Now it was Laura’s turn to shrug. There was something ugly about Neil’s tone. “She’s done well. I don’t know what her title is.”
Neil leaned his head back against the wall. “I’m sure she’ll run that place someday.”
Laura scrutinized him, sitting there, shirtless, cigarette smoking dangerously from his hand between the bedsheets. He looked scrawny suddenly, the bones of his ribs visible. “Neil,” she said, sitting back down beside him. “She’s still Jenny. She’s still the girl you used to know.” She hesitated, and then continued tentatively. “And she’s a good mother. Colin will have a good life.”
She expected derision—a snort of sarcastic laughter or some declaration that that was not what he was thinking about. But instead Neil blew out a long stream of smoke and looked back at her, and his eyes were both cold and hurt. “In what sense?”
Sitting there, Laura had a sudden strong desire to return to the comfort of her own orderly, unascetic house and sleeping children, even her by now surely desperate, needy dog. “Many,” she said finally. “In many senses.”
But Neil did not look convinced. Did not look, in fact, like he had even heard.
9
GALENA CALLED NEIL three times before he answered. It was funny how people still did that in the day of caller ID. She didn’t mind, maybe, that her determination was obvious. After all, she seemed to have no self-consciousness to speak of—a product of being Albanian or whatever, probably. No question: she was what someone like Johnson would call a “ballsy chick.”
The place she had suggested for a drink was predictably characterless: one of the glossy new eateries that had sprung up in the South End since Neil had been away.
Neil hunched forward in his leather jacket and fought the impulse to go back outside for a smoke. He had two barstools. That was a good thing. If he gave this up and had to drink his whiskey standing cheek-to-jowl with this crowd of done-up twenty-somethings he would just about croak. It was a great word: “croak.” Croaked. So full of comical indignity. He was already croaked, wasn’t he?
It was fifteen minutes past eight when Galena walked in wearing jeans and an unflattering, stretchy brown shirt. She scanned the crowd boldly, spotted him, and started across the room. You had to hand it to her: she was completely uninhibited by her lack of fashion sense and minimal natural beauty.
“Hi,” she said, slipping onto the stool he pushed out for her. “What are you drinking?”
“Whiskey.”
“Good.” She nodded approvingly. “Another one of those,” she said to the bartender. No please and thank you. No apology for her lateness. She perched on the stool with both feet squarely on the footrest below her and her hands clasped in her lap like a child.
She was entertaining.
He took another sip of his drink and waited for her to speak.
“So have you always worked at a game company?” she asked. “Do you like to play computer games?”
Neil laughed.
“What?”
“Nothing. Let’s just get right into it. No, this is my first time working at a game company. Yes, I guess I like to play computer games.”
“Hunh,” Galena said, looking at him appraisingly. “In Romania, where I’m from, computer games are mostly for teenagers. I mean, teenagers who have computers. Or who go to the game rooms—where they have the big video game machines.”
“Here too.” Neil shrugged. “Mostly for teenagers and losers like me.”
“No!” she said it fervently. “I did research on this. If this were true we wouldn’t be making deals with those idiots in your office. There are lots of adult men who play them too.”
“Depressed adult men, apparently,” Neil said.
“This is true,” she said cheerily, and took a hefty swig of her drink.
“It’s very American, I think,” she continued. “Adults playing games like this. In my country—no, in most countries—they sit around and drink beer and talk. Or play cards.”
“They do that here too.”
“No. Not the same way. Here they drink beer at a bar. Like this. Or a party. Not just in their backyard or living room or on the corner. It’s not the same.”
“I don’t know,” Neil said doubtfully, but the prospect of a debate with her about cultural drinking habits was unappealing. “What about you?” He turned the subject away. “Have you always been in marketing? Do you like reaching consumers?”
She gave him a curious look, but did not seem to grasp the sarcasm. “I just graduated from Harvard Business School last year. I like my job. Genron is a good place to work.”
