Derailed

SEVEN

Okay,” Winston said, “okay. Seven players who hit forty or more home runs with eleven letters in their last name.”

“Yastrzemski,” Charles answered, immediately going for the local boy made good, the BoSox star who’d been raised on a Long Island potato farm.

“Okay,” Winston said. “That’s one.”

Winston Boyko. Mailroom employee. Baseball fan. General raconteur.

He’d been stepping into Charles’s office ever since he’d spied Charles in his faded Yankees T-shirt.

Charles had asked him if he wanted anything, and he’d said, Yes, the starting lineup of the 1978 Yankees, including DH.

Charles had gotten every one with the exception of Jim Spencer — first baseman — and that, more or less, had started a friendship. Of sorts.

Charles couldn’t tell you where Winston lived or what his middle name was, or even if he had a girlfriend or wife. It was a let’s-talk-baseball-trivia kind of friendship, a relationship conducted in the ten minutes a day Winston delivered the mail — once in the morning, once in the afternoon.

Right now, it was morning and Winston was grinning because Charles was having trouble coming up with any additions to the great Yaz.

Killebrew — sorry, nine letters.

Petrocelli — good guess, only ten.

“How about you give me till this afternoon?” Charles asked.

“You mean so you can look it up on-line and then pretend you didn’t?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Winston said, “sure.”

Winston wasn’t your average mailroom employee. For one thing, he was white. For another thing, he was easily smart enough to be writing copy.

Charles had wondered on more than one occasion why he’d ended up delivering office mail — but he’d never asked him. They weren’t that kind of buddies.

On the other hand, you never knew. Wasn’t Winston looking at him with a hint of genuine concern?

“You okay, chief?” he asked him.

“Sure. I’m fine.”

Only he wasn’t fine. He’d been handed a pain reliever account from Eliot, his boss and betrayer. By note, too—“Till something better comes along,” he’d written at the bottom of the page. Only when was that going to be?

And he was thinking about what he was going to be doing for lunch today. Who he’d be having lunch with. The woman with the luminous eyes.

And Charles thought: I have never cheated on Deanna.

Not once.

Not that he hadn’t been tempted here and there. Sorely tempted, sometimes experiencing actual physical symptoms not unlike the warning signs of a heart attack — a faint sweat, a dull ache in the chest, a slight nausea. It’s just that whenever he contemplated going further, he experienced the very same symptoms.

Only worse.

The problem was that he looked at infidelity pretty much the way he imagined Deanna did—not as a fling, but as a betrayal. And betrayal was the kind of word he associated with Benedict Arnold and the 1919 Black Sox. The kind of act that gets you either banned or executed. Besides, he was sure that he loved his wife. That he loved at least the constant unalterable presence of her.

Then again, this was before life betrayed him. Before he started dreaming about life in a more Charles-friendly universe.

“You look kind of sick,” Winston said. “I’m worried it might be contagious.”

“It’s not.” You couldn't catch what he had, could you?

“That’s what Dick Lembergh said.”

“Dick Lembergh? Who’s that?”

“Nobodynow. He’s dead.”

“Thank you. That’s comforting,” Charles said.

“I’ll give you a hint,” Winston said.

“Ahint? ”

“About the other six players. Three of them were American Leaguers.”

“Why didn’t you say three of them were National Leaguers?”

“Hey, you're good. ”

Winston might not have a blue-collar mind, but he had a workingman’s body. That is, he looked like he could beat you up if he ever felt like it. He had a tattoo on his upper arm — AB, it said.

A mistake I made, he'd once told Charles.

Getting the tattoo?

Nah. Dating that girl — Amanda Barnes. I like the tat.

“By the way,” he said now, straightening up to leave, “I’m not a hundred percent sure if it’s seven players with eleven letters in their last names or eleven players with seven letters in their last names. A guy told it to me in a bar around two in the morning, so it’s anybody’s guess.”

They met at an Italian restaurant on 56th and Eighth where it was reputed that Frank Sinatra used to eat on occasion.

