Alberto. What a wimp. And Vic had had such high hopes for him.
On June 8 he’d watched baby Alberto hatch in the western Caribbean, held his breath as the baby burst out of his red egg, causing a colorful disturbance on Vic’s computer screen as he crawled slowly northwest, fed by sweet winds. By June 10, toddling around Cuba, Alberto had blossomed into a tropical depression, and his predicted path was smack-dab into Florida’s Gulf Coast. When he read this forecast, Vic, down in his basement closet, silently raised his fist in celebration.
Vic’s boy wobbled in the Yucatán Channel—increased wind shear—but he hung tough. On June 11, a red-letter day, he intensified into Tropical Storm Alberto, and Floridians started paying him the attention he deserved. It was hard for Vic to discuss the lad with family and friends and not sound gleeful. And then, praise be, on June 12, the NHC predicted that Alberto would attain hurricane status before he made landfall—in the Big Bend, the armpit of Florida, near Tallahassee! Vic celebrated by having three beers after dinner. But, alas, on June 13, Alberto, weakened due to an infusion of dry air, came straggling ashore fifty miles southeast of Tallahassee, near St. Marks. He remained just a run-of-the mill storm—undernourished and undistinguished.
Yeah, sure, there was flooding, storm surge, downed trees, power outages, and Alberto fathered a few impotent tornadoes; but all in all, he turned out to be a disappointment, an underachiever, a failure. Utterly forgettable.
Meanwhile, there was the rest of his life, which at that time was the portfolio project. Vic’s other baby.
The portfolios included samples of each student’s work in the subjects they took—lab write-ups, essays, the solutions to story problems, the whole shebang. Scoring them was a bitch, and it was Vic’s job to try to figure out how to train people to do that scoring as fast and accurately as possible. Otherwise, students (and ultimately their teachers and their schools) would be assessed on the basis of nothing other than standardized tests.
Portfolios from ten pilot high schools were pouring into FTA offices. Vic and his staff had to read through some of the writing samples and, for each subject area, assemble the packets that they could use as examples to train their scorers with. Vic had persuaded his supervisor that Gigi, with her Ph.D. in English, would be an excellent person to train the language arts scorers. He finagled her a temporary raise. Since Vic was a language arts person himself, he would help Gigi.
Vic and Gigi spent hours alone in a conference room piled high with cardboard boxes labeled Language Arts with the name of the high school written underneath, reading through hundreds of writing samples to find examples of different ways a student could get a score of one, two, three, and so on, so that they could photocopy the samples for training packets. Sometimes they read the papers aloud to each other or asked the other one’s opinion on what score a certain paper should get, and in between reading and discussing student work they talked about themselves and their families and graduate school and their lives since graduate school.
In the hallway, outside the open door of the conference room, there periodically came the deep buzzing sound of somebody pressing a button on the soda machine and the clunk, clunk, clunk of a can of soda falling down the chute and then the trickling clink, clink, clink of coins in the change slot. It was pathetic how much Vic loved hearing those sounds when that machine was buzzing and clunking and clicking for him and now, for Gigi, too.
Gigi sipped her fresh Diet Coke and Vic cracked open his Mountain Dew, and the dreary green walls of the windowless conference room and the fake wood tables and the chemical smell of industrial carpet and the frigid recycled air—everything was transformed into something magical by the presence of Gigi, with her wild mane of hair and dark blue eyes and lively personality. Vic’s life had gone from shades of gray to Technicolor. He felt like he was back in graduate school, when he and his fellow strivers used to go out for beer and gossip and to flirt and argue and dance. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it.
Sitting across from each other at the end of a long table, surrounded by the manila folders that Vic saw in his sleep, they talked about the American Lit. professor they’d had who thought every short story had a hidden key planted by the author that unlocked all the meaning, and the Modern American Poetry professor who only wanted to discuss the boring dreams she’d had the previous night, and the grad student who wrote stories about a young man (much like himself) who hitchhiked around America, sleeping with women and causing their long-awaited menstruation cycles to magically resume.