A shadow fell over Neil at the mention of it. He would have to ask her about Jenny now. He would not be able to stop himself. “Why?” he asked, holding back for the moment.
“It’s a very important company—and the drugs I work on are really breaking new ground. Also the people are smart and the benefits are excellent.”
She sounded like catalog copy. Neil nodded and then let loose. “Do you know Jenny Callahan?”
“Jenny? Of course!” Galena’s whole face sharpened and illuminated. “Why? Do you know her? She’s my boss.”
Neil shrugged, he hoped, nonchalantly. “I used to. We were friends in college.”
Galena practically careened forward toward him. “She is an amazing person. I really think she’s incredible. All of the things you learn in B-school about managing people and making decisions, she just does it…” she gushed, and Neil downed the rest of his drink. Of course she was a fan of Jenny. She was a little mini-Jenny. And Jenny always had a retinue of sycophants.
“Are you still in touch?” Galena asked.
This stopped Neil midsip. He had blown it, it occurred to him suddenly. Now Jenny would know he was in Boston. “Not really,” he said. “Not for a few years.” But then, fuck it. He was allowed to be in Boston. It was a fucking free country. Let Jenny know he was around here. For all he knew, Laura had spilled the beans already anyway. He pushed away the thought of Laura, which threatened for a moment to bring down an avalanche of guilt.
“So you were friends in college,” Galena said, giving him another of her frankly appraising looks. The transparency of her skepticism went a ways toward defusing the gloom that threatened to overwhelm him.
“Incredible, hunh?”
“Unlikely. But college is like that, isn’t it? Everyone’s in the same milieu.”
“Did you go to college here too?”
“Penn.”
“Well, Jenny was always in her own ‘milieu,’” Neil said, flagging the bartender down and ordering two more whiskeys.
“One cider,” Galena amended, again making him smile. “Do you have Woodpecker?” She turned back to him intently. “Why? What was she like in college?”
Neil threw his head back in a posture of deep consideration, though the word had actually already popped into his mind. “Pragmatic,” he said. “She knew what she wanted when the rest of us were just bumbling around in the dark.”
“And what was that? What she wanted.”
The whiskey tasted sharp and rough on Neil’s tongue and was beginning to give him a pleasant loose feeling in his joints. “Well, for example, she wanted to try out acting one time,” he began, and felt himself warming to the role of raconteur. Galena was an avid audience. The bright café lights and buzz of chattery, dressed-up people had an air of festivity. So what if it was a bland scene? So what if it was Boston? The night was beginning to seem downright fun.
They tumbled into Galena’s apartment at two a.m., ostensibly to listen to the Romanian pop music he had forced her to describe. (“Kind of like, how do you call it, that band from the eighties with long hair, Guns N’ Roses, but more soft.”) The apartment was in one of the new luxury high-rises that had risen over the last decade—a spacious one-bedroom with floor-to-ceiling glass windows and a tiny, off-the-living-room kitchenette.
Neil settled himself on the beige carpeting and waited for Galena to load the
CD. The room was spinning slightly. It felt good to sit cross-legged on the floor and press his back against the wall. The music, when it came on, was utterly indescribable: a mix of supermarket Muzak and husky tribal-sounding singing.
He was listening to this with his eyes closed when there was the sound of a door opening and shutting; he had lost track of Galena while he listened, and he opened his eyes with a start. The sight that greeted him was no less than alarming. Galena had changed into a shiny yellow negligee and matching thong and was coming, streaking out of the bathroom toward him. She literally threw herself onto him with a kind of high-pitched screech, followed by giddy laughter, and bit his neck.
“Whoa, whoa,” Neil started to protest, but this only elicited wild laughter as she started undoing his pants.
From there what occurred was barely human. Galena pulled out his poor unsuspecting penis and proceeded to go to work on it as if it were a hamster she was teaching, roughly, to stand. And the girl had energy! The same aggressive determination she displayed when hawking SSRIs to poor unsuspecting gamers, or looking for her date at a crowded bar, she applied to the sex act. She had plans and tricks and she was, by God, going to play them out! She was not exactly grim-faced about it, but there was a look of intense concentration that came over her in the midst of tricky maneuvers that was nearly militant. He had never felt so commandeered before. It was both exciting and horrible.
