Who was she talking about?
“Who else?” she said. “Who could I possibly be talking about right now?”
By then it was certainly time for us to get up, return to our desks, and try to catch Karen in the pursuit of the best fund-raiser concept, but for some reason nobody moved. “Can you believe she might be in surgery right now?” Amber asked us. “I mean this very minute. Does anybody know what time it was scheduled for?”
“I don’t think anybody knows that,” said Genevieve.
“Last night,” continued Amber, “I don’t know why, but I was wondering if she had a boyfriend.”
“Oh, I actually know something about this,” Genevieve announced.
Amber was startled. “What, what do you know?”
“That she was dating a lawyer.”
“How do you know that? She told you?”
“Oh, no. I saw them at a restaurant with my husband. He knew the guy. They were opposing counsel on a case.”
“You saw them at a restaurant?” said Amber. “What did he look like?”
“Kind of heavyset, if I remember. But not fat. Sexy, I thought. I thought they made a good-looking couple.”
“So what happened? Are they still together?”
“Oh, I don’t know that,” said Genevieve. “I only saw them once at a restaurant.”
There was silence. It seemed pretty clear we were all wondering what Lynn Mason did at night when she went home. Did she watch TV, or did she think TV was a waste of time? What hobbies did she have? Or had she sacrificed hobby-having to professional ambition? Did she exercise? Was her diet particularly bad? Did she have a history of cancer in the family? Who was her family? Who were her friends? What had happened between her and the lawyer? And how did she feel, being in her forties, never having married?
“I wanted to call her last night and offer to drive her to the hospital,” said Amber. “Can you imagine that? She’d have been like, ‘Amber, please don’t call me at home at eleven o’clock at night.’ Click.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Genevieve. “She might have been touched. Remember her birthday?” We had made an infomercial for her on her birthday, editing together testimonials from everyone about how great she was. “She was very touched,” said Genevieve. “I don’t think we give her enough credit for being human.”
“It’s hard,” said Benny. “She’s scary.”
“I can’t picture her on a date,” said Larry.
There was more silence, until Genevieve asked, “Do you really think she needed a ride to the hospital?”
WE BROKE APART, climbing down to fifty-nine and up to sixty-three and to the floors in between. If something was on the radio we kept it low. The weather outside, telling from our windows, was overcast but not cold. Spring had finally arrived. We settled down to the fund-raiser ads. We opened a new Quark document, or took out our pencils. Every once in a while a nicely sharpened pencil would crack on the page upon impact and we’d have to go in search of the one electric pencil sharpener. That was annoying. Back in our chairs we drummed the eraser between our teeth. If a stray paper clip happened to be lying around we were likely to bend it out of shape. Some of us knew how to turn a misshapen paper clip into a projectile that could hit the ceiling. If our attention was drawn to the ceiling, we usually recounted our tiles. When we returned to our computer screens, we erased whatever false starts we found there, suddenly embarrassed by them. We had the feeling that our bad ideas were probably worse than the bad ideas of others. Those of us who worked on sketch pads were engaged by that point in the great unsung pastime of American corporate life, the wadded paper toss. This, more than anything, was what “billable hour” implied. It was always annoying when an eyelid started to twitch. We did some drag-and-drop. What was missing was an interesting color palette, so we leaned back in our chairs and gave it some thought. What Pantone would be perfect for a fund-raising event? No one ever admitted to it publicly, but there were days of extreme sexual frustration. The phone would ring. It was nothing. We checked our e-mail. We clicked back into Quark and established new snap-to guides. Sometimes our computers froze and we would have to call down to IT. Or we needed something from the supply room. Lately inventory in the supply room seemed half of what it used to be, and the woefully bereft shelves recalled to mind TV programs that documented seasons of drought and low crop production in the history of a foregone people. But usually we needed nothing from the supply room. We took out our bags of snacks from our desk drawers, or we chewed our fingernails. Suddenly a blinding flash of the obvious would strike, and a flurry of keyboard noise filtered out into the hall. We thought, “This is not a half-bad idea.” That was all we needed, one little insight. Soon the roughest look, the crudest message, started to shape itself into coherence. Inevitably when we reached that point, we stopped to use the restroom.
What was the likelihood, if we were being honest, that this one fund-raiser, one of a thousand, no matter how many donations it might receive, would really get us any closer to a cure for breast cancer? Who knows, maybe it would. None of us understood how advances in medical science worked. Maybe they needed only one more dollar and our solicitations would put them over the top.
