you, Jonah. You might think you get something out of it, but you don’t. She uses you. And you let her do it. You’re like the house slave. They dress you up nice, and they teach you to talk nice, but you’re still a slave.’
She had something more to say, he was sure, and he couldn’t think of anything. She had him, calling him a slave. It caught him off guard. It hurt, that word.
‘Fuck you,’ he said.
She laughed, not a sound of mirth but a burst of stale air from a deflated tire. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That’s the best you can do.’
With that, she went out.
He lay still for several minutes after she was gone, his mind dark and quiet. Then he got up, put his robe on, and went about making something to eat in the kitchen. He picked up the remote control off the counter, leaned back into the living room and started a compact disc going in the stereo.
He figured he would just put Melinda out of his mind, like he had all the others. But in the days that followed, Melinda stuck with him, more than he would care to admit. She was always simmering on a back burner of his mind, and too late he realized he had ruined a good thing. What’s more, the things she said stayed with him. He began to see how some of it made a certain amount of sense.
Jonah knew what people thought of him. He wore a pinstripe three-piece suit, Armani; a gold Seiko chronograph, stylish because it was shockproof – he also could wear it mountain biking if he wanted; silk tie, also Armani; alligator shoes; a smooth hundred dollar fade that enhanced what one art director had called his ‘delicately-shaped’ skull. He was a young executive now, working big advertising accounts. Two belated years of night school at the Westchester Business Institute got him in as a glorified secretary, but he moved up fast. He didn’t handle the accounts, no, he was too brown for that, but he was in the meetings, eating the lunches, bouncing the ideas back and forth, selling the people yet another light bulb that lasted even longer. The honchos liked having him there, and not because he ever hit the home run. They liked him there because they needed a lapdog. They paid him well. In exchange, he smiled and looked good and smelled good and didn’t cause trouble. He did what they wanted.
Sometimes what they wanted was sex.
Elaine was not the first well-kept middle-aged lady executive to bed Jonah, but she was the most giving. Even before Melinda found him out, Elaine’s generosity had begun to make the whole thing look like a job, one that paid in sushi and nights out and new clothes.
Now, with Melinda gone, Jonah was free to spend more time with Elaine. Elaine must have sensed the change, because right away she took him for a weekend on the East End of Long Island. They stayed in a rental cottage hidden back in the scrub pine and sea grass along Old Montauk Highway, with Dom Perignon on ice, a Duraflame burning in the fireplace, and the surf crashing outside and just down the hill from the sliding glass doors.
When any bill came, he reached for his wallet.
‘Oh please,’ Elaine would say. ‘Put it away. I enjoy paying for you.’
Later, after a nightcap, his bill would come. And he always paid in full. Elaine was divorced, and she made love in absolute darkness.
‘Jonah,’ she said as she drifted off to sleep on his chest. ‘Don’t let me fall in love with you.’ As if such a thing could happen. For him, maybe it could. He often fell in love. Women were exotic and wonderful creatures to him, no matter what Melinda said. He felt it for them down deep. It might last for just a little while, but it was there, like the best music. When the music was right, when it was some smoky Miles, or some funky driving hip hop, he caught the line and felt it all over his body.
Love was like that.
But for Elaine, love was improbable at best. She had scraped and crawled and scratched people’s eyes out to get her position, and it had cost her half a lifetime to get there. The wars had taken their toll. Even in her most human moments, even in passion, she was like a granite cliff face warmed by the sun. The heat was there, but then so was the stone.
Jonah grew weaker and less alive the more time he spent with her.
Show up, smile at the dumb jokes, fuck the expensive lady. He knew why he was moving up. He was the thinker who never had a decent idea. But behind the scenes, people pulled strings – Elaine was the chief string- puller right now.
Bending had become routine for him. He came in one morning and some comic genius had cut a picture of Step’n Fetchit out of a book and taped it to his computer. All he did, he pulled the picture down and threw it in the trash.
They were laughing at him.
Meanwhile, shopping had become his consolation. He bought so much expensive shit his apartment looked like the inside of Home amp; Garden magazine. In fact, he subscribed to Home amp; Garden and got his ideas from there.
He lived through his things: the car; some pricey Crate amp; Barrel knick-knacks gathering dust on his shelves; a couple of one-of-a-kind ironwood Nubian sculptures, one of a man and woman making love, the other of an old man’s balding head, both of which were good at gathering dust; the cleaning lady from Romania who came in once a week to wipe the dust off everything; his hanging ferns and aloe plants, which the Romanian gave him a hard time for neglecting; a Trek mountain bike (which he sometimes rode on the streets near his apartment); his two year old Rossignol skis (he had gone skiing once since buying them); his bedroom set, his living room set, his home entertainment center; that river view, don’t forget that, put that first on the list; his Ray Bans; his jacket from the Leather Factory…
He couldn’t afford any of it. The pay was good, but not that good. He carried nearly forty grand in balances on four credit cards. Some days it made him want to cry. But the fun didn’t stop there. As the economy went down the tubes, the firm started letting people go. The citizenry stopped buying things, the companies that sold things started going under, and there came a steep decline in the need to advertise things – especially in the need to have a whole creative group sitting around, throwing out ideas about how to advertise things. Jonah sensed that Elaine protected him as long as she could, but there came a day when even she couldn’t do anything for him.
He remembered the day they pinked him, going on two years ago. He was in her office that day. He could tell from her tone that he was dismissed in every way. ‘Baby doll,’ she said. ‘You’re going to do great things one day. I know that about you. This downturn isn’t going to last forever, and when it ends, even before then, I’m sure you’ll be doing better than ever before.’
Half an hour later he was out on the bright and cold evening streets of the city, the people a faceless swirl around him. Christmas coming – the shop windows were all dressed up for the holidays. Tourists ran around, all bundled up and carrying packages. Downtown, the spire on the Empire State Building shone green and red.
He went down into the subway and made the long ride up through the Bronx. He stood at the head of the first car, looking out the front window at the tracks ahead. It was a place he had stood many times as a child. The mystery of it, the vastness of the dark underground empire, never lost its hold on him. He stared and stared as the train roared through tunnels, lights zooming by on each side. The train changed tracks, never hesitating, as workmen with lanterns stood to the side in the gloom. The train passed through stations that were out of service, darkened corners, graffiti-stained walls, empty platforms long disused. Sometimes there’d be no lights at all out there, and he’d catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror of the black window. He stared back into his own eyes.
Who was he? Where had he gone?
Now, Jonah poked his head up and was almost surprised to find himself still in Kelly’s Bar. He glanced around. The long hairs had gone. The juke box was silent, and the only sounds came from the television and a few people sitting along the bar and talking in low voices. Jonah’s head had settled down to an almost pleasant thumping.
Three pints of beer hadn’t hurt him any.
Thump.
Thump.
The pain beat slow and gentle, like the bass signature on a sad love song. He was already thinking better about the day’s fiasco. At least one good thing had come out of it. He had sure flown across that alley. There were many days when he felt he wasn’t cut out for this kind of work, but man, what a feeling today. He envied the birds. He was beginning to think he should take up hang-gliding.
Gordo nudged him. The big man sat with three piles of Foerster’s open mail before him, one pile for possible
