PLEASE COOPERATE (Excerpt)
Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.
– William Hazlitt
PART 1
*
1
Many people would die to live in a Manhattan apartment; somewhat fewer die for one. So much comes down to real estate. But let’s begin with the wedding, when everyone cooperated so nicely.
Nick’s marriage was a triumph of wish over probability. When Nick announced his engagement, his mother in Framingham had long stopped despairing over her son’s convoluted personal decisions. (“Really, Nick, forget that we all loved her, just tell me: why? What exactly – not generally, not 'we wanted different things' – please tell me in the most excruciating detail what was wrong with this one?”). His two brothers and sister Kate no longer rolled their eyes each time Nick announced the end of a relationship (nor collected on over-under bets about how long a relationship would last). His friends no longer offered up blind dates or possible matches – unless they bore unconscious malice for, or a conscious palpable grudge against, a woman: “Oh, you should meet our friend Nick – he’d be perfect for you.”
Nick’s erratic and volatile career as a freelance producer was perfectly matched to his personal life – both evoked the question, “What exactly are you doing?” One week he was in Cape Town producing a sales boondoggle for IBM; the next month he was in Orlando with 700 pharmaceutical sales reps at their national sales conference (“Leverage Tomorrow Today!”); the next month he was in Las Vegas shepherding Cirque du Soleil wannabes around a stage for their opening act for “Perfect Performance!” a Cisco systems software – oh, hell, it doesn’t matter – no one cared (except the clients and Nick). He was working his New York niche job – one of those jobs no one ever thinks about, no one goes to school to study, like, say, pharmacy, but which amounts to a small industry worth billions and which people just happen to stumble upon after they’ve failed at other jobs. Nick produced business events, or more like, business shows – show business entirely inverted (with the business portion ruthlessly piled over the show – stale cake piled on top of tooth-shattering frosting), with all the fun and excitement of show business squeezed and leached out by PowerPoint-besotted VPs of Sales, leaving it to the creative directors and derelict freelance writers Nick hired to inject a simulacrum of enthusiasm, interest and pseudo-fun.
And then, when the job was done, Nick would do nothing for a month or two – except read the New York Times, the New York Review, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, novels (he possessed a striking, shallow familiarity with an infinite range of topics – “helpful in my work”), but he also used breaks between gigs to meet women on line, walk Baldwin, his pedigree-baffling, shelter rescue dog (and meet women at the dog run by the Museum of Natural History), go to the gym, see movies in the afternoon (and meet women in the movie theater). To productive effect, Nick mined the lonely afternoon clientele of Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, a foreign-independent film mini-plex on Broadway at West 63rd, which, Nick observed, was so bourgeois that “even their English-speaking films have subtitles,” (adding: “they have to show the movies on tiny screens because the films’ budgets are so small”), and which was a source of Nick’s occasional reckless and senseless pickups of women in their fifties and, once or twice, early sixties – who, to give beauty its fair and catholic due, were still stunning – but who in many cases had not received a man’s ardent attentions in at least a decade and were equally thrilled and baffled by the cheery come-ons of a man in his mid-forties. All of Nick’s liaisons ended quite disgracefully – until finally, to avoid being spotted by an increasing number of female patrons he’d treated shabbily, Nick would only enter the screening rooms in the tiny multiplex after the trailers for upcoming films had started. Since he only attended weekday matinees, Nick said it was hardly an inconvenience: “I still get my usual seat!”)
But Nick was getting married! Finally!
While we were thrilled to attend Nick’s wedding, none of us thought his marriage was a good idea. Getting married in your twenties or thirties is respectable and possibly sensible: synchronizing the biological clocks, locking onto the income stream and the expanding assets of a more prosperous partner – which in the interests of a better divorce settlement, starts the division of property clock (time is absolutely money). Getting married in your sixties and even your seventies is understandable – unless you’re watching your inheritance vaporize thanks to a parent’s regression to adolescent impulsive stupidity. The geriatric version of trashing Dad’s car is Dad trash-compacting the children’s inheritance thanks to the machinations of some country club harridan-harlot-widow, bimbotic secretary or, on the distaff side, and alarmingly increasingly, the widow’s sociopathic investment advisor or a health-failing incompetent seeking free and eternal feeding and nursing from a willing drudge. All the same, elderly marriage can still be a respectable way to ensure care, companionship and a reliable hospital visitor who takes the onus off indifferent and preoccupied children to attend a parent’s bedside for long stretches when their iPhones are humming with parent-teacher conference alerts, offers of free Jets tickets or invitations for a beach weekend. Otherwise, in an age of Viagra-enabled ecstasy, surely the otherwise entirely annoying Baby Boomers should just return to their fatuous ideas of Free Love (especially love free of inheritance-spoiling interlopers) and have sex unconstrained by the laws of the state. Right? Getting married in one’s eighties or older (God forbid) is just a pathetic grab for a shred of mercy and dignity shortly before death’s abominating end – and bears the fecal aroma of the ridiculous and shameful.
Marriage in one’s forties, however, generates a WTF moment of incredulity, of searching existential rumination – and plain bafflement. As Nick’s mother should have more properly asked, Why? Why her? Why anyone? Why ever? Oh, why, why, why? (This would come later.)
Oh, you’re thinking, Nick was marrying for love! Well, fine, just dandy, but this is Nick we are speaking about, but, still, even in principle, the unspoken absurdity of marriage in one’s forties was hanging over this event. Nick was not going to have children with Jackie (Jacqueline, with a slurring Zzzzhhhhah at the beginning – Zzzzhhhhah-kleen – when she wanted something from Nick and anyone else equally charmed, as I certainly was, by her lovely marbleized, worlds-of-wonder nether globes, whose contours minutely and, with heat-pressed splendor, perfectly adhered to every fabric that seized her bottom – and just how do they cut pants to part your buttocks’ cleavage – and is it uncomfortable? (I’m sure Nick knew the answer –“Women’s Wear Daily did a piece on this last week – it’s really quite simple.”) So, with no children to come, only financial gain’s magnetism pulled them towards holy matrimony – or so we first thought. At one of our group dinners after a Board meeting, Nick let it drop that when Jackie finally moved into his apartment (though she’d mostly stayed at Nick’s mostly while they dated – having a backyard in Manhattan will do that for your relationship) she’d announced that she’d contribute nothing towards the mortgage because, she told Nick, it’s yours – meaning, the apartment was a pre-existing asset, not communal property, divisible in a divorce (though crafty, Ebola-spleened divorce attorneys would disagree: anything’s possible). Jackie – suddenly purring to Nick in Zzzzhhhhah-kleen mode – said she would be saving for our country home, she’d be building equity – yes, for investors in shoe companies, my neighbor and Board member comrade Paul Wagner would later observe.
