Derailed Page 2

  He asked her, for example, which brokerage house she worked for. Morgan Stanley, she answered. And how long she’d been there. Eight years. And where she’d worked before that.

  McDonald's she said.

  My high school job.

  She was just a little younger than he was, she was reminding him. Just in case he hadn’t noticed.

  He had. In fact, he was trying to think of just the right word for her eyes and thought it was probably luminous. Yeah, luminous was just about perfect.

  “I’ll give you your money back as soon as we get to Penn Station,” he said, suddenly remembering he was in her debt.

  “Tomorrow’s fine,” she said. “Ten percent interest, of course.”

  “I’ve never met a woman loan shark before. Do you break legs, too?”

  “Just balls,” she said.

  Yes, he guessed they were flirting after all. And he didn’t seem half-bad at it, either. Maybe it was like riding a bicycle or having sex, in that you never actually forgot how. Although it was possible Deanna and head.

  “Is this your usual train?” he asked her.

  “Why?”

  “So I know how to give you your money back.”

  “Forget about it. It’s nine dollars. I think I’ll survive.”

  “No. I’ve got to give it back to you — I’d feel ethically impugned if I didn’t.”

  “Impugned?Well, I wouldn’t want you to feel impugned. By the way, is that an actual word?”

  Charles blushed. “I think so. I saw it in a crossword puzzle once, so it must be.”

  Which got them onto a discussion about what else? Crossword puzzles. She liked them — he didn’t.

  She could make it through Monday’s with both eyes closed. He needed both eyes and a piece of brain he didn’t possess. The one that provided focus and fortitude. His brain liked to roam around a little too much to sit down and figure out a five-letter word for . . . say . . .sadness. All right, all right, so that was an easy one. Grief. That place where his brain insisted on spending so much of its time these days. Where it had set up house and resolutely refused to budge. Except, of course, when it was imagining that alternate world of his, where he could flirt with green-eyed women he’d just met not five minutes before.

  They kept talking about other mostly inconsequential things. The conversation a little like the train itself, moving along at a nice, easy clip, if briefly stopping here and there to pick up some new topic of discussion before gathering steam once again. And then suddenly they were under the East River and almost there.

  “Well, I’m lucky you were here today,” he said, entombed in darkness as the fluorescent train lights flickered off and all he could see was the vague shape of her body. It seemed like he’d just got on, like he’d just been asked for nine dollars he didn’t have, and she’d just untangled her thighs and paid for him.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Take the same train tomorrow and I’ll pay you back then.”

  “You’ve got a date,” she said.

  For the rest of the day, even after he’d shaken her hand good-bye and watched as she disappeared into the Penn Station crowd, after he’d waited ten minutes for a cab uptown and was greeted with his boss, Eliot, telling him to brace himself just two feet into the office, he’d think about her choice of words.

  She could’ve said fine, sure, meet you tomorrow. She could’ve said good idea. Or bad idea. Or just mail it to me.

  But she’d said: You've got a date.

  Her name was Lucinda.

  FOUR

  Something was up.

  Eliot informed him their credit card client was coming in to speak with them. Or, more likely, to scream at them.

  Blown deadlines, poor tracking studies, unresponsive account executives — they could take their pick.

  Even though the actual reason was the same reason it always was these days.

  The economy.

  Business simply wasn’t good; there was too much competition, too many clients with too many options. Groveling was in, integrity out.

  This was going to be a visit to the principal’s office, a sit-down with Dad, an audience with the IRS. Where he’d have to stand and assume the position and say thank you, sir, too.

  One look at Ellen Weischler’s sour expression when he walked into the conference room pretty much confirmed this.

  She looked as if she’d just tasted curdled milk or sniffed something odious. He knew what, too. The last commercial they’d done for her company was a triumph of mediocrity. Badly cast, badly written, and badly received. It didn’t matter that they’d recommended another one to them. That they’d begged and pleaded and, yes, even groveled in an attempt to get them to choose a different board. It didn’t even matter that the first cut of the commercial had been almost good—clever, even hip—until the client, Ellen in particular, had meddled with it, changing copy, changing shots, each succeeding cut more bland than the previous one, until they’d ended up with the current dog wagging its tail five times a day on network buys across the country. It didn’t matter because it was their spot, and the buck — or to be perfectly accurate, the 17 percent commission on the $130 million account — stopped there.

  There being, of course, Charles.

  He greeted Ellen with a chaste kiss on one cheek he thought better of halfway into his lean — thinking you should probably shake hands with she who was about to deck you.

  “So . . . ,” Ellen said when they’d all taken their seats. All being Charles, Eliot, two account people—Mo and Lo—and Ellen and hers. So, the way Charles’s mother used to say it when she’d found a Playboy under his bed. So. A so that demanded explanation and certainly contrition.

  “I guess you’re not here to raise our commission,” Charles said. He’d meant it as a joke, of course, only no one laughed. Ellen’s expression stayed sour; if anything, she looked worse than before.

