Yet just as already having come down with the worst disease imaginable might drive you to take up smoking … Just as teenage girls might throw contraceptive caution to the winds because they were already pregnant … Just as the morbidly obese must so often say fuck it, I already weigh six hundred pounds that I’ll never lose, so why not have another piece of coconut cake if I feel like it … Jackson was sunk so deeply in a financial hole that it didn’t seem to matter at any given point if he dug the hole a teaspoon deeper still. Too, he seemed to be caught in a feedback loop: The debts made him feel bad. Larger debts would make him feel worse. In endangering his own future and his wife’s future and his children’s future he should feel worse, so to flagellate himself he made them larger. Some days it was dogs, others a magazine subscription or shirt from LLBean that he could have lived without; in fact, Jackson was fascinated to learn just how much money you could run through without appreciably improving your life or acquiring anything of value. This spending-in-place had become a game he played, a little entertainment in self-torture, and he took a freakish delight in the discovery that you could fritter all your money on utter trivia and nothingness and nobody would stop you. In a hallucinogenic fit of misguided piety, he could actually tap his account number and security code into a website to buy ten gross of deformed plastic menorahs for fourteen thousand dollars, and the charge would go right through.
Granted, he did not want to lose the house. Not only was the home equity loan outstanding; they’d still not paid off the original mortgage. But foreclosure was an abstraction. They lived in the house. He went home every day to the house. He had a key. His clothes hung in its closets; the food for their breakfast was stashed in its kitchen; his mail arrived daily at this address. Something about the sheer three-dimensionality of the place, the great big reach-out-and-touch-it, having-slept-here-most-of-his-married-lifeness of the place, made the prospect of repossession utterly incomprehensible, and if he did not understand it, it could not happen.
The habit wasn’t charitable, but Jackson sometimes thought back bitterly to the early days at Knack, when he and Shep went out on jobs side by side—when the company was basically a two-man operation that occasionally had to contract with licensed plumbers or electricians but was otherwise a de facto partnership. So when he sold up, Shep should really have cut him in for half. Shep should have made him on paper what he was in practice. Then the company would have gone for that cool mil and he’d have five hundred K to float him painlessly through this ocean of bills. Better still, maybe he’d have put his foot down and refused to sign a rash deal drafted merely so that Shep could run off on a fool’s errand to some Third World dung heap. Why, he could have pressed the guy to admit—and in those more credulous days pressed himself to admit—that Pemba, along with its many arbitrary antecedents, was a crackpot fantasy on which Shep would never act in real life. In that case they’d now still co-own a thriving Internet enterprise worth four times the 1996 sticker price, and Jackson Burdina, not Randy Fucking Pogatchnik, would be rich.
Slumped in his cubicle in February, Jackson registered rancorously that it was, of all things, Valentine’s Day. It did occur to him briefly that he could go all out and make one more bid for Carol’s clemency, like the many bids that had failed so spectacularly in the past. But he could see it: A dozen roses crammed perfunctorily into a pickle jar, with no effort made to arrange them in an attractive array. Chocolates slipped distractedly on a high shelf with a remark about making sure to keep them away from Heather. Not so much as a peck on the cheek, but a formal, “Why, thank you, Jackson, that’s very sweet,” delivered with the same impersonal coolness with which his wife declined telephone solicitations that were in violation of their household’s listing on the Do Not Call Registry. Basically, his wife had put herself on a private Do Not Call Registry, a restraining order that applied explicitly to her own husband, which also knocked edible-crotch underwear totally out of the ballpark.
Did he not deserve a Valentine present himself? And in preference to another plaid flannel shirt, why not put himself further in hock to secure something that he genuinely needed?
Jackson had never done such a thing, but with Pogatchnik out, Shep AWOL on another personal day, and his workforce dispersed to the leaky faucets of three New York boroughs, he entered “escort service” and “brooklyn ny” into his search engine.
