He reaches the office at 7.30 a.m. Outside, the Golden Gate Bridge throws its arcs against the still-black sky. Plenty of time to run through his presentation one last time before the 9 a.m. meeting. Barring any major reversals, he’s just about to win the biggest client in the history of United Graphics: Oakland, a range of olde-worlde kitchen and picnic ware that evokes Little House on the Prairie and capitalises on the current craving for all things Americana. Not bad for someone who’s been in the company less than a year. But if you were to count up the man hours he has put into this project and change them into dollars, that kind of professional victory has not come cheap. Ben has worked so hard these last months that even when he does get some precious leisure time, he barely knows what to do with it any more, can barely recall the long, glorious, smoke-hazed hours he frittered away at college. Seriously, he thinks, as this private moment of pride pushes a grin across his face, what has happened to him?
He reaches for his cue cards and the acetate slides from his desk drawer, and takes them into the conference suite. He switches on the overhead projector, fusses with the neck angle until he’s centred the white square of light on the white back wall. Outside, lights still twinkle in the bay. But the late-September sky is bleaching now, a nascent pink glow rising from the horizon. Martha will be in the shower. After that, she will get dressed, have her breakfast and go to work, then come home and wait, eager to tell him about her day spent at the mercy of thirty eight-year-old children. He never hears about her days lately. When they first met, he wanted to know every detail, her every move and thought. He still feels the same. He lives with her and yet he misses her. But these last months he hasn’t had or hasn’t made the time to listen. And now the habit has been lost. This afternoon he will make sure he gets home before she gives up and goes to bed. They will walk together to the restaurant, hand in hand. He wonders if they’ll have sex before they go out, a thought that sends a bolt through him. He should take some time off – spend it with her.
Will you do that thing we talked about? she asked him again this morning.
I’ll do it today is what he said.
He will do it. If Oakland goes well, he will do what he’s promised. He’ll do it this afternoon.
He lays the acetates one by one on the projector, whispering his way through the cue cards, throwing out his hands, pausing for the laughter he knows he’ll get. He’s always a little keyed up round about now, an hour or two before, but the nerves or adrenalin or whatever the hell you want to call it are what make him good at this stuff. They give his performance the edge that has made him stand out, get him so far so fast. The cue cards? No more than a pre-show comforter, a talisman to ward off the heebie-jeebies. Once he’s started, he won’t look at those cards, not even once. He’s a talker – could talk his way into and out of just about anything.
By the time he’s finished his rehearsal, a flash of Titian hair through the glass office wall tells him that Donna, the office secretary, has arrived. After a brief but flirtatious conversation in which he gives her instructions for the set-up, he leaves her to furnish the conference suite with the white Conran cups and saucers he ordered from London. There are croissants too, from Schubert’s. No expense spared. Important not to skimp on the details. Petty short-term savings most often mean losing out in the long term.
Over in the kitchen booth he fixes himself another espresso. Returning to his desk, he dials into his answerphone and finds a call from 6 p.m. on Friday – he was here finishing the storyboard but didn’t hear it come in.
‘Benjamin, hello darling, it’s your mother calling.’ Her voice slips but is not so slurred as to be incoherent. ‘Could you call me back? I won’t try you at home since I’m sure you’re not there.’
He checks his watch: 8.33 a.m. If he calls now, he can say he’s heading into a meeting and it won’t be a lie. Plus he won’t have the call hanging over him, and that will leave his mind clearer for the presentation. He punches in his parents’ number, and in the precise moment of realising what a mistake this is, she picks up.
‘Benjamin, there’s a surprise.’
Four words and already she’s breaking his balls.
‘Dorothy. Listen, I’m heading into a meeting but I saw you’d called Friday. I only picked it up now. Nothing urgent, I hope?’
‘You’re very busy, I know,’ she says.
He waits. Things being what they are, she will have been up since 5 a.m. Vodka knocks her out by early evening, but the trouble is, it wakes her up early too. Double-entry bookkeeping, Martha calls it, the pluses and minuses of every goddam decision you ever make.
‘It was nothing urgent,’ she goes on. ‘You go to your meeting.’
‘George OK?’
The suck of his mother’s lips on the gold tip of her Sobranie cigarette. ‘You know your father.’
Ben checks his watch. The guys from Oakland could be here as early as quarter to. He should never have made the call.
‘I was wondering if you and Martha would be coming for Thanksgiving,’ she says finally.
Nuts in the crusher: check. September and she’s talking about Thanksgiving, for Chrissakes. It’s Put your good shoes on; we’ll be late for Mass all over again. On a loop. With different words.
‘Listen,’ he says. ‘If it’s nothing urgent, maybe I can call you back later?’
‘I don’t know where I’ll be later, but sure, if you’re too busy, I guess.’
Through the glass wall he sees two suits, Donna’s red hair weaving between them. She is pouring them coffee, her lips moving nineteen to the dozen.
‘Dorothy,’ he says, ‘I’ll call you back.’
He rings off but decides to wait before hitting the conference suite. The rationale behind calling his mother was flawed, and he needs a few minutes to settle himself. She always does this – gets under his skin, makes him feel like he’s doing something wrong. The worst of it is, she thinks she’s easy. Genuinely. If he were to say to her, Dorothy, quit busting my balls, she would fall down with the shock. She would cry and wail. She’s given him everything; all she wants is a conversation once in a while, is that too much to ask? Is it? No, it isn’t worth blowing oxygen into that particular fire – better to pretend he can’t see its embers glowing in the hearth. People don’t change. People never go through those epiphanies you see in the movies. Scrooge would have finished up the same old tight-ass eventually, once he’d gotten over the shock of his crazy Christmas Eve acid trip, and his mother is no different.
He straightens his tie, pulls in a lungful of air and heads into the conference suite.
Chapter Four
Understandably, I think, Christopher’s first week at university passed in a blur. Not that he skipped lectures, no. Christopher would never have done that. He attended all his classes with the diligence that was so much a part of him. Consensus and Contention: Investigations in International History; The Crusades and Medieval Christendom; Empire and Aftermath: The Mediterranean World from the Second to the Eighth Centuries… whatever the module, the message was the same: ‘It is history that tells us who we are… it is only history that can put us and everything we know into context…’