It’s not even close to sunset yet and the settling of the forthcoming Benz. The Garrets have broken from work – because they can – and finally arranged their lone son Andrew’s student visa. To Johannesburg, which he says is a pinnacle music city. That took so long they’ve decided to kill the whole morning on mall errands, both office and personal. They’ve bought a whole box of Starbucks Breakfast Blend at Staples – to keep the office team in high gear - and now they’ve progressed through the CompUSA queue to the number one spot, face to face with the one and only checkout lady on duty. Suzi Garret, at long last, has found the gender adapter IBM told her to get, and Gavin Garret is brandishing his old sad clown pose, cracking stupid Luddite jokes about it. As Suzi whips out her Garret Group Visa and slaps it on the checkout counter next to the little shrink-wrapped adapter, like a poker bet, Gavin proclaims to the checkout lady, “hey, I thought she liked me the way I am. I thought she was here to buy something for her laptop.” Suzi, who’s just entered her third decade of enduring such passive-aggressive monologuing, and knows all the landmines, plants her left hand on a cocked left hip and throws him the wifely glare. “Hahahaha,” she says, “a gender bender.” And there they are in the broad morning daylight of CompUSA, the two principals of the Garret Group, staging their little ironic show for the checkout lady. As for her, the narrowed Eurasian eyes show she’s not even noticed the joke-attacking Gavin, who’s embarked on a follow-up crack about the copy on the pack…for use in male to male connections.
No, the skinny, hipless checkout lady aims her two onyx eyes in a squint-lock on Suzi’s shelf of a hip, specifically on the no-nonsense hand that’s planted there, on the lanky, luminescent wedding finger.
“It’s blinding,” she says, “what is it?”
“What do you mean what is it,” says Suzi, shedding the poofy irony for cold steel. “It’s my engagement ring.”
“He gave you that when you got engaged?”
“Hardly,” says Suzi, in the iciest whisper she can find. She recalls her first engagement ring, roughly as dazzling as the pop-top on a Coors can. Gavin, his joking tongue tied by the twist in mood, pensively recalls the slow but relentless rise of their household income - the metamorphosis of two ragtag student publicists into a real Garret Group. This was the tide that swept them at long last to the sacred Tiffany counter, that shimmering glass shrine on which he planted his two hamhock elbows and infamously made the joke-jab about sixty five grand for a blue cardboard box. Whereupon the salesman, acting the Gielgud butler, replied, “you’ve done your duty, sir.”
At this point Suzi and Gavin have noted the absence of any adornment whatsoever on the bony, nervous fingers of the CompUSA checkout lady. They’ve also begun to cast fearful looks at the queuing shoppers behind them. Are the shoppers sullen about the delay? Are there jewel thieves back there?
Persisting, the checkout lady inquires, “how much?”
“How much?”
At last, she picks up Suzi’s deep-freezing, darkening mood, and drops her voice. “I just mean, you know, karats…”
Gavin, switching to the subtle cover of sign language, holds up four fingers for all to see, and Suzi elbows him in his meaty flank, savagely.
The four fingers collapse at once, and the checkout lady proceeds to swiping the card through the slot. But while the authorizing software does its endless click-clack-click, she bears down on Suzi and drills even deeper.
“I’m not a ring person,” she declares. “It’s because of my father and mother. Once, my father threw my mother’s ring down the sink with the soap. She wanted to kill him for it. I saw everything and I sided with my father, I wanted to defend him. What’s more important, a ring or my father? My mother was from Japan, during the war, and she saved everything. My father was Italian and he threw away everything. He either threw it down the sink or into the garbage. My mother and father, they fought like armies. They fought all the time.”
To tell this story she lifts her voice again, amplifying it enough decibels so it resounds down the queue, which becomes transformed into the checkout lady’s audience. In a matter of seconds she’s told her life story, or at least enough of it so that a reasonable person could deduce the rest of her history from it, more or less. Her confession reverbs like waves in a pond struck by a rock. The vibes pursue Gavin and Suzi out the door of CompUSA, and even sneak into the air of Suzi’s Land Cruiser and accompany them back to the Garret Group world headquarters, a six-room office suite in a clapboarded suburban micro-mall over a yoga studio.
“Do you think the mother went at the father with a knife?” Gavin asks. He’s trailed Suzi into her office – pumpkin-colored with pictures of Andrew all about – and he watches in awe at how adroitly she installs the gender adapter.
“That’s what I saw in my mind too – the way she told it. I couldn’t feel for her, though. Who the hell is she? She insulted my ring. She was a bitch, if you want to know the truth.”
