Forgiveness Page 4

  In the background I can hear Deutze cleaning the house. She’ll stop to smoke a cigarette soon, work a while, smoke another, and so on, for another three or four hours. She’ll come again in three days. The next check I write her will bounce. If all goes well, she’ll be the one to find Carmine’s body. She’ll be the first to know.

  The Last Days of the Golden Age

  IN THE LAST WEEK before I realized I was going to lose my job, in the spring of 2002, I was meeting with a new hospital client, trying to sell the administration on upgrading their mainframe-based financial information systems with something that ran on Windows servers and a Windows application called ReadyDoc. By then news of the Enron scandal was eating into the confidence of all my clients, and I could already feel these folks, a Director of Patient Billing and a Director of Patient Financial Services, edging away from me. The name of the place was the Hospital of the Holy Virgin St. Mary in some town called St. Cloud, Minnesota, or someplace like that. I was traveling a lot in the Midwest and was not always sure which state I was in. As the senior consultant in charge of convincing people to give us business, I mostly called on new clients. We at Arthur Andersen were always anxious for more health care business, though times were getting harder and visits tougher as the Enron situation wore on.

  As an Arthur Andersen consultant I had a good bit of influence over which computer products my clients bought when they looked to upgrade their billing systems. Every hospital has to upgrade its financial systems in order to have any hope of collecting third-party reimbursement with the kind of efficiency that will keep a hospital or medical practice in business. Every hospital hires consultants to tell their staff how to do this in spite of the fact that the consultants have rarely done any real work in years whereas the hospital’s own billing staff does billing every day.

  ReadyDoc was a piece of crap that I had sold to a lot of places, after the appropriate bidding process had taken place, and after I had helped my client evaluate the proposals and found that, once again, ReadyDoc was the only answer, along with its partner software package, MediPrik, which took care of tracking laboratory tests, including results and charges, and which offered the best integrated solution for any customer considering the purchase of ReadyDoc. After we had secured this add-on, it would turn out we also needed to integrate RadiShok, to handle X-ray studies and their billings, and then PharmaCop, for the hospital’s pharmacy business. Arranging these deals required that we woo and court lots of hospital administrators and doctors, a painful process which included any number of gourmet meals at expensive restaurants. These software products were all coincidentally available from the same vendor, MushySoft Software Medical Division, where we had a lot of friends. MushySoft would sell and install the systems while we supervised the installation, helped set up planning meetings with all departments, and worked on training. With health care costs rising every year in double digits, consultants like us were riding a boom that might never end.

  At Holy Virgin we were still trying to get in the door. We were finished with the PowerPoint presentation my Bright Assistant had prepared, and were about to start the getting-to-know-you chat with the Patient Financial Services guy. We were moving out of a conference room and into the Financial Services Office when we heard on a radio at a secretary’s desk the news that Arthur Andersen’s Chief Executive Officer had resigned.

  We got through the meeting. My Bright Assistant’s name was Alix Nixon. I was supposed to be showing her the way a client call like this should go but instead we sat in the meeting stunned. We chatted uncomfortably a few minutes and the hospital said good-bye to us. We got very drunk in the airport as the Airport Network played the news over and over again, not just the news about Arthur Andersen but Enron, the whole mess.

  Within a few weeks most of the company dissolved as our clients fled to other accountants. My job abandoned me, left me stranded like a starfish in an ebbing tide.

  My last day of work fell in late May, 2002. This is what Carmine refers to as being out of work for three years. Clearly this is two years, at the most. It’s now 2004, and May is months away, so even if I say two years, I’m giving her a few months. Two years is not three years but you can’t tell Carmine. When I point this out, she says I was afraid I was going to be fired for a whole year before that, which is where the third year comes from. So, as usual, she’s right, as far as she’s concerned.

  When you are reduced to a squabble like that one, whether you have been out of work for two years or three and by whose reckoning, your life has come to a pretty sorry pass. But added to that, when you dig in your heels and refuse to back down from your side of the argument, you know that something more aggressive is really happening. The argument is only a disguise.

