by Jaime Clarke
Essay #4: Amends
Dr. Hatch wanted me to call all the people I’d hurt and ask them for forgiveness. It was part of the program, Hatch said, like the essays and the journal and the writing exercises. Child molesters called their sons and daughters, adulterous husbands called their wives and said sorry. Didn’t I want to call Karine? I couldn’t make Hatch understand: I didn’t hurt anyone.
Here’s what happened: I met Karine one night at La Onda, the bar where I worked in Boca Raton, my attempt to put Jenny behind me for good. Karine hung around the bar most of that night, talking to me while I poured drinks. At first I thought she was merely friendly, or lonely. As the night wore on, I could tell that Karine was hanging around waiting for me.
“My shift’s about over,” I said to her. “You want to get out of here?”
“What do you have in mind?” she asked.
I cleaned empty glasses and wiped the bar in front of her.
“Nothing in particular,” I answered. I told Karine she could come upstairs to the apartment that came with the job and wait while I changed. She said sure, she could do that.
After showering, I came out into the front room and Karine was sitting on my couch, looking around.
“I hate to wait,” was all Karine said, but it was the way she said it that let me know she didn’t actually want to go anywhere, that what Karine really wanted was for me to give her one good time in the vacuum of the dreariness of her life.
A surge of power came over me and I sat next to Karine on the couch. She seemed even sadder when I got up close to her, but instead of feeling sorry for her, I reached out and stroked her arm. She flinched but didn’t make a move to resist, so I leaned over and kissed her hard on the lips. I could taste alcohol on her tongue, but I didn’t gag, and she put her hand on the back of my neck and forced her vodka-soaked tongue all the way into my mouth.
We sat like that for a while, until I moved to untuck her shirt. Karine helped me by wriggling a little and I lifted it off over her head. Soon we were both naked and on the floor. I crawled on top and started kissing her madly, really getting into it, until she pushed me away.
“Do you want to stop?” I asked.
She just looked at me.
“We’ll stop if you want to,” I told her, but she didn’t say a word and I put my hand back down between her legs and she started moaning again.
Just when we started to get back to where we were, I could feel Karine hesitate once more. As much as I wanted to give her what she needed, I couldn’t spend a lifetime doing it, so I quickly moved inside her. Her whole body tensed up. I was gentle. She tried to fight it, but I felt she wanted me to take control, to convince her of what she wanted. When we were through, she was in a hurry to leave and I didn’t get a chance to hold her. I guessed she didn’t need that part of it.
We Finish Nice Guys
The first thing Dale wants to know is what it’s like in rehab.
“Is it like in the movies?”
“Worse.”
Dale and I are waiting for the bartender to notice us at the crowded bar. The restaurant side is pretty empty, and we could easily get a table and have our drinks delivered, but the thought of being chained to a table for an entire meal with Dale is too intimidating, especially without Talie as point man for topics of discussion and interesting interjections.
Dale is satisfied with my answer and doesn’t need to hear any details, which surprises me. Talie’s letters to me at SRC were full of details about this “great guy” she met through a friend of hers, and since most of the guys I knew at that time weren’t “great” in any sense of the word, I secretly began to look up to Dale, or at least the ongoing composite of him drawn from Talie’s letters.
It surprised me how much something so little could mean. Somehow it pleased me to know Dale drove a blue Volvo, that Dale had his clothes dry-cleaned, that Dale took Talie out faithfully every Saturday night. Dale is in real estate in a way that’s too complicated for me or Talie or anyone we know to really understand. I imagine Dale in dark oak rooms with dim light, convincing people to buy, or sell, or to buy more, to lend him their lives.
I didn’t expect Dale to be a pretty boy when I finally did meet him, when the two of them picked me up from SRC. Obviously, Talie had told Dale about me; he seemed “ready” to meet me. I could tell he was putting the nice on a little when he shook my hand. That would have been okay—I almost expected it—but I recognized Dale right away as one of those ironic guys, dangerous because they could draw you out with sympathy and mock interest, and then leave you flapping your arms uselessly in the air.
“What are the tricks to getting attention?” Dale asks.
“Wave money,” I suggest.
Dale pup-tents a twenty and waves it at the bartender, who registers us with a side glance.
“Look at that,” Dale says as we sit. He nods at a guy approaching two women at the bar. We watch like kids in front of a TV, waiting for the shuttle to lift off, anticipating the noise and smoke and breaking apart of intentions, of ideas. “God, I’m glad I don’t have to work for it anymore,” Dale says.
“Yeah,” I agree, trying to figure out if that means Dale’s glad he found Talie, or if it means something more sinister.
“I could never really get into it,” Dale goes on, still staring. “I mean, I always felt like women knew what I was doing when I was on the make. How could they not?”
This question pretty much says it all.
“Did you say you have to go back?” I ask. It seems like a lame thing to ask, but I’m having real difficulty coming up with things to say.
“Uh, yeah,” Dale says, sips his beer. We’re both confused about this, him not remembering if he told me he had to go back to work or not, me not sure either, whatever.
There’s a pause, followed by a critical comment of someone’s appearance, followed by another drink, followed by a pause, and so on.
