proxy somehow to be unreservedly proud of me.
This precluded my telling him where to get off. Who, I reasoned, was he hurting? Who would it help to disillusion an old man with his social mores still resolutely in 1953? So I had danced around his prying apparently too many times, because after a while even Mister Couteau had cottoned onto my intractable attachment to what he must have imagined was sin, pure Godless wickedness of all varieties – not that it wasn’t a relief. But I couldn’t help feeling unaccountably embarrassed that his banter had cooled so to polite acknowledgment, his questions replaced by a look like he was closing the door on me.
Mister Couteau had had better luck as the mentor of Camille Gutierrez whom he’d helped to become a committed follower of Jesus. They studied the bible together over lunch nearly every day. When Camille’s daughter Elana got a part-time job in the Whytebread library she joined them as well. A pretty enough girl to restore nearly anyone’s faith in God, Elana shilled for Alcee’s sermons drawing a crowd among the young men from the mailroom – and enticing the occasional junior analyst with her eye candy for Jesus. I’d even seen Rupert Dean and his friends linger through a Couteau monologue if Elana was in the room.
Herb was still making soft puffing noises that sounded a little like a mild asthma attack and Couteau was still preaching not at me especially anymore, but just in general as if he felt it would be instructive to all concerned. “Vengeance is mine –”
“Aw Jesus,” Herb apparently had no wish to be instructed, particularly by Couteau whom I’d heard him say on a number of occasions didn’t seem to know his place.
Mister Couteau drew himself up, pooling seventy years of bristling dignity. “The Lord says, ‘do not seek revenge.’ ”
“Alcee,” Herb said, “can you just give it a rest today for Chrissakes.”
“And you –” Alcee lifted his cane very slightly, the cane as much of his managed persona as were the three-piece suits. Mister Couteau lifted his cane at Herb so there could be no mistaking his meaning. “And why don’t you call on somebody you know?”
It was a fine effect, a second grand arch of the rubber tipped wood, conveying Couteau from the room. I’d see the old man throw that cane, a prop, aside to catch a box that teetered and fell from the top of the mail stack, running at an impressive gallop.
I had the idea that Couteau was the author of the Post-it Note on Winslow’s obituary. He had come around unable in his terminal self-righteousness to resist the editorial opportunity. He had done it before. That was part of the rancor between them; before Herb stopped him, there were Post-it Notes turning up all over the firm, office surfaces were thick with Mister Couteau’s opinions.
I’d found a note that read. More precious to me is a sinner who accepts God, than a righteous man. It was stuck audaciously to the green glass shade of my polished brass banker’s lamp. Rupert Dean had received: Be sure your sin will find you out. The way of transgressors is hard, was left on the top of the Tupperware container Wesley Winslow used to bring his salad lunch.
Herb made a final indignant sniffle, still working the balled up newspaper in his busy hands and watching in disbelief as Ellen slipped through the empty space Mister Couteau had left in the doorway. I watched as well wondering how no one in fifty years had thought to fire him for that mouth.
No one had even tried. Mister Couteau had been August Madsen’s pet, unable to work his way up through night school like The Irishman, but I was thinking perhaps by walking the halls for fifty years pushing a mail cart, dressed like a partner, by simply the constancy of his presence he had made the way for me into a job where such attire was expected.
The refrigerator motor cut in softly as Herb crushed and crushed the paper into a progressively smaller ball. He tossed it at the trash and missed, standing there for a good while blinking dimly, before he finally walked over, stooped to pick it up again, and put the paper in the trash as he left the lunchroom.
VI
I’d accomplished so little between my arrival and Herb’s company meeting later in the morning, that it felt good to leave the few stock reports I had updated in Camille’s in-box for proofreading on my way to the 25th floor conference room. The “big conference room” as Herb had called it wasn’t really big enough. In the time I had worked there, Whytebread had grown fast from the intimate boys’ club its founders had intended into a sprawling conglomeration of folks that Justin Collier, in a way that always slightly rankled me, called “riffraff” – the brown, the female, those others not quite to the manner born.
Whytebread had grown so quickly that all of a sudden there didn’t seem to be quite enough room at the table for all the worker bees – not if Justin was a dinner guest, much as he tried to dress it up. In Justin you had one hungry hunter, all of the me-first ruthlessness of Roy Cohn and none of the acne scars, genuinely wondering why he ought to step to the back of the buffet line for seconds just because there were some people who hadn’t eaten yet.
By twenty minutes to twelve, Whytebread’s great unwashed were spilled out into the entry hall – leaning on the glass walls and sitting on the rosewood credenzas in a disorderly way that you could tell really worked Herb Symon’s nerves, despite what I could imagine were Herculean efforts at a sort of open-face friendliness to all on his part. Herb was the kind of guy with a living room full of furniture covered in plastic and he was fairly twitching with annoyance as he directed a steady stream of new arrivals to the huge, pink-cardboard, bakery box balanced across the arms of a high-backed chair, encouraging everyone with put-on graciousness to take a donut.
“That’s what they’re there for.” The sentiment at least was genuine; to look at Herb with his short thick waist, I was confident he was a great friend of the donut.
The donut had many other friends that day. I had squeezed myself into a corner beside Camille Gutierrez who was devouring a large, white cake donut, a light frosting of powdered sugar dusting her lower lip and chin. The departure from Winslow’s preferred bran muffins, bagels and fruit tray signaled a change on the horizon. Had Winslow not been dead, that would have killed him.