We also saw our work that day as doing a personal favor for Lynn, even if we couldn’t help feeling that, by choosing not to tell us that she had cancer, she had cheated us of one of our most dearly held illusions — namely, that we were not present strictly for the money, but could also be concerned about the well-being of those around us.
MAYBE THIS WAS why she didn’t tell us:
Not long after layoffs began, things started going missing from our workstations. Marcia Dwyer’s handcuffs, Jim Jackers’ Mardi Gras beads. At first we thought we must have misplaced these things. We had loaned them out, or maybe they’d fallen behind a bookshelf. Don Blattner ran framed movie stills around his walls, with a particular emphasis on scenes from The Lost Boys and From Here to Eternity. Larry Novotny had a collection of World Series pennants dating back to 1984. Who could say why we felt the need to display such things in our offices? For some it helped to say, Hello, this is me. Others just liked having their useless shit around in the place where they spent most of their time. When that useless shit began to disappear, we got angry.
We never suspected the cleaning crew. Those quiet souls weren’t likely to risk their legal status for a paperweight and a few plastic wind-up toys. It was a marvel — never a CD Walkman, never a wallet left by accident on a desk overnight. Instead, Karen’s snow globe of Hawaii. Chris Yop’s gold-plated nameplate. Pictures in cheap frames of our fat parents on vacation. Things of sentimental or practical value to no one but us.
Benny’s friend Roland from security worked an occasional night shift. One Friday morning during this time, Benny asked him, “So what’d you find in there?”
“Well, I looked,” said Roland. “The filing cabinets first off. Nothing in them. I even looked through the file folders themselves. I looked through the bookshelves next, but there aren’t a whole many books there on his bookshelf.”
He was talking about Joe Pope’s bookshelf. Some people had convinced Benny to have a talk with Roland, if just to see what would come of it, and Roland had taken Benny seriously.
“And I looked through his desk drawers, too,” Roland continued. “There wasn’t nothing there, either, except this lucky rabbit’s foot.”
“A rabbit’s foot?” said Benny. “Let me see it.”
Roland handed over a keychain attached to a rabbit’s foot. Before the day was through Benny had shown it to everyone and we all said no, none of our useless shit had ever included a rabbit’s foot keychain.
“Must belong to the prior occupant,” Roland concluded when Benny handed it back to him.
After that, somebody who shall remain anonymous went into Benny’s office; he said he had something he wanted to float by Benny. Benny got a chuckle out of it. Then the guy said, “But hold on, Benny — we’re not joking. We??
?re serious.” And Benny, still chuckling, said, “Yeah, it’s funny, it’s clever.” The guy cut him off. Benny wasn’t listening, Benny wasn’t hearing him. “We’re dead serious,” the guy said. Now Benny could see the guy wasn’t kidding. “Are you serious?” said Benny. “Are you listening to me or not, Benny?” the guy asked. “We are dead, dead, dead serious.” “Oh,” said Benny. “I thought you were just joking.” “No, we’re not joking,” he said. “We are not joking.” “Who’s ‘we’?” asked Benny. “Benny,” said the guy, “don’t be so fucking dense. What do you say, are you in or not?” “You’re talking about deliberately setting him up,” Benny said. “As a joke!” the guy cried. “Just as a stupid practical joke!” “That doesn’t sound right to me,” said Benny. “Why not?” “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just not something I think I want to do.” The guy could only clap his hands on his knees and stand up. “Okay,” he said. “Suit yourself.”
After the guy left, Benny called down to security. “What can I do you for, Benjamin?” asked Roland. “Look,” said Benny. “I think you should stop making inspections of Joe’s office. How many times have you been in there now?” Roland told him that he stopped by there every time he worked a night shift, so every Thursday night. “And have you ever found anything?” “Nothing,” said Roland, “except that lucky rabbit’s foot.” “Listen,” Benny said, “we were just kidding around one day, saying he could be the one because he’s really the only guy who stays here until nine or ten at night. He makes us feel like we’re not working hard enough because we don’t stay here half as long as he does. But it was just a joke, Roland. He’s not your guy. He doesn’t want our knickknacks.” “So if it’s not him,” said Roland, “who is it?” “Hey, Roland, you’re the security man here. You should be telling me that.” “But I thought you said you knew who it was.” “It was a joke!” cried Benny. “A joke! It’s not him!” “Well, I won’t go in there anymore, then, if you’re telling me I should be looking elsewheres.” “I’m telling you,” said Benny. “You’re not going to find anything if you go in there.”
