Mezzanine

by Nicholson Baker

  1 Sometimes it is better to use the pen the restaurant provides, which is usually a cheap stick pen, even when the restaurant is quite fancy; sometimes it is more satisfying to wait with your hand on your own pen in your shirt pocket until the end of a story you are being told, and then, nodding and laughing, remove it from your pocket, hearing the click of its clip as it slips off the shirt pocket’s fabric and springs against the barrel, followed by a second click as you bare the ballpoint—these two sounds being like the successively more remote clicks that initiate a long-distance call that you come to associate with the voice of the person who will answer—audible even in loud restaurants, because the burble of voices is of a much lower frequency. And just as your signature is freed into illegibility by the wine, so you imagine that the very ink in the pen adheres more readily to the tiny pores on the surface of the ball because it has been warmed by your body and by the flow of all this conversation. Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.

  1 For new-hires, the number of visits can go as high as eight or nine a day, because the corporate bathroom is the one place in the whole office where you understand completely what is expected of you. Other parts of your job are unclear: you have been given a pile of xeroxed documents and files to read; you have tentatively probed the supply cabinet and found that they don’t stock the kind of pen you prefer; relative positions of power are not immediately obvious; your office is bare and unwelcoming; you have no nameplate on the door yet, no business cards printed; and you know that the people who are friendliest to you in the first weeks are almost never the people you will end up liking and respecting, yet you can’t help but think of them as central figures in the office simply because they have ingratiated themselves, even if others seem to avoid them for reasons you can’t yet grasp. But in the men’s room, you are a seasoned professional; you let your hand drop casually on the flush handle with as much of an air of careless familiarity as men who have been with the company for years. Once I took a new-hire to lunch, and though he asked not-quite-to-the-point questions as we ate our sandwiches, and nodded without comprehension or comeback at my answers, when we reached the hallway to the men’s room, he suddenly made a knowing, one-man-to-another face and said, “I’ve got to drain the rooster. See you later. Thanks again.” I said, “Yip, take it easy,” and walked on, even though I too needed to go, for reasons that will become clearer soon.

  1 For instance: “Before going I took a last look at the breakers, wanting to make out how the comb is morselled so fine into string and tassel, as I have lately noticed it to be. I saw big smooth flinty waves, carved and scuppled in shallow grooves, much swelling when the wind freshened, burst on the rocky spurs of the cliff at the little cove and break into bushes of foam. In an enclosure of rocks the peaks of the water romped and wandered and a light crown of tufty scum standing high on the surface kept slowly turning round: chips of it blew off and gadded about without weight in the air.” (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Journal, August 16, 1873.)

  1 Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired white pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped wood fiber. Yet do we have national holidays to celebrate its development? Are festschrift volumes published honoring the dead greats in the field? People watch the news every night like robots, thinking they are learning about their lives, never paying attention to the far more immediate developments that arrive unreported, on the zip-lock perforated top of the ice cream carton, in reply coupons bound in magazines and on the “Please Return This Portion” edging of bill stubs, on sheets of postage stamps and sheets of Publishers Clearing House magazine stamps, on paper towels, in rolls of plastic bags for produce at the supermarket, in strips of hanging file-folder labels. The lines dividing one year from another in your past are perforated, and the mental sensation of detaching a period of your life for closer scrutiny resembles the reluctant guided tearing of a perforated seam. The only educational aspect of the Ginn series of grade-school readers was the perforated tear-out pages in their workbooks: after you tore out the page (folding it back and forth over the line first to ready it for its rending), a little flap was left bound in the workbook that told the teacher in tiny sideways type what that page was meant to teach the student; the page I remember from first grade was a picture of Jack standing with a red wagon at the top left, and Spot waiting for him on the lower right, with a dotted line in a large Z shape connecting the two. The instructions were “Make Jack take the wagon to Spot,” or something like that—and you clearly were not supposed to take the direct diagonal route, but rather were meant to travel this pointless Z with your crayon. The sideways explanation on the grown-up side of the perforation claimed that the Z path taught the child the ideal motion of the reading eyeballs—one line of type, a zag of a carriage return, another line of type. I scorned the exercise only a little, because the dotted line itself was like the dotted line printed over perforations in reply coupons and intrinsically beautiful, despite the boy and dog at either end. I was taught, later, about the Indians of New York State, about the making of the Erie Canal, about Harriet Tubman and George Washington Carver and Susan B. Anthony—why don’t I have any clear idea even now, after years of schooling, how the perforation of the reply coupon or the roll of toilet paper is accomplished? My guesses are pitiable! Circular pizza cutters with diamond-tipped radii? Zirconium templates, fatally sharp to the touch, stamping the paper with their barbed braillery? Why isn’t the pioneer of perforation chiseled into the façades of libraries, along with Locke, Franklin, and the standard bunch of French Encyclopedists? They would have loved him! They would have devoted a whole page of beautifully engraved illustration, with “fig. 1’s” and “fig. 2’s,” to the art.