  “We have some serious issues,” Ellen said.

  We have some serious issues, too. We don’t like you telling us what to do all the time. We don’t like being repudiated, belittled, ignored, screamed at. We actually don’t like sour expressions. This is what Charles wanted to say.

  What he actually said was: “I understand.” And he said it with a hangdog expression he was perfecting to the point of artistry.

  “It seems like we talk and talk but no one listens,” Ellen said.

  “Well, we — ”

  “This is just what I mean. Listen to me. Then speak.”

  It occurred to Charles that Ellen had transcended angry and gone straight to rude. That if she were an acquaintance, he would have already walked out of the room. That if she were a client worth significantly less than $130 million, he would’ve told her to take a hike.

  “Of course,” Charles said.

  “We all agree on a strategy. We all sign off on it. And then you consistently go off in other directions.”

  Those directions being wit, humor, entertainment value, and anything else that actually might make a consumer sit up and watch.

  “This last commercial is a case in point.”

  Yes, it is.

  “We agreed on a board. We said it was going to be done in a certain way. Then you send us a cut that’s nothing like what we agreed to. With all this New York humor in it.”

  If she’d uttered a profanity, c — t, say, she couldn’t have looked more distasteful.

  “Well, as you know, we’re always trying to make it — ”

  “I said listen. ”

  She’d definitely entered rude and might actually be edging into humiliating. Charles wondered if this was something one was capable of recovering from.

  “We have to send cut after cut back to you just in order to get it to the board we originally bought in the first place.” She paused and looked down at the table.

  Charles didn’t like that pause.

  It wasn’t a pause that was finally inviting a response. It wasn’t even a pause meant to let her catch h
er breath. It was a pause that portended something worse than what preceded it. The kind of pause he’d seen from girlfriends before they dropped the ax and dashed all hope. From unscrupulous salesmen about to get to the fine print. From emergency room interns about to tell you exactly what’s wrong with your daughter.

  “I think maybe we need a change of direction,” she looked up and said.

  Now what did that mean? Other than something bad. Was it possible she was firing the agency?

  Charles looked over at Eliot, who, strangely enough, was looking down at the table now, too.

  Then he understood.

  Ellen wasn’t firing the agency.

  Ellen was firing him.

  Off the account. Ten years, forty-five commercials, not an insignificant number of industry awards — it didn’t matter.

  The answer was no. You couldn’t recover from this. Eliot could, but he couldn’t. And it seemed to him that Eliot must’ve known, too. You don’t take a step like this without informing someone in advance.

  Et tu, Brute?

  No one was speaking. The pause wasn’t merely pregnant, it was pregnant with triplets — angry, bawling ones; something Charles was scared he himself was about to start doing — just lay his head on the table and begin crying. He didn’t need a mirror to know he was turning bloodred. He didn’t need a psychiatrist to know his self-esteem had taken a mortal hit.

  Ellen cleared her throat. That’s it. After repeatedly admonishing him for speaking out of turn, she was waiting for him to say something after all. She was waiting for his resignation speech.

  “You don’t want me on the business anymore.”

  He’d meant it to sound emotionless and maybe even slightly defiant. But he’d failed. It sounded whiny and defensive, maybe even pathetic.

  “We certainly appreciate all the great things you’ve done,” she began. Then he kind of tuned out. He was thinking that a ballsy company, a ballsy president, might’ve stood up to them — said we pick who works on your business here, and Charles is the guy. Maybe. If the account were less significant, if business were better, if they all weren’t spending so much time on their knees.

  But Eliot was still staring down at the table, doodling now as a way to give him something to do while Charles was being publicly eviscerated. Or perhaps he was just doing the math — $130 million versus Charles Schine — and coming up with the same answer every time.

  Charles didn’t let her finish.

  “It’s been fun,” he said, finally striking the right note, he thought. World-weary cynicism with a touch of noblesse oblige.

  He exited the conference room engulfed in a kind of hot haze; it felt like walking out of a steamroom.

  And into an entirely different climate. Word had spread. He could see it on their faces, and they could see it on his. He barely acknowledged his secretary, walked into his office, shut the door.

  Later, after everything fell apart for him, it would be hard to remember that it all began this morning.

  In this way.

  As for now, he sat behind closed doors and wondered whether Lucinda would be on the train tomorrow.

  FIVE

  She wasn’t.

  He took the same train, stood on the very same spot on the platform.

  He walked the train from car to car — first back, then forward — scanning each face the way people do in airports when they’re expecting relatives from overseas. Faces they know but don’t know, but long to know now.

  “Remember the woman who bailed me out yesterday?” he asked the conductor. “Have you seen her?”

  “What are you talking about?” The conductor didn’t remember him, didn’t remember her, didn’t remember the incident. Maybe he was used to berating commuters on a regular basis; yesterday’s drama wasn’t worthy of recall.

  “Never mind,” Charles said.

  She wasn’t there.

