My brother-in-law, Craig, was gesturing with his free hand. “Concrete,” he was saying. “Forget granite. Granite is so eighties.”
“Concrete?” I said as I walked into the kitchen and kissed my wife. “My boss keeps trying to fit me for concrete boots. I can’t figure it out.”
Polite chuckles. Craig was once a Jeopardy! contestant, so officially he knows everything. He doesn’t like to talk about the fact that he wiped out on the easiest question in Jeopardy! history-the answer was “potato”-and his entire winnings were a year’s supply of Turtle Wax.
“Hey, Jason,” Susie said, giving me a sisterly peck on the cheek and a half hug. “Ethan’s so excited to see you I think he’s going to jump out of his skin.”
“Jason!” exclaimed Craig like we were old buddies. He threw his bony arms around me. He seemed to get skinnier every time I saw him. He was wearing a pair of brand-new-looking blue jeans and an un-tucked Hawaiian print shirt and white Converse All Stars. I also noticed he’d shaved his head. Obviously the minoxidil wasn’t working. He used to have a big mop of curly hair that was thinning on top and made him look like Bozo the Clown. Also, he had new eyeglasses. For years, when he was writing experimental short stories for literary magazines, he wore horn-rimmed spectacles. When he hit it rich, he went through a contact-lens phase until he discovered he had dry eyes. Then he started wearing whatever glasses were cutting-edge. For a couple of years in a row he wore different versions of nineteen-fifties geek frames. Now he was back to horn-rimmed specs.
“New glasses,” I said. “Or old?”
“New. Johnny picked them out for me.” I happened to know he and Susie had recently vacationed in St. Vincent and the Grenadines with Johnny Depp. Kate had clipped out the article from People magazine and showed it to me.
“Johnny?” I said, just to make him say it. “Carson? Isn’t he dead?”
“Depp,” Craig said, with a fake-bashful shrug. “Hey, a little too much of the good life, huh?” He patted my stomach, and I almost lost it. “A week at the Ashram, you’ll drop that weight easy. Hiking, Bikram yoga, twelve hundred calories a day-it’s a boot camp for celebs. You’ll love it.”
Kate saw me revving up to say something I might regret, so she quickly interrupted me. “Let me get you a martini.” She hoisted a silver martini shaker and poured into one of the giant glasses.
“I didn’t even know we had martini glasses,” I said. “From Grammy Spencer?”
“From Craig and Susie,” Kate said. “Aren’t they special?”
“Special,” I agreed.
“They’re Austrian,” said Craig. “The same glassworks that make those amazing Bordeaux glasses.”
“Careful,” Kate said, handing me a glass. “Hundred dollars a stem.”
“Oh, there’s plenty more where they came from,” said Craig.
“Did you notice Susie’s brooch?” Kate said.
I had noticed a big ugly gaudy misshapen thing on Susie’s blouse but I thought the polite thing to do was not to embarrass her by pointing it out. “Is it a starfish?” I asked.
“You like it?” Susie said.
Yep, it was a gold starfish covered in sapphires and rubies and must have cost a fortune. I’ve never understood why women like pins and brooches so much anyway. But this was a doozy.
“Oh, Suze, it’s fabulous,” Kate said. “Where’d you get it?”
“Craig got it for me,” Susie said. “Was it Harry Winston or Tiffany’s?”
“Tiffany’s,” Craig said. “I saw it and thought it was so Susie that I had to get it.”
“Jean Schlumberger,” Susie said. “I would never have spent that kind of money on a piece of jewelry. And it wasn’t even my birthday or our anniversary or any special occasion.”
“Every day I’m married to you is a special occasion,” Craig said, and he put his arm around her, and she gave him a kiss, and I wanted to puke.
I also had to change the subject as quickly as possible, because I couldn’t take any more, so I said, “Why were you guys talking about concrete?”
“They want us to put in new countertops,” said Kate. She gave me a quick, conspiratorial look.
“We just got rid of our granite countertops in our Marin County place after Steven had us over,” said Craig.
This time I didn’t ask whether he meant Steven Spielberg or Steven Segal. “Yeah, I’ve always wanted my kitchen to look like some socialist worker’s communal flat in East Berlin,” I said.
Craig flashed his Lumineer smile. He looked at me with kindly condescension, as if I were some Fresh Air Fund kid. “How’s the corporate world?”
“It’s okay,” I said, nodding. “Gets crazy sometimes, but it’s okay.”
“Hey, your boss, Dick Hardy, invited me to the Entronics Invitational last year at Pebble Beach. Nice guy. Man, I got to golf with Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh-that was a blast.”
I got his point. He was a buddy of the CEO of my company, whom I’d never even met, and he got to hang with all the celebs because, well, he was a celeb. I couldn’t imagine Craig golfing. “Neat” was all I said.
“I could put in a word for you with Dick,” Craig said.
“Don’t waste your time. He doesn’t even know who I am.”
“It’s cool. I’ll just tell him to make sure you’re taken care of.”
“Thanks, but no thanks, Craig. I appreciate the thought, though.”
“You work hard, man. I really admire that. I get paid all this insane money for basically playing, but you really work your ass off. Doesn’t he, Katie?”
“Oh, he does,” said Kate.
“I don’t think I could do what you do,” Craig went on. “The crap you’ve got to put up with, huh?”
“You have no idea,” I said.
I couldn’t take it anymore, so I told them I wanted to change out of my work clothes. Instead, I looked for Ethan and found him in the tiny guest room upstairs, which was supposed to be the future baby’s room. He was lying on his stomach on the blue wall-to-wall carpet reading a book, and he looked up when I entered.
“Hey, Uncle Jason,” he said. Ethan had a lisp-something else for his classmates to make fun of him about, like he needed anything more-and glasses.
“Heya, buddy,” I said, sitting down next to him. I handed him the gift-wrapped book. “You probably don’t need another book, right?”
“Thanks,” he said, sitting up and tearing right into it. “Oh, this is an excellent one,” he said.
“You have it already.”
He nodded solemnly. “I think it’s the finest in the series.”
“I was debating between this one and one on the Tower of London.”
“This was a good choice. I needed another copy anyway, for the Marin house.”
“Okay, good. But tell me something, Ethan. I’m still not clear on why the Aztecs were so into human sacrifice.”
“That’s kind of complicated.”
“I bet you can explain it to me.”
“Well, it was sort of to keep the whole universe moving. They believed that there was this kind of spirit in the human bloodstream, but mostly in the heart? And you had to keep giving it to the gods or the universe would just stop.”
“I see. That makes sense.”
“So when things were going really bad they just did more human sacrifice.”