We had a meeting two months ago and Lana, that's our supervisor, read us the State's definition of sexual harassment, which covered almost everything we do at the office. Afterwards, we all agreed that if any one of us ever said or did anything that hurt somebody's feelings, we'd say so. We all promised we would. As we were leaving the meeting, I put my hand on Shonda's back, giving it a soft rub and said, “Looks like the fun's over.” She glanced back at my hand and said, “I'll give you exactly two hours to stop that.”
Everybody at the office said I should see a lawyer, and so finally, after three years, I did. I thought to myself, maybe I really do get on their nerves. Mcfarland was the attorney's name. He about crapped with joy when I told him why I'd come. “Jeraldine! Jeraldine, goddammit,” he shouted. Jeraldine was his secretary in the next room. “Jeraldine!! Shut off that goddamn mu-zak.”
When the room was quiet, he stood up and leaned his ear toward me, near my chest, squinting his eyes, and then whispered, “Good God o’mighty.” He dove into his desk drawer. “Damn it to hell,” he muttered. “Where the hell is that tape measure?”
He found it and handed me the hook at the head of the tape. “Back up slow,” he said. I began slowly stepping back. “How long ago did you say?” he asked.
“Three years ago.”
“And it's been like this ever since?”
“From the time they...”
“Shhh,” he said, holding his finger to his lips, tilting his head up, eyes closed like a blind man. “Back,” he whispered, “back.” I was already out the door in the middle of the hall. “Stop!” he shouted. He looked down at the tape. “Thirty feet. Thirty goddamn feet. The sonofabitch is audible at thirty feet.” He snapped the tape from my fingers and began reeling it in. “At twenty-five thousand a foot, I figure.…” He broke concentration for a second. “What kind of work do you do?”
“Desk job,” I said. He looked disappointed. He thought for a second.
“Who do you work for?”
“The State,” I said. “Social Services.”
“Damned government,” he said.
Mcfarland pressed a button on the side of the large silver tape measure and the remaining few feet zipped inside.
“Boy,” he said, “after today you can buy fucking Social Services.”
When I told them at work, everybody started saying I'd be cleaning out my desk soon. There were all kinds of sex jokes about wealthy men and smart women. And somebody started a wish list on the wall in the lounge, and everybody wrote their name on a separate sheet of paper and started their own list. At first there were new cars and vacations to Disney World and new carpet. Then people started putting things on other people's lists, like sex lube jell and vibrators and stuff. Lana, the supervisor, said that stuff had to come down, that it wouldn't be understood by folks in Columbia or Washington, that it had to come down from public view. So she taped it up in her office, and people drifted in at break time and read the new additions or added their own. There was always laughter coming from Lana's office.
One day, Jimmy, who was working as receptionist, buzzed me. “I think the FBI is here,” he whispered. When I walked up front, I was met by a tall professionally handsome man in his late forties.
“Richardson's the name,” he said. “I represent Baxley International.” I guess I was still giving him the FBI fish-eye once-over. “Baxley Healthcare,” he continued. “I was hoping you would be free for lunch,” he said, lifting his briefcase. Jimmy was humming “We're In The Money” when Mr. Richardson and I walked out. I glanced back and saw Shonda leaning over Jimmy looking at Richardson. “He looks like he ought to be in the stories,” she said.
For an hour and a half we ate our steaks, or rather I did. “Just call me Richard,” he insisted, buying the first of my five bourbons. All the doctors said I shouldn't drink. But what the hell. What the hell.
“Richard Richardson??” I said after the third drink.
“You can call me Rich if you'd like,” he said. While I ate and drank he showed me charts and computer readouts and four-color brochures. You'd be surprised by the things that a heart can take. I was, anyway. He talked a lot about saving lives and what quality of life really meant. Finally after I'd finished my fourth bourbon, I looked at him as straight in the eye as I could and said, “What do you want?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just a chance to be heard. Just wanted to leave you with a few things to think about.”
“That's all?” I slurred.
