Seven Types of Ambiguity

  “ ‘You see, there were things happening at work . . . even now . . . I’m in the middle of something very, very big. If it comes off they’ll probably make me a director. Another drink?’

  “ ‘Really, a director? That makes you a boss then.’

  “ ‘One of them.’

  “ ‘What do you do exactly?’

  “ ‘I’m a dealer.’

  “ ‘Like a stockbroker?’

  “ ‘Exactly like one. The thing is, I really have to make some calls tomorrow and I have to be contactable to take them. Caught off guard, and to be perfectly frank, also a little overwhelmed by your perfume, I gave you my cell phone when you came around this morning and I shouldn’t have. I need it back or this particular deal could well fall through.’

  “ ‘Sorry, Joe. Terry is absolutely adamant about outside contact. He really—’

  “ ‘Helen, if it’s about money, I could—’

  “ ‘No, no. Joe, you’re an incredibly sweet guy and I’d really love to help you, but it could cost me my job.’

  “ ‘Do you like your job?’

  “ ‘Yeah. I suppose I do.’

  “ ‘You suppose?’

  “ ‘I used to like it more . . .’

  “ ‘Really? Why don’t you like it so much anymore?’

  “ ‘It can get a bit predictable. I know what’s coming and Terry—’

  “ ‘What about Terry?”

  “ ‘He doesn’t treat me . . . as he used to.’

  “ ‘He’s lucky to have you.’

  “ ‘Sometimes I think that too. I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life.’

  “ ‘Look, Helen. I don’t mean to be coy about it; I really need my phone back. If I get it then I can steer this deal through and if that happens—’

  “ ‘You’re a director.’

  “ ‘Almost certainly. Then I can take people on. You know what I’m saying? An attractive, intelligent young woman like you should be out there grabbing the future and embracing it. You know, the future doesn’t have to be an enemy stalking you. This is an opportunity, right here in this cabin. Another drink?’

  “ ‘Are you serious? What kind of job would it be?’

  “ ‘What would you like to do? What are you interested in? Would you like to earn some really good money? That’s always interesting. You could start as a trainee broker.’

  “ ‘Really?’

  “ ‘Why not? Train you on the job. Base salary, plus commission with a start-up allowance. How does that sound?’

  “ ‘What’s that for—the start-up allowance?’

  “ ‘It’s a little signing-on bonus for clothes, shoes, general corporate grooming, and, of course, a cell-phone account.’

  “Joe Geraghty knew how to close. It was an instinct with him, to know how to plant, tend, cultivate, and then harvest. She waited till everything was quiet, and then I heard her go to get Joe’s phone. It was the absolutely perfect seduction. I ducked inside to tell him I’d heard the whole thing and to praise him for the delivery and for thinking so fast on his feet. He had used his celebrity as the father of a kidnap victim as bait, invented the troubled-marriage business to hook her, and had given himself a promotion contingent on her getting him the phone, after which he was going to give her a job as a dealer, to reel her in. Brilliant! Hearing her coming back I ducked outside again to freeze in my hiding place.

  “ ‘Get rid of her fast, will you? I’m freezing out here,’ I whispered as I left, but all he said was, ‘It’s true, Mitch.’

  “ ‘What?’ I asked from outside through the open window. ‘What’s true?’

  “ ‘I didn’t make that—’

  “ ‘I don’t think anyone saw me,’ Helen said, opening the door without knocking. The brandy must have emboldened her.

  “ ‘You said Motorola, right, and there were only three of them. I brought all three.’ She laughed. Joe immediately shushed her, and then it suddenly got very quiet. Neither of them was talking, and I couldn’t hear anything at all. It took a moment before it dawned on me that the bastard was probably kissing her.

