The Bucolic Plague

  This year they wouldn’t even make it out of the attic. I wondered if they ever would again.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Heading into the office every day leading up to Christmas is like opening advent calendar doors in which each day isn’t a kind biblical verse but an ancient Gypsy curse.

  We seem to be losing clients and revenue daily. We’re not alone. The economic meltdown is bringing the entire advertising industry to its knees. Of course the advertising industry is accustomed to spending a lot of time on its knees, but this is something quite different. Even the old-timers have never seen it so bad. I’ve had to let go several more employees, bringing the grand total of lives I’ve had to personally ruin this holiday season to eight. The agency has lost a total of twenty-eight employees. The odds of any of these people finding new places of employment right now are nonexistent—or, in other words, roughly equal to mine and Brent’s.

  Any fleeting hopes of somehow turning the agency around by the end of the year has vanished.

  Tonight is the agency holiday party, which we’ll be hosting in our own office this year rather than at a fancy venue. The decorations are handmade, the booze cheap, and the food scarce.

  For the sake of the company party, I’ve forced myself to dress festively this morning, which I’m regretting now as I trudge through the gray sludgy mess on the sidewalks of Wall Street. The street is practically deserted. In the last few years, Wall Street at Christmastime literally felt like a candy store full of children. High-end retailers like Tiffany and Thomas Pink built some of the first retail shops on Wall Street simply to take advantage of the two or three days each year when bankers and brokers received their multimillion-dollar yearly bonuses. Their rationale, quite simply, was to put diamonds and luxury goods right outside the revolving doors of the banking and brokerage institutions in hopes of intercepting even a small fraction of employees walking out with pockets stuffed with bonuses far greater than the lifetime earnings of 99 percent of Americans.

  I smile remembering a marketing promotion Porsche tried last year. Eight new shiny red Porsche 911s drove up and down Wall Street all day in reindeer formation. Directly behind them followed a black Porsche SUV with Santa Claus sticking up through its moon roof, loudly ho-ho-ho-ing and encouraging the newly flush pedestrians to visit their local tristate Porsche dealership.

  What seemed ingenious then seems morally bankrupt now. Not that I had any right to be judgmental. After all, I’d made a career out of making people want.

  This year, the three-story-tall Christmas tree standing outside of the New York Stock Exchange seems brave but battered. The retail stores in the neighborhood all have CLEARANCE SALE signs posted in their windows going unread by the nonexistent crowds of unemployed Wall Streeters. Every day there seems to be more and more television satellite trucks lining the side streets waiting for another global capitalist behemoth to go belly-up.

  As I step off the sidewalk to cross the street in front of our office tower, I misjudge the location of the edge of the curb, hidden beneath the sooty slush. I land, ass first, in a puddle caused by a backed-up sewer drain. The man right behind me reaches out his hand to help me up, but in my embarrassment, I’m already halfway back on my feet again.

  “Thanks,” I say to him, “but I’m fine.”

  As the cold of my wet jacket and pants seeps through to my skin, I realize just how not fine I am.

  I have two mortgages, a job that is about to end, and a jobless spouse. I have an unsellable mansion in the middle of nowhere, a co-farmer who relies on us for a stipend, eighty-five goats who rely on the stipend for grain, five barn cats who rely on the grain for mice, and sixty-five million cluster flies who rely on the goats to supply the manure for them to lay eggs on and hatch from to then die inside of our unsellable mansion.

  If I counted my blessings, they’d come up in negative territory—just like the Dow.

  My BlackBerry buzzes. It’s a text from Brent.

  “U 4got to say I love you b4 u left.”

  As awful as we’d been to each other the last seven months, we never forgot to say that we loved the other whenever we hung up the phone or walked out the door. It may have just been force of habit or avoiding our problems, but we still did it—until this morning.

  I turn away from my office’s front door. I’m not going in ever again. I quit. I’ll phone my partners and colleagues later and finish up whatever paperwork I need to finalize a clean break. This endless dribbling away of everything in my life has to stop. Even if that means that I have to swing the hatchet on my own neck before someone else does.

