We Love Anderson Cooper Page 10

  He remembered how angry she’d been when she first saw the delivery sign. “It’s a gag, right? It’s not enough for us to be poor, you want to humiliate me, too?”

  Maybe he did. After he was laid off, he was using her laptop—his had belonged to the firm—and he discovered dozens of Facebook messages to Lincoln Moran, who listed his home as Milwaukee. Tara had gone to high school with Lincoln, and it was only out of boredom that Neal began to read their communications. At first, Tara wrote to Lincoln about her mother’s deteriorating health and Avery’s learning disabilities. But later, Neal himself became the subject of her messages. Always working, he had no time for her or the girls, she wrote; he didn’t appreciate what it took to run their home. Tara and Lincoln exchanged phone numbers. Then the messages ended. Neal examined their cell-phone bills and found calls to and from Lincoln, as many as three a day. Neal never would have suspected because Tara paid the household bills. Tara had hearted every one of Lincoln’s Facebook posts, even the one about a missing dog. From Tara’s account, Neal blocked Lincoln. If he couldn’t hit the guy, he could at least make his bloated face and tweed cap disappear.

  “Hear from Wisconsin today?” he asked Tara, when she returned from the supermarket.

  Pink splotches bloomed on her cheeks. She lowered overflowing cloth bags to the floor, ignoring an orange that rolled under a chair. “I needed someone to talk to.”

  Neal was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at an issue of Sports Car Market.

  “I couldn’t get your attention,” she said. “You were always traveling. Even when you were home, you were texting or e-mailing clients.”

  “What about Lincoln, does he travel? Come to Long Island for business or maybe for pleasure?” He turned the page.

  “He never touched me.”

  Neal thought about all the times he hadn’t been able to reach Tara, afternoons she claimed she was at the spa or hadn’t heard her phone. She’d highlighted her hair so the gray wouldn’t show, started wearing spandex pants and sheer blouses, telling Neal she was tired of dressing like a mom. Neal had liked the changes, but he thought she was making them for him. She’d seemed happier. Looking back, that more than anything infuriated him. “Did you talk to him today?”

  “He’s a friend.”

  “That’s not what I asked.” He wanted to know whether she was having an affair but also didn’t want to know because if she was, he would have to do something about it.

  * * *

  Neal got home at ten. Tara was in bed, reading a British novel, the kind that would make an unbearably slow movie. They used to watch films like that together. “Landtech is hiring a senior manager,” she said.

  “I don’t need help finding a job.” They were spending the kids’ college funds, which had lost half their value when the market crashed, but he couldn’t bear the thought of returning to an office. He enjoyed being outside, instead of under fluorescent lights, breathing recycled air. When he pictured himself generating endless reports, attending pointless meetings, and kissing up to a CEO, his skin began to itch. Not crazy enough to think he could deliver pizzas forever, he was considering becoming a mail carrier or a taxi driver, but he wasn’t ready to tell Tara.

  She smelled of toothpaste and antiwrinkle cream. It had been months since she’d worn the Tom Ford lavender perfume he’d tucked into her stocking last Christmas. In the past, she’d worn it as an invitation. He wasn’t expecting invitations from her now, not while he wasn’t even looking for work, though he sometimes imagined entering her roughly, hearing her cry out. He’d always been tender.

  She set the book on the nightstand and turned off the light. A halo burned around her white silk pajamas before his eyes adjusted.

  He walked down the hall to his daughters’ rooms, his footsteps muffled by dense wool carpet, and read the stickers on Avery’s door: “Enter at your own Peril,” “Quarantine Zone,” and “If I Liked You, You’d Already Be Inside.” Light from the room leaked out onto Neal’s shoes. Allie’s room was dark. He pictured Caleb illuminated by the buzzing porch lamp. Boys would have been easier or at least easier to understand. He knocked.

  “What do you want?” Avery said.

