Summertime Read online

  ‘Uh huh. Why aren’t you wearing any shoes?’

  ‘They’re right under my desk, Jim. They’re new and they hurt a little.’

  ‘Uh huh.’ He shambles off and there’s something dissatisfied in the hunch of his shoulders. When he turns he looks as though he’s going to say something which hurts but he says: ‘Lucy, I’m hungry. I want you to know I’m hungry but I’m not eating anything.’

  My sister calls. It’s not seven o’clock yet in California. She’s due to leave for the hospital any minute and she sounds clinical, hurried.

  ‘We’ve been trying to get you all weekend, Luce.’

  ‘I was away…’

  ‘Good! I hope you were having a good time somewhere and not moping about.’

  ‘I moped a bit.’

  Her voice softens suddenly. ‘Oh, Luce, are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I took Daddy up to Stevie’s grave. We left some flowers from Daddy’s yard, spring flowers.’

  ‘Thanks, Jane.’

  It should have been me driving Daddy up to the children’s section of the big cemetery. Supporting him as we walked to the place which marks Stevie’s brief sojourn in this world. That’s how I like to think of my son: someone who stayed a short while and then moved on.

  ‘It doesn’t seem like three years,’ she says. ‘Sometimes it seems like yesterday.’

  If I let myself think about it, Stevie’s death seems like now to me. That moment when I found my son’s body lying white and motionless in his blue crib like something small floating on the surface of the ocean. That moment of simultaneous information and disbelief. That synthesis of the awful new reality and the reality which existed before. That hideous synthesis which can only be comprehended in stages, the first of which is shock. Most of all, I wish I could erase that moment but all I can do is turn away from it.

  I say: ‘I did call Daddy a few times on the weekend but I guess he was out. Is he okay?’

  She hesitates. When she speaks her voice is kind. ‘Of course he was low on Saturday, but who’s going to be ecstatic visiting their grandson’s grave? Afterwards we drove up to the beach house for lunch with Scott and we thought Scott seems a little better this year than he was last and Daddy was real pleased with that. Larry says you should use anniversaries to accept the alleviation in your grief. I mean, celebrate the fact that you’re getting better, not feel guilty about it. Daddy. agrees with him and I guess he should know.’

  Daddy never talks about it directly, but he also lost a son. My brother. I don’t even remember him. He died in some kind of accident when he was a small baby. When Stevie died Daddy still didn’t talk about it but he understood. He knew, and he knew better than anyone.

  ‘I hope…’ Jane is cautious, so it’s half a question, ‘that there’s been some alleviation in your grief.’

  I don’t want to talk about grief. I say: ‘How’s Daddy’s hip?’

  Lately there have been references to Daddy’s hips, specifically the right hip. The references fall unguardedly and then are left rapidly behind like some piece of litter you didn’t mean to drop but don’t want to pick up.

  That hesitation again, then Jane’s voice, reassuring. ‘I think it hurts sometimes but it doesn’t seem to slow him down. For heaven’s sake, Lucy, he’s seventy-two and he’s fitter than a lot of people half his age. As for his memory, well, we were remembering some field trip we took years ago and he said he could recall practically every rock we found.’

  ‘Which field trip?’ Each field trip is a discrete memory. There was always something which happened, something we found, someone we met. Only the rocks seemed the same.

  Quietly, Jane says: ‘Arizona.’

  I remember that trip. I can feel its heat now. ‘Arizona,’ I echo.

  I hear Jane’s voice in my ear, treading carefully, speaking softly, anxious not to wake scorpions, disturb a snake. ‘Daddy never says so, but I’m absolutely sure that what he’d really like…’

  I wait.

  ‘… well, he’d really like to see you, Luce. I know he was half looking forward to this weekend, although it’s sad one, because he thought maybe you’d come home. He even said that he thought Mother might benefit from seeing you. Since I doubt she’d even recognize you, that may have been Daddy’s way of saying he’d benefit from seeing you himself.’

  ‘I have some big negotiations happening, Jane, I wouldn’t want to leave town right now. But when it’s all over, maybe I’ll come.’