“Where did you say you had to go earlier?” I ask, remembering something he said on the phone.
“Oh,” he says tiredly. “I had to meet this old cocksucker friend of mine from school at Propheteers. He’s an investment banker from New York and was meeting a client there for dinner.”
I quit lobbing questions altogether as Dale leans back in his chair, liquefying.
“I’m really in love with Talie,” Dale says, nodding grandly, his head tomahawking through the fog of cigarette smoke.
“Yeah?”
Dale, swear to God, puts on his puppy dog face right there at the bar. “I can’t believe I found someone like her,” he says.
I’m thinking, Please, Christ, don’t start crying.
“Well,” I say.
“You’ve got to convince her to marry me,” Dale says, reaching out and grabbing my arm. His vise grip causes an involuntary recoil and he lets go.
“Yeah, sure,” I say. I look away from Dale and into the gaze of two women at the bar checking us out.
“You see those hooks looking at us?” Dale asks without moving.
“Yeah,” I say. “I see them.”
“I shouldn’t call them hookers,” Dale says, apologetic. “They’re not as dignified as whores.”
I notice: Hey! Dale is drunk!
“See, hookers were great.” Dale leans in. “They knew what you wanted and you knew that they knew.”
I wonder if Talie knows about this. “Didn’t you worry about diseases?” I ask.
“I did get something, once,” he says. “I gave it to my bitch girlfriend, too.”
I was hoping I wasn’t ever going to hear the man who was thinking about marrying Talie use that word.
“I mean, I didn’t have that many,” he says, guessing what I was thinking. “It just worked out.”
He sits up and smirks, satisfied.
The women are no longer looking at us.
“I know a lot of women who aren’t vultures,” I say, making what I think is my point.
“Some women aren’t,”
he agrees. “And not all men are assholes, either.”
“True,” I say.
“I mean, look at us: We’re nice guys. We’re the exception.”
Here Dale realizes he’s talking like a drunk and shakes himself, draining the alcohol from his mind.
“They’re looking again,” Dale says.
I smile, a little amused, both by the women and by Dale’s delusion that he is a nice guy. The more I think about it, the funnier it gets.
Journal #3
That’s me at the conference table with two FBI agents, the seat still warm from Teddy, who had finished his interview a few moments earlier, his last question to the agents, “Should I get a lawyer?” jangling my nerves.
The summer after my emancipation proved a watershed time. I’d enrolled in summer classes at Glendale Community College to gain a head start on those who had the advantages I never would, a plan that evaporated the moment I encountered Talie having lunch in the atrium of Scottsdale Fashion Square with an older man. My immediate thought was that Talie had found her birth grandfather, but Talie had never mentioned any sort of search for her birth family. Instead, Talie introduced her lunch companion as Jay Stanton Buckley, founder of Buckley Cosmetics.
I’d heard of Jay Stanton Buckley before his name became a regular fixture in the papers, though. Randolph College Prep boasted a Buckley Hall, the honor bestowed after Buckley donated a nice sum toward the construction of Randolph’s library. JSB also regularly placed in the top ten of the Phoenix 40, an annual compilation of the forty wealthiest and most influential businessmen (whose sons invariably attended Randolph). Certain titillating rumors about JSB reached the populace via profiles in newspapers and local magazines: that he hopped between real estate holdings by helicopter; that he kept a private plane in a hangar at Sky Harbor International; that he hired only young, staggeringly beautiful secretaries, who were collectively known as Buckley’s Angels.
I had all of this in mind when I arrived at Buckley Cosmetics for the interview Talie had arranged when I mentioned that I would never be truly emancipated without my own money.
Buckley’s offices on Camelback Road consisted of two buildings—a two-story building that housed administration (top floor) and legal (bottom floor), and a single-story building that housed accounting. An impressively clean driveway separated the buildings, the asphalt tributary running around back to the employee parking lot, each space carefully stenciled with the initials of the space’s owner. At the far end of the parking lot, a basketball hoop mingled with the fronds from a neighboring palm tree, which was undergoing pruning by the team of Tongan landscapers imported from the archipelago of South Pacific islands by JSB himself, all outfitted in turquoise polo shirts bearing the Buckley logo.
The receptionist invited me to wait in a nearby conference room, showing me to a couch in a room towering with boxes. Through the floor-to-ceiling drapes I could see men in suits sauntering through the hallways. The electronic buzz of the switchboard was nearly constant.
The conference room door clicked opened and a man in his early seventies appeared, closing the door behind him. “Hello,” he said, introducing himself as Dr. Theodore F. Weber. “You can call me Teddy.” Teddy asked me a few questions about myself, genuinely interested in the answers. Eager to talk about the job, I mentioned that Mr. Buckley had made a generous donation to my high school. “That’s the kind of man he is,” Teddy said enthusiastically. “If you come to work for us, you’ll see that for yourself. The thing is this: We all work for Mr. Buckley. He’s the captain of the team, and everything belongs to him: the bats, the balls, the playing field, everything. And we’re his team.” That was the closest we’d get to discussing the job. Instead, we diverged into the fact that Teddy had come to work for Mr. Buckley through his son-in-law, who worked at Buckley, after running a successful medical practice in Chicago. He’d moved with his wife to Scottsdale to be closer to his daughter and had magically been tapped by Mr. Buckley to head up the department of runners, the foot soldiers that were the backbone of Buckley Cosmetics.
