Commission

       “You aren’t listening,” she says.

       “I heard you the first time.”

He stares at the hand towel hanging from the refrigerator handle, cleanly draped  as though waiting to be photographed. He never dares to use it. He’s never seen her use it. A different one each day nonetheless. No mats, either. Or tablecloth to get dirty.

People who are outwardly very clean are inwardly very dirty.

He’s quoting in his brain from someone, somewhere, but he can’t remember who.  More pointedly, why is he thinking this of Clare? He’s angry, taking it out on every sign of her any-and everywhere, his dwarfish interior revenge.

He sighs, shoulders slumped, hands running over his hair, but only for a moment. He stares out the window, back at his cup of coffee. The cinnamon toast’s been gone from the plate in front of him for over ten minutes.

       They are seated at the round oak table passing for both dining and kitchen fare.  The apartment is small, claustrophobic, a clutching space even when they’re in it without argument. Now, the air allows their breathing to be fully audible, despite the droning of the radiator and fridge. In the pulsating vacuum, the traffic below and beyond the window pushes the buzzing undercurrent to a normalized inner-city cacophony.

        He stares at the grains running in loops on each board of the table.

        “Okay. That’s neither here nor there, really,” she says defiantly. He studies her folded fingers around her cup, polished nails to a high burgundy sheen.  

When did she start doing her nails? How did he miss such a thing?

Clearly, she’s not done. “You simply need to tell him you aren’t going to work commission anymore, not the way it is. He brings in the business…or not. Once customers are in the showroom, you are responsible for the sale, but the notion that commission is only your responsibility from the get-go has to stop. You can’t make sales when people aren’t there to buy, can you?” The ‘he’ and ‘him’ in all of this is, of course, his boss, Stan Bochner.

She pauses, the important point yet to be made. “You can’t support your family  with customers coming to you willy-nilly.”

        His family?

She’s his family. They’ve stopped going to dinners at his homeplace—dinners at the table in the country with his parents, brother and sisters. She doesn’t like them. Well, neither does he. But giving up the obligatory once-a-month Sunday dinners wasn’t his idea.

        “No.” He stops and arranges what he’s going to say. “But this business of commission in sales has been going on for a long time. It’s what they do in salesrooms everywhere. It’s agreed upon. When I took the job I knew what commission meant, and if I didn’t, it was spelled out in the contract I signed.”

        He’s belaboring the point, so now she doesn’t seem to be listening.

        “You signed a contract?” Evidently she is listening.

        “You know I did. Well, an agreement, in any case.”

        “An agreement allows you to step out of what you’ve signed, if you decide to. A contract doesn’t.”

        “What’re you talking about?”

        “You can get out of an agreement, with arrangements on both sides. To break a contract requires legal procedures.” She studies his face, slips her attention momentarily into her coffee cup. Setting it down in the silence, she explains as though she’s the head of a judiciary committee. “I’m saying that if you sign a contract, you’re bound legally to fulfill it—you and whoever signs it with you. If you sign an agreement, you aren’t legally bound to its terms. You may have consequences from not fulfilling it, but you can’t be held legally responsible to what’s in the document.”

        “So now you’re a lawyer.”

        “I know words. I know what some of them mean…what these mean in particular.”

        Now he studies her face, oval, slightly dimpled left cheek, clear brown eyes, perfect skin, petulant expression—lips pursed, then released into a grin, still with tight edges.

 She’s pretty. She’s always been pretty. Even in argument, she’s still good to look at.

 She’s a certified accountant who could have her own business, but she works for Connelly, Connelly and Strover, along with a dozen or more others. He wishes so much this morning she didn’t. He thinks he’s figured out how her being good with numbers has made her good with arguments—it’s fiddle-faddle that’s become elegant with practice, like the clicking of keys on a calculator.

        “Okay.” He hears himself saying, ‘okay.’

 Concessions are coming. His. Always his.

 “I signed a contract. I agreed to work for two percent commission on all sales I  close, even if they’re begun by somebody else.” He stops, glances at her, adding, “No budging allowed.”

        “Budging? What’s budging’s to do with your contract?”

        A word he knows, and she doesn’t—at least not in this context. But he doesn’t say. He doesn’t usually talk about his work with her.

        “Sales guys can’t horn in on each other’s marks.”

        “Marks?”

        Another word to his credit.

        “A pursuited sale.”

        “Pursuit-ed?”

        He knows a word or two. They aren’t all hers.

        He nods with confidence. “A sale you’re pursuing, pushing.”

        “So a mark’s a sale you have underway, but haven’t secured.”