It was nearly five a.m. when he left.
“Hey.” He nodded sheepishly at the doorman on his way out, hands thrust deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched. Galena was sound asleep, snoring riotously on her side of the fancy memory-foam bed.
Neil had a headache and a sinking feeling. What little he remembered of the night made him blush. And worse, gave him a pang of guilt as acute as a wave of nausea. Laura would be horrified to know of Galena. Devastated. Here she was, putting her marriage (the word itself was almost too outrageous, too horrifying, to think) on the line for him and he was dicking around with this Albanian twit! It was way too much responsibility for him. This was the problem with Laura wasn’t it? She was so fucking fragile. She was so good. And so kind and sweet and pretty. It made him want to kill himself. He couldn’t be held accountable for someone like that—fuck—it was like trusting a child with a Fabergé egg.
The street was quiet, still gray with dawn, and littered with broken bottles, papers, an abandoned shopping cart. One lone truck lumbered toward him down the avenue, metal body clanking and thundering like an angry beast.
At the corner of Boylston he was able to hail a taxi and slide into the dark cave of a backseat with relief. It smelled of cigarette smoke and faintly, under this, of bad breath. “Mind if I have a smoke?” He leaned toward the driver on his side of the scratched Plexiglas.
“You have one for me?” the man asked.
“Sure.” Neil tapped two cigarettes out of the carton and felt a pleasant sense of kinship. He rolled down the window and inhaled the satisfying combination of tar and nicotine.
Galena was crazy. That was clear. Crazy in the kind of culturally sanctioned way that would not inhibit her from career success or social acceptance. But crazy nonetheless. He would have been wise to head this whole thing off. But she was so fucking determined! It would have been like trying to fight off a pit bull. Sitting there on the tattered vinyl of the cab, he found himself smiling. You had to hand it to the girl: she knew how to get her way.
When the taxi arrived at 420 Center Street, Neil ascended the stairs to the third floor on tiptoe as if it would have been terrible to wake his sleeping neighbors, who really could not have cared less who came or went. The disaster that greeted him upon entering was no less shocking than his night had been. There was water all over the hallway floor and the P-Funk poster had slid down the wall into a colorful pool at the bottom. From the kitchen there was a gentle, almost peaceful rushing sound. Neil stood for a moment, gaping in the doorway, letting the water spread onto the dirty carpet in the foyer in a brown, soggy stain. Then he splashed along the hall to the kitchen—the heart of the mayhem. Here, the water spread in a wide fanlike pattern from a hole where the wall had simply given out. Bits of plaster lay in a soggy mess on the stovetop and across the beige linoleum. One of the dinette chairs lay on its side. The flow had clearly at some point been more powerful than it was now. Neil turned around and was tempted to simply walk out, lock the door behind him, and disappear. But he made himself go to the bedroom—wet as well, but not as impressively so—throw a few of his things from the floor onto the bed, grab his computer, and shove it in his backpack before he left.
Clearly some major artery of the building had burst and rendered his already tenuous home uninhabitable. Could there be a more apt metaphor for the general state of Neil Banks’s life?
The building would need to undergo extensive repairs, his fast-talking landlord informed him when she called him back that afternoon. They had surveyed the damage and would need to get a whole slew of specialists—plumbers, plasterers, cleaners, insulators, all practitioners of ancient underappreciated trades—to take care of the problem. “How did you not notice until morning?” she barked irritably as if the break in the ancient piping were somehow his fault. He would not be able to live there for the next two weeks. No, it was impossible even if he didn’t mind having no running water. Even if he didn’t mind the mess. Liability. He could deduct it from next month’s rent.
