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Vik's specialty was the assessment of undervalued companies. They called him Old Mother Hubbard, the lax bros and big swinging dicks who staffed his firm. He was the worrier, the detail-sweater, a man of the people who could be trusted to come back from the factory break room with the real story. He traveled a lot. He traveled so that he could sit in a sawdust-floor bar with the drill press operator, or the warehouse associate, or the Logistics Tech II who, after a few drinks, after Vik had listened more patiently to their catalogue of complaints than anyone had listened in their life, might begin to feel that maybe Vik wasn't just some asshole vampire from New York who'd come to suck the life out of the factory that put food on his family's table, but that this guy might actually be sympathetic to the plight of the workingman. Maybe he'd flown all that way because he wanted to do right by them.
They weren't wrong for thinking such a thing. Vik had a soul. He was an avid conversationalist. And if he determined, after a period of information collection, that a distressed company might be made more profitable, his firm would purchase it and set to restructuring. Big deal, so management took a haircut. No one needed to worry about those guys. They parachuted into new Aeron chairs in new offices at new companies without putting so much as a single wrinkle in their khakis. My husband's firm was not a buy-and-burn operation. And they did fine, just fine. They did fine, I should say, until the day they were obliterated, every last one of them.
Thus, by the grace of my husband's good worry, I was allowed to remain on the island of my birth, in the only home I've ever known. I was two months out of Amherst, living in my childhood bedroom, when Vikram hired me as an analyst. He was seven years older than I. We were connected by a long history, though we didn't know each other very well. At first our ages served as a natural barrier. We were formal, respectfully awkward. I told myself he was no different than his colleagues. Nice suits, tall collars, Breitlings, wallets fat as hamburgers parked on their desks lest their spines go crooked from twelve-hour days on misaligned hips. Strange men. Men of practiced masculinity, no subtlety, all of them silently yearning for a lost boyhood. I told myself I had no interest in a man who'd chosen such a life for himself. I told myself I was disappointed in how he'd turned out. We were married three years later.
Vik looked good in a convertible. He looked good in shorts and sunglasses, no shirt, hair blown back. He looked good at the console of Bo Vornado's old Boston Whaler, which he'd scored at a sweet discount. Bo had tried to recruit him when he was twenty-five. The boat had been part of the mating dance. Bo had an eye for talent, but it never would have worked, which Vik recognized long before Bo did. Bo liked to hit the jugular with his fangs out. My husband was a gentleman. He met your eye and listened. He might touch your shoulder on parting. A spy, not a hairy forearm-to-the-face type. On a flight to Tulsa he could talk crop rotation with the Aggie on his right, then turn and talk shoelace production with the Sooner on his left. Mostly he listened, and for his patience he'd been rewarded with a mind that was a warehouse of the arcane. What good does a working knowledge of the lacing patterns attractive to the suburban Caucasian male American 13–17 demo do you? None until you need to assess the financial viability of Oklahoma's last shoelace factory. That kind face, which was absent the menace that men manufacture to scare away the other dogs—it put people at ease. He had brown eyes, elegant bovine eyelashes.
When he traveled for work, I often wished his plane would go down. This was after we were married. I was still in my twenties and hadn't yet developed the competencies that I assume would have allowed me to navigate a long marriage. I didn't know why I wanted him to die. I only knew that I wanted a blank slate. I was getting a bead on it all when he disappeared. He could do a great French accent. He could roll bastard around in his mouth and I'd be in agony. I loved him and I wished he would vanish and he did.
Excerpted from The Blizzard Party by Jack Livings. Copyright © 2021 by Jack Livings. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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