Killer Instinct

by Joseph Finder

  Now he and Susie vacationed on St. Barths with Brad and Angelina, and Susie regularly fed Katie gossip about which movie stars were secretly gay and which ones were in rehab. They had a big house in Holmby Hills and were always out to dinner with all the celebrities. And he never let me forget it.

  She got up and poured herself another cup of coffee. “Susie’s going to take Ethan around Boston—the Freedom Trail, all that.”

  “She doesn’t get it, does she? Ethan’s not into Paul Revere. Maybe the Salem Witch Museum, but I don’t think they show the real sicko stuff there that he’s into.”

  “All I ask is for you to be nice to them. You and Ethan have some sort of great chemistry, which I don’t quite understand. But I appreciate it.”

  “How come they’re staying here anyway?” I said.

  “Because she’s my sister.”

  “You know they’re just going to complain the whole time about the bathroom and the shower curtain and how the water from the shower spills out on the floor, and how we have the wrong coffeemaker and how come we don’t have any Peet’s Sumatra coffee beans—”

  “You can’t hold it against them, Jason. They’re just accustomed to a higher standard of living.”

  “Then maybe they should stay at the Four Seasons.”

  “They want to stay with us,” she said firmly.

  “I guess Craig needs to stay in touch with the little people every once in a while.”

  “Very funny.”

  I went to the cereal cabinet and surveyed its depressing, low-cal, high-fiber contents. Fiber One and Kashi Go Lean and several other grim-looking boxes of twigs and burlap strips. “Hey, honey?” I said, my back turned. “You’ve been looking at real estate?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “On the computer. I noticed you were looking at some real estate website.”

  No answer. I selected the least-disgusting-looking box, a tough choice, and reluctantly brought it to the table. In the refrigerator all we had now was skim milk. Not even one percent. I hate skim milk. Milk shouldn’t be blue. I brought the carton to the table, too.

  Kate was examining her coffee cup, stirring the coffee with a spoon, though she hadn’t added anything to it. “A girl can dream, can’t she?” she finally said in her sultry Veronica Lake voice.

  I felt bad for her, but I didn’t pursue the subject. I mean, what’s to say? She must have expected more from me when she married me.

  We met at a mutual friend’s wedding when both of us were pretty drunk. A guy I knew from DKE, my college frat, was marrying a girl who went to Exeter with Kate. Kate had been forced to leave Exeter in her junior year when her family went broke. She went to Harvard, but on financial aid. Her family tried to keep everything a secret, as WASPs do, but everyone figured out the truth eventually. There are buildings in Boston with her family name on it, and she had to suffer the humiliation of going to public school in Wellesley her last two years. (Whereas I, a boy from Worcester who was the first in his family to go to college, whose dad was a sheet-metal worker, had no idea what a private school even was until college.)

  At the wedding, we were seated next to each other, and I immediately glommed on to this hot babe. She seemed a little pretentious: a comp lit major at Harvard, read all the French feminists—in French, of course. She also definitely seemed out of my league. Maybe if we hadn’t both been drunk she wouldn’t have paid me any attention, though later she told me she thought I was the best-looking guy there, and funny, and charming, too. And who could blame her? She seemed amused by all my stories about my job—I’d just started as a sales rep at Entronics, and I wasn’t yet burned-out. She liked the fact that I was so into my work. She said that I was such a breath of fresh air, that it really set me apart from all her clove-cigarette-smoking, cynical male friends. I probably went on too much about my master plan, how much money I’d be pulling down in five years, in ten years. But she was taken by it. She said she found me more “real” than the guys she normally hung with.

  She didn’t seem to mind my dorky mistakes, the way I mistakenly drank from her water glass. She explained to me the dry-to-wet rule of table setting, with the water and wine to the right of your plate and the bread and dry things to the left. Neither did she mind that I was a lousy dancer—she found it cute, she said. On our third date, when I invited her over to my apartment, I put on Ravel’s “Bolero,” and she laughed, thought I was being ironic. What did I know? I thought “Bolero” was classic make-out music, along with Barry White.

