by Jonathan Dee
“No. Well, arguably. She’s the victim here, that much is plain.”
“You’re right,” Gerry said, reddening. “You’re right. She is the victim. So let’s you and me get in your car right now and go find that impotent fucking wife-beating husband of hers and lay him out. Lay him the fuck out. That’s what you and I should be doing, if you actually give a shit about her.”
“Be serious,” Kimbrough said.
“I’ve never been more serious. What kind of a world is this? What kind of men are we? We’re fucking lost. Getting sued, that’s seriously your first thought in this situation?”
“Gerry,” Kimbrough said. “Look, leave aside for a moment how incredibly stupid it was to get involved with somebody you’re technically in a position of power over, somebody younger than you. You guys did it in a home we were commissioned to sell. I’m not just worried about what she might do. If this gets out, the client could take us for everything, do you understand that? Not just you. I could lose my license. In fact I almost definitely would. You have put every single job here at risk. People with families. You cannot honestly be shocked that I’m firing you.”
It was cold out there but Gerry was trying hard not to fold his arms. Unlike Kimbrough, he didn’t have his blazer on. “Fine,” he said. “Then fire her too.”
Kimbrough laughed. “Sorry, no,” he said. “If the idea is to keep her from suing for harassment, that wouldn’t be such a hot maneuver.”
“How is her offense any different from mine?”
“She’s the victim here,” Kimbrough said again.
“That is such PC bullshit. We’re both adults. We both work for you, we both did the exact same thing at the same time, completely consensually. You could argue that she’s worse than me, because she did it while she was married. But she’s the victim and I’m the oppressor because, what, she’s a woman?”
“Classy,” Kimbrough said coldly. “Right under the bus with her. The marriage is over now, by the way, so she tells me. So good going there too.”
“You’re a spineless pussy, you know that?” Gerry said. He was starting to panic. “I should sue you, since fear of that seems to be what you have in place of a conscience.”
“Knock yourself out,” Kimbrough said. “That one, I’m sure I could get dismissed. In the meantime I’m giving you five minutes to go back inside and get your shit and go home.”
The look on his face was unbearable; after the hard part, which was the firing, his nervousness had quickly given way to a smug sense of triumph. Gerry flirted with the idea of just dropping him with one punch, right there in the wet parking lot. What’s the worst that could happen, now that he already didn’t have a job? Unfortunately that question had a real answer. He’d call the cops and Gerry would get arrested. Guys like Kimbrough always hid behind the law. That’s why there were so many fucking laws. Gerry walked past him and back inside, his hair plastered to his head by the rain. No one in the office was speaking; everyone stared angrily at him. Angrily! He couldn’t believe it. This was not a world of men. That line popped into his head, from Glengarry Glen Ross, one of his all-time favorite movies: I swear to you, Machine, it is not a world of men. He loved that movie but he’d never understood that line until just now.
He’d had sex with her twenty or thirty different times, yet not only did that create no sort of bond between them now, it seemed if anything to accomplish the opposite, to make them intolerable to each other. He had no residual positive feeling toward her at all—only a derision he could barely contain, and then, as he scooped the few contents of his desk drawers into a small white wastebasket-liner whose previous contents he’d dumped onto the floor, he thought, Why contain it? Why be silent? For whose sake? “You’re a cheating whore,” he said to her from across the dumbstruck office, “and I wouldn’t mind that, but you’re a hypocrite too. You care about no one but yourself. Do the world a favor and don’t have kids.” She burst into tears and turned her back; one of the other brokers went over to console her. Smooth move, dude, Gerry thought, now she’ll probably let you fuck her too. He grabbed the garbage bag and his yellow blazer. He was feeling a little of the high you were supposed to feel when you got fired and made a scene on your way out the door, but mostly he just felt isolated and small. What world were these people living in? Nothing made sense, morally. It used to but it didn’t now. He dropped the whole trash bag full of his belongings into a different wastebasket, by the door. Outside, he spread the yellow blazer carefully on the puddled asphalt just behind his car and backed over it on his way out. He didn’t have to turn his head—he knew they were all watching. He honked the horn twice and drove home.