Still, we adored Jackie – all of us. We’d seen Nick suffer in his relationships – thanks to his own hapless lack of self-control and discernment. Aside from his Lincoln Plaza Cinema Lothario escapades and a cast of extras, passing in and out of the scene with relative anonymity, he’d also attempted more ambitious couplings with a marketing vice president, a vice president of pharmaceutical sales, a vice president of procurement (“Perfect, since Nick’s specialty is both vice and procurement” – again from Paul Wagner) – all women Nick had met during one of his corporate freelance jobs. These women’s staggering bodies, flawless chins and taut necks shared the disciplined fitness and lacquered beauty of corporate gladiator-slaves – spectacular and frightening; you could feel the rage and self-lacerating hatred that created such physical perfection (“Hot and angry sex – with every one of them,” observed Nick in one of his more philosophical moments). We’d see them occasionally leaving the building – always before 7 a.m. during the week – trim, crisp and buffed, like trussed prize game birds, ready to serve themselves up on the corporate platter.
They destroyed Nick. You could understand the pull – for them. Amazons-on-the-Hudson in the midst of their quest to conquer a hedge fund manager – or maybe just a pharma EVP – meet this shambling, charming man, plain-spoken, whose deep-ballast voice thrums at a barely audible level, drawing you in, focusing your attention, making you notice the crazed green-hazel eyes, the thick, wavy hair that would never vanish, the weary sad funny eyes, the mouth just curled up slightly as if he’d decided against telling a racy joke to the vicar. Despite the obscure banality of Nick’s work, the budgets of some of the two- or three-day events he produced occasionally ran into the millions, requiring a few people to take the matter seriously or lose their jobs – and sometimes involved crews whose numbers suggested an ant colony – with a roster of corporate egotists and cry-babies and terrified underlings and suckups – whom Nick, with a headset instead of tricorne, commanded with the serene and absolute authority of Washington Crossing the Delaware. And the alpha-babes saw Nick in action. The competence. The strength. The will. The silent but unmistakable determination to annihilate anyone who fucked with his show. The monomaniacal conviction that nothing else matters but this, now: your meeting, your success, your career. You.
A man who combines strength and servitude is appealing to many ambitious women, and in his professional life Nick offered these in abundance, but in his private life he became remarkably slothful – like a kitchen appliance that suddenly came unplugged: the slicing, dicing, shredding, blending food processor suddenly inert, immobile, useless. Relaxing, Nick called it. Barely acceptable catatonia, I once offered after an unwise extra helping of red wine in his backyard (without, for some reason, Paul Wagner). For an apartment so sparsely furnished, Nick’s clutter and disorganization were astounding – as if he’d diverted and stored all the chaos he staved off professionally in his own home; despite the luxury of a garden in Manhattan – not a sliver garden the size of a large planter but five hundred square feet under the stars (if there happened to be a city-wide blackout and you could see stars). His white pine picket fence was shredding like chewed popsicle sticks; after planting flowers the first year he’d moved in – perhaps to assure us on the Board that letting him buy into our brownstone was indeed a wise decision – the garden and his interest in it soon withered.
What we came to realize – not just me, but Paul, Danielle, Stephanie – even that domicile-ruining, self-dealing, self-pitying Serbian bastard (is there any other kind?) Emil – not to mention the uber-alpha-executive-babes who came into Nick’s life – was this: at home Nick was spent. He had the remarkable ability to invest himself with a totality of spirit and energy into his work, but when each project ended, he had nothing left. This is a slight exaggeration, because, as we shall see, he was very helpful in the most severe efforts of the Board – perhaps because these struggles engaged his talents and role of producer (“Fuck with me, then die”) – but aside from mustering his sexual energies, between assignments Nick became indolent, detached from life – his obsessive movie-going, aside from the twisted sexual bonanzas he occasionally reaped, seemed as much about his wish to sever all ties with his life and with the present tense itself and repose in the timeless limbo of a dark room that provided a substitute reality – though, surely, that is a reason everyone goes to the movies.
Eventually Jackie changed everything for Nick. But, until then, as Nick’s corporate VP girlfriends (“the Vice Squad” – Paul Wagner, of course) became involved with Nick or occasionally took up unofficial residence with him – they increasingly turned against him with annoyance, regret and bewilderment. Instead of discovering your producer-GI-Generalissimo-Joe is a superhero, they found the reverse. They didn’t understand that Nick just couldn’t do any more than he did, that he needed a life of discrete, episodic assignments because he didn’t have the stamina to keep up the effort, let alone go to the same office every day, week after week. It wasn’t in him. The Amazons’ daily high-throttle hum of ambition and activity was industrial noise to him. The effort required for a relationship – planning dinners, weekends away, vacations, shopping for housewares we absolutely need or meeting some of my friends was of little interest to Nick, or just too hard (aside from seeing us in the building, which, to his corporate girlfriends’ frequent dismay, simply involved opening his apartment door so Paul and I could make our way to the garden with several wine bottles).
To satisfy Nancy, his most fiercely berating corporate girlfriend, Nick started booking back to back shows – which then meant he was always away on gigs – trade shows for software systems, awards events for telemarketing associations, endless pharmaceutical POAs (“Plan of Action”) meetings – Nick was an endless, perversely gleeful font of corporate acronyms and bullshit: “I’m going to take a deep dive into the POA topics for each silo – without getting too granular or stuck in the weeds – I’ll circle back with key learnings”). Nick’s commitment to steady employment not only provided Nancy with fewer occasions to develop the non-relationship relationship she wanted with Nick, but also inspired her to betray him for some Dockers-wearing douchebag from a suburban corporate park in Central Jersey. We thought we should be toasting her departure – but Nick didn’t see it that way, and Paul Wagner and I vacillated between keeping our distance and spending time with Nick, watching him get self-pityingly wasted and, as with anyone’s breakups but your own, become intensely and increasingly boring in his mono-obsessional fixation on lost love.
