Strangers at the Feast (19 page)

Gavin shook the thought from his mind.

“So what’s the addition?” Gavin asked. His son enjoyed a game—guiding them through his maze of a house, then seeing if they could guess what was new. The last time, it had been a set of French doors leading to their sunporch. Gavin meant to beat him to the punch.

“Things are on hold right now.”

But the house looked larger, more imposing, than Gavin remembered. It reminded him of a ski lodge in Colorado they had once stayed in; he kept expecting pink-faced strangers to walk in and dust snow off their shoulders.

In the corner was a fireplace that hadn’t seen a log in years. The mantel above held a horde of trophies. “Third Place” and “Most Improved” golden plastic towers honoring his grandchildren’s bowling and spelling-bee feats.

Douglas sank into a recliner and palmed a nervous drumbeat on the armrests, distractedly looking around.

“That recliner new?”

“Nope.”

If this was a newfound humility, it pleased Gavin. The way his son had always shown off his house left him with a bad taste. At age thirty-seven, his son’s closet space alone totaled more square feet than the house Gavin had spent three decades paying off. Eleanor would return home and patter around the living room: “Did you see that picture window?
And, oh my, the wine cellar. How much do you think a thing like that costs?”

Gavin had assumed the Obervell business was pulling in decent profits. Douglas certainly worked hard enough. Whenever Eleanor called to say hello, Denise said he was at the office. But Gavin never asked Douglas about the details of his work; a man’s business was his own. And Gavin got the sense that Douglas thought the details were too complicated for an insurance man to follow. Gavin was surprised when Douglas had called in September and asked for a loan.

“What about that forty-story office tower your company just built? That was supposed to be the Obervell cash cow. Supposed to finance projects all over Fairfield County.”

“You don’t understand how these things work. There’s a natural stagnation postconstruction.”

“There is no such thing as a natural postconstruction stagnation. You cowboys all overbuilt, overspeculated.”

“The tenants will come.”

“Are they at least giving you a promotion? Your mother said that when the project went through you’d be regional manager.”

“Look, forget it.”

“How much of your own cash is in the company?”

“Dad, forget the loan!”

He sounded wound up. Maybe he had a drug or gambling habit. Maybe after all his wheeling and dealing he was on the verge of bankruptcy. The possibility depressed Gavin and he said he needed to go.

Long ago, Gavin had tried relating to his son. He took him fishing in Massachusetts where he had fished with his own father. But Douglas brought his Walkman. Every few minutes, he shook M&M’s into his palm. He didn’t like the quiet. If there was no tug on his line, he’d reel it in and pretend the rod was a sword.

His son complained about having to start the day with a cold shower.

Douglas liked hot baths. Towels the size of blankets.

For this softness, Gavin blamed Eleanor; eager for their love, she indulged the children’s every desire.

His son enjoyed crime shows and action movies. Arnold Schwarzenegger. A foreigner on steroids with a machine gun. As a boy, Douglas would jump off the deck wearing camouflage and rush the woods with a paint gun.

“I’ll be baaak.”

He smeared himself with avocado and asked to be called the Hulk.

When Douglas graduated from college, Gavin took him out for a steak dinner in New York, ordered champagne and toasted Douglas’s future. Despite their differences, Gavin saw in his son all the prospects the war had denied him. Douglas didn’t yet have to support a family; he wasn’t looking for work in a bad economy. Knowing that his son would never have to make one hundred sales calls in a day from a windowless office, Gavin felt proud. Douglas might even become a man of consequence. Gavin, who rarely drank, found himself relaxed by the champagne, more talkative than usual, regaling Douglas with stories about his own father. Gavin laid out the idea of law school, becoming a public defender; or medical school. He said there was also great dignity in being a teacher.

“Teach? I barely like to study. Besides, I took a consulting job with Ardor.”

“Consulting on what?”

“Whatever they tell me. The pay is crazy. With the bonus, I’ll rake in at least a hundred grand.”

Gavin went silent. He had never discussed his own salary with his son, but he felt a stiffening shame.

“I don’t recall asking you how much you were making.”

Douglas looked down at the remnants of his steak. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

Gavin let out a gruff laugh.