  I quit.

  I have to go back home to tell Brent that I love him. It might just be a pointless, questionably sincere habit. But then again, it’s not like I have much else left.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Sometimes we wonder whether Bubby sits on the porch steps of the Beekman 24/7 from the moment we leave on Sunday until the moment we return on Friday. No matter what time, day or night, we pull into the Beekman driveway, his goldenrod-yellow eyes greet us and gleam with the reflection of our truck headlights as they sweep across the darkened porch.

  The ground is completely frozen. I can tell just from the feel of the gravel under the tires. The thermometer on the dash of the truck reads 4 degrees. I almost already regret leaving the city early to come up here. What made me think that Christmas at the Beekman was going to be any more palatable than in the city? We should have just come up New Year’s Day to shut the house down. Hell, we should have shut it down after Thanksgiving.

  “The light’s burned out again,” I say, noticing that one of the lamps mounted on the twin stone pillars at the end of the drive is dark.

  “Well, that’ll save us a quarter a month,” Brent says jokingly. It’s precisely the sort of repair that would have thrown him into fits of distraction just a few months ago. But now, with neither of us bringing in a single penny of income, the price of fixing even the slightest imperfection is too high.

  Neither of us commented on the different Christmas light displays decorating many of the houses on the drive over. It’s so unlike us, especially Brent. Last year, he sang along with the radio’s Christmas carols the entire forty-five miles back and forth from the train station during the month of December. I like it when he lets his guard down. When I watch him sing along to silly commercial holiday songs about Grandma getting run over by reindeer, it’s as if I get to see what he must have been like as a ten-year-old boy. Before he met Martha. Before he got his MBA. Before he was a doctor. Before the global economy began collapsing. Before his father died.

  The Beekman is pitch black.

  Last year so many townspeople commented on how nice it was to finally see a Christmas tree lit up in the large Palladian window. Before us it had been decades since anyone spent Christmas at the Beekman.

  John’s little house is dark too. He’s probably at a holiday party with either his family or his new boyfriend. Since we hadn’t planned on being here, I hadn’t bothered asking him what his holiday plans were. I hadn’t bothered asking anyone what their holiday plans were. I was afraid that someone might want to include us.

  As Brent pulls open the screen door, a clutch of Christmas cards falls to the porch floor. I’d forgotten how many we’d received from our neighbors last year. And how we’d gleefully spent the week before Christmas driving around, putting Beekman Christmas cards in every mailbox within a ten-mile radius. In addition to the cards, we find two tins of homemade cookies and an assorted basket of very cold homemade preserves stacked near the door. I pile them up in my arms without even bothering to check who they’re from.

  The inside of the mansion is freezing. I go to turn the heat up…slightly.

  “Keep it at fifty,” Brent warns. “Or lower.”

  The mansion barely feels warmer than outside. It also feels much emptier, lonelier. I realize how intricately woven together cold and loneliness really are. The loneliness is as visceral as the t
emperature. I think even Mary, our little friendly ghost, has gone.

  I know there must be some sort of physical explanation for the change in sounds inside the house. Brent’s footfalls echo through the upstairs hallway as he checks that none of the bathroom pipes has frozen. The cold must magnify the sound waves. Perhaps the wood floors contract and harden into a louder percussive instrument. But in addition to the booming loneliness, something else feels different. Something more tactile is missing. Something…

  “Josh?” Brent calls from upstairs.

  “Yeah?” I shout back.

  “Did you have a cleaning lady or something come in here?”

  What is he talking about? Why, with both of us out of work, would I have hired a cleaning woman?

  “No, why?”

  “It’s just,” Brent’s footsteps cross the wide upstairs hall above me and enter the guest bedroom across from ours. “It’s just that…There are…There are no flies.”

  I look down at the kitchen counter where I’ve just set down the holiday gifts from our neighbors. He’s right. They’re gleaming white. Not a single zombie fly corpse.