  We begin the argument again when she gets home. This is the night before the day on which I plan to kill her. She’s getting ready to go out to the club with her friends. We still have a club membership for the next month or so. I used to play golf there when I could show my face. I haven’t told Carmine how broke we are but she’s figuring it all out on her own. She’s about to go to the club and charge a dinner on my tab, which she knows I can’t pay, but she’s lecturing me about the work ethic.

  “You think I can’t count?” I say. “It’s March, 2004. I was let go from my job in May 2002. That’s less than two years. To get you to two years I’m being generous.”

  “What a crumb,” she says, flinging up her hands, “with your two years instead of three. Like that makes a difference.”

  “I looked hard for work. I spent weeks taking that fucking real estate course.”

  “And you lost that job within three months.”

  “I’m not a real estate person.”

  “Then why did you spend all that time in the course?”

  “To keep you off my back. With your constant, ‘It’s years you’ve been out of work, Charley, what’s the matter with you? All your friends from Arthur Andersen got good jobs.’”

  “They did,” she says, hands on her hips. She’s wearing bronze-colored push-up pants or whatever they’re called, the pants that come down about halfway the calf. The blue veins are showing in the lower part of her legs, driving her crazy. She’s blotting the veins with makeup that makes her lightly freckled skin appear oddly blurred.

  “The fuck they got good jobs. Mickelson’s working nights at the Seven-Eleven on the interstate.”

  “That’s not a Seven-Eleven, it’s a Party Pantry.”

  “Well, whatever. He’s selling cigarettes through a little slide window. You want me selling cigarettes out a depressing little slide window at the side of a store?”

  “You just don’t get it, Charley. You just don’t get it. A man works, Charley. A man brings money into the house. It’s nice when a woman can help with that but it’s a man’s job and that’s the way it is.”

  “What are you telling me, you think I don’t know this? ‘It’s a man’s job.’ Fuck you, with your ‘it’s a man’s job.’ When did you ever bring a dime into this house? Even one thin lousy dime?”

  “You are out of control, Charley.”

  “Listen to you. How dare you.” I am breathless, speechless with rage, and I sit in the chair where she’s piled her dirty clothes. She glares at me but I go on sitting. “How dare you.”

  “How dare you sit on my dresses like they’re common rags.”

  “I bought these dresses. You lousy bitch.”

  She clicks her tongue in that way that drives me crazy, that makes me want to take her by the back of the head and slam her face into a wall, that condescending click of the tongue and her hips in those bronze pants, her desperate pants trying to find some way to cling to her ass as she clip-clops out of the room, a movie star diva on an exit line.

  I follow her to the dining room.

  Framed in the window, backlit against the pool, she says, low, “I want to have a good time with my friends. Don’t try to spoil it before I even get out the door.”

  “
Which friends?”

  “What business is that of yours?”

  “You’re probably meeting that golf coach of yours. Or that guy who used to be your personal trainer back when you were going to run the marathon. Remember?”

  “Fuck you, Charley,” she says. “It was a 10k race and I could have done it if my husband had supported me the way a husband is supposed to.” She sails out the door in a full blaze of her own martyrdom. She’s unshakeable.

  At my old office in Arthur Andersen, one wall was glass and had a great view of the parking deck. The view was of the top of the deck, the edges lined with planters, a lot of English ivy growing out. I expect it was English ivy though it might have been Boston ivy. My own car was parked in another deck and I never actually saw the planters or the ivy up close. The green had a nice, planty kind of look from thirty stories up. Cars crawled around like animated toys. I stood at the window, looking down at the tiny people getting out of the tiny cars and tried to calculate the probable value of the cars that I could see, some ridiculous amount of money, maybe a million dollars right there in front of me.

  Since there was no more Bright Assistant, I had to pack my office myself. I’d stopped on the way to work to snag some boxes from behind a liquor store, and one of the boxes smelled of spilt Jack Daniels.

