by Peter Mattei
“I’m really sorry, Juliette,” I say. HR begins her speech about our very generous severance package we’re currently offering but Juliette won’t let her even get to the benefits part.
“I’ve come to this building almost every single day of my life for thirty years,” she starts. “I have a sister upstate who suffers from severe diabetes and she can’t work and so I support her and her child.”
“Juliette,” I say, not having any idea why I am interrupting her or what I might say next.
“You know at my age I’ll never get another job in this business. You know how much this means to me and yet you went to all these pains to make it look like you were my friend and we were on the same team.”
“I didn’t want you to … I wanted you to have a …”
“Have a what?” she asks. “A sense of reality? Dignity?”
“Juliette,” HR says softly, wiping moisture from her eyes with the base of her palm. “Let’s just try to—”
“Try to what?” Juliette implores. HR hands her a folder of legal stuff to look over but Juliette doesn’t take it. Both her hands are gripping her laptop tightly and I think she has accepted it and is about to stand up, so I lean forward putting more weight on my toes in anticipation of standing up at the same time as her, and I am wondering if I should shake her hand and thank her for all she’s done for the agency or if perhaps I should hug her since she had divulged so much personal information to me just now. I really don’t know what to do or say and suddenly I have the thought that I wish there were a remote with which I could put Juliette on pause and ask HR Lady what the most appropriate response should be from me at this time, insincere intimacy or the wise, knowing strength of a real leader, a firm handshake and I look her in the eye and say, human being to human being, “I’m an asshole and deserve to die, I know this now” or something to that effect. What is, after all, the proper way to bring about real change? The proper way to behave in the face of a human face? But before I can formulate what my action will be in response to all this, she begins to speak again.
“Eric,” she says, “I have one thing to ask of you.”
“What is it?” I say.
“Please don’t fire me.”
This is not at all what I expected.
“Without this job I really don’t have anything,” she goes on. “I don’t know what to tell my sister or her son.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
“If you were, you wouldn’t be doing this.”
I look over at HR. Is it too late to take it all back? I give her a what-can-we-do-now look but she won’t make eye contact with me. I look back at Juliette.
“There’s nothing I can do,” I say. “It’s just how it is.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Juliette says, almost happy about it, she always had lots of ideas. “I make a lot of money, I’ll take a pay cut. I’ll take a 50 percent cut. Isn’t that what you have to do, reduce the staff by half? At least that’s the rumor going around. I’ll take a 60 percent cut. Please. Will you think about it?”
Then HR looks at me and there’s a silence and it’s clear I’m supposed to say something, but I don’t know what to say. What I want to say is “OK, I accept your offer of a 50 percent pay cut, it’s reasonable and well considered, after all, you make more than twice what anyone else at your level makes so I don’t see why we can’t—” But HR would cut me off and remind me that I don’t have the authority to accept her offer, or to make her a counter offer, I don’t really have any authority at all.
At this point Juliette is looking at me the way you would look at someone next to you after a car accident and things are going in very slow motion but you realize that you and the other person are alive although you don’t know yet if you are injured.
“Juliette, I’m sorry, but Eric doesn’t have the authority to accept such an offer at this time,” HR is saying.
“Why not?” Juliette asks. “He’s the Chief Idea Officer.”
“Yes, but anything like that would have to go through corporate and be approved by corporate!”
“Well OK then, I’ll go back to work and you’ll let me know when it’s approved,” Juliette says.
“Who’s corporate?” I ask HR. “Aren’t we corporate?”
Then I’m giving her that what-the-fuck-are-we-doing head shakey look but she’s already on her BlackBerry calling somebody, I’m guessing corporate, and Juliette and I sit there looking at her and waiting but nobody is answering on the other end.
When she turns back toward us there are tears in her eyes.
