“Oh, boy,” Steven groaned. “The evil, depressed, disgruntled gamer rears his ugly head.”
“Not evil, not disgruntled,” Galena chided flirtily. “The numbers here”—she gestured at the next page, which showed a simple chart, courtesy of The New York Times—“show us that there are many people playing computer games who need some kind of psychological help. They are turning, maybe, to these games as a way to escape reality, or their own feelings. You are familiar with the DSM-IV?”
Steven shook his head and Neil nodded mutely, the specter of the baby—his baby, Colin—still looming over all else in his mind. Jenny would have pictures of the baby in her office. Glossy eight-by-tens, probably professional, for the world to see. And yet he, Neil, the biological father of this child, had never seen him. Never laid eyes on his little face.
“The DSM-IV is the diagnostic manual used by mental health clinicians to diagnose mental disorders. In more than one survey, computer gamers were more likely to fit the DSM-IV’s criteria for depression and mood disorders than their non-game-playing demographic counterparts. So this is a logical market for Setlan, which is the most commonly prescribed medication for depression, with over thirty million users in the United States alone. We think if you can integrate the medication into the gameplay in some way—”
“Ha!” Steven reared back in his chair. “Pick up some meds with that ammunition,’” he said in a fake game-show-host voice.
Galena ignored this and plowed ahead in a bulldoggish, unsmiling, and unmarketinglike way. “If you can integrate the drug into your gameplay in some way this will be worth a certain amount of advertising dollars from us because the player’s attention is guaranteed. If you integrate the drug into an in-game advertisement it will be worth a smaller amount of advertising dollars. We will be working out the particular dollar amounts with Carter and Martin”—she nodded her head toward the blond promo team—“once we see the finished product.”
“Man.” Steven shook his head. “Meds.”
“You don’t need to worry about that element,” Ulrich, or rather Martin, said smoothly. “You just worry about the creative angle and we’ll take care of the rest. Galena has brought along information to share with you…”
Neil tuned out the man’s insipid, smiling drone. It was a double whammy, really. The reminder of Jenny—of the baby—here in this previously completely irrelevant place, and now Setlan. Not only that he was completely enmeshed in the inane and unselfconscious world of computer games, but that he was now also supposed to play the creepy role of product marketer for, of all insidious things, a psychotropic drug. A drug, in fact, that he had long despised for its ubiquity and its premise: that happiness and well-adjustedness was within everyone’s reach. Was, in fact, the norm. He had truly been bought. If there had been any question, any grain of hope that perhaps his role here at ZGames was not actually corrupt, not actually a signifier of total sellout on his part, it was gone.
“Neil,” the girl, Galena, said, leveling her gaze at him. She had apparently just finished explaining the various pieces of literature now lying in front of him. “It’s Neil, is that right? You look unconvinced.”
Steven, Heidi, and Ulrich all turned to look at him.
“Unconvinced?” he asked, taken aback. The girl’s intensity was confrontational. She looked ready to spring across the table and tear his throat out, lift her face heavenward with a mouthful of flesh.
“You don’t look like you like this idea.”
“No, no,” he protested instinctively, and then shrugged. “I’m not a fan—” he began, and then reconsidered. What was the point? He wasn’t about to stage some moral battle over this. He had sold out. Period. “Doesn’t matter,” he concluded.
There was a moment of strained smiling on Heidi and Ulrich’s parts, interested spectating on Steven’s, and intent, challenging staring on Galena’s as they waited to see if he would say more.
“Well,” Heidi said finally, just as Galena opened her mouth and then shut it again, still staring at him, “why don’t you boys look this over and see what you come up with and we’ll take it from there?”
And with that cheery instruction from Heidi, the meeting was adjourned. There was smiling and hand-shaking all around. Steven, it seemed, had a basketball dialogue going with Ulrich and a condescending flirtation with Heidi.