Gigi updated Vic on her love life. She’d been married and divorced—her second marriage—since graduate school. She wasn’t seeing anyone at present, because she’d gotten very choosy. She was over forty and she didn’t want to waste any more time on losers. Both her husbands had been alcoholics, and she wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
“Travis has problems,” Gigi said. “He gave me so much grief in high school. Talking ugly, punching holes in walls. Refusing to get out of bed. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him. Oh, they said they knew. Slapped disorders on him left and right. ADD, ODD, OCD, bipolar. You ever wonder if we’re doing the right thing, getting our children saddled with all these labels? Seems like every other person has Asperger’s these days. Hell, Travis might even have it. I sent him to one of those support groups just to see if he felt comfortable with those people.”
Vic suggested she call Caroline for advice. He didn’t really feel competent giving advice about Asperger’s, and he didn’t want to waste precious time with Gigi, talking about Asperger’s. He was sick to death of Asperger’s. Sometimes he wished old Hans Asperger had never been born. Vic didn’t even like to speak the A-word aloud to people not in the know. It usually elicited either chuckles (“Did you say ass something?”) or blank stares. And the word autistic was even worse, as it conjured up head-banging devil children. But Caroline never hesitated to throw those A-words out like firecrackers. Although she wouldn’t admit it, she enjoyed the disturbance those words caused. If asked why she brought it up with people, she would say that she was only making people aware so that they’d be more sympathetic to Ava and Otis, cut them some slack, realize that they weren’t just weird but weird for a reason.
But Vic would argue with her. We’re all on the spectrum somewhere. Why label people? We’re all weird. And aren’t people with obsessions more interesting than those who have no idea what they like? Some people turn their obsessions into great careers. About the social problems. Who doesn’t just not “get it” sometimes? Some of us are more “typical” than others, that’s all.
So Vic, sitting in the suddenly cozy conference room with Gigi, finding himself unwilling to waste time deconstructing Asperger’s with Gigi, segued into Ava’s obsession with Elvis, thinking Gigi would find it as bizarre as he did.
The thing about Gigi was, he could never predict how she’d respond to a question or what take she’d have on a situation or a subject. Of course, if he’d been married to her for twenty years, she might have been as predictable as he found his wife to be. But he realized that he didn’t really know Gigi well at all, and he wanted to remedy this situation. He looked forward to hearing what she had to say, even if she disagreed with him.
“I suppose you like Bob Dylan better,” was Gigi’s response to his complaining about having to listen to Elvis music nonstop.
“Well, yeah. He wrote his own songs, for one thing.”
“Dylan was a poseur! Rich Jewish kid pretending to be an Oakie. He did write some great songs. It’s apples and oranges, anyhow. Elvis was an interpreter. He drew from all sorts of music and put his own stamp on it.”
“He didn’t have such hot taste. ‘In the Ghetto’? Come on.” Vic was surprised to find himself feeling energized, and it wasn’t just the Mountain Dew. Unlike the spats with his family, he was actually enjoying this little tiff with Gigi.
Gigi tossed her loosely curled blond hair over her shoulders. High-maintenance hair, Caroline called it. Caroline had recently cut her hair short and stopped coloring it. It was her hair—she could do what she wanted to with it—but looking at Caroline’s gray streaks made him feel old.
“Here’s the thing,” Gigi told him. “Elvis didn’t get access to some really good songs because the Colonel insisted that Elvis get all the royalties. You have to understand Elvis’s background to understand why he didn’t fight the Colonel. You’re just like everyone else who doesn’t like Elvis because he was white and Southern.” She poked Vic in the chest with her well-manicured index finger. “Face it, Vic Witherspoon. You are a snob.”
Vic swatted her finger away. “Didn’t know you were such an Elvis fan.”
“I’m not,” she said. “It’s just my duty to fight Yankee misconceptions. I’m a Johnny Cash fan, myself. Now. Listen up. Is this a good example of a three?” She held up an essay and read a pitiful little movie review of The Incredibles that was four sentences long. The first sentence said, “Listen up, dudes and dudettes,” and the last sentence said, “You just gotta see the movie your own self!”
“Any misspellings? How’s the punctuation?” Vic asked her. “It might be more of a two.”
“I can’t bear to give this poor kid a two,” she said. “He’s got some flair.”
