LOVE AND THE CONSPIRACY THEORIST

It often happens that the things we most fully intend to do are the things that flee from our minds when the opportunity is upon us. I am speaking chiefly for myself here. It often happens that, upon reaching the store, I will purchase the quart of milk I had meant to purchase the previous night, a bottle of ginger ale-- Schweppes-- and a handful of limes that are deep green all the way round, suggesting, however improbably, that they might have ripened on the tree as opposed to being harvested and hot-housed, but not with the spool of button thread I had sought out initially. Memory is capricious; ideas are not completely captured in memories, in images of memory. This, I am convinced, is the nature of the being human.

This is also why my wife is not talking to me today.

Of course, I am being unfair. It isn't that my wife will not talk to me today. She will respond readily to interrogation; when challenged with the assault "Are you okay?" she will defend with the barbed attack "I'm fine, sweetie." It is far more accurate to say that, for one reason or other, my wife prefers not to talk to me today.

By "one reason or another" I mean that, for one reason, she is angry with me, and another, of course, is that she should be.

Not to go in to too much depth: we are having a fight. When I say we are having a fight, I mean that I am tramping down my gut indifference to how much glittery tinsel to put on the Christmas tree in an effort not to take out my anger on my wife, and that she, as a counter-effort, has called me an old Bah Humbug and turned, pointedly, to place another carefully selected handful of tinsel on the tree.

The dog is on her side. She has curled up by the fireside with her nose pointed, pointedly, at my wife and the tree, and she watches the dispensing of the tinsel withan approving "chuff."

I turned and gave her a crooked smile. "Nah," I said, "Just retreating."

She gave me a quick wink, and I entered my study, resisting the urge to shut the door. As Sun Tsu wrote, war is chiefly an art of deception.

I had gotten so far as to expect the What's Wrong Sweetie gambit. So at least I knew what kind of attack to expect. I did have one weapon of last resort: I'm Under A Lot Of Stress. But, as with any weapon of last resort, I hoped not to use it. About nine-thirty, as I took my third sip of my over-brandied egg nog and gave up on it, the attack came: my wife came into the office and, giving my shoulder a quick squeese and pressing my head to her hip, and, as predicted, said "What's wrong, sweetie?"

I nearly panicked, but in a moment of inspiration, I mounted what turned out to be the flanking move of all time: "Oh, not a damned thing."

I had managed to avoid using the stress bomb, but I needed to bolster it with something in order to discourage another afront. I handed her the egg nog and said "Will you get rid of this for me?"

She took the glass and had a sip, making a face and saying "Blah! Too much of a good thing." She petted me on the head and said "I'm going to bed. Are you coming?

I hadn't expected this; my strategy turned out to be more powerful than I had thought. I capped it off by claiming "In a bit. Love you."

My wife tossed off "Love you too" in retreat, and then was gone. In the silence following the battle, I began to review what would have been the inevitable fallout of the Stress Bomb, had I been forced to use it.

First I would have had had to disclose the meeting with Carl in my office earlier that day, which would probably have lead me to describing Carl as that miserable, fat, balding bastard. This would, no doubt, poison the atmosphere. Then I would have had to tell her how Carl opened our little chat: "The client meeting went fine!"

"What client meeting?" Now, I knew what client: if it was Carl it had to be the bank. I was working on the schematics at the time. Did he want to see an elevation? A floorplan? A site layout?

"The client meeting," Carl said obviously, "this morning." He went on about the meeting while I reflected on three basic facts: the buildings were going to be more expensive to build than the $255,000 the bank people had budgeted per branch; the due dilligence on the first site had not been done yet; and there were design options that had been calculated but not presented to the bank people. The fact that I was not invited to the meeting meant that I wasn't wanted at the meeting. That I wasn't wanted at the meeting meant that my design options were not on the table. The absence of the design options meant that my firm wanted the owner to wrestle with the cost-cutting options with the contractor after the design phase had been closed to preliminary construction documents. You could think of it as something of a dirty trick, as I did, or as a standard business practice, as it most certainly was. But I knew and was good friends with one of the bank people, an oral surgeon named Ken who I had met in college, and I knew that this was a first-time, purse-string venture. They wanted to build and operate a dozen banks and then sell them to one of the major financial institutions. They had a finite operations budget, but if they played their cards right they could triple their investment in a half-dozen years.