A day or two after this conversation, Joe Pope went in search of a woman named Paulette Singletary. Paulette was a sweet black woman of forty or so with hair parted in the middle almost exactly like a thatched roof. She had a greeting for everyone. It might not sound like much to have a greeting for everyone, but in an office as big as ours, we saw people every day whose faces we knew better than our own mothers’, yet we’d never been introduced to them. Maybe we’d sat together in a meeting or seen them at an all-agency function, but because we’d never been introduced, we averted our eyes as we passed them down the hall. Paulette Singletary was the only one among us who would stop someone and say, “You and I haven’t met yet, I don’t think. My name’s Paulette.” It might have been a southern thing. Paulette came from Georgia and retained an accent you could hear ever so faintly. With a greeting for everyone, a warm smile, and an easy laugh, Paulette was everyone’s favorite. It was a challenge finding someone so universally approved, unless it was Benny Shassburger, and even Benny had his detractors.
Joe went in search of Paulette, but not finding her at her workstation he took the liberty of replacing the small piece of stained glass in his hand — an angel of blue and russet — which he knew belonged on Paulette’s cube wall, because he had seen it there over a succession of weeks and months. From the minute he saw the glass glinting unexpectedly from the corner of his office, Joe knew where it belonged.
The following day, one of the new high-powered laptops went missing.
“You all are up to something,” Genevieve Latko-Devine said, sweeping her finger across a good number of us, “and I think you should knock it off.”
This was maybe a day or two after the stolen computer. Tough to recall if her remark — an accusation, really, a broad and mostly unfair one — came before an input, at lunch, or at the coffee bar, or maybe in an off-moment when several of us were gathered around some workstation before returning to our desks. Joe had told her how puzzled he’d been to find Paulette Singletary’s stained glass in his office. He wouldn’t have noticed if the door had remained open at that hour of the afternoon, but he had closed it to get some work done and there it was, catching sunlight in the corner.
Most of us honestly had no idea what Genevieve was talking about. “Oh? Was that also the case,” she asked us, “when someone Sharpied FAG on his wall?”
“That was Joe who did that,” said Karen Woo.
“Oh, give me a break, Karen. That’s ridiculous and you know it.”
“I don’t think it’s so ridiculous,” said Tom.
“You guys are sick in the head,” said Genevieve.
“Prove it,” replied Tom.
“Okay,” said Genevieve. “What about the time you decorated his office in biohazard tape?”
A few people earlier that year had gotten their hands on a roll of yellow plastic biohazard tape and given Joe’s office a good dressing. Whether he ever figured out the insinuations being made by that particular tape — that as a “fag,” he was a carrier of unpleasant disease — was unknown. In fact he never discussed the event. He just removed the tape from his doorway and his chair and, after parking and locking his bicycle, carried on as though nothing had happened. He didn’t seek names or run to Lynn Mason. He just placed the tape in his wastebasket.
“Or,” continued Genevieve, “what about the time — and this is one of my personal favorites — you locked him out of the server?”
Because all of our jobs were located on one central server, if one person had a job open on his or her computer, nobody else could open that job. It was a matter of protocol — only one person working on any one job at any given time. That way we eliminated redundancies and things of that nature. Word spread that Joe was on deadline on a project and needed access to a specific document. All it took to lock him out of that document was one person pulling it up on-screen. When Joe discovered he was locked out, he sent one e-mail, and then another, and then a third asking whoever had the document open to please close it, he was on deadline. Nobody replied. He was forced to walk around looking at everyone’s computer. When he found it at last the computer’s owner apologized to him, closed out of the job, then called someone else on a different floor on a faraway computer who would then open the job before Joe even got back to his desk, locking him out again. He’d return to the first guy, who would plead innocent, a half hour later he’d find the second guy, who would apologize, close out, and call someone new, starting the cycle over again. According to them, the idea was, if Joe Pope likes a late night, let’s give him a late night.
“Sick in the head,” said Genevieve.
