A Firing Offense

  The waitress returned and we all ordered another round. McGinnes had not used any of his water to cut the scotch. Lee excused herself to go to the ladies’ room.

  “She’s all right, you know?” Louie said, leaning in towards me as if we were conspirators.

  “Yeah, I know. She’s cool.”

  “Don’t mess her up, man. When you have a young lady like that,” he said, his hand cupped as if he were holding her in his palm, “you don’t mess with it.”

  “Shit, Louie, give me more credit than that. Anyway, she already told me what was what.”

  “I bet she did,” he said, smiling. “Her shit is more together than yours, man. And she’s ten years younger.”

  The waitress brought our round. I took a sip and watched Louie down half his mug in one gulp.

  “I’m a product of my generation, Louie. I guess it was all those Thoreau posters my junior-high hippie English teachers used to hang on the wall. ‘March to a different drummer,’ and all that. How many guys my age you read about, they’re making a shitload of money, they decide to quit because they’re not ‘happy.’”

  “I don’t know whose product it is,” Louie said, “but you’re right. Now the kids coming up, Lee’s age, they know what they want.”

  “Like Ric Brandon?”

  “Brandon’s an asshole,” he said, waving his hand. “You know what I mean. For instance, man, you don’t mind my saying so, I been knowing you a long time. And you did a helluva job today. But, Nick, you fuckin’ up.”

  “How so?”

  “You sweat your ass off moving stock, you come up through the ranks in sales, you put yourself through college to get to that management position you’re in, now you act like it don’t mean nuthin’.” He got right up in my face. “What’s goin’ on with you, man?”

  “I don’t know, Louie. I just can’t convince myself anymore that what I do is important.”

  “Important? Come on, man, wake up. Where in the world did you get the idea that the work you do in life has to be important?” He took a swig of beer. “Let me tell you something, man. When I was young—you don’t even remember the D.C. I’m talkin’ about—this town was split black and white for real. I couldn’t sit with you like this in a bar and have a beer. In the early sixties I went to work in the old Kann’s department store downtown, and when the riots went down, they had no choice but to make me department manager.”

  Lee came back and sat next to me. We all had some of our drinks, and Louie continued.

  “Well, you know they went out of business like everybody else down there. But I got hired as a manager at Moe’s on New York Avenue. A couple of years later Moe died, his kids took over the business, and they went belly-up too. Then Nathan’s put me on as assistant manager over in Arlington. It was rough for a while, but I hung with it and eventually they give me this store.” He finished his draught and put it loudly on the table. “So I come a long way from the Colored Only section of this town to where I’m at. I don’t just work here. I’m the manager of a store on Connecticut Avenue, understand what I’m sayin’? I own a house and every three years I buy a new ride. I got me a kid at Maryland, one at UDC.” He paused and stared me down. “You want to know what’s important.”

  A small man with a heavily veined nose wearing a tuxedo that fit like an afterthought walked into the room. He sat at the piano and placed his highball glass filled with straight liquor on a coaster.

  “Welcome,” he said into the mike, “to La Fortresse.”

  “It’s La FurPiece,” McGinnes shouted, and Lee jabbed me in the ribs.

  “My name is Buddy Floyd,” the man said, and began indelicately playing the piano intro to “Tie a Yellow Ribbon.” With each chorus he turned his head in our direction and nodded in encouragement for us to sing along.

  Mercifully, others began filing into the room, older couples overdressed for this joint and out for their idea of a night on the town. Most of them were half-lit, and some of the women were elderly enough to be losing their hair, their pink scalps visible through their bouffants. For some reason I felt a tinge of sadness and kissed Lee on the cheek. Buddy Floyd was singing “They Call the Wind Maria.”

  “I’m pretty buzzed,” Lee admitted, finishing her second vodka.

  “So am I. You want to go?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Can we stay together tonight?”

  “Sure. But let’s go to my crib, okay?”

  “Okay,” she laughed. “But aren’t you a little big for a crib?”