        “Riiight.” He draws the word out as though her clarification is either faulty in some way—not catching the nuance in his jargon—or is ignorant of transactions that matter in his line of work.

 He plays with words every day too.  

        “You have to guarantee this in writing, this budging?” She grins. She’s playing with him.

        “It’s not in the contract. I’m just sayin’. It’s understood.”

        “Like the meaning of ‘commission’.”

        “Pretty much…Probably.”

        “Which is it?”

        He’s not sure whether he’s still talking about the commission or the budging. He has an urge to leave, to run out the door to his car, to get lost in his nine-to-six job, with the people there.

        “It’s understood. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” He doesn’t care what he’s  saying to her anymore, but his meaning is about both the commission and the budging. He stands up. Placing his hands on the back of the chair, he scoots it with a scraping noise under the table. He glances at the clock. “I gotta go, Clare.”

        “Time for work. Agreement or contract?” He doesn’t know how serious she is. She isn’t smiling.

         Shit! Ah well, what’s the difference?

         “Contract with unspoken…stipulations.”

 There. He’s found another word.  

 Puffing up a little, he says with assurance, not without a splash of irritation, “Let me put it to you this way, honey. If I show up late to work often, I’ll get called on the carpet for it. If I get called on the carpet too often, I’ll get fired. Did I sign a contract to that effect? No. If I take such a thing to court, because it isn’t in my contract—is only an unspoken stipulation—how do you think the judge will…well, judge on that?”

        “Point taken,” She pauses a nano-second. “Talk to the boss. Today.” She knows Stan’s name. They’ve barbecued together often on Stan’s patio, with his wife, Sheila, bringing dishes to pass—at another time in their lives.

        “I can’t, Clare—”

 “You mean you won’t.” She finishes her cup but remains seated, looking out the window much as he had before.

 “I signed a contract with two percent commission on each sale and a base salary of twenty-five hundred a month. Pure and simple. All the rest, the budging, the being on time, the free coffee and donuts, etcetera, etcetera are…stipulations.” His word.

Agreements. Her word.

        Funny how words suddenly stand out from the ordinary. It’s almost like they’re living things, intruding with their definitions into the reality of what’s happening between them.

        Stipulations, agreements, arrangements, commissions….

        He walks from the table to the front door, turns the knob and opens it a crack. Thin laser light pilfers across the floor, warming his leg through his trousers.

 Going to be hot today.

        “We’ll go out for dinner.” She glances at him with a tiny smile.

        “Agreed,” he says casually, saluting her with two fingers touching his forehead, but she’s already turned away, gathering their dishes and walking them to the sink.

____________

He sits inside the warm interior of the car, not rolling down the windows. The  engine hums, but he keeps the gear box in neutral, hand on shift. He hits the AC button. A low moan issues from the louvered dash.

 One or two of these arguments a week. Only the arrangement changes. There’s never an agreement.

        What does she want?

        Well, he knows what she wants. She wants him to make more money. But there’s more, always more. She thinks he’s intimidated by his boss, that the man over him—his friend and business colleague for the past ten years—is making the rules of engagement. It doesn’t matter if Stan’s part of a bevy of bosses who’ve made the rules. She’s only interested in how his boss is behaving, and how he’s behaving with his boss.

        It’s really his position in the game he’s in that keeps her pushing for change. He’s not in charge of the plays he’s making, because the definition of the game isn’t allowing him what she regards as latitude.

 She’s the only woman he knows who likes boxing. She sits ringside watching  without expression. She watches for knowledge. She watches the intention, the strategy, the moves within the bounds imposed. All around her the passion of the crowd and the fierceness of the fighters mean little. She wants to know how it’s done, this time, by these players. The outcome is simply the consequences which follow from the decisions made. Outcomes don’t interest her much. It’s getting into and out of the final round that holds her attention.

         She isn’t against the restraints. She thinks, as he does, that the ring matters—the ropes must be there, the boundaries set. But she likes it when a fighter goes flying over those ropes, or when he—or she—makes an unpredictable move. It’s why she watches.

         As for him, well, he watches to win. He’s attached to a team, the joint effort. The outcome is the point. It’s why he plays the horses—the competition between them for edge, the attunement of the horse and rider such that winning is inevitable. The horses bore her. Too much, she says, depends on the biology of the horse and the rider. Same with the track. The use of steroids by runners or horses being drugged doesn’t surprise her. Where else to go with such a narrow field of play? Right horse, right rider and the game is all but won. Breeding and biology bore her.

        His salary is not where the game is played. The commission is the variable, the game-changer. She wants him to play the variables with unanticipated verve within the bounds. She wants him to be the boxer who shortens the distance between the beginning and the final round, though if he slugs it away to the end, she wants to see an all-or-nothing fight. It reminds him of the Assyrian kings who hunted fenced-in lions and tigers, in open chariots, drawn by horses.