Lucinda was dressed for success — if success was making Charles’s eyes water with adoration and arousal. A silk V-neck blouse that didn’t hang, drape, or cover — it clung.

Of course, it could have simply been nerves he was feeling. It was like having lunch with a supplier, neither one exactly sure what to expect.

So Charles asked her what any friendly business acquaintance might ask another. What her husband did.

“Play golf,” said Lucinda of the lovely eyes.

“For a living?”

“I hope not.”

“How long have you been . . . ?”

“Married? Long enough to have to think about it. And you?”

“Eighteen years,” Charles said. He didn’t have to think about it — didn’t particularly want to think about it, either. On the other hand, wasn’t talking about their spouses a sign that nothing untoward was going on here, that everything was pretty much innocent?

“Eighteen years ago I was in grade school,” Lucinda said.

He’d wondered how old she was — around thirty, he guessed.

“So,” Lucinda asked him, “any new backstabbings to report?”

“Well, I have a new account.”

“Yes?”

“An aspirin. Recommended by doctors two to one over other aspirins.”

“That’s great.”

“Except doctors don’t recommend aspirin anymore. But if they did . . .”

“So what are you going to . . . ?”

“I don’t know. It’s a headache.”

Lucinda laughed. Lucinda had thin wrists and tapered fingers that she used to brush her thick dark hair out of her eyes — one eye, actually. He thought of Veronica Lake in This Gun for Hire.

“How did you get into . . . ?”

“Advertising? Nobody knows how they get into advertising. It’s a mystery. Suddenly, you just are.”

“Kind of like marriage, huh?”

“Marriage? I don’t follow.”

“Well, believe it or not, I can’t remember actually wanting to get married. I don’t even remember saying yes. I must’ve, though.”

She twisted her diamond ring as if to make sure it was actually there — that she was, in fact, married. Maybe it was Charles’s charm that was making her forget?

“Your husband. Did you meet him in Texas?” Charles asked.

“No. I smoked pot in Texas. And hung out in backseats.”

“Oh, right — I forgot — you were a juvenile delinquent.”

“They call it hell-raiser in Amarillo. How about the teenage Charles? What was he like?”

“Oh. I was a heck-raiser, I guess.” The teenage Charles read a lot of books and handed in every homework assignment and term paper on time.

“Oh, right — you were the guy we made fun of.”

“Yeah. That’s me.”

Charles was basking in the afterglow of lunch.

Unfortunately, he was also staring at a file that said “Account Review” on the cover.

The thing about being given a pain reliever account was that you didn’t necessarily want to accept it. Pain relievers, dishwasher detergents, deodorants. They were signposts to a kind of advertising Siberia. “Downward Spirals This Way.” They existed in a place where no one much noticed what you did, save the clients themselves. And they made you test, retest, and test some more, even though odds were good you’d still end up with a housewife holding the product up to camera and telling you how it changed her life.

In addition to inheriting the account, he inherited a commercial that seemed to be well into the preproduction process. That is, it had already been tested, retested, and tested again and then sent off to three production houses for bids. One of them — Headquarters Productions, Charles noticed — had been recommended by the agency. He knew their rep — Tom Mooney, old style and annoying, a Fuller Brush man with reels.

The account executive on his new account, Mary Widger, had sent him the TV board for his perusal. As it turned out, it wasn’t a housewife holding the pain reliever up to camera and telling the world how it changed her life. It was a housewife holding the pain reliever up to camera and telling her husband instead.

He called David Frankel, an agency producer he’d never worked with before, since David worked on the kinds of commercials he’d be doing from now on but hadn’t up till now.

“Yeah,” Frankel answered the phone. “Who’s this?”

“Charles Schine.”

“Oh. Charles Schine.”

“I think we’re going to be working together.”

“It’s about time,” David said. Charles wondered if he was expressing friendliness or simply satisfaction at Charles’s demotion into the land of analgesics.

He’d pick friendliness.

It was the agency producer’s job to bid out the board, work the numbers to everyone’s satisfaction, then go off and shoot it with you.

