Shimmer (14 page)

“Bastard child,” Trevor would say flatly. “Born of some tryst between your father and a Czechoslovakian maid.”

“Actually,” I would reply, “I prefer the term
illegitimate.
”

He'd shrug. He'd turn his hands to the sky. “I'm just telling you what was said. And what was said was
bastard child. Spawn of deceit. A one-nighter turned lifelong mistake.
”

Trevor was the only son of my father's brother, a top salesman for an international aerospace firm who spent most of his time roaming
the great cities of Asia in search of new business. It was during these trips that Trevor lived with my father and me, a bad-boy cousin who bunked in my room. Staying in my room, not a guest room, because as a kid Trevor hated to sleep alone. Life with his father—a cold, distant and unavailable man—was a kind of transparent breeding ground for Trevor's growing anger. As a kid, I always felt bad for Trevor. Until he would spend three days calling me
bastard child.
And so through the accumulated confusion building up in me from those moments, and from the pain I could see Trevor so clearly feeling, I knew—knew in a kid's way, a way that isn't ever defined or spoken—that Trevor was something other than me or my father or any child or adult I'd ever seen. Scary, funny, mean and vibrant. The boy who drew kids to him no matter how cruel he would always become. The teenager who threw the best parties, who had the quickest access to beer or vodka, who quietly spread more fear among the kids our age than even the usual teenaged felons revolving in and out of juvenile hall.

After dropping out of college, Trevor moved to Bangkok, then Singapore, then London, then San Francisco. Always he worked in sales, selling computers, selling networking gear, selling consulting services, selling e-commerce deals, selling Internet ideas thought up by himself or others around him. Making money, so much money, in every job and on every deal and always, I think, always in that most transparent way, Trevor was trying to outsell and outperform and finally outdo his father.

Of all the problems Trevor liked to point out or create between the two of us, the one he never mentioned was the one that was most obvious—his had been the life of an afterthought son unattached to his distant dad, and I'd been the one living a peaceful, happy childhood with a good father. Only once did Trevor come close to saying this to me. It was his sixteenth birthday, and we'd gotten drunk on my father's roof. Trevor talked about how he hated his dad, how he missed him, how he wished he were around. How he wished his dad were more like my father. And Trevor began to cry. He cried for hours, finally falling asleep on my bedroom floor, and at breakfast in the morning he
started a fight with me, one more transparent response to the anger inside him. He didn't talk about having cried the night before. In fact, he never has. Some much-deserved moment of pain and self-pity, but one for which he would never forgive himself. And for which, quite possibly, he will never forgive me. Which isn't true. Which is too simple. But by the time I was thirty-five, by the time I was three years down this path of lies with him, by then I was desperate for anything that could make sense of my life with Trevor.

Darkly beautiful. Always beautiful. Smiling and patient and perfect. Always perfect.

“You live here?” she asked.

If, somehow, I could have slept. Maybe then I would not have called.

A thick brown sweater. White blouse.

Probably, though. Probably I would have.

Heavy hair across her shoulders, bundled on her back in a loose cotton tie. Jeans and clogs. A college girl. Sent to me that way.

Yes. Yes, I would have.

Maybe you'd like a college girl?

Maybe.

A college girl.

A warm, light smell of familiar perfume. The faintest smell of gin. Gin on my breath. Gin on hers. Her low voice saying, “You don't talk?” and I just shook my head.

In the living room, now the bedroom, rooms all gray and black and white with shadows. It hardly felt like I lived here at all. It didn't seem like I'd found time to move in, this not a home but a place to wander alone, removed from the office by just one story of the building, pacing these near empty spaces, waiting to go back downstairs.

Darkly beautiful. Familiar beautiful. Like some model in the background. Not the cover girl, not the star. But one of the models who fills out the picture, who confirms that impossible space of beautiful
homes, beautiful restaurants, beautiful streets and cars and drinks and people. Beautiful people.

Unbuttoning her sweater. Untucking a corner of her blouse. Enough to see her belly, to touch it lightly. To follow the curve, to touch her hip, her smooth, smooth hip.

“I'd like to touch you there,” she said.

Nodding carefully. Trying to say in that nod,
Slowly, touch me slowly.

Maybe you'd like a college girl?

A woman on the phone. The same woman every time. Suggesting thoughts to me. Forming images in my mind.

It was four days since I'd last called.

Jeans that button, now unbuttoning. Worn fabric, soft stitching. Metal buttons. White panties. Touching them only barely. The top edge. The coolness.

“Slower?”

Slower.

It's like watching a movie, maybe, or reading the slow, circling sex scene in a book. Somehow watching but involved, drawn closer, sinking into that moment, that motion. Filling in your own images, filling in the sounds, the smells, the light and feel. Watching but being there. Watching yourself. Watching both of you.

“Can I take off my pants?” I heard her say. Smiling, behind her dark hair, only her lips, her ear, showing themselves to me, turning below that hair, her whole body turning, touching, touching me just one bit faster.

Paper printed, paper sorted.

“Can I open my bra?” Smiling, touching, touching me even slower.

Whitley in silence, just a few hours earlier, as I told her I hadn't yet talked to Trevor about Omaha. Whitley only looking at me, saying nothing, all disappointment in her silence. In her eyes.

“Can I put my other hand there?” Smiling, touching, touching me just one bit slower.

Disappointed in me. Whitley, SWAT. Whitley, my coworker. Whit-ley, my friend.

Smiling, touching, muttering some word.

Spreadsheets that had to be updated, adjusted. Money that had to be shifted, then hidden.

Another day. Another. I'd gotten us through another day.

Touching, lying back, muttering some word.

The SWAT team searching so close to the shadow network. Budapest just some glimpse of what might happen. And what they might find.

