A gent in the bathroom next door was coughing, hacking his lungs to shreds. The absence of soundproofing in our apartment made me claustrophobic. There were twenty inhabited units in the building; a Victorian tenement where we were lucky to get a studio for a thousand a month. That was after being on a real estate agent’s list for two years.
What would’ve been the sense of telling Frank about Hendrix? It had been absurd: the waiting room, the Pinkertons, the scared shitless social workers in the corridor,
the policemen and their flashlights. When I stood next to Rocky and looked down at my drinking buddy, I saw the end as it would be for everyone. Fuck right I didn’t want to tell my husband about Harry.
“Who did it?” he asked.
“Rocky said it was a client.”
“Jesus, why would someone do that?”
Whoever killed the caseworker wasn’t important, and it was immaterial that Hendrix had become the target. It could’ve been any of the social workers at the DSS. The perpetrator could have been any one of our clientele. Authorship was extraneous; it wasn’t crucial. Something else had been, and it was this: I had seen in Hendrix’s unseeing eyes the hex of a snitch.
I could only guess that my fellow co-worker had failed to deliver on a bargain struck between himself and the other party. The social worker, distracted and self-centered, hadn’t fulfilled a promise, something that meant everything to his client.
“What are you going to do about this, Charlene?”
The light from the window facing the street slanted across Frank’s crewcut hair, his hunky shoulders and chest.
“I’m just doing my job, and I’ll ride out whatever fucking nonsense that comes. What else is there?”
A woman’s word was her life. If someone didn’t come through in our line of business, you could forget charity and forget about human decency. The devil would have his due and on a certain day, if you didn’t take care of the tri-flings, you’d end up bleeding to death on the dirty brown linoleum floor in the waiting room.
“It’s just one of those calls that turned out bad,” I said. “The grapevine has it, Hendrix refused the guy benefits. He thought the data on the application was a crock of shit.
Hendrix blew it. The first time you do that, can also be the last time.”
“Petard called here yesterday.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Why would I make a joke like that?”
“I don’t know…ah, hell, don’t mind me. It’s just…shit, he shouldn’t do that.”
“Well, don’t take it out on me.”
I was suspicious, hearing my boss had phoned. I didn’t even know how the dickhead got our number. It was unlisted; nobody at the office had it.
It was seven in the morning and things were turning ill-starred. Scarily, I didn’t mind. I thought about my briefcase bursting with food stamps stashed away under the bed. Frank had assured me that he wasn’t selling any of them on the street. And Petard? He was weakening. That’s why he was reaching out to me, to get his hooks into me and to drag me under with him.
“What did he want?”
“It was like he was drunk or on anti-depressants. He kept slurring his words, and he wouldn’t finish his sentences.”
Petard was on a binge. In the past, when I wasn’t married, I’d accompanied him on several prolonged drunks. They’d been loads of fun. But things had changed, and who knows what he would have made of Frank.
When my boss and I had been close, he’d evaluated my choice of spouses with a critical eye. My first husband, he’d been indifferent to him. But Gerald was glad when I got divorced. He helped me to recover from a post-marital tailspin by giving me a raise in salary, which made my colleagues painfully jealous. My second mate, he was allergic to him. Being a chronic drinker, Petard loathed alcoholics. You know how that goes: a drinker meets an alky and it’s
cats and dogs in the alley; the sparks begin to fly immediately.
I kept my voice steady, “What did he say? Anything important?”
“He wanted to know where you were. When I said you weren’t at home, he kept insisting that you were, that I was lying. And then he asked me, hadn’t we met before? When I said we had, and when I told him where, he laughed. And then he got angry, saying that I was keeping you from being friends with him.”
“What did you say to him then?”
“I told him to get sober and hung up on him.”
Frank put his arms around me, spooning me, saying he’d get up and start the coffee in a minute. I replied that would be nice. I closed my eyes and began to doze, only to find the late Harry Hendrix floating over the bed, over me and my partner.
