A Truck Full of Money (20 page)

Paul called Billo and Schwenk “my no-men.” He said, “They call bullshit on me all the time. I crave their criticism.” In truth, he didn't seem to like criticism any more than most bosses, but more than most he had arranged to receive it. And yet for now, as his dreams of Blade-by-day and -night sped on, his no-men represented little more than light touches on the brakes.

One afternoon at the very end of July, half a dozen friends received an email from Paul with the subject header “Graves Light.”

Ok, you know about Shake the Lake, but soon we might have Light the Night as well! (But I don't think the coast guard will allow lasers.)

The next line of Paul's email contained a link to a story in
The Boston Globe
about the impending sale of the lighthouse on the outermost island of Boston Harbor, a towering, weather-beaten old lighthouse fronting the open sea on a pile of rocks called Graves Ledges. Under a photograph of the structure, a caption read “The Graves Island Light Station near the entrance to Boston Harbor has no plumbing or utility services, and getting to the front door requires a climb on a 40-foot ladder.” Paul's email continued:

i am going to place a bid just before auction close in five days

don't tell anyone yet!

Paul bid half a million dollars for the lighthouse and woke the next morning alarmed. “What the fuck have I done? That's the stupidest thing I've ever done.” Remorse was like a little clearing in the sky. Someone offered more for the lighthouse, and Paul felt no temptation to compete. He felt he had been rescued.

Months later, Brenda White laughed over the memory of this misadventure. Sometimes in Paul's presence these days, she would think, “Am I talking to a little boy right now? I sometimes feel like I'd prefer the man.” Brenda was still trim, younger-looking than Paul, though she was about his age, near fifty now. “Him buying a lighthouse,” she said. “Part of me says, If the guy can afford it, what harm does it do? He'd have ended up giving it away. If I were in a relationship with someone who couldn't afford it, that would be worrisome. But Paul buying a lighthouse? That sort of thing doesn't frighten me, because he can afford it, and something good's going to come out of it.”

Brenda had followed Paul, with a few detours, from Interleaf to Boston Light, to Intuit, and finally to Kayak, which she had joined near its beginning, as employee number fourteen. She was one of Paul's valued QA engineers, by then a mother of two and still very happily married. Some three years later, her husband died suddenly. Brenda was staggered. “I wanted to crawl under a table and unplug myself,” she said. Meanwhile, a voice in her mind was saying, “When you're a mother, you have to be strong.”

In the aftermath, family and some friends gathered at her sister-in-law's house. Worries had begun to harry Brenda. How was she going to take care of her two kids, how would she keep them housed and clothed and fed? When Paul arrived, he sat down beside her—“in his quiet way,” she said. She thought,
This is my employer who
knows
what I'm going through.
Paul didn't have to say anything. Just sitting there beside him, she knew her job was one thing she didn't have to worry about. He'd give her whatever she needed—the freedom to work more often at home, to take time off.

Over the next months she often turned to him for other reassurance, sometimes by text message: “Am I going to be all right?” she'd ask, and he'd reply, “I'm so bullish on you.” He always made time to talk. She remembered, “My mother's voice did not assure me. My friends' voices did not assure me. But Paul did. And then it turned romantic. I think they say a year is proper. I think it was actually eight months.”

She could begin to list but couldn't rank what drew her to Paul. She felt respect for what he'd accomplished in the world, and for her, he still fell in the category of an attractive man. But what she pictured when she thought of him weren't his looks exactly but his smile and his laugh. She could remember working with him at Interleaf, their computers side by side—and the patient way he'd helped her with her code, and the way he'd worked at his, rewriting, rearranging until it seemed to her that it approached perfection, both in its neatness on the screen and its efficient functioning. His meticulousness had continued, evidently, and extended to his habits at home, Paul making everything line up just so on the shelves in his kitchen and in the silverware rack of his dishwasher. To her these quirks, Paul's “nerdy ways,” were charming. It was great sport, pure “nerdy fun,” to sit with him at her house or his and trade ideas for things like apps and interface designs, one-upping each other—“That might work, but how about this?”

At Interleaf, Brenda had begun what she later thought of as a search for “inner peace” and had found her way to Buddhist teachings. For her, Buddhism wasn't a religion except in the old sense of the word, religion as a practice, one based on many time-honored techniques, which seemed sensible, even scientific. Her other friends weren't very interested in this, but Paul would always say, “Tell me more. Give me an example.”

She remembered, from the time when they first became a couple, trying to help him through what appeared to be a severe panic attack. She couldn't remember the cause or exactly what Paul had said, but he was trembling and he seemed to be speaking to his father, apologetically, fearfully. She rubbed his back, spoke soothing words, and finally helped him take a sleeping pill. He would ask her, “Do you think I'm bipolar?” She knew he hated the label, and she could honestly say she'd never seen him clinically depressed or in a state that struck her as truly manic. His bouts of grandiosity seemed a thing apart, not the product of egotism but of something inborn, chemical. She encouraged him to stick with his medications and also to continue his own meditation practice.

