Mezzanine

by Nicholson Baker

  I looked at the three of them—two whites and the long-running blue—and I decided I would wear my slightly older (four months old) white. Four whole months as a businessman! When I looked closely, I was sure I could detect a slight aging of the cotton—it seemed to be soaking up the starch more completely than the newer white shirt was able to. I snapped the blue paper strip; then I pulled out the shirt cardboard1 and tossed it on the pile of cardboards I had already saved.2 I held the chosen shirt in the air with my little finger hooked under the collar and shook it once. It made the sound of a flag at the consulate of a small, rich country. Now—was I ready to put it on?

  My T-shirt, of course, was already tucked into my underpants: a few weeks into the job I had discovered that this small act of foresight made the whole rest of the business day much more comfortable. And my suit pants were on but not fastened; I was ready. The shirt was always colder than you expected. I began buttoning at the second button from the top, braving the minor pain in my thumb-tip as I pushed that button through and heard the minuscule creaking or winching sound that its edge made in clearing the densely stitched perimeter. From here I progressed right down the central strip of buttons, did up my pants, and moved on to the cuffs. These two cuff buttons were the hardest, because you could use only one hand, and because the starch was always heavier there than elsewhere; but I had gotten so that I could fasten them almost without thinking: you upended the right cuff button with your thumbnail and cracked the starch-fused buttonhole apart over it, closing your fingers hypodermically to propel it into place; then you repeated the procedure with the other cuff. Sped up, the two symmetrical cuff-buttoning sequences would have looked like a Highland reel.

  The topmost button called me to the mirror, where I saw my chin jut up into a bulldog expression to make way for the fists at my neck. Then the tie; the belt; the shoes—all automatic subroutines.

  I had my coat on when I remembered that I had forgotten to put on antiperspirant. This was a setback. I weighed undoing the belt, untucking the shirt, untucking the T-shirt from the underpants: was it worth it? I was running late.

  Here was where I made a discovery. An image came to me—Ingres’s portrait of Napoleon. Displacing my tie, I undid a single middle button. Yes, it was possible to get at your underarm by entering the shirt through the gap made by one undone button and then working the stick of antiperspirant up the pleural cavity between T-shirt and shirt until you were able to snag the sleevelet of the T-shirt with a finger and pull it past the seam where your shirtsleeve began, thereby exposing the area you needed to cover. I felt like Balboa or Copernicus. In college I had been amazed to see women take off bras without removing their sweatshirts, by unfastening the rear bra-catch through the material, pushing one sleeve up far enough to slip off one strap, and, after a few arousing shrugs of their shoulders, pulling the whole wriggling thing nonchalantly out of the opposite sleeve. My own antiperspirant discovery had some of the topologically revelatory flavor of those bra removals.1

  I walked to the subway very pleased with myself. My shoes (very new then; only a few months of wear on the laces) made a nice granular sound on the sidewalks. The subway wasn’t crowded, and I got a standing spot I liked, and had room to bend to put my briefcase between my ankles. It was one of those good rides, where the motion of the train is soothing, and the interior temperature pleasantly warm but not hot. I imagined the subway car as a rapidly moving loaf of bread. The motto “You can taste it with your eyes” occurred to me. It was a shame, I thought, that white bread had fallen into disfavor, since only white bread looks really good as toast, and only white bread looks good when cut diagonally. I recalled the strange steamy feeling of white toast at the moment you removed it from the toaster—no matter how crumby or disreputable your toaster was, the toast always came out smooth and clean—and the many styles of buttering you could use. You could scrape lightly, keeping to the surface; or if you had colder butter, you might be obliged to crush into the softer layer below the crust as you forced the butter to spread; or you could tap little chips of butter onto the toast without spreading them at all, place the two pieces of toast face to face, and cut them in half diagonally, so that the pressure of the knife stroke aided the melting of the butter in addition to halving the bread. Now, why was diagonal cutting better than cutting straight across? Because the corner of a triangularly cut slice gave you an ideal first bite. In the case of rectangular toast, you had to angle the shape into your mouth, as you angle a big dresser through a hall doorway: you had to catch one corner of your mouth with one corner of the toast and then carefully turn the toast, drawing the mouth open with it so that its other edge could clear; only then did you chomp down. Also, with a diagonal slice, most of the tapered bite was situated right up near the front of your mouth, where you wanted it to be as you began to chew; with the rectangular slice, a burdensome fraction was riding out of control high on the dome of the tongue. One subway stop before mine, I concluded that there had been a logic behind the progress away from the parallel and toward the diagonal cut, and that the convention was not, as it might first have appeared, merely an affectation of short-order cooks.