  1 Just as it had in the days when my mother would let me buy her packs of Kents from a machine in the basement of my father’s office building, back when heroic French horns helped the Marlboro Man ride across aerial shots of western lands, and when another man toured the magnified minimalist interior of a cigarette butt (I think it was True, or one of those single-syllable brands) with a blackboard pointer, showing the TV viewer the features of its proprietary system of Dr. Caligarian baffles, designed by a woman gynecologist, that forced the smoke to leave behind some of its more adhesive resins on the irregular planes of this filter.

  1 I think that in later versions of this model that I saw elsewhere, the overdainty background coffee cup in the backlit panel gave way to a larger, cozier-looking brown ceramic mug, as cups and saucers became alien objects in our lives, brought out in uncomfortable clinky silence on trays only at the end of dutiful dinner parties (following a crashing of pans behind the swinging door to the kitchen, caused by the search for the tray). The motleyness of mugs gradually has taken over because, I assume, mugs simply hold more stimulant, and their larger handles allow a pluralism of grasps—for instance, the two, sometimes three fingers around the handle (cups allow only one finger); or the very common one finger hooking the handle and the thumb and other fingers tripoded onto the body of the mug; or the two-palm grip, ignoring the handle completely, that actresses use when they are playing people having real-life conversations at the kitchen table. The cup forced a primness and feyness to the hand and even caused some pain to the joint of the middle finger which at other times shouldered a pen or pencil, because of the exaggerated distance between the cup’s handle and the central weight of the liquid it was supporting. Also, mugs, like car bumpers and T-shirts, have become places for people to proclaim allegiances, names, hobbies, heroes, graphic tastes. Since as a rule you have only one of any particular novelty mug, as opposed to a whole arbor of identical cups hanging from hooks in a white Rubbermaid shelf organizer, you develop a fondness for each mug as an individual, and you try to give even the ones you like least a chance to contain your coffee once in a while—you feel ab
out ugly mugs that you have been given the way you do about bad book-cover designs on paperbacks whose insides you really like—you begin to cherish that slight grit of ugliness and wrongness. Right now, half an hour before I have to leave for work, day before yesterday’s mug is on the windowsill still: a really nice white straight-sided spare mug made by Trend Pacific of Los Angeles circa 1982, and decorated with a pattern of thirty identical 1950s kitchen blenders whose electrical cords have round wall-plugs: my question to the talented visionaries at Trend Pacific being, why did they have to wait until appliance plugs had changed from round to square, and blenders had become, like their avant-garde mug, spare white creations made by Braun and Krups, before they could illustrate the old golden-agey cartoonish kind of blender? Why do these images have to age before we can be fond of them? But I like this mug in a way I could never like a teacup that was part of a set: it is stylish-looking and I reach for it often when deciding which will be my mug for the morning, despite a theoretical disapproval of camp that I feel able to allude to here probably only because camp, though it is still trickling down through the class structure level by level, has long been superseded and in the limbo of its demotions can be glibly disparaged. Of course, though the “serving suggestion” panel on the Hot Beverages vending machine showed a china cup or a mug, in reality the machine dispensed neither for thirty-five cents. The coffee sprayed into a smallish cardboard receptacle without a handle of any kind, not even the ingenious fold-out cantilevered paper handles that seem in general to be vanishing as insulative Styrofoam has moved into dominance, outside of delicatessens. And you might ask, why did a paper cup and not the cheaper, more modern Styrofoam cup drop from inside this vending machine? The answer I came up with, when this question occurred to me in the afternoons, as I stood waiting for the sign saying “Brewing” to go off, was that Styrofoam cups would be too light and clingy to slide down the internal guide-rails into place properly under the spigot—and Styrofoam sticks together: the machine might have a hard time separating one cup from the stack. The cardboard of these cups became almost intolerably hot, and you had to walk very carefully, holding the cup by its cooler rim but avoiding any jostle.