“True,” says Gavin, “but only on one level. On a deeper level she was fighting for her father’s life. I’ll tell you this, though. With an attitude like that she couldn’t work at the Benz place. And that reminds me…”
“I know. It’s tonight. Don’t worry, I’ve cleared the decks.”
“No, not tonight. Tonight is too late. We have to be there before sunset.”
“Why before sunset? What’s going on? What are you hiding, Gavin?”
“You’re insane today. This isn’t about hiding. It’s about an appointment. I made an appointment.”
“I’m insane. Then why are you twitching? I know you, Gavin. Why?”
“Are we fighting? Are we being like the Japanese woman and the Italian man?”
“Why are you making such a big deal over this? Over picking up your new car.”
“It’s not my new car, it’s my new Benz. Did you make a big deal over your new ring? Did you?”
“You must have ordered something crazy. I can tell.”
“There’s nothing crazy about a tint.”
“A tint. You ordered a tint? You’re out of your mind. You don’t tint a Benz. No one tints a Benz. It’s disgusting. Only a pimp or a rapper would tint a Benz. Are you a pimp or a rapper, Gavin?”
“No, I’m not. I’m a father, that’s what I am.”
Suzi blinks, thinks, but pushes on, the way a drug-sniffing dog pushes on. “How dark is the tint?”
“How bright are your karats?”
“Mafia dark? Elvis dark? Will you be able to see the road when you’re driving?”
“We chose the darkest legal limit. And I stress the word legal.”
“We?”
“Andrew and I. I chose this with him. When he was on spring break we went together to the dealership. He wanted to be part of my personal milestone. I was very proud.”
Gavin has that look on his face. The holy look, like he’s reciting the pledge of allegiance. Like he’s been chosen Dad of the Year.
“You let Andrew spec out your new company car? You’ll be driving clients to dinner in that car. Andrew lives his life on KazAA. His pants are so big Eminem’s house could fit in them.”
“The tint works. I’m speaking visually here. It really sets off the silver. If you can only see it while there’s some daylight left you’ll agree. I know you’ll agree…”
The Garrets are interrupted by Melinda, one of “the kids.” The others in the kid category are Tory and Ben. These three are not kids in the sense that Andrew is a kid, a kid who has Gavin’s and Suzi’s last name, a kid not old enough to buy liquor yet. These are the working kids, the young and hungry publicists who give the Garret Group the fire in its belly. And although Gavin and Suzi lump them with Andrew’s generation, not a one of them, in fact, is younger than twenty six.
Normally, Melinda would be hard-pressed to disrupt the Garrets in serious crossfire, but today something about her bearing is especially intrusive and even commanding. In place of her windblown mane, her trademark wakeboard-girl hair, is a neo-perm that projects cutting-edge efficiency; and her makeup says she’s not at a keg party, but at work in serious enterprise. The reason is Melinda’s just back from her honeymoon. She’s now a married woman. “I’m Mrs. Giamante now,” is how she explains it.
“Time out you two,” Melinda barks. And she has a shiny white piece of plank in her hand. “The Kleertek meeting is in five minutes in the conference room. We need you guys, no kidding, okay?”
As Melinda spins to exit, the white plank, which is her sample piece of Kleertek, brushes a plexiglass square on Suzi’s desk. It contains a picture of a smiling Andrew at age twelve, riding a horse through an open ranch gate, straight towards the camera. The plexiglassed photo teeters then lands askew, tipped against Suzi’s telephone. “Oh I’m sorry,” says Melinda. And Suzi shoots back, “it’s nothing. Go.”
Melinda hastens out and Suzi fusses over putting the picture straight. The action causes a ceasefire, a cessation of angry air molecules which at first, to both Gavin and Suzi, feels formless and dead, like a stopped heartbeat or a vacuum or even a black hole. But the lull suddenly becomes a vortex of nostalgia, sucking them both into its lyrical, backward-yearning whirl. They stare at the smiling boy on the horse and see, as they’ve always seen, that luck has handed their Andrew all the physical positives they happen to possess - but scant few of the negatives. He has Gavin’s broad back but none of his devious, potato-serf loutishness. He has Suzi’s long, restless limbs, but on Andrew the spindly bones project innocent prowess rather than a grabby, mantis-like persistence.
“Our baby,” says Suzi, “our buckaroo.”
“You can’t tell me he wasn’t happier then,” says Gavin. “So were we, maybe.”
“Just the three of us, and the Wyoming sky. Out there you can really see the sky.”
“And the horses. Remember their names?”
“They were all like breakfast. Cocoa, Oatmeal. I can’t remember the third.”
“Doughboy, he was mine. He had a big ass.”
