The deli near Mediocre had a new wrap man. He rolled my order too tight. Turkey poked through the tan skin. I studied the damage through the translucent lid of the container. It was a bad way to begin my first day at my old job.
I rode the elevator up with Dean Cooley.
“A new start,” I beamed.
He nodded, appeared unable to place me.
“Milo Burke,” I said. “Back in action.”
Cooley stroked his mustache. The door slid open and he stepped off, glanced once over his shoulder as he went.
The development office looked about the same, with certain modifications. My desk, for example, had disappeared, or else been annexed in some office furniture Anschluss orchestrated by Horace. There he lounged now near the window, spread out in an L-shaped command nook of his own, eating ribs from a foil bag.
“Dude,” he said into his phone, “I just know I’m going to bag this old biddy. She’s got to be good for some serious paper heroin . . . Yes, I mean money . . . Dude, I don’t know if that’s the latest slang, it’s my slang. We all have our own nowadays . . . Anyway, I’m deep in her geriatric ass. I’ve sort of become her protégé. Her son died cliffsurfing a few years ago and I’m like her new son. No offense . . . Well, it’s sort of like base jumping. But more radical.”
I could tell Horace was talking to his mother. He spoke to her daily. I had always been a little envious. My mother and I hardly conversed. Since Bernie had been born, we had not gone often to the house in New Jersey where I grew up and where Claudia now lived with her partner, Francine, but things had decayed before that. I traced it to the year my father got sick and we argued about his treatment. Though I was the first to admit I resented the man, preoccupied as he was with his pleasures, adrift in some dream of sleaze, he was still my father, and after the diagnosis I championed all the heroic measures, the experimental chemos, the scalpels and rally caps, any long shot on tap. Maybe I demanded those things precisely because I resented him. But my mother had his ear, convinced him to go gentle into that shitty night. They had caught the cancer late and it had spread quickly, but I wondered if he agreed to slip away out of weariness or a sense of penance.
Meanwhile, the liberation Claudia had felt since the death of her mother and her husband, the nearly Bataan march terms with which she described the slog and heartbreak of her pre-Francine existence, grated. My father had been a scumbag. There was no counter-argument. He cheated on my mother, bragged about his “nooners,” seduced my babysitter, sold her quaaludes. Between work and infidelity, he hadn’t even been around that much.
Mostly it was my mother and I in that house on Eisenhower Road. We’d had hard times, but also some beautiful ones, full of oatmeal cookies and scary stories, the floor covered with butcher paper and us painting murals of pirates and dragons and rollerskating wraiths. We spent hours curled up together with books on her husbandless bed. Did she remember those occasions at all? Were they no consolation? Was I an ass to think they could be?
Yes, I’m sure I was an ass. Maybe I was jealous of her bliss. She took terms like “self-actualize” seriously, or even actually, had a toned senior body, a monumental sense of certainty. She trained for ultra-marathons. I got winded on the Mediocre stairs.
She was not much of a grandmother, refused even the name. Claudia and Francine, that is how Bernie was to address his grandmothers those rare occasions he saw them. I didn’t mind this. I liked Francine, appreciated any instant granting of progressive status. Less work for me. But I guess I just craved, in my twitching little-boy heart, for my mother to want us around, to maybe even nudge and nag the way grandmothers did in advertisements for stewy soups.
Now she came off more the charismatic aunt. Maybe she had actualized into my father. Perhaps a magic portal existed that I needed to step through, too, so I could leave the planet of the weak and whiny, which I imagined at this moment as a humid orb stuffed with pinkish meat and warmed-over chipotle dijonnaise, though that could have been my lunch talking, or imagining, for me.
I pulled a chair up to the far edge of Horace’s elongated workstation, popped my wrap lid.
“What’s the matter,” said Horace. “Your pussy hurt?”
“What?”
“You look like you just got kicked in your pussy. Or like some commandos kicked down the door of your pussy and just rushed in there with machine guns and concussion grenades. Or like your pussy is being used against its will as a staging area for a large-scale invasion by a nation with which your pussy has long had strained relations, even if certain markets have opened up in recent years.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I said.
Horace had his desk phone pressed to his chest. He put it to his ear again.
“I’ve got to go, Mom. Burke’s here. You should see him. Such a sad case with his little wrap and a few gherkins in a ketchup cup. I know. Cornichons. I was going to say cornichons but I bailed. I got nervous. Yeah, I’ll tell him. I just asked him if his pussy hurts. He’s mulling it over. Okay, love you, Mom. See you later. Around seven. Okay, bye.”
Horace hung up the phone, tipped the rib bag into his mouth. A rivulet of greasy sauce ran down his chin.
“Hello, lover,” he said. “Come for your desk?”
“Horace, look, since I’m working here again—”
“I heard it was just provisional.”
“Since I’ll be around the office some, I think we should try to communicate better in the future.”
“I think flashing your fuzzy nip at me was communication enough, Wolf Man.”
“Horace, I’m sorry. I think I misread some cues or something.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“No, really, I never meant anything untoward. I just thought we were goofing around, being jackasses together. I never meant anything sexual, or imagined you felt harassed.”
“Who said I did?”
“Vargina.”
“Crafty. Divide and conquer. All Gaul, baby.”
“Didn’t you complain about me?”
“Yeah, I guess I did. But more like as a joke.”
“Did you make an official written complaint?”
“Yeah, but in a jokey way.”
“Those go on record, Horace. Those are in our file. As soon as a company hires you they begin plotting the paper trail with which to fire you. Didn’t you know that?”
“Sort of.”
“Okay, let’s just shake and start again. Congrats on the new position. I hear you are really doing well on a big ask.”
“Thanks, Milo. But you’ll have to find yourself another desk. I’m wedded to this configuration.”
I found a Plant Ops guy and an IT guy and by the end of the day I had a desk, a chair, a computer, an internet connection. I had a password to the server, though my only access was to an empty folder marked “MiloStuff.”
Now that I had the desk I wasn’t sure what to do. I only had the one ask. Also, I was on probation. I sent Purdy an email, thanked him for dinner, told him how thrilled I was to be working with him on this tremendously exciting project. I used all the dead language. Dead language would keep me alive. Besides, tone was tricky. I had to sound like a man who unexpectedly discovered himself in a professional relationship with an old friend.
Just because it was true didn’t mean it wasn’t tricky. That was usually when I started to crack — when I told the truth, especially to social betters.