  Jane takes my concession for confirmation. She says how pleased she is. I remind her: ‘I only said maybe.’

  3

  In the early afternoon, when I’ve completed my preparations for the big meeting, I take my coat and go down on to the street. People are still eating in sidewalk cafés, standing up like horses. I go into a glassy diner and eat a bagel which has cream cheese bulging out of the edges.

  Suddenly, I glimpse Daddy. He is peering at me through the window. In an instant I realize that the face belongs to a young woman who looks like Daddy and in another instant I understand that the sky outside has blackened and my own reflection is looking back at me. Dark hair, dark eyes, actually green but not in this strange snapshot, prominent bones. I never understood before now how people could say I resembled my father.

  ‘Most beautiful women,’ Jay Kent told me, ‘have uninteresting faces. Your beauty is intriguing.’ He was making a statement. His tone was dispassionate.

  The coffee the diner serves is so strong and bitter that it makes my mouth curl just the way Kent’s mouth curled that cold morning in Michigan. Day two of the Mittex trip to Thinking Toys in Michigan and it was still snowing. Jay Kent stood on the edge of the parking lot on the edge of the pine forest sniffing. He was cold but that wasn’t why he was sniffing. The workers were arriving in their cars. Cheerful workers, their voices ringing in the frosty air as they greeted one another across the parking lot. Most were overweight, some were obese, but they had an unmistakable aura of rural contentment as they waddled in for their shift. Half-curious looks at the still, slick little group on the edge of the lot. If our presence caused disquiet they didn’t show it.

  ‘Santa’s elves.’ Kent’s cheeks and eye sockets were hollow with cold. His eyes were blue glass. ‘Santa’s happy little elves, plodding into the grotto.’ There was nothing affectionate in the way he said it.

  ‘Not even a small part of you would want to live out here and be one of them?’ I asked him. I thought everyone had a rural dream buried somewhere inside them. Kent pulled his lips back over his teeth. I didn’t know if his lips were thin with cold or if they were always that thin.

  Then, later, wrapped in wood and warmth at the restaurant, his lips full now, he said: ‘Neither could you be one of those guys, don’t kid yourself, Lucy.’

  ‘Actually I used to be sort of like them, Kent.’ No one calls him Jay. Except possibly his wife.

  He raised his eyebrows at me. He’s learned to keep his face and his body still in a way which makes small gestures significant and movement threatening.

  I said: ‘When I worked in private banking in California I used to plod across the parking lot into work just like one of Santa’s elves.’

  ‘Private banking? In California?’ The lips turned down.

  I was defensive. ‘I had some very big clients, mostly Pacific Rim.’

  ‘You were wasted there. I assume this is back when you first started out?’

  No, it was right up until I moved to New York, devastating my husband, disappointing my family, upsetting my father. It was just three years ago. But I wasn’t going to tell Kent that. He watched me, waiting for my reply. I studied the menu. Finally I said: ‘Well, it all sounds like roadkill to me.’

  That’s when he straightened his back and said: ‘I want you, Lucy. I don’t know what to do about it.’

  I knew I should look at him. It took a moment and when I did his eyes were waiting for me, gunmetal blue now, invulnerable despite his words. />
  I hoped he meant that, when the old CEO retired from Mittex and Kent was steering the company, he wanted me to be his investment banker. Jim’s been hoping that from the beginning. Thinking Toys–Mittex is a good deal but if Mittex are so impressed that they trade their bulge bracket bankers for us then it’s a very big deal. So when Kent said he wanted me it was possible he meant professionally and that’s how I chose to interpret his words. Slowly at first, then fast, very fast, I gave him my own analysis of the toy market and where Mittex might consider leading it and he listened to me without moving at all except possibly his eyebrows.

  Jay Kent’s body still did not move while he explained that his interest in me was not restricted to his company’s possible acquisition of my client or even my analysis of the toy market.

  Before I answered I tried to be as still as he was but I must have moved my head, maybe shaken it, because I felt my hair banging softly against my cheeks. I watched my fingers trace the grain of the wooden table.

  I said: ‘We have to respect professional boundaries. We’re working across the table from each other in some delicate negotiations.’

