Beauty: A Novel

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To Leslie, who begins me and ends me and is joy between.

Battle Bay

I
t could have been any factory anywhere. Carol MacLean had been shutting places down for that long. And after all these years, each place hurt more than the last. The good news was that after two more burials, this one and the next, she would finally get her own company, which was everything she could want.

Today was the Battle Bay pulp and paper mill in northern Wisconsin, and after a breath, she went into the lunchroom to deliver her news. She had come expecting to introduce herself and finish this hardest part of things in a couple minutes. Instead she pulled a metal folding chair to the wall behind the men. They couldn’t have numbered more than forty, and they didn’t begin to fill this lunchroom that had once served several shifts.

At the other end of the room, the owner stood on another folding chair. He wasn’t dressed much differently than his men, and he looked at them as if he knew them. There was nothing of practical value he could say, but he had wanted to talk to these last few, which didn’t happen all the time, and Carol had thought it was a sympathetic gesture. Then he began with “Here we are,” and was already choked up. He cared about his men, but it seemed he cared too much. Carol sat forward in her chair.

She was already alert in the usual ways. Once you came through the door, if you didn’t project authority, you knew it and the men knew it, and that made everything worse for everybody. She also reached in her pocket to check that her phone was off. When it came time for her to say what she had to say, the men should know they were all that was on her mind.

The owner said, “Most of you knew my father. But my grandfather . . .” The men shifted in their chairs. The owner said, “With your skills and dedication,” and made something like a sob.

Carol got up.

The owner said, “Excuse me. It’s an emotional day. Those of you still here, we’ve known one another, worked together, for a long time.”

Carol walked to the front of the room.

The owner said in a sorrowful whisper, “I let you down.”

Carol reached him and said, “Why don’t you let me take over?” He looked confused, and she held up a hand to help him off his chair. He took her hand and stepped down and walked to the door, and Carol climbed up on the chair in his place.

She said to the men, “Here we are. You knew it was coming. I wish I could say there might be an emergency-room deal with Baxter Blume, but there won’t. These old buildings will be teardowns when we get what we can get for what’s inside. Your owner has promised you, and set aside, two weeks’ pay; I’ll make sure that you receive it. If you have any problems, you can find me in the offices.”

They got up, and when they were up, they stood. They were the oldest and the last, and they just didn’t want to leave yet. Every man she could, she looked in the eye. Her father had been a machinist for a supplier outside Detroit. He had died at his bench because that was who he was and what he did and, finally, all he had besides his four packs a day. To the men here, Carol said, “I’m sorry,” and she meant it. In her heart she also said it to her father.

It was out of bounds for Carol to tell herself that she hurt when she closed places down and fired people, but she did, and it felt as if all of the closings and firings had piled up on top of her. One more, and she’d be out from underneath them. Instead of an undertaker she’d be a CEO. All right, she’d be a back-door CEO in some pocket-size outfit, nothing the equity partners at Baxter Blume could ever dream of wanting, but Carol had always dreamed of it.

For now, she still faced the men of Battle Bay. She said, “There’s information on the sheets outside, and your union has material for you.” She nodded to them and said, “Good luck.”

A few at first, and then all of them, turned and left, and Carol got down from her chair.

When she reached in her pants pocket to turn on her cell, it vibrated. Baxter. Neither Baxter nor Blume nor any of the rest of them ever went near a plant floor with bad news. They would not have admitted it, but Carol could tell they were frightened of the workingmen they put out of work. Carol came from workingmen and wasn’t frightened. After coming up as a parts salesman for the Best Motor Company, she had what once seemed like the best job she’d ever get, as the lowest of Baxter Blume’s executives.

Baxter’s joke was to ask how many bodyguards she needed each time she told men their jobs were history. Was it a five-bodyguard event? Five was the high. She played along because, behind the joke, Carol believed Baxter respected what she did, delivering the news, and then the slog of disposal that came afterward. Not that there really were bodyguards today or most days, though in a few places she had gotten people to watch her car for the duration.

Today she said quickly, before Baxter could get into his banter, “The next company after this is the last.” As she spoke, Carol remembered the heartbreak in the owner’s face and the emptiness in the faces of the men.

Baxter said, “I’m thinking four bodyguards. I can feel it from here.” There was laughter in his background.

Carol said, “Baxter, you told me that after my next corporate burial I’m done as an undertaker.”

“Five? Tell me you don’t need five bodyguards. Do I need to make calls for your safety?”