“So when can you start?” Teddy asked.
I told him I could begin immediately.
We stood and shook hands, and like that I was Buckley Cosmetics’ newest runner, a position I learned had an amorphous set of responsibilities. There were certain absolutes: The three supply rooms, one on each floor of both buildings, were to be inventoried and restocked daily; the out-of-state lawyers fighting JSB’s various legal wars were to be shuttled to the airport on Friday afternoons and picked up again on Monday mornings; a catered lunch was to be provided daily on each floor, each entrée from a different restaurant (JSB’s theory about this was that if he catered lunch, the lawyers were less likely to disappear for hours in the afternoon); the buildings were to be opened at 7 a.m. and closed at 7 p.m. I came to understand that the largest responsibility, by far, was to be ready to be called into action should the need arise: a last-minute run to FedEx; spinning one of the family’s Mercedes through the local car wash; beating the clock at the courthouse clerk’s office with a legal filing, etc.
My first day on the job, I was certain I’d made a serious error in judgment.
“We could lose our jobs any day,” my fellow runner Trish said on my inaugural courthouse run. “We’re all just waiting to get fired. A lot of people have already quit.”
Trish’s grim prediction spooked me. I’d hoped that I’d quickly rise through the ranks to more hours and more money. More importantly, to be identified with Buckley, a brand everyone knew, would go a long way toward obliterating my anonymous past. The possibility that the opposite would happen was a disaster, and I began to wonder what I’d do if it came to pass.
I envisioned myself a foot soldier under JSB’s command.
And no job was too small.
When JSB needed someone to fetch a tie from his gleaming mansion, I volunteered, punching in the gate code, letting myself into the empty house. My worn loafers clicked against the Italian marble floor as I took in the spectacular view of Phoenix from the kitchen bay windows. I opened the refrigerator to peek at the groceries of the rich and famous, expecting the labels to be fancier, the foods richer, surprised by the inventory of everyday brands you could find in anyone’s refrigerator. I traipsed through the tastefully decorated living room (furnished with the same style and color of furniture as the Buckley offices) into the master bedroom, a room as large as the front room. I stood before the bathroom mirror and ran my fingers through my hair, marveling at my infiltration of such a nice house. I thought about how my ghostly footprints would never be known by JSB or any of the fabulous people who most certainly came through JSB’s front door, how once I stepped back out into the driveway, it would be like I’d never been here.
I finally saw Jay Stanton Buckley again the second time I paid a visit to his house, some two months after I started working at Buckley. JSB sometimes liked to walk the few miles between the office and home for exercise (shrugging off the concerns for his safety from the investors who wanted his blood, according to the papers), and so one of the runners would drive his Mercedes to his house at lunch, with a runner in a company vehicle following. As the last hire, I was never offered the lead position in this two-car caravan; but one day JSB walked home without notifying anyone, calling for his car after all of the other runners had gone home, save me and Trish. Trish had no interest in driving JSB’s Mercedes (she was afraid she’d wreck it), and so I confidently took the keys from Teddy, barely hearing his warning to be careful.
I had, to that moment, driven every car in the Buckley fleet except JSB’s Mercedes. Once every week or so, two runners would spend an entire day driving the company cars through the car wash that was a mile or so away, including the company’s twin tan Cadillac limousines, which sat like sleeping tigers in the back of the employee parking lot. But I’d never been closer to JSB’s Mercedes than walking by it on my way into the building (it was the lead position in the row of employee parking, clo
sest to the door, and directly in sight of JSB’s office window, so I rarely stopped to admire it). It was like no Mercedes I’d ever seen, and there was a rumor that it had been imported from Europe. The dark blue interior matched the custom paint job, and I had to adjust the driver’s seat to account for the difference between JSB’s 6’2” frame and my 5’11” reach. I carefully started the immaculate car, the dashboard and stereo lighting up as I surveyed the gauges and JSB’s preset radio stations. After adjusting the rearview mirror (but not the side mirrors; I couldn’t figure out how), I backed the car out of its spot and pulled into traffic, Trish behind me in the company van.
The drive up Camelback Road to JSB’s house was a short one, but I savored every mile, the Mercedes floating along the streets, banking softly with the slightest turn of the steering wheel, as if the machine were reading my mind. I eased the car into JSB’s driveway, punched in the gate code, and touched the accelerator to climb the sharp incline. My instructions were to leave the keys in the car, but I recognized my chance and strolled through the marble portico and knocked on the solid wood of the front door. Trish threw her hands in the air and shrugged, and I smiled back.
The heavy door swung open and JSB stood towering over me, beaming, his jacket and tie replaced with a polo shirt bearing the Buckley logo.
“I … I brought your car,” I said, stammering, caught without anything to say.
“Great!” JSB said. “Do you want something to drink?” He stepped back to let me in.
“Who is it?” a voice asked. A smallish, impeccably groomed woman appeared from the kitchen. “Oh, hello.”