        She’s interested in the game for the game. He’s interested in the game for the score.

        Why hasn’t he focused of this before? Why hasn’t he thought to ask her what the variables are in an accounting firm that hires dozens of people to sit in cubicles—as she does—clattering all day in front of electric machines and monitors that add up, literally, to a final sum inherent in the numbers given?

What she does is horseplay, in the end, isn’t it?

        He thumbdrums on the steering wheel, listening to the engine whirr.

        So what is it that he wants?

        He wants to not walk through Stan’s door and demand what he deserves. But he will. His demands. Not hers. He’ll not ask for a change in the definition of commission, but an increase in both base salary and commission percentage—still within the guidelines of his signed contract—only the numbers will change. Increase is the variable in his field of play.

 He hasn’t told her sales personnel have begun forming a union, that one of their grievances is the commission, not just the amount but the concept of it. They are talking merit pay with full disclosure. Clare would both love and hate this idea. She believes in competition within the ranks, but without public scrutiny. One battles with as much personal leverage as one can get—Circus Maximus without knowing which chariots the Emperor has chosen for his bets. She likes how Stan plays. She wants him to be Stan.

 He hasn’t told her that one of the sales guys is a woman. LuAnn Bentley. Clare’s never drops by the showroom. She doesn’t need to know about Bentley, well, until he needs to tell her.

 Will she care? 

                                                            ____________

                       

In the showroom, he leans against his desk, looking at the green Taurus SHO  with the couple he knows will sign the papers and return in two hours to pick it up. They haven’t committed yet. He knows they will. Their financial arrangements are already being contracted through the bank and the company desks upstairs. It’s his second sale before lunch.

He’s riding high on possibilities. He watches this couple’s actions and responds with his own. It’s a game of words and numbers, but one in which the variables are all but set, because, by now, he knows them so well. He likes it that way. He likes playing with what he already knows.

Is that true? He thinks it is.

       The wife bends over, head through the rolled down window, running her hand over the slick, chic leather with faux stretch marks. It’s the color of cream floating through coffee to latte. She backs out of the car window and turns to smile at her husband, one leg in the air, as though bending toward him to receive a Hollywood kiss. The ads are about sex and possession. She’s playing them well.

        The wife hums and licks her teeth and brightly-colored lips with the tip of her tongue. The husband laughs and says, “Yes,” turning back to him, the salesman, winking an agreement.

        He motions for them to walk with him to his office, leading the way. He wishes he was leading from the rear, seeing the wife’s tight hips move in her well-tailored skinny- striped suit.

        The couple sits in the Eames-style, black molded-plastic chairs on the other side of his desk. The husband has pulled the chairs together so their arms, resting on the arms of their chairs, are touching.

        In the end, after the haggling and bartering—his customary slip to the upstairs office and back, to supposedly confer with the boss—they win. The game is rigged, but he has given it enough carnival flair for the outcome to feel expansive, downright festive, to them. He sees it in their eyes. The husband will hand her the big, stuffed bear of an automobile, six years of payments he knows they can ill-afford. He writes twenty-five hundred dollars on a formatted check with a fountain pen, blows it dry and pushes it by finger tips across the desk to the husband. He stares at the numbers he’s written in the rectangle box on the check.

        The amount of his monthly salary.

        “It can be applied to the car as part of the down-payment, as well as reducing your interest rate for three years…” he stretches out the word, “oooorrr you can bypass the down-payment-and-rate deal and spend your money any way you like. Your call, my man.” He looks directly at the husband.

        “Whatcha think, my man,” the wife coos, not a hint of sarcasm, soliciting her husband’s gaze from him to her. 

        The husband has given this some thought. If he watches television at all, he’s seen the ads, so he knows what he’s decided to do before he walked in the door.

“We’ll apply it to the loan,” the husband says, chin jutting out toward the paperwork  still lying with the fountain pen on top, uncapped, point aimed toward the husband’s heart. All the man has to do is sign his name on the line.

        He reaches across his desk and starts to retrieve the check, but the wife rises from her chair, lays her hand over the rectangle with the amount written on it, dark red nails almost touching the tips of his fingers. A small tingle ripples up his spine.

        “There’s the casino.” She giggles, not looking at her husband but directly at him. The Marilyn Monroe sound from her throat echoes from The Seven Year Itch. He’s at the piano with her, in her leopard-spotted gown, him in his Tom Ewell smoking jacket, good old Rachmaninoff’s second concerto tinkling between them. The tinkling races up his neck and through the skin holding his naturally disheveled hair in place. He forces his expression to remain pleasantly placid.

