Cold Caller - Jason Starr - E-Book

Cold Caller E-Book

Jason Starr

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Beschreibung

Cool, deadpan, a rollercoaster ride to hell If Jim Thompson had gotten an MBA, he might have written Cold Caller, a ravingly readable story of a downwardly mobile yuppie who'll just kill to get ahead. Once a rising VP at a topflight ad agency, Bill Moss now works as a "cold caller" at a telemarketing firm in the Times Square area. He's got a bad case of the urban blues, and when a pink slip rather than promotion comes through, Bill snaps... Now he's got a dead supervisor on his hands and problems no career counsellor can help him with. Jason Starr has retooled the James M. Cain novel of cynical suspense and murder for the fiber-optic age.

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Praise for Jason Starr

‘Well crafted and very scary’ –Times

‘Cool, deadpan, a rollercoaster ride to hell’ –Guardian

‘Tough, composed and about as noir as you can go. Starr is a worthy successor to Charles Willeford’ –Literary Review

‘Bang up-to-date, but reminiscent of David Goodis and Jim Thompson,Fake IDis a powerful novel of the American Dream turning into the American Nightmare that marks Starr out as a writer to follow’ –Time Out

‘a gripping novel of paranoia and obsession that’s damn near impossible to put down’ –Time Out

‘Demonic, demented and truly ferocious and a flat out joy to read. In other words, a total feast. Like it? ... I plain worshipped it’ –Ken Bruen

‘Jason Starr's Savage Lane is a wickedly smart and twisted look at suburbia - a tense thriller and searing satire’ – Don Winslow, author of The Cartel

‘A hypnotic story of lust and obsession’–Daily Telegraph

‘Who but Jason Starr could render suburban vice pitch black, sneakily endearing, and wickedly funny all at once? Like James M. Cain meets Tom Perrotta, Savage Lane shows, in grand style, how twisted the hearts of All-American families can be, and how those picket white fences can be dangerously sharp’ – Megan Abbott

dedication

For Sandy and Chynna

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Jason Starr

Copyright

1

On most days, I wouldn’t have said anything. Like the typical New Yorker, I’d have given her a couple of dirty looks, maybe grunted a little, and minded my own business. But that morning was different. Maybe things were already building up in my life, pushing me to the brink. Or maybe I was just having a bad day. I’d had a fight with my girlfriend the night before and she’d left for work that morning without saying goodbye.

“Excuse me,” I said irritably. “Excuse me.”

She didn’t answer. I thought she didn’t hear me so I said it again, a little louder, then I noticed she was wearing a Walkman. I tapped her on the shoulder and she turned around as if I’d pinched her.

“There’s plenty of room over there,” I said, motioning toward the middle of the subway car.

“Get your hands off me!” she screamed. Because of the Walkman, her voice was especially loud.

“I was just asking you to –”

A thick, heavy hand arrived on my shoulder.

“Leave the lady alone, will ya?”

He was a young, muscular guy, wearing the plain gray uniform that plumbers and electricians wear.

“I was just asking her if she could move inside a little,” I said.

“You were grabbing her,” the guy said. “I saw you grabbing her.”

“I didn’t grab her,” I said. “I was just trying to get her attention.”

“You were grabbing her,” he insisted. “I saw you. You’ve been kicking and grabbing people ever since you got on this train. You stepped on my foot before and you didn’t even say excuse me.”

“Look, what’s your problem?”

I don’t remember what else he said to me, or what I said back to him, or who pushed who first. All I know is that within a few seconds I was wrestling with a man twice my size in the middle of a crowded subway car. He was so much bigger than me, I don’t know if you can even call it a fight. He got me in a headlock and punched me in the face a couple of times and then squeezed my head and neck. People on the train were screaming – some begging for us to stop, others cheering us on. The doors opened and somehow our wrestling match moved onto the Seventy-seventh Street platform. That’s when the guy got his best shot in, connecting with a solid upper-cut above my left eye. Finally, a Transit cop came over and separated us. People had formed a circle, staring at me. I had a flashback to junior high school in Bainbridge Island, Washington, when Johnny McGuiness beat the hell out of me and a crowd of kids gathered around laughing. These people weren’t laughing but I felt just as embarrassed as I’d felt eighteen years ago.

The cop asked us who had started the fight. The man said I did, which was a lie, and I said so. But when the cop asked if I wanted to press charges I said no.