  Fast, too fast to think, he said: ‘You can have a professional boundary and a personal relationship at the same time. If that’s what you both want.’

  I looked down at his wedding ring and then involuntarily at my own. Occasionally I think of taking it off but something stops me, perhaps the thought of Scott still wearing his. I said: ‘Maybe.’

  As I leave the diner, glancing conspiratorially at the woman in the window, I wonder how it will be today, negotiating with a man who knows me the way Kent does.

  On the way home to the office I pass by the flower shop. I stop, go back and send June Finnigan flowers – spring flowers, mostly tulips but some spiky irises too. I sign the card from Jim.

  Back at my desk on the eighty-third floor, I finger my heel. There’s the sponginess of a blister there now. I look out of the window but I cannot see the ground and, because the glass is tinted, I can only sense the presence of the sun outside. Swinging around in the Manhattan sky at an impossible altitude, the temperature monitored and the air controlled, we barely perceive the weather. We experience the world as reptiles. We have thick skins and primitive nervous systems.

  Gregory and George Hifeld arrive with briefcases and toys. They wait in our office, father and son, side by side. People come over to shake hands and pick up the toys. Gregory explains them stiffly. I sniff George’s breath for liquor as we talk about airplanes, George’s passion. He has two antique airplanes and a landing strip outside his father’s house.

  ‘These divorces,’ he says, ‘they’re going to cost me the goddam Stearman.’ He chews the end of one of his fingers. ‘Maybe the Mustang too.’

  ‘You can smoke on the stairs. I mean, you’re not supposed to but there aren’t many smoke detectors and people do,’ I say. He looks grateful and then glances at his father for permission. He’s forty-two.

  When Fatima announces that Mittex are in the boardroom, we get in the elevator. No one looks at anyone else. I wonder if I’ve done the right thing, keeping Jay Kent and the Hifelds apart and negotiations so loose until now. After all this work, everything could be over today when they hear the sound of each other’s voices. I remember how, on the phone to my sister this morning, I almost agreed to go home for a while when these negotiations are over. I promise myself that this is a deal which is going to work and not founder today on personalities. And I only told Jane maybe.

  As I walk into the boardroom I know that Kent has been waiting for me. He’s talking to someone and he doesn’t move but, barely perceptibly, when he hears my voice his back straightens. When he turns to greet me his eyes have a fullness, a shine, which shouldn’t be there right now in this meeting. He looks at me a moment too long before he looks at the Hifelds. He wants you, Jim said.

  I greet Kent’s adviser from the big investment bank I’d like us to replace. There are colleagues, too, members of the team Kent’s gathering around him for the day when he takes over from the old CEO at Mittex. I know from the late-night calls Kent makes when he’s away from home, relaxed, intimate, slightly drunk, that he wants that day to come soon.

  I introduce our analyst and the Hifelds. I see Gregory as Kent must see him. Correct. Tall. His back is erect but his face tired and his brown eyes sad. He doesn’t want to be here, talking to young men who are fast and incomprehensible like technology, talking to them about selling his company. He’s spent his life building it, supporting the community which depends on it, and, with George’s help, he was supposed to grow old there. George sits next to him, smelling of nicotine, grinning too broadly, dishevelled despite the new suit.

  When the meeting feels ready to start I am irritated to see the Hifelds with heads bowed submissively as though they’re inviting Mittex to swallow up Thinking Toys together with their whole factory in one mouthful.

  ‘So, George,’ says Kent abruptly. I jump a little. George, who has been leaning too close to the Mittex woman on his right, jumps too.

  ‘Tell me, George. What can you do? What place could we find for you in the new Thinking Toys?’

  George smiles. He brushes hair across his forehead and out of his eyes in a sweeping gesture he probably established in boyhood, only now there isn’t any hair.

  ‘Um, well, I don’t want to run it,’ he says unnecessarily. Kent smiles back at him but his eyes glitter and I know he’s going to be merciless.

  Gregory coughs. ‘I probably should have given George more responsibility,’ he says. ‘Who knows what he could have done?’

  We do. We all know.