“Dad, come on. We’re here to celebrate.”

It seemed to Gavin a sad and bitter irony that after all the knocks and blows he had suffered, his son, who had the great chance to do more with his life than make money, cared only about money.

“It’s getting late,” Gavin said.

Douglas and his friends wanted to get rich and live well. They read
Fortune
and
Forbes
and never laid hands on a work of literature after graduation. Science and politics were only of interest if they affected the stock market. Within a couple of years, Douglas went from a ruddy-faced athlete to a consultant in a shiny necktie who ordered fancy vodka drinks—instructing waiters in such bewildering detail as to the configuration of his cocktail that Gavin thought his son should get behind the bar and make it himself.

So when Douglas announced he was quitting consulting to go into construction, Gavin was pleased. Helping to rebuild Stamford seemed a respectable undertaking. Gavin imagined libraries, museums, civic centers. Instead, his son spent two years building an office tower that looked like a giant icicle. A tower that now sat virtually empty. And he’d been dumb enough to throw his own money into it.

On their last visit to his house, Douglas showed Gavin and Eleanor his new shower. Spinning on the faucet, he pointed out twenty-two spray nozzles and six preset water temperatures. As Eleanor rolled up her sleeve to feel what Douglas called his “pre-bed shower temperature,” Gavin noticed a stretch of the counter crowded with men’s lotions and fancy shampoos, stuff you’d see in hotels. Antiwrinkle cream and an electric toothbrush. Built into the blue marble of the shower was a glass case with a CD player; a navy blue terry-cloth robe hung from a silver hook, Douglas’s initials embroidered in white.
DGO.
It reminded Gavin of that crap they sold in the airplane-seat pocket catalogs: electric socks and voice-operated teakettles, stuff you were amazed anyone manufactured, let alone bought.

Gavin wondered what his father would have made of Douglas’s life, the endless luxury, the shiny bulk of it all.

This thought recalled Gavin to his father’s death, to the blow it had
struck and the numbness that followed. Later, ashamed of his insurance job, Gavin had even suffered the uncomfortable recognition that he was grateful his father hadn’t lived to witness his adulthood. His father still loomed daily in his mind, causing Gavin to wonder how Douglas would feel when
he
died, how his son would remember him.

Gavin slipped Ginny’s academic journal under the sectional. He rubbed his knee:
Don’t act up
. He looked at Douglas, biting his thumbnail. For a moment he thought he saw—no, it couldn’t be—a flash of the facial tic his son had suffered as a child.

“Son, let’s see what’s left of that game.”

DOUGLAS

The Monday before Thanksgiving, Douglas had been sitting in his office when Glenn Mirsky called.

“Doug, you got any bone you can throw me?” Glenn asked. “I’ll paint doors on your building if I have to. I’ll mop the damned floors.”

Glenn had just been let go. Permit problems and sluggish cash flow had brought the Pineway Shopping Center, Glenn’s pet project, to a dead stop. He’d already lost his own investment, and now his salary. Glenn and his wife had a newborn.

“My hands are tied.” Obervell wasn’t putting a cent more into Douglas’s tower and he could barely keep himself afloat. “Glenn, try looking at this from the right angle, there—”

“Not the power-of-positive-thinking crap again, Doug. I need a paycheck, not a pep talk.” A baby whimpered in the background. “Doug, I gotta go.”

Douglas hung up and looked around his desk: a company calendar hung on the wall, November featuring a shiny photo of the forty-story, blue-glass Obervell Tower. Three grueling years to get that building up, two million of his own cash behind it, and now they couldn’t find tenants. A brass company paperweight pinned the stack of overdue invoices and legal notices. His screen saver flashed a series of Obervell projects—empty buildings, blueprints that would never see the light of day. Three offices on his floor were now empty: Kevin Henderson, Glenn Mirsky, Ray Sanchez. If they let Douglas go, that was it.

God, if only those homeowners hadn’t stalled the project for almost two years. By the time the mayor cut the ribbon that August, the economy was unraveling. If they’d built the tower according to schedule, it might have been filled, and he’d have at least made back his investment.