First of all, we told her, we had nothing to do with Paulette Singletary’s stained glass ending up in Joe Pope’s office. And the whole FAG incident? Mike Boroshansky investigated and personally cleared every one of us of responsibility, and that included Tom Mota. Was it really so crazy, we asked Genevieve, to suggest that Joe had done it himself? Maybe he was seeking attention, or had a persecution complex. Besides, we continued in our defense, we weren’t trying to excuse anyone’s behavior, but Joe Pope wasn’t the most social guy in the world. After-work drinks for Joe Pope? No chance. Joe, you want to grab some lunch? Forget about it.
“When was the last time,” Genevieve asked us, before shaking her head and walking away, “that any of you asked Joe to lunch?”
GENEVIEVE MADE HER ACCUSATION around the same time that Karen Woo stopped by Jim Jackers’ cubicle one afternoon and made her infamous announcement.
“I’ve just come back,” she said, “from McDonald’s.”
It was like some kind of revelation, the way she said it. Jim looked up from whatever preoccupied Jim when he was at his desk. “Oh my god,” said Karen, moving closer, taking a seat in the plastic chair beside his desk, “I have just come back —” she paused for effect “— from McDonald’s.”
“What’s at McDonald’s?” asked Ji
m.
In Jim’s defense, it was impossible not to engage Karen when she stopped by your workstation. Her voice was a force of nature, her conversation a fast-moving rapid full of deadly churning eddies. She was like Hitler without the anti-Semitism, MLK without the compassion or noble cause. At the same time, Jim was an easy mark. He’d stop whatever he was doing and listen to just about anyone.
“Okay, I never go to McDonald’s,” said Karen. “I haven’t been to a McDonald’s probably since college. I wake up this morning, I have the biggest jones for a Filet-O-Fish.” “That’s weird,” said Jim. “Isn’t it?” said Karen. “So random. It’s seven in the morning, and I have the biggest jones. So, okay, I have to wait till lunch. I make it to eleven-thirty. But it’s still only eleven-thirty! I can’t go over to McDonald’s at eleven-thirty and order a Filet-O-Fish. That’s gross.” “Is it really called Filet-O-Fish?” asked Jim. “What, you think it’s Fish-O-Filet?” “No, I thought it was McFilet,” said Jim. “No it’s not McFilet, Jim,” said Karen. “That’s dumb. That’s seriously dumb. It’s not McFilet. Will you just listen to my story? So I wait an extra half hour, it kills me, but I wait. I go over there. They’re fucking out of Filet-O-Fishes. I’m standing at the counter, I’m like, uh . . . uh . . . and then I basically just fall over and die.” “So what’d you order?” “No, Jim, that’s not my point. I ordered nothing. I hate McDonald’s. I’m not ordering any cow product from McDonald’s, that’s disgusting. I wanted a Filet-O-Fish.” “So where’d you end up going?” Karen rolled her eyes and threw her head back in a display of monumental exasperation. “Jim,” she said, “you’re just not getting it. That’s not my point. Will you please just listen to my story? I had to pee real bad,” she continued, “so I went through the dining area to the back, and you’ve been to that McDonald’s, right? You know that to the left is the bathrooms, and to the right is the play area. You know what I mean by the play area, right? With the McFry guys, and the cheeseburger merry-go-round and all that?” “The PlayStation,” said Jim. “PlayStation, whatever,” said Karen. “No, PlayStation is the videogame,” said Jim. “PlayPlace!” “PlayStation, PlayPlace — whatever, Jim. You know what I’m talking about, right?” Jim nodded. “Okay, in the PlayPlace, they have one of those netted-off areas with all the plastic balls inside. You know what I’m talking about?” “Sure,” said Jim. “The pool of plastic balls.” “You know it?” asked Karen. “I know it,” said Jim. “So I go to the bathroom, I come out, I happen to look through the door to the PlayPlace — something catches my eye. I stop, I look. It’s Janine Gorjanc.” “What do you mean, it’s Janine?” said Jim. “In the pool of plastic balls,” said Karen. “What do you mean, in it?” “She’s inside with the balls,” said Karen. “Just sitting inside it. The balls up to here.” “What are you saying,” said Jim, “she’s sitting inside the pool of plastic balls?” “Inside it,” said Karen, “yes, with the balls up to here.” “What was she doing in there?” “Sitting.” “Right, but why?” “You’re asking me?” said Karen. “How should I know?” “Are you sure it was her?” “It was Janine Gorjanc,” said Karen. “She was sitting inside the pool of plastic balls.”