It became apparent to Maurice that his work didn’t truly exist. He sniped at his superior in secret memos when the phone bills, messenger bills, temporary help bills, and production schedules got out of hand. He meant to protect his flank and contest Little Boss’s turf by ingratiating himself with the Big Boss, who liked to see pockets of waste stamped out. Instead, he got stuck in a petty function that lay outside the job description.
A large cost-saver would have been the elimination of Maurice’s superfluous position. He even asked to be demoted, but there was no way back to the anonymity and autonomy of downstairs, and once you earn more money, my boss said, you spend more, find that you need every new penny, as if you are worse off than before the increase, not to mention the vanity of the whore or the lapse of the rebel who said his master would not part with him for even a thousand doubloons.
Then Maurice had an inspiration: the company wanted him
to quit, to perish in a fever of frustration. He saw it as his moral duty to stay on as the sandbag, to beat them at their own game. “Window dressing,” the tactic was called. He sat under his thatched roof of hair, on display, mechanical, like the figures that appear in the Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue.
My boss said that at first it upset everyone to see Maurice so miserable. That was what Maurice wanted them to see. After a while everyone got used to it. This wasn’t family; it was business. My boss revived at the thought that one day Little Boss would retire, one day Maurice would draw up contracts and advertising budgets. One day he would have “input.” Meanwhile, Maurice was marooned on an island of resentment, surrounded by the buzz of the office.
My boss always stopped before Maurice’s door, in memory of their morning chats in a simpler, more innocent time. He spoke over the threshold, the barrier, as if Maurice had flayed himself and hung his fiery skin on a clothesline like a tattered rug that cordoned off an oily corner in a welfare hotel room. My boss stood there, scraped one dissenting Hush Puppy against the other.
He couldn’t think of what to say, except to ask Maurice what he was reading. Maurice was never without books. They were, like his skin, a form of privacy, his screen. The weight of the books that accompanied him through his hours was also a rebuke to the company. Maimonides, Saint-Simon. “Ricardo’s analysis of rent,” he answered one morning.
I learned, indirectly, at the black table, where we dealt in false impressions with the aplomb of black marketeers, that Maurice had had some serious problems as a teen trying to find himself in East St. Louis and later as an athletic superstar at college in Baton Rouge. From him, we heard almost every day that he
would one day work in television. That’s where the influence on culture really was.
Meanwhile, he had a complicated relationship with other blacks who crashed the perimeters of his cultural preserve. Unfortunately, that took in so much, he was argumentative about almost everything, from
Soul Train,
the black version of
American Bandstand
, to Aesop, “the great black moralist.” Maurice thought of this as rigor. He’d start off on how fantastic realism had long been a part of African culture but the white critical establishment pulled a fast one by letting the South Americans take credit for it.
“Mother, this is too lovely,” Virtea told him. “You are a scream.”
He withdrew, saying that it was time for him to make a dash. An old hand from maintenance reminded Virtea that Maurice was, in fact, painfully shy, and she should be sympathetic when he tried to come out of his shell to them. Virtea said the strands of long hair on his nasty sweaters proved that the caped crusader wasn’t too shy to do the Mess Around.
The company Christmas party was held in our floor lobby, between the banks of elevators and the coffee station. There were plates of morose Santa cookies on the receptionist’s hastily cleared desk, a poinsettia brown around the edges, and a string of taped-up lights. The lethal Christmas punch that put us in mind of English pond life was a tradition.
Aqua celestis,
the old hands called it. The ingredients were a secret. The brew peeled the wax from the sides of cups. Theories about the recipe were disgusting and, after one swallow, absolutely convincing. Morale worsened by the glass.
Bonuses were small, sales poor, and projections so laughable that many employees didn’t put in an appearance until after the
Big Boss’s seasonal toast. By this drink it grieves me to tell you that we spent it all. My boss, whose list of holiday books, which included one on how to dress to enhance fertility, was having a spectacular flop, chugged three cups and went to wage war in toy stores.