“How do you know it’s a he?”
“This is a three or I’m walking right out of here.”
Vic swept his hand toward the door. “Feel free. Dudette.”
She checked her big red watch. “How long till happy hour? Can you go out after work for one drink?”
“Maybe. Just one.”
Gigi, who must’ve picked up on his reluctance, smoothly shifted gears and asked about Suzi’s knee injury. “Must be hard on all of you,” she said.
Vic felt she’d seen through him, knew that he cared too much about Suzi’s soccer career. He had yet to inform the director of the Olympic Development soccer camp that Suzi wasn’t going to be there. He read their thrice weekly e-mails, enthusing about the upcoming camp, the outstanding coaches, the successes of former campers. He just wasn’t ready to give it all up yet. “Actually, Suzi’s doing really well,” he lied. “She’s been going to church with Nancy Archer. That church where your brother is a minister.”
“Suzi has too much common sense to fall for that nonsense. How’s Oats?” Gigi used Suzi’s baby nickname for Otis.
“Oats is Oats.” Vic told her about the smoke detectors, and about how he’d just seen Otis taking a box of old alarm clocks into the shed.
“What’s he doing with old clocks?”
“It’s a big secret.” Vic was ashamed to let people know how little he really communicated with his son. His only son. He wanted to communicate with him. He tried. Just last week he’d taken Otis to see X-Men, but during the previews Otis exploded when Vic gently pressed him about exactly what he was doing with the smoke detectors and clocks. Otis got up and stormed out of the theater before the movie’d even started.
The only thing Otis really cared about was science, and it had always been Wilson, not Vic, who’d encouraged Otis in his scientific endeavors. Vic was a liberal arts person, so he’d readily allowed Wilson to step in. When Otis was little, Wilson sent him an endless supply of mechanical things: robots, model kits, radios, tape recorders. Otis spent hours taking things apart and reassembling them to see how they worked. He strung together batteries to use as a power source for an electric blanket on Boy Scout camping trips. He fashioned a battery-powered skateboard that Caroline had to confiscate after he fell and split his head open. At one point Wilson sent Otis an old book called The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. Otis started experimenting with all sorts of chemicals and even made some chloroform that he administered to Suzi, which knocked her out cold. The Golden Book was sent back to his grandfather. Now, apparently, it was something to do with smoke detectors and alarm clocks.
Gigi kept talking. “Maybe Oats plans to hide those clocks around your house and set them for different times. Wake up, people! It’s happy hour!”
“Not yet,” Vic warned her, and opened another student essay, this one entitled “The Terrible Trip.”
“Hey,” she said in a quieter voice, leaning toward Vic. “Bring Avie out for a riding lesson this weekend. I miss her.”
Vic said that he would. Gigi asking about his children reminded him of where his true priorities lay—that they weren’t here, and they weren’t with Gigi—and after a while he realized that the conference room had lost its magical sheen and had been restored to its drab state; and as usual, he couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there. He told Gigi he’d be skipping happy hour, explaining that Suzi would need him at home.
* * *
In late afternoon, sunlight hung in columns through the canopy trees on Live Oak Plantation Road, which, because they spread out so graciously, never made Vic feel claustrophobic, even though he’d grown up on the prairies of the Midwest. And, turning into Canterbury Hills, he was struck once again by how much he loved his neighborhood, the sheer ordinariness of it. It was the sort of neighborhood he’d always dreamed of living in.
Vic grew up in a house in West Branch, Iowa, that looked, from the outside, as if it had been abandoned. Until he got old enough to mow the grass, it grew so high that the neighbors called a lawn service and took up collections to pay for it. His father, who was always reading and writing and teaching, never seemed to notice the grass at all. And then there was his mother’s rock collection. These weren’t little rocks, or even hunks of interesting and unusual minerals, but big ugly gray-brown boulders she carted home from rivers and creeks in their aged station wagon. She dropped these monstrosities randomly around their overgrown yard, which made mowing even harder for anyone who dared to try it. The Fortress, people called their house.