“I’m talking about the holding company!” she says, “In France! They’re the ones making these decisions. Please. It’s not up to us! They look at salary versus client billing hours vis-à-vis the AOR contracts and they make the determinations and create their kill list. Juliette, you have to understand this is not about us!”
“How could it not be about you?” she says. “You’re the ones doing it.”
“Because we have to!” HR says.
“You have to?”
“We have to because if we don’t, we’ll get fired,” she says. “You have to understand.”
“And also, full disclosure, we wouldn’t get our bonuses,” I say, and at this HR’s jaw drops and she stares at me.
“That’s a breach, Eric,” she says. “You’ve got to leave now. This is done, it was decided months ago. Please, please understand, Juliette. There’s nothing anyone can do.” And then she turns back to me. “Please go.”
But I just sit there, unable to move.
At my inaction Juliette looks at me and I try to impart, by the letting go of my facial muscles, the sense of abject melancholy that has taken over my entire being. I realize, of course, that what HR is saying is entirely true, that were I to even attempt to make some kind of promise to Juliette right now, and send her back to her cubicle with a sense of hope, it would be completely disingenuous, not to mention self-serving, as it would only delay the inevitable, because anything I would say corporate would overrule, and she would only have to go through the humiliation all over again. I am trying to impart all of this with a single look of resignation, and Juliette to her credit gets it, she realizes it’s really happening now, and she begins to weep, to herself at first, the sobs pushing up from somewhere very deep within her, someplace she probably didn’t even know existed, a heretofore unknown sub-basement of her psyche. These fears had lived down there for so long that when they finally rise to the surface they are large and scary and uncontrollable, and she is sucking in air so hard and fast it looks like she is drowning. I want to say something comforting now, but it seems too late, it will only be hypocritical, so I look away, out the window. HR puts her BlackBerry away, leans in toward Juliette, and reaches her hand out toward the woman and it finally comes to rest on her knee, which is covered in a black stocking. Finally we look at each other and HR gives me a kind of “What should I do now?” shrug with her shoulders and eyes. I mimic her gesture back to her like a mirror and we sit there sharing the discomfort, or rather HR’s discomfort because at this point, to be perfectly honest, I am too numbed by my present numbness to feel discomfort; this is just something that is happening, to all of us. Then HR gets up and goes out and waves to Damon and Terry and now I am alone with Juliette for a moment. She has let go of her laptop and it has fallen to the floor and she is grabbing the arms of her chair, trying to hold on. I have no idea how long I am sitting there, trying to think of anything other than what is going on, thinking about all the things I have to do today, including making sure there is a Prius available to rent in LA and a beach-facing nonsmoking room at Shutters, when the two stolid African-Americans are in the office and they are taking hold of Juliette and peeling her panic-hewn fists from the arms of the chair. They walk her slowly and wobblingly out of my office and over to the elevators. Meanwhile my assistant has retrieved Juliette’s jacket from her cubicle and is handing it to her as they pass, and is hugging her—she is still so
bbing—and then they turn the corner and I can’t see them anymore.
Dr. Look’s office is in a downtrodden two-block stretch of Lexington just north of Citicorpse. Every other block in this part of midtown has been razed for the erection of skyscraping hubris-temples to ill-begotten wealth but something went horribly wrong here and the block was never properly developed. I get to the address on the card that Barry shoved at me and see that Dr. Look’s office, also known as Midtown Health, Inc, sits two floors above an Egyptian souvenir and cheap-luggage shop that must be a front for something, possibly black-market kidneys, or passports. I had heard, in the couple of years that I have been at Tate, certain folkloric tales about the company’s founder, Windham Tate, being quite a philanderer, if that is the word, back in his day, which would have been the ’60s and ’70s; how he fucked every young secretary in the place and how there was actually a line item to pay them off if they went after him in court or such, and how he even had a phony doctor who would claim they were all unbalanced. It was making sense now; Barry had sent me to his fixer. I go up the stairs and try the door and it’s locked and so I figure that indeed Dr. Look has moved if he had ever been here at all, if he had ever existed; it could easily be some kind of joke only Barry would find funny. Then I see there’s a buzzer hanging loose from its wire, and taped to the buzzer is a business card, the same one I have in my hand, only this one is stained and dog-eared. I ring the buzzer, or rather I press it, I have no way of knowing if it is ringing or not. I assume it isn’t. But then as I am about to leave, the door opens. A young goateed man in his midtwenties stands there and stares at me funny, shaking his head as if there’s something wrong.