  My mind was still full of the useful work of my employment, and I thought with satisfaction of the dozens, nay, scores of times I had convinced hospitals to purchase not only MediPrik but even PathoDirge, our fully automated Windows-compatible pathology reporting-and-charge-capture system. Even if Arthur Andersen was crumpling like an empty circus tent, I still had the fond memories of all the clients whose lives I had thoroughly muddled over the years. I still had all that I had accomplished in the free market. I would live to consult again, there could be no doubt.

  I had no intention of telling Carmine until I absolutely had to and to this day she thinks I was actually fired two weeks later.

  But today I was walking my liquor boxes full of bits of personal memorabilia down to my car. All my company files had been seized and carted away. My computer had been absent my desk a week or longer. Even then a security guard would check my boxes as I walked them down to my Lexus.

  A few minutes ago I’d met with my boss and signed my severance agreement.

  A few minutes from now would fall my deadline for leaving the premises.

  In the Lifetime version of my divorce, there is a cut to a dream-scene in which I take up my chair as if it weighs nothing, smash it through the glass window and send it hurtling to the deck far below, into one of the planters of ivy, and I leap to join it. Or, rather, the actor, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, leaps out a window and a stunt double takes the long dive to the top of the parking deck. We follow the fall to the final moment of impact and then the camera snaps back, we realize it was all a dream.

  My boss is played by Judith Light and she’s the one who bursts in the door and sees the window smashed, the office eerily windswept, and my body flattened on the roof of a mid-size Mercedes many floors below. She walks to the window with incredible grace and looks down. A thousand emotions in the set of her eyes, the waiting. Or is that hyperbole? Do humans even experience a thousand emotions in a lifetime?

  Prelude to a recession, the fall of Enron and Arthur Andersen acts as a kind of overture to the collapse of WorldCom, to an economic slide that puts hundreds of thousands of people out of work. All this as a result of my having sold inferior software to too many hospitals nationwide. I therefore carry a general sense of being at fault for the whole mess.

  Carmine’s brother Edgar lost his job during this same recession, but in his case, he’d only held it for fourteen months. He thought a year ago he’d found his vocation as a Kinko’s shift supervisor. Now he’s looking for a lawyer to help him file a discrimination lawsuit. He says they fired him because he came to work in a kilt.

  The office still felt like mine as I closed the door. I had a flash of an image from that last meeting with Holy Virgin. The Director of Patient Billing was a pale, rouged, gaudily-scarved woman in a turquoise suit and turquoise print blouse with large turquoise buttons. She appeared to flinch every time I said the word, “MediPrik.” The memory might have made me laugh if this had not been the last time I was closing the door of my office. Marooned out of the life I thought I had been making for myself, I looked at the carpet, stained from my coffee, my muddy shoes, my flecks of skin and bits of hair. Who could be more melancholy, more forlorn? Who could move more unnoticed, more neglected, among all the other unemployed? Who could think more of himself at such a moment? Who, indeed, but me?

  Purchase

  IN THE TWO WEEKS following my departure from Arthur Andersen, while Carmine remained ignorant that I was now a no-good out-of-work bum like all the rest, I spent money like it was about to go extinct. We bought a new Capresso coffee robot even more expensive than the old one, which we gave to Annette. I got new golf clubs, a new riding lawn mower, and a new stereo for my home office. We moved our boat to a more expensive slip at the marina, one I’d been trying to get for years. I knew perfectly well I would be selling the boat pretty soon, but even then I took the more expensive space, just to have the prestige of it for a few more weeks.

  I bought a nice Gucci suit that looks like a sack on me but that looked great when I saw it on Ben Affleck.

  Carmine is never one to be outdone in the shopping arena, and when she saw what kind of mood I was in she decided to redo the kitchen and buy new furniture for the guest house, which is in back of the pool house. So we bought a bed made out of Swedish memory foam once used in a NASA program, and she shopped relentlessly for other excessively stark pieces to match the idea of the bed.