This is real. This isn’t the movies. His commission depends on it.  

        “You win,” her husband says, retrieving her attention, nudging her arm with the hand that holds the check. She leans, pecks him on the cheek.

        She leans toward her husband often.

        What an adorable couple they are. Perhaps they didn’t have it planned. Perhaps they haven’t seen the ads. Perhaps they are playing him. But he knows better.

____________

At lunch, hunching over a table, he and Bentley wolf their sandwiches, twisting them around in their fingers, each wiping mayo from lips with small paper napkins. He watches Bentley’s careful dabbing across her mouth, as though applying lipstick instead of wiping it off. The standing table is perfect for his height, but she has to place her arms on the surface above her elbows. He’s reminded of a resting butterfly, its wings opening and closing as she brings the sandwich up to her mouth and carries it back down to her paper plate. Three buttons tug at the gaping slit down the front of her blouse, the segments of the body of a monarch. Like the two he has pinned in shadow boxes over his desk in his office—a male and a female, he had been told when he purchased them in a snooty gift shop in Cape Cod with Clare.

Bentley does well on sales. She keeps his marks occupied while he’s “conferring with the boss,” but she never attempts to budge. He likes her.

        Is he attracted to her?  

He’d rather not think so. She’s pretty plain, in the meaning of both words. But he  undresses her, then stands taking her in. She’s full-bodied with ample thighs and chest. Large dark nipples. He sinks into her eager softness. She looks up and smiles. He remains good-naturedly still, looking directly into her gaze.

        “You think the union idea will go anywhere?” she asks.

        “Yeah, I do.” He wipes the table with a clean napkin, wadding it tightly in his fingers with one he’s dirtied while eating. “Wanna walk?”

        “Sure.” She opens her mouth, slips in the last bite of her sandwich and chews, swallows.

        They both walk to the trash can and throw their used napkins inside.

        “Why?” she asks, when they’ve hit their stride. They have been walking each nice-weather day since she started with the dealership two weeks ago. She keeps up without effort.

He likes her gait, her easy flow inside her well-tailored navy suit. The corners of her ivory-colored blouse lay loosely over the lapels. Sensible shoes, except for their cost. Kenneth Cole. Clare has similar espadrille wedges, less sensible, two inches higher in the heel and price.

        “You mean the union? It’s been brewing for years, but nobody’s had the gumption  to push the idea into action. Most of us have worked for Stan for years, and it’s been our practice to ask for raises and changes in policy individually.”

        “Is he generous?”

        He shrugs. “Good question.”

He walks in short hops to a bench and sits. She follows his lead. “Stan’s a merit  pay kinda guy, only he likes to make agreements person-to-person. He’s had a group meeting only half-dozen times since I started ten years ago. Nobody knows what the other guys—sales personnel—are getting.”

        “But the personnel want a written contract? That it?”

        He nods. “On the up and up.”

        “Transparency,” she says easily.

        Do all women play with words? Is he in a semi-argument?

        She smokes. She smokes like women in old-time movies. He thinks of Lauren Bacall. Bentley isn’t Bacall, though she has a homey grace about her.

        Smoke floats from her mouth into the air in front of her face. She doesn’t attempt to guide it with her lips. It’s a small transparent cloud from her throat to the heavens.

“I was approached. I’m not sure how I feel about the whole idea, you know, my  being the new car on the lot.”

        “I’d hang loose,” he says, then feels embarrassment at his innuendo. “I mean, I’d wait and watch.”

        That’s what Clare does, for Godssakes. What kinda advice is he giving her?

He reaches over and touches Bentley’s arm. Her cigarette dangles from her fingers as though she’s about to drop it. She looks at his hand. He removes it slowly.

He studies her face. She looks closer to Bacall than he realized. It’s in her eyes, a whimsy only she understands.

        “All right,” she says, slowly, close to a seductive slur.

        “What I mean is, let the others do the work. You can ride in on their tails.”

Why can’t he stop making these oblique sexual remarks?

She grins broadly. “Okay.” She stubs out her cigarette in the grass with her Kenneth Cole wedged toe.

“I have to see Stan today. He will’ve heard the scuttlebutt by now. Not much slides past him. He’ll tell me what he wants to get known. It’s how it works.” He hesitates a beat. “I’ll letcha know ahead.”

“Thanks,” she says.

        They get up together, without signal, and begin the walk back to the show room. 