Harry’s weak, pencil-thin legs were flailing. His skin was sebaceous, gelatine-like. One of his arms was flung out at a right angle, the other was crossed over his chest. The bullet had sucked a hole out of his torso, leaving a gap as deep as a breakfast bowl in his sternum. He kept asking me: where am I?
I didn’t have any answers for Hendrix. His second-rate loafers had looked cheap when they’d peeked out from under the medic’s plastic blanket. The heels were worn out; the soles had holes in them. Harry had ingratiated himself with Petard to keep his job, and what did it get him?
Nothing but his own death in a pair of shoes that were embarrassing to look at.
nineteen
A
t seven forty-five with a homicidal sun drilling me in the back, I let myself in the door, fifteen minutes before the DSS opened up for service. In doing so, I came across Eldon Paskins scrubbing the corridor floor. He was humming to himself, swirling the head of a mop over the linoleum in arabesques. A bucket of bleach-laced water was by his side. His face was solemn, a portrait of transcendence via manual labor.
The custodian was as transparent as a glass of tap water. If he was a snitch, and if he’d been through my desk at someone else’s behest, it was predicated by economic imperative. What freaked me out was that I might have to act that way, too, if I wanted to save my job. The thought made my pussy tingle. If I wasn’t diligent, that yeast infection was right around the corner.
The telephone was chiming when I got to my cubicle. Technically, I didn’t have to answer it or do anything else before eight o’clock. My hand lingered in mid-air, then I took the receiver, holding it away from my ear.
“Hassler speaking. Who’s this?”
“It’s me. Where’ve you been? It’s been ages. How are you?”
That bubbling voice said my name, and said it with a sinuous, but gratuitous lilt. I was reserved and cautious, knowing that in a second I could be sinking into the maw of another person’s neurosis.
“Hello, Gerald. I’m fine, thank you. And yourself?”
“You know how it is. The beginning of the new year. Lots of things to do, but I’m hanging in there, buster.”
“Hey, I’m happy to hear it.”
“Of course you are, and it makes me feel good to hear you say it.”
“So what’s on your mind?”
“Anything new?”
“What could be new?”
“You sound cynical, Charlene.”
“Think so?”
“Then what am I hearing?”
“Do you want a shopping list? How about giving me a paid vacation, and then a new office.”
“You’re adorable, truly adorable. But don’t be like this with me. You know, I’ve been meaning to call you.”
“Oh?”
“There it is again. That tone of voice. You should hear it. Now let me see…”
In the past, I hadn’t minded it when Petard flirted with me on the phone. When he’d been in an affable mood, his calls represented a welcome diversion from my diet of clients, applications, and the goo of petty gossip. I heard him fingering the pages of his schedule book. The sonance, amplified by a quirk in the telephone receiver, was brutal in my ear.
“Hassler? You still there?”
“Where else?”
“Good. We need to talk, you and I. It’s been months, hasn’t it?”
Squelching an honest, vengeful retort, I muttered, “Yeah, it has.”
“Anyway, can you make it for one o’clock? Are you free?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Will you come?”
“I’ll be there.”
“All right. See you then. Bye.”
A visit to my boss. I could see Petard smiling as he hung up the telephone, congratulating himself on how easy it was to handle Charlene Hassler. A pliable, easy-going woman that he had wrapped around his pinky. Domination and submission: these were the only commands Gerald comprehended.
The elevator was out of order, and I was climbing the stairs three at a time. I had an unlit cigarette in my mouth, ashes on my sandals, a peanut butter smudge on my favorite peasant blouse. My heart was slamming into my ribcage, similar to a prisoner trying to break out of a jail cell.
I was passing less and less people with each floor until I got to the last landing in the stairwell. Too bad I hadn’t shampooed my hair that morning because I was feeling frowsy, low on verve.
Petard’s office was halfway down a carpeted hallway. Unframed oil paintings were hanging on the walls. His door was cut from real wood, a rarity, and a sign on it said, “Do not disturb.”
My wristwatch told me it was five past one. Seeing that I was dillydallying, I didn’t stop to knock. I was going to be
mellow about all of this and walk into his lair as if I owned it.
And so I did that.