“I just want to get to work,” I said.

“It’s up to you,” the cop said. As I was walking away, he added, “I’ll get you to a hospital if you want me to. That cut looks pretty bad.”

I kept walking.

With some crumpled up old napkin I found stuffed inside my back pocket, I put pressure on the wound. I got on the next train to Grand Central.

*

I was working at a company called American Commun-ications Association. I made appointments for sales representatives to sell discount long-distance phone services to businesses. It was a part-time job, just four hours a day, but I worked full-time shifts three days a week. After I’d lost my real job as V.P. of Marketing at Smythe & O’Greeley, a big New York ad agency, I’d only intended to work at A.C.A. temporarily, to make some extra cash after my unemployment benefits ran out. But two years had gone by and I was still at A.C.A., no closer to finding another jobin advertising. Of course I’d interviewed at plenty of agencies, but the story was always the same – I was either over-qualified, or they said I’d been out of work too long. I was beginning to think that I’d be a telemarketer for the rest of my life.

The A.C.A. office was on Forty-third Street, near Eighth Avenue. When I got off the elevator on the seventh floor, Eileen, the receptionist, was chewing gum and polishing her nails. She’d never said a word to me or to any of the other telemarketers before, but today she dropped the nail polish when she saw me.

“My God, what happened to you?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said casually. “A little accident, that’s all.”

As I headed along the corridor, I realized the cut might be worse than I thought. I felt the napkin and discovered blood seeping through.

I went into the call center, where the telemarketers worked. The large square-shaped room had four rows of three-foot-wide cubicles. Surrounding the room were the managers’ offices with windows facing the telemarketing floor. Mike Peterson, the Floor Supervisor, came over to me while I was punching in at the time clock.

“Bill, there you are. I didn’t think you were going to make it in today.”

“Well, here I am,” I said.

“Why didn’t you call? Did you oversleep? I mean you know how it is here in the summer. We have a full staff and we need to –”

I turned around. Mike saw the cut on my face. He looked like he was going to vomit.

“Jesus Christ, you’re bleeding!”

“Really?” I said. “I was wondering what all that red stuff coming out of my head was.”

“What the hell happened?”

“I had a rough ride in on the subway.”

“The subway?”

“What difference does it make? I’m here now, aren’t I?”

“You should really get stitches for that or something.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I just have to wash it out.”

In the bathroom, I finally got the bleeding to stop. I put on a couple of Band-Aids I’d found in the cabinet under the sink, then went back out to my cubicle and prepared to work.

I hated my job, but I was good at it. I averaged two or three appointments a day, which was better than most people in the office. I earned sixteen dollars an hour, while most people were making ten or eleven. I was the second-oldest tele­marketer, in seniority and age. Only Harry Pearlman, who was fifty-two years old, had been with the company longer than me. I think I was better on the phone than Harry though. I was very confident and relaxed and people always seemed to trust me. Even when people didn’t really need our service I could sweet talk them into an appointment. Like this one time, a guy hung up on me while I was in the middle of my pitch. I called him right back and said, “I’m sorry, sir, we must have been disconnected,” and I wound up getting him.

I got off to a hot start on the phone, making two appointments in the first fifteen minutes. During the eleven o’clock break, I went to the concession machines in the back and bought a can of Pepsi. Greg Brown was there talking to a girl who’d just started at the company. Later, I found out her name was Marie Stipaldi.

“Man, you know they’re ripping us off,” Greg was saying. “Just because the salesman makes the sale, you think he’s giving us credit for making an appointment? I know for a fact them motherfuckers ripped me off for three appointments. That’s fifteen dollars, man. That shit adds up after a while.”

“I don’t care about commissions,” Marie said. “I’m just working here for the ten dollars an hour.”

“Well, I care,” Greg said. “And if they keep fucking with my shit I’m gonna go in there and do something about it.”

“What are you gonna do?” I said. “Sue them?”

“Fuck the lawyers, man,” Greg said. “I’ll go into Ed’s office and tell him the way it is.”

“A lot of good that’ll do,” I said. “You know how easy they can replace one of us?”

“They can’t replace me, man. I’ve been making ten appointments a week. I’m the king of A.C.A. I’m the most important employee at this company.”

“Believe me, nobody’s important at this company,” I said. “I’ve been here a long time, too long, and I never saw one guy go into that office and get what he wanted.”