  “It’s Dad, can I come in?” He grasped the brass doorknob. When they remodeled, Tara had bought refurbished fixtures from a workshop that employed mentally challenged adults. Each knob cost as much as a hubcap, and she filled the house with them. “Just wanted to say good night to my girl.”

  “I’m not dressed,” Avery said, laughing in a way that made him think it wasn’t true.

  * * *

  “Take that thing off,” Avery said, pointing to the pizza sign on top of the BMW.

  Since Tara had returned to work as a project manager a month ago, Neal drove the girls to school. He had forgotten the sign the night before. “I’ll just have to put it back later.”

  “I’m not riding with that thing on.”

  “We’ll help you, Dad,” Allie said.

  “Speak for yourself.”

  It was his fault Avery was pushy. His and Tara’s. Always giving the girls whatever they wanted: Game Boys when their fingers were hardly big enough to press the buttons, designer clothes they outgrew in six months, soccer camps where professionals coached. He had enjoyed spoiling them, and it was easier than saying no. Now it was too late. He knew from experience to give in, or Avery would sit on the front step refusing to move.

  Wrestling with the sign, he scratched the roof of the car, cutting a jagged line through the luminous paint. “Fuck.”

  “Dad!” Allie said.

  “I guess it’s okay to say that now,” Avery said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  The girls rode in the back as he drove to school. They used to fight to sit in front with him. He glanced at them in the rearview mirror. They were beautiful, even Avery, when she didn’t know she was being watched and wasn’t scowling. Skin perfect and pale like their mother’s, straight black hair touched only by the world’s most exclusive salon products. Avery had recently cut hers into a bob, perhaps so people would stop calling her Allie. How two such attractive girls could have come from him was a mystery.

  After he dropped them off, emptiness took hold of his day. Alone in the house, he started at sounds of appliances breathing on and off, a bird smacking into a windowpane. Tara had left a printout of the Landtech job description on his desk. Skimming it, Neal felt his chest tighten. For years, he’d told Tara how unhappy he was at work. “You know how much everyone in this family appreciates what you do,” she’d said once, which was only partially true and beside the point. Eventually he’d stopped talking about it because her willingness to see him suffer compounded his pain; he questioned who he was sacrificing for.

  Now he was content to let Tara support them. It was her first job since the twins were born. He wanted her to experience work in the twenty-first century, when one person was expected to do the job of two, and the day extended beyond office hours, far into the night, e-mails, texts, and phone calls arriving during the Late Show and after you’d gone to bed. Maybe she wouldn’t have time for Facebook. He left the job description on his desk.

  Tara had written a to-do list for him on monogrammed stationery. They had let go of the housekeeper, but if Tara thought he would scrub toilets or mop floors, she was mistaken. She had never done those things, instead blogging about remodeling and talking to Lincoln while the kids were in school. He crumpled the list and tossed it into the trash.

  Exiting the house through the back door, he sat on the concrete stoop. Kentucky bluegrass stretched out before him. A giant silver maple shaded the patio. Along the edge of a cedar fence, he’d planted marigolds, salvias, zinnias, three kinds of tomato plants, and two kinds of squash. On his days off, he would sometimes stay in the yard until night fell, and he couldn’t see his hands. No one looked for him. The only risk, that he would miss a weed or overwater a tomato. Delivering pizzas was like that, too. At worst a customer would get the wrong pie. He retrieved a
kneepad from the garage and began thinning plants.

  At three he picked up Avery. Allie stayed after school for chess club. Another parent would bring her home later. Neal had driven no more than half a block when Avery opened the glove box, probably looking for gum. “Holy shit,” she said.

  “Close that.” How had he forgotten to return the cash to the envelope? His head began to throb.

  “Are you a drug dealer? Is that what you do all day?”

  As she was counting bills, he grabbed them, swerving and nearly hitting a parked car.

  “It’s cool,” she said. “You can hook me up.”

  “Right.” He shoved the money back into the glove box and banged it shut. With the back of his hand he wiped his forehead. “I’m not a drug dealer.”

  She found the 7-Eleven bag and began to empty it into her backpack.

