The Man Who Could Not
Make Up His Mind
Ed Brodow
Author of Fixer
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
The Man Who Could Not Make Up His Mind
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Copyright © 2012 Ed Brodow
Smashwords Edition
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Published by Ed Brodow
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Chapter 2: The Taming by the Shrew
Chapter 3: What Color Is Your Lipstick?
If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Yogi Berra
Clifford Day Vanderwall could not make up his mind. He loved the thick chocolate layer cake, but he also was crazy for Milano double chocolate cookies. Which one should he buy?
Mmmm! The mere thought of the cookies made his knees weak. He stood for five minutes in the cookie aisle trying to decide if he should take the cookies and return the cake, or keep the cake and return the cookies. It was a heart-breaking decision of cataclysmic proportions.
Return the cake? Oh no, Clifford had been looking forward all day to the marvelous texture of the rich chocolate icing as it made a soft landing on his grateful tongue. He started for the cake aisle but couldn’t bear to give up his beloved cake.
But then there were the Milanos. A paragon among cookies. That exquisite flavor when accompanied by a cup of hot chocolate. Mamma mia!
What to do? What to do?
He finally decided to postpone the decision by taking both of them to the checkout counter. Clifford made certain that the checker scanned everything else in his cart, leaving the two disputed items for last. It finally came time for the big moment. As the checker reached out for the cookies, Clifford grabbed them and held them close to his chest.
“I need to think about this for a minute,” he said. By this time, five people were lined up behind him.
“Do you want this?” asked the checker as he made a move for the chocolate cake.
“No. I mean yes,” said Clifford. “I think.” His heart was racing.
“Come on pal,” said the man directly behind him. “Make up your mind, I got things to do.”
“What’s with this guy?” asked a woman further back in the line.
“What’s it gonna be, sir?” repeated the cashier.
“Oh, okay, I’ll…I guess I’ll…just take them both,” said Clifford.
In the animal world, Clifford would not be confronted by a situation like this one. Animals really don’t make decisions. They are swept along by events as they occur. Chocolate cake? Okay, gimme! Cookies? Okay, gimme! What makes us human is the will to make choices and thereby determine our own existence. We have been naturally selected because we are decision-makers. But there are many among us who, like Clifford Day Vanderwall, are uncomfortable with the decision-making process. Perhaps they are throwbacks to an earlier evolutionary period. Or maybe they are simply overwhelmed by the multitude of decisions they are forced to make in our increasingly complex world.
In Clifford’s case, the crux of the problem was that procrastination was his middle name (one of them, anyway) and it’s not because he was stupid. After all he was very well educated. He went to Princeton, received his MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and now worked for IBM. It’s just that Clifford was not, by nature, a decisive man. Oh sure, he could make simple everyday decisions, like what am I going to have for breakfast and what time should we have our staff meeting today. As a career man, he held down a responsible position with IBM but had not been considered for a major promotion because when it came time to make the big decisions, Clifford just wasn’t up to it. His tentativeness meant he would never climb to the top of the corporate ladder, an unfortunate likelihood that ambitious women recognized immediately.
The irony of Clifford’s life was that he was a type-B personality stuck in a type-A lifestyle. Left to his own devices, he would have enjoyed the simple pleasures of life and never given a second thought to being number one. He had a good heart and rarely, if ever, came into direct conflict with anyone. Cliff was out to play the game right down the middle, take no chances, no rocking the boat allowed. He was twenty-nine going on seventy and even looked like an old man when you watched him walking down the street.
At work, he could accomplish most tasks satisfactorily, but if he was asked for an opinion or an explanation, his answer was so long-winded that his superiors would become exasperated. They lived in a bottom-line world where to be merely satisfactory was not satisfactory at all. Clifford never understood why his bosses always rated him below par for initiative and passed him over for promotion.
In spite of his personal and professional limitations, Clifford put up a good front. The Vanderwalls could trace their ancestry all the way back to the Norman French. His famous ancestor was William de Warrene, first Earl of Surrey, a Norman baron who fought at the Battle of Hastings and was a member of William the Conqueror’s inner circle. A dubious distinction perhaps, but it gave Clifford Day Vanderwall access to New York society. His father, an undistinguished, risk-averse nonentity who never made waves, had somehow risen to the vice presidency of a bank in Connecticut. He sent his son to prep school and the Ivy League, and the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. With his rarefied pedigree, prestigious job, and a spacious East Side apartment, Cliff enjoyed an active social life and wanted for naught. Even if, deep down inside, no one was home.