“He’s right,” Marie said to Greg. “You can’t treat this job like it’s serious. You have to expect to get ripped off.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Greg said. “A white man can go in and get anything he wants, but a black man’s gotta take what he can get. I bet one of you guys could go up to the biggest company in America, IBM or Texon or Exico or whatever the fuck it’s called, and you could get whatever job you wanted. But if I walked in there they’d give me a mop and tell me to start cleaning the toilets. And I know for a fact that if I was white, I’d be getting my commission money here.”

“I disagree,” I said. “Look at me. They owe me two hundred dollars in back commission.”

“I don’t care what you say,” Greg said. “The people who run this place are a bunch of racist motherfuckers. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be too upset if I showed up here for work one day and the whole place burned down – with all the people in it.”

“That’s terrible,” Marie said.

“I’m not talking about you,” Greg said. “Just them managers, you know. I know if they was sittin’ in a fire, beggin’ for me to help, I’d just let their asses burn.”

Greg started to laugh. I started laughing too, partly because I liked Greg and partly because I agreed it would be nice to watch Mike and Ed burn. As we were laughing, Mike poked his head into the room.

“Break’s over, guys. Let’s get back on those phones now.”

“I been meaning to ask you,” Greg said to me as we were walking back to our desks. “Who fucked you up like that?”

“Fucked me up?” I said like I was confused. “Oh, you meanthat,” I said touching my forehead. “It was just an accident.”

“Yeah, right,” Greg said laughing. “You got your ass kicked. Who was it? Did you fuck him up bad?”

“I got a few whacks in,” I lied.

“But he looks like he got a few more whacks in,” Greg said laughing.

As I was about to sit down at my cubicle, Mike came over and said he wanted to talk to me in his office.

“What about?” I said.

“I’ll tell you in private.”

I followed him, wondering what he could possibly want to talk to me about. Had he been listening near the concession machines and heard the things Greg had said? If so, I decided I’d stand up for Greg and deny everything.

Mike closed the door and told me to sit down. He went around to his desk and brought up a file on his computer screen. Mike was thin and wore a white shirt with a black tie and black suspenders every day. He always looked nervous and insecure and I often wondered if he was gay. Not that it would’ve bothered me if he was, but I think it bothered Mike that I wondered about it. He always treated me like I somehow disapproved of him.

“I really hate to do this,” he said, not making eye contact with me. “But I’m afraid I have no choice.”

“You’re firing me?”

“Of course not,” he said. “It’s nothing that drastic. I know you’re one of the best people here, which is what makes this so hard. It’s just that...well, you know we have certain rules around here. They’re not my rules, of course. They’re Ed’s rules and it’s just my job to enforce them. You know you were late this morning.”

“I thought we discussed that already.”

“I just didn’t want to say anything until I checked my records and made sure, but you realize this is the third time you’ve been late this month.”

“I know that,” I said. “But as you can see something happened this morning that was beyond my control.”

Mike was nodding his head.

“I’m sorry about that, I really am, but we have a rule, and that’s why we have the rule, so we don’t punish you for your first infraction. On July first you were eight minutes late to work, on the eleventh you were fifteen minutes late, and today you were late an hour and ten minutes.”

“I don’t believe this,” I said.

“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about it,” Mike said. “After your first infraction, I gave you a verbal warning, then I gave you a written warning, and now I have to send you home without pay.”

“This is ridiculous,” I said, raising my voice. “Do you think I wanted to be late this morning?”

“It’s not a question of what you wanted or didn’t want –“

“This is a joke, right? You’re not serious.”

“I’m afraid I’m very serious,” Mike said. “Maybe you didn’t mean to be late this morning – I mean of course you didn’t mean it – but there’s the fact that you’ve been late two other times this month, and you didn’t call one of those times either.”

“Do you know how long I’ve been working here?”

Mike moved the cursor to a new spot on the screen.

“Twenty-six point five months.”

“That’s over a year point five longer than you’ve been working here,” I said bitterly, “and I think that entitles me to a few privileges.”

Mike’s cheeks had turned pink. I could tell he was upset that I wasn’t respecting his authority. Or maybe it was the gay thing coming out again.

“I don’t care how long you’ve been working here,” he said. “You’re still a telemarketer and you have to go by the same rules that the other telemarketers go by.”

I stood up.

“Excuse me, but where do you think you’re going?”

“Back to work.”

“I already clocked you out for the day.”