No one understands other people’s relationships, let alone our own, but that doesn’t mean we don’t all offer worthless opinions about them. We thought Nick was well rid of these women, though Nick didn’t see it that way and subscribed to their opinion that he had failed. We hated to see him suffer, and Nick felt genuinely bad. He half-heartedly took up acoustic guitar – a mood elevator I do not recommend.
It can be startling to suddenly apprehend the limitations of someone you’re close to – as it occurred to me when I saw how Nick’s work rendered him unfit for much else in life and that despite his gracious competence and the low-key, easy friendship, largely on his terms, in his home, Nick radiated a deeply upsetting exhausted, isolated emptiness.
Then Jackie came into his life. Nick had met her at a Saturday afternoon wine tasting at a Columbus Avenue wine shop – another source of pickups in his repertoire (“A few sips of wine on an empty stomach in the middle of the afternoon makes many slender women much more approachable,” he sagely noted). While Nick was ambitious about little and curious about everything, Jackie was neither especially ambitious nor curious, which proved quite satisfactory for Nick – and, despite some initial resetting of the references we used in conversation, all of us came to see Jackie’s lack of curiosity and her lack of a sprawling (and banal and brainless) ambition to be ideal for Nick. She was happy. She was content with herself. She sold New Age, organic, all natural, Christ-knows-what cosmetics from a small manufacturer to stores around Manhattan, toting her rolly bag around town, dressed in oddball hats – we admired especially her purple sou’wester rain hat whose quirky dash and functionality prompted several of us to seek them out as presents (bolstered by samples of her cosmetics – though after initially buying some as a gesture of goodwill and support to Nick and welcoming Jackie into his life and ours, and that of the building, we rarely bought any of her products again – which, in her chipper, sprightly way, she never seemed to mind) – and we were equally thrilled by her clothing of bright anti-Manhattan colors, fluorescent orange paisleys, fucias, Key Lime green, like a beacon of cheerfulness alerting the citizenry that things aren’t all that bad, chin up, look again!, the sun is always shining somewhere!
Her wavy strawberry colored hair and pink freckled complexion seemed part of a color-coordinated effort to connect her effervescent spirit to everything she touched, and we quickly dismissed our middle-class snobbish concerns that her devotion to People, Us Weekly, Entertainment Weekly (TV version as well), fashion magazines and her total indifference to the cultural or political topics that Nick breezily absorbed would be a problem.
The biggest difference she brought to Nick’s life was this: she liked him and she cared about him as he was. Simple enough to say, but it was new for Nick. (And would probably be a stunning novelty for many other men.). She made her own hours, worked from home (when she moved in there was minor trouble around who worked where in the apartment, but she and Nick solved it). She was kind. She was largely content with the world as she found it, never felt the prick or spur of constant dissatisfaction with the present that goads so much empty-headed ambition. If happiness is a form of genius, she was Einstein – at least back then.
I remember my sweet satisfaction on Nick’s wedding day when, just before the service began, waiting for Jackie with Nick, the minister and the other groomsmen at the improvised altar, I looked up the spiral staircase and saw Jackie about to descend, and I understood how she had brought him such enormous happiness and contentment in all the imperfect ways a relationship can.
I also remember one day when I was next door in Stephanie Ross’s first-floor apartment (above Nick’s, overlooking his rear garden). Steph was our co-op’s President; we were having dinner and working on some Board matter (co-op insurance overcharges? boiler repair costs?) around seven-thirty on a spring evening. While Stephanie made linguine with clam sauce, I looked out her rear window and down into Nick’s garden, where Nick and Jackie were sitting side-by-side, sipping wine at his glass garden table. Nick had put a book down and was looking at the flowers Jackie had planted (her cheer-infusing nature included turning Nick’s garden into a voluptuous, chromatic, horticultural spill of color and texture everyone with a garden view enjoyed). They weren’t speaking to each other, Jackie just sat there, and I turned back to my Board work, but after a minute I looked out the window, and they were still sitting silently next to each other, and this time I couldn’t return my attention to my spreadsheet, but kept watching (somewhat guiltily – while the surrounding buildings turned Nick’s garden into a fishbowl, we were generally discreet enough not to stare into the garden – if you happened to pass by a window and catch their eyes below, one waved and moved on).
Nick and Jackie remained still for another five minutes, then ten minutes, immobile (like some piece of Euro-nonsense performance art – except there was no artifice or act of pretension in this), frozen in domestic tableau. Stephanie had joined me, curious what I was watching. I raised my index finger to my lips, and we, now as still as Nick and Jackie, watched them below – until, after another five minutes had passed, Nick slowly raised his hand from his chair’s armrest and gently lowered it on Jackie’s hand, entwining his fingers with hers. He then leaned over, and found her cheek inclining to him as well, and their cheeks met and pressed intensely against each other, both of them still looking straight ahead at the flowers and the garden fence, and Nick dropped her hand and wrapped his arm around her, pulling Jackie’s shoulder closer, her right cheek still pressed firmly against his left, radiating a chaste electricity upwards through the garden, and then he tilted his head so their temples nuzzled slightly, and Nick’s face bore the relief and tired joy of a long-voyaging traveler who has arrived home, and, next to me, a hushed “Oh” issued from Stephanie, and my eyes were suddenly swimming in glad pools, and Stephanie’s cracking voice said, “Lovely – lovely,” and I looked at her, and we both nodded, and I said, “Yes. Lovely,” and then, the moment fulfilled, we returned Nick and Jackie to their privacy and pretended to look at our work, and when we glanced out the window again, Nick and Jackie were no longer in the garden.
