by Helen Dewitt
“Well, I had a lot of health problems when I started out,” said Laura. “Which didn’t help. And I have to admit, looking back, there was a personality clash between Ed and myself, I was brought up in a certain way so there were some things about Ed’s behavior that according to the way I was brought up were inappropriate.”
Laura sent a document to print.
“I’ll have one of those M&M’s now,” she said. “This is really attractive, having all the blue ones in a bowl. Was that your idea to have a bowl of them in Reception? I always thought that was a nice touch. You know, when I was a little girl I used to wonder why they never had any blue ones, and then one day they brought them out. It was like, Somebody up there likes me!”
Well, thought Roy, there’s just no accounting for tastes. But a lifetime in personnel teaches you to take these things in your stride.
“Anyway,” said Laura, crunching an M&M, “my mother always told me as long as you respect yourself, sooner or later the message will get through. No matter what kind of upbringing someone has had, as long as you know the kind of behavior that is acceptable, sooner or later that fact is going to get across. It may take a little longer to communicate it to someone from a seriously disadvantaged background who doesn’t know any better, but eventually you’ll make your point.”
A good personnel officer knows there are times when you don’t know exactly how to respond. When those times come—and they come to the best of us—the best thing is to remain silent.
Roy ate an M&M.
“I have to admit I was getting pretty downhearted at the amount of time that had gone by with no apparent result,” said Laura. “And to be fair, it wasn’t just Ed, all of the team had an attitude that was not the easiest thing for someone from a different background to accept. But then one day it was the funniest thing. They just seemed to change overnight. I don’t know what brought about the change, but I presume it was just that the time had come. They realized somebody was going to have to change, and since I had demonstrated in no uncertain terms that it was not going to be I, they accepted that it was just going to have to be they.”
“And you can’t pinpoint some specific incident that might have triggered the improvement?” said Roy. Through no fault of her own, Laura was not in a position to see the larger picture. Whatever it was that the team had responded to seemed to have had that effect on everyone in the company. You can’t work in personnel without becoming something of a cynic, and Roy doubted that the ladylike comportment of their secretary had had such dramatic and far-reaching consequences.
“No, not really,” said Laura. “Although I remember they had all had appointments with a gentleman from a temporary agency who was investigating their requirements. It may be that he may have said something in passing which gave them that little additional insight into their behavior.”
This was the first that Roy had heard that the representative from the agency had talked to all the men on the team individually. This was highly unusual, and it would have really been more appropriate to clear it with personnel, but Roy couldn’t fault the agency. It had delivered some really first-class employees, girls Roy would have been happy to have offered a place on the team with no ifs, ands, or buts.
“Well, I’ll leave you in peace,” said Roy. “Keep up the good work!” Roy knew the value of an encouraging word even if some people didn’t.
He was no closer to the heart of the mystery than he had been when he started out. But that there was a mystery was something he didn’t doubt for one second. Something was afoot. The question was, what might that something be?
Roy was determined to leave no stone unturned until he got to the bottom of it.
Roy took the rest of the blue M&M’s to Reception.
At his size, he had to plan ahead. It was no good suddenly making the discovery that he urgently needed to go to the bathroom, since there was no way he could get to the bathroom in a hurry. So he decided to stop off on his way back to his office as a precautionary measure.
Roy sat on the disabled toilet, a prey to uncertainty. What was going on? There were no clues to speak of. What if the trail had gone cold?
He shook his head and sighed. He really should try to cut down. Three jumbo bags of peanut M&M’s per day just wasn’t healthy. Moderation in all things—that should be our watchword.
The thing was, though, that he had cut back at one point. He’d gotten down to one bag a day and he’d stuck to that religiously for a month. But by the end of the month he’d had to concede defeat. Because the problem was, it had impacted negatively on his performance. The human mind is a strange animal, no two alike, and for some reason the activity of going through the different colors of M&M was essential if his mind was to function at its best. And the job was such that a single bag just wasn’t adequate to see you through the manifold challenges that you were apt to meet in the course of a day. He had heard smokers make the same observation. Smoking is an unhealthy, anti-social activity that endangers everyone in the workplace, so the No Smoking policy was not up for negotiation, but Roy could understand their point of view, and he was not without sympathy for it.
Roy was about to pull himself to his feet when he heard a funny kind of click. A panel had slid open in the wall beside him. Roy stared. In the hole revealed by the panel were the soles of two bare feet pointing downward. While he watched, some kind of mechanism must have been operating, because gradually the feet moved out into the room. Bare calves came into view. Bare thighs. Bare—Holy mackerel.
He was looking at the naked lower portion of a woman. The mechanism had stopped. He couldn’t see anything above the waist. As it was he could see plenty. And then some.
I don’t believe I’m seeing this, he thought.
This wasn’t some casual sexual liaison among the staff. Someone had had to build this contraption and put a hole in the wall. How many people were involved? What would the shareholders think? Was it even legal?