Vic bided his time until he could get out. He enjoyed his afternoon paper route because he loved studying other people’s neat little homes; smelling the dryer lint from their laundry rooms; imagining the quiet, mundane lives that were lived within. He bet nobody in those houses accidentally fried eggs in a frying pan lined with motor oil as his mother once did after his father had used the pan to catch oil draining from the station wagon.
For years Vic had congratulated himself on the splendid, impulsive idea he’d had of applying to graduate school at FSU. He’d been working in marketing and publicity at the University of Iowa Press, and one snowy day, eating his tasteless sandwich in the lunchroom, he’d happened upon a spread in an old National Geographic about Maclay Gardens in Tallahassee and Iowa was all over for him. And he’d never been sorry about leaving the Midwest behind. Tallahassee was great! Florida was great! Why would anyone not want to live here? Of course, some sourpusses might take issue with not only the hurricanes and rising insurance rates and rampant, heedless development and lack of state money for education and Governor Jeb Bush and fire ants and palmetto bugs and alligators and vicious exotic pets turned loose and humidity and heat and March, which, although breathtakingly lovely, was when spring breakers and serial killers and long-lost friends and relatives descended upon the Sunshine State. But most of the time Vic didn’t care about any of that, because every place had its drawbacks, and he loved living in Florida.
And there was his very own yellow brick house with the white picket fence, the smooth carpet of St. Augustine grass that, for some reason, this summer, didn’t sport even a patch of brown fungus. If a big hurricane came and washed his house away, he would miss it. He truly would. As he pulled in behind the house and parked the car at the bottom of the driveway he felt a bittersweet tang, as if his house were already gone.
* * *
For Vic, being around Suzi had always been relaxing, like sitting in front of a fire, basking in the warm glow of her competency. Not that she was always easy to be around, by any means. But up until she hurt her knee, she’d been on a steady course—good grades, excelling at sports, and friendships—whereas Ava and Otis were much loopier and uncertain in their passage through the days. They got A’s in some subjects and F’s in others, could flawlessly recite their lines in Guys and Dolls but had trouble cutting up their meat. In a conversation with Ava and Otis, you never knew, from one minute to the next, whether they’d approach you eagerly or flail and curse at you. And being around them out in public, watching them interact with other kids, Vic always felt on edge, expecting a misstep and hating himself for it, overwhelmed one moment with pity, the next with pride, his hopes rising and plummeting. There was always distance between himself and his older two children, even though he loved them with all his heart. With them he always had to think before he said or did anything; and because being with them often felt like work, he’d gradually started spending more time with Suzi. He wasn’t proud of this fact, but there it was.
That’s why he depended so much on Suzi to be the calm center of his life. Watching her decline was extremely disturbing.
That evening after work, when he went into her messy room and sat on the bed beside her, she merely glanced at him and went back to staring up at the swiveling ceiling fan. She wore her shorty pj’s with fairies on them and had an old polyester afghan she’d dug out of the back of the closet covering her injured knee.
Vic worried about leaving her at home all day, because her mother was too busy with Wilson and Ava to pay much attention to her. Oh, Suzi could take care of herself. It wasn’t that. On one occasion, years ago, when Suzi and Ava and Otis had, for one time only, an incompetent babysitter who did nothing but sit on her butt and watch TV all evening, occasionally going outside to call her boyfriend and smoke a cigarette, eight-year-old Suzi made dinner for herself and Ava and Otis—sandwiches and cheese grits and a fruit salad—then put the leftovers away and washed the dishes, took a bath, and put herself to bed. “I figured I was second in command,” she told us later. It didn’t occur to Ava or Otis to step in and take over, or even help.
Vic reached over and stroked Suzi’s unkempt, curly hair.
She flinched, the way Ava always did when he tried to touch her.
“What’ve you been doing today?”
“Praying about my knee. It’s not working.”
Vic decided to leave that one alone. “Help me make something for supper.”
“Where’s Mom?” Suzi said accusingly, like he was keeping her mother away.
“They won’t be home from therapy till seven.”
“Figures.”
“Want to bake some cookies?”
“You don’t get it,” she said loudly. “My knee hurts!”
Vic knew he should stop pushing her, but he couldn’t seem to shut up. “You’ll feel better if you get up and move around some. And your knee will heal faster.”
