The Leading Indicators (7 page)

The man who founded ZiZi was the only other person left in the office, and like Tom, was filling boxes with leased equipment to ship back to a warehouse. He was fit and slender, slightly graying, turned out in khakis and unlaced Timberland boots such as pop stars wear, plus a plain white T-shirt that had cost him ninety dollars in a Beverly Hills boutique. Once in a while the office phone rang—someone asking if ZiZi was accepting job applications.

When the word had come from the venture capitalists about closing ZiZi, people in the office cried, or pounded their fists, or broke down. The firm's founder was blasé. He sat for a moment drumming his fingers, shrugged, then pulled a bottle of forty-year-old scotch from a desk drawer. He broke the capsule, opened the bottle and passed it around, with plastic cups. After the contents vanished, he produced another unopened bottle, that one fifty-eight years old, broke another capsule and passed more around. When Jesus turned water to wine, the wedding guests were amazed that the host had saved the best for last, rather than serving the good stuff first and then pouring cheap wine once everyone was drunk. If the host had said, “Actually, I ran out of wine, so the Son of God did me a favor by turning some rainwater into Chateau Montelena,” who would have believed that story? Most likely Jesus, too, was drunk, the kind of point they tend to skip in church.

Involved in start-ups of a dozen firms, two of which were big moneymakers and the rest busts, ZiZi's founder lived his life in economic turbulence and considered this normal. He had moved in the last twenty-five years to New York, then Atlanta, then Chicago, then New York, then Palo Alto, then Falls Church, then Waltham, then Pasadena, then Seattle, then New York, then Seattle, then Menlo Park. Thrice divorced in the process, he rarely saw any of his several children. He'd made, lost and made again his fortune, owned a magnificent twenty-meter sailboat that he called “the raft,” and kept up all support payments.

“Tom, help me with these,” he said. There were numerous boxes, each containing twenty-four unopened BlackBerrys, intended to distribute to staff that was never hired. Though the devices had to be returned, most likely they would be written off and junked as already obsolete. Up in Canada, researchers were racing to add more keys to the next-gen BlackBerry. The thirty-eight keys, plus miniature joystick, weren't enough.

“We got screwed,” Tom said, of nothing in particular.

“Luck is what it is,” the man replied. “From Wall Street and romancing investors I've known some really rich people. They insist on believing they are rich due to their hard work, inspired ideas and superhuman personal merit. That way they can think it's fair that they have far more money than they will ever know what to do with, while others cry themselves to sleep at night over a few hundred bucks. The rich man wants to believe he's rich, and the poor are poor, based solely on what each deserved. Me, I acknowledge whether you become rich or poor is at least half luck. I've had good luck. With this start-up, we had bad luck. Whether your luck is good or bad, Tom, don't think either is any reflection on you.”

He paused. “I don't like firing people, you know. And I've fired people all across the continental United States.”

“You did a good job with this company,” Tom said, aware the man was broadcasting loneliness on all known frequencies. Tom was also aware that, close to a panic state over money, he was comforting a man without a money worry in the world.

“The free market sucks but is better than the alternatives,” the man replied.

Tom said, “People should realize how much harm we're doing to our souls.”

“Should, agreed. But won't happen. The free market makes people heartless. Has to, in order to function properly. Go to any high-demographic zip code, knock on any door. The people there, even the PC ones who contribute to NPR and want to save the manatee, in their hearts all that really matters to them is they are on top. They'll pay five hundred dollars a night for a resort room without blinking, and at the same time expect the workers at the child-care centers where they leave their children to act grateful for six-fifty an hour. The folks who claim a social conscience and have it made, do they give money away? They put additions on their houses, is what they do.”

The man sealed a box with packing tape and affixed a FedEx waybill. He jotted a cell number on an elegant business card, made of expensive stock, on which was printed only his name. He handed the card to Tom, saying, “I'll head to Cambridge next week and check out biotech start-ups spinning off from MIT. Life-extension drugs are a hot play. Americans complain nonstop about their lives, and would spend anything to prolong them. The soup is terrible and such small portions, eh? If I hear of any start-ups that need a good front man, I'll let you know.”

Tom waited alone until a courier service came to pick up the boxes. The soup is terrible and such small portions—that old Vaudeville line could sum what it means to face life.

The empty office, a week before buzzing with people and hopes, suggested a stage that had been struck following the final performance of a show. As Tom was departing, a team of illegal immigrants arrived: they would work through the wee hours cleaning so the office space could be shown to potential customers in the morning. The cleaners were happy with midnight work, as this paid double-time. Some had taken great risks crossing a desert to arrive in a country where there was so much going on, offices needed to be vacated in the middle of the night. Tom drove to an extended-stay hotel that he'd need to leave in the morning.

 

Chapter 5

November 2008

Record decline in housing prices.

U.S. motor vehicle production: 8.7 million.

Economy contracts for third consecutive quarter.

T
he townhouse was nice, adequate certainly, though Margo found it unsettling to have walls that were shared with someone else. Whose were the walls?

As a college student, then as a footloose bachelorette, then in the place with Tom in Lincoln Park, she'd not only wanted her own home but come to view the detached home, framed by driveway and lawn, as symbolic of the reestablishment of the norm she knew in girlhood. Her first awareness of the world came in a house separate from other houses. When Margo became the mother of a new family of her creation, she desired the same equation of house-equals-home.

They were able to afford the rent for the second floor, so no sound of walking on the ceiling. And on the second floor, she heard less of the slamming. Car doors slammed throughout the townhouse complex at all hours. Why is it people think a car door must be slammed to close? Initially, Margo sought a logical explanation. Perhaps people arriving at two
A.M.
, rather than close their car doors quietly in consideration of others, slammed them as a way of announcing they'd worked extra-long, or been out partying, or felt angry that others slept while they weren't yet home. Eventually she realized people slam car doors for this reason: because they have brains the size of acorns.

