Curse of the Afflicted Read online

  "Mr. Baker?"

  "Yes?" I said.

  "I have this vice president calling you."

  Eli looked at me curiously. "You're having your business calls forwarded to my office?"

  I shook my head. "No. In fact, I didn't think anyone knew my schedule today. Except maybe Wanda, my project director. I just finished a meeting with Garter. Maybe it's their VP of marketing."

  "Why would they be calling you here?" Eli asked.

  "No clue. I suppose I could have left something behind at her office. But I can't imagine how she could have tracked me here."

  "No, sir," the nurse said, a little more emphatically. "That's not it. Not at all."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I have the vice president on the phone," she said a little more emphatically.

  "Which one?" I asked.

  "The vice president," she repeated, starting to get annoyed, "of the United States."

  Chapter 3

  When an important leader calls you on the phone, the first thing you do is wait. Vice President Richard Sudeau's assistant told me to please hold, and it was a long two minutes of silence. I lingered awkwardly in the office hallway, with both Eli and his nurse sending sharp glances of disapproval. Finally, the audio shifted noticeably, as if a window to the outside world had just opened. The vice president presented himself on the other end of the line, the timbre of his voice familiar to the ear, a deep baritone, honed and smooth, as easy to drink in as a honeyed bourbon.

  "Mr. Baker, good afternoon. How are you?" he began.

  "Fine, sir," I answered, not bothering to detail the truth about my aching back or my doctor's worrisome thoughts. "And you?"

  "Well, I'm fantastic. Listen, I won't take much of your time."

  "Take all you need, sir."

  "That's very gracious," he chuckled. "Look, Randy Greece asked me to give you a call and I'm happy to do so, start the process if you will. I'd like to meet with you and Blair. Tomorrow if you can swing it. I'm shaking up my campaign, changing strategists, changing pollsters and I might like to have you do some baseline work for us. You guys have a wonderful reputation. I'd like to get your thoughts. Would tomorrow work? I'll have Greece arrange for a flight. He'll let Blair know."

  "Of course," I said. When the vice president calls, you simply acquiesce to what he wants. My mind raced frantically for something intelligent to pass along, but there was no need. The vice president, well versed in a leader's ability to vamp and make small talk, waxed on for another two minutes about how impressed he was at our ability to put Justin Woo in the California governor's mansion. He concluded by saying he looked forward to seeing us tomorrow, and his assistant would be in touch with logistics.

  When the line went dead, I passed the phone back to the nurse, who provided a withering glare in return. I turned to say goodbye to Eli, but he was, of course, nowhere to be seen. Doctors, like politicians, are busy people too. Walking out of the building, I made a call to Blair and we discussed our itinerary, which is to say, our nightmarish red-eye flight leaving out of Santa Monica Airport at midnight. There was an era when private airports had an unwritten rule against late-night takeoffs and landings, but those rules, like many others, had been kicked to the curb a long time ago. People with means flew in and out when it suited them.

  Since I had the time, I walked over to the imaging center, did my chest x-ray, and then headed home to change clothes, take a nap and get ready for my trip. Our house was in Brentwood, a neighborhood made infamous years ago by O.J. Simpson, and people still ask us if we lived near Rockingham. We were actually a few blocks away on Marlboro Street, and while our block was rarely a bevy of activity, it felt even more quiet on this cloudy afternoon. Even the birds weren't chirping. The air was still and muted, to the point of being eerie.

  I admit to being less than enthused when we moved here almost a decade ago, into a stately, extravagant home, one that was far more luxurious than I ever believed I'd own. But I also never imagined Leslie's parents would pass away early, victims of a horrific car accident. Her father was an attorney, and as the only child Leslie inherited their house, albeit one that came with a spider's web of financial curiosities, that included a number of unsettled slip-and-fall lawsuits. It was a beautiful home, but for the past nine years we had been struggling to pay the mortgage, the legal fees, and the back taxes, in addition to our own weighty expenses. I knew how important it was for Leslie to stay here, to maintain a legacy, the spurious connection with her parents, and we tried to make a go of it. But the nagging issue of having to clean up someone else's financial mess left me with an uneasy feeling. As did the ghoulish knowledge that even when you die, your debts do not die with you.