A photograph of his children stared back at Douglas: he’d taken it last Halloween. Laura, in princess white, stood in front of the house between her Batman and Transformer brothers. Their faces were lit with the excitement from Douglas’s announcement that he would build a pool with a waterslide in time for summer.

Douglas rattled his mouse and the screen saver vanished. Up came the MSNBC page, a series of sickening headlines about the losses at Bear Stearns, Countrywide Financial, Bank of America, Barclays, Morgan Stanley. These firms were the financial backbone of the country. If they could crumble, what next? This was worse than the tech bubble seven years earlier. He’d lost money then, but those were new ventures. Everyone knew it was a gold rush. Real estate was supposed to be solid.

Douglas felt the meatball sub he’d had for lunch burn his throat; he shook the Alka-Seltzer bottle sitting on his desk, but it was empty. Who was stealing his goddamned Alka-Seltzer? The ship was sinking
Titanic
-style when coworkers stole your antacids. Douglas pawed around his drawer until he found a box of Gas-X, then he saw—nicked and bent, covered with lint—the photo Roddy Peterson had sent: Roddy grinning beside his wife and children in front of his jet.

Douglas pulled up his Morningstar page and typed in RDRK on the NASDAQ. Shares of Roderick were trading at $98.14. Shares had already split twice since Roddy sent Douglas those thousand shares a decade earlier. By his best calculation, had he not torn them up, or if he had later paid the activation fee, with dividends, they would be worth about half a million. And how much was Roddy’s stake worth? A billion? More?

It amazed him. It sickened him with envy.

Douglas had attended his classes, graduated from college, taken a solid job with Ardor, followed all the rules—where was he now? His whole life his father had judged the way he spoke or ate, criticizing what he read or didn’t read. But Douglas had shrugged it off. He hadn’t let it hold him down. But now his wife couldn’t stand the sight of him. He’d let her down too many times. He could see it in her face. She thought he was weak, foolish. And she was right. What kind of man had he become? A man who let people walk off with his Alka-Seltzer?

Roddy said he would storm the bathroom-lock industry and he had. Douglas wasn’t storming anything. He was plugging leaks with his fingers. He was hiding, hiding from everyone.

Well, for God sakes, he’d storm things. He was a builder! He cleared wreckage and put up towers that would stand for millennia! A man had to weather adversity, use it to his advantage. Churchill, Edison, Trump. The great men in history had looked failure in the eye and pressed ahead. Roddy was a dropout, a loser, a man who let his testicles hang loose in parking lots, and look what he had done.

Douglas leapt from his chair, walked to the window, stared out at the gray stretch of downtown Stamford. In the distance, above all other buildings, his blue tower glimmered. This was his city; he was building this city. Slowly he unzipped his pants, reached in, and one by one let his testicles loose. He stood still and gazed at the hairy red globes, waiting for the primitive communion Roddy had described. He pictured Neanderthals; he pictured the Aborigines he’d seen on the Discovery Channel; he pictured men with tattooed faces spearing fish and eating them raw, men hunting barefoot through the forest. He puffed up his chest, waited for his pulse to quicken, for a surge of primal confidence, but mainly he felt the cold teeth of the zipper, the scratchy wool of his pants. Suddenly his balls itched. He went to readjust them and found his pubic hairs snagged in his zipper.

Jesus.

So he didn’t like having his balls out. Did that mean he wasn’t a man? Did that mean he couldn’t weather this crisis?

The sound of his office phone startled him. He looked at the caller ID: Denise. God, if she could see him now, what would she think? There was a time she used to finger his balls and put her mouth around them. Those first night in their new house, she’d twirl around the bedroom in negligees. While the children were sleeping she’d make hot chocolate naked. “Baby, I can’t belive this is all ours,” she’d say. But it had been months, maybe a year, since they’d had sex. She wouldn’t touch him. Yes, he’d let her down. Yes, she was working full-time at the school, but didn’t she understand what a little affection could do for a man? A little forgiveness?

Douglas felt utterly alone; his family’s survival depended on him, but he was out of ideas. He needed help, but who could help him? He found it hard to get out of bed in the morning. He felt himself, day by day, crawling toward, then almost lurching into, a dark gulf of unprecedented self-pity. After all these months, the effort of feigning confidence for his wife and children had drained him of energy, of hope.