The Switch

17

Tanner needed to get some exercise, blow off steam. He called a friend, Scott, who worked downtown as a home theater installer and belonged to the same gym Tanner did: SportsClub Boston, a midrange fitness club, part of a network of gyms in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic. Scott was an excellent squash player, and Tanner didn’t mind losing to him; he enjoyed the game. The gym didn’t sell bottled water, and the water he got from the sink in the locker room tasted metallic, so he always stopped on his way in at the fruit stand outside the gym run by a pleasant, plump Nepalese guy. He liked giving the guy his business.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Tanner,” said the fruit-stand guy.

“Good afternoon, Ganesh.”

Tanner and Scott played a best-of-three match. Tanner won one and lost the other two.

Then he quickly showered and went to meet his wife.

Tanner liked tea just fine, considered it a pleasant drink, but didn’t get all the hoopla. The thousand different kinds of teas, the subtle distinctions, calling herbal tea “tisane,” buying loose-leaf tea in bulk, blah blah blah. To him, tea was, even at its best, two clicks away from scented hot water.

The place she’d chosen for their postwork meeting, the T Room, was a couple of white-painted rooms on the second floor over Newbury Street, minimally furnished with tatami mats on the floor and shoji screens and hanging scrolls on the walls. You had to take off your shoes. You couldn’t even hear traffic. The windows were double glazed.

It was peaceful and serene. Not a good setting for an argument. Maybe she wanted to borrow some of the tranquility of the Japanese tea ceremony.

She was wearing a simple white tube dress with a thin suede jacket over it. Her light brown hair tumbled down her shoulders. She didn’t appear to be wearing any makeup, except for lip gloss. And she looked terrific, better than ever. Which was not a good thing. She should look disconsolate, out of sorts, desperately missing her husband.

“I’m guessing I’m not gonna be able to get a double espresso here, right?” Tanner said when she sat down on the mat across from him. She didn’t kiss him, but that didn’t seem to be significant.

“Tanner, they won’t allow coffee near the place. It makes everything smell.”

“Smell great.”

“It’s like having a cigar smoker at the next table when you’re dining at a fancy restaurant.”

“Not exactly. So since when did you become a tea lover and defect to the dark side?”

The waiters and waitresses were dressed in kimonos. There was a complicated ritual involving boiling the pure spring water and using a tea scoop and a bamboo whisk. Tea was served in large primitive-looking bowls you held up in two hands. The tea was a beautiful green but it was bitter and seaweedy. It was accompanied by mochi desserts, sort of sticky buns filled with not-very-sweet dark pasty stuff. The bitter and the sweet. Maybe the elaborately choreographed rituals of the Japanese tea ceremony weren’t so different from the rituals of estranged spouses. They were meeting in a no-coffee zone, neutral territory.

“The forms you wanted — they’re in your e-mail inbox,” he said.

“Thanks for doing that.”

“No sweat. But I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Rent an apartment? It’s a short-term rental.”

“Should I find that reassuring?”

“Do you want it to be?”

“Do I want you to come back home? Of course I do.”

She sighed. “I don’t have any money, Tanner. I hate to say it, but it’s true.”

“Tell me what you need and I’ll give it to you.”

“I want to cash out.”

He didn’t know what she meant and wondered if she was actually talking about divorce now, in some sarcastic way. He said, “Wait, are you talking about—” He didn’t want to actually say the word “divorce,” because that would make it suddenly real. They’d had a fight, she’d moved out, she didn’t want to talk, they were temporarily separated... That was all tolerable. As long as things got patched up and she came back.

“I’m talking about my equity stake in Tanner Roast. I need it back. I haven’t had a closing in two months, and I’m running out of cash.” They’d each put a hundred thousand dollars into Tanner Roast when it started eight years ago. That meant they each owned fifty percent of the company’s stock.

“Sarah, why don’t I just lend you whatever you need? You don’t want me to buy you out now; you really don’t. You know what kind of shape we’re in? You might not even get your original hundred K back.” It was worse than that, but Tanner didn’t want to tell her: her hundred grand was probably worth zero right now.

“With that Four Seasons deal? Don’t kid a kidder.” He’d been talking about that deal at home a lot before she left, probably out of nervous energy.

“That’s not— That’s off.”

“Four Seasons?”

“Yeah. Not happening.”

“I don’t understand. That was a done deal.”

“Apparently not.”

“Oh, wow. That’s too bad. Look, let’s just go our separate ways, Tanner. You don’t need me as an equity partner. It’s time.”

Separate ways. “Sarah. How about you just move back home?”