  I then began to wonder how late to work I was going to be. My own watch had been stolen by threat of force a week before, but I glanced hopefully down the diminishing perspective of hands and wrists that held the metal loops of the subway car. I spotted many watches, women’s and men’s, but on this particular morning they were all unreadable. The buckle, and not the face, of one pointed my way; some were too far off; the women’s were too small; several lacked all circumferential points of reference, and thus remained Necco wafers to all but their wearers; some were oriented so that glints from their crystals obscured the hands or the diodes beneath. A wristwatch less than a foot from my head, worn by a too carefully shaven man reading a newspaper folded into tiny segments, was exactly half visible; the half I needed was eclipsed by his cuff, so that while I could easily make out the terminal “get” of the tall-lettered trademark, the only time-telling I could do was to determine that it was not yet actually past nine o’clock. The cuff was possibly more expertly starched than my own.

  And this was when I realized abruptly that as of that minute (impossible to say exactly which minute), I had finished with whatever large-scale growth I was going to have as a human being, and that I was now permanently arrested at an intermediate stage of personal development. I did not move or flinch or make any outward sign. Actually, once the first shock of raw surprise had passed, the feeling was not unpleasant. I was set: I was the sort of person who said “actually” too much. I was the sort of person who stood in a subway car and thought about buttering toast—buttering raisin toast, even: when the high, crisp scrape of the butter knife is muted by occasional contact with the soft, heat-blimped forms of the raisins, and when if you cut across a raisin, it will sometimes fall right out, still intact though dented, as you lift the slice. I was the sort of person whose biggest discoveries were likely to be tricks to applying toiletries while fully dressed. I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of man I had hoped I might be.

  Riding the escalator to street level, I tried to revive the initial pain of the discovery: I had heard a lot about people having episodes of sudden perception like this, and had not undergone many myself. By the time I was outside, I had decided that I had just been through something serious enough that I was justified in taking the time, late or not, to get coffee and a muffin to go at the really good coffee place. Once there, however, as I watched the woman briskly open a small bag for my Styrofoam cup and tissue-protected muffin, using the same loose-wristed flip my mother had used in shaking down a fever thermometer (which is the fastest way to open a bag), and then sprinkle the purchase with handfuls of plastic stirrers, packets of sugar, napkins, and pats of butter, I felt an impatience to get to the office: I looked forward to the morning show-and-tell period with Dave, Sue, Tina, Abe, Steve, and the rest of them, when I would describe, leaning in doo
rways and on modular dividers, how my personality had ground to an amazing halt, right on the subway, and had left me a brand-new adult. I shot my cuffs and pushed through the revolving door to work.