The same convoluted thinking that plagued his career haunted his personal life. It was never enough for him to simply ask a girl for a date. He wanted to get down to specifics. Where should they go for dinner? What kind of food did she like? Did she have any favorite restaurants? Would it be okay if she met him at the restaurant? If he was going to pick her up, would it be all right if they stopped at his cousin the chef’s apartment to grab a recipe? What was a good time for her? Did she prefer the East Side or the West Side? Women like to be asked for their opinions but, contrary to the nonsense they utter when interviewed by Cosmopolitan, women tend to prefer a man who is strong and decisive.
The highlight of Clifford Day Vanderwall’s social life consisted of the “blue light” parties he and two friends would throw on a regular basis. They would invite three girls over to his apartment on East End Avenue, Cliff would cook up one of his cousin’s recipes, the regular light bulbs would be replaced with blue ones, the wine would flow, and if all went according to plan, everybody would get laid. Except that all too often, the two friends got laid while Clifford’s date would have a headache or complain about menstrual cramps or an early appointment the next morning. It was not unusual for Clifford’s date to be attracted to one of the two buddies. Cliff was generous about this sort of thing and did not mind if one of them subsequently had an affair with the girl. He would simply say: Well, I hope the next one will be THE ONE.
In truth, Clifford desired nothing more than to get married and settle down. He wanted kids. He wanted a home. Every girl he met would be subject to the same hope: I hope she’s THE ONE. But they never were. This was in large part due to the one circumstance where he was compelled by nature to make a quick decision. In bed. Clifford suffered from a malady known as premature ejaculation. As a result, his love life was a shambles and most of the women he met would not hang around long enough to discover Cliff’s more desirable attributes. He was kind, loyal, dependable to a fault, and thanks to his trust fund, had the makings of a good provider. On the other hand, he was not an attractive man. His face would never be described as handsome. People often said he resembled radio personality Garrison Keillor. Although Clifford was tall, he was shaped rather like a pear, his physique inclining to flabby. These deficiencies could be overcome, of course, but not by someone with Clifford’s shortcomings as a lover.
And so Clifford Day Vanderwall suffered through his rather mind-numbing existence until one day he attended a boring tea at the Metropolitan Club, one of the bastions of New York’s elite, and there he met Shirley Horner. Shirley would never be described as beautiful but she was not entirely unattractive. If you came upon her in the right light and at the correct angle, she might catch your eye. Maybe. Maybe not. She didn’t care. Shirley had other attributes. She was smart in a kind of surgical way that labeled her as a barracuda and caused most men to run as fast as their legs could carry them. She had a viper’s tongue and was the kind of woman who loves to win an argument. Shirley, for all her intelligence, had not figured out that a man doesn’t like losing to a woman.
One thing Shirley could do is make a decision, and once she did, get out of the way! She had graduated from Smith, landed a great job as an editor with a top publishing house, and was off and running. Clifford never understood that in many respects – looks, personality, ambition, ruthlessness – Shirley was Hillary Clinton. So he asked her out. Or, actually, she asked him out. But if you mentioned it to Clifford, he would say that he had asked her.
They went out to dinner at first, mostly at Shirley’s favorite restaurant, La Boite en Bois on West 68th Street. It was a charming little French bistro in the downstairs of a brownstone near Lincoln Center. Clifford always ordered the same thing: escargot, the roast duck, and the chocolate mousse. Shirley would select the wine (Clifford could never decide). As the relationship progressed, Clifford would cook his cousin’s recipes at one of their apartments. They might see a movie, or they might go to one of Clifford’s society events at the Armory. The occasional special date was attending the Metropolitan Opera. Both of them were avid Puccini fans. Clifford purchased box seats close to the stage for a performance of Tosca with Bryn Terfel singing the role of Scarpia. Clifford and Shirley were in opera heaven.
Clifford was fairly content with Shirley’s company even if there were no “bells and whistles,” as he liked to put it. Shirley liked Clifford from the outset simply because he was so easy to control. From her perspective, he was the perfect beau. He did whatever she wanted and never raised a fuss because he always thought it was his idea in the first place.