Being on the second floor reduced the parking-area sounds but meant no deck or patio. Margo couldn't walk outside and sit reading the newspaper. There was no yard, no place of their own to toss a ball or light off smuggled fireworks on the Fourth of July. The yard and deck were a small loss—no one needs a yard. But they'd had a fabulous house and now had only an adequate townhouse. The family was going in the wrong direction.

The girls sensed there was something not right about the sudden decision to sell the sort of house they assumed every girl lived in, except for the kind of children one hears about on television. Margo and Tom told them the family was moving in order to live closer to their new school. The girls did not want a new school. It wasn't so much that they grasped the distinction between leaving private education for public. Rather, it was that they were deep into the social scene at Pinnacle Ácademy, and just getting good. Navigating that school's complex cartography of tween and teen social markers was, so far, the biggest accomplishment in life for Caroline and Megan.

Any adult would have known immediately the real cause of the move was money. But neither of the girls ever asked about the family situation with money, a topic children from all backgrounds tend to view as either distant and unimportant or very, very scary.

Before the move, Margo overheard her daughters whispering about whether Mom and Dad were getting divorced. She and Tom became excessively sunny, like actors in a dish-detergent commercial. Divorce was the nighttime dread of many kids at Pinnacle. The children from divorces were put in the middle of arguments they had nothing to do with, employed as pressure points. They could side with one parent and be scorned as disloyal by the other, or side with neither and be found insufficiently loving by both. Not a lot of attractive options there from the children's standpoint. A few at the school overcompensated by boasting about how really great it was their parents finally split up.

“The girls' room is lovely,” Lillian said. She had come over to assist in the latter phase of moving in—hanging pictures on walls, setting out tchotchkes.

“There was a fight about giving up their own rooms,” Margo said, slightly weary. “A fight about who got which bed. A fight about sharing a computer instead of one for each of them. A fight about—well, I could save time by telling you what there wasn't a fight about.”

“They'll get used to the new situation.”

“Tell them in twenty years when they will listen.”

Lillian said, “How I wish I'd had a sister to share my room with.”

Often children are told that bad things—divorces, sudden moves, sports defeats, embarrassments around friends—are happening for their own good. “It's a blessing in disguise,” among the hackneyed comments in the human phrase book, is like saying, “This tornado is a sunny day in disguise.” Margo had always disliked “It's a blessing in disguise” and all variants, such as “God works in mysterious ways,” a phrase often heard in sermons but not encountered in scripture.

In scripture, God is not mysterious, except as regards origin: there are specific, clearly enunciated divine ends, coupled to God's frustration in achieving them. To Margo, most of life's frustrations and wrong turns were bad luck or just really sucked—she was more comfortable telling the girls “This really sucks” than announcing a blessing in disguise. But she failed in being honest with them about the move, though knew she should have been. Nothing mysterious there.

At least, Margo could tell herself, she never used the alibi “Everything happens for a reason.” People said to each other “Everything happens for a reason” in order to palliate grief. But if everything happens for a reason, the world is in even worse shape than feared.

The procession of delivery trucks did not arrive at the townhouse, as had been the case at their home. But there was a plastic package on the table, ripped by a zipper line, with a pair of inexpensive casual pants for Tom—the kind that someone on the sales floor of a hardware store would wear. “Had to exchange the last one, he needs a larger waistline,” Margo said. “Most places are so good now about returns. Tom has this theory that he should only own two pairs of slacks, both from Bean's or Lands' End. Each time one wears out, he would send it back, insisting on a replacement, and wear the other till the new one came. Never have to pay for slacks again.”

Lillian remembered something she'd been told at a party, information that, at the time, seemed fantastical to her, given her naïveté about shopping culture: “I've heard of women who purchase stunning jewelry from Tiffany or thousand-dollar party dresses, wear them to an event where everyone goes ooh and ahh, then the next day return them for a refund, claiming dissatisfaction.”

Margo said, “Really!” She left out that she had done this. Though the claim of dissatisfaction was easy enough to believe.

“I was watching cable news,” Lillian said. “Today's scandal is the governor having affairs. With persons of the opposite gender. At least there's a refreshing change of pace.”

“How does anyone have time for affairs?” Margo asked. In her twenties, she wanted romance to fill her every available hour. Now she had no available hours. “My day is broken down into ten-minute intervals of work, driving and chores. Who has a period in the afternoon that isn't already accounted for? When does this governor find time to seduce?”

“I suspect politicians don't seduce,” Lillian said. “Presumably it's all arranged by the staff.”

“Still.” Margo said this in the way the word “still” can be converted via inflection into a sentence. “If someone arranged to have Will Smith waiting for me in a hotel room, my first words would be, ‘This needs to be quick.'”

“Cable showed the governor giving the mandatory tearful speech, stalwart wife by his side. Let's hope she has a percentage of the book rights,” Lillian said.

“Maybe she set her own husband up with an intern so she could get a divorce and a movie sale all in the same package. That would prove this really is the twenty-first century.”

They laughed. Margo said, “Before Tom gets home—you seem all right, are you all right?”

“Why wouldn't I be?”

“I mean, hasn't it been five years?”

“Five exactly,” Lillian said. “I'm touched you would remember the date.”

Sheepish, Margo indicated her smart phone. “I put the date in here,” she explained. Then stopped and said, “Should I not have placed something so personal and private in an electronic device?” The smart phone was efficient but callous. Diaries and notebooks are inefficient, but seem warm to the touch.

“I had a difficult time last night, knowing today would be five years,” Lillian said. “Then when I woke up I felt fine. Is it wrong for me to feel fine?”