____________

He leaves his green Taurus SHO—exactly like the one he sold earlier in the  day—in the lot off the dealership in the section for employees parking. He unlocks the Black Lincoln Continental with a key on a fob that fits in a lock in the fender badge. The door softly pops open with a touch on the inside of the handle that runs along the beltline. It’s only a demonstrator but one with less than a thousand miles. Despite ads featuring the sexist man on earth, Matthew McConaughey, Lincolns haven’t done well through the Bochner dealership in Woodland Hills, the only one within forty miles. Stan Bochner’s notion that a well-stocked car lot reads as an affluent sales outlet isn’t paying off. Stan’s given him and Bentley—“for her female marks”—permission to drive these Lincolns on week-ends for their own personal use, on the condition that the cars move around town, are seen in highly visible, high-end communities. Stan checks the odometers on Monday mornings.

He sits in the quiet interior, windows up and without AC, to luxuriate in the new  automobile aroma. It’s Bentley’s job each morning to spray fake “new car” fragrance into the row of used cars sitting with signs and balloons facing the street. He grins as he watches from the showroom, remembering well the assignment he fulfilled for two years before passing it to Mason Wright, who lasted six months in the showroom before turning tail to sell Hondas on the other side of the street.

        Turning tail. There it is again.

        When he starts playing the margin like this, he knows he needs a fix, a Clare fix. He feels her skin at the touch of his hand. She loves his making her tough and strong, weak and soft. She says so each and every time, and despite their differences, there’s something steady and sure about how they are together.

        Clare, you is my woman now. You is. You is.

He hums the Porgy and Bess tune. Miles Davis. He’s always loved that album, that score. He grins and hums his way out of the parking lot into the street toward Clarion Boulevard.

He thinks back to his conversation with Stan just before leaving for the day.

Two knuckle raps on the boss’s door. “Come.”  

        “Ah,” Stan had sprung out of his leather chair and put down his pen. Walking around his mahogany desk, he held out his hand. Bochner’s always had a gripping handshake, but he met it with confidence. He’s been a Bochner man for a long time. “What can I do for you, Canoe.”

        Year ago, he and Stan paddled Seneca Lake on Sunday mornings shortly after he and Clare had moved to Woodland Hills and Bochner had his first child with Sheila. Stan still plays around with his first name, a hang-over from those nature-boy trips.

        “Canyon,” Bochner said, correcting himself, softly slapping his shoulder, guiding him to one of two chairs across from his desk. Stan sat down beside him.

                                                                    ____________

           

“You see how easily this goes,” Stan had said after he granted his raise requests with more generosity than he had expected. Bochner stood and began pacing in small easy steps in the space to the side of their chairs. “I don’t want to disturb the person-to-person communication that’s been established here for years.” The boss spread his arms around the room like one of those obscenely evangelically-inspired billboards. “I’ve worked hard to make myself accessible to each and every employee in this company. But truth is, I own it. I don’t mean just the dealership—the physical entity —I mean the responsibility that comes with it. It was my ass on the line when the bubble hit and times got tough. I didn’t sweep personnel out the door in the name of down-grading. Can’t they see, it was my financial risk, not theirs.” Stan waved his finely manicured fingers down toward the showroom floor, his Columbia Business School ring downright clunky in the atmosphere. He was grateful he’d had the foresight to phone ahead and ask Bochner for this meeting after hours. The personnel were gone and couldn’t be sneaking glances up at him through windows in conference with the boss.

To gain his attention—as though he’d lost it—Stan said, “Look, I’m a personal contact kinda guy, you know this, Canyon. This quasi-socialist crap doesn’t do anything except ultimately undermine confidence in the business. Transparency. It’s the buzz word of the day. What it really means is these union people come in, tell everybody how everything has to be done, and before you know it, what the employees thought was going to be fair distribution of pay goes out the window. It’s always going to be somebody deciding who gets what. And with union leader’s plans, it’ll add up to rules and regulations that net them squat. It’s not my intention to shut them out, you’ve got to know this, Canyon. I don’t think I’m the bigshot, and they’re all the little guys. But…well, quite frankly, I do want control over quality workmanship and pay to their benefit.” Stan sighed heavily and came back to sit next to him.

“What I’m asking you to do is spin this so they realize what they’re asking will undercut what they want. It’s far safer to have me as the one who says than these people they don’t know coming in here and taking control of what, in the end, will be their unforeseen futures. I’ve seen it before so often. It won’t take a year, and they’ll start dropping out of here like flies. Trust me on this.”

Wasn’t long and they were shaking hands—firm grip by both of them—and he was out the door on his own. Stan gave him no clues about how he could advance “the boss” idea among his employees. He never had. His merit pay covered the figuring out and implementation of “the understanding”.

