Melanie unloaded the property within a week of the widow Abercrombie vacating the premises and pocketed close to ten thousand dollars in clear profit. Then she drove to the newsstand at the corner of Murphy Boulevard and bought a newspaper to check the obituaries and new listings of area property being sold for liens and back taxes. The fact that Jason refused to buy into the Melanie’s version of the American Dream had them sleeping in separate bedroom by the time Carmen entered kindergarten.
One day he returned home from work and found the answering machine flashing with a new message. “This is Angelina Fuentes from 32 Scenic Vista Drive,” the woman with the thick Hispanic accent was sobbing into the phone. “Please call me.”
Melanie was late getting home that night. She checked messages then fixed herself a Caesar’s salad and cup of tea. “What did Mrs. Fuentes want?”
His wife teased a crouton onto the tangs of her fork and raised it to her lips. “She’s three months behind on her mortgage payments. The bank started eviction proceedings.”
“Why is she calling here?”
Melanie shrugged. Reaching for a knife she slathered butter on a slice of fresh sourdough bread. “No idea.”
It was a cat-and-mouse game. She wouldn’t volunteer information about the tearful Mrs. Fuentes. Being a reporter, Jason was used to puzzling stories together from tidbits of random information. Three years earlier, his wife had hooked up with Willow Tree Lending, a financing firm that specialized in the subprime real estate market. They wrote mortgages for people with bad credit, no credit and questionable income. Since then, there had been at least eight similar calls from people losing new homes, being evicted and thrown out in the street. “What you’re doing is criminal.” Jason made no effort to hide his disgust.
“Coming from someone who considers ‘work’ a four-letter word, I’ll let that slide.”
“You knew perfectly well when you sold the property that the woman couldn’t afford the monthly payments. You earn a hefty commission, while Mrs. Fuentes and her children end up in the poor house.” Jason waited but there was no response. Melanie wasn’t flustered. Neither was she angry or conflicted in any way. Finishing with the light meal, she leaned back leisurely in the chair and took a sip of tea.
“Want to know the difference between you and a vulture?” He didn’t bother waiting for a response. “By scavenging nature’s waste, the bird serve a useful purpose.”
In early May, just before Mother’s Day, Jason spotted Melanie sitting at the counter in Ryan’s Diner. They had been divorced ten years. She was hunched over a copy of The Brandenberg Gazette clutching a yellow magic marker. Jason imagined his ex-wife circling prime pickings among the obituaries and recently foreclosed properties. Her hair was going gray at the temples and the crow’s feet around her eyes lent the middle-aged face a haggard quality. Melanie had always been modestly pretty in an ebullient, if somewhat harsh, sort of way. Now the effusive enthusiasm that blunted the sharp edges of her temperament had faded. All that wheeling and dealing came with a price tag. Cosmetic surgery or a few Botox injections could repair the external damage. Only the external damage.
Things had been spiraling out of control in the marriage long before Melanie walked out. His ex-wife complained that Jason wasn’t enterprising enough. He lacked motivation, direction, and initiative. All of which was true or at least it was accurate from her stilted, money-grubbing perspective.
His wife earned conservatively three times what he did. She said he was low energy, complacent, – worse yet, an inveterate underachiever. So Jason was secretly ecstatic when Melanie rented a U-haul and cleared out her belongings to set up housekeeping with a senior partner at the firm. He never felt cuckold, betrayed. On the contrary, he experienced a queer sense of moral vindication. Let the greedy bitch satiate all her needs, carnal and otherwise.
Jason once considered cataloguing Melanie’s verbal abuse in an informal compendium. He would pilfer a roll of toilet paper from the hall closet and, with an indelible marker, inscribe each new level of insult on the perforated sheets.
‘I wipe my ass with a chronicle of your complaints’ was the not-so-subtle message. The fantasy was infantile and only lent further credibility to his wife's argument that Jason was a lost soul.—half baked, childish, atrophied, a near-do-well, character disordered inadequate personality (Melanie borrowed that twenty-five cent gem from a friend with a PhD in abnormal psychology), and all-around ineffectual loser.