  1 Among average men, the singular, “oop,” is the normal usage; the word is found in its plural as “oops” most often among women, gay men, or men talking to women, in my experience, although there are so many exceptions to this that it is irresponsible of me to bring it up.

  1 The absence of stealth or shame that men, colleagues of mine, displayed about their misfortunes in the toilet stall had been an unexpected surprise of business life. I admired their forthrightness, in a way; and perhaps in fifteen years I too would be spending twenty-minute stretches in similar corporate stalls, making sounds that I had once believed were made only by people in the extremity of the flu or by bums beyond caring in urban library bathrooms. But for now, I used the stalls as little as possible, never really at ease reading the sports section left there by an earlier occupant, not happy about the prewarmed seat. One time, while I was locked behind a stall, I did unintentionally interrupt the conversation between a member of senior management and an important visitor with a loud curt fart like the rap of a bongo drum. The two paused momentarily; and then recovered without dropping a stitch—”Oh, she is a very, very capable young woman, I’m quite clear on that.” “She is a sponge, a sponge, she soaks up information everywhere she goes.” “She really is. And she’s tough, that’s the thing. She’s got armor.” “She’s a major asset to us.” Etc. Unfortunately, the grotesque intrusion of my fart struck me as funny, and I sat on the toilet containing my laughter with the back of my palate—this pressure of containment forced a further, smaller fart. Silently I pounded my knee, squinting and maroon-colored from suppressed hysteria.

  1 When you leave a job, one of the hardest decisions you have to make on cleaning out your desk is what to do with the coffinlike cardboard tray holding 958 fresh-smelling business cards. You can’t throw them out—they and the nameplate and a few sample payroll stubs are proof to yourself that you once showed up at that building every day and solved complicated, utterly absorbing problems there; unfortunately, the problems themselves, though they once obsessed you, and kept you working late night after night, and made you talk in your sleep, turn out to have been hollow: two weeks after your last day they already have contracted into inert pellets one-fiftieth their former size; you find yourself unable to recreate the sense of what was really at stake, for it seems to have been the Hungarian 5/2 rhythm of the lived workweek alone that kept each fascinating crisis inflated to its full interdepartmental complexity. But coterminously, while the problems you were paid to solve collapse, the nod of the security guard, his sign-in book, the escalator ride, the things on your desk, the sight of colleagues’ offices, their faces seen from characteristic angles, the features of the corporate bathroom, all miraculously expand: and in this way what was central and what was incidental end up exactly reversed.

  1 And from this wealth and pomp we return home every evening and stand sweating in front of a chest of drawers, some hanging open, no ball bearings at all, and put the briefcase and the bag from the convenience store down on the floor and begin to pull handfuls of change and stubs of Velamints packs out of our pockets, forced to lean forward slightly in order to cup all the unwanted coinage we have collected from the world that day because we have lazily used whole bills for every transaction, dropping the warm change and keys and cash-machine receipts and litter into a saucer that is already overflowing with change, and then assuming another special contrapposto pose to pull out the wallet, whose moist bulk was a subliminal bother all day, although we weren’t able to pinpoint our discomfort until now, as we drop the slightly sticky lump of leather and plastic on top of the sliding mound of change and feel one whole cheek of our ass instantly cool down, relieved of ten hours of this remorid propinquity. And we store our pants away, ensuring that the creases are reinstated for later wearings by holding the pants upside down by their cuffs and bringing them up through the triangle of the clotheshanger with its specially treated no-slip cardboard tube and letting them fall in half over it, knowing that though the pants are a bit sweaty now, they will be all fresh-seeming by day after tomorrow when we will need to wear them again. We walk around in our underpants and T-shirt waiting for the Ronzoni shells to boil. Can this disorganized, do-it-yourself evening life really be the same life as the clean, noble, Pendaflex life we lead in office buildings?