  I parked in the driveway, walked up the flagstone path, past the pair of weeping willows out front. I hated these trees. They were fragile and brittle, the branches broke easily, and their roots had begun to worm their way into the sewer line. Mostly, they reminded me of the South, a world to which I no longer belonged. But I had finally stopped asking Leslie if we could uproot these and have them replaced with jacarandas, or even a pair of orange trees. The response was always the same. Let's keep things the same for a while. We'll see. Maybe in a couple of years. But the couple of years came and went, getting pushed into that murky, vague image we call the future.

  "You're home early," Leslie said as I walked inside our spacious home. "How did it go?"

  "Fine, the client was happy. Should get more work. But the big news is we may have landed on Rich Sudeau's team. He wants to meet us tomorrow."

  "Oh my! That's incredible news. But I was actually referring to your appointment with Eli."

  I knew what she was referring to, but had hoped to avoid that topic. "He ordered a chest x-ray, pretty ordinary. I did it right after I saw Eli. Hey, listen. Sudeau's arranged for us to fly out to D.C. tonight. We're taking a red-eye."

  "Oh," she said, processing this. "So, when will you be back?"

  I shrugged. "I suppose when Sudeau's done with us. Tomorrow night, maybe?"

  "You'll miss Angelina's play-in game."

  "That's tomorrow?" I asked, reaching into the kitchen cabinet for a bottle of Advil.

  "God, Ned. Do you remember anything I say?"

  I normally do recall, but there are those instances when my brain just shuts down with Leslie. There are so many details and nuances and segues to irrelevant pieces of information that at times, I simply stop listening. My occasional grunt of affirmation keeps her talking and relatively happy. That is, until awkward moments like these present themselves. The happiness disappears and the fuming begins.

  "Of course," I said. "I just have a lot on my mind. What time is the opening pitch?"

  "It's at four o'clock tomorrow. Home game against Sierra Canyon. They win, they go into the CIF tournament. God, but you're lucky Angelina isn't here to listen to this. I don't think she knows how uninvolved you are in her life."

  I bit my lower lip. Today was not a day for marital strife. To a point, Leslie was correct, I am not intimately involved with the daily details of my teenager's comings and goings. I attend her softball games when time permits. I don't wince in agony when the opposing team scores a run or two against Brentwood, or when Angelina whiffs on a surprisingly fast pitch. Generally, I just kibitz with the other dads at the top row of the bleachers, involved to the point of providing a decent role model and a more-than-decent lifestyle, but a step removed from the drama and petulance of teenage girl angst.

  "I do the best I can," I sighed. "You know financially this has been a tough year so far."

  While we had had a rush of business last November, the publicity from our election win mostly generated a lot of empty buzz. Helping to elect a governor put us on many corporate clients' radar. But the projects ended, clients drifted away, promises of future business did not always materialize. Only Garter stayed with us, feeding us enough ongoing projects to keep the cash flowing. The call from Vice President Sudeau could not have come soon
enough.

  "Well, it's not like we're starving," Leslie said. "And we can always tap into the home equity if we need to."

  I shook my head and did not relish another fight about money. This is the subject couples are most likely to argue about, and we were not unique. "That's just digging a deeper hole. I hate living above our means. We still have a daughter to put through college and bills to pay. My income this year is barely even meeting our payroll. And I had to let someone go on Friday."

  "Oh? Who?"

  "Haley Comey. One of the junior moderators."

  "That's no great loss," Leslie sniffed. "You should have gotten rid of that tart last year. My God, Ned. Why did you let a girl who behaves like that stick around?!"