“This job seems a little high,” Charles said. He was referring to the bid price penciled in at the bottom of the page — already forwarded to the client for approval after factoring in editing, music, and all the other postproduction costs. Plus agency commission.

Nine hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars for a two-day shoot.

“They always pay that,” David said.

“Okay. It just seems a little high for two actors and an aspirin bottle.”

“Well, that’s the price,” he said flatly.

“Fine.” It wasn’t as though money were something Charles was supposed to concern himself with — only if the clients themselves were concerned about it. And according to David, they weren’t.

But it did seem high.

“Why don’t we get together next week and go over everything,” Charles said.

“I count the minutes,” David said.

Charles guessed friendliness wasn’t what David had been expressing after all.

Their second lunch date was still more lunch than date. Still just two people who found each other interesting, if unavailable.

When dessert arrived — two biscottis with cappuccinos — she said: “You never mention your daughter. What’s she like?”

“Normal,” Charles said.

“Normal?”

“Yeah. Normal.”

“That’s it? I’ve heard gushing parents before . . .”

“Rude. Moody. Generally embarrassed I’m her father. Normal. ”

Of course he hadn’t told her why his daughter was rude and moody a lot of the time.

But she was looking at him with an expression that looked kind of reproachful, so he did.

“She’s sick.”

“Oh.”

“Juvenile diabetes. And no, you don’t just take insulin and everything’s okay. Not this time.”

“Sorry,” she said.

“So am I.”

Lucinda was a first-class listener.

He realized this about ten minutes into his mostly uninterrupted monologue about just how sorry he was. How eight years ago he and Deanna had brought this normal little girl into the ER and left with someone else. A kid he had to give shots to twice a day and monitor closely so she wouldn’t dive into hypoglycemic shock. A kid for whom he had to go buy special insulin made from pig cells because it was the only one she’d really respond to, but whose general condition was in free fall anyway. A kid like that.

His kid.

She listened with empathy and concern. She shook her head, she sighed, she politely asked him questions when she didn’t understand something. Pig insulin — why was that?

He answered her as best he could, and when he finally finished spilling his guts, she resisted feeding him even one moronic platitude. He appreciated that.

“I don’t know how you manage,” she said, “I really don’t. How’s Anna dealing with it?”

“Fine. She’s renting herself out as a pin cushion.”

One of the way she was dealing with it, of course, was this way. The lame joke, the stale bon mot, laughing in the face of disaster.

“How’s that working out for you?” Lucinda asked him after he mentioned needling Anna about taking her pig’s insulin on time.

“How’s what working out?” Charles said. Playing dumb.

“Nothing,” Lucinda said. “Never mind.”

What do you talk about when you can’t talk about the future?

You talk about the past.

Sentences begin with “Remember when . . .” or “I passed Anna’s old nursery school today . . .” or “I was thinking about that vacation we took in Vermont. . . .”

After he and Deanna spent dinner reminiscing about the heatless ski shack in Stowe where Anna’s milk bottle had frozen solid, after they finished eating and stacked the dishes and Charles went upstairs and checked Anna’s feet, which she only grudgingly displayed for him, they both ended up in bed with the TV on.

Then somehow, her hand ended up touching his. His leg sidled up to her leg. It was as if their limbs were doing it on their own, their bodies finally saying, Enough of this, I’m cold. I’m lonely.

Charles got up and locked the door. Not a word about what they were doing. He slid back into bed and embraced her, heart colliding with his ribs, kissing her and thinking how he’d really and truly missed this.

Only somewhere in the middle of becoming lovers again they became strangers. It was odd how that happened. As he was moving on top of her and beginning to enter her, his mouth searching for hers — a sudden awkwardness to their motions. They were like two jigsaw pieces refusing to match — turn them this way and that way, and they still wouldn’t fit. She pushed against his chest, he fell out of her, he went to kiss her, she turned her head the wrong way. She smiled in encouragement, he moved back into her, she froze, he shrank and slunk away.

They untangled slowly and drifted to opposite sides of the bed. Neither of them said good night.