Up in the Air

“What’s wrong with that?” I ask her.

She touches her glasses, pushing them higher on her bony nose. Her face is handsome, angular, distinguished, the product of generations of prudent mating by people who worked hard and skimped on frills only to give rise to a bohemian.

Her attitude reminds me of my college years. My father should never have sent me to DeWitt. It was the name that impressed him, the slick brochure, the aura of humanistic broad-mindedness. In fact, the place was a haven for bratty pricks—reggae-grooving, seaboard hippie kids in school to refine their contempt for people like me, who’d been raised in the wheaty void between the coasts by mothers who draped plastic on their sofas, which they called davenports. My roommate, a boy from the Washington, D.C., suburbs, smoked dope from a Native American hand-carved pipe, cashed monthly checks from his trust fund that made me gulp, and listened to “world music” on a high-end stereo worth more than one of my father’s propane tankers. He called himself a feminist, of all things, and enlisted me in “a self-criticism circle.” We met in our opium den of a dorm room, its windows blacked out with Indian batiks that forced me to use an alarm to wake for classes, and when it was my turn to confess my prejudices, I announced that I had none. My roommate kicked me out. I rigged up an “independent concentration” in Comparative Commercial Culture—as close as a kid could get to going square there—and bought a nice glowing Timex and started wearing it.

“I’m sorry to hear you feel that way,” I say. “If your work’s beneath you, you should change professions.” Maybe we’re bound for conflict, after all.

Alex produces, from somewhere, a small inhaler, and mists her lungs with steroids. Her color changes. Not for the better, necessarily.

“I already have. Events are my act two. It’s not the job, it’s the clients who wear me out. This lady senator. A power bitch. She sent back my sketches of the floral arrangements with big black X’s through them and a note: ‘More funereal, please.’ Can you believe it? Her poor old husband’s beheaded by a speedboat and she sees a fund-raising gimmick.”

“A Democrat?”

“You’ve got it. I ought to switch parties.”

“They’re both corrupt.”

“Disempowerment machines,” she says.

She’s speaking my language now. Maybe she’s read Sandy Pinter, or read of him. Maybe there are layers to this Alex.

“So what do you do?” she says.

I leave out my work in CTC and play up my infrequent coaching jobs, using my Reno assignment to illustrate. It’s a canned presentation: the Art Krusk story. Retired army tank captain and cancer survivor opens modest Mexican buffet featuring mariachis and wife’s recipes. Expands his operation with borrowed money, staying one step ahead of swelling debt load by targeting growing market: young working families. Institutes generous compensation plan to retain top employees but overshoots, breeding widespread resentment when he scales back. Absenteeism follows. An act of sabotage: the suspected contamination of spiced ground meat with human feces. The resulting E. coli outbreak sickens dozens and tarnishes Krusk’s name. Among my recommendations: a company sports league to raise morale and, on the public relations front, sponsorship of medical “scholarships” for needy local children.

A snack is served: bagel sandwiches of ham or turkey dressed with mayonnaise and lettuce leaves. Alex asks questions, good ones, about Krusk’s case, probing the fine points of Brand Reconstruction—a term she actually uses. She’s with me, frowning and nodding, synthesizing. It orders her features, draws life into her eyes.

When I’m finished, Alex tells me about herself. She hails from a town in Wyoming, as small as mine, whose claim to fame is the time a local deputy stopped Robert Redford for speeding. I can top this. Back in Polk Center we had a doctor, a friend of my father’s through the Shriners lodge, who specialized in medically questionable oversize breast implants. He once performed surgery on a president’s mistress. We knew this because the local Western Union handled a White House get-well telegram. The clerk made a copy and tucked it in the files of the county history museum, where my father took me to view it as a teenager, explaining that it was important for young men to see through the saintly posturings of their leaders.

“Wise parent,” Alex says.

“I miss him badly.”

“When did he pass away?”

“Six years ago.”