  So I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth. Obviously Kate didn’t marry me for my money—she knew plenty of rich guys in her social circles—but I think she expected me to take care of her. She was on the rebound from an affair she’d had with one of her college professors right after she graduated, a pompous but handsome and distinguished scholar of French literature at Harvard, whom she discovered was simultaneously sleeping with two other women. She told me later that she considered me “down-to-earth” and unpretentious, the polar opposite of her three-timing, beret-wearing, silver-haired father-figure French professor. I was a charismatic business guy who was crazy about her and would make her feel safe, at least, give her the financial security she wanted. She could raise a family and do something vaguely artistic like landscape gardening or teaching literature at Emerson College. That was the deal. We’d have three kids and a big house in Newton or Brookline or Cambridge.

  The plan wasn’t for her to live in a fifteen-hundred-square-foot Colonial in the low-income part of Belmont.

  “Listen, Kate,” I finally said after a moment of silence. “I’ve got an interview with Gordy this morning.”

  Her face lit up. I hadn’t seen her smile like that in weeks. “Already? Oh, Jason. This is so great.”

  “I think Trevor has it sewed up, though.”

  “Jason, that’s just negative thinking.”

  “Realistic thinking. Trevor’s been campaigning for it. He’s been having his direct reports call Gordy and tell him how much they want Trevor to get the job.”

  “But Gordy must see through all that.”

  “Maybe. But he loves being sucked up to. Can’t get enough of it.”

  “So why don’t you do the same thing?”

  “I hate that. It’s cheesy. It’s also devious.”

  She nodded. “You don’t need to do that. Just show him how much you want the job. Want an omelet?”

  “An omelet?” Was there such thing as a tofu omelet? Probably. Tofu and scrambled eggs too, I bet. This could be nasty.

  “Yep. You need your protein. I’ll put some Canadian bacon in it. Gordy likes his guys to be meat-eaters, right?”

  9

  On the way into work I popped a CD into the dashboard slot of the rented Geo Metro. It was one of my vast collection of tapes and CDs of motivational talks by the god worshipped by all salesmen, the great motivational speaker and training guru Mark Simkins.

  I’d probably listened to this CD, Be a Winner, five hundred times. I could recite long stretches of it word for word, mimicking Mark Simkins’s emphatic, singsong voice, his nasal Midwestern accent, his bizarre, halting phraseology. He taught me never ever to use the word “cost” or “price” with a customer. It was “total investment.” Also, “contract” was a scary word; you should say “paperwork” or “agreement.” And never ask a prospect to “sign” an agreement—you “endorsed” the copies or “okayed” the agreement. But most of all he taught that you had to believe in yourself.

  Sometimes I listened to the discs just to get myself fired up, to stiffen my spine, give myself a tequila shot of confidence. It was as if Mark Simkins were my personal coach, cheering me on in the privacy of my car, and I needed all the confidence I could get for my interview with Gordy.

  By the time I got to Framingham, I was swimming in caffeine—I’d brought the extra-large travel Thermos—and totally pumped. I walked from the parking lot reciting like a mantra a couple of my favorite Mark Simkins
lines: “Believe in yourself one hundred percent, and everyone else will have no choice but to follow you.”

  And: “Expect good things to happen.”

  And: “The only thing that counts is how many times you succeed. For the more times you fail and keep trying, the more times you succeed.” That one was like a Zen koan to me. I used to repeat it over and over trying to crack its wisdom. I still wasn’t totally sure what it meant, but I repeated it to myself every time I got dinged on a sales call, and it made me feel better.

  Hey, whatever it takes.

  Gordy kept me waiting outside his office for a good twenty, twenty-five minutes. He always kept people waiting. It was a power thing, and you just got used to it. I could see him through the window, pacing back and forth with his headset on, gesticulating wildly. I sat there at an empty cubicle next to his secretary, Melanie, who’s a sweet, pretty woman, very tall, with long brown hair, a couple of years older than me. She apologized repeatedly—that seemed to be her main job description, apologizing to everyone he kept waiting—and offered to get me coffee. I said no. Any more caffeine and I’d go into orbit.