“You didwhat?”

“I’m sending you home, Bill. If you don’t go, I’ll have to do something drastic.”

“Are you threatening my job now?”

“I don’twantto threaten your job, but you’re giving me no choice.”

“I’m going back to work. I’ve already made two appointments today and I plan to make a couple more. In other words, I’m going to continue doing my job.”

“Bill, you’re making a big mistake.”

“I want to speak to Ed.”

“Ed won’t talk to you.”

I stormed out of Mike’s office and headed across the telemarketing floor. The argument had caused a scene. Almost everyone had stopped making phone calls, and when I passed Greg’s cubicle, I saw he was fighting to hold back his laughter. This made me smile, but I was too furious to laugh.

Ed was on the phone and motioned for me to sit down. He was the typical guy from Long Island you might see any weekday night in his shirt and tie at a strip club or a sports bar. He was balding and had a bushy mustache and a beer-drinker’s gut. He quit drinking a few years ago, but he was one of those recovering alcoholics who imposed their newfound wisdom on everyone around them. Sometimes people joked and called the company A.A. instead of A.C.A. because Ed ran the Telemarketing Department like it was a Twelve-Step program. He was constantly telling us about “our responsibility to ourselves as telemarketers” and how “what we learn at this job will reflect on the rest of our lives.” He had created a long list of rules and regulations that read like a manifesto. Besides lateness, there were penalties for drinking or eating at the workstations, cursing, making personal phone calls, and violating the dress code. Even laughing was illegal, if it reached “a disturbing volume.” I don’t think I ever saw Ed smile or tell a joke, and he rarely said anything directly to the telemarketers. We said hello when we passed each other in the hallway, but this was the first time I had ever been inside his office. The telemarketers were supposed to air their grievances to Mike because Ed was “too busy” to deal with our problems. To me, it looked like Ed was never busy at all. Sometimes I overheard him talking on the phone and his conversations were always about football or hockey or the size of some woman’s tits.

Today it sounded like he was talking to his girlfriend, or someone he wanted to be his girlfriend. I was getting impatient listening to him go on and on in that pseudo-nice voice he put on only when he was talking to women –Really? That’s very interesting. I love museums too. Which is your favorite museum in New York?– but at least it gave me a chance to calm down and figure out exactly what I wanted to say. It was comfortable in Ed’s office, a lot more comfortable than where the telemarketers worked. I was sitting in a padded vinyl chair, breathing air that must have been about twenty degrees cooler than on the telemarketing floor.

Finally, Ed hung up. I was expecting him to be upset that I had barged into his office the way I had, but he was surprisingly cordial.

“Bill Moss,” he said as though he enjoyed saying my name. “What happened to you this morning?”

At first I thought he was talking about my lateness, then I remembered the cut on my forehead.

“It’s actually the reason why I came in here,” I said. “As you can see, I had a little mishap on the subway this morning.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Did you go to a doctor?”

“I don’t think it’s that bad,” I said. “I’ll take care of it when I get home. Anyway, what I’m here about, I was late this morning – over an hour. It was the third time I was late this month and Mike wants to send me home without pay.”

Ed was looking at me closer now. He had a dazed, stumped expression. This would be the most complicated decision he made all day, I realized, and he didn’t want to blow it.

“Let me get this straight,” Ed said. “This was the third time you were late, and the other two infractions were brought to your attention?”

“Yes,” I said, “but there was an extenuating circumstance.”

“I get it,” Ed said. “You think you’re entitled to an exemption.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “I mean it’s not like I slept through my alarm clock or anything like that. I’ve already made two appointments today and I was telemarketer-of-the-month last month. I think I’m entitled to some sort of break.”

“But you understood that the rule existed?”

“Of course,” I said. “But I’ve been working here a long time, and as you can see I had an accident this morning.”

Ed continued to stare at me, in deep thought, then he stood up.

“Wait right here.”

He left the office. Through the windows, I saw him talking to Mike in Mike’s office. Mike did most of the talking and I thought he looked angry and defensive. Ed nodded his head a lot with his arms crossed in front of his chest. Then Ed left and started back toward me with his usual humorless expression.

“Well, I discussed the situation with Mike,” he said, sitting down at his desk, “and I’ve decided you’re right – he shouldn’t have sent you home without pay.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“However, I’m going to have to back up his decision.”

“What?” I said.

