The Forever Year

by Lou Aronica

  I wanted to mention that I would have been able to “incorporate” things even better if I had a five-thousand-square-foot lakefront second home at my disposal as they did, but I bit it back. Another complicated thing about our relationship: I knew she earned the massive amount of money she made, but I still couldn’t help feel a little envious about it.

  “Dad was a trooper about making decisions on what to bring here,” I said instead. “And of course no one will ever be able to go into the basement again.”

  “Under the circumstances, the house looks good.”

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling that little thrill I got – decidedly involuntarily – whenever she gave me even the vaguest compliment.

  “Jesse’s got me eating Mexican food,” my father said. Denise turned to me with a look of surprise on her face.

  “Well, twice,” I said.

  My father continued. “And turkey meatloaf. Did you even know you could make meatloaf with turkey?”

  “Can’t say I’ve given it much thought, Dad.”

  My father smiled over at me as if to say that he was impressed even if Denise was unmoved.

  “So what are you working on?” he said to her.

  Denise rolled her eyes. It wasn’t clear whether it was as a prelude to her recitation about her overwhelming workload or as a way of thanking God that the subject had moved off meatloaf.

  “Ugh, a million things. When am I not working on a million things? The quarter’s winding down, I’m putting together a summit with the London office, I’ve got two people who completely aren’t cutting it . . ..”

  “Come tell me about it,” my father said, taking her by the arm and leading her back toward the den. I knew that the next half-hour at least would be a skull session between the old financial pro and his brilliant protégé. Denise would pretend to pay attention to my father’s observations, while at the same time trivializing every one of them. My father would interpret this as the pupil surpassing the teacher, but it was hard for me not to interpret it as the pupil being so full of herself that there wasn’t room for any opinion other than her own.

  Gladly choosing to skip this exchange, I walked into the living room with Marcus right behind me. Brad was hardly scintillating, but we at least had a bit we could talk about. He was a senior vice president at a corporation that included a few magazines in its holdings. As a result, he knew some of the people I worked with and we could patch together a conversation even as I cringed over his posturing as an expert on the industry.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” I said as I walked into the room. Brad had fixed himself a drink (I was surprised he even knew where the liquor cabinet was) and was sitting in an armchair looking toward a window.

  “Good, good,” he said as he glanced over at me briefly. Marcus walked up to him and he touched the boy lightly on the head. Marcus then quickly surveyed the pottery on the breakfront and left the room.

  “How’s life at Lynch these days?” I asked.

  “Fine,” he said, again making momentary eye contact. “Busy, you know.”

  “Hey, did you hear that Ken Hurley is leaving Alive to take a television gig?”

  “No, I hadn’t heard.”

  “What do you think about the management changes at American Week?”

  He shook his head and said, “They’ve been coming for a long time.”

  After each exchange, he turned back toward the window, just to make clear that he wasn’t planning to take the discussion further. I’d used my two opening gambits, meaning I was tapped out of conversation-starters with my brother-in-law. Usually, Brad had a lot more to say. I assumed he would spend an hour talking about American Week, including how he believed their problems stemmed from taking writers too seriously. As far as Brad was concerned – “all due respect” – writers had only slightly more to contribute to a magazine’s success than the clerical staff. It was all about management and the ad sales team. This time, though, he was skipping an opportunity to take an easy shot, since overpayment to writers was at least part of the reason that Week had been so unprofitable. If we weren’t going to talk about the industry, I wasn’t sure what we were going to talk about.

  After a couple of minutes of uncomfortable silence (at least it was uncomfortable for me; Brad seemed perfectly relaxed with his drink and his view of my driveway), the words “have you seen any good movies lately” were actually forming on my lips when Brad spoke, still looking out the window.

  “How much do you know about Gruenbach Communications?”

  “Didn’t they buy Hesson last year?”

  Brad offered an unamused laugh and said, “Yes, they did.”

  “I don’t know, they’re like the third or fourth largest media conglomerate in the world, they have all of those women’s service magazines and the children’s cable channel, and of course they own Chimera Studios and Chimera Records. Why?”

  “Do you know anyone over there?”

  “Well, Ted Ream records for Chimera and I always loved his stuff,” I said, joking.

  “I meant do you know someone personally over there.”

  I thought about it for a minute. “Sally Oxford, who I used to work with at Optimum, went over to Senior Woman last year. I haven’t stayed in touch with her since I don’t have many credentials for writing pieces on grandmotherhood.”

  Brad shook his head. I’m sure he was thinking, “Just another useless writer.”

  “Why?”

  He put down his drink and turned to me.

  “I have it on good authority that Gruenbach is trying to buy Lynch.”

  “Wow. That would be major news. What’s the point, though? Don’t you guys own things like and drug stores and car washes?”

  “We own no car washes,” Brad said in a voice much more animated than normal. He wasn’t usually this easy to rile. “They want the magazines. They’ll sell everything else off.”

