“So what are you?”
“I’m not going into Jumbo. I’m just a sales guy. I am what I am.”
“But if you get into management, baby, that’s when you start making the real money.”
A couple of years ago, Kate used to talk to me about how I should focus on climbing the corporate ladder, but I thought she’d given that up. “Those guys in upper management never leave the office,” I said. “They have to put a LoJack on their ankles. They turn fishbelly white from being in meetings all the time. Too much sucking up, too much politics. It’s not for me. Why are we talking about this?”
“Look. You become the area manager and then a DVP and then a VP and general manager and pretty soon you could be running a company. In a couple of years, you could be making a fortune.”
I took a deep breath, wanting to argue with her, but there was no point. When she got like this, she was like a terrier that wouldn’t let go of its Nylabone.
The fact was, Kate and I had very different ideas of what a “fortune” was. My dad was a sheet-metal worker at a plant in Worcester that made ducts and pipes for air-conditioning and ventilation systems. He rose as high as shop foreman, and he was pretty active in the Sheet Metal Workers Local 63. He wasn’t a very ambitious guy-I think he took the first job that came along, got good at it, stuck with it. But he worked really hard, did overtime and extra shifts whenever possible, and he arrived home at the end of the day wiped out, unable to do anything more than sit in front of the TV like a zombie and drink Budweiser. Dad was missing the tips of two of the fingers on his right hand, which was always a silent reminder to me of how nasty his job was. When he told me he wanted me to go to college so I didn’t have to do what he did, he really meant it.
We lived on one floor of a three-decker on Providence Street in Worcester that had asbestos siding and a chain-link fence around the concrete backyard. To go from that to owning my own colonial house in Belmont-well, that was pretty damned good, I thought.
Whereas the house Kate had grown up in, in Wellesley, was bigger than her entire Harvard dorm building. We’d once driven by the house. It was an immense stone mansion with a high wrought-iron fence and endless land. Even after her boozer father had finally killed off what remained of the family fortune with some lame-brained investment, and they’d had to sell their summer house in Osterville, on Cape Cod, and then their house in Wellesley, the place they moved to was about twice as big as the house she and I lived in now.
She paused, then pouted. “Jason, you don’t want to end up like Cal Taylor, do you?”
“That’s a low blow.” Cal Taylor was around sixty and had been a salesman with Entronics forever, since the days when they sold transistor radios and second-rate color TV sets and tried to compete with Emerson and Kenwood. He was a human cautionary tale. The sight of him creeped me out, because he represented everything I secretly knew I was in danger of becoming. With his white hair and his nicotine-yellowed mustache, his Jack Daniel’s breath and his smoker’s hack and his never-ending stock of stale jokes, he was my own personal nightmare. He was a dead-ender, a timeserver who somehow managed to hang on because of a few tenuous relationships he’d built over the years, those he hadn’t neglected anyway. He was divorced, lived alone on TV dinners, and spent almost every night at a neighborhood bar.
Then her face softened and she tipped her head. “Honey,” she said softly, almost wheedling, “look at this house.”
“What about it?”
“We don’t want to bring up kids in a place like this,” she said. There was a catch in her breath. She suddenly looked sad. “There’s no room to play. There’s barely a yard.”
“I hate mowing the lawn. Anyway, I didn’t have a yard growing up.”
She paused, looked away. I wondered what she was thinking. If she was expecting a return to Manderley, she sure married the wrong guy.
“Come on, Jason, what happened to your ambition? When I met you, you were this totally fired-up, sky’s-the-limit kind of guy. Remember?”
“That was just to get you to marry me.”
“I know you’re kidding. You’ve got the drive, you know you do. You’ve just gotten”-she was about to say “fat and happy,” I’ll bet, but instead she said, “too comfortable. This is it. This is the time to go for it.”
I kept thinking about that documentary about the Fierce People. When Kate married me, she must have thought I was some Yanomami warrior she could groom into a chieftain.
But I said, “I’ll talk to Gordy.” Kent Gordon was the senior VP who ran the entire sales division.
“Good,” she said. “Tell him you demand to be interviewed for a promotion.”
“‘Demand’ isn’t exactly my style.”
“Well, surprise him. Show him some aggression. He’ll love it. It’s kill or be killed. You’ve got to show him you’re a killer.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “You think I can get one of those Yanomami blowguns on eBay?”
3
“We’re screwed, man,” said Ricky Festino. “We are so screwed.”
Ricky Festino was a member of what we called the Band of Brothers, a fellow salesman for Entronics USA’s Visual Systems unit. Salesmen are supposed to all be outgoing and affable, backslappers, hail-fellows-well-met, but not Festino. He was an outlier. He was dour, cynical, bitingly sarcastic. The only thing he seemed to get into was contracts-he’d dropped out of Boston College Law School after a year, and contracts was the one course he liked there. That should tell you something about him.
As far as I could tell, he hated his job and didn’t much like his wife and two little kids either. He chauffeured his younger boy to some private school every morning and coached his older boy’s Little League team, which would theoretically make him a good dad, except for the fact that he was always complaining about it. I was never sure what motivated him except fear and bile, but hey, whatever works.
I couldn’t figure out why he liked me so much either. To Ricky Festino, I must have seemed cloyingly optimistic. I should have made him seethe with contempt. Instead, he seemed to regard me like the family pet, the only one who really understood him, a happy-go-lucky golden retriever he could bitch to while he took me out for a walk. Sometimes he called me “Tigger,” referring to Winnie-the-Pooh’s bouncy, irrepressible, and basically retarded friend. If I was Tigger, he was Eeyore.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“The acquisition, what do you think? Crap,” he muttered as he squeezed out a glistening dollop of antibacterial hand cleaner from a tiny bottle he carried with him everywhere. He rubbed his hands together violently, and I could smell the alcohol. Festino was an out-of-control germophobe. “I just shook hands with that guy from CompuMax, and he kept sneezing on me.”
CompuMax was a “system-builder,” a company that assembled and sold low-end no-name computers for corporations. They were a lousy client, mostly because they didn’t spend money on name-brand components, and Entronics was too name-brand for them. Festino was trying to sell them a bunch of LCD monitors that Entronics didn’t even make, that we got from some second-rate Korean firm and just put our logo on. He was trying to convince them that having the Entronics name on at least one of their components would make their systems seem classier and thus more desirable. A good idea, but CompuMax wasn’t buying. My guess was that Festino didn’t know how to pitch it, but I couldn’t get too involved-it was his deal.
“I’m starting to get why the Japs think we Westerners are so unclean,” Festino went on. “He was, like, sneezing into his hands over and over, then he wanted to shake. What was I going to do, refuse to shake his filthy hand? Guy was a human petri dish. Want some?” He offered me the tiny plastic bottle.