“Excuse me a moment,” Neil could hear Galena saying to them as he made his way out the conference room double doors. And then, as he had—hoped? dreaded? was it normal to have no idea which?—she pressed out the door after him. “So you’re suspicious of pharma,” she said, somehow managing to plant herself between him and the elevator bank.
He had no choice but to meet her gaze. Glittering, sharp, slightly mocking—he knew what he would find there. It was—honestly, absurdly—the story of his life. She wanted him. For God knows what reason, or what signal he was giving off. This Albanian whip-cracker was interested.
The recognition made him tired already. He knew what would happen. He would try to walk away. God knows, he tried. But something in his trying was defunct.
8
LAURA WAS AT THE FOOT of her daughter’s pink, princess-inspired bed trying not to think of Neil.
“Will you sit with me?” Genevieve asked anxiously as soon as Laura turned out the light.
“Of course,” Laura said with a sigh, and let her head rest against the wall.
Her daughter was a fearful sleeper. Frightened of ghosts and monsters and burglars, giant tractors and rabid squirrels. For years Laura had kept up the charade of an argument over sitting with her. All the books and doctors and friends she consulted were in agreement: Genevieve had to learn to fall asleep alone. But this proved impossible without torrents of tears and screams and protests that Laura herself was not capable of withstanding, and so now she sat with Vievee, for the most part in secret. (Mac would find it ridiculous—or worse, would find it coddling, which in his book was tantamount to abuse.) She waited until Vievee’s little hands finally unclasped from the fretful fists they made around her sleepy bear, and her breath grew deep and even, and sleep overcame her body like a drug.
Laura’s compassion for her daughter was clearly on account of her own childhood memories of being left alone at night in the nether regions of the tall brick house she had grown up in. It was a narrow five-story brownstone on Beacon Hill: the house, in fact, that her father, Adam Trillian, had grown up in so many years before. It was full of ghosts—cold, disapproving ancestors and disgruntled cooks, housekeepers, and nursemaids. After her mother died, Laura had imagined her as a protector—a kind spirit from the other world who sat on her daughter’s bed and kept the others at bay. But it was not enough, always, to reassure her.
And here Adam Trillian had also been of no help. He had stocked his daughter with sophisticated reading: Steinbeck, Dickens, and the Brontë sisters when she was only ten, and Poe (why Poe for an impressionable, motherless young girl?) for her twelfth birthday. He had taken pride in her voracious reading, and boasted jokingly to friends of his daughter’s sensitivity. But as a caretaker, he was remote and oddly formal. He had been much older than Annabelle Trillian when they married, and was sixty when Laura entered her teens. He was the product of an older, more formal era, which had ill-prepared him to reassure his imaginative ten-year-old that she would not be carried off by evil spirits in her sleep.
Tonight, sitting in the dark, with Genevieve’s warm, innocent body curled up beside her, Laura’s head was full of thoughts of Neil. He had sounded so funny on the phone at lunchtime, so…distracted. And then suddenly announcing that he loved her! What did that mean? It was Neil, after all. She was not naïve enough to ascribe some usual sentiment to those words. Of course he loved her in a way—they had known each other for so long! But did he love her? Was he in love with her? Had he been for all these years? The idea made her heart beat fast with excitement. It took her by surprise—had this wish always lurked somewhere in the back of her mind? O
r was it something uniquely here and now—an alignment of circumstances and trajectories that had given birth to some completely new electricity? Honestly, she did not know. But no matter what, she had to be careful. She knew Neil well enough to know that.
When he had called her after work, his tone had been inscrutable. Mac was out of town, she had volunteered shyly. And Kaaren was there all night. Should she—? Would he want—? She could come over…This had been left inconclusive. Did he pine for her touch the way she pined for his? The patch of skin on her neck that he had passed over still prickled and thrilled when she thought of this.
Finally Genevieve was asleep. Laura maneuvered herself gingerly off the bed. She stood for a moment in the hallway, thinking, until Cocoa, fearless Cocoa, back from the country (otherwise known as Mac’s sister’s place on the Cape—a haven Laura took every opportunity to ship the manic dog off to), frisked toward her down the hall. Laura bent absently to pat her and Cocoa licked her face and breathed hot dog-food breath into her ear.
