by Helen Dewitt
Roy was still mulling over his quandary when it was solved for him. There was a low whirring noise. The lower portion of the woman began to disappear through the wall. Soon there was nothing to be seen but her feet. Then her feet were gone, and the panel closed, and he was alone in the stall.
Someone was still pounding on the door.
Roy lifted the bolt and opened the door.
I shoulda known, he thought.
He was looking into the irate face of Ed Wilson.
It took two seconds for Ed to realize he’d made a mistake. It was only too obvious why Roy had chosen this particular cubicle when five where free. Ed wouldn’t have liked to have to lift 320 pounds of human flesh from a sitting position using nothing but his knees; in all probability Roy didn’t like it either.
“Sorry, Roy,” said Ed, thinking on his feet. “I thought I left my gym bag in here earlier. I coulda sworn this was the last place I had it, but I don’t see it. Guess I musta left it at the gym. Hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”
Roy had never really cared much for Ed’s sense of humor at the best of times. For some reason he could never think of a better come-back than “Ha, ha, ha. Very funny.” He was about to say “Ha, ha, ha. Very funny,” for want of a better idea, but Ed was already on his way out the door.
And now Roy was in a real quandary. Ed Wilson was one of the top performers in the company. Roy knew, none better, just what outrageous demands Ed had made and gotten away with in the past. Ed was always being headhunted, and every time Ed was headhunted he used it as an opportunity to demand some new and more outrageous level of compensation. Every time Ed made some new demand Roy would think This time he’s gone too far, this time he’s really done it—next thing he knew Ed would be driving around in the Lamborghini he’d demanded as a company car.
Well, it was only too obvious that Ed hadn’t personally knocked a hole in the wall. Something like this couldn’t happen without somebody approving it somewhere. What had obviously happened, incredible though it might seem to an outsider who didn’t understand the weird dynamic that operated between Ed and Steve Jackson, was that Ed had made yet another demand and Steve had just given in.
Well, if that was the case, just who was Roy supposed to report this to? If he took it to Steve, it wasn’t going to be Ed Wilson who was sitting at home with the Want Ads.
On the other hand, did Steve really know what he’d gotten himself into? Was something like this even legal?
It was a real quandary.
Elaine dressed, returned to the fax machine, picked up fax and transmission sheet, and went over to Ed’s office to drop them off. She got there just as Ed came striding up from the Men’s Room.
“It took you twenty minutes to send a fax?” said Ed, who was in no very good mood. “If I’da known it was gonna take twenty minutes I’da told you to walk it over.”
“It took five minutes,” said Elaine, in no very good mood herself. “The other fifteen I was doing something for Bob that I had to interrupt because you said this was urgent. Bob, just in case you’ve forgotten, is my boss. I presumed that the urgency of the fax pertained to transmitting the material to the recipient rather than transmitting the transmission sheet to you. I do apologize for this unfortunate misunderstanding.”
In the old days Ed would probably have said something direct and to the point. But the lightning rods had brought him to a new level of self-awareness which he had not had before; he knew the reason he was ready to strike out at anybody within range had nothing to do with the fax. Besides, he was suddenly conscious of things he would have been less conscious of in the old days. He had always been interested in breasts, obviously, but now he felt an appreciation for a full frontal view, even clothed, which he would once have taken for granted. Besides, he wasn’t one to hold a grudge. He liked a girl who could hold her own instead of letting you walk all over her.
“Did anyone ever tell you you’re beautiful when you’re angry?” he asked grinning.
“Let’s put it this way,” said Elaine, “it’s not exactly an original line.”
Ed laughed. He’d had four separate sessions today already, he could live with an isolated disappointment. Besides, Elaine was really attractive. She had dark red hair, and dark brown eyes, and a long, full, sexy mouth. He’d been working hard, no time to play, it had been a long time since he’d connected with someone from this direction.
“OK, I overreacted,” he said magnanimously. “I admit it. I overreacted. What can I say? Excess is my middle name. So I’ll make it up to you. Can I buy you a drink after work?”
“Much as I’d love to,” said Elaine, “I have to pick up Hayley from her homework center after work, and I have other plans for the evening.”
“Tell you what,” said Ed, who had not gotten where he was by taking polite or not-so-polite negatives for an answer, “I’ll take you to pick her up. How does that grab you? We’ll surprise her. Turn up in the Lamborghini, make her day. And then I’ll just drop you off, unless of course I can persuade you to cancel your plans.”
“Why, thank you,” said Elaine. “What a wonderful idea! Usually I have to use my own car to pick her up and drive home in, which means I have to give up my parking space. I then run the risk of not finding one in the morning after I drop her off at school on the way to work, especially if the traffic’s bad. This way I can just leave the car there overnight and take the bus in, and no matter what time I get in I’ll know I’ve got a parking space, because the car will have been there ahead of all the other people who took theirs home and then had to drive in again the next day. If only I’d thought of that before!”
Ed grinned. “No problem,” he said. “Gimme your keys, I’ll get one of the guys on security to drop it off for you. They owe me a coupla favors, and besides, they got nothing better to do, long as I pick up the cab fare, which I’m happy to do, Elaine, just to show you my heart’s in the right place.”
