Six Figures - Hardcover

Leebron, Fred G.

 
9780375406409: Six Figures
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375406409 ISBN 13: 9780375406409
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Warner Lutz knows he is dissatisfied with his lot in life, but when his wife is brutally attacked, he is surprised to learn how many people in this life believe him capable of the crime. 20,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Fred G. Leebron's stories have appeared in several anthologies and in publications such as <i>Grand Street, TriQuarterly</i>, and <i>DoubleTake</i>. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has been the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship, a James Michener Award, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. He teaches creative writing at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife and two children.

Fred G. Leebron teaches creative writing at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Aus dem Klappentext

ix Figures</b>, Fred Leebron has written an intricately nuanced novel of psychological investigation and suspense, riveting in the depth and intensity of the questions it raises about ourselves -- and about our status-obsessed society.<br><br>Warner Lutz isn't sure how he got where he is, but he's not particularly happy to be there: midthirties, married, two kids, dead-end career in fund-raising, cramped town house, old Honda, clothes slightly frayed around the edges. His latest job has landed him and his family in Charlotte, North Carolina, a boomtown where everyone else seems to have more than Warner -- and more is what Warner wants. <br><br>But it's not what he gets. Instead, the probation period of his job has just been extended; his wife, Megan, thinks her own job is in jeopardy as well; their entire savings are going toward a house that won't be big enough for them; and their four-year-old daughter, the preschool teacher tells them, is "a couple of beats behind" the othe

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The line for the polling booths at Charlotte Baptist Church was more than a hundred people long, and Warner Lutz rocked the unsettled baby in his arms while studying the diverse messages posted around Fellowship Hall. Pray for God to bring the lost and hurting people from your community to himself. Anger is just one letter from Danger. Every half minute a blue light blinked, and the next person would enter a vacated stall, drawing the curtain closed. At the far end of the auditorium, uniformed children paraded across a stage under a green-and-white banner that said kids can vote, too! A handful of Girl Scouts guarded a cardboard ballot box, cheerfully distributing sharpened yellow pencils with pink eraser tips. In Boston, Warner and Megan had voted at a public elementary school, in San Francisco in a row-house garage. The other day a monied pastor had told him that Charlotte liked to view herself as a conservative town who loved her churches on every street corner, and Warner had felt the Jew in him cringe in a kind of fear and the atheist in him vow to do something anarchic about it. From the start, he and Megan had been torn between blending in and pushing out, but he was feeling increasingly damned if he was going to assume his born-into religion just because everybody around him seemed to put so much stock in theirs. All along the length of the hall his neighbors chatted quietly as they smoothed the minor fault lines in the creases of their business suits or sweater sets, double-checked the coordination of their wristwatches and cuff links or necklaces and earrings. Behind him was Megan in her faded jeans and baby-stained cardigan. She leaned forward and lightly breathed into his ear. "He's asleep."

The little wobbly head was already imprinting an island of drool above Warner's heart. He felt the familiar surge in his throat of gratitude and awe at the unearthly ripeness of the boy's cheeks, the tender narrowness of his neck. How hard he had fought against having him, and now look at the baby and Sophie. Sometimes when he was at the office fielding phone calls from the trustees he understood that his only real reason for living was five o'clock, when he could go home to sit in the beige puddle of their living room and build stacks of blocks to the strains of heartfelt songs from various Disney animated classics. He bent carefully, held his nose close to Daniel's partly open bow of a mouth, and took in the milky breathing.

Megan reached and stroked the baby's hair. "What a cuddlebug." Then she felt Warner's shoulders. "You're still mad? You could wait in the car."

He nodded at the high windows. "It's pouring."

"Everyone should vote," she said. "It's only an hour. You shouldn't resent it so much." She unfolded a pamphlet on bond issues and began to read. "Look, there's education and highways and sidewalks, all that stuff we always talk about -- "

" -- and everyone votes on," he said quietly, "out of ignorance." The baby stirred, and Warner began to sway him back and forth.

"You want me to hold him?"