  For us, the lack of flies is far spookier than the presence of ghosts.

  I hear Brent cross into the other guest room. “None in here either!”

  I run up the stairs and find him standing at the top waiting for me.

  “Did you check the attic?”

  We head to the attic stairs together. I reach the door first, and to be honest, I’m a little afraid to open it. I’ve seen this horror movie before. There are probably a million flies piled up on the other side, waiting to spill out on top of us or, even worse, one giant queen fly ready to burst with trillions of replacement zombies. I open the door slowly.

  Nothing.

  Brent heads up the stairs just far enough to survey the attic floor.

  “Nothing,” he says incredulously. “Absolutely nothing.”

  “Maybe John swept them up.”

  “Why?” I ask. “He doesn’t even come in the house when we’re not here.”

  “It’s spooky.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s a Christmas miracle.” A smile crosses his face.

  “Praise baby Jesus,” I say. “Or is there a patron saint of flies?”

  We putter around the empty house for the days leading up to Christmas, doing nothing much other than reading tabloid magazines and surfing gossip sites. The constant wind drifts the snow across the driveway, making it completely impassible, but we barely even notice. There’s just enough left in the pantry, root cellar, and freezer to last us till New Year’s.

  We keep the thermostat hovering around forty to save money and traipse around the house wrapped in quilts and blankets that trail behind us like wedding dress trains. We look like ghosts in our own house, trudging from our bed to the kitchen and back to bed. Occasionally we shower, but with the house so frigid, we even try to avoid that for as long as possible. We seem caught in an endless loop of nothingness between our past lives of constant activity and our future lives of…what?

  We’ve never been this un-busy.

  I suppose we could find some chores to do—maybe something in the barn? It’s too cold, really. Normally this time of year would find us in a shopping, decorating, or baking frenzy. But I’m realizing that if you decide to ignore Christmas, the entire second half of December is sort of dead air. It’s like being caught in between stations on a radio. The thought crosses my mind that with our sloth combined with the frigid temperature of the house, we might just fall asleep and never wake up.

  We continue this lazy rinse and repeat pattern until the morning of Christmas Eve, when my cell phone rings.

  “Is the lady of the house home?” comes the chipper voice from the other end of the line. It’s Doug. I smile for the first time in days.

  “Speaking,” I chirp, eager for battle.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Doug replies. “The voice was so masculine, I thought I had the wrong number for you.”

  “No, you just have a number of things wrong with you.”

  “Yes, according to my friends I’m a horrible judge of character.”

  “You’re so funny,” I say. “I guess it’s true that people develop good personalities to compensate.”

  “How flattering. I’m being lectured on compensation by a whore.”

  “Consider it my Christmas gift.”

  “Speaking of,” Doug says, finally turning somewhat serious. “Rumor has it that there are lights on at the Beekman but nobody’s home.”

  “Yes, we decided to come up for the holidays after all. But we’re not really celebrating.”

  “At your age it’s birthdays you don’t celebrate. Not Christmas.”

  “It’s just been such a bad year,” I explain. “You have no idea how terrible things are down in the city.”

  “It’s been bad up here for the last hundred years, city slicker,” Doug says, putting on his pretend hick voice. “Why we locals have been known to celebrate Christmas with nothing more than a baby Jesus made outta corn husks and goat poo.”

  “Enchanting.”

  “C’mon, everyone knows you’re in town. You’ll have to come by for our party tonight. Doug’s mom is making her Christmas Eve margaritas. And I have a brand new pair of footie pajamas.”

  “I don’t know. We’re kind of just lying low.”

  “If you don’t, I’ll tell everyone that you’re not coming because Martha’s at your house for Christmas. The road in front of your house will be like the parking lot at Walmart on food stamp day.”

  “I’ll check with Brent.”

  “Okay, we’ll see you around seven-ish.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And hey…Merry Christmas.”

  In the end, we don’t go to Doug and Garth’s Christmas party because we wanted to. We went because we were afraid that if we spent one more minute in bed we’d wind up with deep vein thrombosis.