In response, she rolled over and faced the wall. “I. Don’t. Want. To. Do. Anything.”
Vic found himself wanting to yell at her, shake her. Stop this at once! You’re my only normal child and you’d better stay that way! Then another voice, a wiser voice, came over the loudspeaker in his head: Get away from your child. Now.
He ducked out of her room and into his own, changed into shorts and a T-shirt, grabbed a can of sparkling water from the fridge—no beer left! Should’ve gone to happy hour—then went out back to sit on the screened porch, under the ceiling fan, which was uselessly paddling the turgid air. It was the golden time of day, mellow spotlights of sun gleaming between the branches of the live oak trees. Quiet except for the squirrels chittering in the limbs and the whine of a distant leaf blower. It was so hot out there in the summer that he always had this second story porch to himself. His own little tree house. Down below, Otis’s white shed looked like the hut of a fairy-tale creature.
Their backyard was so totally enclosed by trees and shrubbery, they could cavort around naked if they were so inclined. Caroline had done that very thing one morning, peeling off her sweaty clothes after her run. She’d never do anything like that now, not since her body had decided to betray her by aging, but he wished she would. He would take off his own clothes and join her. He pictured the two of them, frolicking in the backyard, a gleeful, world-weary middle-aged Adam and Eve who’d returned for a second honeymoon in a much smaller, homelier Garden of Eden. If he told Caroline about this fantasy, she’d either bring up dirty laundry or laugh her head off.
The longer Vic sat there, sipping the unsatisfying sparkling water, the more he became aware of the work that needed to be done all around him. The porch smelled musty and the screens looked green. He needed to pressure wash again, needed to replace some mushy boards on the deck, and repaint the whole thing. But before he did any of that he would check the NHC Web site.
“Daddy.” Suzi stood in the doorway, flushed and disheveled but determined, leaning on her crutches. “I’m sorry. I want to make cookies.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Vic said, rising out of the wicker chair.
“For what? You didn’t do anything.”
How could he even begin to explain what all he was sorry about? He was sorry she’d hurt her knee, sorry that he depended on her to prop him up, sorry that she’d been stuck in the role of the “only normal kid in the family.” He was sorry that poor Wilson had had to come live with them and that poor Ava and Otis had Asperger’s and sorry that his marriage had gone south and that he missed the days when it was just him and Caroline and sorry because Caroline felt so besieged and that he felt so inadequate that he was counting on a hurricane to blow their problems away. He was sorry that his life was slipping away while he sat on the porch feeling sorry. He was sorry that he was such a sorry son of a bitch.
“Forget it,” he told Suzi. “How about peanut butter with chocolate chips?”
* * *
Gigi and Vic were finishing up the training packets—six example packets and six testing packets. The readers had been hired by Human Resources and would show up at FTA the following day, ready to be trained.
Vic was not only helping Gigi make up her packets but also supervising the other test specialists in math, science, and social studies, and he needed to go over their training packets with them later that day. He and Gigi were taking too long to make hers up, because, basically, she couldn’t keep her mind on the task.
“If I have to read one more review of The Incredibles I’m going to kill myself,” Gigi said. There were entire classes at one high school that had written reviews of The Incredibles. “I’ve never seen that movie and I never will. Just the thought of it makes me sick.”
Vic smiled at her and picked up another essay to read.
Gigi pulled up the hood of her green sweater. “It’s like a refrigerator in here,” she said. “Aren’t you cold?”
Because Vic wasn’t seeing any bigwigs that day, he was wearing shorts and a polo shirt. He was cold, but it did no good to complain, because that’s the way management liked it. “Get some coffee,” he told her.
She shrugged. “Almost lunchtime.”
The bank of fluorescent lights above them emitted a high-pitched buzz. Vic’s left big toe throbbed. He wriggled it against the bumpy rubber sole of his sandal. Gigi’s horse Cisco Kid had stepped on it. He’d been holding Cisco while Ava tightened his girth, and the dumb horse moved sideways, planting his hoof on Vic’s sneakered foot. He hoped the nail wouldn’t turn black and fall off.