Our honeymoon was long over, but he would not yell at me for my idiotic mistakes like a real boss. I saw the wisdom of the secretary’s motto: Not only did I not do it, but you made me do it. The milder his reproaches, the more keenly I felt his disappointment. Whenever he came up to me, from behind, to ask a question to which I never had an answer, I was, invariably, eating a second lunch at my desk, and not only was I covered with crumbs, I was in the middle of a personal call, long distance.
It was the Christmas cease-fire, but the white partitions did not come down. The clusters formed according to rank: editors remained with editors; publicity people with publicity people; and evidently the Black Caucus had gone fishing. I began to experience the reality of the phrase “social death” and missed my boss, as when the only person you know at a party has fled to another room, leaving you to pretend that you are fascinated by the barometric pressure gauge on the wall.
“So this Knut Hamsun, is he in town?” Little Boss asked the Power Bitch.
Some of the employees took advantage of the occasion to stuff their book bags with office supplies. The most that I had been able to decide about them was that they suspected that interoffice mail transmitted germs and that they went to shrinks. Insurance forms often fell into the aisles. My fellow secretaries and I seemed to have taken our work habits from the CIA’s
Freedom Fighter’s Manual of Sabotage Techniques
: Come late to work; delay completing tasks; call in sick so as not to work; telephone to make false hotel reservations; damage books; break light bulbs and
windows; cut down trees; drop typewriters; spill liquids; leave lights on; telephone giving false alarms of fires and crimes; threaten the boss by telephone.
A lithe, dewy secretary, the office beauty, floated toward the elevators with a cord, possibly that of an answering machine, wagging from the bottom of her Annie Hall coat. Delfina was the department’s balletomane. Her neck lengthened and the bun on her head tightened week by week. A biochemical salt tablet was forever dissolving on her tongue. She had a slightly affected Foxcroft drawl when she spoke, which wasn’t often, since she let a perpetually ironic gaze say everything.
Delfina was so aloof that Little Boss, who thought of the lowest form of love, the office romance, as another corporate perk, went so far as to intercept her getaway with “I nearly did a triple soutenu turn after that last glass of heaven.” She paused to blow away the come-on he had laid before her like a dried rose. “Looks like a dick, only smaller,” she was known to have said to a flasher. The cord was plainly visible between her white stockings. Little Boss’s leer was bound to slide in that direction.
Maurice announced an international call for the managing editor. He called out again, like the Philip Morris bellhop. Little Boss grumbled about his secretary as he tried one after another of the dead buttons on a nearby phone, which gave Maurice enough time to signal Delfina that her tail was showing. It had retracted into her coat by the time she turned in the elevator, and she bestowed on her prince a smile of mischievous luminosity.
Little Boss spooned out punch for the troupers, those who understood the season’s spirit and hadn’t taken advantage of it just to have a half day. Loyal copy editors were made to guess the day’s temperature in various cities of the Southern Hemisphere. A wrong answer brought another cup of punch. The
Power Bitch placed herself discreetly in a referee posture and discussed with the publicity director the pressure she had been under to get her house in Amagansett ready for the holidays.
Once the punch bowls were empty people sneaked away. They tottered off in tight affinity groups. I heard the Power Bitch invite Maurice along for eggnog. Maybe she was feeling the strain of always maintaining combat readiness. Go out into the highway and hedges and compel them to come in. He didn’t answer.
By the time I got off the telephone, a security guard was making his rounds, the cleaning lady in her blue smock was dumping ashtrays in the garbage. Soon she would run a dust cloth over the enormous wall cases in the main hall, which made me think of ducal bonnets and red gowns in glass caskets. The cases contained mostly the new titles of the season, sure shots that were not helping the company out of its hole. Discountenanced already, the books would be piled all too soon on remainder tables in big bookstores like damaged altinelle bricks on a wharf. My boss once said he knew the company was in trouble because the employees didn’t steal its books.