Nothing happened.
I gotta get outta here, thought Roy.
He stood up, did up his pants and buckled his belt. He flushed the toilet.
The naked rear end of the woman hadn’t moved.
Jesus, thought Roy.
Roy had never had a girlfriend, and though he had been on a couple of dates when he was younger and thinner he had always been shy. This kind of thing was way out of his league.
I’m getting too old for this job, he thought. Roy had had to deal with a couple of unsavory incidents in his time. But what the dickens was he supposed to do about this? Who would he even tell? What was he supposed to say? He tried to imagine telling someone, Steve Jackson for example, about the naked lower portion of a woman.
I just can’t do it, he thought. A man from the younger generation would probably have taken something like this in his stride. Roy just couldn’t deal with it. He couldn’t even think of words he could bring himself to speak in the presence of another person. But how could he just walk away from it? It would be irresponsible to bury his head in the sand and pretend it hadn’t happened. But what the hell was he supposed to do?
Besides, there was another problem. How was he going to get out of here? What if he opened the door and there was someone out there? What if somebody saw? They’d think he had been involved in this. If you’ve been in personnel long enough you know how stories get around. There was no way somebody was going to keep something like that to himself. The story would get around, and everyone in the building would think there was something in it.
Somehow he was going to have to persuade the woman to take herself off.
Was there some kind of speaker or something somewhere so he could tell her to go away?
Roy looked around the cubicle, but he couldn’t see anything. Unless maybe this thingamajig by the toilet roll was some kind of communication device? He jiggled at it. An unopened condom fell out onto the floor.
Roy picked up the condom and tried to squeeze it back up inside the thing it had fallen
out of. Three more fell out on the floor.
He considered trying to shove the four condoms back in, but the way things were going he’d just end up with a whole stream of the darned things piling up on the floor. He stuffed them into the inside pocket of his jacket.
There seemed to be absolutely nothing in the cubicle that would allow above-the-waist communication.
Well, maybe if he just kind of pushed on her legs she would get the message?
But what if she got the wrong idea?
Roy hesitated. This could be really embarrassing.
He had thought that things couldn’t possibly get any worse. Suddenly he realized just how lucky he had been when all he had to worry about was how to get rid of the visitor.
The handle of the cubicle turned just a fraction.
Someone was trying to get in.
THE HUMAN STALLION
Sometimes life forces you to learn things about yourself that you would rather not know.
Ed had always known he had drive. He just didn’t realize how much drive. But after the facility had been in place a month many guys actually found they weren’t making that much use of it, whether because of being in a relationship or whatever. So they would send screen messages offering their disability for a bottle of Scotch or whatever, and Ed started picking up extras. Soon he was using it five, six times a day.
Previously he had always thought the female staff unduly sensitive. Now he realized maybe it was not all their fault. They were working with a stallion in their midst, someone who could only work off his energies by using the DF an unrealistic number of times a day. Now that he had the outlet he knew he was a nicer person as a result of it. People had even commented on it.
So he had to give a lot of credit to the people who had devised the program for their insight into the workings of people with drive. It was kind of like going to a gym and working out on a punchbag. Instead of taking whatever it might be out on whoever happened to be standing by, you took it out on someone who was paid to have stuff taken out on them.
Anyway, once he had recognized that he had a problem he made a point of using the facility regularly even on the rare occasions when he didn’t feel like it.
Today a message from Mike had flashed up on his screen and he’d been in the middle of something, but he thought Might as well get it out of the way, so he clicked Yes to show he was coming. He had a big fax he wanted to get out, he could give that to one of the girls on his way over. Laura wasn’t at her desk, so he stopped off in the next department. Elaine was just standing up from her desk when he came by. He explained that he had an urgent fax that had to go out now and he handed it over.
Elaine seemed about to object.
“Look, I don’t have time for this,” said Ed. “Put it on the machine. Wait for it to go through. Put it in my In tray with the confirmation. Any problems, take an aspirin and call me in the morning.”
He strode off. He had just reached the door to the Men’s when he remembered he’d promised to call someone at two. It was now 2:05.
The lightning rod could wait. It was what she was paid for, after all. He headed back to his office and picked up the phone.
Elaine put the fax on the machine but it kept jamming on autofeed so she finally had to feed it in manually herself. The whole time she was there she was conscious of time passing. Finally the last sheet went through. Then the machine dialed the number but the number was busy. It dialed three times and then it just printed out a sheet saying it couldn’t get through so she had to feed all the pages again. This time she got a connection. She left the document on the fax machine and hurried to the Ladies. She was way too late.
Ed was back in his office on the phone, she could see. He’d probably want the fax back immediately. Well, too bad.
She hurried into the disabled. Sure enough, the light was on; the guy was already in the other cubicle. No time for the skirt today. He wouldn’t be seeing anything he hadn’t seen plenty of times already.
She undressed from the waist down, got on the transporter and went backwards through the wall.