“How can you stand doing this day after day?” Gigi blurted out.
“I do it with half my brain tied behind me.”
“Is that any way to go through life?”
Why had he asked Gigi to work with him again? She hated work. She didn’t know how to work. She didn’t need to work. Her family had money. “We’re not all independently wealthy,” Vic told her.
Gigi spread her hands to check out her pink fingernails. She had beautiful hands, but they looked pale and cold. Vic could take hold of her hands, warm them for her. “Actually, I’m broke,” she said. “I need this job.”
“Your idea of broke is different from mine,” Vic said.
She shrugged. “I’m going to teach more riding lessons, too. That ought to help.”
She’d insisted he not pay her for Ava’s lesson on Cisco Kid, so he’d offered to take her out to dinner sometime instead. It had been wonderful to watch Ava’s total absorption while she rode and her straight posture as she posted around the ring. And he’d enjoyed seeing another side of Gigi—the competent horsewoman, passing on her knowledge, neither one of them paying the least bit of attention to Vic. Despite the heat, it would have been a perfect afternoon except for three things: 1. Caroline had not wanted Ava to go because she was worried about her having another fall, so Vic and Ava had had to spend way too much time talking Caroline down; 2. During the lesson Travis, Gigi’s son, had plopped down in the lawn chair beside his and had talked unceasingly about horse manure while staring at Ava; and 3. A horse had smashed his toe.
Vic’s next paper was about the philosophy behind The Little Engine That Could and how it had helped the writer achieve her goal to become class president.
“Here’s a perfect three,” Gigi crowed, waving her paper at him. “A narrative that’s all dialogue. It’s a tree talking to a bird.”
“Want to read it?”
“No.” He wanted to put his head down on the desk and sleep.
Gigi smacked her lips and picked up another essay. “Yeah. Okay. This one’s about 1984. When are they going to put that book to rest? All it is, is an anticommunist manifesto.” She spoke in a Valley girl voice. “Like, it’s so cold war!”
Vic wasn’t looking at her. He was trying to make sense of the lines on the page in front of him. “Dear Sir,” the letter began. “I have some suggestions for alternative power sources that you may be interested in hearing about.” No, actually, I’m not, he silently answered the student, then told Gigi, “Let’s just read the fucking essays or we’ll be here all night.”
There was a few minutes of strained but blessed silence.
Gigi couldn’t keep quiet. “Vic,” she said, and waited until he finally glanced up at her. Her face was framed by the hood of her sweater, tendrils of blond hair wisping around her face. Little Green Riding Hood. “Is your toe bothering you?” She smiled at him, and he felt bad for being so cranky.
His toe, actually, was killing him. “Little Italy for lunch?” he asked her.
“You’re on. I’m gonna take me a bath in a hot bowl of pasta.”
The image of Gigi, naked, in a bowl of pasta, like a kind of old-timey black-and-white photo, filled his head and warmed him right up.
* * *
The following day they began training the newly hired temps who would score the sample portfolios. Gigi trained the Language Arts people, Ed did Science, Carol did Math, Sandra did Social Studies. Vic went from one conference room to the next, observing, answering questions when he needed to, making sure everything went well. The scorers were over-educated and underemployed, some of them mentally unstable (those people usually left after a few days), some of them happy to be out of the house and eager to stay out (these people tried to impress him at every turn, thinking that they might get a real job at FTA), some of them angry about being smarter than the trainers but having to score portfolios in an assembly line at two dollars over minimum wage. These people often challenged the trainers and had to be dealt with.
When Vic walked into the conference room as Gigi was getting ready to start the training, he did a quick inventory of the scorers and noticed many familiar faces, old hands who helped out on every project, and there in the back row, Nancy Archer, her accoutrements spread out around her—coffee mug, pens, pencils, notepad. She looked like a regal but mischievous queen. She waved at Vic, claiming their special relationship in front of God and everyone. He nodded at Nance, thinking, Oh shit. He remembered telling her about the project, suggesting that she might want to score, but never thought she’d actually follow through.
He sat down in the back of the room to watch Gigi—wearing a low-cut, sleeveless dress, high heels, and big hoop earrings—explain the training packets to the scorers. As soon as she’d finished, three of the scorers—an African American ex-military fellow, a young greasy-haired Harley type, and Nancy Archer—banded together to challenge her.
