The Futility Experts

by Margaret Broucek

  TIM

  Rita, The Publisher’s gutless secretary, slid a few pages onto Tim’s desk and stepped back, frowning. The top sheet displayed a diagram of a football field, with an overlay of dots in the shape of a big head with googly eyes. “She thinks this drill chart was a poor choice,” Rita said. “Too offensive to parents.”

  “Did she do a poll?”

  “She did a little poll.”

  Tim pushed back in frustration, scraping the floor with the thin metal legs of his chair.

  “Sorry,” Rita said, “everyone agreed.” Whenever The Publisher wanted to dump a piece, she got emotional backup by wandering into people’s offices and saying, “Can I get your opinion on this? Don’t you think this article is pandering/beneath us/offensive to some group/dull/biased/clichéd/run-of-the-mill/etc.?”

  “Okay,” Tim said. “I’ll let the poor guy know that the Simpsons are too controversial.” Now he’d have to work overtime to get a new drill selected and described this late in the month. Besides short descriptions of new marching-band products from the advertisers, this was the only other element Tim provided for the magazine: the monthly “Killer Drill,” which presented the wet-dream field show of some earnest high school band leader.

  “And she’d like to see you in her office right away.”

  He grabbed his legal pad and followed her. “We were all in over the weekend,” he told Rita’s withered back. As usual, on Saturday he had screwed in the desk lamp light bulbs for the other editors, Emily and Marcel, so they wouldn’t be caught out after The Publisher unscrewed them all on Friday evening.

  Usually when he pushed into The Publisher’s office, she was concentrating on her iPhone and would remain doing so for an uncomfortable stretch. This time, however, she nearly leapt from her chair to greet him.

  “Mr. Turner! Come in, come in!” Then she landed hard, back onto her executive throne.

  Something wonderful had happened to her, he thought, already jealous.

  “Thanks for taking a moment out.”

  He lowered himself tentatively into the opposite armchair.

  “I’ve been thinking for quite some time, ever since our first meeting, in fact, since when you first came in for an interview—do you remember that day?” She was breathing hard, actually panting. She was fatter than he was, and inspiration winded her. “I’ve been thinking about your friend that you mentioned, the band leader for the President’s Own.”

  “Okay…,” he said, drawing it out.

  “Your old friend.”

  “Joe Masotta.”

  “Joe Masotta,” she said with an Italian accent, like she was teaching him the proper pronunciation. “Every year since you mentioned him—if you can believe it—every year when I am preparing for my keynote at NMBA, I check the fall concert schedule of the President’s Own, hoping beyond hope that they will be playing near where the meeting is held. And now, my dear man, this is the year!” She seal-clapped over her desk. “They’re playing in Providence the night before and in Boston that very same night. My keynote is at eleven a.m.! I want to interview Colonel Masotta. Oh, I want this so badly. Just think about it—all of the stories of the inaugurations and the state visits and the presidential funerals. He’s got the history; he could show photos! You know, I watched him in a video interview on the Internet.” She reached out to rap her big gold pen against the far edge of her blotter like she was dinging a cymbal. “Fascinating! My God! And he’s funny!”

  Finally, after twelve years of humiliations, he understood why he’d been hired to do a job he’d been wholly unqualified for: Joe Masotta. “Yeah, he’s funny, all right.”

  “Will you call him?”

  “I guess I could see if he’ll talk to me.”

  “Of course, he’ll talk to you! Will you try him this afternoon? Pretty please?”

  “Sure, but he’s busy, of course.”

  “And if you can arrange this, I want you to know that you will be rewarded with a substantial raise.”

  “How much?”

  “Five thousand.” She wagged the thick pen at him. “The title of senior editor and financial remuneration because this—this would be my greatest achievement and a great night for Bells Up, a real dream come true.”

  “Emily’s already the senior editor.”

  “Emily can move over. Emily doesn’t come in on Saturdays. Not like you.” She was back to her phone, at last. Scrolling.

  Oh, God, Tim thought, Emily will quit. She doesn’t need the aggravation. “I don’t need a new title,” he said.

  “Well, you’ll deserve it if you can make this work.”