It took me a full ten seconds to register what I was seeing. Ten seconds is a long while by most standards. Political careers can end; assassinations come and go quicker than that. Earthquakes destroy cities in less time.
Petard was putting his cork into Lavoris on the disheveled cushions of a sofa in the waiting room to his office. She wasn’t wearing her customary silk palazzo pants; her thighs had the blue markings of middle age, but her calves were lissome, newly depilated. They were high in the air, poised like stirrups over Gerald’s milk-white trunk.
He was going up and down clumsily, intermittently jerking to one side. His undone turquoise and silver belt buckle flopped uselessly against her leg. To give himself more flexibility, Petard’s polka dot boxer shorts were down below his knees while he squashed Lavoris underneath his beach ball-sized stomach.
To include me was to humiliate me. To let me see this: it was a supremacist gesture by Petard, a spiritual coup de grace. In doing that, he was reminding me that I was under his thumb, as much as I’d ever been.
Gerald grunted audibly and his thrusting became singular, highlighting the flaccid musculature and the tendons on his freckled buttocks. He kept knifing himself into Lav’s pelvis. His belly jiggled through an unbuttoned blue dress shirt, a yellow and green tie strangling his neck.
Lavoris’s mouth was twisted into a spasm of dying and she started to weep, writhing under my boss. She seized his hair with both of her hands, holding on to those red locks, twining them around her fingers. Her eyes revolved backwards
into their sockets and she meowed, “Fuckin’ God! Oh God!”
The curtains on the windows in the office were wide open and I could see the freeway traffic inching by the DSS, bumper to bumper, roiling in car exhaust, no more than a few yards from us. A few of the motorists, stuck out there on the road with nothing to do, were looking back at me and at the scene in the window. Feeling like it was the best thing to do, I left Gerald and Lavoris where they were and went downstairs to get myself a cup of coffee.
twenty
I
had one final interview that afternoon, with an Afghani man wearing a t-shirt inscribed with the plea: “Ross Perot Rescue Us.”
My client had spunk. He said he’d been trying to get a job at a health food co-op in the Sunset district. He had his papers together, and I gave him a month’s worth of indigent Medi-Cal, a stack of food stamps, and three vouchers, each good for two consecutive nights in a bunk bed at the Donnelly Hotel on Market Street. It’s what we gave the first-timers. We called it the honeymoon package.
There were more clients waiting for me outside the door to my cubicle, sitting in folding chairs. They’d have to wait because I had diarrhea and it was making me shit three, four times a day, what with the Maalox I was drinking, pints of it.
At three fifty-five, like a head cold you didn’t want, Lavoris entered my office unannounced. What did she think this was, a Greyhound bus station? I was attending to the details of a client’s application, stamping the form with the official city and county seal. She plopped herself on top of a metal cabinet and x-rayed me with her eyes.
I didn’t see any sign of Gerald on her; no mashing or
denting in her suit. Her coiled and wired hair was immaculate. Yet there were differences about Lav. She was pensive, which accounted for how jittery she was acting, drumming her fingers on a filing shelf. If I were smart, I’d take the time to see what direction these changes took. To see how they affected me.
“What’ve you been doing, Charlene?”
“Just some applications. You?”
“I was restless. My paperwork was boring me to death.”
She lighted up a cigarette and tossed the match onto the floor. Both of us watched it sizzle a hole into the carpeting. We were quiet for a bit and I relished it, but Lavoris had an agenda. She was the first to violate the silence.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked.
“About?”
“Your job, remember?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll manage.”
She waved her cigarette at me. “That might be true. But look at it from another angle. How long do you think any of this is going to last?”
I had asked the same thing of myself, more or less. Lavoris was subdued, introspective. And I knew she was listening to the underlying intent of her own question. Age lines that I’d never seen before had found a home in her mouth and eyes. She picked a speck of lint from her suit pants and turned to me. “But it gets worse.”
This allusion sent my blood pressure through the ceiling, but when Lavoris saw that she couldn’t goad me into a response, she crossed her legs at the ankles and added, “Petard is thinking about leaving. He doesn’t want to go down on a sinking ship.”