“No comment,” says Suzi derisively, still in partial battle mode. Nevertheless, she does indeed make no comment, at least no further comment, for what seems like a very long while; perhaps enough of a while for a remembered whoosh of wind to ricochet from one end of a Wyoming canyon to the other. Suzi’s mind’s eye has fled the eastern seaboard office park and crossed the Great Divide. She scuds along a trail of memory under a racing herd of clouds, cottony puffs gone from bright, lazy white to red-hot copper, stirred to stampede by the giant red stallion of a sun, vamoosing at day’s end behind the black mountain peaks. With his canine nature, Gavin – adept as a terrier at reading wordless human cues – mentally joins his wife on this long forgotten trail, joins her and Andrew and their three rented horses under the very same copper-waning sky at the very same ranch they visited years ago, having noted even back then how cruel it was of Travel and Leisure to call something so authentically moving and family-bonding a dude ranch.
Time passes; minutes with just the two of them and the photograph, until a bugling speaker-phone snaps the reverie. This time it’s Tory, announcing that the conference-room corkboard has been pinned wall-to-wall with Kleertek concepts.
Gavin and Suzi turn reluctantly from the picture of Andrew-as-cowpoke. They exit her office and she asks, “what in the world were you driving back then - besides Doughboy? I can’t even remember.”
“A Pacer,” says Gavin. “Used. I actually bought a used Pacer.”
Remembering their days in the Pacer tax bracket has a salutary effect on the Garrets, extending the state of truce they’ve stumbled into – if not full concord at least partial ceasefire. Unlike the warring parents of the ring-phobic Staples employee, Suzi and Gavin are a united front as the Kleertek meeting settles down to business; Suzi flashing her rock like a challenge at the up-and-comers; Gavin sermonizing on the need for a “tipping point” of an idea, something to break the Kleertek business wide open. Until he runs out of gas on this harangue, Melinda, Ben and Tory shuffle papers and nod obediently, the latter two steaming like horses from the lunchtime run they take together, whenever their busy schedules permit.
The urgent purpose of the meeting is to arm Gavin with concepts he will attempt to sell tomorrow at lunch, a summit of a lunch with the Kleertek CEO and three of his sub-commanders. Gavin will be picking up the execs in his new Benz. They will see the tint glinting at them in the Kleertek corporate lot. They will be encompassed by the tint during the entire ride to the lunch destination and back. Gavin wants to go on his mission with a tipping point idea – no small task for a product that is wood-like without a trace of tree in it – but even more pressing is his hunger for Suzi’s blessing on the trappings of his silver chariot. It’s his canine nature again – he’ll fawn for approval, and bow and scrape with bared teeth when he doesn’t get it. As the conference room turns tense with the wham-bam of brainstorming and the nostalgia over the photograph fades, Gavin wonders about Suzi, Andrew, himself and the Benz. Andrew has already sided with him over features and options – more than sided, he has dictated the choices. Years from now, will Andrew be making the same kind of manic, morbid confession as the checkout lady? I wasn’t just defending a car, I was defending my father.
Gavin’s throat tightens as Suzi lights into him publicly over something completely unexpected – his slam of a Kleertek tag line proposed by the hard-working Ben. Think beyond wood is the line, and Gavin sees it pinned to the wall and hates it so much he ridicules it. “We’ll be thinking beyond this client if we ever bring that in. This is no tipping point, guys. It’s a firing point.”
For two decades, Suzi has been content to run infrastructure and let Gavin play idea director. But this time she sees him as bullying the young and lets fly an icy, “and you have better?” Of all humans only Suzi, thinks Gavin, would have the nuggets to demean him this way – in front of the kids.
“Not just better, bigger,” he fires back, picking up a Magic Marker. He scribbles and speaks simultaneously. “The look of hard wood. Without the hard work.”
“What have you been smoking, Gavin?” says Suzi. “That line is so Zen. Worse, so Woodstock. Talk about a non-event strategy. I say we have a vote.”
And they cheer her, and vote – and Think beyond wood wins four to one. Gavin sweats at the corners of his mouth, which gives his face a dewlapped look. He pants like a hound that’s been chasing a flea on his tail. Even the old clown disguise won’t come to him; the smile muscles just won’t go up. Gavin yearns for the company of his son, who’s at college; not the beaming lad in the horse picture, but the style-savvy hip-hopper of today. If only Andrew were here with him, he thinks, he’d have a champion, a kid on his side; he just knows it.
“I just hope your tint isn’t as bad as your line,” says Suzi. She too has her mind fixed on the present-day Andrew. But she views him through a different lens than Gavin – as a sweet-child-turned-courtier who’s duped Dad into pimping out a Benz, only so he can borrow it to impress his rap-happy friends.