  “Leave some for Allie.”

  “Can’t forget Miss Perfect. Did we win the lottery?”

  “We didn’t win anything. Don’t tell your mother about the money.”

  “Why are you keeping secrets from Mom?” She opened the glove box again and fingered the bills. “Can I have a hundred?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t want me to say anything, right?”

  He had raised an extortionist. He closed the glove box again, pulled his wallet from his back pocket, and handed it to her. “Take twenty. And don’t tell anyone. Not even Allie.”

  “We don’t talk to each other. She’s a geek.” She withdrew the money and returned the wallet. Jamming in earphones and scrolling through her phone, she ignored him for the rest of the ride.

  When they got home, he offered to make her a snack.

  “Yeah, Dad, some milk and cookies, because I’m three,” she called over her shoulder. She couldn’t seem to get away from him fast enough, slamming her bedroom door shut.

  He wanted to go after her, snatch her phone, and ground her until she learned to be as polite as Allie. But Tara was always telling him to go easy on Avery, who struggled to keep up in school and had few friends.

  He watched reruns of Formula 500 races until it was time to go to Mama Jane’s. To get to the shop, he drove through a neighborhood of castlelike homes even bigger than his own. Swimming pools liquefied sprawling backyards. Pool houses pushed up out of the ground. Anorexic teens lay on lounge chairs, sipping sugar-free lemonade served by Central American maids. Once, when he’d delivered to one of those addresses, a man his age tipped him fifty dollars—a karma payment, Neal figured, so the man wouldn’t end up like Neal.

  Mama Jane wore the same thing every day: jeans dusted with flour that matched the color of her hair, and a chef’s coat. “I got one for you,” she’d say when he came in the door, and he’d pick up the box and the receipt. She must have wondered about the BMW and the thick, gold wedding ring, but she didn’t ask.

  He’d applied for the job the day after he found out about Lincoln. “Long as you don’t mind your car smelling like pizza, we can use you,” Mama Jane said. Neal remembered delivering pizzas the summer of his senior year in high school, sleeping until two in the afternoon, getting stoned before work, and flirting with a girl who came in for slices. When the girl learned he was starting Cornell in the fall, she waited until he made his last delivery and then blew him in his Camaro among empty soda cups and burger wrappers. “When can I start?” Neal asked Mama Jane.

  If the shop owner had a family, Neal never saw them. She talked on the phone only to take orders. The place stayed open seven days a week, and she was always there. Neal wanted to ask if she found satisfaction in a life of pies and soft drinks, but they didn’t have that kind of relationship.

  The night was slow, and Mama Jane let him go at eight. One of the counter guys could deliver. Neal was reluctant to head home. He boxed up a plain pizza and drove it to Caleb’s house.

  The boy’s mother opened the door. “I didn’t order that.”

  “I thought your son might like it.”

  “Look, I don’t have the money, and we already ate dinner.” She wore the same outfit, her wet hair hanging loose.

  “It’s on me.”

  She gripped the door, poised to close it. “Is this some kind of racket? I suppose you’ll be offering me free siding next.”

  “I didn’t want to eat alone.”

  She glanced at his wedding ring. “Shouldn’t you be eating with your wife?”

  Neal shrugged. “She doesn’t like pizza.”

  Caleb appeared, his mouth falling open when he saw the box. He hopped from one bare foot to the other.

  The woman glanced at her son and took a deep breath. “I tell him not to talk to strangers.”

  “And never let strangers in,” Caleb said.

  “I tell my daughters the same. Name’s Neal, by the way.”

  “Don’t you have pizzas to deliver?”

  “Just this one.”

  “It’s getting cold.” The boy was on his toes.

  The woman took the box, and Neal followed her inside.

  She introduced herself as Felicia, which Neal thought he remembered meant happiness in Latin. He sat across the dining-room table from her, computer parts scattered across the scratched pine. A hard drive flattened a napkin. Tara would’ve cleared the table and covered it with a cloth before they sat down.