Her, his victim? What had he done, raped her? Is that what he was supposed to believe now? This was the hilarious part: even though the reason the two of them had connected in the first place was that they were exactly alike, now he was instantly presumed to be the opposite of her, the bad guy. Why, because he was white and male? That was his supposed position of power? He thought that was pretty rich, as he stalked back and forth through the shabby rooms of his half-assed house, jobless, with no savings, nothing. Gerry the Powerful!
He went online and scrolled through Drudge for a while: illegal immigrants collecting welfare, the ACLU suing to get terrorists released from Guantánamo. Everybody shouting their innocence. He went to Daily Kos and got into it with some liberal clowns in the comments section. He was looking for catharsis but it didn’t work, it was all just words. He told himself he wouldn’t drink. Two days later, not having left home once, he was telling himself the same thing. Then he got a notice from the post office telling him he had to come in and sign for some piece of registered mail. He wasn’t expecting anything, so it seemed unlikely to be good news, but he figured it couldn’t hurt to get some air into his lungs other than the fetid air of his dusty home. He went to the counter with his little green notice and rang the bell, summoning that weird loser with the pretentious facial hair who worked there. The guy disappeared again for a moment and brought back a letter addressed to Gerry from the Assessor’s Office of the Town of Howland and he ripped it open right there on the spot, letting the fragments of paper fall on the floor.
Gerry’s home had been reassessed, mysteriously, anonymously, which suggested the outcome was a foregone conclusion; and, shocker, it was now magically worth more than it had been when he woke up in it that morning. Like the town government knew more than Gerry did about the value of his home, about the value of any home in the Berkshires! His property taxes had gone up by six hundred dollars annually. Just like that. Just because they could do it. There was a form letter from that idiot Maeve Brennan—who held power now not because the people had elected her but because fat old Marty Solomon had dropped dead in somebody’s basement—explaining that this reassessment was prompted by the newly tax-exempt status of the Caldwell House, but he didn’t do that bullshit excuse the honor of reading it all the way to the end.
“Sucks, right?” said the guy behind the counter, with the little US Postal Service emblem on the sleeve of his blue zip-up sweater. Gerry lifted his gaze.
“I mean not that I read it. Of course. But I’ve seen like twenty people open that same notice this week, so I know what’s in there.”
“Do you,” Gerry said. “Let me ask you something. How much do you get paid?”
“I’m sorry?” Glenn said.
“What’s your salary? I mean before taxes.” That last bit was said with something of a sneer, Glenn thought.
“I think that’s kind of private,” he said.
“Actually it’s not. It’s public record, since I’m the one who pays it, me and everyone else in this town. That’s where this tax revenue goes.”
“Actually, I think it’s earmarked for the school budget,” Glenn said.
“I thought you didn’t read it.”
He’d read Penny’s, when it came three days ago. But he couldn’t very well say that. “Postal service salaries are federally manda
ted anyway.”
“I’ll bet they are. So what?”
“So it’s apples and oranges,” Glenn said, without quite knowing what he meant. He tried to smile, to keep it friendly.
“No, it’s all one big fucking apple, is what it is,” the angry guy said, and he turned and banged the door open with the flat of his hand and was gone.
What an asshole, Glenn thought. Not for the first time that day, either. There’d been some woman in earlier who wanted to negotiate with him the price of sending a piece of certified mail, which was like, what? Did she think he had anything to do with it? Yeah, okay, lady, he thought as he drove back to Penny’s at the end of the afternoon (his lips moving as he drove, to help him imagine his retort), tonight after dinner when I sit down for brandy and cigars with the Postmaster General, I’ll be sure to bring up your complaint. Maybe you’ll get a refund from him. How do you spell your name again?
