Now he and Susie vacationed on St. Barths with Brad and Angelina, and Susie regularly fed Katie gossip about which movie stars were secretly gay and which ones were in rehab. They had a big house in Holmby Hills and were always out to dinner with all the celebrities. And he never let me forget it.
She got up and poured herself another cup of coffee. “Susie’s going to take Ethan around Boston-the Freedom Trail, all that.”
“She doesn’t get it, does she? Ethan’s not into Paul Revere. Maybe the Salem Witch Museum, but I don’t think they show the real sicko stuff there that he’s into.”
“All I ask is for you to be nice to them. You and Ethan have some sort of great chemistry, which I don’t quite understand. But I appreciate it.”
“How come they’re staying here anyway?” I said.
“Because she’s my sister.”
“You know they’re just going to complain the whole time about the bathroom and the shower curtain and how the water from the shower spills out on the floor, and how we have the wrong coffeemaker and how come we don’t have any Peet’s Sumatra coffee beans-”
“You can’t hold it against them, Jason. They’re just accustomed to a higher standard of living.”
“Then maybe they should stay at the Four Seasons.”
“They want to stay with us,” she said firmly.
“I guess Craig needs to stay in touch with the little people every once in a while.”
“Very funny.”
I went to the cereal cabinet and surveyed its depressing, low-cal, high-fiber contents. Fiber One and Kashi Go Lean and several other grim-looking boxes of twigs and burlap strips. “Hey, honey?” I said, my back turned. “You’ve been looking at real estate?”
“What are you talking about?”
“On the computer. I noticed you were looking at some real estate website.”
No answer. I selected the least-disgusting-looking box, a tough choice, and reluctantly brought it to the table. In the refrigerator all we had now was skim milk. Not even one percent. I hate skim milk. Milk shouldn’t be blue. I brought the carton to the table, too.
Kate was examining her coffee cup, stirring the coffee with a spoon, though she hadn’t added anything to it. “A girl can dream, can’t she?” she finally said in her sultry Veronica Lake voice.
I felt bad for her, but I didn’t pursue the subject. I mean, what’s to say? She must have expected more from me when she married me.
We met at a mutual friend’s wedding when both of us were pretty drunk. A guy I knew from DKE, my college frat, was marrying a girl who went to Exeter with Kate. Kate had been forced to leave Exeter in her junior year when her family went broke. She went to Harvard, but on financial aid. Her family tried to keep everything a secret, as WASPs do, but everyone figured out the truth eventually. There are buildings in Boston with her family name on it, and she had to suffer the humiliation of going to public school in Wellesley her last two years. (Whereas I, a boy from Worcester who was the first in his family to go to college, whose dad was a sheet-metal worker, had no idea what a private school even was until college.)
At the wedding, we were seated next to each other, and I immediately glommed on to this hot babe. She seemed a little pretentious: a comp lit major at Harvard, read all the French feminists-in French, of course. She also definitely seemed out of my league. Maybe if we hadn’t both been drunk she wouldn’t have paid me any attention, though later she told me she thought I was the best-looking guy there, and funny, and charming, too. And who could blame her? She seemed amused by all my stories about my job-I’d just started as a sales rep at Entronics, and I wasn’t yet burned-out. She liked the fact that I was so into my work. She said that I was such a breath of fresh air, that it really set me apart from all her clove-cigarette-smoking, cynical male friends. I probably went on too much about my master plan, how much money I’d be pulling down in five years, in ten years. But she was taken by it. She said she found me more “real” than the guys she normally hung with.
She didn’t seem to mind my dorky mistakes, the way I mistakenly drank from her water glass. She explained to me the dry-to-wet rule of table setting, with the water and wine to the right of your plate and the bread and dry things to the left. Neither did she mind that I was a lousy dancer-she found it cute, she said. On our third date, when I invited her over to my apartment, I put on Ravel’s “Bolero,” and she laughed, thought I was being ironic. What did I know? I thought “Bolero” was classic make-out music, along with Barry White.
So I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth. Obviously Kate didn’t marry me for my money-she knew plenty of rich guys in her social circles-but I think she expected me to take care of her. She was on the rebound from an affair she’d had with one of her college professors right after she graduated, a pompous but handsome and distinguished scholar of French literature at Harvard, whom she discovered was simultaneously sleeping with two other women. She told me later that she considered me “down-to-earth” and unpretentious, the polar opposite of her three-timing, beret-wearing, silver-haired father-figure French professor. I was a charismatic business guy who was crazy about her and would make her feel safe, at least, give her the financial security she wanted. She could raise a family and do something vaguely artistic like landscape gardening or teaching literature at Emerson College. That was the deal. We’d have three kids and a big house in Newton or Brookline or Cambridge.
The plan wasn’t for her to live in a fifteen-hundred-square-foot Colonial in the low-income part of Belmont.
“Listen, Kate,” I finally said after a moment of silence. “I’ve got an interview with Gordy this morning.”
Her face lit up. I hadn’t seen her smile like that in weeks. “Already? Oh, Jason. This is so great.”
“I think Trevor has it sewed up, though.”
“Jason, that’s just negative thinking.”
“Realistic thinking. Trevor’s been campaigning for it. He’s been having his direct reports call Gordy and tell him how much they want Trevor to get the job.”
“But Gordy must see through all that.”
“Maybe. But he loves being sucked up to. Can’t get enough of it.”
“So why don’t you do the same thing?”
“I hate that. It’s cheesy. It’s also devious.”
She nodded. “You don’t need to do that. Just show him how much you want the job. Want an omelet?”
“An omelet?” Was there such thing as a tofu omelet? Probably. Tofu and scrambled eggs too, I bet. This could be nasty.
“Yep. You need your protein. I’ll put some Canadian bacon in it. Gordy likes his guys to be meat-eaters, right?”
9
On the way into work I popped a CD into the dashboard slot of the rented Geo Metro. It was one of my vast collection of tapes and CDs of motivational talks by the god worshipped by all salesmen, the great motivational speaker and training guru Mark Simkins.
I’d probably listened to this CD, Be a Winner, five hundred times. I could recite long stretches of it word for word, mimicking Mark Simkins’s emphatic, singsong voice, his nasal Midwestern accent, his bizarre, halting phraseology. He taught me never ever to use the word “cost” or “price” with a customer. It was “total investment.” Also, “contract” was a scary word; you should say “paperwork” or “agreement.” And never ask a prospect to “sign” an agreement-you “endorsed” the copies or “okayed” the agreement. But most of all he taught that you had to believe in yourself.