  We settled up by leaving a twenty on the table. Lee kissed Louie good-bye. Malone, who was whispering something to our waitress, looked up long enough to give us a wink.

  McGinnes was behind the piano, one arm around an older woman with raven black hair in the shape of a football helmet, his other hand clutching a precariously tilted tumbler of scotch. He and the others grouped around the piano were laughing and singing along loudly to the Fabulous Buddy Floyd’s interpretation of “Hello, Dolly.”

  AT THE DISTRICT LINE I stopped for a bottle of red wine, then headed towards my apartment. We sat in the car in front of my place, talking and listening to some old Van Morrison. When that was over, we went inside.

  A half bottle of wine later our clothes were thrown about the living room and Lee and I were writhing all over my couch. We ended it loudly and in a sweat, with Lee inclined in the corner, the tops of her calves locked beneath my ears, the soles of her feet pointing at the ceiling.

  Afterwards, I slid a pillow under her ass to catch the wetness, and watched the sweat roll onto her chest and break apart as it reached her large, brown nipples.

  My apartment resembled a bombed-out laundromat. The cat had Lee’s underwear on her head and was bumping into furniture. Lee pulled my face down and kissed me on the mouth for a long time.

  “I had a good Saturday,” she said sweetly.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me too.” Then I pulled a white blanket up from the back of the couch and spread it over us, and we slept, holding each other until morning.

  FIFTEEN

  LEE ASKED, “Where are we going?”

  After a slow morning of breakfast and the Sunday Post at my place, we were heading south on Thirteenth Street, passing large detached homes with expansive porches. Ahead stood three-story rowhouses crowned with incongruously grand turrets.

  “We’re going to visit someone,” I said. “A friend of my grandfather’s.”

  I turned right on Randolph and parked halfway down the block of boxy brick houses. There was little color in the trimwork or shutters here. Dogs barked angrily from alleys. Even on bright and sunny days, this street seemed to remain dark.

  “This is my Uncle Costa’s place,” I said. “He worked for my grandfather when he was a young man. When he wanted to start his own business, my grandfather helped him out.”

  “Let’s go in.”

  “I just wanted to explain to you first, before you meet him. Let’s just say that some of these guys didn’t really assimilate themselves too well into the American culture.”

  “You’re not ashamed of him, are you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Fine,” she said, tugging at my arm. “Let’s just go in.”

  As we walked up the steps, I waved to a man coming out of the next house who I knew to be a reverend. Behind us two gangly but tough-looking kids walked down the sidewalk, one wearing a Fila sweatsuit, the other with an Eddie Murphy “Golden Child” leather cap on his head.

  A rusted metal rocker with moldy cushions sat on the concrete porch. Black iron bars filled the windows. I knocked on the door and waited, counting three locks being undone. Costa opened the door, looked at me, and smiled.

  “Niko,” he said.

  “Theo Costa.” I gripped his hand and kissed him on the cheek.

  He was short and solid, with thick wavy black hair that was gray at the temples and slicked back, and a thin black mustache below his bumpy nose. Though it was Sunday, he wore a short-sleeved
white shirt with two pens clipped in the breast pocket.

  “Come on,” he said, waving us in with both hands. As Lee passed him, he looked back at me and said in Greek, “Your girl? Very nice.”

  “A friend,” I answered, but he winked anyway.

  I introduced her and they shook hands. A couple of cats ran by us and into the kitchen. The curtains were drawn throughout the house. Costa switched on lights as we followed him through the living room and into the dining room. The air was dry and very still.

  We sat at a large table in ornate chairs with yellowed cushions. On one wall was a mirror covered with a blanket; on the other hung a sepia-tinted photograph of a man and woman that had been taken in the early part of the century. The woman, even shorter than the short man and wearing a long black dress, was unsmiling. The man wore a baggy suit, a very thick mustache, and a watchchain from vest to pocket.

  “You want coffee, gleeka’?” Costa asked.