  As he was leaving the office, The Publisher added, “Oh, and Tim, Angela’s in the hospital. I’m afraid her cancer is gaining ground. I’ll be going over this afternoon, and I’ll let you know what I find. Of course, I’m hoping she can still call up at least a few key accounts now it’s so late in the month.”

  “Cancer? I’d heard a rumor, but I just spoke with her on Saturday about a short.” Angela was the sales director. In fact, she was the whole sales department.

  “You know, I wish I knew where to find twelve more of her,” The Publisher said and then tucked her throne tightly under the desk, shaking her head and tsking as though Angela were already dead. Before Tim reached the door, she asked, “By the way, Tim?”

  He turned back again.

  “Do you know what stellar means? The word stellar?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you?

  “Yes.”

  “Then don’t use it to describe an activity involving middle schoolers.”

  # # #

  When Tim stopped at Emily’s door, she was just setting her bag on the desk, her back to him.

  “Angela’s in the hospital,” he told her.

  “Oh,” she turned, crestfallen. Tim felt off-balance, looking at her. She’d made some kind of transformation. Her face was glowing and she’d straightened her hair or added hair on until it was long enough to tease her clavicles. God, that was sexy. Wow. It was crazy how this small change hit him, full on. Or, no, it was the low-cut blouse, or just the fact that it was a blouse and not a chaste cotton oxford. This blouse was cut low enough to emphasize—the boobs! Those were not Emily’s boobs. Emily could not have had those before this moment. “Wow, Emily. You’ve changed your look.” It was as though a showgirl were resting in Emily’s office between numbers.

  “What’s she in for?” She slumped back against the desk.

  “Cancer. That’s what I heard.”

  “Shit, shit, shit.” She shook the silky hair. Tim wiped the corners of his mouth with a thumb and finger. Emily had gone from being a lilting balletic melody he couldn’t get out of his head all the way to The Firebird.

  She said, “We have to go see her.” The new boobs and hair had required a new leather skirt, he now realized, which she smoothed over her ass as she sat down to pull her phone from her purse.

  His tongue sloshed in his mouth. “Sure, I can take you.”

  “We should go some night this week. She has a kid, right?”

  Tim began to rapid-swallow all of the saliva, but he lisped anyway: “Two shons. She’s my age.”

  “Those poor kids!”

  “Your hair,” he managed.

  “Yeah, got it done on Saturday. Not sure if I like it.” Then she glanced down at her own cleavage.

  Tim nipped a tight smile and stood there in her doorway until he realized by her raised eyebrows that she was waiting for him to answer something. “What?”

  “I said, how’s Wednesday?”

  “Let me check,” he said, pushing himself away.

  # # #

  Eyes closed, his fingers resting on the vibrating Selectric keys, Tim went from visualizing Emily’s tits to wondering how much they cost to figuring that the senior editor gig must pay a whole hell of a lot more than he made. Maybe he could just ask her, “What do you make here, Emily?” Maybe she would tell him. He palmed his cheeks, but in his min
d he was cupping her breasts against his face, so cool, spreading to cover his eyelids, his lips.

  It was a no-hope fantasy. She used to go out for a beer with him on Fridays, but she’d turned him down ever since the night of his perfect performance, when every story of his had slayed her, the night she’d needed his steady arm as they left the bar. He was high on himself and rightly so, and at the zenith of intoxication, having driven her back to her car in the Bells Up lot, he had grasped her head and pulled her lips over from the cheek kiss she was intending to a full-on wet one, and then she’d reared back and fled the vehicle.

  He opened his eyes from the tit fantasy onto his forty-pound gray typewriter. All three editors owned such a boulder. The reason computers were not allowed for the editors was that once The Publisher had read any piece and made her notations in pen, she did not want any editing to go on that she could not see. The hard-copy shorts and articles moved back and forth between The Publisher and the editors, growing more and more crazed with inky trailings. Then a person outside the process, someone who could have no motive for changing The Publisher’s directions, took the mess and keyed it into an actual computer program. If Tim scored that raise, then he could maybe save enough money to get out of this asylum.

