by Lee Upton
On the path that veered toward the cabins, Anselm met Toby, headed in the opposite direction.
“I’ve got something I want to show you,” Toby said, reaching into the pocket of his shorts. “Only if you have time. I don’t mean to—.”
“It’s all right. What am I going to see?”
Toby gave a half laugh that devolved into a shy snort. He thrust out a piece of notebook paper with words on it: It is no surprise that we struggle. An organ is needed.
“Gosh, Toby,” Anselm said. “I’m sorry.”
Toby tilted his head. “Wrong paper. That was a draft.” He pulled out another sheet:
Something is needed to raise our spirits. This building, as not all of you know, used to be a fruit market. Following which for years the structure was abandoned. It was lonely here—by itself, a lone building, this building standing in its gray siding serving nothing. Now an organ is needed—an organ to fill this structure with magnificent sound.
Toby’s eyes sped over Anselm’s face. “Do you think it will do the trick?”
“I’ll say. I was getting ready to donate a kidney. It’s good. I can help you out with a donation.”
Toby sucked in his stomach. “The money has to come from the congregation. They have to make the sacrifice. If they don’t make the sacrifice they don’t have ownership. I don’t like that word, ownership. It makes me think of a car dealer. Not that there’s anything wrong with car dealers. My dad’s a car dealer.”
“Isn’t he—a minister or a deacon or—”
“That too.”
“He sells cars and he leads a church? Pretty clever.”
“That’s not all. He’s mainly interested in teaching people about self-forgiveness. It’s very important: self-forgiveness.” Toby was staring at him—hard. Anselm had to resist the temptation to tell Toby that his father sounded like he was the deacon of The Church of Divine Self-Interest. That Toby’s father deserved all the indifference a son could muster. Except that Toby, constitutionally, wasn’t capable of indifference.
Anselm tried to banish his hangover with coffee, but whatever he was drinking in the meeting hall tasted bizarre—like it was used in a specimen tub.
“Personal strength,” Dick said as Anselm dragged himself back to his cabin. “It ain’t easy. Too much lifting.”
“What’s up with you after the retreat?” Anselm managed to ask him.
“That’s a question I tend to avoid answering,” Dick said. “By the way, have you ever heard of what’s called animal hoarding? You can’t stop. It’s a disease. It’s not bestiality, but maybe it’s close.”
Even here—even here the rumor had followed Anselm. Thank you, Ray Trunkajar. Thank you very much. Bitterness flooded Anselm. For years the people he worked with had looked at him and seen a dying—bestialist? Was that the term for a practitioner? He was almost grateful to be hung-over. It dulled the edge. Except that being hung-over made faces look rolled in crushed nuts.
Dick went into a deep knee bend, popped up, and said, “At least I’m keeping my promises. I came. I’m socializing. She can’t say I don’t keep my promises anymore.”
“Who?”
“Pamela. My wife. The poor unfortunate. Not her. Me. But at least my fealty to her ladyship is complete.” He went into another deep knee bend. In a squat, he looked up at Anselm and said, “Women, they speak another language. It’s like a language without—without words. By the way, we’re all sorry about what happened.”
“What happened?” Anselm asked.
“You know. Your past.”
“I’ve got a long past,” Anselm said. “A lot happened. Not bestiality. That didn’t happen.” Anselm thought of Janine. Surely she didn’t think . . . A stray thought: she had always resisted getting a dog.
Dick said, “It’s not true. I knew it wasn’t. That other thing from when you were a kid. Your father. In the heart.”
“He’s dead—my father. That’s one of the reasons why I’m here.”
“I guess so.”
“He died this year.”
“So you weren’t a small boy?”
“At one time I was.”
“I heard that you killed your father in a hunting accident and never got over it. Which made you unstable. I said an adult who takes a little kid hunting deserves to get shot in the heart. I defended you.”
Anselm’s father had died without him. The home health aide called at 3 a.m. His father’s bed was sopping with blood—as if he had come apart, been split open. The home health aide didn’t spare details.
Dick was waiting for him to say something. At last Anselm asked, “Who told the story?”
“Toby heard it—from somebody.”
Anselm’s chest cramped. The story was unbearable. He hadn’t killed his father, he’d neglected him. Didn’t call enough. Couldn’t wait to get off the phone when he did call. And now he couldn’t stop missing him. Parents are always accused of neglecting their children. Some parents do. But sometimes, sometimes, maybe almost always, it’s the other way around. He asked, “Did Toby believe it?”
“He’s a true believer, what can I say? Not that he held it against you. He could probably solve some of his own problems with intrafamily violence.”
“Somebody made it up. Why?”
Dick stroked his chin before he said, “One: entertainment value. That’s some people’s idea of fun. Fun fun fun. Two: explanatory value—it explains you. The weirdness, your particular brand. Three: it could potentially isolate you from me and Toby. But you know what?”
Anselm found it hard to concentrate. “What?”
“It made you popular with both of us. Whoever spread the rumor underestimated what sick fucks we are.”