We knew everything and nothing about Nick (and nothing at all about Jackie), which made me happy, because I find it comforting to know I have an entire lifetime to keep discovering people I love. Until you discover things you wish you hadn’t.
*
2
The wedding was spectacular, and the first two things I will say to anyone who gets married in New York is that, if possible, you should get married at the Columbus Citizens Foundation, and the second is that you should not marry a woman whose mother has gone off her mania meds and run out of Xanax.
The third thing is that, even if you are an experienced producer, you should not produce your own wedding.
It started well enough. They’d chosen an October wedding, the Saturday after Columbus Day (the Foundation’s biggest day of the year – since it is New York’s pre-eminent Italian-American social organization) – and undoubtedly the finest time of the year in New York, when the mature foliage in the park peaks and the thriving energy of the city and the post-Labor Day resurgent ambition of art, science and commerce hurls forward with excitement undaunted by the slush of inevitable compromise, fuck-ups and sorrows of mid-winter months. And, best of all, none of us had to buy plane tickets, pay for hotel rooms and travel to a suburban golf resort in a planned community with piped-in weather to eat brie en croute.
At ten o’clock on the Saturday morning of the wedding day, Paul Wagner, Stephanie Ross and I knocked on Nick and Jackie’s door. A photographer’s assistant, strung with two cameras, holding a nylon bag with batteries and lenses, appeared. “We’re the Co-op Board,” said Paul. “We’re investigating reports of bestiality.” The assistant started to open her mouth. Stephanie punched Paul in the arm. We could see Nick sitting with the photographer – you can tell the difference between the photographer and the assistant because the photographer never holds a camera unless he’s shooting – with Nick running down a shot list.
“So, we’ll need an establishing shot when we gather at the top of the stairs – one of me with my best man,” said Nick. “I know we’re going docu-guerilla” – a term I’d never heard Nick use before – or ever again – “but we need to set the narrative – ”
“Nick, really, how many shows have we done?” said the photographer with a patient smile. Nick was using one of his corporate hires, a trusted partner, a friend (though nobody we knew), Nick probably got a nice price, a combination of favor and trust and promise of future work. “Nick, I know it’s your wedding, but it’s a wedding. I’ve shot a hundred weddings. I shot civil wars in Africa.” The photographer was in his fifties, haggardly good looking, all the lumps and creases working together – you could imagine the safari vest in his closet; a whiff of cordite on him like aftershave. “I shot Beirut, for Godsakes – ”
“If you haven’t seen Paul drink, I’d say Beirut was good preparation,” I offered. Stephanie whacked me with the back of her hand. Then she whacked Paul for good measure.
The assistant looked back and forth from her boss to Nick to us, before Nick said, “you can let them in.”
“Where’s Jackie?” asked Stephanie.
“Sleeping,” said Nick.
Stephanie’s eyes bounced. “Really?”
“Yeah, really.” His voice crushed us into silence.
“Well, good, we don’t need a nervous bride,” said Steph, after a pause, trying to chip the conversation towards the flag.
“But we still need a bride,” said Nick.
“Shall I go see her?” asked Steph, a little more tentatively.
“Give it your best shot,” said Nick. “Paul, have a seat, and practice being quiet. Derek, can you make coffee for everyone?”
“Sure,” I said, and I walked into his alcove kitchen as Stephanie knocked gently on the bedroom door and Jackie snapped “What?”
“Jackie, it’s Steph.”
“Okay, come in.”
Stephanie found Jackie not sleeping, but in her sweats, her freckles pink islands in a wide bay of tears, speaking into her cell phone. “Mom – Mom – they can’t give you medication without a prescription – I’m sorry the pharmacist called the police – I’m glad he’s one of the handsome ones – yeah, Mom, I did always prefer firemen – yes, Mom, lots of firemen have sexy moustaches – Mom – Mom – Mom! I’m getting married today! Please, Mom, just one day – can you just – my one day – for once in my life can it not be all about you? Just once! Once! Just one thing for me?” The last words exploded from her with ferocious pain and hurt, punctuated with agonized panting, as if she were gagging on a small toy in her throat.
I put the bag of coffee down and left the pot filled with water on the counter and went straight into the bedroom. Jackie threw her cell phone on the bed, then started stomping her foot on the floor, and punching her bureau.
“Jackie? Jackie Pick up the phone! Stop thinking of yourself – I’m being arrested – Jackie, I’m your mother – stop being so selfish – ” I picked up the phone and hit the mute button.
Stephanie held Jackie in her arms. “I never should have gotten married! I knew she’d ruin everything – everything always turns to shit for me and always will, I know it – ”
I’d never seen Jackie cry. I’d only known her to be of good cheer, occasionally quiet and withdrawn – tired or preoccupied or angry I never knew (or asked). And there was something quite clarifying and terrible in this moment, when all the asides and off-hand comments we’d heard from both Nick and Jackie about her mother (“impossible,” “screwed up,” “a complete nut job,” “psycho,” “nightmare”) became more than the standard derision, complaint and intolerance of children for their parents – but frighteningly accurate assessments, and clarified why Jackie had left Arizona to come to New York, as opposed to Los Angeles or even Phoenix – fleeing her mother in a Tucson trailer park. (Her father, Ted, lived in San Diego with his third wife.)
None of us had ever met Jackie’s mother, and Louise’s delayed flight from Phoenix the previous night had prevented us from meeting her at the rehearsal dinner – “Typical, of course,” Jackie said upon hearing the news.) And though, sure, today was a wedding day, Jackie’s wedding day, and the pressure, the nerves, the astonishing decision to pledge yourself to someone forever can make people act sensationally deranged, Jackie’s misery unnerved me because for the first time in the two years that I’d known her I’d never seen anything like this – her anger, tears and guttural sobs more like sickness than sadness – and I wondered whether in my hopes and affection for Nick and even in my condescension to Jackie’s intellect, I had missed her gaping wounds. I berated myself for failing her and Nick, who was counting on me and the rest of us in the building to help fulfill his wedding day – a day that would demonstrate all that is possible when people cooperate.
Then I snapped to with the clarity of what had to be done.
[END OF EXCERPT]
***
© Jeffrey Harper. May not be reproduced or transmitted without author’s permission.
Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.
– William Hazlitt
PART 1
*
1
Many people would die to live in a Manhattan apartment; somewhat fewer die for one. So much comes down to real estate. But let’s begin with the wedding, when everyone cooperated so nicely.
Nick’s marriage was a triumph of wish over probability. When Nick announced his engagement, his mother in Framingham had long stopped despairing over her son’s convoluted personal decisions. (“Really, Nick, forget that we all loved her, just tell me: why? What exactly – not generally, not 'we wanted different things' – please tell me in the most excruciating detail what was wrong with this one?”). His two brothers and sister Kate no longer rolled their eyes each time Nick announced the end of a relationship (nor collected on over-under bets about how long a relationship would last). His friends no longer offered up blind dates or possible matches – unless they bore unconscious malice for, or a conscious palpable grudge against, a woman: “Oh, you should meet our friend Nick – he’d be perfect for you.”
Nick’s erratic and volatile career as a freelance producer was perfectly matched to his personal life – both evoked the question, “What exactly are you doing?” One week he was in Cape Town producing a sales boondoggle for IBM; the next month he was in Orlando with 700 pharmaceutical sales reps at their national sales conference (“Leverage Tomorrow Today!”); the next month he was in Las Vegas shepherding Cirque du Soleil wannabes around a stage for their opening act for “Perfect Performance!” a Cisco systems software – oh, hell, it doesn’t matter – no one cared (except the clients and Nick). He was working his New York niche job – one of those jobs no one ever thinks about, no one goes to school to study, like, say, pharmacy, but which amounts to a small industry worth billions and which people just happen to stumble upon after they’ve failed at other jobs. Nick produced business events, or more like, business shows – show business entirely inverted (with the business portion ruthlessly piled over the show – stale cake piled on top of tooth-shattering frosting), with all the fun and excitement of show business squeezed and leached out by PowerPoint-besotted VPs of Sales, leaving it to the creative directors and derelict freelance writers Nick hired to inject a simulacrum of enthusiasm, interest and pseudo-fun.
And then, when the job was done, Nick would do nothing for a month or two – except read the New York Times, the New York Review, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, novels (he possessed a striking, shallow familiarity with an infinite range of topics – “helpful in my work”), but he also used breaks between gigs to meet women on line, walk Baldwin, his pedigree-baffling, shelter rescue dog (and meet women at the dog run by the Museum of Natural History), go to the gym, see movies in the afternoon (and meet women in the movie theater). To productive effect, Nick mined the lonely afternoon clientele of Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, a foreign-independent film mini-plex on Broadway at West 63rd, which, Nick observed, was so bourgeois that “even their English-speaking films have subtitles,” (adding: “they have to show the movies on tiny screens because the films’ budgets are so small”), and which was a source of Nick’s occasional reckless and senseless pickups of women in their fifties and, once or twice, early sixties – who, to give beauty its fair and catholic due, were still stunning – but who in many cases had not received a man’s ardent attentions in at least a decade and were equally thrilled and baffled by the cheery come-ons of a man in his mid-forties. All of Nick’s liaisons ended quite disgracefully – until finally, to avoid being spotted by an increasing number of female patrons he’d treated shabbily, Nick would only enter the screening rooms in the tiny multiplex after the trailers for upcoming films had started. Since he only attended weekday matinees, Nick said it was hardly an inconvenience: “I still get my usual seat!”)
But Nick was getting married! Finally!
While we were thrilled to attend Nick’s wedding, none of us thought his marriage was a good idea. Getting married in your twenties or thirties is respectable and possibly sensible: synchronizing the biological clocks, locking onto the income stream and the expanding assets of a more prosperous partner – which in the interests of a better divorce settlement, starts the division of property clock (time is absolutely money). Getting married in your sixties and even your seventies is understandable – unless you’re watching your inheritance vaporize thanks to a parent’s regression to adolescent impulsive stupidity. The geriatric version of trashing Dad’s car is Dad trash-compacting the children’s inheritance thanks to the machinations of some country club harridan-harlot-widow, bimbotic secretary or, on the distaff side, and alarmingly increasingly, the widow’s sociopathic investment advisor or a health-failing incompetent seeking free and eternal feeding and nursing from a willing drudge. All the same, elderly marriage can still be a respectable way to ensure care, companionship and a reliable hospital visitor who takes the onus off indifferent and preoccupied children to attend a parent’s bedside for long stretches when their iPhones are humming with parent-teacher conference alerts, offers of free Jets tickets or invitations for a beach weekend. Otherwise, in an age of Viagra-enabled ecstasy, surely the otherwise entirely annoying Baby Boomers should just return to their fatuous ideas of Free Love (especially love free of inheritance-spoiling interlopers) and have sex unconstrained by the laws of the state. Right? Getting married in one’s eighties or older (God forbid) is just a pathetic grab for a shred of mercy and dignity shortly before death’s abominating end – and bears the fecal aroma of the ridiculous and shameful.
Marriage in one’s forties, however, generates a WTF moment of incredulity, of searching existential rumination – and plain bafflement. As Nick’s mother should have more properly asked, Why? Why her? Why anyone? Why ever? Oh, why, why, why? (This would come later.)
Oh, you’re thinking, Nick was marrying for love! Well, fine, just dandy, but this is Nick we are speaking about, but, still, even in principle, the unspoken absurdity of marriage in one’s forties was hanging over this event. Nick was not going to have children with Jackie (Jacqueline, with a slurring Zzzzhhhhah at the beginning – Zzzzhhhhah-kleen – when she wanted something from Nick and anyone else equally charmed, as I certainly was, by her lovely marbleized, worlds-of-wonder nether globes, whose contours minutely and, with heat-pressed splendor, perfectly adhered to every fabric that seized her bottom – and just how do they cut pants to part your buttocks’ cleavage – and is it uncomfortable? (I’m sure Nick knew the answer –“Women’s Wear Daily did a piece on this last week – it’s really quite simple.”) So, with no children to come, only financial gain’s magnetism pulled them towards holy matrimony – or so we first thought. At one of our group dinners after a Board meeting, Nick let it drop that when Jackie finally moved into his apartment (though she’d mostly stayed at Nick’s mostly while they dated – having a backyard in Manhattan will do that for your relationship) she’d announced that she’d contribute nothing towards the mortgage because, she told Nick, it’s yours – meaning, the apartment was a pre-existing asset, not communal property, divisible in a divorce (though crafty, Ebola-spleened divorce attorneys would disagree: anything’s possible). Jackie – suddenly purring to Nick in Zzzzhhhhah-kleen mode – said she would be saving for our country home, she’d be building equity – yes, for investors in shoe companies, my neighbor and Board member comrade Paul Wagner would later observe.