She would take her out, Laura decided. It would give her time to think, to clear her head. Downstairs she pulled on a cardigan—it was still chilly after dark these days—and let herself out.
The night was damp and fragrant with the smell of lilacs, which grew lustily along the peeling garden wall. They were Laura’s favorite flower and she stood for a moment appreciating the fact that she had inherited such a healthy, blooming old world garden from the previous owners of her house. She’d barely had to lift a finger to enjoy such luxuries as delicate, blossoming mock orange bushes, white climbing roses, clematis, and, of course, the lilacs, which were profuse and widely admired. This was the kind of neighborhood in which people admired lilacs. Distinguished elderly couples walked by after dinner to see them, and neighbors asked what sort of fertilizer she fed them, and who did the pruning, smugly aware of the quaintness of their conversation. This was exactly the sort of thing that drove Mac crazy about Cambridge—he had wanted to buy a newer place somewhere less fusty, like Weston or Chestnut Hill, but Laura had fallen in love with the house on Fayerweather Street, and while in most of their life decisions she was quite pliable, in this she had stood fast.
And so the house, with its odd, painted sandstone façade, and long, elegant shuttered windows, became hers. It was so serene and peaceful, with its flat, pinkish-beige-painted stone front, its slate roof, its crumbly, English-looking garden wall.
“It’s like you,” Elise had said when Laura had first taken her by to see it. “If you were a house, this would be you.”
“How do you mean?” Laura had asked, although she understood it was true.
“I don’t know.” Elise had shrugged matter-of-factly. “Beautiful, but a little sad.”
The neighborhood was quintessential old Cambridge: liberal, disheveled, and discreet. Boring, Mac pronounced. And he was right. But Laura liked this about it. There was a sense of moderation inherent in the beautiful, expensive old houses, with their minimally landscaped yards and well-made but neglected fencing. There was something commendable, if contrived, about the frumpy L. L. Bean style of the rich people who lived there: elsewhere, their economic counterparts would be wearing Hermès and Chanel, driving Lexuses, renting shares in private jets, but here they drove their Volvos and flew commercial. It was an assertion of values, which, however righteous, Laura could respect. “Hypocrites,” Mac would say as he watched them unload their paper bags of overpriced groceries from the local gourmet shop, but Laura didn’t mind. What was hypocritical about spending money on food rather than bling?
Tonight the pavement was wet from the light rain and Cocoa pulled sharply at her leash, hot on the trail of fresh and interesting city smells. The streetlights threw misty pools of light, buzzing with the first intrepid insects of the season. Should she go to Neil’s? Would he want her to? More importantly—she reminded herself—did she want to? It wasn’t just some game they were playing, after all. It was an Affair. It was the deepest, darkest form of deception and emotional calumny a person could perpetrate within a marriage. Within a family. The thought of family—her girls, sweet, sleeping girls—laid a tentacle of cold and slippery panic on her shoulder. She shook it off, sped her footsteps, tugged violently on Cocoa’s leash. The dog yelped indignantly and tore her nose away from the stinking pile of shit she had been absorbedly snuffing. No, Laura would not think about this right now. She would not stop and consider.
And so back at home she found herself dialing the number from her cell phone, her heart beating madly, the glass of bourbon she had poured joggling slightly in rhythm with each thundering heartbeat.
“Lo?” Neil said, and she blurted it out without even really hearing him. Certainly without trying to read his tone.
“Kaaren?” she asked moments later, rapping lightly on the au pair’s bedroom door. “I have to go out for a bit.” She had not even stopped to think of an excuse and felt her face coloring. “Just wanted you to know in case, you know, something is wrong. I have my cell phone.”