“Why’s ‘My Big Fat Halloween Party’ a three and ‘Lost in Kentucky’ only a two?” Harley asked Gigi. “ ‘Lost in Kentucky’ at least has a voice.”
“I used to be an English teacher,” Nancy said, “for twenty-five years. And I never would’ve given ‘My Big Fat Halloween Party’ a C, which is what a three is—am I right?”
Military Man read Gigi’s rubric back to her in a sarcastic voice, and then waited for her to defend her scores.
Gigi kept glancing at Vic, her eyes panicky like a horse’s. He nodded encouragingly at her, but even though they’d discussed the reasons they’d given the papers their scores, she didn’t seem to remember their rationale. She stammered and blushed and giggled. “Well, let me think. I know I had a good reason. Can anybody help me out here?”
The rebels saw they were getting to her and stepped up their attack. How had this woman ever taught when she was a graduate student? Was she falling apart because Vic was there, watching her? He finally stood up and sent everyone on break.
Vic planned to spend half an hour with the upstarts in his office, the three unhappy know-it-alls, letting them know, in the nicest way possible, that they were completely replaceable.
He spoke first to Military Man and then Harley, who both left his office in a huff and quit the project, and saved Nance for last. He was particularly angry at Nance, whom he felt was trying to take advantage of the fact that they had a personal connection.
“I’m sorry I upset Gigi,” Nance said, sitting across from him. She was wearing a pinstriped jacket with a white bow blouse underneath. “I truly didn’t mean to.”
Vic flipped the overhead lights on in his office so as to create an official atmosphere. As in, This is a corporation you’re dealing with, lady.
“Gigi’s a real nice girl,” Nance went on. “She’s Buff Coffey’s sister. I believe I saw you talking to Gigi at the roller rink. Is she a good friend of yours? Is that why she has this job?”
Vic said that Gigi was qualified to be doing what she was doing, having a Ph.D. in English.
“She might be smart,” Nance said, “and she’s real cute, but I could do a much better job training than she’s doing.”
Did she think Vic was going to let her take over Gigi’s job? The arrogance! And after he’d been so nice to her that evening she came over, defending her against Caroline’s sullen attacks.
“Gigi’s doing a fine job. You need to give her a break and not argue with everything she says. We made up those training packets together. I stand by all those scores.”
Nance grimaced and raised a hand to her cheek. “I’m so sorry. Didn’t mean to step on your toes. I didn’t realize that you two were a team. I thought you were her supervisor.”
“I am her supervisor. And we’re working together. My toe’s already been stepped on.” He told her about Gigi’s horse stepping on his foot, realizing as he did so that he was only making things worse.
“Oh, I see. I had no idea you two were together.”
What the hell was wrong with this woman? “We’re not together. We work together.”
She swiveled around and gazed at some framed photos on the shelf behind her. “And,” she said cheerily, “you’re good friends!”
“We’re friends.”
“What a lovely picture of Caroline,” Nance said, pointing at one Vic had taken of Caroline, tan legs and big smile, in front of the Grand Canyon, right after they’d graduated from college. With virtually no money, they’d taken the whole summer off to drive out West to places neither of them had ever been before.
Nance persisted. “Is Caroline a friend of Gigi’s, too?”
“Mrs. Archer.”
“Nance.”
“Maybe working on this project isn’t the best thing for you. You seem to be very unhappy with it.”
“Oh no! I love it so far. I’m so sorry I’ve offended you. I won’t say another word. I’ll just score my papers and leave you and Gigi alone.”
Vic reluctantly agreed to let her stay on, and Nance returned to the training room with her tail between her legs. She was just desperate for attention, Vic decided. For people to acknowledge that she was smart and knew her stuff. That put her into a category of people that Vic and Gigi could deal with.
That evening, after checking on Suzi and explaining to Caroline that he was dining with “some FTA people” he took Gigi out for dinner.
