But when Frank saw the awesome name of Knox Business Machines being added to the list he thought there must be some mistake. “Hey, no, wait a minute; I know that can’t be right—” and he gave a brief oral summary of his father’s career, which caused the philosophy student to enjoy a pleasant chuckle.
“I think you’ll find things’ve changed a little since your old man’s time, Frank,” he said. “That was the Depression, don’t forget. Besides, he was out in the field; you’d be in the home office. As a matter of fact this place is just what you’re looking for. I happen to know they’ve got guys sitting around that building that never lift a finger except to pick up their checks. I’d certainly mention your father, though, when you go for the interview. Probably help things along.”
But Frank, as he walked into the shadow of the Knox Building with the ghosts of that other visit crowding his head (“Better take my hand here, this is a bad crossing…”), decided it would be more fun not to mention his father in the interview at all. And he didn’t, and he got a job that very day on the fifteenth floor, in something called the Sales Promotion Department.
“The sales what?” April inquired. “‘Promotion?’ I don’t get it. What does that mean you’re supposed to do?”
“Who the hell knows? They explained it to me for half an hour and I still don’t know, and I don’t think they do either. No, but it’s pretty funny, isn’t it? Old Knox Business Machines. Wait’ll I tell the old man. Wait’ll he hears I didn’t even use his name.”
And so it started as a kind of joke. Others might fail to see the humor of it, but it filled Frank Wheeler with a secret, astringent delight as he discharged his lazy duties, walking around the office in a way that had lately become almost habitual with him, if not quite truly characteristic, since having been described by his wife as “terrifically sexy”—a slow, catlike stride, proudly muscular but expressing a sleepy disdain of tension or hurry. And the best part of the joke was what happened every afternoon at five. Buttoned-up and smiling among the Knox men, nodding goodnight as the elevator set him free, he would take a crosstown bus and a downtown bus to Bethune Street, where he’d mount two flights of slope-treaded, creaking stairs, open a white door so overlayed with many generations of soiled and blistered paint that its surface felt like the flesh of a toadstool, and let himself into a wide clean room that smelled faintly of cigarettes and candlewax and tangerine peel and eau de cologne; and there a beautiful, disheveled girl would be waiting, a girl as totally unlike the wife of a Knox man as the apartment was unlike a Knox man’s home. Instead of after-work cocktails they would make after-work love, sometimes on the bed and sometimes on the floor; sometimes it was ten o’clock before they roused themselves and strolled into the gentle evening streets for dinner, and by then the Knox Building could have been a thousand miles away.
By the end of the first year the joke had worn thin, and the inability of others to see the humor of it had become depressing. “Oh, you mean your father worked there,” they would say when he tried to explain it, and their eyes, as often as not, would then begin to film over with the look that people reserve for earnest, obedient, unadventurous young men. Before long (and particularly after the second year, with both his parents dead) he had stopped trying to explain that part of it, and begun to dwell instead on other comic aspects of the job: the absurd discrepancy between his own ideals and those of Knox Business Machines; the gulf between the amount of energy he was supposed to give the company and the amount he actually gave. “I mean the great advantage of a place like Knox is that you can sort of turn off your mind every morning at nine and leave it off all day, and nobody knows the difference.”
More recently still, and particularly since moving to the country, he had taken to avoiding the whole topic whenever possible by replying, to the question of what he did for a living, that he didn’t do anything, really; that he had the dullest job you could possibly imagine.
On the Monday morning after the end of the Laurel Players, he walked into the Knox Building like an automaton. The show windows were featuring a new display, bright cardboard images of thin, fashionable young women who grinned and pointed their pencils at emblazoned lists of product benefits—SPEED, ACCURACY, CONTROL—and beyond them, across the deep-carpeted expanse of the display floor, a generous sampling of the products themselves stood poised for demonstration. Some of them, the simpler ones, were much like the machines that had kindled his father’s enthusiasm twenty years before, though the angular black designs of those days had all been modified to fit the globular “sculptured forms” of their new casings, which were the color of oyster meat; but there were others equipped to deal with the facts of business at speeds more lickety-split than anything Earl Wheeler could have dreamed of. These, ready to purr and blink with electronic mystery, grew more and more imposing across the floor until they culminated in the big inscrutable components of the Knox “500” Electronic Computer, a machine which, according to the museum card displayed at its base, could “perform the lifetime work of a man with a desk calculator in thirty minutes.”