“Although I agree with your position,” Ed continued, “Mikeis your supervisor and if I let you stay today I’d be showing him up in front of the other employees. If you hadn’t argued with him and made such a scene, maybe we could’ve worked something out.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “You’re sending me home without pay – me, one of the best telemarketers in the office, a guy who’s already made two appointments today. You’re just going to let me walk out of here?”

“I have no choice,” Ed said. “I have to respect Mike’s decision.”

“Fine,” I said bitterly. “But if I leave here now, there’s a chance I might not come back tomorrow.”

“That’s up to you,” Ed said. “Personally, I hope you stay on with us. Obviously, I don’t know you too well, but you seem to have a degree of intelligence, at least more intelligence than most people we hire here, and I’d like to keep you on board. But if you decide to leave, I wish you luck.”

I left Ed’s office, closing the door hard behind me, but not slamming it. I went to my cubicle and gathered some papers I had in my desk. Greg came up behind me and said in a low voice:

“I told you, man. The guy’s a motherfucker, ain’t he?”

“What can I say?” I said. “You were right.”

“You outta here, man?”

“Looks that way.”

“If I don’t see you again – peace.”

“Peace,” I said.

Without saying goodbye to anyone else, I left the office.

On Eighth Avenue, a beggar in front of a triple-x video store asked me for change, a drug dealer offered me crack, a tourist asked me for directions to Times Square. I ignored everyone. My forehead hurt and the heat was unbearable. It must have been a hundred degrees already and it wasn’t twelve o’clock yet.

I thought about stopping at a phone booth and calling Julie at work and telling her about my morning, but I figured she’d still be angry at me because of our fight last night. I didn’t feel like making up with her, not yet anyway. I crossed Forty-fourth Street with a crowd of people, wondering what to do with the rest of my life.

2

Iwent tothe movies. To be honest, I can’t remember the name of the movie I saw, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. I was so busy thinking about work that I hardly remember being in the theater.

Work had always been extremely important to me. When I was six years old my father had dropped dead of a heart attack. Two months later, my mother killed herself, overdosing on sleeping pills. My parents weren’t wealthy and they didn’t have insurance policies. I had no brothers or sisters and my grandparents were dead, so I was sent to live with my father’s brother and his wife who also had a house on Bainbridge Island. My new parents didn’t have any children of their own and they always made it very clear to me that after I finished high school I’d have to fend for myself. In junior high and high school I had part-time jobs – delivering newspapers, washing dishes, mowing lawns, walking dogs – and I saved most of my money for my future. I wasn’t one of those kids who dreaded work. I preferred work to playing with my friends, and I tried to work as often and as hard as I could. The more I worked and the more money I earned, the more I felt I was protecting myself from my aloneness in the world. I never considered the possibility of not working.

It must have been about three or three-thirty when the movie let out. I wandered crosstown, still feeling depressed. August rent was coming up and I only had a few hundred dollars in the bank. I still had about ten thousand dollars in student loans to pay back from grad school and college and the credit card companies had taken away my Visa and American Express cards. I knew I had to find something fast – maybe work at a bookstore or get a job waiting tables – or making next month’s rent would be impossible.

At Fifty-first, I took the number 6 to Ninety-sixth Street. Julie and I lived on the fifth floor of a renovated walk-up onEast Ninety-fourth between First and Second Avenues. Tech­ni­cally, this was the Upper East Side, but the best parts of the neighborhood started five or six blocks downtown or westof Park Avenue. Our block was a mix of tenements and smallfactories. Some yuppies lived on our block, but there were also a lot of working-class black and Puerto Rican families. I liked the area, but Julie thought it was too dangerous, especially at night, and this had become a major conflict in our relationship. Julie always made comments about how her friends were living in such nice doorman buildings in the Seventies and Eighties, and how nice it would be to live in a place where you don’t have to walk up five flights of stairs every day. Of course I was sensitive to this, because I knew the implication was that we could be living in a better place if only I was making more money. So I would blow up, accuse Julie of resenting me because she had a higher salary, and she would say that she didn’t mean that at all, that she just didn’t feel safe in our neighborhood, and then we’d both start screaming, calling each other names, forgetting of course what the argument was about in the first place.