  Felicia explained the functions of the components. Neal didn’t understand much of what she said, but he nodded. He liked smart women.

  Caleb ate, holding a slice in each hand, a third resting on his plate.

  “He’s had ramen every night this week,” Felicia said, examining a thumb drive.

  “How’d you learn about computers?”

  “One of those schools that advertises on cable. Improve your life with a new career. I can’t complain. It was good for a few years.” She took a bite of pizza, wiped her mouth with a microfiber cloth, and said she’d been fired from her job as a programmer after coming down with chronic fatigue syndrome. “They expect you to be gung ho, but I didn’t have the energy anymore. I do a few computer repairs. Mostly we get by on my disability.” The humidity was kinking her hair.

  Neal played with a crust while he told her about being laid off from a job he hated. He hadn’t intended to get into all that. But she had opened the door, talking about her illness, and it was a simple matter to walk through. Felicia nodded, thin hands resting on the table.

  It was a relief to talk about it. But it heightened the reality of his predicament. “I used to be a corporate superhero. Now I’m going to destroy my wife and daughters’ lives, and they don’t even know it.” There were many things about his new, reduced circumstances Neal preferred. Beneath the suit he’d worn and the meals of organic, grass-fed beef he’d eaten because Tara prepared them, he’d always been a jeans and T-shirt, pizza and hot dogs, kind of guy. But his family would have a hard time adapting. The knowledge troubled him but also—and he was ashamed to admit this even to himself—gave him a perverse sense of satisfaction.

  * * *

  “Do you mind sharing how much longer you’re going to be on your vacation?” Tara asked, when he returned that night. She muted Jimmy Fallon.

  “I have a job,” he said, though what he earned didn’t cover their groceries. He peeled off his cargo shorts and dropped them on top of a full bathroom hamper.

  She sat up, arranging two pillows behind her. “I suppose if you get really ambitious, you’ll take on a paper route.”

  “We should simplify our lives. People all over the world live on less than a hundred dollars a month.” But he didn’t believe the life they had constructed around wealth could be reconstructed around something else.

  She turned toward the TV. Gave Jimmy back his voice. The studio audience was laughing. “You want to pretend you’re in Bangladesh? Do it alone,” she said. “Explain to our girls why they can’t get mani-pedis with their friends.”

  “You earn good money. We could sell the house and move to an apartment. I could get rid of t
he car, buy a beater for the pizza route.” He didn’t expect her to agree. But he didn’t know what else to say, how to tell her he wouldn’t work anymore for the kind of life she and the girls wanted.

  “That’s what you want to do? Deliver pizzas?” She was shouting. He closed the bedroom door. She hugged her legs and dropped her forehead to her knees. Her voice, softer now, sounded like it might crack. “Why aren’t you looking for a real job? Because of Lincoln? I told you we only talked.”

  Maybe Lincoln was the reason. Or maybe Neal was never meant to live the kind of life he’d been living. Either way, he knew he should try to explain. He owed her that. She hadn’t always been a person for whom wealth was important. When they first met, she was living in an Upper West Side studio with a one-eyed cat she’d rescued. But it had been years since their lives revolved around anything other than the girls and the remodel. The cat was long dead. “The corporate life isn’t for me anymore,” he said. She was quiet, probably waiting for him to continue, and he might have, if she hadn’t let another man make her happy.

  “What about your kids?” she said.

  “It’ll be good for them. It’s about time they learned what all this really costs.”

  * * *

  Nine thirty the next morning, Neal brought Felicia croissants. She set the brown paper bag on the dining table unopened and poured him a cup of coffee in a chipped Einstein mug, topping off her own. As they sat on the couch, Neal told her about Avery’s stubbornness and his struggle to treat her learning problems with medications and therapies that didn’t seem to work. “I don’t know how people do it. Keep it together until their kids are grown.” The PlayStation was back on the floor. Neal wondered if Felicia ever smacked Caleb after she tripped over it, or because he stuck gum behind his headboard.