At one point, at the cozy corner table in Cyprus, surrounded by the elegance, candlelight, and fine wine they felt they deserved after such a hard day; when they were toasting each other with their wineglasses and imitating Nancy Archer and Gigi was looking at him eagerly, as in, Now what? he finally realized where he was headed. He kept hearing Nancy Archer’s insinuating voice saying, “You’re a team. You’re good friends.”
Vic, like any man his age, had done a few rounds with this problem. He knew full well that you couldn’t help who you were attracted to. Forget about willing it away! He’d thought about this problem over the years and had come up with some theories and options and a solution that he thought would keep him on the straight and narrow. He called it Vic Witherspoon’s Guide to Doing It and Not Doing It at the Same Time: The All-and-Nothing Approach to Marital Fidelity.
To begin with, attraction just springs up, that dizzying electrical field, and there it is. Attractions are often inappropriate. Usually inappropriate. If you’re married, always inappropriate. In said inappropriate situations, he’d come to see, one had a number of choices. The smartest choice, and the one that was often the hardest to make and carry out, was to remove yourself from the company of the attractive person as quickly as you could and never go near her ever again. This was often not possible because of the circumstances that placed you in the path of this person to begin with, for instance, an attraction between coworkers like him and Gigi.
If you can’t flee the attractive person, you can choose to hang close but not too close to this person, indulging in the glimmering edges of the force field, convinced that nothing’s going to happen and that it’s perfectly okay because: 1. Nobody else notices, including the person you’re attracted to. (Everyone notices.); 2. The feeling is probably only coming from you and so, since it isn’t reciprocated, you aren’t in any danger of actually acting on it. (If the other person allows you to hang around her, she is attracted to you, too.)
So scratch that option. Here’s the best solution he’d come up with, the one that seemed to make the most sense, the one he decided would work with Gigi: You hang around the attractive person as much as possible, bathing in the glow, waiting it out, telling yourself that even if the desire between the two of you is mutual and acknowledged, you’ll have the power to resist.
This, he thought, was the best solution for two reasons: 1. The more you’re around the object of such attraction, the more you’re forced to face the fact that she does have a few flaws, a few unappealing qualities, and before long she becomes as ordinary as an old shoe, or your spouse, and you’re breathing a sigh of relief that you didn’t say what the hell and give in. 2. He’d used this method once, successfully, with another coworker, Wendy, a few years back—ten years, to be exact. Actually, he didn’t breathe a sigh of relief until she moved away, but by the time she left most of the sparkle had worn off and she’d transitioned into being just a friend rather than a friend. Her pregnancy and the birth of her first child was undoubtedly a factor in the transition, but still.
Full disclosure—he knew the other methods didn’t work because of a few slipups, a very few, none of which Caroline knew about. When he turned thirty-five, he’d determined that all that was behind him. The older he got, the more he had to lose, the less compelling became the prospect of upheaval and drama; and even if Caroline never found out, the pining, scheming, euphoria, and the wallowing in guilt would’ve taken too much out of him. Add to that his intense desire to avoid dueling lawyers; acres of counseling appointments; and most of all, heartbroken children. He’d prefer to just stay home, eat popcorn, and watch all of the above on TV.
So Vic was counting on the all-and-nothing approach with Gigi, because he had no desire to disturb his marriage any more than it was already disturbed—he didn’t want to add to the damage that had already been done by the everyday wear and tear of life with three kids, two of them with “disabilities,” and an old man with dementia. Also, he was already aware of some of Gigi’s flaws: She overdid it with the eyeliner and revealing outfits. Her laugh was too loud and her Southern accent exaggerated. She didn’t take the job seriously. She wasn’t very good at it. She drank too much.
He told himself that nothing had happened between himself and Gigi at the Cyprus—they ate dinner and drank a lot of wine, hugged good-bye a little too long in the parking lot and went their separate ways. But he never mentioned to Caroline that Gigi was the only other person at the dinner, which broke the cardinal rule of All-and-Nothing—if he couldn’t tell his wife about it, it was not nothing.
Later that night, his head heavy with pinot noir, instead of getting into bed where he belonged, he found himself in front of his laptop, checking the NHC Web site to see if there were any new developments, any new storms that might have potential.
There was nothing on his computer screen. Nothing.