“Hi,” Julie said. “I’m back in for the day. Any messages for me?”
“You look really awful,” Lindsay told her, ignoring the part about the messages. Julie had a private secretary to take her messages. “Are you sure you want to go back to work? You look like you ought to lie down.”
“I’m fine. I’m just a little tired. Is Mark in?”
“He’s been in the main conference room drawing up subsidiary employment contracts for the past hour. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. And I’m going on vacation tomorrow. What about Europabanc? Any wild-eyed Europeans calling up to say how I did everything they wanted me to do wrong?”
“No wild-eyed Europeans at all. No Europeans. Just bankers.”
“Bankers?”
“To see Mr. C and Mr. J. About the loans and the cash and the stock and the rest of it so we can close after Thanksgiving. I think I’m going to hate it when we close.”
“Everybody will.”
“Sukie in accounting says there’s going to be wads and wads of actual cash lying around the morning of.”
“There won’t be. It’s two hundred million dollars we’re talking about here. It’ll be done by computer.”
“That’s too bad,” Lindsay sighed.
Julie was about to say it wasn’t too bad at all, having that much cash around the office would just be inviting a robbery, but instead she backed away from Lindsay’s desk and began to retreat down the hallway that led to the offices. Her stomach had begun to roll again and her vision had begun to blur. It was much worse than it had been in the elevator. It was almost as bad as it had been at Willow and Wall.
“Damn,” Julie said, not quite to herself, not quite under her breath, so that a typist passing her in the hall looked up, stepped back, and stared. “Damn, damn, damn.”
There was a communal washroom that the secretaries used right around the corner from where Julie now stood, but she knew she couldn’t use it. She had to get to the back hall and the private lavatories she had the keys to. Then she had to throw up again, and then she had to think. At the moment, that list of chores looked long enough to take up the rest of her life.
She was moving as quickly as she could without running, pumping along the thick carpet in her fashionably high and wretchedly uncomfortable heels, when the feeling passed. She came to a full stop, surprised and a little suspicious. She took a deep breath and found she didn’t feel dizzy any more. She looked around and found that she was standing with the Divisions Comptroller’s office on her left and one of the doors to the main conference room on her right. Since the main conference room was in the center of the block and had doors that opened into every perimeter hallway, this was not surprising.
“Mark,” Julie said to herself.
She opened the door to the main conference room and looked inside. Her husband was at the far end of the conference table, surrounded by three assistants and entranced by a stack of papers. Other stacks of papers were laid out along the table in front of the seats that would be occupied on the day they closed. They were laying out the documents the principals would need to have and making sure they had enough copies. At least, if Lindsay was right, they were doing that for the subsidiary employment contracts.
Julie came in, shut the door behind her, and said, “Mark?”
Mark looked up, nodded to the young women around him, and hurried to Julie. “Are you all right?” he asked her, as soon as he was close enough to whisper. “I just had a call from Lindsay at reception. She said you were white as a ghost.”
It was really a cold day, one of the coldest so far this year. Julie could feel that even standing in the center of the building like this, where no wall of the room bordered on the outside. She wrapped her arms around her body and tried not to shiver. She’d always thought there was something unprofessional about showing the effects of temperature. She’d always thought there was something inherently wrong with being unprofessional. She looked over at the table and the piles of papers on subsidiary contracts and almost came over ill for a whole new set of reasons altogether.
“Jesus Christ,” she told her husband. “What would you say if I told you I was going to quit work?”
2
Calvin Baird had always been one of those people who believed in details. Even as a child, his difference from his brother Jon was clear. Jon would climb trees and plan grand strategies for the conquering of neighborhoods. Calvin would calculate the exact number of foot soldiers they would need to successfully storm the Ackmartins’ back lawn. It was that way in life, too, on every front but the emotional one. Calvin was of a generation, and a temperament, that didn’t think men were required to have emotions. What this led to was a kind of superficial schizophrenia, professional perfection and personal chaos. Calvin’s business life was full of neatly drawn lines and exactly totaled sums, while his home life was a roiling mass of confusion and resentment. He had had two wives so far and six children, and they all hated him. He wouldn’t have cared except that they kept dropping into the real part of his life and forcing disruptions. His first wife wanted more money. His second wife wanted him to spend more time with their children. His oldest son from his first marriage was in drug rehab and threatening to escape. His oldest daughter from his second marriage was plain and dumpy and cried every time she had to go to dancing class. It was enough to make any sane man crazy.