Julie and I had met at a laundromat on Columbus Avenue a few months after I’d moved to New York from Seattle. After two dates, we started spending practically every night together. During the first year we lived together, we were even talking about marriage. Then something happened. I guess there are an endless number of reasons why a relationship can turn sour, but with us there was one big reason – I was Catholic and Julie was Jewish. This was never an issue for me, but it was a big issue for her. My aunt and uncle had sent me to Catholic schools, but I hadn’t set foot in a church since college. Julie wasn’t religious either, but her parents were, and I always felt she secretly resented me for being what her father called ashagetz. She didn’t have to say anything specific for me to get offended; sometimes it could just be a subtle comment – “Oh, did I tell you, my friend Lori, she met this great guy Saturday night – he’s Jewish and everything.” She even asked me once if I would consider converting, but I told her that since I was basically agnostic, that would be hypocritical. She gave me one of her looks – she could look right through me – and I knew she wouldn’t bring up the subject again.

When I got out of the subway it was about five o’clock. I knew Julie wouldn’t be home from work for another hour and, feeling guilty about our fight, I decided to do something nice for her. I stopped at the Korean grocery on the corner and bought a bouquet of pink roses. I couldn’t remember exactly what we had argued about last night, but I knew it was probably my fault. I can be a pretty difficult guy to get along with sometimes, and it was amazing that Julie had the patience to put up with me at all.

I didn’t realize how exhausted I was until I’d walked up the first of the four flights of stairs. Living on the fifth floor was good exercise, I always told Julie, but the truth was I hated it as much as she did. When I got into the apartment, I immediately undressed and put on the air conditioning. The landlord had installed French doors to screen off the space near the windows and this was “the bedroom.” There was another space where we kept the couch and the T.V., and beyond that was a small kitchen and a bathroom big enough for one person at a time. The apartment would’ve been fine for a single person, but for two people, especially two people who weren’t always on the best terms, it was like living in a walk-in closet.

When Julie came home, I was sitting in front of the T.V. in my underwear, eating some pasta. She was holding a tall bag full of groceries and looked exhausted.

“My God, what a day,” she said, out of breath from the walk upstairs. She put the groceries down near the door, then went into the bedroom to get undressed. I stayed on the couch. When we first moved in together, I’d get up and give Julie a warm kiss hello whenever she came home from work, but now we were like a married couple who had been together too long to get excited about each other’s comings and goings.

Julie came out of the bedroom wearing a long T-shirt and started unpacking the groceries. Her hair was dyed blond, but not phony-blond; it looked nice, especially when she blew it dry or wore it up with a clip. She had a small, pretty face and light-brown eyes that looked green in the sunlight. She carried some extra weight on her thighs and her hips, but I thought it was sexy. I usually felt proud to be with her, especially when I saw other guys looking at her on the street. But other times – like now – I saw her as a chubby thirty-two-year-old with wrinkles under her eyes and low self-esteem who hated me for not being Jewish and I wondered what I was still doing with her.

“You wouldn’t believe what happened to me at work today,” she said. “My boss comes in and he’s like, ‘Did you mail that letter to Mr. Jacobs yesterday?’ I said I didn’t mail it to him personally, I put it in the mail room and Jose was supposed to mail it. So he starts going off on me. He’s like, ‘It’s your responsibility to make sure my mail goes out on time. I told you to mail the letter, not Jose.’ Can you believe that? Like he thinks I’m going to take the letter to the post office for him or something. Jenny told me it’s probably because he’s going through a divorce. But I don’t see why that has to be my responsibility. If he’s angry at his wife, he should take it out on her, not on me. So what do you think? Do you think I – my God, what happened to your face?”

She sat down next to me on the couch.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a little cut.”

“It looks terrible. Let mommy see the boo-boo.”

She peeled back the bandage and her eyes widened.

“Bill, that’s awful,” she said in a serious tone. “What happened? Did somebody hit you?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“You have to do something. We have to go to the emergency room.”

“I’m not going to any emergency room.”

“You have to. If you don’t do something you’ll get a scar.”

“I don’t want to talk about it, all right?”

“Fine,” she said angrily.

She went back to the kitchen and started putting away the groceries. The sports report came on the news. I watched highlights of the Yankees-Mariners game and saw Hundley hit one out for the Mets. I don’t know why I was angry at Julie, I just was. After the announcer read off the other baseball scores, I said:

“I got some flowers for you over there.”

“I saw. Thank you.”

