The Drywall Incident

I'm thirty-four years old and I sell commercial flooring for a living, which means I have spent the last eleven years of my life in places like this one. Half-finished hotel, four stories of bare concrete out in the west suburbs of Phoenix, plastic sheeting snapping in the wind off the loading dock. I know the smell of a job site the way some people know their own kitchen. Joint compound, sawdust, coffee somebody left on a sawhorse two days ago.

What I did not expect to find in the lobby of this particular job site was Deepak Sutter.

Deepak covers the territory next to mine. We have traded emails for three years and traded barbs for about two and a half of those. He is thirty-six, built with the sturdy compactness of a fire hydrant, and he has the kind of smile that makes you want to check your wallet. I have never once worked an account with him because we are, by every reasonable measure, competitors.

There he was, at the sawhorse they were using as a desk, arguing with the foreman about sample boards. Not discussing. Arguing. Both his hands were flat on the plywood like he was swearing an oath.

"That's my board," he was saying. "Right there, the herringbone, that's mine."

The foreman, a big guy named Ray with a clipboard holstered on his hip like a sidearm, looked bored in the way only construction foremen can look bored. "Nobody's name is on it."

"It's in my case. It came out of my case."

"That's not the same as your name on it."

I set my own case down on the concrete, and I want it noted that I did it loud, on purpose. Both of them turned around.

"Well," Deepak said. "They sent both of us."

"Looks like it."

Ray squinted at the two of us, back and forth, like a man at a tennis match he hadn't paid for. "So which one of you is running this pitch?"

"We both are," Deepak and I said at the same time, and then we looked at each other, and I hated that we did it at the same time.

* * *

Here is the situation, because it took me most of the morning to get it straight. Our boss, a man named Wexler who has never once in his career done something as simple as check his own calendar, sent us both to the same account. Same hotel, same renovation, same budget, same construction manager. His logic, as relayed to me by email at six in the morning while I was sitting in a rental car outside a donut shop, was that we "complement each other." His actual logic, I suspect, was that he forgot he'd assigned it twice and figured nobody would notice.

So we pitched. Together. Sort of. We took turns talking over each other in a conference room that had no door yet, just a plastic flap, and the construction manager, a patient man named Shaw, watched us the way you watch two dogs figure out who sleeps where.

By noon we were measuring rooms on the third floor, and by noon-thirty we were fighting about a measurement.

"This is your error," Deepak said, holding the tape against a baseboard. "Your spec sheet says twelve-eight here. It's twelve-six."

"My spec sheet is fine. Your tape is stretched."

"Tapes don't stretch."

"Yours did. Cheap tape stretches. You get what you pay for."

He turned around with his whole body, which is a thing he does, and gave me a look over the top of the tape measure. "You're telling me about what I get what I pay for?"

"I'm telling you your tape is off by two inches and you'd rather blame me than admit it."

A worker on a ladder near the window, spackling something, cleared his throat. He was maybe fifty, gray stubble, name tag that said HECTOR. "Twelve-two," he said, not looking up. "You're both reading the tape wrong. You're counting from the tab, not the mark."

There was a pause. Deepak looked at the tape. I looked at the tape. Hector spackled.

"Well," Deepak said.

"Yeah," I said.

And then the two of us just started laughing, which surprised me more than anything else that day. Not polite laughing. Real laughing, the kind that makes you bend over a little. Two grown adults, thirty-four and thirty-six years old respectively, standing in a dusty hotel room being corrected by a man on a ladder. Deepak laughed until he had to put a hand on the wall, and I laughed until I had to sit on a paint bucket, and Hector just kept working as if the whole thing was beneath comment.

"Okay," Deepak said finally, wiping his eyes. "Truce."

"Truce. Your tape is still cheap."

"Truce, mostly."

* * *

The call from Wexler came at four, while we were packing the cases in the hallway. I put him on speaker because I figured misery loves company and I wanted a witness.

"Gents, small snag." Wexler has called me "gents" my entire career regardless of configuration. "The room block. There was an error."

"What kind of error," I said.

"The convention in town. The regionals. Everything's booked. There's one room left at the property and it's got your names on it, singular."