  He picked up his cell phone and thumb-typed “Joe Masotta” into the browser search box, thinking five thousand dollars might just be enough to accomplish Fire Team Mission #1: Make Enough Money to Buy Mona the Driveway. Joe and Tim had both studied with the maestro and had taken turns playing tuba for the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra (there was only one tuba position). When they graduated high school, they decided to audition for one of the Marine bands. They figured since Marine musicians also had to go to boot camp, the number of players auditioning would be much lower than for most orchestras. Joe prepped Tim daily, running him through his audition pieces and yelling at him like they imagined the Marines would do at the audition. At the actual event, however, Tim was nicely asked to run through the E scale in two octaves, and he botched it. Then he mooed his way through the Kopprasch #33 and wasn’t even asked to do the sight-reading portion. Meanwhile, Joe was a resounding success and entered boot camp alone.

  The photo of Joe that came up on Tim’s Samsung browser was of a handsome, fit man in uniform, holding a conducting baton, with his arms crossed, eyes leveled at the camera—an accomplished, confident, middle-aged man.

  Tim dialed the contact number for the President’s Own public affairs office. When a man answered, Tim said, “Hey, how would I contact Joe Masotta, do you think?”

  “May I ask who’s calling?”

  “An old friend, Tim Turner, from a thousand years ago. But he’ll know me.”

  “Let me take your phone number, and I’ll see that Colonel Masotta gets it.”

  Tim gave his number and then sorted through the mail until he found the envelope from KingMar that poor Angela had asked him to look for. After reading the brochure, he typed up Angela’s short.

  Come Out Ahead with KingMar Plumes

  Are Your Plumes Outdated? Have they lost their majesty? Change your image with KingMar Marching Band Plumes, designed to top off the new sleek and fashionable uniforms. Shako, French Upright, and French Fountain plumes are available in a range of heights and thicknesses. Custom colors also available for an extra fee. Look sharp with KingMar.

  Majesty might be one of The Publisher’s many forbidden words, so he’d have to check it against his list, and he wasn’t sure about the title, either, but plumes did come out of your head. The next brochure that appealed to him was one for batons, since he had just seen Joe’s publicity photos. After he wrote each line, he would say to himself, Who gives a shit? He wondered if the phrase shaft and ball would send The Publisher over the edge. If so, he would have to think of new names for what actually were the shaft and ball of the baton.

  Precision Batons for the Most Demanding Performances

  Flagship batons in every inch are carefully weighted and manufactured of inflexible, chrome-plated steel, quality engineered for top performance. The sleek, dimpled 3/8-inch shaft and ball are designed to help the discerning director gauge hand placement. All batons have a one-year warranty against factory defects. Champions worldwide use Flagship batons.

  Next, Tim reviewed his choices for the replacement Killer Drill. Band directors had recently sent in charts for marching-band shows called The Planets (with simulated planetary collisions), Portrait of a Nation, Pandora’s Boom Box, and Fat Bottomed Girls, set to a Queen song of the same name, the last of which would never make it out of the polling committee. Tim often selected the month’s Killer Drill at random, mixing up the handful of charts that came in through the mail—just mashing them all over his desk and then picking one up. Then he would call up the band director and talk with him during the man’s planning hour or during lunch. The guy was always thrilled to pieces. Tim’s first question: “I gotta ask, man, what inspired such an incredible drill?” He’d heard it all: fireworks, Star Wars, the Beatles, the butterfly lifecycle, the Columbian Exchange, the true spirit of Texas. As he slid Portrait of a Nation from the stack, he began to notice sounds rarely heard in the Bells Up halls: murmurings, then all-out hall talking, not in hushed tones but like regular people speak. And this made Tim rise from his chair and come to realize that they were free. The Publisher had left the building to go to the hospital to see Angela. For the rest of the afternoon, he and others made the rounds of the building like it was an open house. Even the reclusive accounts payable woman left her station and swaggered around like Hugh Hefner at the mansion.

  “If I had The Publisher’s money,” graphic artist Connie Garvin announced to a clutch of women by the kitchen, “I would act the exact same way. Money turns you into a complete bitch. It’s fucker-juice.”

  Tim moved on to find Marcel Aubert—the senior (and only) editor for the other company magazine, Lift Your Voices, for choral directors—sitting on the desk of the finance guy and telling him, “Fat is actually exhaled from your body. That’s how it leaves, and now that I’m running, I’ve exhaled seventeen pounds so far. Think about it. Fat in the air. Fat blowing in the wind.”