  Chapter Eight

  I WAS BOTH RELIEVED and disappointed to find, later, that I wasn’t quite so developmentally fixed as it had seemed on that morning; but even so I continued to think of that day as marking a notable, once-in-a-lifetime change of -hoods. Now, keeping this fixed age of twenty-three in mind as the definitive end of my childhood, we’ll assume that every day of my life I had thought a constant number of new thoughts. (The thoughts had to be new only to me, previously unthought by me, regardless of whether or not everyone else considered them to be outworn and commonplace; and their actual number was unimportant—one, three, thirty-five, or three hundred a day; it depended on the fineness of the filtration used to distinguish the repeaters from the novelties, as well as on my own rate of new thinking—so long as it remained constant.) We’ll assume that all of these new thoughts, once they occurred, did not decompose past a certain point, but rather remained intact to the extent that they could be plucked back into living memory at any later time—even though the particular event, or later new thought, that would remind me of any given earlier thought might never arise. And let’s say that my memory began suddenly to function consistently at age six. Under these three simplifying assumptions, I would have laid away in storage seventeen years’ worth (23 − 6 = 17) of childish thoughts by the time I finally turned into an adult on that subway ride to work. Therefore, I concluded recently,1 I needed simply to continue to think more new thoughts at the same daily rate until I passed the age of forty (23 + 17 = 40), and I would finally have amassed enough miscellaneous new mature thoughts to outweigh and outvote all of those childish ones—I would have reached my Majority. It was a moment I had not known existed, but it quickly took on the stature of a great, shimmering goal. It is the moment when I will really understand things; when I will consistently put the past to wise and well-tempered uses; when any subject I call up for mental consideration will have a whole sheaf of addenda dating from my late twenties and my thirties in it, forcing down the primary colored pipings from “when I was eight” or “when I was little” or “when I was in fourth grade,” which had been of necessity so prominent. Middle age. Middle age!

  As I paused for an instant a few feet from the escalators, at the close of my lunch hour on that day my shoelace broke, carrying my Penguin paperback of Aurelius’s Meditations and my CVS bag, I was two years on my way toward this great goal, though I did not understand it clearly at the time; that is, two-seventeenths, or roughly twelve percent, of the available ideas in my brain at that moment were grown-up ideas, and the rest were childish, and I had to accept them as such.

  It happened that nobody was on the escalators just then, either going down or going up, even though the end of lunch hour was a peak time. The absence of passengers, combined with the slight thumping sound the escalators made, quickened my appreciation of this metallic, uplifting machine. Grooved surfaces slid out from underneath the lobby floor and with an almost botanical gradualness segmented themselves into separate steps. As each step arose, it seemed individual and easily distinguished from the others, but after a few feet of escalation, it became difficult to track, because the eye moves in little hops when it is following a slow-moving pattern, and sometimes a hop lands the gaze on a step that is one above or below the one that you had fixed on; you find yourself skipping back down to the early, emergent part of the climb, where things are clearer. It’s like trying to follow the curve on a slowly rotating drill bit, or trying to magnify in with your eye to enter the first groove of a record and track the spiral visually as the record turns, getting lost in the gray anfractuosities almost immediately.

  Since nobody was on the escalators, I could have played a superstitious game I often played during escalator rides, the object of which was to ride all the way to the top before anyone else stepped onto the escalator behind me or above me. While maintaining the outward appearance of boredom, gliding slowly up the long hypotenuse, I would inside be experiencing a state of near-hysterical excitement similar to what you felt when you were singled out to be chased in a game of tag; the premise, which I believed more and more strongly as I approached the end of the ride, being that if someone got on either escalator before I finished my ride, he or she would short out the circuit, electrocuting me.

  I often lost the game, and since once I locked myself into it, it became a somewhat nerve-tingling experience, I was at first relieved to glimpse the head of someone named Bob Leary appearing way up at the top of the down escalator, because his presence made the game an impossibility for the time being. Bob and I had never had one of those less-than-a-minute chats that are sufficient to define acquaintanceship in large companies, yet we knew who the other was, just by having seen the other’s name on the distribution lists of memos and on the doors of our offices; a sense of discomfort, or near guilt, was associated with our never having gotten around to performing the minimal social task of introducing ourselves, a discomfort which increased every time we ran into each other. There are always residual people in an office who occupy that category of the not-introduced-to-yet, the not-joked-about-the-weather-with: the residue gets smaller and smaller, and Bob was one of the very last. His face was so familiar that his ongoing status as stranger was really an embarrassment—and just then, the certainty that Bob and I were gradually going to be brought closer and closer to each other, on his down and my up escalator rides, destined to intersect at about the midpoint of our progress, twenty feet in the air in the middle of a huge vaultlike lobby of red marble, where we would have to make eye contact and nod and murmur, or stonily stare into space, or pretend to inspect whatever belongings could plausibly need inspection on an escalator ride, wrenching past that second of forced proximity as if the other person did not exist, and thereby twisting the simple fact that we had never exchanged pleasantries onto an even higher plane of awkwardness, filled me with desperate aversion. I solved the problem by freezing in mid-stride, the instant I caught sight of him (just before I had actually stepped onto the escalator), pointing in the air with an index finger, as if I had just thought of something important that I had forgotten to do, and walking off quickly in another direction.1