  “Thanks, Costa. Nescafe for Lee.”

  “One minute,” he said in Greek, jabbing a finger in the air and stepping quickly into the kitchen.

  “He’s nice,” Lee said. I nodded and she pointed to the wall. “What’s with the mirrors? I noticed the one in the living room is covered too.”

  “His wife died last year,” I said. “He covered the mirrors so he won’t see her reflection.” She raised her eyebrows. “I told you.”

  “It’s just that it’s so dark in here, and sad. He must be very depressed.”

  “I’m sure he’s a little lonely and misses his wife. But this house was always closed up and dark, even when she was alive. They’re old-timers, that’s all.”

  Costa returned with a tray of two Turkish coffees, a cup of instant, and a small platter of sweets, which he set in the center of the table. On the platter were koulourakia, kourabiedes, galactoboureko, and baklava. He pushed the whole thing in front of Lee.

  “Don’t be shy,” he said, moving his hands in small circles. “Eat!”

  “I like baklava,” she admitted, emphasizing the second syllable as most Americans do, and chose a slice. I took a kourabiede for myself.

  We sat and talked for the next half hour, mostly about what we had been doing in the time since I’d seen him last. The tiny cup of coffee had given me quite a jolt. Lee eventually drifted away from the table and began to wander around the house. We heard her steps on the wooden staircase that led down to the basement.

  She called upstairs excitedly, “Hey, Nicky, there must be twenty cats down here!”

  “Twenty cats, Costa?” I said, and smiled.

  “Maybe a dozen,” he said sourly. “Lousy gatas.”

  “If you’d quit feeding them…. ”

  “Aah,” he said, dismissing me with a wave of his hand.

  Now that Lee was gone we spoke in Greek. Though I understood everything he said, I kept my own sentences simple so as not to embarrass myself with my marginal command of the language.

  Costa reached behind him and opened the door of an old wall cabinet. He pulled out a bottle of Metaxa and two shot glasses.

  “Too early for you, Niko?”

  “No.” He poured a couple of slugs with efficiency and we knocked glasses. He sipped and watched as I threw mine back in one quick motion, returning the little glass to the table with a hollow thud.

  “You drink like a Spartan,” he said.

  “Like my papou.”

  “Your papou could drink. But he gave it up when your parents sent you to him.”

  “I miss him,” I said.

  “He would be proud of you,” Costa said. Like most immigrants he equated my white collar with success.

  “I’m doing fine,” I said.

  “It’s time you found another woman.”

  “I’m not against the idea.”

  “The girl you’re with. She’s Jewish?”

  “Yes. She’s my friend, like I told you.”

  “Friends, okay. And the Jews are good people, very smart in business. But it’s not good to mix, you found that out. Marry a Greek girl.”

  He finished his drink and poured two more shots. A gray cat with green eyes did a figure eight around my feet then jumped up onto my lap. Costa reached across the table and picked it off me, tossing it to the other side of the room.

  “How is it here in the neighborhood now, Theo?”

  “Not too bad,” he said, and shrugged. “When Toula was alive, I worried more. They took her purse once, when she was walking home with groceries.” His eyes were a faded brown and watery, more from long afternoons of drinking than from bitterness.

  “It’s not the same town it was,” I said.

  “You don’t even remember how good it was,” he said, suddenly animated. He pointed a finger at my chest. “When I first came here, your papou and me swam in the Potomac on hot summer afternoons. Now it’s so dirty, I wouldn’t even throw a photograph of myself into that river.”

  I laughed as he finished his shot. I turned the bottle around on the table and read the label.

  “Five star, Costa?”

  “Yes. Very good.”

  “Do you think you’ll go back to Greece?” I asked, wondering why anyone would remain a prisoner in a house like this, in a city where the only common community interest was to get safely through another day.

  “No, I plan on dying here. Believe me, Niko,” he said, without a trace of irony, “there is no place in the world like America.”