But Frank moved past the display room without a glance, and his actions on entering the lobby were absentmindedly expert: he obeyed the pointed finger of the elevator starter without quite being aware of it, nor did he notice which of the six elevator operators it was who sleepily made him welcome (he almost never did, unless it happened to be one of the two whose presence could be faintly oppressive: the very old man whose knees were so sprung that painful-looking bulges pressed against the backs of his trousers, or the enormous boy whom some glandular disorder had afflicted with the high hips of a woman and the downy head and beardless face of an infant). Pressed well back in the polite bondage of the car, he heard the sliding door clamp shut and the safety gate go rattling after it, and as the car began to rise he was surrounded by the dissonant conversations of his colleagues. He heard a deep, measured voice of the Great Plains, rich with distance and travel and the best accommodations (“…course, we did hit a little bumpy weather comin’ inta Chicawgo…”), sound out in counterpoint to the abrupt and sibilant accents of the city (“…so I siz ‘Whaddya—kiddin’?’ He siz ‘No, listen, I’m not kiddin’…”) while a softer medley of eight or ten voices, male and female, repeated their hushed morning courtesies under the buzz of the overhead fan; then it was time to begin the nodding, side-stepping ritual of making way for the people who edged toward the front with murmurs of “Out, please…Out, please” and to wait while the door slid open and shut, open and shut again. The eighth, the eleventh, the twelfth, the fourteenth…
At first glance, all the upper floors of the Knox Building looked alike. Each was a big open room, ablaze with fluorescent ceiling lights, that had been divided into a maze of aisles and cubicles by shoulder-high partitions. The upper panels of these dividers, waist to shoulder, were made of thick unframed plate glass that was slightly corrugated to achieve a blue-white semi-transparency; and the overall effect of this, to a man getting off the elevator and looking out across the room, was that of the wide indoor lake in which swimmers far and near were moving, some making steady headway, some treading water, others seen in the act of breaking to the surface or going under, and many submerged, their faces loosened into wavering pink blurs as they drowned at their desks. But the illusion was quickly dispelled on walking further into the office, for here the air was of an overwhelming dryness—it was, as Frank Wheeler often complained, “enough to dry your God damned eyeballs out.”
For all his complaints, though, he was sometimes guiltily aware of taking a dim pleasure in the very discomfort of the office. When he said, as he’d been saying for years, that in a funny way he guessed he would miss old Knox when he quit, he meant of course that it was the people he would miss (“I mean hell, they’re a pretty decent crowd; some of them, anyway”) and yet in all honesty he could not have denied a homely affection for the place itself, the Fifteenth Floor. Over the years he had discovered slight sensory distinctions betwee
n it and all the others of the building; it was no more or less pleasant, but different for being “his” floor. It was his bright, dry, daily ordeal, his personal measure of tedium. It had taught him new ways of spacing out the hours of the day—almost time to go down for coffee; almost time to go out for lunch; almost time to go home—and he had come to rely on the desolate wastes of time that lay between these pleasures as an invalid comes to rely on the certainty of recurring pain. It was a part of him.
“Morning, Frank,” said Vince Lathrop.
“Morning, Frank,” said Ed Small.
“Morning, Mr. Wheeler,” said Grace Mancuso, who worked for Herb Underwood in Market Research.
His feet knew where to turn at the aisle marked SALES PROMOTION, and they knew how many steps would bring him past the first three cubicles and where he would have to turn again to enter the fourth; he could have done it in his sleep.
“Hello,” said Maureen Grube, who served as floor receptionist and worked in Mrs. Jorgensen’s typing pool. She said it in a frankly flattering, definitely feminine way, and as she swayed aside to let him pass he wanted to put his arm around her and lead her away somewhere (the mail room? the freight elevator?) where he could sit down and take her on his lap and remove her royal blue sweater and fill his mouth with one and then the other of her breasts.
It wasn’t the first time this idea had occurred to him; the difference was that this time it had no sooner occurred to him than he thought, Why not?