“That's it.”
“Hell, I'm never short on things to think about,” I said.
“I hope you'll communicate your feelings about all this to your attorney—” he looked at his pad, “Mr. McFarland.”
“Let me buy you a drink,” I said. He'd ordered one before the meal but he hadn't touched it.
When we got back to the office, he wanted to shake hands in the Lexus. “Hell no,” I said. “I want you to meet some people.”
Nobody was at the desk up front when Richie and I walked in. But I remembered the code to the inside door; they have to keep it locked, you know. Some of our clients come in drunk or stoned. You have hell getting them out once they get in.
I burped real loud on the elevator going up. I just cracked up.
As I passed the first couple of offices I realized they were empty, the lights out. “Yooo-hooo,” I said. Richie wanted to stop right there, retreat back to the Lexus, but I had a pretty good hold on his Brooks Brothers. I dragged him into the office I share with Lisa, Steve, Synthea, and Brenda. I reached for the light.
The girls from the office had formed two lines in front of the desks, each one of them wearing a little grass skirt they'd made from shredded paper. Carmichael, who was near the door, pressed the button on his ghetto box and “Heartbreak Hotel” blasted across the room. The women all shimmied in their skirts, and I hunched up the line with my thumbs inside my belt, singing like a dead Elvis, only louder. Steve moved up the line beside me, my bodyguard. And Lana, our boss, stood waiting at my desk with a crown somebody had made from cardboard and silver wrapping paper.
The girls did little fake fainting spells as I hunka, hunka, hunka burnin' love past them. Rachel, who weighs about 270, took my face between her cream puff hands and kissed me right on the mouth. Then she stumbled back like it had done something for her.
When the song was over, Lana put the crown on my head and proclaimed me King of Hearts. Mr. Richardson stood leaning against the door in the back, smiling. I don't think anybody had noticed him. I couldn't for the life of me remember his name. When I did remember it, he was gone.
I was the last one to leave the office that afternoon. I always like to clean up my desk. A clean start each day does me a world of good. So I was alone on the elevator. I could hear my faulty heart all the way down. By the time the bell chimed and the double doors slowly opened, I felt like crying. I felt that alone. I turned up the radio loud when I got in the car to drive home.
A few weeks later, Lana called me into her office. She said that she was having some surgery and would be out of work for at least three weeks. “It could be longer,” she said. “Could be six weeks.” Everybody knew she was going in for a boob job. You could tell that when she was young she'd been a knockout. “I need to know,” she said, “if I should ask for a replacement for you.”
“Why does everybody seem to think I want to quit?” I said.
“Because you won't have to work when you get your settlement,” she said. “Maybe you think you would, but you won't. Why should you?”
“This is all lawyer talk. That's all. I'll believe it when I can write checks on it.”
“When they send a three-piece suit to take you out to lunch, that means something,” she said. “I don't have to know today, but if you know when you might be leaving it'd make it easier on everybody.”
When I got back to my office, there was a message to call Mcfarland.
I held the phone about a foot from my ear. It was the go
ddamned government this, and the goddamned government that, and there's no way to get the bastards, and there's no justice for the common man.
When he was done shouting, the best I could figure was this: If a manufacturer of heart valves makes a valve that is approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the manufacturer can't be sued. Period.
“But nobody told me I'd be a walking tambourine for the rest of my life,” I said.
“Those goddamned bastards,” he began again. Finally he said he thought he had a good chance of winning the case if he could fight it far enough, but there was no way he could do it on spec. I'd have to pay. I'd get it back ten thousand times over when we won. But I'd have to pay.
When Lana came back from her surgery, we all threw a surprise party for her, with gifts and party hats. You could look at her chest and tell they'd done some work there, some fine work. There were a thousand boob jokes. And all the guys begged her to let us see them. She assured us that they were in no condition to be seen at the time, but that she wasn't closing off all possibilities for the future. The girls in the office bought her a bathing suit and insisted she open the box to give us a hint of what to expect. We guys had bought her a gift too, but we made her promise that she would join the party when it moved to The Paradise Lounge. The Paradise Lounge is a bar where those of us who have nobody to go home to go after work sometimes.
