Leaving Word. Steven Boykey Sidley
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‘What was the last book you read?’
‘I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you.’
‘Really,’ the second syllable dropping instead of rising.
‘You’re hoping I’ll say that I don’t read much, so that you can pick up your toys and leave.’
‘I wasn’t really hoping that. I was just interested.’ Yes, she was hoping that; she did want to pick up her toys and leave.
‘Well, my computer science education at Stanford left a few holes in my education. So for the past three months I have been reading the Russians—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pasternak, Gogol, even some Chekov plays. When I am done with Russia I’m going to move on to nineteenth-century English women—Brontës and Austen, Eliot, Browning.’
He stopped and smiled defiantly. He was probably lying, but she appreciated the effort.
She put her toys down and stayed.
In the two years that he had been there she felt that she was being mildly flirted with, a favor she mildly, even enthusiastically returned. Actually, it was more than that, she was sure. A gaze held a beat too long. His smile coy, sexual, she thought, at least with her. An interest in her life outside of the office. His body language, timbre of voice, even his silences seemed generous.
Notwithstanding his unembarrassed and modest corpulence, which she generously suspected was a consequence of genes and not sloth, he was a handsome man, in a sort of childish plump-cheeked way. Quick to smile, direct in stare and a careful listener, he appealed to the part of her that dreamed of a partner without pretensions, a partner who could make her laugh at the things she found less than funny in her own life. But it was all hypothesis; he was younger and had the luxury of clamorous attention from women within and without the industry. Being the extremely rich CEO of a media company was the pinnacle of unearned sexuality. He was with a different woman at every event, but never anyone she recognized and rarely the same person twice. But she began to wonder, against every well-tempered bone in her body, to try on the dresses of flirtation and friendship and consummation and more. And at night, in the darkness of her bed, the musings took on a more urgent insistence.
Although Joelle was well respected within the company, looked up to by junior and assistant editors looking to find their way to the promised land of creative and financial fulfillment, she had never made it to the boardroom, a more sacred space reserved for CFOs, COOs and other operating and non-executive fundis. But rumors trickling out of those hallowed rooms had Buddy Jekylling and Hyding into a bellowing and red-faced monster when the right (or wrong) circumstances demanded. She wanted not to believe this, but knew well that board meetings brought out the absolute worst in men as they hauled out their respective dicks and swung them around in a testosterone-infused alpha war. She knew many women who sat on these boards. Having no such appendages, they reputedly merely stared in disbelief as the rages rose and fell. One particular story involved a CEO of a film company trying to throw his CFO out of a thirty-second-story window for blowing a formula in an Excel spreadsheet that had the company reporting slightly more or less of some financial marker. In the version reported first-hand to her, the CFO, a small and nervous fellow, mewled like a cat as the CEO managed to wrangle most of his trembling little body out the window before being pulled back in by other board members, presumably less concerned about the poor man’s safety than the effect of public executive murder on the share price.
And now Buddy was dead.
Chapter 5
Joelle stared at the sobbing, nameless intern and stood up, her attention now having expanded completely to fill the gap between wanting someone—anyone—to die, and then having it happen. She walked out of the office and strode briskly up the corridor, where various members of staff were standing about with hands over mouths, wildly texting or frozen into various attitudes of shock and incomprehension. Joelle sailed past them, vaguely hoping that fast walking would somehow make some unspecified difference. She had only ever once faced death at close quarters. Her mother had fallen under the hammer of early demise when Joelle was sixteen, in their family home in Simi Valley, a dry and hopeful and disappointed bedroom community about an hour north east of Los Angeles. It was a heart attack—a cruel expression of her mother’s heart-weakened ancestral lineage. She had dropped dead in the kitchen, while making Joelle’s lunch. Sort of stopped, looked oddly at the cheese-and-tomato sandwich she had carefully assembled, and sank to the floor on her knees, carefully putting the plate down before tumbling forward. Joelle had walked quickly then too, but that was to a neighbor’s house for help, and she had not yet realized that her mother was dead. But now fast walking and death had fused in her brain. She had made a mental note to dawdle everywhere, but was violating that now. Fast walking can only lead to trouble.
She stepped into the deputy publisher’s office. Clayton Delaware was on the phone. He motioned her to sit. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, ‘Speaking to the lawyers.’ Then he returned to his conversation, his voice squeaked to high pitch.
‘I fucking found him, that’s who. He was sitting on his chair. Eyes open. How did I know? I’ll tell you how the fuck I knew. He didn’t greet me. Then he didn’t answer my questions. Then I realized he wasn’t looking at me. Then I raised my fucking voice. Then I realized something was fucking wrong. So I stood up and put my ear to his mouth, like in movies. There was no breath. What? How the fuck would I know? Jesus. Get some people here. Fuck. Police, doctors, his rabbi, his brother, whoever. Not the press. Fuck. Fuck.’
He put the phone down.
‘Jesus. Fuck.’
‘What happened?’ She concentrated hard so as not to sob. Nobody likes a sobber.
Clayton was a loquacious and scrawny weasel of about fifty who had worked his way up from event management and who wore a bowtie and who fancied himself a literati, a connoisseur of fine things. As far as she knew, he had never read a single book that the company had published but rather gobbled up synopses and regurgitated them eidetically at dinner parties and meetings. But since Buddy had arrived he had suddenly gone mute, his corporate ladder clearly in a state of tip and fall. She would have preferred distance, but publishers and editors must co-operate, collaborate, drink together and kibitz. She did all with equal dollops of distaste. Clayton’s saving grace was that he did not ask her out. She imagined that his attempts at consummation were mainly committed on himself. He was so awful that she occasionally looked forward to their interactions, as one might look forward to the hall of horrors in a wax museum. She wondered if Buddy’s death had stabilized his ladder.
Clayton turned to her. ‘Don’t ask me anything. I know nothing. I found him. He’s dead.’
‘Yes, but how? What?’
‘Jesus, Joelle, I know nothing, I told you.’
‘Was he murdered? A heart attack?’
‘Fuck! You’re asking questions I can’t answer again!’
‘Can I go and see him?’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s not a good idea.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because if he was murdered, then you’d be trampling on evidence.’
‘HE WAS MURDERED? WHO WOULD WANT TO MURDER BUDDY?’ She felt herself losing control.
‘Joelle! Get a grip. How the fuck would I know if he was murdered? Go home. I’ll call you later when the cops have come.’
Joelle exited and consciously slow-walked back to her office lest someone else die. She grabbed her bag and left the building and drove her nondescript little car back to her place in Santa Monica, her head a cacophony of emotional whatnot. She lived about five blocks back from the beach, a small apartment, overpriced and underwhelming. When she had moved from head office in New York to pet and stroke and seduce the West Coast cadre of literary talent, of