His feet had led him to the entrance of the cubicle whose plastic nameplate read:
J. R. ORDWAY
F. H. WHEELER
and he paused there, one hand hooked over the rim of the plate glass, to turn and look back at her. She was all the way down to the end of the aisle, now, her buttocks moving nicely in her flannel skirt, and he watched her until she disappeared beneath the waterline of partition tops to take her place at the reception desk.
Take it easy, he counseled himself. A thing like this would need a little planning. The first thing to do, he knew, was to go on inside and say good morning to Jack Ordway and take off his coat and sit down. He did that, instantly shutting out his view of everything beyond the cubicle walls, and as he settled himself sideways at his desk with his right foot automatically toeing open a lower drawer and using its edge as a foot rest (the pressure of his shoe over the years had worn a little saddle in the edge of that particular drawer), he allowed a slow wave of delight to break over him. Why not? Hadn’t she given him every possible encouragement for months? Undulating past him in the aisle like that, bending close over his desk to hand him a folder, smiling in a special, oblique way that he’d never seen her use on anyone else? And that time at the Christmas party (he could still remember the taste of her mouth) hadn’t she trembled in his arms, and hadn’t she whispered, “You’re sweet”?
Why not? Oh, not in the mail room or the freight elevator, but didn’t she probably have an apartment somewhere, with a roommate, and wouldn’t the roommate probably be out all day?
Jack Ordway was talking to him, requiring him against his will to look up and say “What’s that?” An intrusion by almost anyone else wouldn’t have mattered—he could have nodded and made the right replies while keeping most of his mind free for Maureen Grube—but Ordway was different.
“I said I’m going to need your help this morning, Franklin,” he was saying. “This is an emergency. I’m dead serious, old scout.” He was apparently studying a sheaf of typewritten papers on his desk, the picture of concentration; only someone who knew what to look for could have told that the hand which seemed to be shading his eyes was really holding his head up, and that his eyes were shut. In his early forties, slight and trim, with the graying hair and wittily handsome face of a romantic actor, he was the kind of borderline alcoholic whose salvation seems to lie in endless renewals of his ability to laugh the whole thing off, and he was the sentimental hero of the office. Everybody loved Jack Ordway. Today he was wearing his English suit—the suit he had ordered from a touring London tailor some years before, at the cost of half a month’s salary, the suit whose cuff buttons really buttoned and whose high-backed trousers could only be worn with suspenders, or “braces,” the suit that was never seen without a fresh linen handkerchief spilling from its breast pocket—but his long narrow feet, which lay splayed with childish awkwardness under the desk, betrayed a pitifully all-American look. They were encased in cheap orange-brown loafers, badly scuffed; and the reason for this clashing note was that the one thing Jack Ordway could not do in the grip of a really bad hangover was to tie a pair of shoelaces.
“For the next—” he was saying in a hoarse, unsteady voice, “for the next two or possibly three hours you’re to warn me of Bandy’s every approach; you’re to protect me from Mrs. Jorgensen, and you may have to screen me from public view in case I begin to throw up. It’s that bad.”
The capsuled story of Jack Ordway’s life had become a minor legend of the Fifteenth Floor: everyone knew of how he’d married a rich girl and lived on her inheritance until it vanished just before the war, how since then his business career had been spent entirely in the Knox Building, in one glass cubicle after another, and how it had been distinguished by an almost flawless lack of work. Even here in Sales Promotion, where nobody worked very hard except old Bandy, the manager, he had managed to retain his unique reputation. Except when a really bad hangover laid him low he was up and around and talking all day, setting off little choruses of laughter wherever he went, sometimes even winning a tolerant chuckle from Bandy himself, driving Mrs. Jorgensen into fits of helpless giggles that made her weep.