In his mind, floating down Clarion Boulevard now in the claustrophobic silence of the Lincoln interior, he sees himself glancing at the arms of his and Stan’s chairs— their shirts almost touching. 

The green Taurus mark and his wife that morning.  

He watches as Stan reaches over and gently touches his arm then moves away.

        Him and Bentley.

An uncanny replay of his day begins, the reel spinning rapidly backward. Four sales which was only one short of his daily record. Given that the average salesman makes ten sales a month, it’s no wonder he’s top guy on the floor.

The first was a retired Stafford-Sterling University professor of engineering with his effete wife who taught creative writing in the gerontology department at Union College, of all things—a wistful reminder that he hadn’t visited his parents in months, followed by a promise to call them soon for an exchange and dinner appointment, with or without his wife. They weren’t old, by any means, just approaching sixty, with their fortieth wedding anniversary next year, but he needed to see them more often before they fell into that stage beyond their well-functioning senior years. He was lucky. They were healthy, independent and in love—had been since they met the year before he was born.

His second mark had been a melancholy twenty-three year old with beach- sandy hair whose credit couldn’t carry a new ruby red Ford Escape Titanium, so he settled for the used light blue 1998 Fiesta, with stick shift and seventy-thousand miles. When he’d been in his twenties, he, too, had gone to California, borrowing two thousand from his dad, so he could enroll in Berkeley’s school of business. He had become swept in the anti-establishment movement, with its end-of-the Vietnam-war ancillary, escaping the draft with a faint heart murmur and flat feet. He switched majors to CSA farming and lived in a small commune with other back-to-earthers for a year before hitching rides to New York and back to his parents. The commune had been back-breaking work that had finally got to him—the cutting and stacking of firewood, the lugging of water from a well to a kitchen dry sink and a corroded, chipped enamel tub for bathing, and the using of an outhouse in winter. His father was delighted with his return to the dairy farm, but deflated in days when he voiced his desire to escape to city living, away from any hint of husbandry or carpentry. It was his last attempt at drawing life outside the box. His life with his original agricultural family had become distant and strained.

        His third mark was a hard sell--a brunette with unusually intelligent eyes and a stunning resemblance to his wife—curly, wildly out-of-control hair and Clara Bow lips, the “it” girl for whom Clare had been named. He had met Clare (birth certificate shown as Clara) his year at Berkeley in the business school, but after several dates saw immediately she would not suit well to the communal life toward which he was headed. By coincidence, he met her again on his way out of Berkeley, in the student union where he was meeting a friend to say good-bye. Spontaneously, he asked her for a dinner date, stayed an extra week—which they spent the good share of in bed—and she accompanied him home to Woodland Hills, where she enrolled in Union College. With two years of business at Berkeley behind her, she flew through the U.C. program, graduating early, but Clare’s background—always obscure, never fully articulated to him—clouded the demands of post graduate study, and she fell into a dark relapse with drugs and esoteric sexual relationships with both men and women.

Her ability with numbers far exceeded any practical applications in accounting. She could administer algebraic operations in her head, relying on sporadic notations to keep her train of thought from bursting bounds. But she simply could not keep to the discipline requirements in order to reach the creative heights of scientific inquiry. In the academic communities, however, word circulated quickly around her unusual talents, and she was soon courted by Stafford-Sterling’s law, philosophy, linguistic and astronomy departments to no success. She interviewed well, gain candidacy approval in law and philosophy, only to fall into a drug-induced haze for weeks before entrance to graduate work.

His relationship with Clare during all these ins and outs was on-again-off-again, but they never gave up on making it last. He helped her as he could, and she finally gave in to therapeutic support, and has been clean for the past eight years. After her sobriety reached her third year mark, they married in a quiet civil ceremony with only his sister, Margie, present.

His fourth mark had been a single dad with his young son—of indeterminate age, but somewhere, he guessed, in the three-to-four year range—the lad sitting stone-eyed still on an Eames plastic chair during the entire sale process. He thought the child might be retarded, but his eyes were clear, even penetrating, his features normally proportioned and well-positioned on his face. If he were mentally challenged, this boy was on the normal side of the spectrum. And then he realized the child’s hair was undoubtedly home cut, bowl-styled black curls, a buzz-cropped band separating his hairline and the circular mop on top of his head. His hands were long-fingered and delicate—surgeon’s or pianist’s small hands on little boy’s arms. He wore an Indikidual t-top, lightly blue-stained along the seams with three dark Möbius symbols stitched down the front, and a bright yellow baseball hat— a black Möbius on the bill--and denim-colored knit slouchy pants. Well-worn pink sneakers rounded out his romper-room persona, with a style awareness beyond the father dealing with the purchase of a new silver Expedition. The mother, undoubtedly, had picked the kid’s clothes.