“Do you know what I want?” Jason was lying in bed at three-forty-five in the morning. A late spring thunderstorm was whipping sheets of rain against the storm windows with unrelenting force.
Maribel Munsen’s wraithlike doppelganger was perched on a Windsor chair strategically placed near the foot of the bed. “If this degenerates into another rant against your ex-wife,” Maribel warned, “I’m history.”
“You already are history,” Jason corrected. “No, it’s nothing of the sort.” “Did you ever hear that Frank Zappa tune about hungry freaks in America?”
Maribel shook her head. “That was before my time.” A bright gash of light ricocheted off the far wall followed by a rumbling of thunder that built momentum until it finally climaxed in a deafening roar.
“First few years of our marriage, my wife and I used to go camping in the White Mountains. Sleeping bags, Coleman stoves, birding binoculars, hiking gear—the whole shebang.” “One day Melanie comes to me and says Willa Cather betrayed the woman’s movement and her books should be banned from libraries.”
“Willa who?”
“Cather. A novelist from the eighteen hundreds.”
“What crime did she commit?”
“In My Antonia the middle-aged heroine marries a farmer and begins raising a family. The National Organization of Woman, in their infinite wisdom, felt the ending to the novel was a betrayal of feminist ideals.”
“So your ex-wife morphed from a naturalist into a bra-burning feminazi,” Maribel was clearly unimpressed. “That woman’s less a physical presence in your life than I am, but you’re still agonizing over her.” “Your wife and daughter,… They’re just symptoms. They’re not the disease that’s eating away at you.”
“What’re you doing? Carmen returned home from work the third week in September to find her father laying out underwear and athletic socks across the bed.
“Taking a sabbatical from the rat race.” Straightening up, Jason wrapped his daughter in a generous bear hug. “I bought a Eurrail Pass—twenty-one countries over six weeks.” Scooping up a backpack mounted on an aluminum frame, Jason slipped the harness over his shoulders. The price tag was still dangling from a chrome post. “What do you think?”
Carmen’s face cycled through a series of unflattering contortions before settling on anxious disbelief. “I think you drank from a well with crazy water. What about the newspaper?”
He waved a hand in a placating gesture. “I had some vacation time coming. It’s no big deal.” Locating a map on the bureau, he splayed it on the surface of the bed. The itinerary took Jason in a sweeping arc from Luxembourg up through the Scandinavian countries then backtracking through southern Germany, Switzerland and Italy. “From Florence,” he thumped the map weaving a finger along the Mediterranean, “I’ll skirt the coast and spend a few days in Paris. From there, head south, cross the Pyrenees and tour Spain.”
“What about accommodations?”
Jason removed the backpack and leaned the metal frame up against the bedrail. “I’ll be staying at dirt-cheap pensions and youth hostels along the way.” He waved a copy of Fodor’s Essential Europe, The Best Of 16 Exceptional Countries under his daughter’s nose. “Already got a list, country by country.”
“Don’t you think you’re a little old for the Youth Hostel circuit?” Carmen groused.
“I’m considering a side trip,” he ignored the remark, turning his attention back to the crumpled map, “through s
outhern Spain to the port city of Algeciras, where I could cross the Bay of Gibraltar by ferry to North Africa.” He tousled his daughters blond hair. “Bring you back a souvenir or two from the Arab bazaars in Casablanca.”
“When do you leave?”
“A week from Friday.”
Twin rivulets began to dribble down Carmen’s cheeks. “In your absence, I’ll starve to death.”
“You’ll do just fine.” Jason steered her out of the bedroom in the direction of the stairs. “I already set up the crock pot on the kitchen counter along with a dozen beginner recipes. Even wrote out step-by-step instructions for the lemon-dill salmon.” Draping an arm over her shoulder, he pulled her close and planted a sloppy kiss on Carmen’s cheek. “This is just the beginning.”
“Beginning of what?”
“Not sure.” Releasing his grip, Jason held his daughter at arm’s length. “When I get back, we’ll just have to play it by ear.”