When Anselm finished packing and was ready to catch a shuttle that would get him out of camp, Dick came trotting back with Toby in tow. Both men blocked the door of the cabin. Dick must have told Toby that the bestiality rumors and the part about Anselm killing his father—those rumors weren’t true. Toby was breathing heavily and wearing a shirt the color of a housefly. Oddly, for Anselm, looking at that shirt felt relaxing.
Anselm was leaving the retreat early, but the day was full of revelations, one being that maybe the two men standing before him by some strange accident of fate were the only genuine friends he had. His other revelation: his girlfriend. Janine. Holy Christ, Janine must really love him.
It was Toby who spoke first: “Tell us,” he said. “Tell us. How long do you have to live?”
Let Go
For three years, lifetimes ago, I was an office manager at a credit agency. During those years, with one exception, I never fired anyone. Probably this was because everyone quit first. The pay was miserable, there was too much work for any person to do in any given position, and my superior was an aimless man who was slowly ruining us all. His office window looked out onto the street, and it was on the sill of this window, visible to every passerby, that he kept his balled-up hamburger wrappers. It was from this man that I received orders to fire Paula.
I wasn’t supposed to fire Paula because she was lazy or incompetent. We kept on a lot of people who were lazy and incompetent. In fact, they tended to be the ones who got the most respect from the majority of us. I was to fire this young person, this twenty-one-year-old typist, because when she took her first vacation her replacement from the temp agency did an astonishingly better job and was willing to take over Paula’s job. The girl from the temp agency, Linda, typed at what was a phenomenal rate, according to my superior, although I had never been a witness to her fast finger work. Purportedly, she didn’t make mistakes either. She was prompt. To top it off, she brought my superior his hamburgers twice during the week that she served as Paula’s replacement.
Why I eventually agreed to fire Paula was not a mystery to me. My superior made it sound like a solid business practice to fire Paula. Besides, he so seldom made a demand that it seemed unthinkable to argue for too long with him—although I did express my opinion that we sh
ould keep Paula.
Paula had been with us for just over a year. She was quiet and did her work. She wasn’t late—except for a couple of times and then with good reasons. She sometimes got lost in details, that’s true, and once she handed in a document that was part gibberish. But when she was told about the problem she worked straight through her lunch hour to get the report straightened out. She was, I think, entirely unremarkable.
Except for her brother.
For years, even long after I fired Paula, I would think of her brother and feel a surge of longing and confusion—and even some envy of Paula. In fact, on a certain level those of us women who saw him (he stopped by at least once a week to take Paula out to lunch) felt almost proprietary toward him. He and Paula had the same dark coloring and slim, graceful build, although he was considerably taller. But more than his good looks, it was his manner that was touching. He remembered everyone’s name after the first visit. Without fail, he helped his sister put on her coat. He had a way of making his whole face smile, and then he’d turned to Paula with a wink, and for a moment you could see what they’d been like as a couple of little kids. It was obvious that he was the kind of brother who could manage a secret. It seemed certain that they had had secrets as children—silly little secrets that they kept and that drew them closer together. You just knew that he was the big brother who protected her. I imagined that he would protect her after she was fired too.
I suppose that seeing Paula’s brother was so refreshing because of some of the things I had to do and say. For instance: I had to tell a pretty young woman that she smelled funny—so funny that people couldn’t get their work done around her. Frequently, I listened to employees tell me about their gynecological problems because they knew that although I was also a woman I would never in a million years ask them follow-up questions, and so they could get the day off with only a small amount of self-humiliation. Along with that sort of thing I counseled someone with an ulcer who worked with a can of warm cola at her elbow on doctor’s orders. I think she got an ulcer because she was such a good listener—everyone confided in her. For a while two pregnant women kept falling asleep while talking to clients on the telephone. There were harrowing things too: I had to barricade the door three times when deranged husbands or boyfriends came for the women who worked in the agency, and one of the husbands was our security guard. Worst of all, I had to pretend that I didn’t notice when a woman from accounting came in with her newborn baby and the baby was missing a hand.
No one had warned me. It was a beautiful baby, and I said it was a beautiful baby. And there was the mother making hardly more than minimum wage, and there was her baby without a hand.
Presumably there is a way to fire people, but I didn’t know how to do it.
It shouldn’t be done right before Christmas or New Year’s, I reasoned. I decided that the right time to fire Paula was three weeks after New Year’s. If I had to do it over again I wouldn’t have done it at that time because that’s the time, at least in Ohio, when few people have anything to live for. The snow has been around for a long time and has a used, particularly defeated look. It begins to look unnatural, even though nothing could be more natural. And then you have Valentine’s Day looming around the corner, like some sort of mean mockery of everybody. But, as I said, the snow is the worst part. It isn’t even a color anymore—but an unreflective, dead, noncolor. When I had to confront my superior again to see if he still meant that I ought to fire Paula, I stared out the plate-glass window behind him, past the hamburger wrappers wadded on the windowsill. The snowbanks looked as if an occasional canon shot landed in them. That sort of bleak snow makes you think that nothing will change. Things will just break down and wear away at best.