He hadn’t known what children played with or one polo shirt from another until Clare walked in the door one Saturday afternoon with string-handled packages from Meow! Cuddle Cribs, and Nursery Rhythms—kiddie stores on The Commons and Main- Street-on-the-Mall. He found out quickly the difference between Loola, Mini Classy, Lot801, and Caroline Bosmans, though sometimes he fudged when Clare wasn’t looking, reading the tags for confirmation. He had to keep his kiddie talk above par.

They lost their son, Nico, when he was approaching his fourth birthday, to strep, contracted from two children who had infections at nursery school, thought initially to be no more than colds. The infected kids were removed from the school when their symptoms became severe, but not before others had played with their toys and been near enough for contact. Nico’s illness started with a cough, then was quickly diagnosed as strep. He resisted the antibiotics prescribed to him and progressed to pneumonia. From the time of diagnosis to his death had been less than two months. The last two weeks in the Pediatric Infection Ward were excruciating for him and Clare. Their son lay buried in white pillows and sheets, tethered to a respirator and IVs.

The funeral and the weeks that followed were a series of nightmares, the worst being the medical bills swollen hideously out of proportion to their income—only now were they seeing light at the end of that financial tunnel. His father had insisted on helping, for which Clare was both grateful and furious. It meant bargaining time for a debit that hardly touched the balance owed.

Clare was in despair for two years after Nico’s death. She withdrew from him, clung to work and therapy to keep off drugs. There were times, still, when the shadow in her eyes hurt him so much, he could hardly breathe. Though she’d been out of therapy as long as she had been depressed, work had become her anchor. Their lovemaking was intense, even fierce, but their earlier familiarity and intimacy had been lost with their son.

After the father had signed the papers for the Ford SUV Expedition, he leaned over the sales desk, his back to his son, and in a clearly audible whisper, told him, “Charlie is autistic. My wife won’t be seen in public with him.” The father lay the pen down on the papers, including the twenty-five hundred dollar check, and pushed them back to his side of the desk, his eyes directed toward the gesture. When he stood, he smiled, looked at him directly as though he hadn’t spoken, and shook his hand, saying he would return the next day to pick up the Expedition.

He had glanced at the son and back to the father. He started to speak, but saw the warning in the young man’s eyes. “Tomorrow then,” was all he said, watching them walk out the showroom door, father holding the son’s tiny, long-fingered hand.

After the mark was gone, he leaned back in his chair, waved to Bentley and the other two salesmen as they left for their evenings away from work.

“Exceptional day for you,” Bentley called out as she scooted through the door. He nodded his appreciation to her, following her disappearance through the rows of cars in the sales lot.

____________

He’s living too close to his work, he thinks. He has to change his life before it flies out of bounds.

He feels today he made a move in a positive direction in his meeting with Stan Bochner. But he needs something more. He needs a bungee jump in the Royal Gorge, a hallucinogenic trip on ayahuasca with a shaman in Brazil, or dicing leads in a spec-top racer on a NASCAR track. He glances at his speedometer—88 mph in a weave in and out of traffic in the third and outside passing lanes. He eases on the accelerator, bringing the Lincoln down to sixty-five. He seems suddenly to be in slow motion. But he knows too well the jettison into perilous territory.

He prefers pinball these days, with a pint of strong dark ale, hogging the machine with his winning streaks. He thinks to stop before going home, but it’s already approaching seven. He’ll surprise Clare with a date at Ti Amo and before-dinner-drinks at The Irish Spring.

When he turns onto West View, he sees beacons flashing red light from two police cars parked at diagonals, a wedge blocking his driveway. He curbs the Lincoln in front of the McEvoys next door and walks up the embanked lawn to the cluster of neighbors looking at his house, ablaze with lights from every room.

“What’s going on?” he calls to Mick McEvoy, as he passes him, race walking toward his house.

There are no fire trucks, so it can’t be a house problem.

“Dunno, but it’s going on in your house, buddy, whatever it is.”

A break-in. Clare.

He runs past several neighbors calling out to him. His heart’s pounding erratically. He rushes up the steps and inside the door.

“What’s going on?” he asks, watching the sergeant bind his wife’s wrists behind her with a plasticuff. He glances around the room as though he’s walked into the wrong house.

The arresting officer spins her around to face him, but before she can speak, the dick answers for her, “Cookin’ the books,” he says smugly, as though he’s Bogie in a film noir.