His pulse may have been pounding, but meeting his latest credit card purchase in a Fifth Avenue Starbucks was weirdly mundane. The girl in the picture he’d picked on the Web had long auburn hair, full breasts, and a remote expression that you’d think would have been a turnoff, but he missed the cat-and-mouse games that had once kept his wife just teasingly out of reach, and maybe he still wanted to have to work for it. He took a minute surveying the other patrons hammering at their laptops beside flat cappuccinos, only recognizing his Valentine’s Day present to himself at last because she was bulging from the red leotard she’d described on the phone. In fact, giving a cheerful wave, she saw him first; doubtless the sudden-cold-feet look on his face—that darting glance at the door through which he might make a quick, skulking exit—was one that “Caprice” (or whatever her name was) confronted all the time.
“Sorry,” said Jackson, pulling out a chair and immediately regretting that, since he just wanted to head out and get this over with. “You’re not the girl in the picture.”
“Oh, we never are, honey,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t know where they get those photos. Say, do you want a coffee?”
A double bourbon would have been more like it. Still, Jackson let her order a coffee for him so he could check her out, taking a beat to realize as she stood beside him that the arched eyebrows were for cash; all he had was a ten. While she stood in line, he confirmed that her figure wasn’t bad, if a little heavy in the ass. He’d picked one of the pricier sites, so at least she wasn’t tricked out in feathers, but wore a classy, form-fitting black suit. He might have been peeved about the switcheroo, but “Caprice” was at least—well—white. She was nominally blond—maybe the girls were color-coded—though he would have liked to return to the days when dying your hair was a disgraceful secret, and women wouldn’t leave the house showing a millimeter of dark roots, of which his escort shamelessly sported a solid inch. The breasts, he noted on her return, were fake, too. Maybe in her late twenties, the woman was passably pretty, but the proportions of her face were askew. You got used to such anomalies in the likes of an actress like Julia Roberts, but on a hooker you couldn’t help but envision how her mouth might have got that wide.
Sipping his grande coffee of the day—only a couple of bucks, and she’d kept the change—Jackson realized that this meeting-in-public ritual was mostly so she could check him out. The surest route to seeming normal was to be reassuringly dull. “So, how long you been at this—job?”
“Don’t worry, I’m not a lifer,” she said breezily, and Jackson had the unexpected impression (how was it that you could tell, with everybody, after under a minute? What fleck in the eye gave them away?) that she was smart. “I’m supporting myself through a course in Human Resourcing at Brooklyn Community College. You know, what they used to call Personnel Management. I figured, what could be a better way to get an on-the-ground education in personnel management?”
She’d probably aired the quip before, but it at least broke the ice. By the time they left, he’d shared his (reassuringly dull) job, adding that on his own time he was also writing a book. What was such an encounter good for if not a little rounding up? It wouldn’t do to admit that he was still working on the title. He even tried out his latest on her: The Myth of the “Law-Abiding Citizen”: How We Gullible Goody-Goodies Are Brainwashed into Shit-Eating Compliance (or) You Have No Idea How Much You Could Get Away With If You Only Had Balls.
“It’s about how we’re all manipulated into getting with the program,” he explained with some of his old ebullience on their way out the door. “You know those cheesy TV shows like
World’s Wildest Police Videos? Some loser in a pickup streaks down the highway at a hundred miles per hour in the wrong direction, with our brave men in blue in hot pursuit. Does the villain ever successfully abscond into the sunset? Not on your life! The sucker’s always cuffed in the dirt by the end of the clip. It’s social engineering, and it ain’t subtle, neither. Crime doesn’t pay. You can’t get away. Same as all those straight-ass cop shows, from Dragnet to Law and Order. Nobody ever gets away with jack. Pure mind-fuck propaganda.”
He was standing out in the cold with a prostitute, and he was blathering about politics. She looked amused. “You know, there’s no reason to be nervous.”
“I’m not nervous,” he said. “I talk this way all the time.”
“No wonder you need an escort agency.”