He had told her about the fights of his teenage years and the fury that went with them, all of which was hard to imagine, because it seemed completely out of character. She had seen him truly angry at her just once, and that occasion was notable for his restraint. He wasn't shaking or red in the face. He simply ducked his head, saying in a calm voice, “Hang on.” Several times he tried to speak and stopped, and calmly said again, “Hang on.”

In every important way, he was the perfect companion for this next part of her life. But for the first five years of their romance, she kept breaking up with him.

For one thing, she was dating the boss, and everyone in the Concord office had to know.
What's Schwenk thinking?
she'd ask herself. Mainly, though, the problem had to do with circumstance and timing. “My kids were in high school, my daughter was twelve, my son fifteen. They had been through the most earth-shattering change of their lives, and I wanted them to have no more change, and bringing Paul into my life—for my life it was good, but not for them.” When her father had died, her mother had been “rock-solid there” for her and her siblings. Maybe that was the source of her conviction. Paul wanted more time with her than she could give. Again and again, she felt undone. She would tell Paul, “We shouldn't date. I can't make you happy and my kids happy.” Looking back, she said, “I should have been dating someone who didn't have time for me either.”

When he and Brenda would break up, Paul used to remove her phone number from the Favorites on his smartphone, and at once he would start going out with other women. He would warn them about Brenda if things seemed to be getting serious, and sooner or later he would end up telling them, “I'm sorry, but Brenda called.” He explained, “I was trying to get over Brenda.” One could say he had worked hard, even overtime, at this. In February, he had received valentine cards from no fewer than nine other women. So far, though, he hadn't been able to get over Brenda.

In the course of their decades-long and often interrupted conversation, she had taught him the beginnings of a way to quiet himself when he felt irritation or anger rising. He remembered her saying, “Anger is an incredible gift that someone is giving you. It gives you an opportunity to figure out something about yourself.” Looked at this way, anger also gave him a choice. When he felt it stirring, he would say to himself, “You can choose
not
to get angry. Would you hit yourself with a hammer?” Adapting general Buddhist practice, he would form an image of feelings that assailed him, usually anger or shame. He would imagine them as tumors, which he was holding in his hand. He would say to himself, “This is that anger, but you know what? It's not around my heart anymore. It's in my hand.” He would address the thing, saying, “I'm not ashamed of you, and when I'm ready, I'm going to throw you away.”

Boston's narrow roads and notoriously deranged drivers had been a principal laboratory. In the years of phase one, a driver would cut Paul off and he would speed up after the car and return the favor if he could. In phase two, he would stay in his lane and talk to himself, saying, “That's an angry person, and I'm not going to try to get retribution, because they're going to fuck themselves up.” Nowadays, in what he thought of as phase three, he'd look at the driver speeding away and think,
I love that person, and if I had their background and chemistry, I would probably cut me off, too.

Sometimes he wondered if others might not turn the tables on him: “Sometimes I meet people who are so fucking sweet I wonder if they're holding it in. And then if they get angry at me, will I not fucking know?” The thought amused him. What mattered, what felt good, was knowing he'd made progress. Just recently, he had driven a friend to the airport in rush hour traffic, and halfway there she'd told him, “You're amazing. You're the only person I know who doesn't get upset in traffic.” The previous winter, his neighbor, an elderly woman who shared a driveway with him, had mistaken reverse for forward and backed her big Mercedes at high speed into the front of his garage. She'd half destroyed the structure. Even worse, the flying debris had damaged his Audi R8, his most expensive, most beloved car, the car he wouldn't drive when it was raining or take to a meeting unless there was valet parking and he knew and trusted the valet. Moreover, this woman and her husband had given him no end of trouble back when he'd been renovating his house. Right after the accident, however, when he came running outside and found the old woman distraught, he told her that she shouldn't worry, insurance would cover everything. The next morning he felt as though he had passed an important test.

Of course, he had to tell Brenda—“I felt really proud,” he said. They were a couple again at the time, but only for a while. By May, they had broken up once more. He hadn't deleted her number from his Favorites, though. He'd grown tired of removing it and typing it back in. He might as well just leave it there. About three months later, around the time of his fiftieth birthday, Paul told his current girlfriend that he was sorry, but Brenda had called.

Her circumstances had changed. She had sold her house, which her husband had built and which she had designed in the image of a childhood dream of a house. She had resigned from Kayak. She had loved QA coding, but twenty years of it felt long enough. Her Kayak stock made her financially independent, and now both children were heading off to college. No house, no job and no need for one, no kids except on holidays. She finally had time for Paul, but she was afraid she had pushed him away once too often. She had felt miserable all summer, harboring this thought. When she finally called him, she said, “Can we just hang out?”