“Sorry, I was expecting the delivery guy, you’re not the delivery guy, are you?”
“No,” I say, “I’m not the delivery guy.”
“Three days now I’m supposed to get some papers from a conference I recently attended, I’m beginning to think they just tossed them in the river.”
“I’m, I guess you would say, looking for Dr. Look,” I offer.
“I’m Dr. Look, is there anything I can help you with?”
“I was referred by my company. Tate? They said I should see a Dr. Look and I guess that’s you.”
“Oh, of course, come in,” Dr. Look says. He extends his hand and I’m thinking he doesn’t seem old enough to have gone to college and medical school unless he was some kind of a prodigy, which maybe he is. We go inside the space, which is actually a railroad apartment that was never renovated, never turned into a drivers ed school or a CPA’s office like the rest of them on this block. “Take a seat,” he says, gesturing to an old black couch that has been repaired with duct tape. I don’t know what else to do so I sit on the edge of it and watch while he opens and closes the drawers on a row of filing cabinets that take up one wall. On the other wall there’s nothing but a clock, one of those plastic cat clocks where the eyes move back and forth and the tail wags every second. Eventually he finds whatever he’s looking for, a sheet of paper, and turns toward me. “Here it is.”
“Here what is?”
“The form.” He takes it and sits down at an old desk and hunts for a working pen. He finds one and scribbles on the sheet of paper, then signs his name at the bottom and stands.
“Done.”
“What’s done?”
“The paperwork.”
He comes around the desk and hands the form to me and I take it and look at it.
“What is it?” I ask.
“You came to me, we spoke at length, I conducted an extensive psychological examination, and then I deemed you fit,” he says. I had heard there were scam doctors like these in New York, the ones actors went to when they needed to pass a drug test before working on a movie. I look at the paperwork.
“You mean mentally fit? How do you know I’m mentally fit if we didn’t even speak?”
“We don’t have to talk about it unless you want to talk about it,” he says.
“Talk about what?”
“Whatever it is you did.”
“But I didn’t do anything.”
“It’s a formality,” he continues. “Let’s assume you kicked a door in, or in a pique of anger you threw a chair out a window. Or tossed your computer at a wall. Screamed at a colleague, threatened to kill someone, took a shit in your boss’s office, or any of a million other things you might do and that people in stressful jobs do everyday, and let’s say some overly sensitive person reported it internally to the human resources department, and for insurance purposes your company needs to vet you as not insane, so you come to see me. The liability requires it.”
“But I didn’t lose my temper,” I say. “I never lose my temper.”
“No?”
“No. I don’t even have a temper to lose.”
“Well then perhaps this is merely meant to be prophylactic.”
“In what way?”
“Perhaps someone is worried you might possibly lose your temper at some point in the future.”
“But couldn’t anyone possibly lose their temper?” I say. Dr. Look pauses for a moment to consider this, nodding with a mock seriousness he didn’t even know was mock.
“I suppose. But that’s really none of my concern.” He then reaches out his hand to shake mine, indicating that the office visit is over. I stand dutifully and take his hand and shake it for the second time. Then I look at the form again.
“It says here we met three times for one hour each time.”
“That’s right, that’s what the insurance company requires.”
“But I’ve only been here for five minutes. And you’re going to bill my company for three hours at, what, what’s your hourly?” I ask him, knowing it’s rude but going there anyway.
“Four-fifty,” he says.