She was being droll. He should like that. After all, he couldn’t do this impersonally; it wasn’t in his nature. He wanted her to like him. He wanted to impress her, which was pathetic. “Gonorrhea isn’t the problem,” he said, and then as what he’d actually said echoed in his ears he kicked himself. “I mean, logorrhea. See, my wife is—what you’d call cold to my advances.”
She kept her mouth shut, but couldn’t control the little smile.
“Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard that before. My wife is frigid. Well, she’s not frigid. And don’t get the idea I’m stuck with some support-hose house-frowse. My wife is gorgeous.” He kept himself from adding, better looking than you are.
“You don’t need to apologize to me, ‘Jonathan.’ So, want to get a drink, bite to eat?”
“I don’t have much time. Better skip to the main event, you know?” He’d rung Carol this afternoon to tell her he’d be a couple of hours late, because he was overseeing the repositioning of some kitchen cabinets whose installation had been botched, leaving a space for the fridge that was only two feet wide … He could have forgone the embellishments, since Carol wasn’t even listening. What was odd about the conversation was that lying hadn’t felt any different from all the other times he’d called and told the truth. Regardless of the details, these days the two of them were always lying to each other, really. That’s why the literal lie had been almost a relief. It was honest lying.
Caprice led him to an innocent-looking hotel, a converted brownstone on Union Street that defied the seediness of his imagination. At check-in, they were brisk and blithe as he rifled his wallet for a Visa with paperless billing that had just, to his incredulity, further extended his credit limit. In the room upstairs, cloth lampshades danced with hokey tassels; the bedspread was a homey chenille, the print over the stead an exuberant color lithograph of the fireworks over the Brooklyn Bridge when it was first opened in 1883. The joint was, believe it or not, kinda cute.
Jackson studied the print while he undid the two top buttons of his shirt, but couldn’t unbutton any further. “You know, a week after that bridge opened a rumor spread it was about to collapse. Stampede killed twelve people.”
Caprice came up behind him and slid her hands into his trousers’ front pockets. “You don’t say.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
She was obliged to deny it. “You’re right.”
Jackson turned around and slipped his hands around her hips, startled by their unfamiliar contour. Still, just the heat of her body through the fabric stirred him in the way that of course he’d been anxious about. He wasn’t hot for the perfume; Carol rarely wore commercial scents, and what really turned him on was the musky waft off her skin when she’d been hauling Flicka in and out of the car all afternoon—a deep, loamy smell like rotting logs. If he’d really wanted to ensure rising to this occasion, he should have insisted that Caprice wear one of Carol’s dirty T-shirts.
“You one of these girls doesn’t kiss? I read you folks don’t like to kiss.”
“You’ve read about it.” She kissed him lightly, no tongue. “I think your problem is too many books, buster.”
Something about the buster. “You’re still laughing at me.”
“Did you also read this sort of thing has to be grim? You’d be surprised, but sometimes I have a great time. And you’re a piece of work. You are—hilarious.”
Jackson reclined on the bed as she shimmied out of the short pencil skirt and removed her jacket; her care to drape the suit smoothly over the chair was comfortingly domestic. The red leotard proved a teddy; how efficient. Carol’s underwear tended to be simpler … He wasn’t sure if he should be thinking about Carol, although he didn’t seem to have a choice.
In retrospect, this is where he should have turned the light off.
Caprice slid next to him still wearing the red teddy. She had nice legs. Carol’s thighs were just starting to … Whoa, this girl sure got right down to business. Carol didn’t usually … That knee slipped between his legs was delish … Jackson flinched when she pressed a little too hard on his fly but managed to cover the wince, thinking, still a little sensitive, but maybe that was fine, because what was wrong with sensitive? She unbuckled and unzipped him, and he inhaled sharply at the sudden smack of cold air, the welcome release from his boxers, thinking maybe she could suck him first, go ahead baby, suck it—
Caprice had no sooner laid him open than she recoiled. “What’s that?”
“Well, what do you think it is?”