The sky was a scrim of creeping mists, but the papal bubble car and its detractors had been visible from our office windows. Demonstrations at Rockefeller Center were audible. Feminists in chador or in the attire of the Peacock Throne’s generals, and students in ski masks or in the chains of the SAVAK’s prisoners, raised the symbols of another misread revolution. The company’s employees stepped over it all. They knifed through picket lines, squeezed around police barricades, argued with badges, ignored bullhorns. They did what they had to do to cross the street and get to the office.
The New Year had begun with a round of layoffs. The corridors were quiet except for the sounds of flu symptoms. A muzzled
quality was palpable on every floor. Telephones were snatched up on the first ring, as if to shut them up. Employees were afraid to wander too far from their desks or to be too conspicuous. An unattended desk might be jotted down or the Big Boss might come along and lop off the loudest heads, even the editorial director’s.
No matter what was happening outside, inside the office affairs had compressed around a single point: survival. Secretaries no longer gathered at the coffee station to savor the fall of a snotty higher-up type. Press clips that ridiculed the Big Boss’s high-handed, inept rule appeared on the departmental bulletin board above the premature softball sign-up sheet. Maurice didn’t bother to hide that he was the culprit.
Maurice seemed to fatten on the company’s bad luck. Natty herringbone suits replaced his usual formless sweaters. His breast pocket overflowed with silky colors. My boss discovered him showing his teeth into the telephone in the mornings, his weighty books set aside.
He unlocked his jaw and ate up every discouraging report, which earned him the distrust neighbors in hard times are said to show toward someone they suspect is feeding on a secret stash while they go without. There was something taunting in his demeanor, the strut of a man who has no intention of revealing the whereabouts of his hoard.
Maurice straightened up to his true height. Little Boss put a stop to the funkadelics of Maurice’s new radio, but he was powerless to prevent his whistling as he walked about at a smart clip. He saw red when Maurice cleaned his office, made room for Delfina, who paraded across the threshold that no one else had thought to breach. She perched on the edge of Maurice’s desk, swung her long legs, laughed in a throaty way at the mirror of her compact, and waited with him for five o’clock.
The secretaries said Delfina was making Maurice as happy as a Rasta. Little Boss made scenes. “That message was for me. It was not for my assistant. If you take a message for me, please be so kind as to put it on my desk. Do not put it on her desk. If you can’t do that, I’ll thank you not to take messages for me.”
“Well, we all commit crimes against humanity, don’t we,” Maurice said over his padded shoulder.
Maurice began to stay away from work for days on end. We never knew where he went, but go places he did, because he would return with stories that were a little revolting. He had a brutal picture of the city. We watched Delfina to see if there was any change in her ironic expression, but she hardly seemed to notice his absences. She sailed out of the elevators as usual, intent upon the mystic book of the dance and nothing else.
Little Boss turned on her one afternoon. “Why do you have an electric pencil sharpener and I don’t?”
“Because she’s a terrible person,” the Power Bitch said.
Little Boss followed his scarlet ears back to his office. The Power Bitch went also and shut the door, but not before she had fixed Delfina with a look through her thick makeup that made it clear that it was for his sake alone that she had spoken up.
I got the impression that my boss felt challenged by Maurice’s disaffection. He stopped throwing the I Ching when he had to make decisions. He discarded his Hush Puppies and cut his hair. He said he knew I was paid enough to invest in a tie, apologized, and promised to take me to lunch if his latest deal worked out well, if I owned a tie by then. He began to talk of “product.”
One morning I thought that everyone had gone out the night before and splurged on new hairdos, facial massages, contact lenses, acupuncture, résumé-writing classes, and tennis rackets. The company rallied. Executives congratulated one another, like scientists after a successful rocket test. My boss had a surprise
hit on his hands, a sleeper from the slush pile. In the aisles, among the white picket fences, the sales figures made him hearty. “Look at me. All grown up and having lunch with a television producer.” Privately, he was afraid of success and called home to make certain that his children were still breathing. He also began to ask me to dial numbers for him, like a secretary should.