Lana called for a sitter—she's been divorced for four or five years—and at five o'clock we took the Japanese elevator down. The elevator became Japanese by squashing people in until the doors would barely close. Bells rang all the way down.
As it turned out, it was Karaoke Night at The Paradise Lounge, and people were singing. Lisa and Brenda and Shonda did “Leader of the Pack” and “My Boyfriend's Back.” Jimmy, the guy who trouble-shoots electrical problems in our building, sang “Midnight Hour.”
A lot of other people sang too. The place was really crowded. Maybe I was just at that point when the liquor for a split second settles everything, lines it up so that all things point in the same direction. I don't know what I'm trying to say. But I looked up at everybody, and everybody was so happy, everybody.
The DJ, or whatever you call the Karaoke guy, took a break, and Russ handed over Lana's gift. She opened the box and held up its contents, a flaming red knit sweater. It must have been at least three sizes too small.
“You boys ain't got one brain between you,” Shonda said, holding the sweater up in front of Lana. “There ain't enough thread here to cover one of these boobs.” Everybody laughed.
“Show her, Jimmy, show her,” yelled Russ over the noise.
Jimmy lifted the right sleeve of the sweater. On the inside was a tiny switch. With Lisa's help, they had sewn in hair-thin wires that attached to two little lights on the front of the sweater where Lana's nipples would be. Jimmy pushed the switch one way and one side blinked, pushed it the other and the other side blinked.
“Turn signals,” I said. “We don't want any accidents on the job.”
I'm no singer. Never have been. Probably one of those things I would have learned in church, had I gone. But a band of fools requires foolishness in equal parts from each. I looked down the list of hundreds of songs to find something that wouldn't hurt the audience. My name was called.
“In the town, where I was born,” I began. The song was “Yellow Submarine,” and to my delight everybody, I mean everybody, sang the chorus. People put their arms around one another and rocked from side to side and sang. They held up their drinks to one another or to me. “We all live in a yellow submarine,” they sang, packed against one another, not wishing to be any other place. Then came the part in the middle of the song that I'd forgotten, a little brief part where there are a couple of spoken lines. I never understood those lines. Everybody stopped singing. I felt it was my responsibility to get them smiling again. Over the spoken lines of the song are sounds of the submarine's engine room.
I didn't even think about it. I put the microphone to my chest. The engine room filled the bar. The place went bananas. You should have seen their faces. Their eyes flew open like spring loaded shades and their mouths fell open, and then they laughed in a rising wave that swept over me. Except for one person.
She was standing near the speaker, blondish brown hair, thin, squinting a little as if she'd left her glasses at home. The thing is, her expression didn't change when my heart played its solo. It was going cha-ching, cha-ching, pretty much in time with the song, and my friends from the office were going down on the floor; Jimmy was banging his face on the table. But the girl with the wrinkly eyes up front didn't change her expression at all. The same as when someone tells a joke and the other person just doesn't get the punch line.
By the time I got back to our table, there were two drinks waiting for me already. Somebody had put Lana's name on the list to sing a Dolly Parton song, and then there were more drinks. But I found myself looking at the girl near the speaker. I say girl, but she was not much younger than me. She stood in the same place, near the little stage, clearly in a world of her own—not unhappy, mind you—as happy as anyone there. But she seemed, the longer I looked at her, to be in her own little Star Trek beam-me-up column of light.
When I looked around again, all eyes were turned on Lana. Every eye in the bar. She was walking back from the ladies' room in the red sweater that looked like paint on her skin. People smiled and opened a path for her. And when she wanted to make a turn, she'd stop, hit the blinker switch, and then make a right or a left. All the guys hooted, but nobody was ugly. When she got back to our tables, she gave each one of us a little hug and kissed us guys on the cheek. Her eyes were all watery and bright.