  "It wasn't my choice. I have a partner, and I can't control who he sleeps with. And you shouldn't give me advice on business," I said, walking into the den to remove myself from further bickering. This was an age-old pattern we kept on repeating, a ramification of two people living together for over twenty years. We knew how to press the other's buttons, bringing up stale arguments from long ago, the wounds still there, never fully healed, ready to spring back up at any moment.

  Leslie and I had met toward the end of our sophomore year at Berkeley, and we dated exclusively for the rest of our time in college. I proposed a few nights before graduation, on one of those sultry, luminous, evenings where everything was right with the world. We had driven down to Santa Cruz for the day, lounged on the beach, sauntered along the boardwalk, rode the roller coaster. It was a warm night, a big moon, our casual ease fueled by a few margaritas. But it was our unease perhaps that led us to become engaged. The unease that came with graduating school, separating from friends, and being thrust out of the cocoon of college, into the tenuous independence that is the real world.

  We held hands on the beach that night, as a soft humid breeze blew in off the Pacific, and we talked about the future. We could not see a future without each other, but that was mostly because we could not see what lay ahead. Draped in the comfort of an elite university, we dreamed our lives would be a fairy tale, when in fact, we barely even knew what had attracted us to each other. Over the years, I concluded it wasn't so much physical. Although Leslie was certainly pretty, there wasn't an emotional or psychic connection, it was simply that we were at the same level of maturity. It was how we could relate to one another, why we felt comfortable with one another. We were at the same parallel. Being with her was simply like looking into a mirror.

  We moved down to L.A., Leslie's hometown; it was a place where we both felt comfortable. Clearly, she was not cut out for a life in the low country of South Carolina, and after Berkeley, I doubted I was, either. Not any longer. My career stalled and then took off; Leslie's never really got in gear. I went back to school to get a master's degree, she worked at a non-profit charity in Santa Monica. Our lives melded together smoothly, the sense that we belonged together thickened over time. We started off moving in unison, the mirror images walking in tandem. At some point though, the images stopped moving together. But when Angelina entered our lives, a blossom of sweetness reemerged and we became one again. There was no going back, there was no growing apart. The only path led us to amble forward together as a unit, albeit not as smoothly as we had once thought, and certainly not as assured.

  Angelina burst into the house just before six, her movements ramping up the energy level in our home. She was dressed in her white softball uniform, still sweaty, with her thick, blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. She was the color of honey. Her long arms and legs were golden and smooth. Tanned, toned, shiny. She was a pretty girl, bright, a whirling dervish of energy. Her presence in our home changed everything, and certainly for the better. I counted my blessings every day, not certain why we had been gifted with such a child, whereas other parents we knew had kids who brought them more heartache than joy. I finally surmised that it was partly good luck, and partly the fact that we were only able to have one child. Leslie's pregnancy complications kept Angelina an only child, and we were able to shower her with attention. While some kids grow weary of their parents' doting, Angelina did not mind. She actually reveled in the spotlight we shined on her.

  A few years ago we had next-door neighbors, both prominent attorneys within the entertainment industry, who used to boast of their parenting skills. We enviously watched their near-perfect son easily glide through adolescence; captain of his school's tennis team, dreamy girlfriend, valedictorian, and then on to Harvard. They were so sure of their abilities as parents that they had a second child, paying no mind to the fifteen-year gap between the kids. Perhaps it was because of the different constitution of child number two, or they were simply less involved, or maybe they were just marveling too much at their success with child number one. But the second child was an unmitigated monster, a kid who would think nothing of calling 9-1-1 as a prank, discharging a BB pistol at passing cars, or borrowing his father's hunting knife and bringing it into school to threaten other children. To the relief of the neighborhood, they eventually sent him to boarding school, where his malevolent behavior would, at the very least, be out of everyone's sight. Needless to say, our neighbors' boasts of writing a how-to book on good parenting never materialized.

  Angelina threw her backpack and her softball glove at the foot of the stairs, announced her arrival, and darted upstairs for the sanctity of her bedroom. The door shut immediately and stayed that way for thirty minutes. What she did in there was a mystery, a teenage ritual, about which I was not eager to learn. Eventually, Leslie called us both in for dinner.