“So you’re going to charge my company thirteen hundred and fifty dollars to deem me mentally fit without even talking to me?” I say, repeating the obvious, and with a tinge of disbelief.
“Would you rather you had to come here three separate times?” he asks. “Who has the bandwidth to do that these days?” I don’t say anything, I stand there looking at him. Then I look at the form again. Through the jargon I spy a number from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, that psychiatrists use: 310.83. I’ve studied the DSM before and I know what the classification means.
“Isn’t 310.83 Borderline Personality Disorder?” I ask. “I thought you said I was fit as a fiddle?”
He looks at me with more mock mock-concern than before and then slowly crosses over to an easy chair that looks like it had been sitting out in the rain for a year.
“Sit down,” he says quietly. “Why don’t we begin?”
I sit back down on the couch, which I now realize is a divan like you would see in an actual psychiatrist’s office, with a headrest at one end. It’s then that I look around for a diploma on the wall. I find one and squint at it.
“Harvard,” he offers. “Psychiatry MD with a PhD in behavioral studies.”
“Really,” I say. “That’s great.”
“This isn’t my main office,” he says as I look around. “My main office is downtown.”
“I see.”
“So why don’t you tell me what happened?” he says, and there’s something about his tone, something strong and reassuring yet at the same time anxious, as if he is hiding some kind of horrible career-destroying event in his past, something that got him here, a character-defining backstory that doesn’t get revealed till the end of Act Two, and this comforts me; I want to know more.
“Well …”
Then a long silence hangs between us and I realize for the first time that noises from the street can be heard, cars whooshing by and horns and a siren in the distance. An argument, in Spanish, or is it Cantonese, becomes barely audible, too, filtering up from below. Dr. Look reaches down to his feet where one of those white noise machines sits half-hidden under the skirt of the easy chair. It’s a ro
und gray cylinder about the size of a small pound cake with a single switch on the side of it. He feels around for the switch and then flicks it, keeping his eyes on me the whole time, and the machine begins making its patented, airy, noise-canceling, oatmeal-colored sound, and then all the sounds of the street fade away into oblivion.
I sit there listening to the machine (possible tagline: SILENCE = JUST TOO FUCKING FRIGHTENING FOR THE TIMES WE LIVE IN™) fighting the effort of my mind to cancel that sound out, too, and so there we are bathed in a kind of delusional quietude, a silence built of a protracted death rattle, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt such peace.
“I lied earlier,” I say. He waits. “They think I hit someone,” I continue, “which I didn’t, I’m sure of that, although I was heavily intoxicated at the time, so perhaps it’s possible that I pushed her, although I don’t think I did, in fact I know I didn’t. But it’s all quite a mess.”
My gaze remains fixed on him to note his reaction, to see how far I can push this fallen man into moral lassitude and fraud.
“Hmmm,” he says.
“I mean it’s interesting, because they’re saying I punched someone in the face, and she’s saying I punched her in the face apparently, and even though that’s false there’s a certain amount of truth to it. Not her, but other people.”
“Who?” he says quietly, with a tilt of his head to suggest I lie down on his Viennese divan. I take the cue and lean back, putting my head flat on the couch, and now I’m staring up at an old partially rusted tin ceiling, sections of it missing and replaced by plywood painted the same creamy beige.
“A woman I work with,” I go. “A girl, really.”
“You hit her.”
“OK, for the sake of argument let’s assume I did,” I say. He doesn’t give me the pleasure of a reaction, and so I can’t tell if he thinks it is a grave and terrible thing I’ve done or if this is the smallest and least worrisome act of random violence that he’s ever come across. Of course it’s also possible that he knows I’m fabricating, since I’ve never hit anyone, certainly not a woman and most definitely not the intern, but since I do happen to know that I am an extremely effective liar, and no one ever knows when I’m lying, ever, with the possible exception of the time said intern called me on my not getting her text message.