She leaned against the refrigerator, eating a container of fat-free yogurt, while I watched the beginning ofJeopardy. Finally, she said, as if we were in the middle of the conversation:

“And I don’t understand why I have to deal with this, after I come home from a hard day at work. I’m just trying to help you and you start up again, snapping at me. And then you think it’s no big deal, that you can just give me some flowers and everything’s going to be all right. It’s not fair, Bill. We have to be able to communicate. All the books I’ve read, the showsont.v., say that’s when a relationship gets in trouble, when youcan’t talk to each other anymore. You can’t just sit there watch­ingbaseball games ont.v. when I’m trying to talk to you.”

“They weren’t games.”

“What?”

“They weren’t games, they were highlights.”

“You know what I mean, stop changing the subject. I hate when you do that. It’s like I can’t have a simple conversation with you.”

“What makes you think my day wasn’t hard?”

“I have no idea how hard or not hard your day was. You won’t talk to me about it.”

“Maybe it was so hard I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did somebody mug you? Is that how you got that cut on your face? I told you this neighborhood is terrible, but you wouldn’t believe me.”

“I wasn’t mugged.”

“Then what happened?Pleasetell me.”

The Double Jeopardy round was starting. Julie came over and muted the television.

“Who is Edward Albee?”

“What?”

“That’s the answer. Put the sound back on, you’ll see.”

Julie sat next to me, gently rubbing my back.

“What happened?”

“I got sent home from work early today,” I said.

“Oh no,” she said. “Why?”

I told her the whole story, an abbreviated version. When I finished, she looked confused.

“But what’s that have to do with the cut on your face?”

“Forget about the cut. I walked out of my job today. I’m unemployed.”

“It’s okay,” she said, holding my hand. “There’s no reason to get upset. I mean you didn’t care about that job anyway, right?”

“That’s not the point,” I said. “It was my job. It was paying rent.”

“It’s all right. I have plenty of money. I can pay the rent next month if I have to.”

“I’m not letting you pay my rent.”

“Why not? I love you. I mean we’re in love, aren’t we?”

“That’s not the point,” I said, wriggling my hand free from hers. “The point is I need money, I need a job. What am I gonna do, just hang around in this fucking apartment all day?”

“There are plenty of telemarketing jobs out there,” she said. “I’m sure you can find one like that. If not, you can always temp.”

“What is Nagasaki?”

“Are you listening to me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And then what?”

“Eventually you’ll find another ad job.”

“Eventually! I’ve waited two fucking years for eventually!”

“Don’t yell at me.”

“I’m not yelling at you!”

“You’re acting like a total baby now.”

“Oh, so now you’re gonna start calling me names?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about!”

“Lots of people lose their jobs, William. It’s just a bad time, that’s all. Besides, maybe there’s a bright side to all this. Maybe if you could get on unemployment you could use the time to blitz all the agencies again. You could spend every day, nine-to-five, looking for work.”

I went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. I wasn’t hungry, I just needed something to stare at. William, I thought. I hated it when people called me William.

“I can’t get unemployment. I wasn’t fired, remember? I quit. At least I’m going to quit tomorrow.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” Julie said. “Maybe you should just go back there tomorrow.”

“There’s no way I’m gonna go back there. To beg on my hands and knees to those assholes? Fuck that.”

“Then don’t go back,” Julie said from the couch. “I don’t understand why we have to argue about this.”

I stood motionless, staring at a carton of milk. I realized Julie was crying. I went over to the couch and sat down next to her. She buried her face in my chest, her body convulsing every couple of seconds. I wiped her tears away with my fingers.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you’re only trying to help. Stop crying, okay?”

She continued to cry and shake.

“You were yelling at me,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I was wrong.”

“Are you angry at me for something?”

“Of course not. This has nothing to do with you.”

“Then I don’t get it. And I don’t understand why you won’t tell me what happened to your face.”

“I didn’t tell you because I was embarrassed,” I said. “I was mugged on my way to work.”

“Oh my God, that’s terrible!” She sat up. “Where did it happen?”

“On the subway. Well, not on the subway, Grand Central Station, in the tunnel going to the subway. One guy hit me and the other guy took my money, just a few dollars. There were people around everywhere, but nobody helped me.”

“Did you see the guys that did it?”

“They were wearing baseball hats.”

“Shvartzas,” Julie said bitterly. “Are you sure you’re okay? Do you want to go to the emergency room?”

