“You let that fool get under your skin?” Lavoris asked. “Rocky, that’s it. You want to be a clown? Why don’t you leave while I try to get Charlene here not to call the cops on your butt.”
The security chief sat up, swung his legs over the table’s edge, brushed off his blazer and hobbled off a tad worse for wear.
“You,” Lav said to me. “Get off the table. These people were having a meeting. C’mon, there’s work to do around here.”
I propped myself up with one elbow and watched everybody scuttling about picking up papers, straightening out the chairs. The force field of Lavoris’s instinctive belligerence was restoring harmony, putting everything back where it belonged.
twenty-five
P
etard showed up while I was finishing a three-way telephone conference with a downtown paralegal and a client. I dropped the receiver and voila, there was my supervisor, my former mentor.
There was a concrete, lasting presence around Gerald. He coaxed the gravity, mass, and volume out of every nearby object, and pulled it towards him. Call it personal magnetism; some people said he was a bloodsucker.
He had a method of gazing at someone off-center in the face, so that you felt unsure of yourself. Whenever Petard was talking to someone he made sure the lighting in a room was at his back, giving him a halo and making him appear, by inference, larger than life.
“You too busy to have a chat?”
There wasn’t any expression on his florid, beefsteak face. His candid, guileless eyes had a steady, familiar I’llshow-you-nothing-until-you-show-me-yours glint.
“No, Gerald, I can give you five minutes. Why don’t you come in.”
“Thanks, don’t mind if I do.”
Other than the instances when I’d intruded upon him
and Lavoris, I hadn’t seen much of Petard in the last year. Our relationship had changed a great deal. At one time, we’d been mirrors of each other’s needs and ambitions. But the elements of our friendship, those things which had brought us closer, now moved at contrasting speeds, never overlapping.
“Charlene, I must say, you’re rather svelte. Have you been dieting?”
“Thanks. No, I haven’t. You want a cigarette?”
“Nah, I gave it up a few months ago. I started wheezing every morning. I didn’t like that, and my father, the pious shit, God rest his soul, he died from emphysema.”
Watching Petard sit down, easing his hips into the folding chair across from me, I could see he’d gained approximately twenty-five pounds. Mostly around his waist and thighs. He was wearing a custom made suit that did an admirable job in hiding his girth. The drinking veins on his skin were darker, redder than ever, like they’d been nailed to his cheeks with a staple gun.
“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, Hassler?”
His entire face crinkled into a fan of deep laugh lines that started in the corners of his eyes, working back into his hairline. He leaned forward in the chair; it creaked under him as he said, “The same business day after day, isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure I see it that way, but yes, it is…the same old shit.”
Surprising me, he stood up, hiked his slacks and parked his monstrous thighs on the far right hand corner of my desk.
“You’re looking good, Charlene. No zits or anything. You exercising?”
“Nope. No time nor inclination.”
“Me neither. You eating out much these days?”
“Hardly ever. Who can afford it?”
“Are you drinking?”
I said to him, aware of his eyes on my bosom, “Not at all.”
“Right. Me neither. Look, I’ve been meaning to get around to seeing you. I’ve sent notes. Did you ever get them?”
“Yeah, I got them, some of them.”
It was because of him that I’d forfeited the previous twelve years of my life to the DSS. The cigarette girl of welfare. I knew the decade had gone somewhere; I don’t know where. That was untrue. All the time went into Petard’s bloated face. Every day and every month, with the promises that had cobbled those years together. Gerald had said I would go far, that I would rise high in the reich of social services. The bastard had manipulated me into a cul-de-sac.
“Hassler, what’s going on here?”
“Give me a break.”
“What?”
“I’m busy. You know how it is, chipping away at my caseload.”
“Is that all?”
“What else would I be doing?”
“You don’t have to get churlish about it.”
“I don’t know…maybe I feel let down.”
“Yes? What about?”
“It’s not worth going into.”
More than anything I wanted Petard to know that I didn’t care. That after toiling like a slave for him, feeding myself on his measly assurances, believing that my career would improve—and now hearing the rumors that he was leaving just as everything got difficult—I wanted him to know I didn’t give a damn.