He shook his head. The boy's bunched knees pressed gently against Warner's rib cage, and his head lolled in the contour of his shoulder. He was six months old, a native Bostonian. Sophie was a Californian. Warner was a Pennsylvanian, and Megan a New Yorker. They'd begun in graduate school, where he was getting a master's in public affairs and she was earning one in art history. She'd said near the end of their first afternoon together, at a graduate student happy hour, that he was the most negative person she'd ever met. He wondered if that were still true. He supposed it was. He rested his head against the baby's head and shut his eyes to a pearled old woman navigating her way into a booth with the aid of a walker and an attendant dressed in white. He wished he had a cell phone so he could check in with the office. He'd denied their request for an electoral day off, and now he himself would be late. Everyone at MORE -- he hated the acronym and pushed to get them to answer the phone with M-O-R-E -- was from the North or Midwest. Privately, they called themselves nonprofit carpetbaggers and liked to imagine their roles as ideological descendants of the sixties integrationists. But the Metrolina Organization for Resource Exchange was a networker, a facilitator, a broker -- all the eighties-nineties tautology that said what you actually did was as close to nothing as doing something could be. Not that he didn't believe in MORE: as its director, he was obligated to. Before his time the organization had helped create the Nonprofit Housing Coalition, the Emergency Food and Drug Delivery System, and the Educational Access Network. It was all paper. He was a technocrat. In Charlotte, who wasn't? But he knew what those other people were making -- not that it was only about money, but it was always at least partly about money -- and this distinction between them and him made him boil.



"Look where we could be," Megan liked to say.

And of course he looked -- because he could and he had to, it was part of his job -- at what lay under the trapdoor. The poor. The poor poor, the working poor, the criminal poor. The there-but-for-the-grace-of-birth-and-circumstances-go-I poor. The outhouse, crackhouse, madhouse, jailhouse poor. The people-he-thought-he-worked-for-every-day poor. The goddamn-he-was-lucky-he-wasn't-one-of-them poor. Yet he still wanted more. Every morning when he drove Sophie in their shitcan hundred-thousand-plus-mile Honda with the guardrail crease down one side to the private but only $175-a-month preschool and he saw the other parents in their new Volvos and minivans and Suburbans, he wanted more. Every noon when he stood in line at the vegetarian take-out for his cup of soup and can of diet cola while in a nearby café the gray suits and sleek dresses milled between garden salads and poached salmon, he wanted more. And in the evenings when he drew up to the cramped redbrick town-house apartments of Crape Myrtle Hill, having passed the magic dust mansions of the growing rank-and-file rich with their screened-in porches and their two-story great rooms and their eat-in kitchens and their master bedroom baths with built-in saunas, he wanted more. He snuggled the sweet, warm baby draped on his shoulder, and wondered if he would ever understand what enough was, and if so, whether he would recognize when he himself had achieved it. Not twenty feet in front of him was a guy in a sweater more ragged than Warner's, wearing pants with a baggier ass than his. The man turned and offered up a slightly grayer face, halved by unfashionable prescription glasses that sat crookedly on his nose, and showed a set of browning teeth. UnderWarner. He ducked into a polling booth, seemingly holding his breath, and drew the curtain closed.

Daniel pushed at Warner's chest and examined his eyes, his own expression neutral after the abbreviated nap. As they straggled forward in line, Megan reread the pamphlet, her head down, slight shimmers of silver in her hair streaking the shades of brown. Warner loved the gray hair. It made him feel as if they'd endured something together. Now his own glasses bit into the bridge of his nose and he stifled a yelp and snatched at Daniel's tightening fist.

"No," Warner said. "Honey, no." He groped at the tiny wrist and found the pressure point. The baby released the glasses onto Warner's nose. He turned to see if Megan was watching, and his glasses raked across his face, slashing his cheek, and sailed from Daniel's hand, clattering to the hardwood floor. "Daniel! Goddamn -- "

Around him was an instant intake of breath, a whispered oh my and a murmured if you please. He had to remember he was in a...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375406409
ISBN 13 
9780375406409
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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