  He was a little amazed that it mattered to him. That it mattered to the point where he’d walked the cars like a rousted homeless man seeking warmth. Who was she, anyway, but a married woman he’d harmlessly flirted with on the way to work? And that’s what made it harmless — that they hadn’t done it again. So why exactly was he looking for her?

  Well, because he wanted to talk, maybe. About this and that and the other thing. About what happened to him at the office yesterday, for instance.

  He hadn’t been able to tell Deanna.

  He was all ready to. Honest.

  “How was work today?” she’d asked him at dinner.

  A perfectly legitimate question, the question, in fact, he’d been waiting for. Only Deanna had looked tired and worried — she’d been peering into Anna’s blood sugar journal when he walked into the kitchen.

  So Charles had said: “Work’s fine.”

  And that was it for talk about the office.

  When Anna first got sick, they’d talked of nothing else. Until it became apparent what the future held for her, and then they’d stopped talking about it. Because to talk about it was to acknowledge it.

  Then they created a whole canon of things they were not to talk to each other about. Anna’s future career plans, for example. Any article in Diabetes Today involving loss of limbs. Any bad news in general. Because complaining about something other than Anna diminished Anna.

  “I was monitored by Mrs. Jeffries today,” Deanna said. Mrs. Jeffries was her school principal.

  “How did it go?”

  “Fine. Pretty much. You know she always throws a fit if I deviate from accepted lesson plans.”

  “So did you?”

  “Yes. But the composition I gave out was ‘Why we like our principal.’ So she couldn’t really complain, could she?”

  Charles laughed. And thought how that was something they used to do a lot of. The laughing Schines. And he looked at his wife and thought, Yes, she’s still beautiful.

  Dirty blond hair — with a little help from Clairol, maybe — tousled and curly and barely constrained by a white elastic headband; dark brown eyes that never looked at him without at least a modicum of love. Only there were tired lines radiating out from the corners of those eyes, as if tears had cut actual tracks into the surface of her skin. Like those lines crisscrossing NASA photographs of Mars — dry riverbeds, the astronomers explain, where torrents of water once surged across the now dead landscape. Which is sometimes the way he thought about Deanna — all cried out.

  After dinner they both went upstairs. Charles attempted to help Anna with her eighth-grade social homework—the separation of church and state, something she was trying to do with MTV tuned to the volume of excruciating.

  “What steps did the United States take to separate church and state?” Charles said, only he mouthed the words so that maybe Anna would get the point — that there should be a separation of homework and TV.

  She refused to take the hint. When he finally stood in front of the television so she’d stop sneaking peeks at Britney or Mandy or Christina and concentrate on the business at hand, she told him to move.

  “Sure,” he said. And jerked his arms and legs in a reasonable facsimile of the funky chicken. See, I’m moving.

  At least that elicited a smile, no small accomplishment from a thirteen-year-old daughter whose general demeanor ranged from sullen to dour. Then again, she had good cause.

  When he finished helping her, he gave her a kiss on the top of her head and she grunted something that sounded like Good night or Get lost.

  Then he entered his bedroom, where Deanna was lying under the covers and pretending to sleep.

  The next morning he ran into Eliot by the elevators.

  “Can I ask you something?” Charles said.

  “Sure.”

  “Did you know they were coming in to ask me off the business?”

  “I thought they came in to complain about the advertising. Asking you off the business was how they registered the seriousness of their complaint.”

  “I just wondered if you knew it
was coming.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you want to know if I knew it was coming? What’s the difference, Charles? It was coming.”

  When the elevator doors opened, Mo was standing there with two legal pads and the new head creative on the business.

  “Going down?” she said.

  SIX

  Lucinda,” he said. Or yelped.

  That’s what it sounded like to him — the noise a dog makes when its tail is stepped on.

  She was back on the train.

  He hadn’t seen her when he sat down; he’d opened his paper and immediately burrowed into the land of the Giants: “Coach Fassel lamented the lack of pressure by his front four this past Sunday. . . .”

  Then that black pump, the stiletto heel like a dagger aimed at his heart, as he looked up and bared his chest for the kill.

  “Lucinda . . .”

  A second later, that perfect face edging out into the aisle to peer at him, eyes sheathed in black-rimmed spectacles — she hadn’t worn glasses before, had she — followed by a full-wattage smile. No, more like one of those soft-glow bulbs, the kind of light that takes the edge off and makes everything look better than it actually is.

  And she said: “Hi.” Such a sweet “hi,” too, as genuine sounding as they come, a woman who seemed glad to see him. Even though she was four rows and three days away from their scheduled assignation.

  “Why don’t you come over here,” she whispered.

  Yes, why not.

  When he reached her, Lucinda pulled her impossibly long legs off to the side to let him pass.

  “Just in time,” she said. “I was ready to call the police and report the nine dollars stolen.”

  He smiled. “I looked all over for you the other day.”

  “I’ll bet,” she said.

  “No, really, I did.”

  “I was kidding, Charles.”

  “So was I,” he lied.