  “Proving once again that I’ll never understand the corporate world.” I let the notion roll around in my head a bit. “So if that were the reason they were buying Lynch, they would basically need none of Lynch’s executive management.”

  “That’s what one would think.”

  “Got a good contract?”

  Brad looked at me scornfully then picked up his drink again. At least I now knew why he was less willing to lecture me on my chosen profession than usual. I felt a little sorry for him. While I never had very much respect for people whose job it was to supervise people who were supervising people who were actually doing something, I could sympathize with his fear for the future of his employment – though given Denise’s salary, he was hardly going to be panhandling anytime in the near future. When it was clear that Brad didn’t want to talk about business anymore and I couldn’t think of any way to effectively change the subject, I excused myself to check on the food.

  A little less than an hour later, we were all seated around the dining room table. My father seemed flushed from his exchange with Denise, as though he had just completed a vigorous match of racquetball. Marcus, noting that I had included paprika in the chicken dish I’d made, offered a brief dissertation on the origins of the spice and its uses in various cuisines. If ever a child needed a videogame system, it was Marcus. The thought flashed in my mind that there was probably no one in the world who called him Mark. Brad remained sullen and distracted. I would have interpreted this as smug if we hadn’t spoken earlier. I tried to imagine what he was thinking. Did he see the same energy in my father’s face after he’d had his session with Denise? Did he feel somewhat disenfranchised from it, knowing that his wife had been regaling my father with the vibrancy of her professional efforts while he himself was facing an uncertain career future? Was he wondering if my father (and by extension, the entire world) was going to see him as a hanger-on if he lost his position when Lynch was acquired and he couldn’t find another executive spot quickly?

  “You do realize that that company has been grossly overvalued for years, don’t you?”
my father said. It seemed like a non-sequitur, but it was probably a continuation of something he and Denise had been discussing earlier. “The stock is certain to tumble.”

  Denise shook her head. “It’s never that simple, Dad. When you know as much about their operations as I do, you realize there are more subtle indicators.”

  “You mean like there were with Dodd?”

  Denise picked up her salad fork to help her emphasize her point. “I never said that Dodd was going to show long-term gains.”

  “I think you called them one of the most solidly constructed companies in the entire sector.”

  Denise waved her fork in the air. “I doubt that I said it that way. And who could have anticipated that the old man was going to crash on his way out with the only risky move he made in his entire career?”

  My father laughed. “Served him right. And I’m sure it taught you a lesson, even if you don’t remember all the details.”

  “I never said anything about the long-term,” Denise said again, but with a small smile of concession. It always surprised me to see her in an exchange like this because she gave ground to absolutely no one else. I’m sure she had just spent forty minutes explaining to my father how antiquated his observations about commerce were. But he was still the only person I’d ever seen call her on her mistakes and he was certainly the only person with whom she actually seemed a bit entertained when it happened.

  I could tell that my father took special pleasure in eliciting that smile. I’m sure he cherished his position in Denise’s life and the knowledge that she would concede things to him that she conceded to no one else. It was precisely this kind of exchange that left me so envious of the relationships he had built with my siblings. I began to react to it the same way I always did: a flicker of appreciation followed by brush of melancholy. I was surprised to discover that there was a third component to my response this day, though: a flash of inclusion. For perhaps the first time in my life, I could actually relate to the feeling of being an “insider” with Mickey Sienna. Denise might have Dodd Petrochemical with my father, but I had Gina. It made it so much easier to accept Denise’s dismissal of my dinner as “bold,” and her appraisal of National Voice, the first issue to which I had contributed, as “too narrow to find a meaningful readership.”

  When dinner was over, I went into the kitchen to clean the dishes while the others went into the den. This was another family tradition I’d somehow remained outside of. My father and the other kids would talk while my mother cleaned up. When I was about six, I started helping her perform this task. She always seemed surprised when I did so, would suggest that I join the others, and then come to appreciate it as the time passed. I was in the kitchen alone for about ten minutes when Denise came in and put her hand on my shoulder.

  “So how’s Dad holding up?” she said.

  “I think he’s doing great. Why, are you concerned about something?”

  “No, not at all. He looks good. He seems relaxed. He seems to be walking more stiffly, but what are you going to do about that? If he doesn’t want to do the knee thing, he doesn’t want to do the knee thing. So he hasn’t blown anything up?”

  “We probably would have gotten around to calling you about it already if he had.”

  “Well, I can’t say that I thought this was going to work out, but I guess you guys haven’t tried to kill each other yet, so it can’t be as much of a disaster as I guessed it would be.”

  I simply smiled and returned my attention to the dishes. Obviously they escaped Denise’s notice because she didn’t offer to lend a hand.

  “And how are you doing?” she said after a minute.

  I glanced over at her. “I’m fine.”

  “You know, I’ll tell you right now Jess that if you’re worried that this is too much for you but you don’t want to ‘admit defeat,’ no one is going to give you a hard time.”

  “Really, Denise, I’m fine. I like having Dad around.”

  She shrugged, as though the notion was simply inconceivable to her.

