“No, Pudge, we aren’t good,” Gary said. “Do you remember I took twenty thousand shares of refinanced Adelson Lee off your hands? We also took—”
“Gare, Gare, don’t do this to me,” Pudge said. “I’m aware. Have I forgotten Adelson Lee? Christ, please, it haunts my every waking hour. All I’m trying to say to you is that five hundred shares of Axon, it may sound like a dis, but it’s not a dis. It’s the best Daffy’s going to do for you.”
“A refreshing breath of honesty,” Gary said. “Now tell me again if you forgot I said five thousand.”
“OK, I’m an asshole. Thank you for letting me know. But I can’t get you more than a thousand total without going all the way upstairs. If you want five thousand, Daffy needs a direct order from Dick Hevy. And since you mention Adelson Lee, Dick’s going to point out to me that CoreStates took forty thousand, First Delaware took thirty thousand, TIAA-CREF took fifty, and so on down the line. The calculus is that crude, Gare. You helped us to the tune of twenty, we help you to the tune of five hundred. I mean, I’ll try Dick if you want. I can also probably get another five hundred out of Daffy just by telling him you’d never guess he used to be shiny on top, to see him now. Whuff, the miracle of Rogaine. But basically this is the kind of deal where Daffy gets to play Santa Claus. He knows if you’ve been bad or good. In particular, he knows for whom you work. To be honest, for the kind of consideration you’re looking for, what you really need to do is triple the size of your institution.”
Size, oh, did it matter. Short of promising to buy some arrant turkeys with CenTrust money at a later date (and he could lose his job for this), Gary had no further leverage with Pudge Portleigh. However, he still had moral leverage in the form of Axon’s underpayment for Alfred’s patent. Lying awake last night, he’d honed the wording of the clear, measured lecture that he intended to deliver to Axon’s brass this afternoon: I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that your offer to my father was reasonable and fair. My father had personal reasons for accepting that offer; but I know what you did to him. Do you understand me? I’m not an old man in the Midwest. I know what you did. And I think you realize that it is not an option for me to leave this room without a firm commitment for five thousand shares. I could also insist on an apology. But I’m simply proposing a straightforward transaction between adults. Which, by the way, costs you n o t h i n g. Zero. Nada. Niente.
“Synaptogenesis!” Axon’s video pitchman exulted.
7. NO, ITS NOT A BOOK OF THE BIBLE!
The professional investors in Ballroom Β laughed and laughed.
“Could this possibly be a hoax?” Denise asked Gary.
“Why license Dad’s patent for a hoax?” Gary said.
She shook her head. “This makes me want to, like, go back to bed.”
Gary understood the feeling. He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in three weeks. His circadian schedule was 180 degrees out of phase, he was revved all night and sandy-eyed all day, and he found it ever more arduous to believe that his problem wasn’t neurochemical but personal.
How right he’d been, all those months, to conceal the many Warning Signs from Caroline! How accurate his intuition that a putative deficit of Neurofactor 3 would sap the legitimacy of his moral arguments! Caroline was now able to camouflage her animosity toward him as “concern” about his “health.” His lumbering forces of conventional domestic warfare were no match for this biological weaponry. He cruelly attacked her person; she heroically attacked his disease.
Building on this strategic advantage, Caroline had then made a series of brilliant tactical moves. When Gary drew up his battle plans for the first full weekend of hostilities, he assumed that Caroline would circle the wagons as she’d done on the previous weekend — would adolescently pal around with Aaron and Caleb and incite them to make fun of Clueless Old Dad. Therefore on Thursday night he ambushed her. He proposed, out of the blue, that he and Aaron and Caleb go mountain-biking in the Poconos on Sunday, leaving at dawn for a long day of older-male bonding in which Caroline could not participate because her back hurt.
Caroline’s countermove was to endorse his proposal enthusiastically. She urged Caleb and Aaron to go and enjoy the time with their father. She laid curious stress on this phrase, causing Aaron and Caleb to pipe up, as if on cue, “Mountain-biking, yeah, Dad, great!” And all at once Gary realized what was going on. He realized why, on Monday night, Aaron had come and unilaterally apologized for having called him “horrible,” and why Caleb on Tuesday, for the first time in months, had invited him to play foosball, and why Jonah, on Wednesday, had brought him, unbidden, on a cork-lined tray, a second martini that Caroline had poured. He saw why his children had turned agreeable and solicitous: because Caroline had told them that their father was struggling with clinical depression. What a brilliant gambit! And not for a second did he doubt that a gambit was what it was — that Caroline’s “concern” was purely bogus, a wartime tactic, a way to avoid spending Christmas in St. Jude — because there continued to be no warmth or fondness for him, not the faintest ember, in her eyes.
“Did you tell the boys that I’m depressed?” Gary asked her in the darkness, from the far margin of their quarter— acre bed. “Caroline? Did you lie to them about my mental state? Is that why everybody’s suddenly being so agreeable?”
“Gary,” she said. “They’re being agreeable because they want you to take them mountain-biking in the Poconos.”
“Something about this doesn’t smell right.”
“You know, you are getting seriously paranoid.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“Gary, this is frightening.”
“You’re fucking with my head! And there is no lower trick than that. There’s no meaner trick in the book.”
“Please, please, listen to yourself.”
“Answer my question,” he said. “Did you tell them I’m ‘depressed’? ‘Having a hard time’?”
“Well — aren’t you?”
“Answer my question!”
She didn’t answer his question. She said nothing more at all that night, although he repeated his question for half an hour, pausing for a minute or two each time so that she could answer, but she didn’t answer.
By the morning of the bike trip, he was so destroyed by lack of sleep that his ambition was simply to function physically. He loaded three bikes onto Caroline’s extremely large and safe Ford Stomper vehicle and drove for two hours, unloaded the bikes, and pedaled mile after mile on rutted trails. The boys raced on far ahead. By the time he caught up with them, they’d taken their rest and were ready to move again. They volunteered nothing but wore expressions of friendly expectation, as if Gary might have a confession to make. His situation was neurochemically somewhat dire, however; he had nothing to say except “Let’s eat our sandwiches” and “One more ridge and then we turn around.” At dusk he loaded the bikes back onto the Stomper, drove two hours, and unloaded them in an access of anhedonia.
Caroline came out of the house and told the older boys what great fun she and Jonah had had. She declared herself a convert to the Narnia books. All evening, then, she and