The door opened and Kaaren’s stern Scandinavian face appeared in the crack. Kaaren was a good person, a perfectly fine, relatively unobtrusive, responsible young woman, but for some reason Laura had not managed to establish a comfortable rapport with her. Maybe it was her seriousness. Or her general air of reproof. (In Denmark, it seemed, people were much more efficient and less frivolous—more direct and unhampered by demonstrations of humor or politeness.) She almost never smiled.
“You want me to do something?” Kaaren asked bluntly.
“Oh, no, no,” Laura protested. “Just wanted you to know—you know, in case. I mean, maybe if you leave your door open a crack in case one of them wakes up. But they won’t—they were so tired.”
“Okay.” Kaaren continued to look at her expectantly.
“Just drinks with a friend. Having a hard time. Her husband…” Laura made a vague gesture and rolled her eyes as she began to back toward the steps.
“Ah,” Kaaren said. “Okay.”
And then, feeling guilt creeping up again, Laura ducked down the stairs and grabbed her keys, her wallet, and, at the last moment, a newer, sexier pair of underwear that she shimmied into under her skirt.
It was later, lying on Neil’s bed, flat on her back, breathless, that she realized she had forgotten to feed Cocoa.
“Shit,” she said aloud.
“What?” Neil rolled onto his side next to her.
“I forgot to feed the dog.”
“You have a dog?”
Laura nodded. “She’s a pain in the ass.”
Neil rolled onto his back and laughed.
“What?”
“Just that this”—he waved his arm to encompass the scene in general—“seems to be bookended by hungry dogs.”
“Hm.” Laura sat up. “Is that good or bad?”
“I don’t know—hungry dogs, going to the dogs, getting dogged—doesn’t seem too auspicious.”
Laura shifted on her hip to look down at him. “That’s not funny.”
“Biting the hand that feeds, let sleeping dogs—”
“Neil!”
“I’m sorry. It’s just, as a metaphor—”
“Well, it’s not a metaphor. It’s just a”—she groped—“circumstance.”
“Un-hunh.”
“What? It’s no more a metaphor than, say, the weather. Which has been fine. Or, like, the parking. Which has actually been easy. Surprisingly easy.” She pushed her hair out of her face. “Do you always do that? Look for metaphors in everything?”
“Not voluntarily.”
“What was that program you dropped out of? Rhetoric?”
Neil groaned.
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry.” She put a hand on his belly and gave it a pat. His skin was smooth and dry and warm.
Neil wrapped a hand around her wrist and pulled her down, laughing.
“You like to be gloomy,” she said.
“Is that news?” Neil managed to spin her around and lie on top
of her now, nuzzling her neck. “You knew what you were getting into.”
“I did?” Laura said into his hair, feeling—what was it?—a hint of foreboding?
Pulling up her skirt sometime later, snapping her bra, preparing to go home, Laura was reminded of this again. It was nearly one a.m. She hoped Kaaren and the girls were sound asleep. And off in his hotel room in Louisville…She didn’t finish the thought. A wave of anxiety welled up in her.
“What is Jenny’s job now?” Neil asked, apropos of nothing.
“Jenny? Marketing. At Genron—it’s a—”
“I know. A pharmaceutical company. I mean, what exactly? Is she still a product manager for that heart-disease drug she was in charge of when she paid her visit to me?”
“Oh, no. She’s been promoted. She works on coming up with new drugs now. And Setlan.”
“Fuck me,” Neil said with real force, and Laura turned to look at him.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said, then sighed, and sank back against the pillows now propped up against the wall. He reached for his pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and lit it. The dirty smell of cigarette smoke filled the room.
“Why ‘fuck me’ then?” she asked.
“Ha.” Neil gave a bitter and humorless snort of laughter. “Just figures she’d be pushing that shit. I should’ve seen it coming.”
Laura frowned and began buttoning her blouse. “I get it—you’re anti-antidepressants.”
Neil looked up at her in surprise and then shrugged insolently. “No, I mean, whatever floats your boat, I guess. Just as a cultural force—as an arbiter of normalcy—” He broke off, taking a long drag on his cigarette. “So she’s a big shot now? At Genron?”
Perfect Life Page 12