  “Why in hell was he doing that? He had the phone. He didn’t need anything more from her. Why couldn’t he have just thanked her and promised to use it discreetly before simply saying good night. Perhaps he could have reiterated his promise to give her a job, anything polite just to get her out of the room. After all, I was outside freezing. Okay, so he kissed her as the first installment of her start-up allowance. One kiss, something wrong exchanged for something wrong, and then out she goes. But no, the silence gave way to heavy breathing, and I was getting angry. He could have used me as an excuse to get her to go. Where on earth was I supposed to be walking to, Mongolia? He had forgotten about me.

  “I didn’t know what to do. It seemed to be taking forever and I was getting angrier by the second, and colder. I got up slowly and looked through the window. She had her top off and his hands were moving over her breasts like a milking machine in overdrive, methodically, until he’d removed her bra. I couldn’t believe it. And then he proceeded to rub his face between her breasts furiously, manically. What did he think I was doing? He didn’t care. He just kept fondling and kissing those huge breasts of hers, like a man possessed.

  “She was putting up no resistance, either. In fact, she seemed to be similarly aroused even though he was being quite rough with her. She ought to have been a little frightened. She didn’t know this man at all. She had just stolen for him and risked her job for him. Now he was grabbing at her with all his strength and she was letting him. Still standing, he pushed her hard up against the wall opposite the window I was looking through. People in other cabins could have heard her forearms slap against the wall to keep her head from crashing into it. He lifted her with one hand and she just let him. Then he started pumping her like an animal. He didn’t care about the noise they were making or the three cell phones lying uncovered on my bed. He was just going for it with the little fat girl for no damn reason at all, just because he could, and he had forgotten all about me. He was risking everything and all I could do was watch it, this pointless, carnal, reckless risk-taking.

  “Hell, it wasn’t as though he didn’t get any.”

  “What makes you say that, Dennis?”

  “He was always talking about it like a schoolboy, that and his car. It was like he never grew up. He apparently had this quasi-supermodel of a wife, and yet he still had to sleep around. It was he who first took me to a brothel, you know. My wife was screwing anything that moved. She’d already walked out on me once, and yet I was the one who was shivering outside while he was gratuitously fucking the fat girl. What kind of justice is that?”

  “What did you do?”

  “I walked around to the front door, stepping as loudly as I could, and then I knocked on it. I knocked; I didn’t tap or anything. It was too late to worry about the noise. He whispered loudly, ‘Just a minute!’ somewhat breathlessly and then there was some more quiet whispering inside before he stuck his head out the front door and, still panting, said, ‘Give me a couple of minutes.’

  “ ‘Fuck you!’

  “ ‘Sorry, Mitch,’ he said, closing the door.

  “He seemed to be assuring her that I was all right, that she had nothing to fear from my knowing some or all of what had gone on. I was his partner. I was his friend. I was cool. I was cold, tired, and sickened by what I had seen. You know, Alex, you can have your suspicions about your friends and colleagues, about what animals they can be, how stupid and utterly irresponsible they can be, but when those suspicions are confirmed, even cynics can be disappointed.”

  “Were you disappointed?”

  “He said he was drunk. I didn’t want to talk to him. We had to be up at six the next morning. I’d been up since five that morning. He held his cell phone up in triumph as if it were a trophy. The truth was, he wasn’t going to get through to Sheere and, even if he did, we both knew that there was no good argument to keep Sheere from selling. I
told him he was pathetic and, you know, he agreed.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. What is it they say about alcohol?”

  “Lots of things.”

  “Well, in this instance it had lubricated a slide from a kind of adolescent triumph to a kind of senescent self-pity. He started telling me his marriage was a sham, that his life was a sham. He said, God help him, that I was really the only friend he had.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him his life was a sham and that if he didn’t let me sleep I’d ram the phone down his throat. He said he was sorry and that he would fix everything tomorrow. He wanted me to trust him to make everything okay tomorrow. Then he fell asleep, and not long after, so did I. I slept heavily, deeply, cocooned by my own body heat from the coming storm.”

  10. “At six the next morning ‘Celebration’ came pounding over the public-address system, the reveille of the asylum. We were all to assemble for a series of stretches and exercises, which included a one-and-a-half-mile time trial.”