  George’s eyes stare right ahead of him.

  ‘Oh boy,’ says Kent slowly. He’s stroking his chin. ‘Oh boy,’ he says, ‘I wonder, George, how you’ll deal with the changes we have in mind for Thinking Toys…’

  ‘Well,’ proposes the bulge bracket banker. ‘I’d like to suggest we take a look at some of those changes.’

  Kent explains that Mittex think Hifeld productivity is too low and wages too high. That one thousand employees is too many employees, too many by one thousand. Gregory’s face is frozen.

  I clench both fists but feel the deal slipping irrevocably away from me.

  Gregory looks at Kent. ‘Your world,’ he says, and his voice trembles a little, ‘is plastic. Maybe you don’t understand that high-quality wooden products are labour intensive. Our labour is second to none. Their loyalty, and the quality of their work.’

  Kent gives Gregory a sudden smile but only for a moment, like a weapon which has caught a second’s sunlight in the course of its deadly arc. ‘Mr Hifeld, Gregory, I know the welfare of your workforce has been a priority for you and I admire the ingenious way you’ve been able to maintain the high-wages low-productivity situation in the woods back there with your value-added educational products. Make no mistake, I admire everything you’ve done. But at Mittex we don’t have the same allegiances. We believe we can make your products to as high or higher a standard in the Far East. We see no reason to manufacture in Fullton, Michigan, for twice the price.’

  ‘The Far East?’ echoes Gregory. ‘The Far East?’

  ‘That’s where most of our manufacturing facilities are located.’ Swish, swish. Kent’s a scimitar. ‘We’re concentrating resources in Malaysia right now.’

  ‘The Far East…’ Gregory Hifeld echoes. ‘It would make your figures look good but the price in human terms would be incalculable for Fullton.’ I know how much he must hate Kent. At this moment, I hate him too.

  There is a knock on the boardroom door. An interruption. This wasn’t supposed to happen and I assumed everyone knew that. The door opens and Fatima inches in. She looks thinner than usual. How can she have lost weight in just one hour? I realize it’s the way she’s moving. Her face, when she turns from an over-elaborate refastening of the door, is a caricature of her normal features. I give her a mean look and the whole room watches her in silence although she’
s trying to edge towards me as if no one’s noticed. When she reaches me her face is red as she hands over a piece of paper. On it is Jim’s big, sloppy writing.

  ‘Emergency. Come now. Sorry. J.’

  I stare at the paper. There is no emergency which is enough of an emergency to pull me out of this meeting. Anything could happen with me out of the room.

  ‘Please, now, Lucy,’ Fatima whispers. Everyone can hear her. She might as well have yelled it.

  I look around. I don’t mean to look at Kent but I do.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, turning to Gregory and back to Kent. ‘Could we take a break for five minutes?’ I make no attempt to hide my irritation. ‘I can’t imagine what this is about.’

  From Fatima’s face it’s easy to see this is no negotiating ploy and Kent nods at me.

  ‘Sure,’ he says, ‘we’ll take a break.’ The Hifelds nod, George too vigorously.

  Everyone watches me leave, Kent most intently. I give an apologetic shrug as I edge out of the door.

  In the hallway I look at Fatima for an explanation but she says: ‘Can you go into Jim’s office? Right now?’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  She looks away from me. ‘I don’t know what it’s about. Jim’s waiting for you. Oh Lucy, I think it’s bad news, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’

  We walk to the elevator and go down nine floors and get out together and we don’t speak. My mind doesn’t even begin to examine the possibilities. There’s a numbness where fear or panic should be. I don’t think anything at all. I’m waiting. I’m a reptile.

  4

  Jim, behind his desk, his feet propped on the edge of the garbage can, is expressionless. When I walk in he struggles up, circumnavigates his desk and puts his arms around me. His immense sponginess makes me want to giggle, or maybe that’s embarrassment. Jim and I have never been this close before. When he looks up I see to my amazement that he’s crying.

  ‘Jim?’ I say.

  ‘Sorry…’ His voice is strangled. ‘I’m crying because this shouldn’t happen to you, Lucy.’