Still, we adored Jackie – all of us. We’d seen Nick suffer in his relationships – thanks to his own hapless lack of self-control and discernment. Aside from his Lincoln Plaza Cinema Lothario escapades and a cast of extras, passing in and out of the scene with relative anonymity, he’d also attempted more ambitious couplings with a marketing vice president, a vice president of pharmaceutical sales, a vice president of procurement (“Perfect, since Nick’s specialty is both vice and procurement” – again from Paul Wagner) – all women Nick had met during one of his corporate freelance jobs. These women’s staggering bodies, flawless chins and taut necks shared the disciplined fitness and lacquered beauty of corporate gladiator-slaves – spectacular and frightening; you could feel the rage and self-lacerating hatred that created such physical perfection (“Hot and angry sex – with every one of them,” observed Nick in one of his more philosophical moments). We’d see them occasionally leaving the building – always before 7 a.m. during the week – trim, crisp and buffed, like trussed prize game birds, ready to serve themselves up on the corporate platter.
They destroyed Nick. You could understand the pull – for them. Amazons-on-the-Hudson in the midst of their quest to conquer a hedge fund manager – or maybe just a pharma EVP – meet this shambling, charming man, plain-spoken, whose deep-ballast voice thrums at a barely audible level, drawing you in, focusing your attention, making you notice the crazed green-hazel eyes, the thick, wavy hair that would never vanish, the weary sad funny eyes, the mouth just curled up slightly as if he’d decided against telling a racy joke to the vicar. Despite the obscure banality of Nick’s work, the budgets of some of the two- or three-day events he produced occasionally ran into the millions, requiring a few people to take the matter seriously or lose their jobs – and sometimes involved crews whose numbers suggested an ant colony – with a roster of corporate egotists and cry-babies and terrified underlings and suckups – whom Nick, with a headset instead of tricorne, commanded with the serene and absolute authority of Washington Crossing the Delaware. And the alpha-babes saw Nick in action. The competence. The strength. The will. The silent but unmistakable determination to annihilate anyone who fucked with his show. The monomaniacal conviction that nothing else matters but this, now: your meeting, your success, your career. You.
A man who combines strength and servitude is appealing to many ambitious women, and in his professional life Nick offered these in abundance, but in his private life he became remarkably slothful – like a kitchen appliance that suddenly came unplugged: the slicing, dicing, shredding, blending food processor suddenly inert, immobile, useless. Relaxing, Nick called it. Barely acceptable catatonia, I once offered after an unwise extra helping of red wine in his backyard (without, for some reason, Paul Wagner). For an apartment so sparsely furnished, Nick’s clutter and disorganization were astounding – as if he’d diverted and stored all the chaos he staved off professionally in his own home; despite the luxury of a garden in Manhattan – not a sliver garden the size of a large planter but five hundred square feet under the stars (if there happened to be a city-wide blackout and you could see stars). His white pine picket fence was shredding like chewed popsicle sticks; after planting flowers the first year he’d moved in – perhaps to assure us on the Board that letting him buy into our brownstone was indeed a wise decision – the garden and his interest in it soon withered.
What we came to realize – not just me, but Paul, Danielle, Stephanie – even that domicile-ruining, self-dealing, self-pitying Serbian bastard (is there any other kind?) Emil – not to mention the uber-alpha-executive-babes who came into Nick’s life – was this: at home Nick was spent. He had the remarkable ability to invest himself with a totality of spirit and energy into his work, but when each project ended, he had nothing left. This is a slight exaggeration, because, as we shall see, he was very helpful in the most severe efforts of the Board – perhaps because these struggles engaged his talents and role of producer (“Fuck with me, then die”) – but aside from mustering his sexual energies, between assignments Nick became indolent, detached from life – his obsessive movie-going, aside from the twisted sexual bonanzas he occasionally reaped, seemed as much about his wish to sever all ties with his life and with the present tense itself and repose in the timeless limbo of a dark room that provided a substitute reality – though, surely, that is a reason everyone goes to the movies.
Eventually Jackie changed everything for Nick. But, until then, as Nick’s corporate VP girlfriends (“the Vice Squad” – Paul Wagner, of course) became involved with Nick or occasionally took up unofficial residence with him – they increasingly turned against him with annoyance, regret and bewilderment. Instead of discovering your producer-GI-Generalissimo-Joe is a superhero, they found the reverse. They didn’t understand that Nick just couldn’t do any more than he did, that he needed a life of discrete, episodic assignments because he didn’t have the stamina to keep up the effort, let alone go to the same office every day, week after week. It wasn’t in him. The Amazons’ daily high-throttle hum of ambition and activity was industrial noise to him. The effort required for a relationship – planning dinners, weekends away, vacations, shopping for housewares we absolutely need or meeting some of my friends was of little interest to Nick, or just too hard (aside from seeing us in the building, which, to his corporate girlfriends’ frequent dismay, simply involved opening his apartment door so Paul and I could make our way to the garden with several wine bottles).
To satisfy Nancy, his most fiercely berating corporate girlfriend, Nick started booking back to back shows – which then meant he was always away on gigs – trade shows for software systems, awards events for telemarketing associations, endless pharmaceutical POAs (“Plan of Action”) meetings – Nick was an endless, perversely gleeful font of corporate acronyms and bullshit: “I’m going to take a deep dive into the POA topics for each silo – without getting too granular or stuck in the weeds – I’ll circle back with key learnings”). Nick’s commitment to steady employment not only provided Nancy with fewer occasions to develop the non-relationship relationship she wanted with Nick, but also inspired her to betray him for some Dockers-wearing douchebag from a suburban corporate park in Central Jersey. We thought we should be toasting her departure – but Nick didn’t see it that way, and Paul Wagner and I vacillated between keeping our distance and spending time with Nick, watching him get self-pityingly wasted and, as with anyone’s breakups but your own, become intensely and increasingly boring in his mono-obsessional fixation on lost love.