  “Running?”

  “Running or jogging, whatever we were capable of, but Brabet was going to time it. People didn’t know what to expect. It was still cold at six-thirty and barely light. Most of the group were standing around looking half asleep, bewildered, some still a little embarrassed from the last session of the previous evening. Pamela looked a little crazed. You know what I mean? She had an almost psychotic cheerfulness to her, greeting everyone as though we all went way, way back, as though we’d all graduated from high school together and then served side by side in the trenches. She had snapped. You could see it in her eyes. At six-thirty in the morning she had her little pocket-sized camera with her and was taking shots of all of us. She kept this up all day. She was finished.

  “Joe showed no signs of being hungover. In fact, he was buoyed by the night’s conquests, which he saw as twofold: Helen, of course, and his cell phone, which, before we left our cabin, he tossed from one hand to the other, hamming up Brabet’s juggling lesson. He patted me on the back as we closed the door and made our way to meet the others.

  “ ‘Sorry I kept you up, Mitch, but all you’re going to remember when this day is over is that I’m the guy who got the phone back, got hold of Sheere and made him fall in love with Health National all over again.’

  “He probably believed that. I didn’t say anything. But I have to confess that when it came time to run the mile and a half I found myself trying a lot harder than I would have expected. I used to run a lot at school.”

  “What do you mean, you tried harder?”

  “I wanted to beat Joe. He worked out and, although I didn’t, I was determined to beat him, or at least try to.”

  “Did you beat him?”

  “No. Not a chance. He was fit. He stayed with me for a while, more or less jogging, telling me how he had it all worked out, how he couldn’t call too early, it being a Sunday morning. Then he sped off. By the time I got back to the start he had Helen hanging around him so we were not able to talk even if I had wanted to. I tried to keep away from him as much as I could through the morning but at the start of the noon session he sidled up to me, looking pretty pleased with himself, and told me that he’d spoken to Mrs. Sheere, who loved him, would do anything for him, and she had promised to have her husband call him back within half an hour. I was saved having to answer by Terry Brabet clapping his hands together, seal-like, to get everybody’s attention for the next exercise.

  “He had us all outside again for what he called a ‘trust’ exercise. He tended to volunteer some pseudo-social-scientific mumbo jumbo before every session. He wasn’t capable of telling you to go for a run without first delivering a vacuous homily or reminding you who he was, ‘a personal consultant with a background in attitude change.’ Really, that’s how he styled himself. The ‘trust’ exercise, as he called it, was supposed to demonstrate that, whatever the undertaking, if you had a united team backing you up, you had nothing to fear. Something trite like that. Something that people want to believe. And that isn’t true.

  “There was a flagpole on the lawn outside the dining area. Brabet had arranged to have a vertically positioned extension ladder attached to it. The top of the ladder was about twelve or thirteen feet off the ground. We were to take it in turns to climb up the ladder. Everybody had to take a turn at being what Brabet called ‘the climber,’ and stand at the top facing the flagpole. The distance between the rung you were supposed to put your feet on and the ground was about ten feet.

  “I was not the first climber. I was probably about the tenth. I might have been the last of the men. There were different signals you were supposed to give at different stages of the exercise, in a sort of Lord of the Flies ritual. ‘Climber ascending,’ you were supposed to call out as you went up the ladder. When you got to the highest or second-highest rung, you were supposed to grab hold of a rope that was tied to the top of the flagpole. Grabbing hold of the rope was a signal to the rest of the group below, whom Brabet had told to stand in two parallel lines facing the ladder. When they saw the climber take hold of the rope, they were to signal by calling ‘Catchers ready.’

  “When you heard their call, when your fear had been overwhelmed by a desire to get the whole thing over with, to show that you’re as much a man as anyone else there, when your anger at the people beneath you, at the world, and at the near-certainty of your imminent unemployment had become the dominant reason for your shaking, when you had jettisoned even the most rudimentary laws of physics from your memory, you were to call out ‘Climber falling,’ let go of the rope, and fall backwards through the air onto a sea of hands and arms, heterogenous in height, musculature, rigidity, and owner concentration.

