Riverside Drive. Laura Wormer Van

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      Well, needless to say, had Harriet not been quite as attractive as she had been that night, had she not followed her criticism of Sam’s career by an utterly disarming seduction of him emotionally, he never would have seen her again.

      Instead, six months later, he married her. Right after he took a pay cut to move into the marketing department at Electronika.

      Sam worked like a demon—mostly because he loved his work and loved what he was learning (including that he was very good at it), and partly because he wanted to leave the sea of white faces around him back in the wash. He was under enormous pressure—real and self-induced—and a twelve-hour day was nothing unusual for him. When Harriet got pregnant in 1967, he worked even harder—pushing, pushing, pushing himself—and by the time Althea was born (the day after Martin Luther King was shot), Sam was supervising a department of ten in the new-product division.

      Although Harriet did not drink at all, Sam customarily had two scotches before dinner and a beer with. In the few years following Althea’s birth Sam and Harriet joined a group of other black professional couples who met once a week for dinner. It was more of an encounter group on the state of black America than it was a social event, and they usually talked into the wee hours of the morning, sitting around on the living-room floor, with Sam and a few of the others drinking throughout. Something happened to the group after a while—around 1972—and the dynamics of it began to shift. The wives grew reluctant to come; Sam and two other men were drinking more and more and once even a fistfight broke out. The women stopped participating altogether and the talk of the men started to change, and suddenly it was no longer about “them,” the white establishment, but about “them,” the wives and children who chained them to jobs they hated and to a lifestyle that was smothering them.

      The men moved to bars and Sam went with them. And then it was just Sam in the bars, with whoever was around. And then there were terrible fights between Sam and Harriet, always around the issue of his drinking. And then there were terrible fights over Sam’s drinking and Sam’s women.

      Harriet went to work in the publicity department of Gardiner & Grayson at the end of 1972. In 1973 she started warning Sam that if he did not do something about his drinking she was going to leave him. And then, in November, Sam passed out in his chair and his lighted cigarette started a small fire. Harriet told him he was on his last chance. The very next night Sam did not come home at all, and Harriet took Althea and moved in with her aunt in Harlem.

      Sam cried and pleaded and did everything he could to get Harriet back—except stop drinking. Then he said to hell with her and started hitting the bars straight after work, finding sympathetic women to tell his sad story to, to buy drinks for, and to sleep with that night. It was amazing how much he was still able to function at work in those days—particularly since he had taken to martinis at lunchtime—but word began to get around the office about the caution needed to make sure Wyatt was in the right “mood” when he made a decision.

      By 1975 it was anyone’s guess whom Sam might wake up with in the morning. His blackouts were unpredictable, coming anywhere after two to ten drinks. At his company physical, he was told his liver was enlarged, his blood pressure was far too high and that he was running the risk of becoming diabetic. As for Harriet, she was so sick of Sam’s middle-of-the-night assaults on her aunt’s apartment (that he never remembered), she started calling the police and having Sam hauled away to the precinct.

      And then Sam’s boss called him in one day, sat him down, and gently, quietly offered Sam a choice: take a leave of absence and sign himself in for treatment or be fired.

      To this day Sam does not know why he agreed to go to a rehab. At the time he didn’t think he had a drinking problem. He thought he had a lousy wife and a lousy job problem. But somewhere, somewhere very deep inside of him, a little voice told him that maybe…maybe he would be better off it he stopped drinking for a while. And so, very quietly, very confidentially, Electronika flew him out to Minnesota for treatment.

      Two months free of drinking, Sam went back to work. Four months free of drinking, Althea stopped hiding when he came to visit. Eight months free of drinking, Sam and Harriet went out on a date. Fifteen months free of drinking, Harriet and Althea came home to live with Sam. Thirty-nine months free of drinking, the Wyatts gave birth to a second daughter, Samantha, and Sam quit smoking. Sixty-two months free of drinking, Sam was made a vice-president of Electronika. Sixty-four months free of drinking, Harriet was made director of promotion, publicity and advertising at Gardiner & Grayson. Seventy months free of drinking, the Wyatts were profiled in the New York Times Magazine as examples of Manhattan’s black upper middle class. Seventy-eight months free of drinking, the Wyatts bought a four-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive.

      Sam and his family were now one hundred and thirty-five months free of drinking. Of it.

      Samuel J. Wyatt, Vice-President, New Product Development, sat in his office on the forty-seventh floor and wondered what the hell to do.

      He sighed, turning his chair away from the window and back around to his desk. He looked up at his wall, covered with plaques and certificates of recognition, and of pictures of him at various functions. Sam, it should be said, was a doer. He didn’t just talk the talk, he walked the walk. The Urban League, the United Negro College Fund, the Howard University Trustees Board, Junior Achievement…Sam sat on so many boards he had lost count, but he had never lost his energy or his willingness to do what he could for any organization he thought was effective.

      But now…

      Sam had recently pulled off a coup at Electronika. He had swung the deal for Electronika to take over a small British company called Trinity Electronics, which had developed a gem of a copying machine that no one had ever seen the likes of. The ZT 5000 could be used to reproduce originals; it could be hooked up to computer systems; it could be hooked up to wire services; and it could copy images of any size—from a postage stamp to the center fold of a city newspaper—and automatically cut the paper to size. In seconds. And at a cost that was leaving the competition agape.

      Trial machines had been placed in key accounts across the country, and when the ZT started shipping five months from now, in October, it was already guaranteed some forty thousand placements and promised to move into every good library, telecommunications center and computer graphics room in the country before the end of the decade. On the strength of the machine’s early reviews, Electronika’s stock had climbed eleven points on the New York Stock Exchange.

      Sam had been dancing in the aisles. With a hit like this, with Electronika miles ahead (in a product line they had always been sorely lagging in), it meant a huge promotion for him, vaulting him out of the divisional and into the corporate vice-presidential ranks.

      But now there was a problem.

      Oh, man, was there a problem.

      And Sam was hoping against hope that today it would turn out that it had all been some terrible misunderstanding.

      It has to be, he thought, pressing his temples.

      Yesterday afternoon the new president of Electronika had summoned Sam to his office. There had not been any of the pleasantries that Sam had been accustomed to for the last six months from Walter Brennan. Brennan had scarcely greeted him, pointed to a chair and then had let him have it. “We’re in one hell of a mess with the ZT 5000.”

      Immediately Sam’s stomach had lurched. I knew it was too good to be true, he had thought.

      “And I’m not very happy about it,” Brennan had continued, pacing back and forth behind his desk. “Now, technically speaking, you’re not responsible for the production СКАЧАТЬ