  I walked quickly through the bank of elevators that handled traffic for the fourteenth through twenty-fourth floors, out into the other side of the lobby, past the long, low building directory, in which white names and floor numbers glowed out of a black background (although little imperfect slits of light were visible in the black film here and there, where a less artful hand had updated the list of tenants), past a grouping of plants I had never noticed before, where a woman in a blue business suit stood paging through a stiff new manila folder that she had pulled from her equally new briefcase.1 Circling back around to the front of the lobby again, I passed several guys from the mailroom in sunglasses who were lounging on a decorative clump of couches (couches that were really intended for people like the woman with the résumé, and not for support staff from the building to hang out on during lunch break, I thought disapprovingly). I knew them from a time I had had to send a number of last-minute packages via DHL to Padua for a philanthropic thing the company got involved in, so I waved at them. The sound of the mailroom’s Pitney Bowes meter machine, which wetted and sealed envelopes in addition to printing a faint red postage emblem on them that included the time, an eagle’s wings, and an exhortation to give to the United Way, was loud and rhythmical, and even with earplugs I never would have been able to stand it all day long the way these mailroom guys did. One of them waved back, but before I turned away I was fairly sure that I caught sight of another of them (notable because on hot days, incredibly, this man would wear a clip-on tie clipped to the V at the second button of his open-collared shirt, so that the gray plastic stick-figure limbs of the clip-on mechanism were plainly visible) leaning toward the othe
rs while looking at me in order to say something mildly malicious about me to them, something like: “A couple of weeks ago, I was walking past that guy’s office? I look in: he’s right in the middle of pulling a hair from his nose. He goes doink! and then he makes a face, nnng, eyes watering, and then this shiver goes through him. Probably he made a mistake and pulled out three at once.” I knew it was some story like that, because I heard “No’s!” and laughter at just the right interval after I’d waved to them, and because if I had been lounging on that couch, I would have been tempted to say something mildly malicious about someone like me, too.

  Finally I closed in on the escalators again, now viewing them in profile. Bob Leary was gone; several secretaries were riding up. At the base of the machine, though, there now was an interesting little scene. A man from building maintenance, whose name I didn’t know, had in my absence wheeled up a cart bearing squirt bottles of various cleaners, spare rolls of toilet paper, brooms, a window-washing squeegee, and lots of other things on it; and as I drew close, he atomized some pale green liquid onto a white bunched-up rag and applied the rag to the rubber handrail of the escalator. He did not make any wiping motions: he simply leaned on the rag with both hands, looking up at one of the secretaries, while the moving handrail polished itself to a blacker gloss. Imagine working in a building where one of the standard weekly jobs of a maintenance person was to polish the handrail of the escalator! The comprehensiveness of this, the all-embracing definition of what a clean office building really was, was thrilling! I was sure that this was one of the parts of the man’s job that he liked the most, and not just because it was fun to watch the secretaries, but because it was something that maintenance men had not been doing for hundreds of years: they had been sweeping, repairing damage, mopping, waxing, finding the right key in the large ring that was clipped to a belt loop, but they had only recently begun shining escalator handrails by leaning motionlessly on a white cotton rag, using the technology, yet using it so casually that they appeared to us all as if they were lounging against their Camaros at a beach. This guy probably knew every landmark of that rubber handrail as it circled around—the chip in it where it looked as if someone had tried vandalizing it with a knife, and the section where it warped outward, and the little fusion scar where the two ends had been spliced together to close the loop. One of these landmarks was what he no doubt was using to be sure that he held the rag to the handrail long enough to have polished all of it. I said to him, “How’s it going?” and then, reminded by the sight of a box of trash bags in the lower tier of his cart, “Ray’s out, I hear.”