White Man's Problems (9 page)

He rose to go to the bathroom, where he took an Ambien, making it two that night—a no-no, but he had to get to sleep. He picked up the iPad one more time as he lay back down to see if the analyst in New York had redone the numbers. There was still no service. His inbox was unchanged. The last message was still the one from his wife that he had read on the plane. He had missed Bella's fourth-grade class' party, having stayed in the city for one more meeting, and Rita had e-mailed him this:

It went great. Really cute. She had a ball. They were in the pool most of the time, but it broke into a whiffle-ball game around four…boys v. girls of course. Monica and I both said how fun it was to c the girls all in their little bikinis running around not self-conscious. Probably last time for that – soon there will be body worries. Fly safe. We ate but Mariana left something in there for you. XX

He listened to the girls sleep. Bella was a miniature version of Rita, like the same document zoomed down to 60 percent. He was proud of their shared jokes, their love of dogs and horses and guinea pigs, and their obsession with
Say Yes to the Dress
. And he was lucky for his daughter: Bella worked hard to keep him happy. She was always up for a visit to the office, and when they were alone in the car, she asked about his life. She complained when he went away and told him not to smoke cigars. But lately she could vanish in a cascade of tears from an innocuous conversation. Before he knew it, Rita would be standing hands on hips in the doorway asking him what the hell he'd said, like when Bella admitted to liking a boy and he asked, perfectly harmlessly, if any of her friends were into the same guy. Or when he told her not to worry about being ugly because her braces would be off soon, thinking they were in the teasing space of buddies, misjudging that, though Bella often wore the X chromosome, it was really just to be nice to him and didn't give him the right to treat her like a golf buddy. Back at the iPad, he made one wrong move, and the black queen came roaring across screen. His king was cornered. He started another game.

***

When Rita and Bell awoke, they did not wake him, or at least not enough for him to acknowledge consciousness. He thought he felt Bella kiss his cheek. Rita wrote a note that he found on the bed stand:

Went to the Barn. Let Sondra in and ask her to please get the cushions on pool chairs. meet us for lunch, Bye.

Underneath, Bella's handwriting read:

Yo dawg, where you been? LU xo B
.

Mulligan rose and went through his ablutions. Helpless as to breakfast, he considered going to Starbucks but remembered his one-man boycott of its bullshit. The weird thing about the Northwesternization of the culture was its false patina of hipsterism and liberal politics: it was all so green, healthy, smug, and egalitarian. But no one was greedier than the geeky tech trillionaires up there on stages, endless stages, walking around like stand-up comedians with concealed microphones, introducing products to beaming crowds of devotees in San Jose, Palo Alto, and Redmond—or Cupertino, a name that said it all. How could it all be so fucking great? Weren't eight people killed every day texting while driving? Could he be the only one confused by how the crunchy, organic, artisan, environmentalist, pro-third-world, and anti-child-labor ethos found room to embrace the iPad with 4G? Starbucks sold
coffee
, for God's sake, and widow makers like apple fritters and iced cinnamon rolls. Software programs stole all the world's music. And the parents of every fourth grader did not know what to do in the face of their kid's desire to join Facebook. He longed for a day when
Boeing meant jobs
and it was weird for Seattle to even have a football team.

Mulligan took the iPad and his BlackBerry and went across the lawn, past the pool, to his home office in the guesthouse, where he turned on his desktop. It did not boot up correctly, which he theorized was related to Bella's going on illegal music sites. He had sixteen new e-mails on his BlackBerry but none on his iPad. Fourteen of the sixteen e-mails were from the bank's analyst in New York. Each had important attachments—complicated accounting spreadsheets on special proprietary enterprise software—that were impossible to view on the BlackBerry. That meant, with the iPad not updating due to the Wi-Fi connection issue and the desktop not working at all, Mulligan found himself with three devices turned on and no spreadsheets. He picked up the phone, which was cordless, to dial the bank's twenty-four-hour IT service. After three rings, a two-tone noise preceded a recording:
To complete this call
,
you must first dial nine…Please hang up and dial again
. He felt sweat over his brow. The voice was
not
telling him that what he had wrong was the usual unknowable difference between dialing one before the area code or not dialing one before the area code. No, he had forgotten to dial nine—nine!—before the number, something which struck him as insane, since it was a call from
home
,
and, for the entirety of his professional life, dialing nine had been the exclusive province of the business phone, something you did from the
office
. Dialing nine was something that never—
never
—applied to the home phone. What meant anything if that was not the way it was anymore? The interlaced fingers met forehead once more.

