Somehow.
Fuck.
How did she let it all slip away?
She gets up from the desk, but immediately feels a little dizzy and has to reach for the back of her chair to steady herself. If she’s going to stay on her feet, if she’s going to keep working, she needs to eat something.
But not here.
There’s something about this-being at home in the middle of the afternoon, on a weekday, when he’s not sick or on vacation-that Frank really doesn’t like.
It’s weird and unsettling.
On his way back from the mall, he stopped off and bought a six-pack, and has put it in the fridge, but that’s probably where it’s going to stay. The alternative was a bottle of Stoli. That would have been too extreme, too fast, too downward-trajectory.
The six-pack isn’t going to do it for him either, though. He can tell.
Too chill, too ball game.
What he needs is some serious anti-anxiety medication, a nice warm blanket of Don’t worry, that didn’t just happen, or of… Okay, even if it did, so fucking what?
But he ran out of those pills a long time ago. After the divorce.
Another thing Frank is finding weird at the moment-now that he thinks about it, now that he has the time-is the fact that he could even casually refer to this place he’s in as “home.” It bears so little resemblance to anywhere he has ever lived before.
Sitting on the couch now, he looks around.
Everything is stripped down, smaller, more compact.
Cheaper.
He hasn’t put any kind of a personal stamp on the place. There’s no art or interesting furniture, no design sense. There are no CDs or DVDs either. That stuff is all digital now anyway, invisible and hidden. He has a few books, but they torment him more than anything else. He started several in his first couple of months here, but lost his way with each one.
And it’s not just books. His sense these days is of everything being fragmented, digitized, atomized. He can’t stop at a channel on TV for more than a few seconds, can’t decide what music he wants to listen to anymore, can’t read a newspaper. He can’t pay attention to anything in front of him for long enough to even bring it into focus.
Sometimes he wonders how he ever managed to sit at a drawing board at Belmont, McCann and work, how he ever used modeling software, read contracts and building codes, how he ever steered a whole project through from initial concept to launch.
It’s only been a couple of hours since he left, but now he’s even beginning to wonder how he held down his job at the mall for so long.
How he spoke to people, interacted.
He reaches for the remote, hesitates, doesn’t touch it. He considers standing up.
Or maybe stretching out on the couch.
There’s really no move he can make here that’s going to be the right one, is there? This is paralysis of the will, good and proper.
He stares at the blank TV screen.
The thing is, without the job at the Paloma outlet, there’s no reason for him to be in this apartment, let alone in West Mahopac.
There’s no money for it now, either.
So what’s he going to do?
He’s already cut his expenses to the bone. The move from working as an architect in the city to selling electronics out here in the boonies was about as much of a downsize as he could have ever envisaged being necessary. He did the math and made all the adjustments. The one thing he didn’t factor in, he supposes now, was a sort of fatal, infantile compulsion on his part to eventually whine about it.
Deb would have factored that in.
Deb.
Deb-or-ah.
But then…
He stands up. Where’s his phone? He gets it from the kitchen table and checks for messages.
Nothing.
He scrolls for Deb and hits CALL. It’s been a while since he’s done this.
It rings. She’ll be at work. Plenty of that for lawyers.
“What is it, Frank?”
Her tone. Christ.
“Have you heard from Lizzie?”
Stony silence for a second, then a panicky “Why?”
“Have you?”
“No. Yes. Over the weekend. Saturday, I think. Why?”
He sighs. “Nothing, it’s just that I’ve left a couple of messages for her and she hasn’t gotten back to me.”
“Jesus, Frank, is that all? She’s got a life, she’s busy. She’s a student.”
“Yeah.” He stares out the window, at the car dealership across the street. “I know.”
Then, in one of those classic Deb changes of pace-he can picture it, the lip bite, the head shake-she says, “Frank, honey, are you alright?”
Honey?
There’s no question of his coming clean here, about the job, not now-she’d link the fact that he’s vulnerable with this sudden concern for Lizzie, and make a big deal out of it.
“I’m fine.”
And that’s it. Nowhere left for either of them to go.
Didn’t take very long, did it?
Afterward, he remains in the same position, looking down, the phone in his hand.
He’ll call Lizzie again, leave one more message.
He glances up.
And after that?
When they’ve all left, Craig Howley goes back to his office, sits at his desk, and gazes out the window.
There are a lot of things that he’s not.
He’s not a sentimentalist, he’s not a hedonist, he’s not a fool. But for a few moments now he thinks he can allow himself to feel just a little giddy. It’s quite a sensation…
And he wants to mark it.
When he walked past Angela’s desk on his way in here, he had an impulse to ruffle her hair, or to… to…
See?
He’s no good at this.
He hasn’t told Jessica yet. Should he call her now, or wait until later?
Chairman and CEO of the Oberon Capital Group.
Damn, that sounds good.
Ideas are already fighting for airtime in his head. There’s so much to do, so much restructuring and reorganizing that Oberon could benefit from.
He swivels in his chair.
And that’ll be the first hurdle, now that he thinks about it. He’s been the chief operating officer of the company for a year now, and in recent months something more than that, but the truth is there’s still a lot about the place he doesn’t know, information he’s not privy to. And the reason for this is quite simple. The company, in a hundred different ways, is the very embodiment of its founder-a fact that, in turn, might help explain the culture of secrecy around here… the general reluctance ever to do interviews, for example, or to attend conferences, or to nurture any kind of a profile outside of financial and Washington circles. If a corporation is indeed a person, then no one can seriously doubt that the Oberon Capital Group is James Vaughan.
But all of that’s going to have to change.
The old man may have spent decades preserving his anonymity, but Howley will have no problem going on Bloomberg or Fox and talking the company up, talking the industry up-because that’s what it needs right now, people like him to go out and tell it like it is.
He smiles, briefly amused by his own enthusiasm.
It’s true, though. Private equity has an image problem-the predatory thing, the bonuses, a couple of lavish and regrettably high-profile birthday parties held in the last year or two-but Howley doesn’t see why that trend can’t be reversed.
He swivels around to his desk, reaches for a pen and a legal pad, and starts writing.
Notes, headings, bullet points.
Not exactly a to-do list, not exactly a mission statement either-something in between maybe.
At the very least, he wants to have his thoughts clear for when he next speaks to Vaughan.