He looked past my shoulder to the photographs on
the wall. A snapshot of Frank, a framed diploma from the California licensing board stating that I was qualified to be a social worker. Petard observed these symbols of my life without any visible interest. He knew my history and had used it well.
“Let’s not bullshit each other, Charlene. Yes, I know there’ve been problems. We could start with your career. How did you feel when you failed to get the promotion you wanted?”
I didn’t want to answer that question.
“You thought it was a raw deal, and it was. It wasn’t easy to turn you down,” he admitted. “But I didn’t come down here to rehash the past.”
“That’s white of you.”
“Please, you know as well as I do, there’s no call for disrespect. So here’s my advice.”
“Advice? What makes you think I want it?”
“Precisely. Here’s what I say. You ought to leave this place while you can, on your own terms. I can help.”
“I’m sure you can. It’s amazing how helpful people are when they want you out of the picture.”
He held out his hands to me. “Don’t interrupt me. It’s for your own good. You’ve heard rumors that I might be leaving?” Petard sneered, to demonstrate his ambivalence. “I don’t know…we’ll know shortly.”
“What’s that?”
“C’mere.”
Gerald leaned over and touched my chin with his blunt fingers. Other than Frank, any man who did that, I’d have slapped him. But something in me desisted from doing it, something that was made from nostalgia for a time when Petard and I had been more together. He was trembling; his lupine mouth grazed my ear. His tinsel-red hair was in my eyes.
“Listen,” he said.
“To what?”
Did he mean the waiting room, the Pinkertons, and the people in the corridor? Or the alcoholic temblor in his own head?
“Can’t you hear them?”
“Who?”
“Every loser who wants to see you fail, that’s who.”
He stroked my arm, and even after the damage he’d done to me, I let him. His paranoia was unaffected, safe for me to be around. It loosened the furrows and the creases on his face, and made him seem young again.
“Are you okay, Gerald?”
“Oh, yes, yes.”
His voice was muffled in the unstarched folds of my blouse collar. I traced my index finger across his jaw; he was unshaven, but not unpleasantly. Petard quieted down, and I was relieved. Not only because I didn’t want him to have a breakdown, but Gerald had grown children who were older than me. Mothering the man, that was not what I was about.
twenty-six
I
n between bites of a spicy burrito, a gift to myself for having survived the morning, I heard a ruckus starting to escalate in the hallway. The voices involved were female and unrecognizable. I was wondering what was going on when Lavoris burst into my office followed by two women. She spat at me:
“What’re you doing? Sleeping? Where’s there a computer in this building that works? These ladies are getting on my tits.”
I shrugged my shoulders to signal that I didn’t know. Lavoris, stressed out, shouted an indecipherable gibe at the two women trailing after her. The younger one of the pair, a sepia-colored woman in a jeans jacket kept arguing with my colleague. I felt sorry for the wee girl; anyone who crossed Lavoris was risking a calamity.
For a social worker, Lav had a talent for bullying her clients, particularly the pregnant women. She was inflamed from the negative fallout of womb envy.
“Hey, baby,” she said. “I don’t have all day for this. You’ve got to give me the information I requested. Why can’t you do that?”
The three women were at the door facing each other,
quibbling. It didn’t look too dangerous. Lavoris got the last word in, as she always did. She was turning around to walk out when the girl had the gumption to backhand her, giving it to my co-worker in the mouth.
The other woman jumped into the fray, clambering on Lavoris’s back, driving a fist into the social worker’s collar-bone. My cohort got sandwiched in the middle and fell to the floor after knocking over a chair.
By the time I got the burrito out of my mouth, Simmons was at the door. It was only a matter of seconds before the Pinkertons would arrive. You could hear them in the corridor, scampering in our direction. Lavoris seemed to understand that; she threw a punch, taking care to protect her face.
Her suit jacket got a rent in it and the heel of one shoe snapped off, laying there on the floor like a golfing tee. But Lav, to her credit, displayed no emotion. She turned over on her back, flailing her legs, raising her knees up to guard her breasts, because that’s what the bigger woman was aiming for.