Return to Table of Contents
Old Man and Old Woman
“We need to talk.” Clarice’s tone was frigid, all business. Throwing the covers aside, she slithered off the side of the bed. Moving to the center of the room, she placed her fleshy arms up over her head and began to gyrate – as lewd and suggestive a performance as a person might expect at two in the morning in the VIP room of the Foxy Lady Lounge in downtown Providence.
But it was a perfunctory display of physical assets. Clarice wasn’t trying to arouse or titillate Alex, at least not in the conventional sense of the words. When the raunchy dance was done, she lowered her arms. “Eight months we have been dating. If you don’t want marry me before the year is out, I can live with that. But, we should at least live together. One way or the other, I got to get on with my life.”
Alex gave the woman an appraising once over before glancing away. Clarice was physical perfection personified – the luscious breasts that stood at firm attention even with her arms down, the straw-colored blond hair and velvety skin that blushed pink when she stepped out of a steamy shower. The other night, Clarice wore a strapless, black evening gown with pearl drop earrings to a family gathering, and the odd thought flitted across Alex’s mind that the woman was quite possibly even more beautiful with clothes than in the buff.
Then why the hesitation? Cold feet were one thing, but there was nothing intrinsically wrong with Clarice. Besides her bodacious charms, the woman was reasonably intelligent, had a great sense of humor and came to the relationship with no excess emotional baggage. “Okay,” Alex beckoned with outstretched arms. “The beginning of the month we’ll set up housekeeping together.”
When Clarice was gone, Alex drifted into the kitchen and put the coffee on. Agreeing to cohabitate with the luscious vixen registered a perfect ten on the Richter scale of dopey deeds. Alex had no intention of ever setting up house with the blonde much less marrying her. Outside of maintaining her gorgeous looks, the woman had few interests. Clarice was sweet, kind and considerate. But he wasn’t in love with her. She was a trophy wife, not a woman to grow old with.
Alex would be seeing Clarice again around mid-week. He would tell her the truth straight out. He had spoken prematurely; the notion of setting up house together was a bad idea. Maybe they should start seeing other people. She would throw a hissy fit. The woman would accuse him of being a selfish lothario, an inconsiderate bastard. Then, inside a week, she would dry the crocodile tears and put her luscious, thirty-something flesh back in circulation. No need to pity Clarice during her short-lived, dark night of the soul. There would be more guys queuing up for a date with Clarice than diehard, New York fans vying for tickets to a Yankee’s World Series game.
But why didn’t he just tell the woman the truth?
I think you’re a swell human being,, if just a tad bit vapid and narcissistic. What did he really want? He didn’t want some upwardly mobile fashion plate who pulled up short every time she passed a mirror. To be sure, Clarice’s ultimatum had caught him at the worse possible time. At the home care agency, receivables were chasing expenses like the proverbial carrot on the end of a stick. No matter how much money he brought in, there was never any profit margin from one month to the next. In April, Alex had to borrow ten thousand dollars to cover payroll and a federal tax payment. You didn’t screw around with the Feds. So why, if the company was expanding and taking on new contracts, was money so tight? In a panic, Alex had called the accountant and a meeting was set for later that morning.
At Caring Hearts Home Care, Phyllis Moon, the office coordinator, was waiting with a stack of messages when Alex arrived. A health aide called out sick with strep throat and all of her elderly clients would need coverage through the week. Mrs. Mancuso left a vulgar message on the answering machine to the effect that the home health aide had stolen one of her hearing aides. In her nineties, the client was demented and constantly misplacing things. Still, the case manager over at the Department of Elderly Affairs would need to be notified as well as Mrs. Mancuso’s daughter.
“You look tired,” Phyllis observed.
“Yeah, well maybe a little.” The early morning lovemaking coupled with Clarice’s ultimatum put Alex out of sorts.
“Can I get you a coffee or anything?” she added.
