“You had to see a vendor in Cambridge again?”
He nodded. “Figured I’d just stop by and say hi, and Kate put me to work.”
I shot Kate a dirty look. “Are we still going to the movies tonight, Kate?” I said.
Kurt got the message and said good-bye. Then Kate began the incredibly long and involved process of getting ready to go out-there’s always a “quick shower,” and about forty-five minutes of blow-drying her hair, and then the makeup, which she applies as if she’s about to walk down the red carpet to the Kodak Theatre to get an Oscar. Then the inevitable, frantic race to get to the movie on time. Of course, the more I hounded her to hurry up, the slower she went.
So I sat in the bedroom, impatiently watching her do her makeup. “Hey, Kate,” I said.
“Mm?” She was lining her lips with that pencil-looking thing.
“I don’t want you to exploit Kurt anymore.”
“Exploit him? What are you talking about?” She stopped in mid-stroke, turned around.
“You’re treating him like your servant. Every time he comes over here, you put him to work fixing something.”
“Oh, come on, Jason, he volunteers. Anyway, does he look like he resents it? I think it makes him feel useful. Needed.”
“Uh-huh. Well, it strikes me as a little-I don’t know, entitled.”
“Entitled?”
“Like you’re the lady of the manor, and he’s some peasant.”
“Or maybe I’m Lady Chatterley and he’s the gamekeeper, is that it?” she said sarcastically.
I shrugged. I didn’t get the reference.
“Do I detect a note of jealousy?”
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You are jealous, aren’t you?”
“Jesus, Kate. Of what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’re jealous of the fact that he’s so handy, such a regular guy.”
“A regular guy,” I repeated. “And I’m-what? Thurston Howell the Third? My dad worked in a sheet-metal plant, for God’s sake.”
She shook her head, snorted softly. “When you told me he was Special Forces, I was expecting something, I don’t know, different. Crude, maybe. Rough around the edges. But he’s awfully considerate.” She let out a low giggle. “Plus, he’s not unattractive.”
“‘Not unattractive’? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, you know what I mean. Not-not what I expected, that’s all. Don’t be jealous, sweetie. You’re my husband.”
“Yeah, and he’s, what? Now he’s like your-your Yohimbe warrior with the blowgun and the machete?”
“Yanomami.”
“Whatever.”
“Well, sometimes a machete is just the tool you need,” she said.
I sulked for a while in the car, but by the time we got there I’d cooled off.
My wife likes films that have subtitles. I like movies that have cars that crash through plate-glass windows. Her all-time favorite movie is Closely Watched Trains. She likes them slow and contemplative, preferably in Czech or Polish, captioned in Serbo-Croatian.
Whereas my all-time favorite movie is Terminator 2.
I like movies, not films. My requirements are simple: big explosions and car chases and gratuitous violence and unnecessary flashes of female nudity.
So naturally we’d gone to a foreign-film theater that evening in Kendall Square in Cambridge to see a film set in Argentina about a young priest in a coma who’s in love with a quadriplegic dancer. Or maybe I should say, she watched it while I snuck glances at my BlackBerry, which I hid from her behind the popcorn bucket. The guy I was dealing with at Chicago Presbyterian, the Assistant Vice President for Communications, had once again changed his specs for the plasma screens he wanted in their one hundred operating rooms and wanted me to reprice the whole proposal. The facilities manager at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport said that he’d just been told by Pioneer that their plasma displays had a higher resolution and a better greyscale performance than Entronics and wanted to know if that was true. I was damned if I was going to lose this deal to Pioneer.
And an e-mail from Freddy Naseem. He wanted me to give him a call.
What the hell could that be about?
“Did you like it?” Kate said, as we walked to the car. You had to take your parking ticket to get it validated in one place, then pay for it somewhere else. It was a system apparently designed in the Soviet Union.
“Yeah,” I said. “It was moving.”
I figured that would make her happy, but she said, “Which part?”
“Most of it, really,” I said.
“What was it about?”
“What was what about?”
“The movie. What was the plot?”
“Is this a quiz?”
“Yeah,” she said. “What was the story?”
“Come on, Katie.” I beeped the Mercedes open and went around to the passenger’s side and opened the door for her.
“No, I’m serious,” she said. “I don’t think you watched any of it. You spent the whole time on your BlackBerry. Which really pissed off everyone around us, by the way.”
“I glanced at it a couple times, Kate.” She stood there, refusing to get in. “There’s some stuff I really needed to check on.”
“This is a night off,” she said. “You’ve got to stop.”
“I thought you said you understood this came with the job. Didn’t we talk about this? Come on, get in.”
She stood there, arms folded. She was starting to show already. You could see the swell in her belly underneath her cotton dress. “You need an intervention or something. You’re out of control.”
“You’re never going to live like you did when you were a kid, you know. Not as long as you’re married to me.”
“Jason, that’s enough.” She looked around as if to see who might be listening. “My God, I feel like I’ve created a monster.”
32
In the morning I called Freddy Naseem at eight-thirty on the dot, when I knew he always got in.
“Jason,” he said, sounding overjoyed to hear from me. “Did you ever find out how quickly you’d be able to get us the plasma monitors?”
“But I thought you were all set with Panasonic. You said they could get the screens to you within a week. Did something change?”
He paused. “They got us all the monitors yesterday. But there was just one little problem. None of them worked.”
“None of them?”
“Every single one-dead as a doornail. Panasonic is blaming some glitch at their Westwood warehouse. They say there was a gas leak of some sort-chlorine gas, I think. Apparently chlorine gas destroys the microchips or some such thing. And hundreds of flat-screen TVs and monitors in that warehouse were ruined. The problem is, they won’t be able to replace the product for a few months at least, and Harry Belkin is desperate to have them in.”
I answered slowly. My mind was reeling. “Well,” I said, “you’ve come to the right place.”
I found Kurt in the company Command Center on the ground floor adjacent to the main entrance. I’d had to page him, and when I told him I needed to see him right away, he told me to meet him there.
The Command Center was lined with banks of Entronics closed-circuit TV monitors and a big curved console around the room where guys wearing microfleece pullovers-the air was cold here because of all the computers-sat tapping at keyboards or shooting the breeze with one another. You could see on the monitors every entrance to the building, every computer room and common area; you could see people coming in and out and walking around. It was amazing, and a little creepy, how much of the company you could see from here.