Marcelo in the Real World (8 page)

“Well, well, well. Does she? That’s interesting. Well, off you go. I’ll tell Wendell to take you to the club for some squash.”

As soon as I step out of Stephen Holmes’s office, I write down the word “squash” in my yellow notebook. I gather the word refers to some kind of game similar to tennis, but I don’t know why they named it after the vegetable.

“Marchelo! Hey, Marchelo!” At first I think that Stephen Holmes is calling me from his office, but then I see that the voice is coming from the office directly across. I walk to the doorway and see Wendell sitting behind a stack of cardboard boxes. He looks like a younger, messier version of Stephen Holmes.

“My name is pronounced Mar-se-lo,” I say. I think of the bad word that Yolanda used to refer to Stephen Holmes and his son, Wendell.

“Of course it is. Sit down, Marcelo, sit for a second.”

“I need to help Jasmine. She’s going to show me how to operate the copying machine,” I say, still standing.

“Just for a minute.” Wendell comes from behind the cardboard boxes and removes a paper bag from the chair where he wants me to sit. “I need a mental break from this crap.”

I sit down and put my hands on my legs. I want to say something to Wendell, who seems to be waiting for me to start the conversation, but I can’t think of anything to say. Despite hours of practicing at Paterson, initiating “small talk” is still a formidable challenge for me. “You play squash,” I finally think to say. Only I’m aware that I did not enunciate the phrase in the form of a question.

“I see you’ve been talking to the old man.”

“Your father is not old,” I say.

“I’ll tell him you said that. It’ll make him happy.”

“It is good to be happy.” I think of Jasmine. Jasmine is not
happy I’m working at the law firm. I’m not happy either. The effort required to converse politely is draining every drop of happiness out of me.

“Speaking of happy, I’d be happy if I were spending my days in the same room with Jasmine. She’s hot, isn’t she?”

“Hot.” Why is it that whenever I don’t understand how a word is used, I tend to repeat it?

“Do you notice things like that, Marcelo? You know, when a woman is hot to look at, pleasant to the eyes, attractive? Do you get that urge we all get when we see a good female body?”

“No.” I think the answer to that question is no. I gather that Wendell is talking about sexual attraction.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No.”

“That’s not possible. Are you attracted to men then?”

“No.”

“Maybe your testosterone hasn’t kicked in yet. If it hasn’t, it soon will. The male’s need to sow our seed wherever, whenever, as much and as often as we can—maybe it hasn’t hit you yet. You’re what, eighteen?”

“I turned seventeen on March twenty-sixth.”

“Then the hormones of adolescence have long started to flow. I can tell just by looking at you. Look at you. You’re almost as tall as I am and I’m six feet. Your voice is deep. You shave, right?”

“Yes.”

“You’re built solid. Look at those biceps.”

Wendell grabs my arm and squeezes it. I try to pull it away. I don’t like people to touch me without warning me first. I hope that I have not offended Wendell. “I lift weights every day.”

Wendell ignores my statement and goes back to his original topic of conversation. “You mean to say that looking at Jasmine and looking at me are all the same to you.”

“You and Jasmine are persons.”

“But have different types of bodies.”

“You are both persons. You are essentially the same.”

“That’s deep, Marcelo. It really is. If you really feel that way and are not trying to pull my leg, or anything else for that matter, I take my hat off to you, I guess. But I’m not so sure. I don’t think you’re being totally honest with me.”

“You don’t have a hat on.” It is my attempt at humor and at changing the subject but it doesn’t work on either count.

“You mean to tell me that you never,” Wendell lowers his voice, “never want to, you know, do it.” Wendell has made a circle with his index finger and his thumb and is sticking the middle finger from his other hand repeatedly in and out of the circle.

“It.”

“It.” Now Wendell lifts his arm slowly up in the air like an elephant raising his trunk.

I know that Wendell’s finger poking is a gesture meant to signify sexual intercourse and that the rising arm signifies an erection. The rules regarding sexuality and conversations about sexuality are hazy, confusing. I don’t know whether Wendell is joking or whether he is interested in discussing the topic seriously. I decide that Wendell is most probably joking and I don’t need to respond. I stand up and say, “I need to go help Jasmine.”

“Hold on, hold on.” Wendell pulls me down. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I was just curious, from an anthropological point of view.”

“I was not offended,” I say. I stand up again.

“Wait a second,” he says, standing up as well. “Let me fix your collar.” Before I know what he’s doing, he unbuttons the top button of my shirt. “If you’re going to spend time with Jasmine, you might as well not look like a dork.”

When I get back to the mailroom, Jasmine hands me a piece of paper and says to me, “I made a list of the tasks you need to learn. We’ll start after lunch. We’re going to spend the afternoon going over things and tomorrow you’ll do them on your own.”

I walk to my desk and read the paper that Jasmine has given me.

Aurora once told me that she knew I was different within the first few months after I was born, because as a baby, I never cried. She had no way of knowing if I was hungry or if my stomach hurt
until I was old enough to point and talk. Even when I fell and it was obvious that I had hurt myself, I did not cry. When I didn’t get my way, I would go off by myself and sulk or have a tantrum. But I never cried. Later, when I was eleven and Abba died, I didn’t cry. When Joseph, my best friend at St. Elizabeth’s, died, I didn’t cry. Maybe I don’t feel what others feel. I have no way of knowing. But I do feel. It’s just that what I feel does not elicit tears. What I feel when others cry is more like a dry, empty aloneness, like I’m the only person left in the world.

