Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [41]
But what if Bobby had never been the type of person to celebrate good fortune, not even when he was a freewheeling fraternity boy? And therefore, what if success didn’t change his relentless negativity? What if Bobby was the kind of guy who was able to somehow view your mutual achievements as failures? What if all the success only made him depressed and agitated?
Ha! But you know you! You always think you can come up with the solution to everything! So then what if, in your search for a remedy for Bobby’s unhappiness, it occurred to you that maybe your idea of combining work and love was the core of the problem? Of course you would think this. You were trained by your culture and by your gender to value love over work. After all, isn’t love what makes the world go round? So then what if that led you to conclude that the best thing you could do would be to step away from this business you and Bobby had built … selling discount cleaning supplies or running a French restaurant or dropping watermelons off of buildings … whatever it was you guys did together. It made sense to think that if you avoided the line of fire at work, the time you spent together at home would become a safe haven. Obviously, it wouldn’t occur to you that there was one big glaring incorrect integer in this equation, kind of like the inherent flaw in the chocolate-plus-milk formula. What if you had failed to notice that time at work was the only time that mattered to Bobby?
Then what if, even after signs that this wasn’t working too well, you stayed the course, trying to prove that your theory was correct and something good would eventually come of it all? What if you hung around the house, cooking exotic Craig Claiborne recipes from The New York Times Cookbook, until one day when you intercepted some suspicious letters written in a big, loopy, young girl’s handwriting that Bobby claimed had been sent to him by “a crazy person”? Maybe you tried to believe him, even though the letters sounded more feebleminded and adolescent than they did psychotic. After all, “letters from a crazy person” wasn’t an unreasonable explanation in those days, because part of the success you and Bobby had wrought in your business involved the unwanted intrusion of unstable customers whose clinically diagnosed psychiatric disorders occasionally inspired them to break into your house.
But still … what if right after that there were a bunch of other awful things that caused the whole house of cards you had built with Bobby to topple? Like inconsistent remarks when he called from his office at the cardboard box factory or the lumberyard or the Home Depot or the broadcast facility or the haircut emporium or wherever it was that he worked? What if it now was becoming clear that love and work had again united for Bobby, but this time you were not part of either one?
Well, that would be rather upsetting and even heartbreaking for most people. But let’s say that over a period of years, once the inevitable breakup had transformed itself into water under some theoretical bridge, you worked hard to close that chapter and move on. That is a difficult thing to do under the best of circumstances, but what if it was even more trying for you because at this point Bobby had become a public figure whose name and face and business trajectory were hard to avoid? Sure, in this day and age, who doesn’t fall into that category? But what if you encountered pictures or references to Bobby so often that it almost seemed like some kind of cruel cosmic joke? For instance, what if everywhere