  “Dad tells me you have a girlfriend.”

  “He mentioned that to you?”

  “For several minutes. I guess he thinks she’s pretty cute. She’s a schoolteacher?”

  “Third grade, yeah.”

  “Are you serious with her?”

  “Why is that always the next question? Would you like to know her name?”

  “I know her name already. Does that mean you aren’t serious?”

  “It means we’re not preoccupying ourselves with whether we’re serious or not.”

  “Well, that’s very sophisticated.”

  “Is it? I just thought we were being realistic. It’s nice to know it’s also refined.”

  “It is. Very postmodern. Of course, when you’re fifty-five and doing this for the twentieth time, it’ll just be pathetic, but it’s cool now.”

  She patted me on the back and walked back toward the den. Under my breath, I thanked her for her help.

  We had coffee a short while later, and not long after that the three of them left. My father and I returned to the den after saying goodbye to them. For a while, he talked about how smart Marcus was and how he was teaching the kid about P/E ratios. Then we turned on the television and watched the end of a basketball game. As the game went to commercial in the fourth quarter, my father hit the mute button on the remote and turned to me with a huge boyish grin.

  “Okay, I promised myself that I wasn’t going to say something, but I’ve got to tell you this.”

  “What?” I said, smiling because he was smiling.

  “While Denise and I were talking in here this afternoon, she pulled out her Blackberry, called her assistant, and talked to him for ten minutes. And – get this – the assistant was in her office because Denise insisted on a report being ready when she returned this evening.”

  I rolled my eyes and smiled, as much at the pleasure with which my father was telling me this as what he was telling me.

  “I’d like to say I’m surprised, Dad.”

  My father snorted. “She’s something else.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  He was still smiling when he pointed his finger at me and said, “And she has always been very good to your mother and me.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mickey knew that he had had Jesse’s full attention when he told him the first part of his story, and he knew that Jesse would have sat there listening for as much of it as Mickey was willing to tell. Mickey still didn’t feel like he could read his youngest son as well as he read his other kids, but in this instance the expression on Jesse’s face made his feelings easy to decipher. Mickey also knew that it was important that he get out the rest of the story of his life with Gina, because Jesse needed to hear it. After that first session, though, Mickey felt as though he had spent twenty hours on the trading floor of the Stock Exchange. How could it be so different to talk about Gina than it was to simply think about her all the time? Whatever the reason, Mickey could feel the effects days later and only now, more than a week after the first time he’d sat down with his son, did he feel that he had the emotional strength to continue.

  Jesse had breezed in and out of the kitchen that morning, wolfing down a bowl of cereal and mumbling something about parquet floors. The kid certainly wrote about many different things, even if most of them seemed inconsequential. Mickey had his morning conversation with Theresa, learning that the doorman in her building had suffered a heart attack and that Maggie was back from the hospital and feeling well enough to eat three pieces of the apple pie Theresa made for her. He put on the television after that, but as happened four times out of five, he couldn’t find anything that held his interest. It never ceased to mystify him that with everything that had been filmed since the moving picture was invented the sum total of worthwhile entertainment wouldn’t fill a week’s worth of television programming. He snapped the remote at the screen and sat in silence for a few minutes. Then he p
ulled himself up slowly from the couch and made his way toward Jesse’s office.

  He knocked softly on the closed door and then peeked his head in. Jesse hadn’t turned around and seemed intent on holding down the backspace button of his keyboard to erase whatever he had just written.

  “This is a bad time,” Mickey said quietly.

  Jesse lifted his finger off the key and leaned his head back without turning around. “Dad, do you know what the fascinating thing is about parquet floors?”

  Mickey took a step into the room. “What’s that?”

  “I have no idea! That’s the problem. I took this stupid fifteen-hundred-word article for practically no money and a tight deadline because I thought it would be a piece of cake, but there is nothing worth saying about parquet floors.”

  Mickey took a step back and put his hand on the doorknob. “This is a bad time.”

  Jesse swiveled his chair around. “No, I’m just having my daily crisis. What’s up?”

  Mickey took his hand off the doorknob. “I just thought, if you had a little time, that I’d tell you some more about what we were talking about last week.”

  Jesse’s eyebrows inched upward and he sat back further in his chair.

  “Yeah, definitely,” he said, signaling to Mickey to sit down. “It’s gotta be better than what I was doing in here.”

  Mickey settled into the other chair in the office. Now that he’d told Jesse what he was going to do, he wasn’t sure where to start. It wasn’t like the first time when they were sitting at the kitchen table and Jesse had no idea what was coming. There were so many things that Mickey wanted to say, but he wasn’t sure where he should go next. Without realizing it, Mickey allowed his mind to drift in a way that he never did when others were present. He was standing outside of Gina’s apartment building, her face pulling back but still so close that he could feel the warmth of her skin.

  “I didn’t kiss her on the lips that first night because it didn’t seem like the right thing, but after our second date, we kissed and my knees actually buckled. Where the hell does that come from?”