  Tim paused at each clump of coworkers but didn’t stay long. He felt out of sync, uninterested in any line of conversation.

  From time to time, a phone would ring or the front door would open, and the groups would scatter and the fluorescent-bulb hum would again become discernible until they realized The Publisher was still off premises and they could once again mingle.

  He looked into Angela’s office. Just last week he had teased her again about it, threatened to strip down to a Speedo for a meeting. Her office had a beachy theme: striped love seat; blue wave-patterned rug; shelves of erotic pink-lipped conch shells; hand-painted quotes on weather-beaten wood (“A goal is a dream with a deadline,” with no attribution; “What we dwell on is who we become—Oprah Winfrey”). Her desk chair was thickly cushioned, and from it he studied the photos of her family: a close-up of her tilting her head dreamily toward a man with a porn-star mustache, and another of two boys dressed up, one as a Minecraft character and the other as a ballot box (a box with a slit and the word VOTE on it). Jesus, what boy wants to be a goddamn ballot box for Halloween? But there the kid was, happy, denied nothing—certainly not paintball birthday parties that cost forty-five bucks. In her desk drawer were all of the Certificates of Excellence that The Publisher awarded instead of bonuses and a composition book that was her sales notebook.

  Tim’s phone buzzed with a Words with Friends prompt. The Publisher had played her word, quibble (24 points). He pictured her sitting in Angela’s hospital room, shoving peanut M&M’s into her face funnel with one hand and sliding tiles into place with the stubby index finger of the other, all while Angela was gasping for air.

  Tim went back to his game with TallBlondBabe18 and played bad. Instantly he got a message.

  O I like bad.

  This was a jolt to him. He rubbed his chest with his left hand
, thinking how to reply. Then Mike, the muscle-bound shipping guy, came in and leaned against a filing cabinet. “False alarm. Her car’s not back.” In his tight Lycra shirt, Mike’s nipple jewelry looked like ringworm.

  “Yeah, she’s still there, playing Words with Friends from the hospital room. Hey, what was going on out in the parking lot this morning?”

  “Did you see that shit? She calls me out there to diddle around with the seat belt mechanism. She wants a knot tied in there so the belt will not feed out too far in a crash, which it won’t, because that’s how belts are designed, that’s the whole purpose of a belt, but she doesn’t trust it.”

  “I’m playing a game against someone named Tall Blond Babe.”

  Mike came over to look at the phone. “What game?”

  “Words with Friends.”

  “Don’t get to see her?”

  “No.”

  “Ask for a picture.”

  “I just started playing with her.”

  “All right then.” Mike hovered a little while longer, but Tim was focused on the phone. “Did I tell you The Troll’s got me going up to Kennebunkport on the weekends, now? Do some handyman shit around the beach house? Like I don’t already do forty hours’ worth of weird shit for her here.” Tim frowned at his little game screen, wanting Mike gone.

  “Thinking of taking a girl up there next time,” Mike continued, but he got no response. “Chaining her to the bed as my slave.” After another silent moment, Mike shrugged his bulbous delts. “Guess I’ll get back to it.”

  As he left, Tim messaged, I can be bad if you’ll let me. After five minutes with no reply, he put the phone on Angela’s desk and looked through her sales notebook. Each page listed a month’s sales, steady through the years, the same players returning again and again, until the last few months, when their regular buys grew larger and she’d also landed new companies. As she was shrinking, her income was bulging.

  Then the message came: Ur just who I been looking for.

  # # #

  It was seven-thirty when Tim pulled up to the auction house. The old man who owned it was standing behind the glass door, staring out onto the parking lot. He’d held the place open just for them. Sunny Straub, a sharp-featured woman in early old age, rose from a chair by the door and bustled ahead of Tim through the maze of antique furniture to the grand piano in question, whose closed lid edge she grasped, grinning like a child claiming a toy. As Tim sat on the bench of Sunny’s intended purchase, mostly he noticed that its white finish was flawless. He knocked on the cabinet and gave an impressed nod, depressed a few keys, and told her, “Isn’t this fine!”