In fact he was having dinner tonight with Penny’s boys. It wasn’t a regular occurrence but it had happened a few times now. It had all come about more or less by chance; one Wednesday afternoon earlier that winter, Penny’s ex-husband had called her from the emergency room in Stockbridge to say that he’d been in a car accident, so could she please pick the boys up from basketball practice and take them for that night? She called Glenn at work—it was already past four—and told him he would have to spend that night in Springfield; and could he please leave work a little early and get his car and the rest of his shit out of her home, just for tonight, the boys’ practice ended in twenty minutes, she wouldn’t have time to go home first herself and do it. They got into a little bit of a fight about it—federal law, for one thing, prohibited his locking up the post office early on a whim—and then out of nowhere she just said, “You know what, fine, who cares,” and that was the night he finally met Henry and Carl. They were wonderfully impolite to him—seriously, their utter lack of manners put him immediately at ease—asking him who he was and was he Mommy’s boyfriend and where did he sleep and how come they’d never heard of him before. He answered all their questions while Penny sat eating quietly. Then the three of them went into the living room and played Mario Kart while she stayed in the kitchen and smoked.
He knew she didn’t really want all of them to get that close, and that was because she didn’t see him as someone who would be around forever. It was a little insulting, but in truth he didn’t really think of her all that differently. It wasn’t only the certainty of rejection that kept him from ever suggesting that they take their relationship to some next level. In the meantime, he wasn’t going to resist the boys’ efforts to get along with him, to include him; what would be the point of that? He sometimes wondered how they described him to their dad. That’s if they’d mentioned his existence at all. But, knowing them, he bet they had.
For their sake he did his best to put the trials of his workday behind him and walk into Penny’s house in an upbeat frame of mind, but the atmosphere quickly soured anyway when it emerged that he’d forgotten, somehow, that tonight was parent-teacher conference night at their school, which meant that he’d be alone with Henry and Carl for a couple of hours. Penny couldn’t believe that he’d forgotten, that it meant that little to him. She’d told him five times. He wasn’t even aware enough to be nervous about it—his first time alone with his girlfriend’s kids, ever. He was a kid himself. Same old story, she thought. There was the man you wanted, and then there was the man you got.
She sat in the car while it warmed up, looking at the bright windows of her home against the disappearing shadows of the woods and hills beyond. It was only about six o’clock. The house itself was an accident; it had belonged to David before they met, and then she got it in the divorce, and so now it was her house. She backed out onto Route 4 and took the county roads to the school, the shorter route, past ambiguous stripped woods and fallow farms, concentrating on the tunnel of light the car made through it all, never once meeting anyone coming in the opposite direction, so her brights stayed on. Every crack and pit in the asphalt showed up in the light as if being interrogated; the road itself looked hard worn, like it had been put together from pieces of other roads. The colors didn’t even match. Stop signs glared at the intersections, and she observed them, though she didn’t need to. You had to observe them, just as you had to stay between the yellow lines even when there was no reason to. Craziness was right there, waiting for a word from you, a nod. Another winter in the middle of fucking nowhere.
Penny rolled into the half-full parking lot (it was never more than half full; it had been built back in the sixties when they still expected the regional population to go up) and cut the engine. She gave herself an instinctive once-over in the mirror on the back of the window visor; she would likely run into half the town in there. She marched off across the dark lot toward the floodlit front steps of Howland Elementary.
It looked like they all do. A long, featureless rectangle, lots of windows, a sort of tower in the center where the steps led up to the main entrance, the whole edifice in the posture of a kneeling mother with her arms spread wide to keep you from getting past her. Or an eagle, maybe, or an insignia on a coat of arms. An institutional beige. No relation to the lot on which it sat or the landscape against which it had been built. Across the street were playing fields, but no more than fifty feet from any edge of the school building itself, the lot reverted to scrawny woods. You had to go pretty deep into those woods before you could consider yourself truly hidden, as each generation’s edgy subset of middle schoolers learned anew. The structure’s most remarkable feature was that it sat only about a thousand yards from the district high school, which looked almost identical and had been built at the same time, in some sort of orgy of public works. Thus there was no mystery, for the students, as to where their yearly promotions were leading them. Any time you were out front, waiting for the bus or crossing the street for sports, you could point right to it.