“First of all,” he was saying now, “on Saturday these crazy friends of Sally’s flew in from the Coast all eager for the treat. Could we show them the town? Oh, indeed we could. Old, old buddies of hers and all that, and besides, they always bring pocketfuls of loot. So. Started off with lunch at André’s, and dear God you’ve never seen such whopping great martinis in your life. Oh, and none of this sissy business of one or two apiece, either, buddy. I lost count. And then let’s see. Oh, yes. Then there was nothing to do but sit around and drink until cocktail time. Then came cocktail time.” He had abandoned his working posture now, pushed the false papers aside and leaned delicately back in the chair to hold his head with both hands; he was moving it from side to side in the rhythm of his narrative, laughing and talking through his laughter, while Frank watched him with a mixture of pity and distaste. Most of his hangover stories seemed to begin with a flying-in of Sally’s crazy friends from the Coast, or from the Bahamas, or from Europe, with pocketfuls of loot, and Sally herself was always featured at the center of the fun—the former debutante, the chic, childless wife and irrepressible playmate. That, at least, was the way his listeners on the Fifteenth Floor were expected to picture her; Frank had been able to do so, and to picture their apartment as a kind of Noël Coward stage setting, until the time he went home with Ordway for a drink and found that Sally was massively soft and wrinkled, a sodden, aging woman with lips forever painted in the petulant cupid’s bow of her youth. Her every whining intonation of Jack’s name that night, as she swayed bewildered through rooms of rotting leather and dusty silver and glass, showed how deeply she blamed him for allowing the world to collapse; once she had turned up her eyes to the paint-flaked ceiling as if calling on God to punish him—this weak, foolish little man for whom she’d sacrificed her very life, who poisoned all her friendships with his endless counting of pennies, who insisted on grubbing at his dreary, dreary white-collar job and bringing dreary office people home with him. And Jack, apologetically hovering and making little jokes, had called her “Mother.”
“…and as for how we got back from Idlewild,” he was saying, “it’s a thing I’ll never know. My last completely clear recollection is of standing in the Idlewild lounge at three o’clock this morning and wondering if someone would please tell me how we’d gotten there in the first place. Or no, wait. After that there was som
ething about a hamburger joint—or no, I think that was earlier…” When the story was over at last he removed his hands from his head, experimentally, and frowned and blinked several times. Then he announced that he was beginning to feel a little better.
“Good.” Frank dropped his foot from the drawer and got settled at his desk. He had to think, and the best way to think was to go through the motions of working. This morning’s batch of papers was waiting in his IN basket, on top of last Friday’s, and so his first action was to turn the whole stack upside down on his desk and start from the bottom. As he did each day (or rather on the days when he bothered with the IN basket, for there were many days when he left it alone) he tried first to see how many papers he could get rid of without actually reading their contents. Some could be thrown away, others could be almost as rapidly disposed of by scrawling “What about this?” in their margins, with his initials, and sending them to Bandy, or by writing “Know anything on this?” and sending them to someone like Ed Small, next door; but the danger here was that the same papers might come back in a few days marked “Do” from Bandy and “No” from Small. A safer course was to mark a thing “File” for Mrs. Jorgensen and the girls, after the briefest possible glance had established that it wasn’t of urgent importance; if it was, he might mark it “File & Follow 1 wk.,” or he might put it aside and go on to the next one. The gradual accumulation of papers put aside in this way was what he turned to as soon as he was finished with, or tired of, the IN basket. Arranging them in an approximate order of importance, he would interleave them, in the same order, with those of the six- or eight-inch stack that always lay near the center of the desk, held down by a glazed ceramic paperweight that Jennifer had made for him in kindergarten. This was his current work pile. Many of the papers in it bore the insignia of Bandy’s “Do” or Ed Small’s “No,” and some had been through the “File & Follow” cycle as many as three or four times; some, bearing notes like “Frank—might look into this,” were the gifts of men who used him as he used Small. Occasionally he would remove a piece of current work and place it in the equally high secondary pile that lay on the far right-hand corner of the desk, under a leaden scale model of the Knox “500” Electronic Computer. This was the pile of things he couldn’t bring himself to face just now, and the worst of them, sometimes whole bulging folders filled with scrawled-over typewritten sheets and loose, sliding paper clips, would eventually go into the stuffed bottom right-hand drawer of the desk. The papers in there were of the kind that Ordway called Real Goodies, and that drawer, opposite to the one that served as a foot rest, had come to occupy a small nagging place in Frank’s conscience: he was as shy of opening it as if it held live snakes.