Whitley watching. Everywhere, watching. As if, somehow, she could even see me now. Her face near mine, watching me here, seeing me from the edge of my bed.

Touching on top, below, slow movements, now wet, wet motion, still slow, still that hair, my eyes caught and lost in that hair.

Do you want this to end?

Maybe, somehow, there was a way to save this. A way I hadn't seen. Maybe, somehow. Maybe, somehow.

I came inside her.

It was Friday still. Seven hours after my conversation with Trevor. Seven hours only because I could see a clock now. Because otherwise I would not have been sure how long it had been. Without a calendar I wouln't have known for sure what day it was. This is what happens without sleep. Two years. In two years I hadn't slept for more than three hours at a time.

I touched her hair. I touched her chin and neck, her chest. She smiled and I watched. She touched me and nodded. “There,” she said. “I see, there.”

No cheap talk. No sassy lines. No heavy moans. No high-pitched voices. Only a quiet aching. Sex a release, temporary but complete. A release from everything bad. Everything wrong. Everything past.

Although, even in that moment, I knew there was something wrong with this too. Of course I did.

Do you want this to end?

The sweater near the bed. The worn jeans and clogs, the tie from her hair. Those panties. That bra. The clothes, a costume, a college girl.

Inside her again.

Nothing bad. Nothing wrong. No past. No future. No talk. No regret. No love.

I came inside her again.

She is, in so many ways, forgotten. She is the other one, the fourth. She is simply in charge of building the boxes. Manufacturing, production. She is the orchestrator. Every machine, every new product, every process behind them. All of it is built by Julie.

And somehow, all of what Julie does is forgotten. All of it taken for granted. All of it only barely noticed.

Julie's parenthetical life.

Which, for her, is absolutely fine. For her, that is absolutely right. Her work gets done. Her facilities deliver everything on time.

There are no questions.

No one has any doubts.

She wanders the basement now. Two floors below the street. Midday, weekday, and she walks among the boilers and brick hallways and hanging pipes and unmarked doors leading to unknown rooms. She likes it here, in these hallways with the thickly painted floors, shiny paint, all green and rubbery in their layers of color.

And she thinks that any normal person would want to leave this company.

And all she wants is to stay.

One more fight with her husband. The night before.

Leave,
he says.
Don't do this to yourself another day. Leave.

And there is a baby now, and she is older too, and her husband thinks maybe they should move out of the city, and she thinks she would like that too.

Maybe he's right. Take an offer. Leave the company. Leave as soon as you can.

Maybe it's time. Forget about money. About stock options waiting for you. About bonuses just a few months away.

Leave. Before you lose completely the ability to sleep. Before you begin to cry, alone, one more time.

Leave.

She tells her husband that she stays because of the security.

She tells her husband that she stays because of the money.

But what she doesn't say, what she can't say, what she can't make sense of to him or to anyone, is that she stays because once a week Robbie and she meet in the mailroom on the fourth floor. Talking through production problems, talking through expansion plans, talking but the point is to be sitting in the mailroom. There with the CEO of the company, both of them smiling quietly in the soothing sounds of the copiers and mail sorters and postage meters and printers. There and it's the rhythm of it, she thinks. The noise and motion. The timelessness of the place. The simplicity of the place.

Her boss has a secret interest in copy machines.

Her boss thinks postage meters are cool.

Her boss is known to blush when she makes another stupid joke about sex.

And, maybe best of all, her boss has never once asked her about the community work she does. The programs she leads here and in every office she can. He just nods, he says, Good, he gives her any support she needs. But he never brings it up. He never makes much of it. And she likes that.

She does it because it's the right thing. Not for any other reason.

She opens the door onto an empty room now. More concrete walls. More fluorescent tubes. A door on the far side of the room, leading somewhere she's never been. She walks to it. Thinking about facilities worldwide, about production steps being refined, about efficiencies her people search for and find every day.

And she thinks about the odd things. The overbuilt servers in European facilities. The extra satellite dishes in a manufacturing plant in Asia. And she wonders why Robbie set up the company this way. Wonders why it often seems like she is a step out of place. As if there's a number out of order, some step in the logic that she just can't quite follow.

Robbie has always had a vision. Maybe a vision grander than Fadowsky's own plan. And sometimes it's a vision she can't quite see.

I wish, for one moment, that I could see his plan.

But for now what she gets are the meetings in the mailroom. And, most often, that is more than enough.

She's not sure what other kind of work she would do.

She's not sure where exactly she would go.

But it's more. More than that.

She can't say it to her husband. She can barely say it to herself.

And now she finds a stairwell leading back up into the building. And she stops for a moment at the bottom step. And she closes her eyes and she breathes two breaths. And she lifts herself up and takes the stairs two at a time.

I'm not sure who I'd be without this job.

It was a discussion they fell into at least once a month, an interchange part dark confessional, part tentative celebration.

“I leased a new car,” Leonard said.

“We're buying a pool table for the kids,” Cliff said.

“We're converting an abandoned building into a home,” Julie said.

“I'm eating out,” Whitley said.

“When?” Leonard asked.

“For the rest of my natural life.”

Core was a company of millionaires. All of the senior staff, the best salespeople, the top vice presidents and programmers in every division of the company, all had stock, stock options and a very high-paying bonus program that made some three hundred of them millionaires.

Millionaires on paper, that is. Or, more exactly, millionaires in waiting. Waiting for the chance to cash in their accumulating bonuses and stock options.

“My credit is pressed, though,” Whitley said.

“My borrowing is high,” Cliff said.

“Please,” Julie said, smiling knowingly at the rest of them. “I'm so overextended I can't bear to open my mail.”