  LATER THAT DAY LEE and I drove down to Southwest and walked along the water, checking out the yachts in the marina. Continuing west, we ended up at the fish market on Maine Avenue.

  Most of the good fish had been picked over by that time of day. I bought some squid, at one forty-nine a pound, from a cross-eyed salt who was attempting to stare at Lee. We took it back to my apartment.

  After removing the ink sacks and the center bone, I sliced the squid laterally into thin rings, and shook them in a bag with a mixture of bread crumbs, garlic, and oregano. Then I fried them in olive oil in a hot skillet.

  We ate these with lemon and a couple of beers as we watched the first half of the Skins game. For the second half we napped together on the couch in roughly the same arrangement as the night before. We woke as the afternoon light was fading. I drove her back to her car at the store and kissed her good-bye.

  Back in my apartment I warmed some soup on the stove. From the television in the living room I heard the stopwatch intro to 60 Minutes and felt that familiar rush of anxiety, announcing that my weekend was ticking away.

  Two hours later I dialed the international operator and reached Greece. For the next ten minutes I was shuttled around to various women who worked the switchboards. Finally I reached my mother at her home in a village near Sparta. I had last spoken to my parents on the day my grandfather died.

  We spoke superficially about our lives. She ended most of her sentences with, “my boy” or “my son.” I tried not to confuse the ethnic inflection in her voice with concern or, especially, love. As our conversation pared down to awkward silences between pleasantries, I began to wonder, as I always did, why I had called.

  I turned in early that night but lay in the dark for quite a while before I finally went to sleep. Though I forced myself to wake several times during the night, I was unsuccessful in stopping Jimmy Broda from haunting my dreams.

  SIXTEEN

  I WAS NEARLY done shaving my weekend stubble when Ric Brandon called early Monday morning. He instructed me to change my plans for working on the Avenue and report to the office.

  I finished shaving and undid my tie, switching from an Italian print to a wine and olive rep. I changed my side buckle shoes to a relatively more conservative pair of black oxfords that had thin steel plates wrapped around the outside of the toes. I put on a thrift shop Harris Tweed, secured the apartment, and drove to work.

  When I reached the receptionist’s desk at half past nine, the office was already bustling with Monday morning’s full fury. Calls from customers
who had been stiffed on their weekend deliveries were automatically being forwarded to the wrong extensions. All terminals were printing, and everyone, though they were moving fairly quickly, carried Styrofoam cups of hot coffee in their hands. The usual line of delivery drivers and warehousemen had formed at the personnel office to complain about Friday’s paycheck.

  Marsha was screening the call of an angry consumer, but dug deep for a smile as I tapped her desk and set upright the “Elvis Country” plaque that had been knocked on its side.

  Aside from a couple of new plants, the office had not changed in the week of my absence. There were several rows of used metal desks with laminated tops. The desks displayed photographs of children; notes written on small squares of adhesive-backed paper, stuck on the necks of clip-on lamps; rubber figurines from the fast food deathhouses, this year’s being the California Raisins, running across the tops of computer terminals—all illuminated by the green glow of florescence.

  I removed my jacket and had a seat at my desk. Marsha had arranged my mail in stacks, separated by solicitations, trade magazines, and important co-op advertising credits and checks. I tossed the junk mail after a quick glance at the return addresses, then went to the employee lounge for a cup of coffee.

  When I returned, Ric Brandon was at my desk, his elbows leaning awkwardly on the soundtreated divider that separated Gary Fisher’s cubicle from mine. He was wearing a boxy navy blue suit with a white shirt, and this year’s popular tie among the fast-track M.B.A.s, a green print.

  “Where’s the funeral, Ric?” I said, and sipped my rancid coffee.

  “No funeral,” he said a little too cheerfully. He looked down at his black wing tips. “I’d like to see you in my office at eleven sharp.”

  “Sure, Ric. Eleven.”

  He put his head over the divider and told Fisher he wanted to speak to him “right now.” Then Fisher followed Brandon down the hall into his office, where they closed the door behind them.