No one understands other people’s relationships, let alone our own, but that doesn’t mean we don’t all offer worthless opinions about them. We thought Nick was well rid of these women, though Nick didn’t see it that way and subscribed to their opinion that he had failed. We hated to see him suffer, and Nick felt genuinely bad. He half-heartedly took up acoustic guitar – a mood elevator I do not recommend.
It can be startling to suddenly apprehend the limitations of someone you’re close to – as it occurred to me when I saw how Nick’s work rendered him unfit for much else in life and that despite his gracious competence and the low-key, easy friendship, largely on his terms, in his home, Nick radiated a deeply upsetting exhausted, isolated emptiness.
Then Jackie came into his life. Nick had met her at a Saturday afternoon wine tasting at a Columbus Avenue wine shop – another source of pickups in his repertoire (“A few sips of wine on an empty stomach in the middle of the afternoon makes many slender women much more approachable,” he sagely noted). While Nick was ambitious about little and curious about everything, Jackie was neither especially ambitious nor curious, which proved quite satisfactory for Nick – and, despite some initial resetting of the references we used in conversation, all of us came to see Jackie’s lack of curiosity and her lack of a sprawling (and banal and brainless) ambition to be ideal for Nick. She was happy. She was content with herself. She sold New Age, organic, all natural, Christ-knows-what cosmetics from a small manufacturer to stores around Manhattan, toting her rolly bag around town, dressed in oddball hats – we admired especially her purple sou’wester rain hat whose quirky dash and functionality prompted several of us to seek them out as presents (bolstered by samples of her cosmetics – though after initially buying some as a gesture of goodwill and support to Nick and welcoming Jackie into his life and ours, and that of the building, we rarely bought any of her products again – which, in her chipper, sprightly way, she never seemed to mind) – and we were equally thrilled by her clothing of bright anti-Manhattan colors, fluorescent orange paisleys, fucias, Key Lime green, like a beacon of cheerfulness alerting the citizenry that things aren’t all that bad, chin up, look again!, the sun is always shining somewhere!
Her wavy strawberry colored hair and pink freckled complexion seemed part of a color-coordinated effort to connect her effervescent spirit to everything she touched, and we quickly dismissed our middle-class snobbish concerns that her devotion to People, Us Weekly, Entertainment Weekly (TV version as well), fashion magazines and her total indifference to the cultural or political topics that Nick breezily absorbed would be a problem.
The biggest difference she brought to Nick’s life was this: she liked him and she cared about him as he was. Simple enough to say, but it was new for Nick. (And would probably be a stunning novelty for many other men.). She made her own hours, worked from home (when she moved in there was minor trouble around who worked where in the apartment, but she and Nick solved it). She was kind. She was largely content with the world as she found it, never felt the prick or spur of constant dissatisfaction with the present that goads so much empty-headed ambition. If happiness is a form of genius, she was Einstein – at least back then.
I remember my sweet satisfaction on Nick’s wedding day when, just before the service began, waiting for Jackie with Nick, the minister and the other groomsmen at the improvised altar, I looked up the spiral staircase and saw Jackie about to descend, and I understood how she had brought him such enormous happiness and contentment in all the imperfect ways a relationship can.
I also remember one day when I was next door in Stephanie Ross’s first-floor apartment (above Nick’s, overlooking his rear garden). Steph was our co-op’s President; we were having dinner and working on some Board matter (co-op insurance overcharges? boiler repair costs?) around seven-thirty on a spring evening. While Stephanie made linguine with clam sauce, I looked out her rear window and down into Nick’s garden, where Nick and Jackie were sitting side-by-side, sipping wine at his glass garden table. Nick had put a book down and was looking at the flowers Jackie had planted (her cheer-infusing nature included turning Nick’s garden into a voluptuous, chromatic, horticultural spill of color and texture everyone with a garden view enjoyed). They weren’t speaking to each other, Jackie just sat there, and I turned back to my Board work, but after a minute I looked out the window, and they were still sitting silently next to each other, and this time I couldn’t return my attention to my spreadsheet, but kept watching (somewhat guiltily – while the surrounding buildings turned Nick’s garden into a fishbowl, we were generally discreet enough not to stare into the garden – if you happened to pass by a window and catch their eyes below, one waved and moved on).
Nick and Jackie remained still for another five minutes, then ten minutes, immobile (like some piece of Euro-nonsense performance art – except there was no artifice or act of pretension in this), frozen in domestic tableau. Stephanie had joined me, curious what I was watching. I raised my index finger to my lips, and we, now as still as Nick and Jackie, watched them below – until, after another five minutes had passed, Nick slowly raised his hand from his chair’s armrest and gently lowered it on Jackie’s hand, entwining his fingers with hers. He then leaned over, and found her cheek inclining to him as well, and their cheeks met and pressed intensely against each other, both of them still looking straight ahead at the flowers and the garden fence, and Nick dropped her hand and wrapped his arm around her, pulling Jackie’s shoulder closer, her right cheek still pressed firmly against his left, radiating a chaste electricity upwards through the garden, and then he tilted his head so their temples nuzzled slightly, and Nick’s face bore the relief and tired joy of a long-voyaging traveler who has arrived home, and, next to me, a hushed “Oh” issued from Stephanie, and my eyes were suddenly swimming in glad pools, and Stephanie’s cracking voice said, “Lovely – lovely,” and I looked at her, and we both nodded, and I said, “Yes. Lovely,” and then, the moment fulfilled, we returned Nick and Jackie to their privacy and pretended to look at our work, and when we glanced out the window again, Nick and Jackie were no longer in the garden.
We knew everything and nothing about Nick (and nothing at all about Jackie), which made me happy, because I find it comforting to know I have an entire lifetime to keep discovering people I love. Until you discover things you wish you hadn’t.