I looked at Deepak. Deepak looked at me. Somewhere behind the plastic flap, a nail gun went off with the sharp report of a starter pistol.

"One room," I said.

"One room. Two queens, though. Listen, I'd fix it but the Shaw pitch is tomorrow at nine and you're both already there. Settle it like professionals." And he hung up, because Wexler has the phone manners of a man backing out of a driveway.

Deepak put the tape measure in his case very slowly. "I can sleep in the rental."

"It's my rental."

"I can sleep in your rental."

"You're six foot one. You sleep in a rental car, you'll show up to a nine a.m. pitch looking like a folded lawn chair, and then we both lose the account."

"So we share the room." He said it like he was reading a weather report. "One night. We're both adults, we're both tired, and tomorrow we go back to hating each other on email."

"That's the plan, then."

"That's the plan."

Neither of us mentioned that we had stopped hating each other somewhere around the paint bucket. We just didn't say it out loud.

* * *

The hotel was the kind of place that exists purely because a highway exit needed something on it. The room was on the third floor, over the ice machine, and it had two queens separated by maybe three feet of carpet and one nightstand. There was a desk. There was one desk, wedged under the television, with one chair.

"I take the desk," Deepak said, already setting his laptop bag on it.

"You don't take the desk. I have spec revisions to type."

"I have a quote to build."

"I have a quote to build first."

"It's my account."

"It's our account, that is the entire problem."

We stood there, on opposite sides of the desk, in a silent standoff that would have embarrassed both of us if either of us had been capable of embarrassment. Then I went for the thermostat, because I had lost the desk and I was not losing the climate. He had it set to sixty-four.

"Sixty-four," I said. "It's Phoenix. We're paying to refrigerate the desert."

"I sleep cold."

"Well, I sleep human." I reached past him and turned it to seventy, and he reached past me and turned it back to sixty-six, and we stood there adjusting it back and forth in two-degree increments like a couple of idiots playing thermostat chicken until it ended up, through mutual exhaustion, at sixty-eight. Which neither of us wanted. Which felt correct.

The truce lasted about four minutes. I was walking backward toward my bed, talking with both hands about load ratings, the way you do after a day of talking about load ratings, and I did not see my own sample case open on the floor where I had left it. My heel caught the edge of it, my arms pinwheeled, and I went down.

Except I didn't. Deepak crossed the room faster than a man that size has any right to move and caught me by both arms, and for a second we just stood there like that. Him holding me up. Me holding his forearms. The air conditioner rattling away at sixty-eight degrees that nobody wanted.

His hands were warm through my sleeves. My face was maybe eight inches from his. I could see the dust from the job site still in the crease of his collar, and the little scar through one eyebrow that I had never been close enough to notice before, and I was aware, in a very professional and businesslike way, that my heart was doing something unprofessional.

"Got you," he said. His voice was lower than it had been all day.

"Yeah." I didn't step back. I noticed that I didn't step back. "Thanks."

"You're welcome." He still didn't let go.

The ice machine kicked on under the window, loud as a garbage disposal, and neither of us moved.

* * *

We ordered takeout from the only place that delivered, which was a strip mall Mexican spot whose menu had been laminated sometime during the previous administration. Deepak claimed the desk chair like it was a throne he had legitimately won. I ate on my bed with the sample case pushed against the wall, and the food was honestly better than it had any right to be, which felt like one more thing going wrong with the day.

"You know your problem," he said, pointing a fork at me. "You opened with the warranty. Forty seconds in, warranty. Shaw's eyes glazed."

"My problem is I opened with the warranty because it's the strongest thing we've got. Your problem is you opened with a joke about his golf game."

"It worked."

"He didn't laugh."

"He laughed on the inside. There's a lag on guys like Shaw. The laugh arrives Thursday."

I threw a chip at him. He ate it off the desk, which felt like cheating somehow. And then, because the room was small and the day was long and there was nobody from Wexler's org chart within two hundred miles, I said the thing I had been not saying for about a year.

"I'm the oldest rep on the team, you know. On the whole team."

He looked up from the carton.

"Thirty-four," I said. "Eleven years on job sites. There are reps in our region who weren't born when I learned