Elaine felt herself weakening. Ed was all right when you got to know him, you just had to make it clear you weren’t putting up with any bullshit. The person who had recruited Laura Carter to be his secretary had to have been insane, to put it mildly. Or on some weird peanut M&M trip or something.
“Well,” she said.
“It’s a deal,” said Ed. “Five o’clock?”
“Sure,” said Elaine, shrugging and giving in. In spite of herself she felt flattered. Ed usually stayed till 9 or 10 at night, at the earliest. And here he was basically leaving halfway through the day, and all for her.
At 5:20 the Lamborghini pulled up in front of Hayley’s school, which provided an after-school homework center for children of working parents. Hayley came down the sidewalk with her friends, obviously looking for Elaine’s Toyota. Then she saw Elaine in the Lamborghini.
Elaine had never seen anything like the look on her face, this kind of 1,000-watt look of amazement, as if somebody had explained that they’d decided to introduce a second Christmas to the year and today was the day.
“Mom?” said Hayley, coming toward the car, and all her friends came with her.
“This is Ed Wilson, from the office,” said Elaine. “Ed, I’d like you to meet Hayley.”
“Pleaseta meetcha,” said Ed, holding out a hand, and they shook hands across Elaine. Then Elaine got out to let Hayley into the back seat, and then she got back in, and then they took off.
“You guys in a hurry to get home?” said Ed, and Hayley said No before Elaine had a chance to say Yes. “Wanna take a drive along the shore?” said Ed, and Hayley said Yes before Elaine had a chance to say No.
They drove out along the shore, which was not too crowded at this time of day, so Ed was able to just test the speed limit once in a while to give them some idea of the general point of a Lamborghini. Then they stopped for hamburgers, and Ed bought eight separate Rodeo Deals just so they could instantly collect all eight Rodeo Gals. They went and sat down, and Hayley just sat there with her chocolate milkshake and the eight Rodeo Gals
, each in a different cowgal outfit, and she looked all lit up inside.
Elaine had been on lots of dates over the years, and she couldn’t count how many times she’d had to sit there cringing while the guy sat there trying to be nice to Hayley and Hayley sat there being polite and quiet back. She couldn’t think of a single one that knew how to talk to kids, or that Hayley had liked. And now here was Ed not even making an effort, it wasn’t just the fact of the Rodeo Gals, it was the fact that Ed just naturally entered into things from a kid’s point of view. From a kid’s point of view, the whole point of being grown up is that you can afford to get the whole set of a special offer all at the same time, so why would you want to wait? Of course, some men might have had just enough of a glimpse of that to buy the whole set, but they would have been so condescending about it to Hayley that it would have been almost as bad as not buying anything at all. Whereas Ed obviously had the attitude, Who knows when we’ll come back? If we ever do? Who knows if they’ll still have the offer? Let’s get the whole set now just to be on the safe side. In other words, the attitude of a ten-year-old kid.
Now of course, one way of looking at it was that the reason Ed related so well to a ten-year-old kid was that Ed had the mental age of a ten-year-old. And thinking back over some of the stories she’d heard about Ed’s sense of humor, Elaine had to admit there was more than a grain of truth in it. But wait just a minute. This wasn’t some total idiot who couldn’t get his act together, this was the top earner in the company, somebody who had asked for a Lamborghini as a company car and gotten it.
Besides, you can tell something about someone by the way kids respond to them. A kid can usually tell if someone is genuine or full of b.s. If a kid likes someone that tells you something you probably couldn’t find out any other way.
So Elaine sat eating one of the eight Broncoburgers, watching Ed eat fries in a way that suggested his manners hadn’t undergone much of a transformation since he was ten, and relaxing. It felt weird to relax on a date with Hayley around, because usually she was so tense what with sensing all the cross-currents.
Roy, meanwhile, was breaking his golden rule. Roy’s golden rule was that you should never take work home with you. When you leave the office, leave the office, and make sure you leave the office at the office. That was the rule, but Roy was in a quandary, and he had simply not been able to leave that quandary behind when he walked out the door.
Should he tell someone? If so, who?
Not easy questions, and there was no easy answer.
AN UNEASY TRUCE
For the next three weeks Roy went on trying to make up his mind what to do. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to use the disabled stall again. He had had to make do with the ordinary stalls, something he hadn’t tried for several years and would have preferred not to be attempting now.
He noticed that some kind of romance seemed to be developing between Elaine and Ed Wilson. He was surprised that Elaine would want to get involved with someone with Ed’s reputation, and in fact, once or twice he considered the possibility of giving her some kind of subtle hint. If she had any idea what he really got up to she’d drop him like a hot potato. But it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you could convey by a subtle hint. Luckily, considering Ed’s reputation, there was precious little chance of anything coming of it. So he just kept his distance and hoped the end, when it came, wouldn’t be too much of a disappointment to Elaine.
Finally, at the end of the third week, Roy decided enough was enough. He couldn’t go on flinching every time he passed the disabled cubicle. The truly brave man is not the man who feels no fear—it’s the man who faces his fear and conquers it. So Roy went into the Men’s on Friday afternoon, pushed the door to the disabled stall firmly open, and strode in.