“One more company to bury, and then I get my own company to run. I need to hear you promise me that again.”

“Okay, Carol, okay. The next company is the last one you bury.”

“And then I get my own company to run.”

“The gears are already turning, Carol, cross my heart.”

She said, “I broke the news today without any bodyguards, but you, Baxter, you would have wanted five.”

Before she hung up, she heard someone say through the laughter, “Nobody screws with the Beast.”

Carol pocketed the phone and took a breath and moved on.

New York

W
hen Baxter saw Carol MacLean walk past his door with a
Journal
under her arm, he was not happy. Fortunately he was on the other side of his office, so she didn’t see him. Baxter had bad news for Carol, and he didn’t want to break it now, and he hadn’t thought he’d have to. Truth be told, he couldn’t. Carol was supposed to be on her way up the coast to bury a little fish-processing outfit. After which, he’d tell her.

Baxter watched her stride down the hallway. She was wearing a skirt instead of pants, and high heels that weren’t remotely high but were a statement for Carol just the same. Baxter thought he knew what the statement was. She’d come in today to make sure that, after this next burial, she would be getting her company. She wasn’t going to say so outright, he hoped. She wouldn’t want to press so hard he’d reconsider. Baxter himself wouldn’t say what he had to say either.

She looked good, relatively speaking. Whether she was dressed up or not, though, Baxter had always found her a mystifying presence. Really she was nothing but bones and angles and parchment-white skin, so thin you could see through her. She was also, what, six-one, but from a generation of women who didn’t want to be tall, which was why she almost never wore high heels. The tall ones now wore heels that put them most of the way to the ceiling, which sometimes Baxter appreciated and sometimes didn’t. Anyhow, Carol was flat chested along with everything else, not that Baxter stared at his employees. But what she did have was the great red hair she’d managed to keep all these years. That and posture. She wasn’t just erect; despite her natural and professional courtesy, she had always held her shoulders back like a wrong-side-of-the-tracks tough girl. Baxter would never entirely understand it, but taken as a whole, Carol possessed what his mother had always wished he had: character. Baxter liked Carol for it. What’s more, he’d known she was ready to run her own company for years now, and that made everything harder. He wished to hell she hadn’t come in today. Dressed up, for Christ sake.

He followed her down the hall and stepped into the copy alcove when she stopped at the large conference room, where in fact Baxter was due shortly. Both doors to the conference room were open, and he could see that the room was mostly full. Blume was in and down. Patterson sat in the corner with his numbers acolytes. The numbers wore khakis and no ties. Blume and Patterson, and Baxter, were in suits because they had a prospect on deck later.

Patterson avoided noticing Carol, but Blume turned around, and since Carol wasn’t supposed to be in today, Blume’s face registered the surprise. Baxter knew Blume would not register the heels and the skirt. Those were for Baxter. Carol dropped her
Journal
on the conference table and walked, shoulders back, toward the wall of windows facing downtown. As she went, she made a little nod to Blume. She’d always thought Blume cared about her career. No foundation in that whatever, Baxter thought. Carol was smart in many ways, but a bit dense politically. Baxter waited to figure out what she was going to do. He hoped she was going to leave and soon. He hated the fact that, by a petty agreement with Blume, he was forbidden to tell her what she deserved to know. Blume. Baxter wanted to tell her regardless, give her a better shot going forward.

Patterson’s acolytes watched her, probably wondering. Why wouldn’t they wonder? They weren’t likely to understand Carol. They were all over twenty-one, but none of them looked eighteen, which was how you looked when you had gone to good schools and were smart and lucky and had not yet gotten your nose rubbed in it like Carol. Of course, to Baxter, everybody looked younger now, which he chose to take as a measure of his own enlarged authority (not the prostate yet after all).

Remy was at the table. He had always been Carol’s team and was soon to be more. He had probably looked old the day he was born. He also had all the wrong schools for Baxter Blume. Carol had spotted him six years ago, when he was a doomed intern, and she had asked for him and gotten him. Because Carol was so seldom in town, they relied on each other and, as best Baxter could tell, had become friends.

Susannah was the only other woman in the room. Susannah was someone who made a commitment and took a position on it, a pledger who right now gave all her attention to marking out her territory on the conference room’s tabletop. Susannah tailored and displayed herself as young and smart and capable, all true. Blume had been determined to hire Susannah. She would be the first woman to have any equity participation in Baxter Blume. Carol would never have gotten equity participation, which she’d have long since guessed. Carol, God help her, had always wanted a company anyway.