Lavoris wouldn’t give up. That wouldn’t have been the caseworker who incited conflict with her coworkers. That wasn’t the temptress who seduced her boss, nor was it the lass who’d kissed me years ago in an unstaffed administrative office. She said to me when we broke our clinch, “You taste like abalone, you know that, Charlene?”
I had contemplated Lavoris in a variety of poses over the years, some of them pseudo-sexual. Seeing her in battle, I was imbued with an understanding that we were at a turning point, she and I.
Rocky and a quintet of Pinkertons stalked into the cubicle and without wasting a second, the security chief efficiently knocked the larger woman off Lavoris. With his foot, he kicked the girl, yelling, “Cool it with the shit!”
When the two clients heard the order, they got to their feet, dreadfully glum. The fight these women had in them, it died as quickly as it had ignited. Rocky handcuffed them without any resistance.
Pulling herself together, Lavoris held onto a chair and adjusted her stockings, then fiddled with a barrette in her hair. After the two women were taken outside, manacled to each other, Rocky came over to her. Trying to be helpful, he asked, “You need a hand, hon?”
Her near-purple eyes were puffed up and haughty. The cups of a black silk bra were visible through a rip in her Armani blouse. Lav had held her own during one hell of a cat fight and she knew it. “For Pete’s sake, leave me alone. Don’t come near me,” she said.
There was a look of canceled amazement on Rocky’s corrugated face. A sadness and reckoning that couldn’t be put into words. I could see how much the Pinkerton cared for Lavoris. How much he admired her, and how he wanted her.
He would put up with any amount of rejection to get next to the woman. It was extraordinary to see the sacrifices a man would make to get near some nookie. To be close to a female who didn’t want him, not in this lifetime.
“Don’t you touch me,” she said, eyes slit, mascara spoiled. “I can take care of myself, thank you.”
After rebuking Rocky, Lavoris picked up the broken heel from the floor, and with a hitch in her stride, she reeled out of the cubicle into the corridor. She wobbled by the clients and the Pinkertons, bearing toward the exit doors in the waiting room.
twenty-seven
W
ith the computer software malfunctioning, we’d temporarily misplaced Mrs. Dominguez’s file. Simmons, being her original caseworker, said it might’ve been shipped out to the annex downtown in a box of disks because her papers weren’t at Iron Mountain. We didn’t have documentation about Frances and her income. Since she didn’t have any legal identification, I thought I’d expedite the process by getting her prints.
One thing, maybe two things, about my clients that I didn’t understand. They complained about what they had to go through. Why all the peevishness about getting fingerprinted? At least they didn’t have to take a drug test or undergo retina scans. But if that’s what it took to get food stamps, what was the problem?
There was a firm knock at the cubicle door, and Mrs. Dominguez tramped into my office, showing gusto. I directed her to a chair, watching her settle on its cushion, adjusting herself like she was going to take a belated
plotz.
Frances was dressed in an oversized Vietnam jungle army coat and a red babushka was knotted under her chin.
Her high cheekbones were well-toned for her age, fertilized with Nivea moisturizing lotion, which I could smell from behind my desk.
I waited until she was comfortable before doing anything. The ink pad and blotter, easy-wash napkins and paper towels were on my desktop. Near these items was a blotter sheet that had her surname typed on it in sans-serif lettering.
“What is it you want me to do?” she asked.
She laid her hand, palm up on the desk. She was prepared to have it amputated, to have it severed from her wrist, if that meant she would receive one hundred and fourteen dollars worth of food stamps each month.
“See the ink pad?” I said. “I’m going to dip each of your fingers into it, and then, see that blotter paper with your name on it?” I pointed at the shining white sheet of paper with the fragile red lines. “That’s where your prints will go. That’s all I have to do.”
“Is this necessary?”
“It’s the law, Frances. I can’t do anything about it.”
Mrs. Dominguez questioned me with an obsidian black gaze, trying to figure out what genus of insect I was. But she let me pick up her hand, and I guided the thumb, the index finger, then every other digit onto the ink pad. I made sure she got enough ink on each fingertip, so we wouldn’t have to repeat the procedure twice.