“What’s he talking about?” he asks Clare, his eyes on his wife’s beautiful mouth. “You’ve…you’ve been cheating Connelly?” he tumbles out inanely, taking the detective at his word. He throws his arms around her, smelling her familiar scent, but feeling her stiffness in his embrace. He steps back, sliding his hands down her arms. “Clare? What’s…”

“Connelly?” the policeman interjects sardonically, looking at him briefly before  nudging Clare forward, snapping the plasticuff as though it were a leash. “Where she works? God, no, man. Where you been? José Mendoza’s her sugah-daddy.” The cop’s playing on the cartel underboss’s known nickname, “The Sugar.” But Mendoza couldn’t be anywhere close to Woodland Hills. The media would be all over it, absolutely wild. Besides their town’s too incidental for the likes of Sugar Mendoza’s attention.

The detective stops in front of him, and tilts his head in sympathy, a dog waiting for  his master to right himself. “We’ve been watching her for eighteen months, or I should say, our man on the inside has. You got yourself quite the little cherry here.” The officer shakes her wrists by the overhanging strap again and nudges her forward.

Cherry? What is he talking about? Clare, a virgin?

As though reading his thoughts, the detective calls over his shoulder, “A soldier on the front lines with not enough savvy.”

Smart-assed copper. 

“Clare?” He calls, reaching out to stop the detective by the arm, the detective who’s pushing his wife toward their front door, out to the cars with the whirling lights and the neighbors’ eyes.

“Watch it, bub,” says the uniform to the side, grasping the offending arm, guiding him away from the detective.

He holds his arm outstretched, his hand forming a fist, as though he’s going to be cuffed as well.

The uniform stares at his arm as though he’s going to swing at him. “Step back and let us do our job. You can see her at the station.”

He lowers his arm, standing like a good little soldier, at the foot of his bed, during inspection at boot camp.

When she turns at the door, the detective stops and lets her speak with him. But she says nothing.

His heart is caving in. He blurts, “I got it. I got the commission I asked for and the raise.”

He feels like a fool. But it’s all he can think to say, feeling like a child begging his mother for another hour of play before the dark. She looks at him with puzzlement. Now she’s the dog with tilted head.

“My terms,” he clarifies. He pauses, knowing she wants more. Her eyes always ask for more. “My terms within the contract, but I got what I asked for, and I asked for a lot. Double percentage and not just for me but for the whole shop.”

She shakes her head slightly, then speaks to the air in front of her, “Honey, our arguments were so trivial. I simply can’t be that bored anymore.”

“We’re married, Clare. That’s a legal contract.”   

Her eyes glisten with the smarts of an inside game-player. “Agreed,” she murmurs, with a sly smile.

He watches her exit, the dick loosely holding her leash.  

He sees himself, rushing out the door, following her and the detective to the whirling neons lighting up the twilight, where the detective pushes her head down as she slides into the back seat.

He asks the detective if he can ride with her, but drives behind them to the station, standing beside her while she’s being booked—the photos, the fingerprinting—then the movement down the hall away from him.

But none of this happens. He doesn’t move from his spot. He is paralyzed. He has nowhere to go, not a thing to do.

He’s a wind-up toy, that’s suddenly out of commission.

His old word. New meaning.  

And, like it or not, now hers. 

____________

           

Four years into her prison term, he’s served papers through the mail from Clare  for a divorce. He’s not surprised, as his attempts to visit her and to reach her by phone have all been thwarted. His letters have come back unopened. Since he doesn’t contest the divorce—neither children nor property are involved—the judge signs off on the paperwork quickly, and within six weeks of being served, he’s no longer married to Clara Bowman. It’s the last he hears from her.

There are days when he fantasizes that she’s a government informant in a witness  protection program somewhere, or, in another variation of that theme, she’s become a jailhouse lawyer, helping others through the appeal process, or in a less altruistic version, has begun working on her Juris Doctorate or social worker degree, which she’s earned out of prison and now is on her way to privileges she always wanted so badly.

There are other days when he believes beyond doubt that she is dead. He’s even seen her—in his heady mind-set—walking out of the prison gates as a shiny black limousine  speeds by gunning her down before she reaches the ride waiting for her. He has experienced sudden death before, so whether she’s dead or alive, he’s felt Nico-like symptoms surrounding thoughts of her since she walked out of his life.

But he remarries within a year of their divorce, to a nice girl he meets through a new  salesman at the dealership, and they now have two late-in-life babies—a boy and a girl. He and his wife rarely argue, and when they do, he always wins. He’s so much better at manipulating words in his favor. But not a day goes by that he doesn’t feel the absence of Clare’s caustic challenges. He drinks too much, works late hours and drives home contently in his Lincoln Continental that he’s earned through his personally-granted merit pay.

____________