  Melanie asked me how the game went last night, and I told her how we’d won, without getting into detail about our ringer. She asked me how Kate was, and I asked her about her husband, Bob, and their three cute little kids. We made small talk for a couple of minutes until her phone started ringing.

  At close to eight-thirty, Gordy’s door opened and he came barreling through. Both of his stubby arms were extended in welcome, as if he wanted to give me a bear hug. Gordy, who looks sort of like a bear cub, only not cute, is a very huggy person. If he’s not hugging, he’s got an arm on your shoulder.

  “Steadman,” he said. “How’re you doing there, buddy?”

  “Hey, Gordy,” I said.

  “Melanie, get my buddy Steadman here some coffee, could you?”

  “Already offered, Kent,” said Melanie, turning around from her cubicle. She was the only one in the office who called him by his first name. The rest of us had largely forgotten he had a first name.

  “Water?” he said. “Coke? Scotch?” He threw his head back and brayed, a sort of open-mouth cackle.

  “Scotch on the rocks sounds good to me,” I said. “Breakfast of champions.”

  He brayed again, put his arm around my shoulder, and pulled me into the vast expanse of his office. In his floor-to-ceiling windows you could see turquoise ocean and palm trees, the waves crashing against the perfect white sand. Really a magnificent view, enough to make you forget you were in Framingham.

  Gordy sank into his ergonomic desk chair and leaned back, and I sat in the chair across from him. His desk was a ridiculously large oblong of black marble, which he kept fanatically neat. The only thing on it was a giant, thirty-inch Entronics flat-panel LCD monitor and a blue folder, which I assumed was my personnel file.

  “So, man,” he said with a long, contented sigh, “you want a promotion.”

  “I do,” I said, “and I think I’d kick ass.”

  Believe in yourself one hundred percent, and everyone else will have no choice but to follow you, I chanted silently.

  “I’ll bet you would,” he said, and there was no irony in his voice. He seemed to mean it, and that surprised me. He fixed me with his small brown eyes. Some of us in the Band of Brothers—not Trevor or Gleason, who were famous suck-ups—referred to Gordy’s eyes as “beady” or “ferretlike,” but right now they seemed warm and moist and sincere. His eyes were set deeply beneath a low, Cro-Magnon brow. He had a large head, a double chin, a ruddy face that reminded me of a glazed ham, with deep acne pits on his cheeks. His dark brown hair—another Just For Men victim, I assumed—was cut in a layered pompadour. There were times when I could imagine him as the tubby little kid in school he must have been.

  Now he hunched forward and studied my file. His lips moved a tiny bit as he read. As he flipped the pages with a stubby paw, you could see a flash of monogrammed cuff link. Everything he wore was monogrammed with a big script KG.

  There was no reason for him to be reading my file right in front of me except to rattle me. I knew that. So I repeated to myself, silently: “Expect good things to happen.”

  I looked around the office. In one corner of his office he had a golf putter in a mahogany stand next to an artificial-turf putting mat. On a shelf in his credenza was a bottle of Talisker eighteen-year-old single-malt Scotch, which he liked to brag was the only Scotch he drank. If so, he must have made a real dent in the world supply of it because he drank a lot.

  “Your annual reviews aren’t bad at all,” he said.

  From Gordy, this was a rave. “Thanks,” I said. I watched the surf crashing against the dazzling white sand, the palm trees swaying in the gentle breeze, the seagulls circling and diving into the azure water. Gordy’d had the latest Entronics QD-OLED prototype PictureScreen installed in his windows, and the resolution and colors were perfect. You could change the high-definition video loop to one of a dozen scenes, any of which was better than the view overlooking the parking lot. Gordy liked the ocean—he owned a forty-four-foot Slipstream catamaran, which he kept in the Quincy marina—so his background films were always the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Caribbean. The PictureScreen was a real breakthrough in display technology, and we owned it. It could be manufactured in any size, and the screen was flexible, could be rolled up like a poster, and there wasn’t a better, crisper picture available anywhere. Customers and potential customers who visited Gordy in his office always gasped, and not just at what a pompous jerk he was. It was strange, though, when you walked into Gordy’s office at seven or eight in the morning and saw midday Caribbean sunlight.