Inside, the light was mind-frying and there were three PTA moms at a card table, each cheerfully responsible for one-third of the alphabet. Penny recognized one of them, though all three seemed to recognize her. “Penny!” the one on the left said, and urgently waved her closer. “Come, come! I’ve got the B’s!” She gave Penny an adhesive nametag, already filled out, and a schedule that granted her four minutes at a time with each of the boys’ five teachers. So forty minutes in total—closer to sixty, because there were some breaks built in—but when it was all written out like that, it seemed like more than she should be asked to endure.
“Coffee in the teachers’ lounge on the second floor!” Mrs. Stepford shouted. Coffee was the wrong instinct entirely. Having been to these perfunctory conference-nights before, knowing exactly what to expect, Penny would have shown up comfortably tanked for sure if she didn’t have to drive. Her nervousness had nothing to do with her sons’ academic progress or lack thereof. Here was the thing: listening to a series of other people, almost all of them women, women she didn’t even know, talk knowledgeably about her children—give her advice, offer her their half-assed opinions about what was best for them and what was not—sometimes made her start to cry. Literally. It had happened before. “Carl is a good boy,” some fat idiot with hair like Prince Valiant had told her, “and he can handle this level of material, but only if his study habits improve,” and Penny had barely made it outside the building and into her car before she’d started sobbing. She did not like other people to talk about her boys. She did not like to be confronted with the fact that there was no way to hide them forever from the world, no way to keep them from being exposed to the soulless predations of smug grownups.
So by the time she reached the next-to-last appointment, in Henry’s animal-bio classroom with the cloudy beakers stacked on the counters against the wall, she was already looking toward the finish line. The bio teacher was a somewhat mousy-looking chick whose nametag read Ms. Firth. Penny recognized right away that Ms. Firth was as ready to be done with this whole evening a
s she was. Anyway, she tried to read Penny’s name discreetly off her left tit and then commenced flipping through some papers on her desk, her cheeks reddening.
“Henry Batchelder,” Penny said helpfully. “Short, kind of a mullet, wears videogame t-shirts a lot.”
“Of course,” the teacher said. “I’m so sorry, it’s no reflection at all on Henry that I had a little brain freeze there. He’s a great kid. It’s just been a long night.”
“I can imagine. It’s been a long night for me and I only have my own kids’ names to remember. To be honest there’s no way I would have come up with yours if you weren’t wearing it.”
The teacher stuck out her hand and smiled with what looked like relief. “Candace,” she said.
“Penny. So you’re a science teacher, there’s no way you could build like a margarita machine with all this crap in here?”
Candace laughed. “If only,” she said. She was happy to drop her formal demeanor, maybe unwisely; but it was not only because she liked this loose cannon of a mom, though she did. Her defenses were down. “Anyway, Henry is one of my favorites. He’s funny but he’s never disruptive; if he’s not interested you can see him try his best to get interested. He’s got a solid B and he works hard for that. I like him.”
Henry’s mother continued to stare at her, smiling, and Candace realized she had run out of things to say about the boy. Some kids were geniuses and some were nightmares, but if you were in that middle eighty or ninety percent, there just wasn’t always four minutes’ worth of stuff to say about you. Usually this wasn’t an issue because the parents took over and did most of the talking. But here an awkward silence had taken shape. When Candace tried to think how to break it, she drew a blank.
“That’s it?” the mother asked.
“Well,” Candace said. “I do like to leave time for questions.”
“Jesus Christ, you’ve made me so happy!” the mom said. “That’s all I want to hear. That’s all I care about. He’s doing fine and nothing’s wrong. To be honest some of these other teachers who go on and on about how they know your kid better than you do, for four solid minutes, it makes me want to pop them right in the mouth.”