Not that I paid this information any particular heed.
I was wondering if she’d call him Thursday night. I took it as a foregone conclusion that she would have lunch with him on Friday. But how about Thursday night?
Would she visit him in his hotel room?
And come to think of it, why had she chosen me over Chris Tomlin? I mean, while I may not be a nerd, I’m not exactly a movie star, either. And with Chris Tomlin, there wouldn’t have been any penny-pinching for a down payment on a house, either.
With his daddy’s millions in pharmaceuticals, good ole Chris would have bought her a manse as a wedding present.
The workday ended. The usual number of people peeked into my office to say the usual number of good nights. The usual cleaning crew, high school kids in gray uniforms, appeared to start hauling out trash and run roaring vacuum cleaners. And I went through my usual process of staying at my desk until it was time to pick up Laura.
I was just about to walk out the front door when I noticed in the gloom that Ms. Sandstrom’s light was still on.
She had good ears. Even above the vacuum cleaner roaring its way down the hall to her left, she heard me leaving and looked up.
She waved me into her office.
When I reached her desk, she handed me a slip of paper with some typing on it.
“How does that read to you, Donaldson?”
“Uh, what is it?”
“A Help Wanted ad I may be running tomorrow.”
That was another thing Miss Hutchison, my fourth grade teacher, had been good at — indirect torture.
Ms. Sandstrom wanted me to read the ad she’d be running for my replacement.
I scanned it and handed it back.
“Nice.”
“Is that all you have to say? Nice?”
“I guess so.”
“You realize that this means I’m going to fire you?”
“That’s what I took it to mean.”
“What the hell’s wrong with you, Donaldson? Usually you’d be groveling and sniveling by now.”
“I’ve got some — personal problems.”
A smirk. “That’s what you get for reading your wife’s mail.”
Then a scowl. “When you come in tomorrow morning, you come straight to my office, you understand?”
I nodded. “All right.”
“And be prepared to do some groveling and sniveling. You’re going to need it.”
Why don’t I just make a list of the things I found wrong with my Toyota after I slammed the door and belted myself in.
A) The motor wouldn’t turn over. Remember what I said about moisture and the fuel pump?
B) The roof had sprung a new leak. This was different from the old leak, which dribbled rain down onto the passenger seat. The new one dribbled rain down onto the driver’s seat.
C) The turn signal arm had come loose again and was hanging down from naked wires like a half-amputated limb. Apparently after finding the letter this morning, I was in so much of a fog I hadn’t noticed that it was broken again.
I can’t tell you how dark and cold and lonely I felt just then. Bereft of wife. Bereft of automobile. Bereft of — dare I say it? — self-esteem and self-respect. And, on top of it, I was a disciple of defeatism. Just ask my co-worker Dick Weybright.
The goddamned car finally started and I drove off to pick up my goddamned wife.
The city was a mess.
Lashing winds and lashing rains — both of which were still lashing merrily along — had uprooted trees in the park, smashed out store windows here and there, and had apparently caused a power outage that shut down all the automatic traffic signals.
I wanted to be home and I wanted to be dry and I wanted to be in my jammies. But most of all I wanted to be loved by the one woman I had ever really and truly loved.
If only I hadn’t opened her bureau drawer to hide her pearls...
She was standing behind the glass door in the entrance to the art deco building where she works as a market researcher for a mutual fund company. When I saw her, I felt all sorts of things at once — love, anger, shame, terror — and all I wanted to do was park the car and run up to her and take her in my arms and give her the tenderest kiss I was capable of.
But then I remembered the letter and...
Well, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about jealousy. There’s nothing worse to carry around in your stony little heart. All that rage and self-righteousness and self-pity. It begins to smother you and...
By the time Laura climbed into the car, it was smothering me. She smelled of rain and perfume and her sweet tender body.
“Hi,” she said. “I was worried about you.”
“Yeah. I’ll bet.”
Then, closing the door, she gave me a long, long look. “Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“Then why did you say, ‘Yeah. I’ll bet?’”
“Just being funny.”
She gave me another stare. I tried to look regular and normal. You know, not on the verge of whipping the letter out and shoving it in her face.
“Oh, God,” she said, “you’re not starting your period already are you?”
The period thing is one of our little jokes. A few months after we got married, she came home cranky one day and I laid the blame for her mood on her period. She said I was being sexist. I said I was only making an observation. I wrote down the date. For the next four months, on or around the same time each month, she came home crabby. I pointed this out to her. She said, “All right. But men have periods, too.”
“They do?”
“You’re damned right they do.” And so now, whenever I seem inexplicably grouchy, she asks me if my period is starting.
“Maybe so,” I said, swinging from outrage to a strange kind of whipped exhaustion.
“Boy, this is really leaking,” Laura said.
I just drove. There was a burly traffic cop out in the middle of a busy intersection directing traffic with two flashlights in the rain and gloom.
“Did you hear me, Rich? I said this is really leaking.”
“I know it’s really leaking.”
“What’s up with you, anyway? What’re you so mad about? Did Sandstrom give you a hard time today?”
“No — other than telling me that she may fire me.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“But why?”
Because while I was going through your bureau, I found a letter from your ex-lover and I know all about the tryst you’re planning to set up.
That’s what I wanted to say.
What I said was: “I guess I wasn’t paying proper attention during another one of her goddamned sales meetings.”
“But, Rich, if you get fired—”
She didn’t have to finish her sentence. If I got fired, we’d never get the house we’d been saving for.
“She told me that when I came in tomorrow morning, I should be prepared to grovel and snivel. And she wasn’t kidding.”
“She actually said that?”
“She actually said that.”
“What a bitch.”
“Boss’s daughter. You know how this city is. The last frontier for hard-core nepotism.”
We drove on several more blocks, stopping every quarter block or so to pull out around somebody whose car had stalled in the dirty water backing up from the sewers.
“So is that why you’re so down?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Isn’t that reason enough?”
“Usually, about Sandstrom, I mean, you get mad. You don’t get depressed.”
“Well, Sandstrom chews me out but she doesn’t usually threaten to fire me.”
“That’s true. But—”
“But what?”
“It just seems that there’s — something else.” Then, “Where’re you going?”
My mind had been on the letter tucked inside my blazer. In the meantime, the Toyota had been guiding itself into the most violent neighborhood in the city. Not even the cops wanted to come here.