Carol turned around from the windows, and Baxter moved to watch her through the surprisingly large crack between the alcove door and its frame. Carol looked to Blume, who was not going to look back. Remy, however, smiled up at her from whatever he was running. Carol wouldn’t have expected Remy at a meeting like this unless he’d told her about it ahead of time, which he had been forbidden to do. If Carol was startled to see him, however, she barely showed it. She smiled at one of the numbers who had freckles and red hair. Nice-looking kid who had no idea that Carol, alas, thought her own company was almost in reach.

But Carol wasn’t leaving anytime soon, and Baxter had to run this meeting. He stepped out around his door, and as he did, Carol started to move as if she was in fact going to leave. Too late. Everybody’d seen him. She’d seen him. She froze.

“Carol,” he said as he made his entrance, taking in all of his kingdom.

She stood waiting for him to zero in on her.

“Carol,” he said again, and sat down across the table from her. He wondered if she was nervous. She didn’t show nervous. Coming up blue collar, with nothing but an undergraduate business degree from a vo-tech school, she would’ve had to learn about a whole different order of thick skin. On the other hand, business was apparently all she’d ever wanted from the time she was four or five. Was that what she’d said? Helping delinquents in her neighborhood alley manage expenses while they made hot rods of the cars they’d stolen. All right, the “stolen” part was Baxter’s gift to a story Carol had only told once.

He let her stand there, frozen. He said, to everyone but her, “Why is Carol MacLean here?” Baxter went with full names for problems. Carol would long since have learned that. What an asshole he was. Exactly the point.

He asked his kingdom, “Shouldn’t Carol MacLean be out somewhere hitting something over the head? Shouldn’t she be digging a hole to bury the carcass?”

Believe it or not, he was doing Carol a favor. He turned back to her and said, “Get lost, Carol. Beasts do not belong in Baxter Blume’s offices.” To her credit, in Baxter’s opinion, she showed nothing.

This was ugly behavior even for Baxter. He only ground on people when they needed grinding, but Carol hadn’t needed grinding for years. Besides which, he was the one guy who never called her the Beast. He trusted she would put the pieces together. They’d scheduled a meeting when she was supposed to be on the road; they’d invited Remy to the table on his own account; Baxter himself was being, even for him, a superhuman asshole. Baxter watched Carol check the boxes.

Baxter Blume put together buyouts of two-hundred-, three-hundred-, four-hundred-million-dollar targets that had accumulated extraneous divisions. The viable divisions got reconfigured or set aside for later, and the rest got loaded with debt and Carol buried them. Which was not how she got nicknamed the Beast, but by now a lot of numbers had come and gone thinking it was, that and being tall and pale and bony and with the crazy hair not everybody admired as much as Baxter. And that spoke to the problem. Baxter was taking a break from things, or from the next fund anyway. That meant he wouldn’t be around to wave Carol’s flag, and that meant the people who didn’t get Carol could get rid of her. They could have Remy to take over the burials at a lower salary than Carol now commanded. Baxter was no longer sure that he could get Carol the company that she deserved and that he’d promised even if he was full speed around the office.

Carol smiled at Baxter. Baxter was relieved. She had received the message. Good for you, Carol, he thought. Not only did she know she was out, she was taking it like a soldier.

Carol was on her way to Massachusetts for her last burial. There would be time for her to line up a new position. Baxter would help her with that, if she ever chose to speak to him again. What’s more, Baxter knew she would do a good job on her last burial. That was Blume’s concern, that if Carol knew she was out, she’d bail on this last job, which was a horseshit concern if you knew Carol.

She walked back around the table, and when she got behind Baxter, she put the heel of her hand on his shoulder and held him down as he pretended he was going to stand.

She said, “Don’t try to get up, Baxter. We all know that’s gotten difficult for you.” And she walked from the room.

Shit, Baxter thought. If Carol understood she was out, she would know to forgo the sarcasm and concentrate on the recommendations she was going to need. Had she thought he was giving her a final exam on toughness before turning her company over to her? And was she letting him know that she was immune to any ugliness he could muster? She was dialed into her company and standing up for it. Baxter had not gotten the message across after all. He opened his mouth to say something, but what could he say?

The khaki number with freckles whispered loudly enough for her to hear, “Beast.” And before Baxter could tell him to shut up, everybody else, including Blume and Patterson, whispered loudly in chorus, well before she could have gotten past reception and out the lobby doors, “Beast, Beast, Beast.”