So it is very strange to feel my eyes well with tears as I read Jasmine’s list.

E
very morning this week, after the first mail run, my task has been to go to all the copying and printing machines in the office and fill them up with paper, as well as leave packages of paper next to them. Moving around the office with a cart full of mail or paper for the copying and printing machines is my least favorite task. Inevitably someone will say something to me and I have to respond.

Small talk. I know all about small talk. I studied small talk at Paterson and have a number of set responses to small talk initiated by others, as well as a number of small talk questions for those times when, for whatever reason, I feel called upon to start the small talk. In Social Interaction class, we learned to formulate four or five questions from the day’s events. By reading the paper or by searching in our computers, we memorized questions about the weather, about sports, about the latest happenings. Every morning this week, I have gone to a Web page that reports on local events and have written down a few questions just in case.
“What do you think of the Boston Red Sox losing to the New York Yankees?” Questions like that.

Fortunately, I haven’t had to use any of my prepared questions. When I come in the morning Jasmine is already here. She hands me my daily list and we each go about what we have to do in silence. I like it that way. I think Jasmine does as well because most of the work she does at her desk, she does with headphones on. But sometimes I wonder what Belinda was like and whether Jasmine would put her headphones on if Belinda were working here instead of me.

Opening up boxes and taking out packages of paper is something that I can do without too much concentration. Many of the jobs here at the law firm are like that, which is fine with me because then I can think about other things like I’m doing now. What I’m thinking about now is whether there is ever any “large talk” in the law firm. Sometimes I overhear the lawyers talking about their work. They talk about the content of letters they received or what someone said to them over the telephone or about what happened in a meeting. I hear a lot of “Then he said” or “Then she said” and this reporting of what other people have said is retold with a lot of emotion. This I think is the law firm’s equivalent of large talk, since emotion is not something that accompanies small talk.

I wonder how I would define large talk. Most of my talks with Rabbi Heschel are large talk since they involve questions about God. The conversation that Aurora and I had after Arturo told me about the summer job at the law firm was large talk. All of my conversations with my friend Joseph at the hospital were large
talk, even if they were about small things. The reason for that is that both of us knew that each word counted. The one thing I don’t understand is why I never made a distinction between small talk and large talk at Paterson. I know it doesn’t make sense, but for some reason all the talking that I did and heard at Paterson seemed like large talk.

“Excuse me.”

Someone is speaking to me. I turn around and there is the secretary who sits in space number eighteen. I search for her name. Space eighteen. Beth. The lawyer she works for is Harvey Marcus. I stand there not knowing exactly what to say to her.

“Where is Jasmine?”

I like those kinds of questions. “She went to the post office.”

“Shit!”

This is an unexpected response. Then I see a small stack of documents on the counter and I understand that she needs Jasmine to do something for her. I catch her looking at the big, white clock that hangs above my desk.

“I told her I was bringing her some documents that needed to be bound before eleven.”

I know about binding documents because Jasmine pointed out the machine in the back that is used for the task, but Jasmine has not yet taught me how to use it. “She will be back by ten.” I turn around to look at the clock. It is nine-thirty.

“Harvey needs these for a Board of Directors meeting that we’re having here at eleven.”

I look at the documents that she has placed on the counter. “There are only six documents there,” I say.

“I need ten copies of each, and each one of them has to be tabbed and bound.” She is not looking at me. She is writing on one of the request slips on the counter. She presses so hard on the slip as she writes that the slip tears. “Shit! Tell me this is not happening to me.”

I don’t think she is asking me to tell her this. I don’t know what “tabbed” means and I don’t know how to bind, but I can make copies, so I say, “I can make the copies. I can start.”

She looks at me. “Aren’t you supposed to be re…I mean, slow or something?”

How can I answer that? I know in this case what follows after she stopped: “retarded.” So Beth somehow expected me to be retarded or slow or something, and I said something or offered to do something that deviated from that expectation. But where did she get the expectation that I was retarded? Who put it there in the first place?

“Hey, are you there?” She is snapping her fingers at me. “I guess if you work here it means you can do the work, right?”

I don’t respond. But I don’t think that the conclusion to her assumption is necessarily correct.

“You see these yellow stickies? These are the places where the tabs are going to go. You need to take them off the documents when you make the copies, but then you need to put them back on so you can place the tabs.”

“What are tabs?”

She looks at the clock on the wall. There is a grimace on her face. I have seen kids at Paterson make that grimace seconds before they break down in tears of anger and frustration. “I really
don’t have time for this. Here’s the request slip. I got it here in time for it to get done on time. If the firm can’t hire decent support…Harvey is going to have to deal with it. I did my part.” All the time she says this, her hands are in the air moving about. I wonder how it is possible for her to feel what she appears to be feeling over a simple task like copying and binding.

At ten Jasmine arrives. She is carrying a plastic bag, which she places on her desk. She comes over and looks at the six stacks of documents that I have made: Ten copies of each of the documents that Beth left with me. I can tell she is wondering what I am doing.

“Beth,” I say. I hand her the torn request slip. “They need to be tabbed and bound. There is a meeting at eleven. She was very upset that you were not here.”

Jasmine nods. Unlike many of the other people who work at the firm, Jasmine is always calm. Even when she is angry, like at Juliet for example, you can tell that the anger does not affect her. The reason I can tell is that her breathing never alters. A person who is truly angry has physical reactions that last for a while, even after the event that caused the anger is gone. “You started with the copying,” she says. She picks up the top copy from the first set. “There is no table of contents. How do we know where to put the tabs?”