*
2
The wedding was spectacular, and the first two things I will say to anyone who gets married in New York is that, if possible, you should get married at the Columbus Citizens Foundation, and the second is that you should not marry a woman whose mother has gone off her mania meds and run out of Xanax.
The third thing is that, even if you are an experienced producer, you should not produce your own wedding.
It started well enough. They’d chosen an October wedding, the Saturday after Columbus Day (the Foundation’s biggest day of the year – since it is New York’s pre-eminent Italian-American social organization) – and undoubtedly the finest time of the year in New York, when the mature foliage in the park peaks and the thriving energy of the city and the post-Labor Day resurgent ambition of art, science and commerce hurls forward with excitement undaunted by the slush of inevitable compromise, fuck-ups and sorrows of mid-winter months. And, best of all, none of us had to buy plane tickets, pay for hotel rooms and travel to a suburban golf resort in a planned community with piped-in weather to eat brie en croute.
At ten o’clock on the Saturday morning of the wedding day, Paul Wagner, Stephanie Ross and I knocked on Nick and Jackie’s door. A photographer’s assistant, strung with two cameras, holding a nylon bag with batteries and lenses, appeared. “We’re the Co-op Board,” said Paul. “We’re investigating reports of bestiality.” The assistant started to open her mouth. Stephanie punched Paul in the arm. We could see Nick sitting with the photographer – you can tell the difference between the photographer and the assistant because the photographer never holds a camera unless he’s shooting – with Nick running down a shot list.
“So, we’ll need an establishing shot when we gather at the top of the stairs – one of me with my best man,” said Nick. “I know we’re going docu-guerilla” – a term I’d never heard Nick use before – or ever again – “but we need to set the narrative – ”
“Nick, really, how many shows have we done?” said the photographer with a patient smile. Nick was using one of his corporate hires, a trusted partner, a friend (though nobody we knew), Nick probably got a nice price, a combination of favor and trust and promise of future work. “Nick, I know it’s your wedding, but it’s a wedding. I’ve shot a hundred weddings. I shot civil wars in Africa.” The photographer was in his fifties, haggardly good looking, all the lumps and creases working together – you could imagine the safari vest in his closet; a whiff of cordite on him like aftershave. “I shot Beirut, for Godsakes – ”
“If you haven’t seen Paul drink, I’d say Beirut was good preparation,” I offered. Stephanie whacked me with the back of her hand. Then she whacked Paul for good measure.
The assistant looked back and forth from her boss to Nick to us, before Nick said, “you can let them in.”
“Where’s Jackie?” asked Stephanie.
“Sleeping,” said Nick.
Stephanie’s eyes bounced. “Really?”
“Yeah, really.” His voice crushed us into silence.
“Well, good, we don’t need a nervous bride,” said Steph, after a pause, trying to chip the conversation towards the flag.
“But we still need a bride,” said Nick.
“Shall I go see her?” asked Steph, a little more tentatively.
“Give it your best shot,” said Nick. “Paul, have a seat, and practice being quiet. Derek, can you make coffee for everyone?”
“Sure,” I said, and I walked into his alcove kitchen as Stephanie knocked gently on the bedroom door and Jackie snapped “What?”
“Jackie, it’s Steph.”
“Okay, come in.”
Stephanie found Jackie not sleeping, but in her sweats, her freckles pink islands in a wide bay of tears, speaking into her cell phone. “Mom – Mom – they can’t give you medication without a prescription – I’m sorry the pharmacist called the police – I’m glad he’s one of the handsome ones – yeah, Mom, I did always prefer firemen – yes, Mom, lots of firemen have sexy moustaches – Mom – Mom – Mom! I’m getting married today! Please, Mom, just one day – can you just – my one day – for once in my life can it not be all about you? Just once! Once! Just one thing for me?” The last words exploded from her with ferocious pain and hurt, punctuated with agonized panting, as if she were gagging on a small toy in her throat.
I put the bag of coffee down and left the pot filled with water on the counter and went straight into the bedroom. Jackie threw her cell phone on the bed, then started stomping her foot on the floor, and punching her bureau.
“Jackie? Jackie Pick up the phone! Stop thinking of yourself – I’m being arrested – Jackie, I’m your mother – stop being so selfish – ” I picked up the phone and hit the mute button.
Stephanie held Jackie in her arms. “I never should have gotten married! I knew she’d ruin everything – everything always turns to shit for me and always will, I know it – ”
I’d never seen Jackie cry. I’d only known her to be of good cheer, occasionally quiet and withdrawn – tired or preoccupied or angry I never knew (or asked). And there was something quite clarifying and terrible in this moment, when all the asides and off-hand comments we’d heard from both Nick and Jackie about her mother (“impossible,” “screwed up,” “a complete nut job,” “psycho,” “nightmare”) became more than the standard derision, complaint and intolerance of children for their parents – but frighteningly accurate assessments, and clarified why Jackie had left Arizona to come to New York, as opposed to Los Angeles or even Phoenix – fleeing her mother in a Tucson trailer park. (Her father, Ted, lived in San Diego with his third wife.)
None of us had ever met Jackie’s mother, and Louise’s delayed flight from Phoenix the previous night had prevented us from meeting her at the rehearsal dinner – “Typical, of course,” Jackie said upon hearing the news.) And though, sure, today was a wedding day, Jackie’s wedding day, and the pressure, the nerves, the astonishing decision to pledge yourself to someone forever can make people act sensationally deranged, Jackie’s misery unnerved me because for the first time in the two years that I’d known her I’d never seen anything like this – her anger, tears and guttural sobs more like sickness than sadness – and I wondered whether in my hopes and affection for Nick and even in my condescension to Jackie’s intellect, I had missed her gaping wounds. I berated myself for failing her and Nick, who was counting on me and the rest of us in the building to help fulfill his wedding day – a day that would demonstrate all that is possible when people cooperate.
Then I snapped to with the clarity of what had to be done.
[END OF EXCERPT]
***
© Jeffrey Harper. May not be reproduced or transmitted without author’s permission.