The Garret Group is about to adjourn with the principals in near civil war when Ben stands, takes Tory’s hand and says he has an announcement to make. The two of them sigh and heave – and Melinda joins with her own oohs and ahhs – as they let Gavin and Suzi in on their double secret. They are engaged to be married. And not only that, they are pregnant. The news hits the two Garrets hard at the heart, but not nearly in the same way as the Andrew photograph. Instead of pushing the sweet gush-buttons this news sends them to a hollow, jealous place. They explode with fake jubilation, the requisite hugs and toasts. While the kids are bonding and baby-making, they worry, what are they? What have they become but two shot shells? Two bruised casings minus the bullets. A pair of relics who can only carp at each other or long mawkishly for their own Ben and Tory days.
For the rest of the afternoon Suzi so busies herself with the gender adapter and other plugs and ports and discs that Gavin is nearly pawing at her door as the daylight starts to fade.
“It’s so unflattering when you beg,” Suzi says. “You ought to see yourself in the mirror.”
“Bitch,” says Gavin, his lip starting to curl upward, exposing fang. “You can’t see a tint when its dark out.” Once again, he envisions how Andrew would present this schism years from now, how he would speak – hopefully as passionately as the checkout lady - in his father’s defense.
Finally they clamber into the Land Cruiser and barrel-ass down the atrocious, clotted highway – past the plastic cows grazing on steakhouse lawns, past the huge inflatable whale guarding the water slide, past the neon Full of Bull sign over the roast beef drive-in – until they reach the even more atrocious Auto Mile where the car dealers keep their acreage and stock.
Overhead the sky is blood-orange, streaked with purple-gray starting to feather to black. “Hurry,” says Gavin to the crunching traffic. “Hurry up, you bastards,” as if every rush-hour car were on its way with them to the Mercedes dealership.
At a red light, Suzi looks at the sky and remembers Wyoming. “We used to chase the sunset to see a herd of elk,” she says. “Now we chase the sunset to see the tint on a Benz.”
“Pull in there,” yells Gavin as the light changes and a Silverado lurches into their lane. “Don’t let him block you.”
Suzi wrenches the wheel and screeches into the long driveway that slopes to the showroom. Gavin curses each speedbump in their way, and there are many of them. As the glass doors part at their approach Suzi throws a fleeting glance back at the fast-changing sky. “The stupid things rich people do,” she says.
And when she finally stands in the lot and stares at the gangsta tint – still discernible in the half-light – she reacts as expected. She hates it – but she lies; and Gavin, in turn, lies about knowing she’s lying. They drive the Benz to a celebratory restaurant, empty two bottles of wine and eat beef – because this is an occasion. Over coffee and cognac they phone Andrew at college and praise his knack for accessorizing contemporary luxury cars.
Next day, the Kleertek CEO sits in the passenger seat and coaches Gavin through the numerous twists and hairpin turns that lead to his toney and secluded club. For a reason Gavin can’t pinpoint, the CEO’s tone somehow gives the creepy impression he might be addressing a chauffeur; and the manner of the club parking valet makes it even creepier by not discounting the impression.
Over glasses of seltzer and lime the CEO states to his colleagues – as he has in the past – that he believes the strength of the Garret Group is in its young blood, and he praises Gavin for having the guts to hire associates who aren’t just yes-men.
“So what’s new with them?” he asks, actually ticking off the three names, and correctly too.
“Big news,” says Gavin. “Melinda’s back from her honeymoon. Ben and Tory are getting married, and they’re having a baby.”
“Hey,” says the CEO, grinning. “Hey, wow.” And his trio of honchos chime in, heying and wowing.
“And what about you, Gavin – anything new?”
Gavin sips his seltzer and thinks. “There is,” he says. “I just got the Mercedes.”
The CEO puts down his drink and mock-wipes his forehead. “This is too much in one day,” he says to the table. “One is back from a honeymoon. Two others are getting married and having a baby. And another one has a brand new Mercedes.” He leans forward and asks his brain trust, “now which of those biggies will be smooth sailing?”
The meeting ends on an up-note, because the execs all see huge possibilities in Think beyond wood – “an idea with legs,” as one puts it. In fact, the CEO strongly hints he will nearly double the Garret Group budget for the coming fiscal year. Gavin chauffeurs them back from the club and takes the long way back – the longest possible, because it takes him into the thick of the city to Copley Place and Tiffany’s. There he does the high-five in dollar signs for something to drape around Suzi’s neck. At the crucial moment they imprint his Platinum Amex, he pictures her neck as swan-like.