“I don’t know much about it.”
“Be honest. What did you think when I brought it up?”
“I wondered if you were — ”
“A fruitcake, right? Be honest.”
“Yes,” Adams says. “I did.”
“That’s okay. est has that reputation, but it’s an easy target, you see. Anything really personal is easy to laugh at, don’t you think?”
“Sure, because nobody knows what it is.”
“Exactly.” She looks away, suddenly shy. “I’m sorry, Sam, I probably am coming on like a fruitcake. It’s been a long week, you know? I haven’t had a chance to unwind.”
“It’s okay. I’m enjoying it.”
“Me, too.” She smiles. “I just don’t want you to think I’m one of those dizzy secretaries or anything. Actually, I think est is pretty stupid. It gave me something to do when I first got back to the States. What really interests me is the stock market. I watched it for a year, then started investing. Made thirty-two hundred bucks the first five months.”
“You’re kidding.”
“You got to watch these high-tech industries. They’re springing up everywhere and if you hit the right one you’re off and sailing, but lots of them go bust right away. I wish I’d been old enough to get in on air conditioning in the early days. That’s the place to be. What about you?” she says. “What are your values in life?”
The question is troublesome, but not without charm. “I like my work,” he says.
“Yeah, but Carter’s a smoothie, isn’t he? I could see him in the Nixon administration or something. He’ll make a lot of money for the company, but I wouldn’t vouch for his ways and means.”
“I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels that way.”
At home, Adams offers her Drambuie. For the first time he looks carefully at her body. He’d found her attractive at work, but any slender woman with blond hair who is the boss’s secretary achieves a kind of status. He senses that, in sexual matters, she is not a patient woman.
Her left shoe has come off. Discreetly, Adams nudges the shoe away from her foot. “Would you like to go to bed?”
“Yes, I think so.” She places her glass on the coffee table. “We should make a process note first.”
“A what?”
“It’s kind of silly, but sometimes you learn something. We should admit to each other, honestly, how this evening affected us.”
“All right.”
“How do you feel,” she asks.
“Fine.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“I’d like to make love to you.”
She wants to know why. Adams doesn’t say anything. She accepts that.
Chopping vegetables for the children’s dinner, Adams listens tight-lipped to Toby complain about congestion in his chest.
“Mom gets me these pills.”
“What kind of pills?”
“Oxydol, I think.”
“That’s a detergent, Toby. What about an antihistamine?”
“They don’t work.”
His seditious illness. When he was smaller, rather than do what Adams said, he gasped like a sun-bleached fish. I was born wrong, his face seemed to say. “I’ll dream for you a day of air,” Adams promised. “Leaping, running, baseballs falling slowly in the blue, blue sky.” But at night his lungs glowed blue with exertion through the sheets. This was Toby’s way of fighting him. Adams thought of Alan, pink fists flailing in the air, waving good-bye.
Deidre’s body is as strong as a missile. Setting the table, she stretches as if health were as easy to hold as a fork. But Adams anticipates failure. He pictures Deidre a few years older, chipping away at her body piece by piece with PCP and pot, group sex and artificial coloring agents. Driving her home from dance class one evening in late winter, he passed a young boy walking barefoot in the snow, shirt unbuttoned, mouth open to the cold and sleet. Deidre pointed, frightened. “What’s wrong with him, Dad?” Adams pulled up beside him, rolling down his window. “Are you all right?” he said. “Can we help you?” The boy didn’t even know they were there. He plowed through drifts of snow, flapping his arms in the headlights.
“Is he crazy?” Deidre said.
“I think he’s taken some kind of drug.”
They followed him slowly for half a block, then three squad cars surrounded him in the middle of the street, spotlighting him with their flashing lights. He put his arms over his eyes and began to scream; four policemen were needed to subdue him. Deidre started to cry. For a long time after that she refused to take even aspirin, and is still wary of medicines, but Adams, exercising his fatherly right, imagines the worst for her teenage years.
Isohyet, from the Greek: isos, equal; hyetos, rain. A line drawn on a map to indicate equal rainfall along its length.
Twice a year the employees of On-Line Information Systems are required to see the company psychologist, a muttering, bent man named Mayer. He does not submit anyone to rigorous testing, merely asks questions related to work. A week later he types a psychological profile of each employee, listing his/her managerial strengths, social limitations, etc. In rare cases he recommends that someone attend a personal growth seminar, tax-deductible.
Adams is scheduled for Monday morning at eleven. At 10:55 he sits waiting in the foyer. Jordan bolts from Dr. Mayer’s office.
“What’s the matter with him,” Adams asks.
“Nothing, nothing,” the doctor says.
“Bad day?”
“He’s under a bit of a strain right now. As who isn’t?” Mayer says.
“I’ve been worried about him for a long time.” “Oh?”
“Yeah. He seems a little weird to me.”
“You all know I’m here. If he’s having problems, he knows where to come.”
Adams nods. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but I think he’s been standing in my yard.”
“Really?”
“Well, not lately. But I’m sure it was him. And there’s nothing to see, I mean, I don’t know what he was looking for. It gave me the creeps. I called the police but they wouldn’t do anything.”
“Have you spoken to him about it?”
“He denies it.” Jordan, in fact, had merely laughed in his typical offhand manner.
“Let me know if you see him again.”
The doctor asks Adams a series of questions, such as, “When you are under deadline pressure and fear you won’t make it, do you (a) give up, (b) request an extension, (c) work harder to finish, (d) other.”
The following Monday, Adams receives his profile in the interoffice maiclass="underline" “A conscientious worker and careful listener. A tendency toward abstraction, even in the most casual conversations. Best production when allowed to proceed at his own pace, though he responds well to pressure. Uncomfortable in groups, prefers to work alone.”
He’s had friends. Fathers like himself who’ve sacrificed exciting careers as anglers, goalies, and entrepreneurs to raise their children. Watching baseball on Saturday afternoon with one such friend, he encountered, face-to-face, the sadness that grips certain fathers. “Right there. That was me. I was up for that part,” his friend said. On the screen a man putted around a toilet bowl in a boat. “Katie was pregnant. Insisted there wasn’t enough security in acting, so I went to work for State Farm.” His friend gazed wistfully at the little boat. “Ah well, what the hell,” he said. “I insure suckers ten times that size.”