  “ ‘Climber falling,’ I called, just as I had been told to.

  “Brabet was wrong about it being an exercise in trust. It was an exercise in a man’s capacity to clear his mind, even if only momentarily, of all reason and judgment. And since people have been doing this every day since we could walk upright—when we drink and drive, when we choose our jobs, when we go to war, when we marry—it didn’t need to be proved. We are the living proof. I am. It wasn’t that I trusted Joe Geraghty so very much. I just had not expected that he would be fumbling for his cell phone as I was falling. What are the chances of that? What are the chances, Alex? An educated man would put his money on it not happening.”

  “Dennis—?”

  “Shut up, Alex. Of course I’m crying. You should hear me in the middle of the night. I howl like an infant. And no one comes in; no one turns the light on to see if I’m all right. Because I’m not all right. That’s the reason I started calling her. That’s the real reason, if you want to know the truth of it.”

  “Dennis, I’ve told you, I don’t care—”

  “You don’t care about the truth?”

  “Yes, of course I care about whatever you say is the—”

  “Then shut up and let me finish. I haven’t yet. This is what it was all for, Alex. Can’t you see that? Wasting my time training to be unemployable as a physicist, getting a job with the biggest game in town, climbing one corporate ladder after another, conniving with people like Sid Graeme and Joe Geraghty, it was all so that I could climb that last ladder, let go and fall backwards. My father never had to do that for a living.”

  “You said he was a painter. He would have had to climb ladders in his work.”

  “Yes, but nobody wanted him to fall, nobody instructed him to fall backwards. There was no missive from the head office ordering him to commit suicide. His eyes, the eyes I inherited, were never inflamed and swollen, like mine are now, from months of spontaneous crying. He didn’t earn very much, never had a bumper year. He used to get a little hamper at Christmas from the company, ham, mince pies, mostly tinsel. We thought how lucky we were when he brought it home. How lucky he was to be able to look anyone in the eye, anyone at all.”

  “Looking people in the eye, why can’t you look people in the eye? I don’t
understand, Dennis. Are you talking about morality?”

  “I can talk about morality if you want. I never could, but I can now. In the course of my job I used to have drinks, lunch, or dinner regularly with people, usually men, who said things, who threw away lines that would have had average people outside the industry gasping with disbelief. I courted them. One guy—he worked in Emerging Markets—”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Investments in the Third World. He used to say that the best time to buy was when there was blood in the streets. That way you could get everything for half price. He used to tell me all about his trips to Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa. He would fly in, get picked up at the airport in a bulletproof limousine, get escorted through the streets by members of a private militia so that he could inspect one or other natural resource. He’d be talking on his satellite phone to Sydney, London, New York, Singapore, all within the space of a car ride that took him past row after row of tin shanties, open sewers, and muddy children who, he said, stared at the car the way rabbits stare in the night at the beaming light of a flashlight. Occasionally, the dirt road might be blocked by an angry crowd demonstrating against this or that. The car would slow and before he had a chance to inquire about what they wanted, two or three of the closest would be shot by the militia. Then the rest of them would disperse and his car would pick up speed to make up the time. ‘Only two or three,’ he explained. ‘I didn’t tell them to shoot,’ he said.

  “On his way back he would pick up a couple of children and take them with him to his hotel. He would tell me all this the way people might tell you how they managed to get upgraded on a flight somewhere or how they got away with parking in a loading zone while they picked up tickets for a show. I had lunch with this man regularly. We used each other. Once, while we were eating lunch, he saw a destitute old man through the window of the restaurant. He said, ‘Look at that guy wandering around like that. They should take them all and slap great big advertising boards on them so that they’d be doing something useful as they shuffle around. It’d be a win/win move.’ My father would never have met anyone who talked like that.”