He heard the doorbell—another interruption. It was Sondra, the housekeeper. She was more like an assistant housekeeper who worked on the weekends because Mariana was off. Sondra was illegal, but Mariana had convinced him to hire her on the altogether fair but altogether unspoken premise that Mariana was getting too old to clean the entire house every day. He was (truly) happy to do it, and it made each of the three women—Rita, Bella, and Mariana—happy, which made his life easier. Plus, Sondra was a devout, demure, diminutive, and decorous girl who was thrilled to get four hundred bucks a week, which he paid via personal check because he never had enough cash, even though it was certain to fuck him up one day taxwise. The moral, ethical, and legal ramifications of failing to withhold from someone who was illegal but had a Social Security number and a California driver's license was one of the few mental wormholes of his quotidian life Mulligan had left unexplored. He didn't know what she did about health insurance.

Sondra spoke no English, so he used what Spanish he had garnered from trips to Cabo San Lucas and UEFA Cup games on Univision. This meant he knew only the elementals—for example, that limpio meant clean.

“Oh, Sondra,
por favor, necesito limpio
,” he said, making a wax-on motion with his hands. “Rita said for me to ask you if you could ‘please
limpio
'?”

Sondra nodded vigorously and said, “
Sí, disculpa, pero limpia que? Afuera?
”

He realized she was asking him just exactly what she should clean. Giving in to his inability to communicate in words, Mulligan pointed to the pool chairs. She told him, also in gestures, that first she would walk Henry. He nodded. Before he turned away, she said, “
También, señor, necesito ir a comprar las cosas por casa
,” and pantomimed pushing a shopping cart. He remembered that Mariana had delegated the weekly grocery run to Sondra on top of the other grunt work. Mulligan momentarily marveled that he lived in a world where Sondra thought he might be concerned about her workflow plan. He thanked her in Spanish, she thanked him in English, and he beat a retreat back to the technological windmills of the guesthouse.

With all the confusion over attachments, he was late for lunch. The girls wanted him at Rosti
on San Vicente at quarter past noon, and he was already more than fifteen minutes late. He closed his eyes in frustration. When would he break through his preoccupation with work? He'd been in New York for a week, hadn't spoken to his wife or daughter in three days, and was a no-show at yet another event that would never come again. It didn't matter that yesterday's party was billed as just another entirely missable school thing; it had turned out to yield a golden moment, a parent's keepsake to be clutched when looking back, when inevitably he would think,
Man, did that go fast
. It was a memory, like so many others, that he would now have to access through the prism of his wife. He looked for his BlackBerry. Not wanting to let the girls down again, he texted Rita:
I'm coming. I will be there. Sorry.

Mulligan went to his closet and put on the jeans, the blue T, and sneakers. The brown shirt would have been the perfect thing. No response came from Rita, and he knew that meant she was angry, because she—like everyone everywhere—read all texts within five seconds of receipt. In moments like this, no answer from Rita was bad news, her way of leaving him alone to feel rotten about being absent. He raced to the other side of the house and jumped in the car, hitting the button to open the closest of the doors on the four-door garage. His moves combined the precision that comes with having done something a thousand times with the kind of corner cutting you did only when you were in a rush, like not snapping in your seat belt, which he could get to once he backed out of the Kenter Canyon driveway. The car's roof narrowly passed underneath the still-upward-moving garage door. He reached for his sunglasses with his right hand and began rolling the wheel counterclockwise with his left.

Before he could get the glasses to his face, Mulligan heard a muscular and garbled noise, almost like the workings of a trash compactor. He slammed the brakes. The sound had been strange—like something being rolled, very low and dense. He sat silent, hoping the coast was clear. He hoped it might have come from across the street. Maybe the gardeners were mulching something. Or maybe he had run over a branch or Bella's skateboard or something. He shifted back into drive and started forward.