  We pull up in front of their rambling 1874 village house, which, with the windows glowing and silhouetted partygoers visible from the street, looks exactly like the sort of holiday scene we’ve been trying to avoid.

  “Ready, Grinch?” I say.

  “Let’s get this over with.”

  It’s even worse than we feared inside. The holiday cheer nearly knocks us over when Doug greets us at the door in his best holiday kilt.

  “You made it!” he says. “I was getting worried. I was just about to send Michelle to the bottom of the hill to watch for you. Okay, to be fair, I was actually going to send her out because she’s drunk as an Irishman and I thought it would be fun to watch her try to stumble down the hill on the ice. But still, it’s nice you came.”

  I give Doug a quick kiss on the cheek. It is nice to actually converse with someone after several days of muttering only to Bubby, Brent, and the television. Garth comes around the corner with his arm around his mom, who’s holding her holiday pitcher.

  “Hi, boys,” the woman says. “Salt or no salt?”

  “Slow down, Mom,” Garth says. “Let them get their coats off.”

  “Hey!”

  “Merry Christmas!”

  “So good to see you!”

  Everyone is full of proverbial good cheer and Mama Garth’s margaritas. The house is so warm compared to the Beekman. The air is filled with the scent of woodsmoke from the fireplace. It seems like there are even more villagers here than last year.

  George the mortician/bartender and his new bride are talking about their record garlic harvest in one corner. In another Heidi and Michelle (who is nowhere near as tipsy as Doug mentioned) are complaining about the lack of good-looking straight men in the county. Our neighbor Peter, from D. Landreth Seeds, is comparing notes on one of his favorite new wine discoveries with another wine buff from down the road.

  It’s so festive.

  What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they know that the world as we know it has ended? That one-hundred-year-old department stor
es are getting ready to shutter their doors right after the holidays? That a deserted Wall Street now attracts more somber and reverent tourists than Ground Zero? Where do they think the state is going to get its tax revenue this year? Why are they so damn oblivious?

  “Hey. Happy holidays.” It’s Farmer John. He’s here with his boyfriend, Jason. The two are wearing colorful, almost matching sweaters and neatly pressed jeans. I hardly ever get to see John in anything other than his barn clothes and muck boots. “I’ve seen the lights on in the mansion,” John says. “I didn’t think you were coming up till New Year’s.”

  “We just wanted to leave the city,” I say. “It’s so horrible there right now.”

  “Oh, I know,” John says. “Somebody was talking about it all at the Agway.” If they’re talking about Wall Street in the Cobleskill Agway, things must be really bad.

  “So are people worried?” I ask.

  “About what?” John says.

  “You know…jobs, the market…” I nearly say “trade deficit” but even I realize how ludicrous the words sound in Sharon Springs. The closest thing to a trade deficit Sharon Springs has ever seen is when someone opened a rival roadside ice cream in nearby Cherry Valley two summers ago.

  Of course these people are celebrating Christmas like they always do. There’s really no measurable difference between this Christmas in Sharon Springs and any other. There’s really no measurable difference between any two given days in Sharon Springs.

  But Sharon Springs’ nonchalance stems from more than just being far removed from the epicenter of the financial maelstrom. Ever since Mayberry, we like to think of small towns as separatist utopias. But our small towns are not blissfully ignorant; they’re weary and pragmatic. Sharon Springs, once one of the leading spa destinations in the world, is, frankly, over it. It’s been collapsing—quite literally—for years, with nary a rebound. The town that once hosted the Rockefellers and Oscar Wilde was dealt its fatal blow decades ago when the train stopped coming to town and the thruway bypassed it. It had to deal with social, financial, and cultural ruin way back then, without any billion-dollar bailout packages. And after you’ve been essentially dead for fifty years, it takes a lot more than global market collapse to get under your skin. If or when this whole mess is over, life ain’t gonna be much measurably different here in Sharon Springs.