  “You were Salesman of the Year three years ago, Steadman,” he said. “Club four years running.” He gave a low whistle. “You like Grand Cayman?”

  The Cayman Islands was one of the trips the company sent the Salesman of the Year on. “Great diving,” I said.

  “Diving for dollars.” He tipped his head back, opened his mouth, did a silent bray.

  “I’m impressed you were able to sell UPS those self-keystoning projectors. They wanted compression technology, and we don’t do compression technology.”

  “I sold them on future compatibility.”

  “Booya,” he said, nodding.

  That was Gordy’s way of congratulating people. He was being too nice, which made me nervous. I was expecting his usual frontal assault.

  “Morgan Stanley?” he said.

  “They’ve got an RFP on the street, but they won’t talk to me. Got to be an inside job. I’m just column fodder.”

  “Sounds right,” he said. “They’re just specking the competition. Send ’em back their lousy RFP.”

  “I’m not going to make it easy for them,” I said.

  His smile twisted up at one end, making him look appropriately Mephistophelian.

  “And it looks like FedEx hasn’t delivered yet, huh?”

  “FedEx wants a bunch of LCD projectors for their logistics center, to display the weather and all that, twenty-four/seven. I demo’d it for them in Memphis.”

  “And?”

  “They’re jerking me around. They’re looking at Sony and Fujitsu and NEC and us. Doing a side-by-side shoot-out.”

  “Deciding on price point, no doubt.”

  “I’m trying to sell them on quality and reliability. Better investment in the long run, all that. I’d say we’ve got a thirty percent chance of winning it.” That was a complete hallucination.

  “That high, huh?”

  “That’s my take. I wouldn’t forecast it, though.”

  “Albertson’s fell through,” he said, with a sad shake of the head. Albertson’s is the second-largest supermarket chain in the country. They own thousands of supermarkets, drugstores, and gas stations, and they wanted to put in digital signage in a bunch of their stores. That would have meant fifteen-inch flat-panel LCD screens at every checkout lane—I guess so you wouldn’t have to re
ad the National Enquirer and then put it back in the rack—and forty-two-inch plasmas throughout the store. They were calling it a storewide “network” that would “provide our customers with relevant information and solutions during their visits to the stores.” Translation: ads. Brilliant idea—they wouldn’t even have to pay for the equipment. It was going to be installed by this middleman, a company called SignNetwork that bought and installed all this stuff in stores. The screens would run ads for Walt Disney videos and Kodak and Huggies diapers. I’d been dealing with both Albertson’s and SignNetwork, trying to sell them on the advantages of paying a bit more for quality and all that. No dice.

  “They went with NEC,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “You want to know the truth? Jim Letasky. He’s NEC’s top sales guy, and he basically owns the SignNetwork account. They don’t want to deal with any other company. They love the guy.”

  “I know Letasky.”

  “Nice guy,” I said. Unfortunately. I wished I could hate the guy, since he was stealing so much of our business, but I’d met him at the Consumer Electronics show a couple of years back, and he was great. They say people buy from people they like; after we had a drink, I was almost ready to buy a bunch of NEC plasmas from Jim Letasky.

  He fell silent again. “And Lockwood drags on like a case of the clap. You column fodder there too?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re not giving up on this one, though, right?”

  “Give up? Me?”

  He smiled. “That’s not you, is it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Let me ask you something, Steadman. Hope you don’t mind if I get too personal. You got problems in your marriage?”

  “Me?” I shook my head, flushing despite my best efforts. “We’re great.”

  “Your wife sick or something?”

  “She’s fine.” Like: What the hell?