22 | THE COMPANY OF ONE
January 30, 2006
I CALL WILLIAM AND TELL HIM I’M NOT COMING IN AND to cover my accounts. I don’t tell him I’m sick or try to sound sick or even tired. He can probably hear that I’m calling from the car.
I had told Julia that I wanted to take the car to check on our house in Sag Harbor and stay there a couple days. She seemed to find as much relief as I did in the plan. We slept in the same room last night, though I had thought about moving to a couch to ease the effect of the silence in such close proximity, but there’s something so official about dragging a pillow and blanket to the next room, like ringing the bell at a prizefight. Anyway, I was up and out the door by 7 a.m. before she was awake.
I love driving in winter with my jacket still on and the windows down, and I do it the whole distance I’m on the Long Island Expressway. It feels like camping out. There’s no traffic at this hour heading in this direction, so I’m out to Sag Harbor in about two hours. I love it here in the winter. The whole town seems to be resting. Even the trees seem to be lounging with coffee and a book.
When we bought our place a few years ago, we decided on the philosophy of buying the worst house on the best street. Even still, our house is not at all bad with its large bay windows and working fireplace. I pull into the market for ground coffee, the paper, and firewood before going there.
I stop the car at the head of the driveway and admire my house for a moment. I think how it looks old and nice and that I own it. I can claim this as my own and others can attribute it to me. It is something I use and that feels substantial.
I think how I should buy only real things and not stock in some company. When I buy stock in IBM, I never visit the offices to walk the halls of the company or sit down with management. The stock will move up or down based on the comments of an analyst, and I have no real connection to the company. The whole thing could be a fiction or a board game. It’s like buying a vacation property that I know I intend never to visit or even see, then adjusting the value each day based on the weather forecast.
But this is a real home where I can step inside and get warm or shower after a day at the beach and others can drive by and admire it and decide they would pay an amount for it. It feels good to possess. Something in our nature promotes that, and I know too much about the manipulations on Wall Street to find any comfort in a paper investment.
Julia and I used to take off as many summer Fridays and Mondays as we could, pack the car and fight the traffic to get here. We’d pull in and notice the city sounds had been replaced by quiet and salt air and feel that these are the moments that make life good on balance.
I walk in the front door and slide my hand up the wood frame, admiring the sturdiness more than I have in the past. I start the coffee and a fire and sit in a reclining chair so I can feel the pulse of heat from the flames. The chair is old and leather and so worn in places that the brown has turned yellowish. All the furniture is so rustic and otherwise uncoordinated that it creates a theme of its own that nearly works for a comfortable beach home. Or maybe Julia has put more thought into it than I know.
I pick up the paper and start reading and wait for the calmness to come.
I have the Journal and the Times, and between periods of closing my eyes for a rest and getting up to freshen the fire, I make my way through most of the articles. I turn to the crossword puzzle. Nothing signals being on vacation like spending time on a crossword. It’s the Monday version, so there are some easy gimmes that help establish a whole corner of the puzzle. I find myself starting to care about completing the puzzle and it feels good to see progress and to have a corner I can count on as a foundation. It’s a shame that life doesn’t come with the same little victories and affirmations of correctness of a crossword puzzle.
Within an hour I’ve gotten all I can get without cheating, which is disappointing because it’s only Monday and I used to be able to complete these. But it’s been a while since I’ve done one, maybe since a vacation with Julia a few years ago.
I put the paper down and recline back in the chair to rest my eyes again. My mind reverts back to Oliver, as though he was there all the time under my eyelids just waiting for them to close. I have an image of accepting his invitation to play squash and crushing his slight body into a side wall as I pretend to go for a ball but angle directly into him instead. Then I stand over his body writhing in pain from cracked ribs and his broken glasses lying at an angle on top of his wincing face, and I offer him a hand up with a look that says, This is your fault because you shouldn’t have been standing there. You should have stayed out of my way and not come anywhere near me. My hand comes off the armrest of the leather chair and extends to pick up Oliver’s crumpled body as though I’m on the squash court, and my body acts out the scene the way a little kid will mime a rock star in the bathroom mirror. This scene is something I can make happen in real life if I go just a little bit crazier, and it makes me happy to think that.
Then my mind races on to Julia tending to his broken body still lying on the court. She kneels beside him and looks up at me with appalled eyes that know that I wasn’t trying to get to a ball at all. Then she turns back to him to straighten his silly glasses and smooth over his hair with the other hand. I drop my racquet and walk off the court, and in real life I straighten up from the reclined chair, open my eyes, and put another log on the fire.
My plan for calmness isn’t working. Being so focused on acting calm never made anyone calm. I think maybe I should start a diary of my own. Maybe I can take all of this and dump it onto the pages of a journal. This wouldn’t be a document to memorialize things so that years from now I could leaf through the pages and recapture the feeling. This would be the opposite. Like removing a wart, I want to cut it out of me and cast it into the pages and never see it again.
I wonder which of these roles Julia’s diary plays for her. I also decide that I’m starting not to like my own company very much. Being alone strips away all the little distractions and corners I can use to hide away from my own thoughts. It unveils me to myself. I know it should be good, like shaving down a callus to bring out the virgin skin. Two days of this will be enough and three too many. Right now I’m not sure I like myself enough to be alone.
I’m a cynical bastard stuck in relationships that I should let go. Churchill said a fanatic is a person who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject, and I think I’m a fanatically cynical bastard. What I need is a good crisis to help me clean house.
I know I could go stir-crazy here, and I don’t like the image of getting drunk home alone in an emptied beach community, living out a clichéd version of rock bottom. I decide I’ll leave early in the morning to get a workout at the Racquet Club, then get to the office. I’ll be better off if I’m not alone.
My phone rings and it’s William calling. A few days ago I had spoken with the lawyer representing William in the assault charge. It turns out the assistant DA wants to speak with William’s boss, so the idea to include me had never been William’s or his lawyer’s.
“Hello.”
“Hey, Nick. It’s William.”
“What’s up?”
“The ADA is hoping to meet tomorrow at ten a.m. Will you be in the city? Can you make it?”
I’ll have to do it sooner or later. “I’ll be there.”
“Thanks, Nick. I haven’t even been charged yet, so my lawyer thinks this is a good show of confidence that I’m taking this meeting. The DA is One Hogan Place. I’ll be in the office early until about nine a.m., then go to the meeting.”
“Got it.”