Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

“True,” Claflin conceded, his smile fading, “but there’s no unsightly mess. That open-kitchen thing, that’s the big problem with this great-room design that no one talks about. You have this stunning kitchen with all the best appliances, and this big farmhouse table where your guests eat their dinner, and what do they end up looking at? A mess of dirty pots and pans on the counters and island. This solves that problem.”

“But the kids can’t sit around it.”

“Believe me, that’s trivial compared to—”

“Laura wanted everyone to be able to sit around the kitchen island. She wanted to be able to see the kids hanging out here, doing their homework or reading or talking or whatever while she was making dinner.”

“Nick,” Claflin said slowly, “you don’t cook, right? And Laura’s — well, she’s...”

“Laura wanted this big, open, hang-out kitchen,” Nick said. “That’s what she wanted, and that’s what we’re going to have.”

Claflin looked at him for a few seconds. “Nick, I faxed you the specs, and you signed off on them.”

“I probably didn’t even look at them. I told you we’re doing everything exactly according to Laura’s wishes.”

“This has already been cut. We can’t... send it back . You own it.”

“I really don’t give a shit,” Nick said. “You get the stone guy back here and have him recut it the way Laura wanted.”

“Nick, there’s a logic to this design that—”

“Just do it.” Nick’s voice was arctic. “Are we clear?”

As soon as Claflin left, Julia entered the kitchen. She was wearing a gray sweatshirt emblazoned with the arch-shaped logo of the Michigan Wolverines. Her friend was still sitting at the computer in the family room, busily tyrannizing the lives of her Sims family like some high-tech Hitler.

“Daddy, are you the president of Stratton?”

“President and CEO, baby, don’t you know that? Give me a hug.”

She ran to him as if she’d been waiting for permission, threw her arms around him. Nick leaned over and gave her a kiss on her forehead, thought: She’s just figuring this out?

“Emily says you fired half the people in Fenwick.”

Emily looked up from the computer screen, stole a furtive glance at Nick.

“We had to lay a lot of really good people off,” Nick said. “To save the company.”

“She says you fired her uncle.”

Ah, so that was it. Nick shook his head. “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry to hear it, Emily.”

Emily gave him an imperious, condescending look, almost withering, quite remarkable for a ten-year-old girl. “Uncle John’s been unemployed for almost two years. He says he gave everything to Stratton and you ruined his life.”

Nick wanted to respond — It wasn’t me, and anyway we provided extensive outplacement counseling, you know — but once you start debating with ten-year-olds you might as well hang it up. He was saved by the honk of a car horn. “Okay, Em, you’d better get going. You don’t want to keep your mom waiting.”

Emily’s mom drove a brand-new gold Lexus LX 470 roughly half as long as a city block. She wore a white Fred Perry tennis shirt, white shorts, a Fenwick Country Club windbreaker, expensive-looking white tennis shoes. She had great, tanned legs, short auburn hair coiffed in a high-fashion cut, a giant glittering diamond engagement ring. Her husband was a plastic surgeon who was rumored to be having an affair with his receptionist, and if even Nick, who was completely out of the gossip stream, had heard it, it was probably true.

“Hello, Nick.” Her cigarette-husky voice was chilly and bone-dry.

“Hi, Jacqueline. Emily should be out in a second. I had to tear her away from the computer.”

Jacqueline smiled in an artful semblance of sociability. Nick knew her only enough to say hi: maintaining friendships among the school parents had been Laura’s job. Not that long ago, Jacqueline Renfro would light up when she saw him at school plays and parents’ nights, as if he were a long-lost friend. But people didn’t suck up to him so much anymore.

“How’s Jim?” he said.

“Oh, you know,” she said airily. “When people lose their jobs they don’t get Botox quite as often.”

“Emily mentioned that her uncle got laid off from Stratton. Is he your brother or Jim’s?”

She paused, then said sternly, “Mine, but Emily shouldn’t have said that. Honestly, she has no manners. I’ll talk to her.”

“No, no — she was saying what was on her mind. Where’d your brother work?”

“I don’t—” she faltered, then she called out, “Emily, what is taking you so long?”

They stood in awkward silence for a moment until her daughter emerged from the house, struggling under the weight of a backpack the size of a Sherpa’s.

Julia didn’t look up from the computer monitor as Nick approached and asked, “Where’s your brother?”

“I don’t know.”

“You finish your homework?”

Julia didn’t answer.

“You heard me, right?”

“What?” What was it with the selective hearing? He could whisper “Krispy Kreme” in the kitchen and she’d come bounding.

“Your homework. We’re eating dinner in half an hour — it’s Marta’s night off. Turn off the computer.”

“But I’m in the middle—”

“Save it and shut down. Come on, sweetie.”

He went to the foot of the stairs and shouted up for Lucas. No reply. The house was so unnecessarily big, though, that sound didn’t carry far. Nick went upstairs, past Laura’s study, its door unopened since her death, to Lucas’s room.

He knocked. The door, slightly ajar, opened inward a few inches. He pushed it open the rest of the way, called, “Luke?” No answer; no Lucas here. His desk lamp was on, a textbook open. He walked over to see which textbook it was, inadvertently bumping against the desk. The iMac’s flat panel screen came out of sleep mode, displaying a profusion of colorful flesh-tone photographs. Nick looked again and saw naked bodies in various sexual contortions. He came closer to get a closer look.

The entire screen was taken up with pop-up windows of slutty-looking women with huge boobs in garish shades of pink and orange. “Real Amateur Pussy,” one window read, the word “real” flashing red like a neon sign.

Nick’s first reaction was a very male one: he looked even closer, intrigued, felt a stirring he hadn’t felt in months. Immediately after, though, he felt disgusted at the tawdriness of the images — who were these girls who were willing to do this stuff for all the heavy-breathing Internet world to see? And then the realization washed over him that this was Lucas’s computer, that his son was looking at all this stuff. If Laura had discovered this, she would have freaked out, called him at work, demanded that he come home at once and have a Talk with his son.

Whereas Nick didn’t know what to think, how to react. He was at a loss. The kid was sixteen, and developmentally a fairly advanced sixteen at that. Of course he was interested in sex. Nick remembered when he and a buddy, around the same age, had found a matted, waterlogged Playboy in the woods. They’d dried it out carefully, pored over it as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls, hid it in Nick’s garage. Looking back on it now, it was amazing how different smut was in those days, how innocent, though it sure didn’t seem it at the time. The photos in Playboy were so heavily airbrushed that it was something of a shock when Nick first got an up-close glimpse of his first real-life tits not long afterward, in the finished basement of his first real girlfriend, Jody Catalfano. Jody, the cutest girl in the class, had been after him for months, was ready long before he was. Her breasts were far smaller than the voluptuous babes’ in Playboy, her nipples larger and darker with a few stray hairs around the edges of the areolas.