The next night they had an early dinner together so that Adam could make his flight to Milwaukee. Guy-whose last name was Farbar but whose abusive phone manner had earned him monomial status in the Perini office-ran a company that made cryogenic rubber; he wanted financing to take it global. Adam didn’t have a perfect understanding of what cryogenic rubber was or what it was used for, but one of the beauties of his job was that he didn’t really have to. Sanford was high on the numbers, and with good reason, even though as a man of business Guy himself was essentially everything Sanford was not-loud, confrontational, impetuous, undisguised. His staff turnover was incredible, a fact that his seeming compulsion to fuck every single one of his female employees did nothing to diminish. In fact, probably the biggest red flag about getting into business with Guy at all was that there were already two pending lawsuits against him, one of which involved a temp who had been nineteen at the time.
He turned out to be even more of a character in person. He had bushy hair and a retro mustache and had taken this cryogenic rubber company from receivership to eleven million in profit in less than three years. His office had one of those topless gas-station calendars on the wall. “We were up thirty-one percent last year,” he shouted at Adam. “In fucking Wisconsin! What is taking you people so long? Where’s the money already? Fucking tight-ass Ivy League Wall Streeters. None of you have ever run an actual business in your lives-I mean, a business that makes things. Calling me up and asking for this form and that prospectus. Get your heads out of your asses! I talk to that Sanford guy and it’s like talking to one of those animatronic Disney things. The Hall of WASPs. You, on the other hand, seem almost like an actual person. Why can’t I just deal with you? Just write me a fucking check already!”
“It’s not my money,” Adam said, amused.
Guy scowled. “Whatever,” he said. “If it was your money we could shake hands and get rich. But you’re still young and you still have a boss to jerk off, I get it. When do you fly back? Do I have your cell?”
“Tomorrow first thing. Here, let me write it down for you again.”
“Then by Wednesday morning latest I need sixteen million for starters or I go elsewhere.”
“Understood,” Adam said, meaning that he understood that Guy delivered this same ultimatum every time. Secretly he had an intuition that there was no way this maniac would not succeed, no matter what he was selling. Still, it wasn’t Adam’s money.
“Whatever way it works,” Guy said, and turned around to make a phone call.
And that was it: no lavish dinner to woo him, no junior executives, no strip club. Back at the hotel Adam tried to book a flight home that same night, but there was nothing-some kind of storm was coming in, and flights were being canceled in bunches. A hotel room these days was basically like a mausoleum with a big TV in it: he couldn’t just sit there. But the health club in the basement was closed for renovations; and there was a Journey tribute band playing in the bar. It was like a nightmare. He hadn’t even brought any work with him. Rain battered the windows, and in the lobby the staff ran around putting wastebaskets under new leaks in the ceiling. He went back upstairs to his room and called Cynthia.
“So what have you been up to?” he asked, drumming his fingers on the bedspread.
“Math homework. April’s class started talking about geometry this week. Not exactly my strong suit. She gets a little stressed if she doesn’t pick up something immediately.”
Her voice flattened out in the evenings, once the kids were in bed-he’d noticed that lately, but never as distinctly as he did now, when her voice was all he had of her.
“There’s acute angles,” he said, “and also some other kind.”
“Okay,” she said. “Home schooling probably not an option, then.”
“Why so early, anyway? Didn’t we start geometry in like ninth grade?”
“I can’t remember,” Cynthia said.
“Well, you have to talk to me about something,” he said. “I’m in some kind of black Midwestern hole here. What have you got?”
She sighed. “Okay,” she said. “ Marietta has this shrink she used to see, and I called him up today and made an appointment.”
He said nothing.
“Discuss,” she said.
“An appointment for yourself?”
She laughed. “Yes of course for myself, genius. At least it’s not like he’s some stranger. I mean he’s a stranger to me, but Marietta vetted him for like three years. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about a little bit and I decided to see what it’s all about.”
He could feel that she needed him to say something, but something was preventing him, something that felt, at least, a little like panic.
“Adam, of course I won’t do it if it’s going to freak you out,” she said. “I mean it. I know it’s probably not something you approve of in general.”
“Of course it’s okay with me,” he said. “Of course I approve of it. I mean it’s not for me to approve or disapprove. It’s just I guess I didn’t know you were unhappy.”
“Not unhappy,” she said thoughtfully. “More like stuck. Anyway, Christ, it’s like going to the gym, everyone does it. You know that, right?”
He tried to say the right things, and then he heard April come in with another homework question and he had to let her go. The truth was that he did disapprove, at least a little-not in general, not for other people; but the two of them were different. One of the things that made the two of them so great together, he’d always felt, was that shared talent for leaving all their baggage behind. Why would you want to go back and pick that up again? Everybody’s got their own; just walk the fuck away from yours and don’t turn around. He saw it borne out every day in the world of finance: the most highly evolved people were the ones for whom even yesterday did not exist.
Still, she was unhappy; she was unhappy, and that had to be his responsibility. He opened up the minibar, sat on the edge of the vast bed with his feet on the windowsill, his back to the empty room behind him, and watched the lightning over black Lake Michigan. A few mini-bottles later he felt less agitated; but he hated doing nothing, and these were hours he was never going to get back.
The first thing Jonas ever collected was Duplo animals. He was too young at the time to remember it now, but his mother liked to tell him stories about himself. The different Duplo sets had different animal-shaped blocks, and he would take them out of their sets and line them up on the coffee table in the living room, or on the rim of the bathtub, or on the floor under his parents’ bed, always in the same mysterious order determined somehow, as best she could tell, by their color. Cynthia would find them arrayed like that, in different places around the apartment, two or three times a week.
Next it was pennies: he would arrange them by year, once he’d learned his numbers, and then he’d arrange them by color, really by gradations of dirtiness, from the bright polish of the new ones to the murky greenish-bronze that made the man on the penny look like he was sitting and thinking about something on a bench inside a cave. Then his mother was talking to another mother in the playground and after that she showed him how to bring the shine out of all the pennies by soaking them in lemon juice. That was a lot of fun-like leading the penny man outside where it was light-though it was also the sort of fun that could only be had once and then it was done. This was often the case when grownups got involved.
There was one morning when Jonas walked into the living room to ask his mother for Oreos before dinner even though he knew he wasn’t going to get them; he saw her sitting on the window seat, holding onto her knees, looking out the window, like she was sad about something she couldn’t find. Think, she often said to him. Where did you have it last?