“Are you all right?” That was Paula’s question to me. She put her hand on my forearm. Her touch was gentle and hesitant, and I noticed for the first time how broad her face was, like a child’s.
She had touched my arm after I asked her to come into the restroom with me. When I realized that she thought I must be ill and was asking for her help, blood shot into my head.
Of course I thought it would be best to fire Paula first thing in the morning, so that she would have the whole day to herself and so that her brother couldn’t accuse us of getting the most possible work out of her before letting her go. I also thought it would be best to fire her in the restroom so that we would have some privacy. My own desk was at the head of an office of eight desks. Certainly there was no privacy there. In particular, I didn’t want any men to see her being fired. It would be too humiliating to be fired in front of a man—even some of the kinder men. And of course there were men in the credit agency who had hardened their hearts long ago to women in trouble.
I thought that my firing of Paula should be swift too.
But this is the truth: although I had rehearsed ways to break the news to Paula, I can’t remember a word I said to her. I was trying to keep my balance so that I wouldn’t plunge my head into the sink.
I must have said something to the effect that she was being replaced because of the accelerating demands of the position she was filling (i.e., typist).
I braced myself for angry words—because even a quiet, passive sort of person like Paula can let you have it.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the way Paula cried. Never before and never since have I seen anything like it.
There was no prologue. Seemingly no beginning. No snuffle or slow moistening of the eyes or blushing of the cheek.
Her crying was instantaneous and silent. It was as if water were spurting soundlessly out of her head.
If I hadn’t been there I wouldn’t have believed it: it was as if she had to be made of tears. Her blouse—a violet-colored flimsy blouse that showed the outlines of her bra—was wet with tears. As if she had to cry not only out of her eyes but out of her cheeks and out of her eyebrows and out of her chest.
I count it as a miracle that no one came into the restroom during all this.
I myself was ready to run from the restroom. I couldn’t even see her eyes for her tears; her eyes were that puffy and her tears were that profuse.
And then I started.
I was crying—and I wasn’t even feeling sympathetic toward poor Paula during those moments. I was only feeling physically sympathetic, I suppose. I was lurching and crying. I was in my tears, inside them, swimming in them, and all my sadnesses came up—things I can’t mention here and would rather not dwell on. They came up not as discrete names or memories but as substances of some sort without features, as if my sadnesses had turned to liquid inside me.
When I finally gathered myself, when I could see again, Paula had left the restroom.
I walked through the back door to her desk. She wasn’t there. Her coat was not in the cloak room. I ventured back to her desk, in case somehow I had missed her, and the big beige typewriter—we used electric typewriters in those days—seemed to be resting by itself, just waiting for Linda, the remarkable replacement for Paula.
Now I am going to move swiftly to another part of the story, the part where I come to see that I have been party to something like a murder. But of course it took me a good long time to figure it out, and once more something strange happened in the agency’s restroom.
The next week when I saw Linda seated at Paula’s typewriter I felt guilty. I hadn’t paid much attention to Linda during the week she was temping, but now I looked at her closely. She had Paula’s coloring, that was true, but not Paula’s smile. Paula had a shy, embarrassed smile—as if she were apologetic just for being Paula. Linda’s smile was a challenge. It was a smile that practically spoke. Her smile said: You are so stupid. When she smiled one of her teeth stuck to her lower lip.
On the very first day she only typed in the necessary information on three of the forms that we use for garnishing wages.
On the second day it occurred to me that there was something vicious about the way she looked at me. And then I realized the obvious: she felt p
ity for Paula—and anxiety. She was afraid that she would suffer Paula’s fate. She thought of me as the sort of office manager who fired people easily and often and thoughtlessly.
As I recall it now, I made a point on the third and fourth days of her first week to stop by her desk. I even brought her coffee twice to show her that there was nothing to worry about.
Once, I watched her when she couldn’t see me. She was looking into a compact of facial powder with such concentration that I wondered what she could be seeing. She squinted at her reflection. She actually licked her lips. And then she smiled at herself—a beautiful, dazzling, full-toothed smile that lit up her eyes, a smile I had never seen her use for any of us.
At the end of the week I actually found myself staring into the restroom mirror and wondering why I appeared to be a person who is easy to disdain. I washed my hands, pulled off one of the manila papers to dry my fingers, and when I was about to toss the paper into the wastebasket I saw something that made my heart skip: mailing addresses. Lists and lists and lists of mailing addresses. Linda’s mailing addresses. They had cost us a fortune to obtain, and she was supposed to affix those addresses to envelopes for our new advertising brochures. She had dumped them here. There could be no mistake.
It had been a long day, and suddenly I was close to tears. Linda had left early, and so I retrieved the mailing labels from the waste basket and put them on the top of her typewriter. I knew that I wouldn’t even have to talk to her about them on Monday. She would see the mailing labels and know that I knew what she was up to. That ugly smirk would dissolve back into her face, and she would have to contend with the labels and my knowledge of her perfidy—and her knowledge that I couldn’t be viewed as an imbecile quite so easily anymore.