The man himself, a stern-faced reminder of his culinary predilections, looked out from a stray edition of the past quarter’s Whytebread Investor Newsletter that had been left on the credenza. The black and white photo of Wesley Winslow sat above the caption: Malaysia! Kuala Lumpur has 19 million consumers, the first and second tallest buildings in the world and nowhere to go but up, eerie in its naturalness. Herb Symon was there on the second page, always number two, with his little perspective column: What does it profit. Like this one I had been considering, Herb’s commentaries usually started with some lofty quote, a blatant rip-off of Forbes Magazine’s only slightly more pretentious Thoughts on the Business of Life.
“Excuse me,” Allison Price reached over me licking at the dollop of jelly on the side of her hand, and clip-clopping back lumpishly into the crowd with her cherry Danish.
“Too bad about Wes,” Cal Fraiser was saying to Marty Goodman, “but at least now we can have pastry again.”
I was relishing an apple fritter myself as Herb called for quiet, pushing down the air in front of him with both hands. “Let’s take our seats, people. Can I have your attention please?”
The chatter barely decreased to a low roar until Jon Patel stood up on his chair and gave a long shrill whistle through his teeth. Then Herb began: “For those of you who may not have already heard, Wesley Winslow passed away over the weekend from a severe case of flu. I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say he will be deeply missed.”
Camille Gutierrez snorted loudly enough that I wondered if anyone else had heard, but her disdain was lost in a variety of other disrespectful raspberries from nonspecific areas of the room directed at Herb – or at Wes, who could say?
“Wes,” Herb continued either oblivious or unperturbed, “had only begun to realize his potential as leader of this firm. He had just begun to make what all of us expected would be significant contributions to the financial health and prestige of Whytebread: the inroads he forged in client contacts, the Gold Rush investments offer, which Wes solicited,” and to this there were vague kind of prayer meeting rumblings from Jon Patel, Rupert, and others eager to position their lips on whatever rosy buttocks would succeed Winslow’s.
Herb paused extravagantly to let Wes’s accomplishments cast their long shadow, leaving all but the dimmest minds in attendance to wonder how long he had been rehearsing this particular speech. “Of course,” he said, “Wes Winslow’s untimely departure creates some challenges for those of us remaining, but I am sure he would have the utmost confidence in our ability to meet them. Until the board names Wes’s successor, his uncle and our Chairman, August Madsen, has asked me to take responsibility for the day-to-day operations.” Barely able to contain his pleasure, Herb was fairly chortling, “I will make every effort to run Whytebread in a manner which will do justice to Wes’s vision for this firm.”
The applause was sparse, but he continued: “I will be asking some of you to take on expanded responsibilities in the new organization as well,” and with that applause was very much greater. Satisfied, confident looks were beaming on the faces of Herb’s old cronies, The Irishman among them. Then Herb said, “In light of our loss, however, the Board has decided to table the vote on the Gold Rush offer until further notice.”
From somewhere behind me, The Irishman’s whoop was followed by a perfect silence as if all the rest of us had taken a moment to mourn the loss of our fortunes. By canceling the Gold Rush vote, August Madsen had dropped the financial equivalent of a neutron bomb on Whytebread and Greese – the building was standing but the money was gone, the money I and everybody else had already spent in a million ways, and a million times over in our imaginations.
The silence gave way to pandemonium, but Herb Symon had slipped off already, presumably back to Wes’s old office where he was no doubt adjusting the executive lumbar support to fit his spineless, pear-shaped ass.
“That’s all, folks.” Likely in anticipation of his expanded duties as senior lieutenant, Jon Patel was broadly encouraging people back to work, herding us out of the conference room towards the elevators like a sleepy dinner party host expelling his over-staying guests. “Thanks for coming.” Jon squeezed my arm with uncharacteristic camaraderie. “Be sure to take a sweet roll back to your desk.”
* * *
Swept out with the disoriented tumble of my colleagues, I found myself in the hall where The Irishman was holding forth to some juniors a long-winded joke about a Black, a Jew, and a Chinaman. Rather than wait for the punch line I took the stairs back to my office. In the walk, that morning’s hangover had returned for an unfortunate curtain call accompanied by a healthy dose of clinical depression. The combination left me so dispirited that I nearly sat down on the note that was taped to the seat of my chair: It said: Meet me at the Wendy’s on the corner of Clark and Madison across from the Bank.
* * *
The note which I presumed was from Cassandra had mentioned no specific time for our meeting but when I arrived, she was waiting with several coffee cups lined up in front of her like an hour and a half’s worth of dead soldiers.
“Please sit down.” Popping up from her chair, Cassandra took my hand in both of hers across the table, muse-asking “How long has it been?” as if I were a very dear friend unfortunately kept out of touch by unavoidable circumstances.
I shook my head. How long had it been? I couldn’t say exactly, although I had considered the question in my walk to Wendy’s. Had I been inclined to guess, I would have ventured at least ten years since we had spoken – longer than that since we’d spoken civilly, rather since I’d spoken civilly to her. Leaving me had not really emotionally affected Cassandra.
Not much did. Ten years ago, I had liked her police trainee swagger; it made me feel like I was slumming in a B movie. I’d liked best that she had been unflappable, matter-of-fact in everything she did, including me. I’d loved that for three whirlwind months, she’d stop by my apartment unpredictably, leave her gun on my dining room table, fuck my brains out, and manage an exit by five-o’clock the next morning. Sometimes she would kiss me before she left. Sometimes she would tell me what she was thinking. Other times she would share little details about her life, which I took to mean in her way that she loved me – loved me specially – which is how I came to mistake our servicing agreement for the intimate relationship I so desperately wanted. Understandably I had been bitter when she dropped me; it made me feel I had been pathetic. And she had ended things unceremoniously, cheating me of closure, a point over which my therapist said I had every right to be angry.