  I slept in the guest house the night I told her I had lost my job. The Swedish foam space-bed had not yet arrived, but I had the old bed with its tired innerspring mattress. Carmine was sobbing hysterically on the phone with her sister, Eileen, who lives in Brussels with her diplomatic corps husband.

  A phone sat on the night table by the bed in the guest house, but I realized with a lurch that there was nobody I could call except my children. My wife had kicked me out of my own house for the night and I had no one to talk to about it. Parents dead, God bless them both. No brothers or sisters. All my friends from work gone the way of all friends from work, especially when work was the subject of a public scandal. So I could call my son Frank and disturb him from his duties as a young banker and family man, or I could call Annette and disturb her in the precious quiet of late night, with her skinny girlfriend passed out from hunger in the next room.

  I sat on the bed, which creaked with a metallic welcome. Was this really true, was there really nobody I could call?

  Throughout this crisis I had begun drinking steadily more; I had always enjoyed alcohol too much, though I usually did my heavy drinking away from the house. Tonight, I thought, I would drink at home.

  Sneaking into the kitchen, I poured myself a stiff vodka. I fiddled with the new coffee machine for a while but still could not figure out how to turn it on. I drank the vodka.

  At the top of the stairs sounded a ringing voice. “Charley, that better not be you, bum that you are, in my kitchen. Get out of my house. Get out.”

  I waited for her heavy footfall on the carpeted step, a sound I knew well, and slipped out the back door with my drink, my ice, my bottle.

  A person’s mind forages for comfort on well-beaten paths. Even then, I was thinking that if I could only buy the perfect gift for Carmine, I could make everything right. Even with Carmine as angry as she was, with a good gift I stood a fifty-fifty chance.

  Maybe she would want a piece of jewelry. Or maybe that would seem like a reminder of our love, the taste of which went a bit sour in the mouth at the moment. At any rate, jewelry was entirely too portable.

  She hated every dress I ever bought her, even the ones she picked out, until she had exchanged them at least twice. So giving her a dress risked that we would both
forget what the gift was for by the time she found something she liked.

  In fact, it is my firm belief that Carmine hated every dress she ever bought the week after she had worn it the first time. She also had a rule about shoes, which was that I was never to buy her any.

  Maybe we could both go away on a trip together, somewhere more practical than the pilgrimage to the Holy Land she was always talking about. Neither of us had ever seen the Grand Canyon, for instance. We could explore it together, a trip west, symbolic of the need for change. People’s lives are often transformed by trips west, especially to scenic vistas like those available near the Grand Canyon. Such a fitting end to this troubled period of our lives would become possible there, the two of us reconciled in spite of our troubles, facing an uncertain future but steadfast in our devotion to one another.

  From where I was sitting I could suddenly hear her voice, and to make sure I caught every word, she’d opened the windows with her own two hands, when for twenty years it’s been, “Charley, would you get the window? You know my back.”

  Now she was screaming into the phone at the top of her lungs. “Because he is a no-good bum, Eileen. All that bullshit about being kept on to help close down the company. A pile of I don’t know what. A word I can’t say in front of our mother, who is also standing right here, looking at me like we’re both about to be homeless in the street.”

  She had an artful way of setting the scene, not only for her sister Eileen but for me and for any of the nearer neighbors who might be listening. A voice like the rasp edge of a saw.

  “What do I know whether he did anything wrong? He’s been afraid of getting fired for a year, can you believe it? A whole year of this, and now it’s really happened. Thank God we have a little savings.

  “Well, I don’t know what I thought. I thought he was just exaggerating. How would I know? Sure, he’ll find another job. What, me? What could I do? For God’s sake. Look at you, talking to me about getting a job when you never worked a day in your life. I didn’t say I was any different. I said I didn’t say I was any different. You’re upsetting Mother. She’s upset, she’s walking out of the room, she’s shaking her head. She’s shaking her head at you, not at me.