It would have made sense to ask Steven Closter for a couch to sleep on if Closter wasn’t such an ass. Neil had nearly come to blows with him over the living “tablet” in the game—the creature the group of geologists would discover, and which held all the secrets of enlightenment in its cells. It should be a monster, Steven had suggested. Something really terrifying and bogus. It should have three heads and be pickled in some kind of formaldehyde and look really nasty. This was all wrong. Neil had tried, at first, to put this gently. The creature had to be peaceful and alluring. It had to reflect perfection on a fantastical level. (He thought of Laura’s unicorn, but this would never fly with gamers.) Steven had been so belligerent, so snotty in his derision of Neil’s “arty” concept that Neil finally had had to give it to him straight. His monster idea was childish, clichéd, and unsophisticated. Neil would never put his name to it. The debate had ended when Joe, the breasty kid who had shown Neil around the first day, stepped into the cube in which they were arguing and offered tentatively that they should all take a smoking break.
So there was no way he was going to ask Steven Closter for a place to crash.
It was at five forty-five, with the specter of having to ask Joe to take him in, when Neil thought of Elise. He had not seen her yet. Had not looked her up or made any effort to get in touch since his arrival in Boston. But at one point they had been good friends: pot-smoking buddies with a kind of unlikely intellectual admiration for each other, to be exact. Something about the idea of putting himself in front of her, of letting her sharp gaze take him in, was intimidating: Elise’s perspective had always had a certain moral acuity. But desperate times called for desperate measures and he needed a place to stay. And dialing the number, Neil felt, actually, a kind of growing excitement about seeing himself through Elise’s eyes: being summed up.
It took no more than a call to information to track down Elise’s number, and the woman who answered the phone sounded friendly—Elise’s partner, probably. He imagined an attractive pixie-haired woman with a lot of tattoos. Elise was attractive herself in a kind of skinny, unstriking way.
“Neil Banks?” the woman asked. “Not her friend from college?”
That’s me, he had affirmed, and the woman had sounded genuinely excited, even a little giddy. I’m sure she’d love to see you, she said, before he had even asked.
Elise’s house was like something out of a movie—one of those cheery romantic comedies in which the heroine, a single mother or otherwise somehow handicapped woman, lives in the coziest, most creatively but inexpensively appointed house, w
hich stands in stark contrast to the hero’s own awful, rich, and mannishly neglected pad. The kitchen was painted a bright yellow and rosy orange. There was a bay-windowed sitting area with a love seat and a squishy, comfortable armchair. Brightly colored pots of herbs lined the windowsills, and the wall calendar—Wayne Thiebaud cake paintings—was full of jotted plans.
“Have you told Laura you’re here?” Elise asked, sitting across from him with her arms folded on the white kitchen tabletop, holding a steaming mug of mint tea.
Neil hid his face in his own steaming cauldron of tea and scalded his lips sipping it.
“It’s hot,” Elise said. “Sorry.” But she continued to wait for his answer.
“She knows,” he said, looking away.
“She does? She didn’t say anything. I just talked to her yesterday—”
“Maybe she was trying to keep it on the down-low. You know, with Jenny and all that…” It was the first time the subject of Jenny—implicitly of the baby, his baby—had come up since he had arrived. It felt, actually, relieving to mention. And like a viable excuse.
“Oh. Right.” Elise frowned more deeply. “I never understood—” She cut herself off. “Well.”
She stood up and selected an orange from the fruit bowl on the counter. “We don’t have to get into that. For the moment.” She looked at him appraisingly and then extended the orange. “Do you want one?”
Neil shook his head.
“So. Laura must be happy you’ve resurfaced. She’s always been defensive of you—I mean”—she hesitated, but in typical Elise fashion, did not look embarrassed at the slip—“defensive of your choices. Like your choice to disappear. Or drop out of that program you were in that everyone thought sounded so…promising.”
Again, at the thought of Laura and her kindness, Neil felt a searing flash of guilt. And self-hatred.
Perfect Life Page 13