So I was not at the meeting. Carl prattled on for a while about the bank people, staying as far away as he could from the actual design, while I sat on the feeling of anger and betrayal that I wasn't quite sure I should be having. After a while I answered some basic questions about the design, and Carl gave me a pat on the shoulder and some encouraging words and left.

I went over the design options in my mind-- a different grade of granite pavers in the lobby, a cheaper grade of carpet, modular instead of custom glazing on the front-- while I tried to divert my attention from the possible reasons I would have been excluded from the meeting. Among them were that I knew EXACTLY how much money they had for start-up, and EXACTLY how much of that had to go to operating, and EXACTLY how much that left for site development and construction, and if it came down to that I knew EXACTLY which contractor to hire and EXACTLY which ones to avoid and EXACTLY which one the firm would recommend in the end towards the goal of frugality, and that would be EXACTLY why Carl wouldn't have wanted me in there.

Shut up, I told myself. Shut up, shut up, shut up, just shut up and keep drawing. I went back to my favorite one, an artist's rendering of the front elevation, which made the bank look inviting and homey and cozy, just the sort of place you'd be comfortable cashing a check or depositing your savings. It was a beautiful little bank, and it hurt my heart to think that it was not going to go to Perfect Form.

I tried to work but my mind wasn't on it. A little before lunchtime I put in a call to Skip Davies, who was working on the real estate end of the bank deal. About one thirty he called back

"Hey, buddy!" Skip hollared over the phone. "What's up?"

"Same old, same old," I said back. "Hey, listen: I was curious to know about the client meeting this morning?"

There was a cold pause on his end of the line. "Oh! You mean with the bank people!"

"Yeah," I said, reaching over to close the door to my office, "Carl passed through here this morning, said it went well, but I was hoping that I could get a little better idea of what was exchanged."

Another pause. "Why," he asked, "you think it might affect the design?"

I had to draw him in slowly; I didn't want him to think I thought anything was amiss. "It might could; you never know.'

The pause on the other end was palpable, but I had Skip where I wanted him. He had been a bully in high school, and nothing pleased him more than being able to hold something just over someone else's head, just to make them jump and grab for it. After a couple of moments, he said "Well, nothing monumental, but I think we have ruled out one or two of the sites."

Bingo. "Think you might be able to let me know which ones? Just so I can kick that into the mix as a design aspect."

Without a pause he spilled: "Morrowcroft, due diligence problems, and the Plaza Road Extension beacuse we don't want to be responsible for a lease-back property until they have a couple of branches vested."

That told me what I needed to know, although I didn't know quite what to do with it. I rang off with Skip after a promise to do lunch next week. I wouldn't tell Carl about the conversation, and I sure as hell wasn't going to tell Ken. I guess I just felt like I needed to cover my ass, and I didn't like it. It gave me a bad feeling.

So I didn't tell my wife about it when I picked her up from the school, and I didn't mention it over dinner, and I said nothing of it as we traipsed over to Queens' Road East to our favorite Christmas tree lot to pick one of the season's small pleasures. Silently did I retrieve the decorations from the attic, and, as always, I watched as my wife decorated the tree as only she truly can. Even now I held on to my secrets, making furtive moves around the lower story of our house while my wife was laying in wait above, ready for an ambush.

At something after ten I decided that I had plotted enough strategy, and went to watch television. One of the history channels was playing a special on the Kennedy assassination, and I had meant to watch it, but I was clearly in no mood. Before eleven I had decided I had had enough, and I didn't care if the mob had boosted Jack so if the commies propped up Cuba, the odds that Eiesenhouer would cut a deal with Castro were good since the braintrust at the White House thought that China had The Bomb. And if the Mormons were suppliying the junkies in Manhattan and the hippies out in Frisco in order to create and urban blight to overcome, it still didn't follow that the faggot in New Orleans would have set the tables turning (even if he was a mob informant) so the commies saw it coming and they circulated rumours making Ruby so flipped out that he hopped a flight to Dallas and told Oswald "Act alone."

So I had had it. So I gave up. I turned off the TV. I climbed the stairs in silence, and shed my clothes before gently pulling back the bedclothes and curling up next to my wife, ceding defeat.

"Good night," I tell her.

"Mmmmm" my wife says.

"Chuff" says the dog.

Ever gracious, even in defeat, I curl up and close my eyes, awaiting sleep. sweet oblivion, unconscious rest, a temporary end of the world.