“I have the right to cash out anytime I want. You know that.”

He sighed. “Well, do what you want to do. But you get a valuation done, you’ll see, we’re in the red.”

“We’ll see about that.” She said it matter-of-factly, not threateningly. “I’ll send you a formal e-mail tomorrow.”

She could force him to buy her out. Require him to come up with a hundred thousand dollars or whatever the stock was worth. Which he could maybe squeeze out somewhere, but it would be ugly. He might have to start selling off equipment.

“Sarah, can I apologize?” Tanner said.

“For what?”

He thought: For whatever you want me to apologize for. Just give me a list. He said, “For that big fight we had. I was a jerk.”

“You weren’t even in the fight.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t fight. Everything is” — she held her hand out, palms down, flat, and gestured a perfectly flat line — “smooth. You never get upset. You never get pissed off.”

“I get pissed off plenty, and you know it.”

“Only when you tell me. There’s no other way to know.”

“Because I don’t throw heavy objects or scream like a loon? Believe me, I’m pissed off about... well, the Four Seasons thing.”

“You know what you’re like, Tanner? You’re like those giant heads, those statues on, is it Easter Island or Christmas Island? You know, those huge, expressionless, impassive heads. That’s you.”

He smiled. Just let the balls whiz by. Don’t swing at them.

He had a fleeting memory of one of his parents’ fights, one of many that woke him up in the middle of the night and made him feel like he wanted to throw up. He was squatting on the staircase, on the step from which you could see into the kitchen without being noticed. His father’s roars — “Goddamn you! Goddamn you!” — had awakened him.

His father could be terrifying. His face was dark red. Tanner saw his father pick up the ceramic pumpkin that he’d made in art class and hurl it at his mother, who screamed and dodged and just missed being hit by it. The pumpkin smashed against the wall and exploded into a hundred jagged pieces. He was upset about seeing his pumpkin break, of course, but it felt as if something else had shattered then too, something bigger and more important: that basic feeling of trust a kid has that his parents are the grown-ups, the rational ones. He’d never forget the look on his mother’s face. It wasn’t anger, and it wasn’t regret. It was fear.

“Listen,” he said calmly. “You talked about counseling before — I think that’s a good idea. Let’s give it a try.”

“Who says I’m interested any longer?”

“Oh.”

“That was a joke, Tanner. As if anything gets a rise out of you.” She took a sip. “I bet your friends are lapping this up. Especially Lanny and Carl.”

“Misery loves company, I guess.”

“You’re all just yukking it up about your shrew of a wife.”

“No way,” Tanner said. “Are you kidding? They all love you.”

She shook her head, gave a rueful smile.

“Sarah, sweetie, I miss you. It’s lonely without you at home.”

“You? Lonely? Don’t play that violin for me. God, you’ve got more friends than... I remember walking across the quad with you when we were undergrads. It was like walking through water. Every ten steps someone was accosting you, wanting to say hi. It was nonstop. You knew everybody. I don’t know how you got to your classes on time. You were like a walking Facebook.”

“While you were studying, I was partying,” he said with a smile. “I admit it.”

“And our wedding — remember, your original invite list was like five hundred people? I made you cut your list down to the size of mine, and I felt bad about it. I mean, you ended up inviting like a tenth of the people you wanted to. You’re, like, the least alone person in the world.”

Tanner shrugged. “I find most people interesting once you get to know them.”

“It’s so easy being your friend,” Sarah said. “Maybe we should have stuck with that.”

“With what?”

“With just being friends. More tea?”

Tanner couldn’t help but think about the Box. The one that contained the menu for a restaurant, Tanner Q, that never was.

His father always had a few scotches after work, and by the third, he was usually pretty well plastered. Tanner knew to stay away from him when he was drunk. Not that he’d get mean — he usually didn’t — but it embarrassed Tanner. It was a side of his father he preferred not to see. One day he’d wandered into the TV room where his father sat in his BarcaLounger, a glass of scotch in the cupholder, watching the Sox. He asked about the Box.

“It’s nothing,” his father said. “It was just an idea.”

“But why didn’t you do it?”

Fred Tanner gave him a watery, unfocused stare over the rim of his rocks glass. “Why?”

“Yeah, why?”

He gave a strange, bitter smile. “Because of you.”

“What do you mean?” Tanner said, alarmed, confused.

Then his father’s face became clouded and inscrutable. “I’m kidding,” he finally said, but he didn’t look like he was kidding. In any case, the conversation was over. His father turned back to the Red Sox.

“What’d I do?” Tanner asked, but his father didn’t answer.