Nothing happened.
She glanced at her watch. She wished the guy would just get on with the show so she could get back to work. Ed was going to want that fax back.
Time passed. She pictured the guy on the other side, desperately trying to get it up. If only Joe had installed some kind of way of communicating from one side to the other. She’d tried suggesting it, heck, they’d all tried suggesting it, but Joe just kept saying he’d get on to it as soon as he had the time. They all knew what that meant. Someone had once had an idea for improving the original notification, but getting Joe to do even the simplest little programming was like pulling teeth.
Ed, meanwhile, was getting irritated. He had finished his phone call and hurried over to the Men’s, only to find that someone was in the disabled stall. All the other stalls were free, and the company didn’t have any disabled employees, which could only mean one thing: Someone was helping himself to Ed’s disability. Or rather, they were really helping themselves to Mike’s dis, which Ed had snapped up for the going rate (a bottle of Johnnie Walker) because he might as well get it over with. So now Ed was a bottle of Scotch down and someone else was helping himself to the proceeds.
Ed rattled the door.
Inside the stall, Roy had suddenly asked himself a question. Why was somebody trying to get in? There were five other stalls. You couldn’t tell him all five were now occupied. And the company didn’t have any disabled employees, which could only mean one thing: Someone had turned up expecting to find this, this obscenity within the disabled stall and in all probability make use of it.
What this meant was that Roy found himself in a quandary. If he opened the door, he could put a name to a face. He could identify a member of the workforce and challenge him and the whole sordid business would come out. That was obviously the responsible course of action. But there was just one problem.
If Roy opened the door, he would be the one who was actually in the stall with a naked half-woman. All the evidence would point to it being Roy who had turned up for this little rendezvous. It would be Roy’s word against whoever. There would be no actual proof that it was, in fact, the other man who had intended to use company time for R&R, and that Roy was just an innocent bystander who got caught in the crossfire.
Someone was pounding on the door with a fist.
Elaine, meanwhile, was wishing she had had time to pick up something to read.
The lightning rods had gradually accumulated a stash of magazines, but Elaine had read all the issues of People and Us Weekly and Mademoiselle and Elle and Marie Claire and Better Homes and Gardens at least once. People has never claimed to be War and Peace. It’s not really the kind of thing you keep reading and rereading, discovering new layers of meaning each time. It doesn’t pretend to be. Nor, for that matter, does Us Weekly. People don’t go back to the February 1999 issue of Mademoiselle and suddenly realize how much they missed the first time around because they were too young to understand. This is not a criticism—that’s what people like about them. But what this means is that if you’re stuck in a waiting room with back issues of People which you’ve already read you’re going to have a long wait. A wider range of preread magazines is not going to significantly improve the situation.
What this meant was that Elaine had time on her hands. She had a million things to do, the screen message had come at the worst possible time but then that’s men for you, if they have a choice between sex at a time when it’s convenient and sex when you have a million things to do they’ll go for the bad time every time. In this case, to be fair, the client hadn’t specifically picked her and she didn’t have to accept—she could have let someone else pick up the assignment. But then she’d just have had it hanging over her head for the rest of the day. If she’d waited she’d have ended up having to accept later in the day, probably at an even less convenient time. So when it had come up on her screen she’d though
t Might as well get it over with. And now here she was, stuck, waiting for Rambo to get off the dime.
She found herself wondering, as she sometimes did, whether it was all worth it. Sure, the money was good, but who needs this kind of aggro?
The fact is, there’s no perfect job. You’re going to run into aggro whatever you do, so you might as well get paid for it. Most places just pretend the aggro doesn’t exist, why would they compensate you for working in an environment that’s just one big happy family, you’re lucky just to be working with such great people it’s not the money that counts it’s the people I don’t think so.
The important thing is just to be clear about your goals. If you go through a lot of extra aggro on a daily basis, and at the end of the year all you’ve got to show for it is a lot of clothes in your closet, don’t go looking for someone to blame if you spend what would have been your retirement selling secondhand clothes. Elaine had opened a separate account for her lightning rod earnings, and she put everything she earned on that side straight into that account. That money was going to put Hayley through college, and Elaine wasn’t going to touch a penny of it. She hadn’t had a lot of choices in her life, but Hayley was going to go wherever she wanted, no matter how much it cost. Money was just not going to be a consideration. In just six months she’d put $15,000 in the account. For $15,000 you can put up with a lot of back issues of People.
Elaine had reached this realistic conclusion, and now she’d been waiting fifteen minutes. What was the problem with the guy? Many women who provide sexual release for male clients in more orthodox settings have had this reaction to an unanticipated delay, but at least they can see that the client is trying. Elaine had no idea what the client was doing. If, in fact, he was doing anything at all. If, in fact, he was even there.
She’d been here sixteen minutes, and in all probability Ed Wilson was wearing a hole in the floor waiting for his fax. Right. You had your chance, Jack, and you blew it.