The same low noise shot out, this time punctuated by a higher-pitched yelp. He closed his eyes and lifted his hands off the steering wheel as though it were suddenly ten thousand degrees. He
had
run over something. It was bad—muffled, crunching, and violent. He knew the sound of a body getting hit. He threw open the car door and dove to the ground. There was Henry, wedged under the rear axle, staring at him, a purplish mark on his brindled brow.

Heartbreak slammed into Mulligan's chest. He tried to be calm. “Hey, Henry. Hey, buddy,” he said. “C'mon, big boy. Can you come here?” Henry moved his front legs and shoulders, trying to obey, but he got nowhere. Mulligan reached and burned his hand on the exhaust pipe, and when he pulled back in pain, he smashed it against the inside of the wheel housing. He shimmied as far as he could and stretched again but barely touched the hair of the dog's back. He spun over on his back, and tried to reach with his legs but got the same result. He went to the side to try to get at Henry from a different position, but he could only flex his toe thinly against the dog's big shoulders, a pitiful drip of pressure—no match for the crush of the axle.

Sondra was off to the market by now, which left him alone. He felt the sickening rise of panic. He played out the scenes to follow: Henry slowly dying, Sondra crying, Bella shrieking, Rita stunned, and Bella and Rita both staring at him in judgment, forgiving him slowly over years but never, ever, ever forgetting. He stood up and looked for anything—he thought about running next door to the Stanhope's house. He had to do something. He dropped down to the ground again. “Hey…Ok, buddy…Hi, boy…You're a good boy…a good king boy…Yeah, that's right. Relax, big boy…” With the next wave of desperation, the defensive back part of his brain took over. He put his shoulder under the bumper and, with a furious groan, tried to lift the car up. It didn't work.

Mulligan came to a knee and tried to collect himself. He thought about hitting the car's OnStar Service button but decided there would not be enough time for whomever they get to come to the rescue to get there. Henry's eyes had that dumb, lovable, low-brain-wave stare, although it was plainly fading. He was crying a little. Mulligan considered dialing 911, but that seemed like it would be even slower than
OnStar
. He jumped to his feet and started running down the driveway to look for help. A few steps later, it hit him:
The jack! Of course! The fucking jack!
Racing to the driver's-side window, he hit the trunk icon, sending the lid on its automated rise. He threw the golf clubs and the rest of the compartment's contents to the side, pulled out the carpeted trunk floor, and began unscrewing the wing nut holding the jack in place. It came out in two pieces, and an instruction sheet was buried below. Mulligan stared at the directions for a few seconds, grasping what he could. He put the stand into the risers and placed the combined unit in front of the right rear tire.

It was then that he realized he was missing the small tool needed to ratchet the thing up.
Where is the fucking crank
? Under the car, Henry struggled and groaned and wore the same heartbreaking stare of confusion. Mulligan peered again at the image of a small elbow-like piece of iron. He tore through a brown paper bag full of hangers and old CDs. Not finding anything, he ripped out the spare tire, hoping the missing crank had fallen into the nether regions of the trunk. He went back to the littered driveway and dumped the contents of his golf bag. Out came his oversize driver, his irons, his putter, half a dozen Titleist twos—which bounced down toward the mailbox—dried-up Cohibas, a cigar cutter, lighters, ball marks, and divot fixers.

He sat on the blacktop amid the array of shit he carried around in his car every day. It was all his fault—twice over. Not only had he run the dog over, he also could not save him.
This is it,
Mulligan said to himself.
This is where I come apart. This is the kind of thing that happens in real life. The bad thing.
He tried to take it in, to taste it like the second week of prison food, like the flesh and the blood.
Sometimes the bad thing happens
. He felt the unwelcome guest of sense memory, a panicky flashback to when three kids from his high school were killed by a drunk driver—the petrified feeling that accompanies abrupt confrontation with a horrible accident.
There is no safety net. Sometimes it is just
all
bad.
He made a decision to settle into the pain and, in this purgatorial time between the lightning bolt and the crack, to sit and watch Henry die.