Caprice took her knee back. “What the hell happened, were you born with some kind of defect?”
“I was born perfectly normal!” Or at least that’s what Carol had been lecturing him for the last year.
“Look, I’m sorry, I can’t do this.” Caprice got up and started pulling her suit back on.
“Why not? My money’s not good enough? You’re supposed to fuck me, not fall in love.”
“I just can’t, it’s too … Look, I’m not that hard up, okay? I’m afraid you’re stuck with the hotel, but I can have the agency reverse the charges on the escort. There are some other outfits who cater to … You can look them up. Who specialize in—disabilities. Special needs.”
Jackson fastened his fly furiously. “Special needs? I have some scar tissue, but I’m not an idiot!”
“Whatever you wanna call it, it’s not my bag.” When the zipper on her skirt snagged, this hitherto unflappable young woman seemed to panic, and when she finally got the zipper to budge she wore the expression of the sort of resourceful heroine in thrillers who barely manages to pick a lock with a hairpin before the serial killer busts in the window. “Good luck on the book!” she said, remembering her manners at the door. “I—I’ll be sure to look out for it!”
The following morning Jackson was already at work when Shep arrived, because Shep was late—and not for the first time. Jackson would have liked to cover for him, but Pogatchnik was standing in his office doorway, lying in wait. Under his employer’s scathing eye, Shep settled at his station, removing his sheepskin jacket to reveal a muscle T patterned in Hawaiian flowers; Jackson rued his friend’s recent fleshiness, since otherwise the sleeveless T would have shown off a musculature that he himself had always envied. Shep wriggled out of snow pants, underneath which he was wearing the loud Bermuda shorts that Pogatchnik favored in summer, except that it was February. Lastly, he withdrew a miniature battery-powered fan that he propped atop his terminal. All part of the ongoing war over the thermostat (at only 10:00 a.m., it must already have been nearing ninety degrees in here), but if Shep was going to antagonize Pogatchnik with that getup, he should at least have been on time. Something was going on with the guy, something a little reckless and unhinged, but in a peculiarly quiet way; aside from the gear, Shep’s demeanor was one, apropos of a certain pending bestseller, of shit-eating compliance. Meanwhile, the rest of the staff were silent, their eyes trained studiously on computer screens yet angled in such a way as to keep Shep and Pogatchnik within their peripheral vision.
“Nice of you to join us, Knacker,” said Pogatchnik. “I’m, like, overcome by the honor of your presence. To what do we owe the royal visit? This extraordinary sigh
ting of Lord Slacker, slumming among the teeming masses and deigning to come to work?”
“My wife was running a temperature of a hundred and three yesterday,” Shep said evenly, booting up his computer and adjusting the fan. “Another infection. I was up all night in the hospital.”
“You aware that chronic tardiness and absenteeism are grounds for dismissal—period, in any court you care to drag me into?”
“Yes, sir. And I can see how you might be driven to drastic measures if it were merely a matter of an employee who sleeps late. That being impossible when said employee has never got to bed.”
“On top of looking the other way when you waltz in here whenever you please, you expect me to feel sorry for you?”
“No, sir. I expect you to take into consideration the exceptional medical circumstances in my family, as would any reasonable, fair-minded employer like yourself.”
“Guess that makes me unreasonable, then. You’re fired, Knacker.”
Shep froze. His gaze burned straight at the screen. “Sir. Mr. Pogatchnik. I sympathize with your frustration. And I promise to try and arrive on time and put in as many regular workdays as my current difficulties allow. With your permission, I would like to observe that I have continued to keep up with my responsibilities. The many complaints about our substandard service”—here he paused, and Jackson could hear the impolitic inference, our once-exemplary but now-substandard service—”have not been piling up. As you’re well aware, my wife’s medical care is dependent on the insurance provided by this company. On her account and not my own I would beg you to reconsider.”
“You’re shit out of luck. I didn’t hire your wife, and I don’t run a hospice. You got problems with the system, write your congressman. Now, get your stuff, and get out.”