Alex stared at the woman. “No, thanks.” Where Clarice was the quintessential hot tamale, Phyllis resembled a soothing gazpacho. A slender beanpole of a woman, the receptionist’s dark skin and short-cropped raven hair framed a face that was pleasant if unremarkable. She wore dark-framed glasses and infuriatingly drab skirts and blouses that reminded Alex of the scholarly, old spinster you might find in Copley Square behind the reference desk at the Boston Public Library. But the woman was efficient and dependable. Phyllis knew how to calm a crotchety client addicted to stool softeners, to finesse a homemaker into taking on a difficult case while keeping office politics to a bare minimum.
“Your accountant’s stopping by this morning.”
“Yes, I know,” Alex replied. “Clarice wants us to live together… cohabitate.”
“That’s nice.” Phyllis replied in an introspective, low-keyed monotone.
Both lines lit up simultaneously. “Caring Hearts Home Care.” Phyllis put the first caller on hold and attended to the second.
Alex picked up the flashing line. “Can I help you?”
“Sarah Cohen from Scenic View Apartments. Is my aide coming this morning?”
Alex glanced at the clock on the far wall. “It’s not quite nine o’clock. The girl should be there momentarily.”
“I got an appointment with the podiatrist. Senior van is picking me up at eleven. She gotta help me get dressed.”
“The aide will be there shortly,” Alex promised.
“Ingrown toenail. It’s all infected…pus and everything. The girl’s got to help me get ready.”
“Has Mildred ever been late?”
“No, never,” the old woman observed with genuine feeling. “Mildred's good as gold.”
“So you’re all set then?”
“Yeah, for sure.” There was a slight pause. “This is the third time.”
“Third time what?”
“I got this crumby foot infection.” Alex could hear a commotion in the background. “Wait, somebody’s at the door. I gotta hang up.”
“That would be Mildred,” Alex noted but the line had already gone dead. Hanging up the phone he turned back to Phyllis. “Clarice and I have decided to live together.”
“Yes, you just told me a moment ago.” Phyllis tilted her slender neck to the side and smiled opaquely. “Congratulations.”
Alex headed down the hallway in the direction of his office. “Let me know as soon as the accountant arrives.”
“I examined your accounts receivable,” Howie Tittlebaum noted. He was a small man with pale, flaccid skin and a receding hairline. “Company income is way up.”
“I’m projecting a million five this year,?
?? Alex was seated behind his desk in the back office. A coffee-colored UPS truck swerved onto the street. That would be the non-surgical glove shipment he ordered the middle of last week. Ten cases of latex-free, powdered gloves for the health aides who bathed their clients.
“That’s good,” Howie observed, “but profits are in the toilet.” He laid a spreadsheet on top of the desk. “Look here.” He stabbed at a double line midway down the page. “Caring Hearts brought in close to four hundred thousand in gross sales through March, but blew three-quarters of the revenue on payroll.”
Alex’s expression darkened. “Our business is labor-intensive. To stay competitive with the nursing homes, we give regular pay raises. But then the state nickel-and-dimes us to death.” Alex cracked his knuckles and shook his head in disgust. “A ton of money flows in every month but it flies back out the window in operating expenses.”
“You think you’re in health care?” Howie waved his slender hands in the air, assuming the gently mocking tone of a practical jokester. “Surprise! Surprise! You’re in the garment trade!” He burst out laughing hysterically at his own joke.
“The garment industry in New York,” the humor was tempered now with an equal measure of gravitas, “functions on a razor-thin profit margin. The small shops can’t raise prices, because the jerk down the street will undercut them; so clothiers got no control over their operating expenses. Millions of dollars in, millions out.” “You can cart the goddamn money to the bank in a freakin’ wheelbarrow, but if it’s all eaten up in wages, there isn’t a plug nickel’s worth of profit at the end of the day.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“You don’t need more money, you need stronger profit,” he replied. “Hit the state for a rate increase when you renegotiate contracts.” Howie rose and, reaching across the desk, pumped Alex’s hand up and down. “When you own your own company,” he quipped, “everybody thinks you’re rolling in dough.”