Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

“That’s bullshit, ” Nick said.

“What it is, is water under the bridge.”

“Come on. I’m the CEO of the company. If Stratton was being sold, you’d think I’d know, right?”

“You said it.” The chilling thing was that MacFarland sounded kindly, sympathetic, like an oncologist breaking the news of a bad diagnosis to a favorite patient.

Marjorie poked her head around at ten thirty.

“Remember, you’ve got a lunch at half past with Roderick Douglass, the Chamber of Commerce guy,” she said. “He’ll be wanting to hit you up again. Then there’s the meeting with the business development execs right after.”

Nick swiveled around and looked out the window. “Right, thanks,” he said, distracted.

It was a beautiful day. The sky was blue, deepened a little by the tint of the glass. There was enough of a breeze to flutter the leaves of the trees. A jet was making its way across the sky, its double contrails quickly turning into smudgy fluff.

It was also the seventh day in a row that Andrew Stadler hadn’t been alive to see.

Nick shivered, as if a gust of cool air had somehow made it through the building’s glass membrane. Cassie Stadler’s fragile, china-doll face now filled his mind. What did I do to you? He remembered the look of infinite hurt in her eyes, and he found himself dialing her number before he was even conscious of having decided to.

“Hello.” Cassie’s voice, deep and sleepy-sounding.

“It’s Nick Conover,” he said. “Hope I’m not calling you too early.”

“Me? No — it’s — what time is it?”

“I woke you up. I’m sorry. It’s ten thirty. Go back to sleep.”

“No,” she said hastily. “I’m glad you called. Listen, about yesterday—”

“Cassie, I’m just calling to make sure you’re okay. When I left, you didn’t look so great.”

“Thanks.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I... it helped, talking to you. Really helped.”

“I’m glad.”

“Would you like to come over for lunch?”

“You mean today?”

“Oh, God, that’s ridiculous, I can’t believe I just said that. You’re this big CEO, you’ve probably got lunch meetings scheduled every day until you’re sixty-five.”

“Not at all,” he said. “My lunch meeting just canceled, in fact. Which means a sandwich at my desk. So, yeah, I’d love to get out of the office, sure.”

“Really? Hey, great. Oh — just one little thing.”

“You don’t have any food in your refrigerator.”

“Sad but true. What kind of host am I?”

“I’ll pick something up. See you at noon.”

When he hung up, he stopped by his assistant’s desk. “Marge,” he said, “could you cancel my lunch meetings?”

“Both of them?”

“Right.”

Marjorie smiled. “Going to play hooky? It’s a beautiful day.”

“Hooky? Does that sound like me?”

“Hope springs eternal.”

“Nah,” he said. “I just need to run a couple of errands.”

The house on West Sixteenth, in Steepletown, was even smaller than he remembered it. A dollhouse, a miniature, almost.

Two stories. White sidings that could have been aluminum or vinyl, you’d have to tap to be sure. Black shutters that weren’t big enough to pretend to be shutters.

Nick, holding a couple of brown bags from the Family Fare supermarket he’d stopped at on the way over, rang the bell, heard the carillon tones.

It was almost half a minute before Cassie came to the door. She was in a black knitted top and black stretchy pants. Her face was pale, and sad, and perfect. She was wearing glossy orange lipstick, which was a little strange, but it looked right on her. She also looked better, more rested, than she had yesterday.

“Hey, you actually came.” Cassie opened the door, and walked him past the vase with the dried flowers and the framed embroidered sampler to the small living room. He could hear “One Is the Loneliest Number” come from the small speakers of a portable CD player. Not the old Three Dog Night version. A modern cover. A woman with a voice like clove cigarettes. Cassie switched it off.

Nick unloaded the stuff he’d bought — bread, eggs, juice, milk, bottled water, fruit, a couple of bottles of iced tea. “Toss whatever you don’t like,” he said. Then he unwrapped a couple of sandwiches, placing them ceremoniously on paper plates. “Turkey or roast beef?”

She looked doubtfully at the roast beef. “Too bloody,” she said. “I like my meat burned to a crisp, basically.”

“I’ll have it,” Nick said. “You have the turkey.”

They ate together in silence. He folded up the Boar’s Head delicatessen wrappers into neat squares, a form of fidgeting. She finished most of her iced tea and toyed with the cap. It was a little awkward, and Nick wondered why she’d invited him over. He tried to think of something to say, but before he could, she said, “Hey, you never know what you’re going to learn from a bottle cap. It says here, ‘Real Fact — the last letter added to the English-language alphabet was the “J.” ’”

Nick tried to think of something to say, but before he could, she went on: “Aren’t you supposed to be running a Fortune Five Hundred company or something?”

“We’re not a public company. Anyway, I had a boring lunch I canceled.”

“Now I feel guilty.”

“Not at all. I was happy to have an excuse to miss it.”

“You know, you really surprised me yesterday.”

“Why?”

“It wasn’t very ‘Nick the Slasher.’ I guess people are never what you expect. Like they say, still waters—”

“Get clogged with algae?”

“Something like that. You know how it is — you see someone who seems so desperate, and you just have to reach out and help.”

“You don’t seem desperate.”

“I’m talking about you.”

Nick reddened. “Excuse me?”

She got up and put the kettle on. Standing at the stove, she said, “We’ve both suffered a loss. It’s like Rilke says — when we lose something, it circles around us. ‘It draws around us its unbroken curve.’”

“Huh. I used to have a Spirograph set when I was a kid.”

“I guess I figured you for the typical company man. Until I met you. But you know what I think now?” Her gaze was calm but intent. “I think you’re actually a real family man.”

He cleared his throat. “Yeah, well, tell that to my son. Tell that to Lucas.”

“It’s a bad age for a boy to lose his mom,” Cassie said quietly. She took a teapot down from a cabinet, then some mugs.

“Like there’s a good one?”

“The kid probably needs you badly.”

“I don’t think that’s how he sees it,” Nick said, a little bitterly.

Cassie looked away. “You’re saying that because he’s isolated and he’s angry, and he turns on you. Am I right? Because you’re safe. But you’ll get through it. You love each other. You’re a family.”

“We were.”

“You know how lucky your kids are?”

“Yeah, well.”

She turned to face him. “I’ll bet being a CEO is sort of like being head of a family too.”

“Yeah,” Nick said acerbically. “Maybe one of those Eskimo families. The kind that puts Grandma on the ice floe when she’s not bringing in the whale blubber anymore.”

“I bet the layoffs were hard on you.”

“Harder on the people who got laid off.”

“My dad had a lot of problems, but I think having a job helped him keep it together. Then when he found out they didn’t want him anymore, he fell apart.”

Nick felt as if there was a metal strap around his chest and it was steadily tightening. He nodded.