The panel in the wall was gone.
Roy walked over to the wall and knocked where the panel had been. It seemed solid, as far as he could tell. Could he have—but he couldn’t have imagined something like that. Could he?
He paced up and down. Wait! What about—
The wall attachment which had dispensed condoms was also gone.
Roy examined the wall carefully where the attachment had been. There were no screw holes or anything like that, but if he wasn’t mistaken there was a new tile in the wall. Besides, now he thought of it, he probably still had those four condoms in the inside pocket of his suit. He slipped a hand into the pocket; yup, still there. So it hadn’t been a figment of his imagination.
On the other hand, as proof that something fishy had been going on four condoms were pretty weak—if you were going to try and convince someone else. There was absolutely nothing here now to show that anything had ever happened.
Well, what did it matter? Didn’t this solve everything? For whatever reason, whoever had been responsible for it had had it removed. It was gone now. Wasn’t that the main thing? He could just put it out of his mind and get back to work.
Unfortunately the human mind doesn’t work like that. Now that there was no physical evidence left, now that there was no problem to actually solve, Roy’s mind just went on chewing over the mystery. To outward appearances he was the same efficient human resources operator he had always been; inwardly, he was preoccupied. He went right on wondering how it had actually reached the stage of being put in place, and who had been responsible, and why they had taken it out. Was it because they knew he knew? Had Ed Wilson had a word with someone higher up? Had they realized that if they did not take preemptive action Roy would take it for them?
There’s an old saying: An elephant never forgets. If they had been hoping to put him off the scent by removing the evidence, they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they had remembered that famous saying.
What had actually happened, of course, was that the probationary period for the lightning rods had come to an end. Over the six-month period the facility had been gradually extended to allow a wider range of employees to participate at strictly performance-related frequencies, as its positive effects on those already participating began to be perceptible. Joe had gone in to talk to Steve, who was absolutely delighted with the results—absenteeism was down, profits were up, everything was for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
“I’m glad to hear that, Steve,” said Joe. “So you’d like to make this a permanent arrangement, is that it?”
“For the time being,” said Steve.
“There’s permanent and permanent, obviously,” said Joe. “Two-year contract?”
“Let’s do it,” said Steve.
“That’s what I like to hear,” said Joe. “Because I’ve introduced some enhancements to the product that I’m very excited about. I wouldn’t want you to have anything but the best, Steve. That’s not the way I do business. These enhancements have worked beyond all expectations on our other sites, and I want you to have the benefit of those developments.”
“I’m pretty happy with what we’ve got in place right now,” said Steve, rightly sensing that these enhancements would not be complimentary.
“Sure,” said Joe. “But remember, Steve, we’re providing this above all as an incentive. It’s false economy, if you want my opinion, to cut corners when it comes to making that incentive as attractive as possible.”
“What did you have in mind?” Steve asked reluctantly, and Joe explained about the adjustable toilet.
Whatever Steve was expecting, it wasn’t this.
“I’m pretty happy with what we’ve got in place right now,” he said again firmly. “I see what you’re saying about the ambience, Joe, but I really don’t think these guys are that sensitive to atmosphere, if you want my honest opinion.”
Joe had been expecting some initial resistance, but he knew he just wouldn’t be happy until the original, flawed prototype had been replaced by the model which was now up and running in Kansas City. “Look, Steve,” he said patiently. “It’s to do with self-perception. I’ve just installed an absolutely up-to-date facility in Kansas
City. What kind of message does that send to your staff if they hear they’re trailing Kansas City in the level of provision? Do you want your staff to feel like a bunch of hicks? Do you want them to think they’ve got to go to Kansas City for state-of-the-art accommodation?”
In other words, did he want to have Ed Wilson singing THEY’VE GONE ABOUT AS FUR AS THEY KIN GO around the office at the top of his voice.
“Well, no,” said Steve. “But we’ve only had this six months.”
“Sure,” said Joe. “But believe me, Steve, once you’ve upgraded you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.”
With these words did Joe persuade Steve to approve installation of ten complete height-friendly facilities, thus further improving the cash flow situation. It was something he could feel good about. He had ensured that Steve would not face any unpleasant legal eventualities through making access to lightning rods subject to height restrictions. At the same time, he had spared Steve the aggravation of being aware of this. A good salesman knows that the fact that something is true is not necessarily a reason to share it with the customer. The current provisions for disabled employees caused Steve enough grief. There was absolutely no need to add a gratuitous source of irritation.
It came as second nature to Joe to clean up after himself. The new installations were added to the other end of the Men’s and Ladies’ Rooms over the course of a single weekend, and on the following weekend, once participants were aware of the change of venue, the old transporter was removed from the disabled cubicle, the panels removed, and the holes plastered up. Joe had no way of knowing that the installation had been seen by someone who shouldn’t have known about it. He had no way of knowing just how far-reaching the repercussions of that breach of security would eventually be.
5.
Troubleshooting
A WOMAN IN A THOUSAND