“I really don’t think it’s necessary,” I said. “The bleeding’s pretty much stopped. But now you can see why I got so pissed off at those assholes at work. It was bad enough getting mugged, but then getting sent home because of it! And then I had to sit there quietly while Ed went on and on about how ‘I seem to have a degree of intelligence!’ I mean I have an M.B.A., I was a V.P. at a major company, and I have to be patronized by some moron who probably barely made it through high school.”

“I know how you feel,” Julie said. “Look what happened to me at work today. It’s very frustrating when you can’t talk back to your boss.”

“No, it’s different for you,” I said. “You’re working in publishing, that’s your career. When your boss yells at you or puts you down you have to put up with it. But these guys mean nothing to me. On days like today, when they’re talking to me like that, I just feel like killing them. I’m not kidding. I actually want to murder them.”

“I think you need a drink,” Julie said. “Why don’t you open that wine Robert and Jennifer brought us?”

“I don’t want any goddamn wine!”

“All right,” Julie said. “Then forget it.”

“I’m just trying to talk to you,” I said. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Of course I –”

“You think I’m making a big deal about nothing, don’t you? You don’t see why I’m so upset.”

“Of course I know why you’re upset.”

“You think I should just go back there and ask for my job back like nothing happened. You think I’m secretly glad this all happened because I didn’t want to work there anyway. You think I want to sit home all day and do nothing like some kind of bum!”

“Bill, I honestly don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“I’m an embarrassment to you. You can’t stand all your friends married to doctors and lawyers while your boyfriend is a tele­marketer.”

“First of all, you’re not a telemarketer.”

“You’re right – I’m not a telemarketer. I’m an out-of-work telemarketer! How humiliating is that?!”

“This isn’t fair,” Julie said. “You had a bad day and I had a bad day and now you’re taking it all out on me.”

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s not discuss it anymore.”

I went back to the couch and turned up the sound on thet.v.Wheel of Fortunewas coming on.

“You can’t do that,” Julie said. “You can’t just start all this, then walk away.”

“You said you didn’t want me to take it out on you.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk.”

“The argument’s over.”

“The argument is not over. I didn’t even get a chance to say anything yet.”

Julie tried to grab the remote from me. I stiff-armed her, trying to keep her away. She fell backwards over the coffee table. The way she landed, hitting the back of her headagainst the floor, I thought she was dead, or at least seriouslyinjured. But she must have braced the fall with her arms because she sat up on her knees almost immediately.

“Jesus,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“Why did you push me?”

“I didn’t push you. At least I didn’t mean to. I just – are you okay?”

“I hate you!” she said. “I hate you so much!”

She ran into the bedroom, slamming the French doors. The glass rattled for a few seconds afterwards.

“Open the door!” I said squeezing the knob. “I want to talk to you! Come on, open up!”

For several minutes, I tried to convince her to let me in, but nothing I said worked. I must’ve said “I’m sorry” a hundred and fifty times. I felt terrible for pushing her and I decided this might be the most pathetic day of my life.

“Fine,” I said. “If you won’t talk to me now, maybe you’ll talk to me later.”

I couldn’t get my clean clothes from the bedroom, so I put on some sweats and a T-shirt I had in the closet and left the apartment. I didn’t know exactly where I was going, but I knew I had to go somewhere. Julie was right – I’d been taking my problems out on her and I resolved not to come back until I’d calmed down.

I wound up at a bar on First Avenue and Eighty-seventh Street. I’d never been to the place before, but it was dark and empty and I thought it would be a good place to get drunk. During my third glass of Bud, I was starting to feel better. Julie was right, I decided – I just needed a few drinks to calm myself down.

“Another Bud,” I said to the tired-looking barmaid.

I’d been so deep in thought, I hadn’t looked around much. I’d never been to this bar before – I hadn’t been to any bars the past few months. It was a Tuesday so the place was pretty much dead. A fat guy was playing bar basketball, and at the end of the bar two guys were hitting on these two women. I envied the guys for being single, for not having angry girlfriends waiting for them at home. I wondered if I missed being single, or if I had simply been going out with Julie for too long.

I tried to figure out if the guys were going to score with the women. One woman seemed interested in one of the guys, but the other one had turned her stool toward the bar and was trying to ignore the guy who wanted to talk to her. Definite negative body language. The first woman, the one talking to the guy, was the moreattractive of the two by far. She had long, straight brown hair and she was wearing awhite T-shirt tucked into faded blue jeans. She was probably



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