Now I wanted to sing. Wanted to. I couldn't get up there fast enough. I'd found my song. When the DJ called my name, I bounded forward. My friends and the people who'd heard me do “Yellow Submarine” all clapped.
I looked down at the girl near the speaker. She hadn't moved from her place. She looked at me and smiled. The music began.
I took a deep breath and sang. “I've got spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle…” Everybody was singing again. After the second chorus, when there was just music, I put the microphone to my chest, raised one foot, then the other, and shook my imaginary spurs. The whole room wailed. Joyous bodies convulsed in a community of hilarious ecstasy, bodies doubled over, breathless hands rising up in testimonial. The tears came down on the blushed, happy faces. Lisa and Brenda and Lana had their arms around one another, falling out in laughter, and by the end Jimmy and Steve were standing on their chairs, heads down, solemn, holding their flaming cigarette lighters up high.
I was laughing so hard I gave up on singing at all, held the microphone to my chest and jingle, jangle, jingled over the music.
But the girl just looked up, smiling, happy, but seeming to miss the performance. She seemed unaware of everybody else behind her.
I don't talk a very keen line. You can guess the reasons. After the operation, when I'd get really hard up, I'd go to noisy bars or discos and hit on the women who were anywhere near my league. But there would always come that point outside on the sidewalk, or in the car, when I'd get that funny look and the woman would say, “Do you hear that? What's that sound?” You should have seen the looks on their face when I told them. Some just sat there. Some, who were the social worker types, would ask if I wanted to talk about it. Some said stuff like, “You're shittin' me!” None of them were put in a very romantic mood. My confidence was eroded a little.
But there was the business of the girl standing up front. By the time Lisa, and Shonda, and Brenda and Lana and the others were paying up, I couldn't stop looking at her although she never once turned and looked back at me.
I'm the sort of guy who's the last to leave a party. I mean I don't stay around when it's clearly time for me to go, when I'm no longer wanted. But I figure that somebody has to be the last to leave. It's not like I have any pressing business. Usually I'll help clean up. I'm just not in a hu
rry to go home, that's all. So the gang all left, and suddenly the room seemed empty. I just sort of stood there, turning like a rotisserie in the middle of the floor. The DJ was playing a poker machine.
I walked up behind her. I thought she might just turn around on her own. I'm like that. I think that if you are in a room and you think hard enough about a person, they'll feel it somehow and turn and look at you. It almost never happens. When it does, though, it's magic.
So I was standing eight or ten feet behind her and it wasn't working. I took another step and then she turned. She smiled. “Oh, hi,” she said. Her voice sounded like she was really drunk, snockered, I'd say. But her eyes weren't a bit drunk.
“Hi,” I said. Then the cat got my tongue.
“I enjoyed your singing,” she said, in that slurred voice again. Her eyes were wide and lively now, as if looking at me close-up she could finally see.
“Thanks,” I said. “I noticed that you were about the only person who didn't sing.” Her eyes followed my lips like they were sheet music or something. “You're not that shy, are you?”
She smiled and shook her head, and then I knew she was deaf.
Faith, that's her name, and I had a cup of coffee at the Waffle House on the bypass. She said she was a computer programmer for the telephone company.
“Why did you go to The Paradise if you can't hear the music?” As soon as it started out of my mouth, I knew it was coming out wrong. But she didn't seem to mind.
“I like the people,” she said. “I like to watch them have fun. I can feel the music when I stand near the speaker. And of course I can watch the people having fun. It really is contagious, isn't it?” she said. She didn't sound like a drunk to me now.
Before she left, I asked her if she thought she might have dinner with me some time, and she said she might.
I had one hell of a time getting to sleep. I'd almost doze off thinking about nothing in particular. Then I'd see Faith sitting across from me so close I could have taken her hand if I'd had the courage, and suddenly my heart would be rattling like a beggar's cup. I'd wake again. And I'd lie there. My mind would start up again.
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