  "I am just so looking forward to tomorrow!" Angelina said, bouncing into the dining room. She reached over and piled some grilled chicken and rice onto a flour tortilla, adding a dollop of salsa and a sprinkling of lettuce before wrapping it haphazardly and beginning to eat. Monday is often taco night in our household, the remnants of the weekend, be it barbecued chicken, grilled fish, or the occasional steak, chopped up into pieces and reconfigured with other leftovers which happened to be handy. Today it was the rotisserie chicken we got from Costco last night, me being lucky enough to grab one of the last ones off the heating display before the supply ran out.

  "Coach told us one of the Stanford scouts will be there. I think they're looking at Jordan, but I plan on making an impression."

  I smiled to myself and did not respond. Angelina liked to goad us, knowing we had both gone to Berkeley, Stanford's arch-rival. Our daughter was a straight-A student, had high SAT scores, volunteered with Heal the Bay, and was a prefect at her high school. She was also a pretty fair athlete. And yet none of that would even remotely ensure her placement at an elite college today. Unlike some of her classmates, she wasn't legacy, meaning her parents had not attended Stanford, and we did not donate large sums to the school. And there were an awful lot of kids who were just like Angelina, smart, athletic, well-rounded. But most of them, nearly all in fact, who applied to Stanford would be turned down. There was just an abundance of qualified students, coupled with a dearth of spaces. America's population had been burgeoning over the past few decades, but slots at elite colleges had barely increased at all. This was unwittingly our saving grace. The thought of paying over sixty thousand dollars a year for college was staggering.

  "Did Jordan ever re-take the SATs?" I asked.

  "Yeah. But she got the same score."

  Jordan was one of many ambitious schoolmates at Brentwood. An excellent student, she had wound up with a near-perfect score of 770 on her math SAT. But in the world of elite colleges, getting accepted meant going the extra mile, and taking the exam again in pursuit of a perfect 800 was certainly an acceptable, if not expected behavior. Even if she didn't improve her score, the college counselors whispered, it would look good that she had tried. We had suggested that to Angelina, but she had simply decided the school would look more approvingly upon her if she simply took it once, did well, and moved on. I didn't want to burst her bubble, so I simply let it be.

&nbs
p; "Remember to ice your elbow after the game," I said. "Especially if you pitch more than five innings."

  "Yeah, yeah, I know the drill already," she said absently and then stopped chewing. "Hey. Aren't you going to be at the game?"

  "I'm a definite maybe. I've got quite an important meeting tomorrow. Want to guess with who?"

  "Your big shot father," Leslie broke in, "is meeting with Vice President Sudeau. In Washington."

  Angelina stopped in mid-bite. "Really? That's so cool. Oh, but he's supposed to be a total slime ball, isn't he? Still, you'll have to send me a picture of him while you're there."

  "Sure," I smiled. "I'll take a selfie with the vice president. And why do you say he's a slime ball?"

  "I dunno. Stuff on the internet. But it's still cool you're meeting with him. It gives you a get-out-of-jail free card."

  Leslie and I looked apprehensively at each other. In my own, relatively tame South Carolina adolescence, I had heard this expression just once. The mother of one of my high school classmates had been involved in a brief yet torrid affair with a local handyman. Her husband walked in on them unexpectedly, and after chasing the soon to be ex-employee out of their house by waving a pistol and yelling vigorously, he allowed his hysterical wife to apologize profusely for her mistake. It was a topic that received an inordinate amount of neighborhood gossip, the story of a near-naked man, racing out of a house clutching his clothes to his chest was not one to be ignored. That the couple stayed together gave forth the humorous notion that the husband had earned the equivalent of Monopoly's cherished get-out-of-jail-free card. He could now engage in whatever sordid or elicit behavior he chose to, and his wife, having engaged in a similarly indecent act, would have little choice but to provide forgiveness.

  "Just what do you mean, honey?" Leslie asked carefully, as we both leaned forward to hear her answer.