by Helen Dewitt
Sometimes your words come back to haunt you. You say something casually, without thinking that much about it. Later it turns out you spoke truer than you knew.
In the early days, when Joe had been trying to persuade women that being a lightning rod was something to be proud of, something aspirational that could fit in with the life goals of a very special person, he had used the phrase “a woman in a thousand.”
“Maybe one woman in a thousand could do it,” he’d say. “We’re looking for that woman in a thousand.”
“It’s not for everybody,” he’d say. “We’re looking for the woman in a thousand who is a real team player.”
Well, he’d said it, obviously, but really it was just a way of flattering the applicant, the way you flatter someone into buying the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Or if the truth be told, what he was probably thinking was that not one woman in a thousand would fall for it. He was looking for the woman in a thousand, all right, the woman in a thousand who was dumb enough to think it was a smart career move to stick her fanny through a hole in a wall and let someone give her the old Roto-Rooter from the rear.
Well, ironically, it turned out he had spoken no more than the truth.
It was a job for the woman in a thousand. Or at least, he didn’t have a thousand gals on the payroll yet, but of the couple of hundred signed up so far, apart from Lucille, there weren’t more than about five with the brains of a headless chicken. The rest, if you wanted his honest opinion, had a damn sight less brains than a headless chicken.
It’s hard work finding new clients for an innovative scheme like this; it’s hard work convincing existing clients that it definitely is for them. All you want from the ladies is for them to demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that the installation is the morale-boosting, productivity-enhancing type of product you made it out to be. All you want is for them to get on with their job while you get on with yours, which is persuading more companies to go with the flow.
But instead Joe had found himself fielding constant phone calls. He’d be in the middle of a meeting with an important client when the phone would ring. His secretary would tell him it was urgent. He’d pick up, and it would be some gal in floods of tears because some guy slapped her on the fanny.
For the kind of money she was getting you’d have thought she could throw in a slap on the fanny every so often without going into a big song and dance about it, but the gal would go on and on about how she had been given every assurance that she would be treated with respect, this wasn’t at all the kind of thing she’d been led to believe, she felt that her integrity had been compromised di bla di bla di bla.
“I hear what you’re saying,” Joe would say. He couldn’t help but hear what she was saying, she was yelling so loud everyone in the Goddamn building could probably hear every Goddamn word. “Look, I’ll give this my serious consideration. You’re right, this raises serious questions. It’s too serious to do anything hasty. I’ll call you back when I’ve had a chance to give it some serious thought.”
And he’d hang up thinking Jesus.
Or sometimes one of the gals would come down to the office and raise Cain. Sometimes they’d come during office hours when there were new applicants being screened, and sometimes they’d come after work and catch him just as he was getting ready to get home for the day—he never knew which was worse.
“If you think I’m going to put up with this kind of thing you’re very much mistaken!” they would say, just as if he hadn’t warned them that it was a job for a woman in a thousand.
Joe would generally just let them talk themselves out. When the hullabaloo had subsided he would say, “I couldn’t be sorrier, Suzanne (or Julie or Nicole or Yvonne as the case might be). I’m shocked that a thing like this could happen. I need hardly say that I never in my wildest dreams anticipated that one of our clients could step over the mark in this fashion. This is way out of line. Totally unacceptable. But the thing is, Suzanne, as I explained when I interviewed you, this is a job for a woman in a thousand. Because as I’m sure you know, this is a very innovative approach. We’re all feeling our way. Some of the behavioral parameters are still fluid at this stage. I’m sure the client didn’t mean to cause offense, he was just feeling his way—”
This was a slightly unfortunate turn of phrase in the circumstances but Joe would speak smoothly on.
“—as are we all. This is all very new. And remember, many of our clients are relatively unsophisticated young men in many ways, the fact that they are high earners doesn’t necessarily mean that they have the conceptual framework which would enable them to deal with an unfamiliar situation of this kind with the level of savoir faire you might prefer to encounter. It’s that very lack of savoir faire, I need hardly say, which leaves them in such crying need of a service of this nature.”
“That’s all very well, Joe,” the gal would say, “but just how much background in the social graces do you need to know that you don’t go around peeing on people?”
“I know, I know—” Joe would begin.
“What kind of shithead has to consult Emily Goddamn Post to ascertain that pee belongs in the receptacle provided? What kind of social moron are we talking here? I’m sorry, Joe, but this is just too much. What kind of infantile pervert derives sexual satisfaction from taking out his wiener and squirting pee on people? I mean Jesus, Joe, di bla di bla di bla . . . ”
“I know,” Joe would say again. “I know. I couldn’t be more horrified. But that’s just the point. We’re dealing, often, with deeply inadequate individuals. Persons with a very low sense of self-worth. Now unfortunately, as I’m sure you know, in a conventional office that type of person tends to take out his feelings of low self-esteem on his colleagues, in a way that impacts negatively on the effectivity of the team. I’m sorry to say this, but I have to remind you that, as well as the obvious sexual function, providing a safe outlet for that low self-esteem is part of what we here at Lightning Rods are hoping to achieve.”
“Sure, Joe, I appreciate that, but Jesus—”
“Remember, Suzanne, we don’t know the whole story. For all you know the client may have just been taken to task by someone higher up in a way that he perceived as humiliating—he may, unforgivably I know, have taken out that humiliation on you. I’m not condoning what happened for one second, let’s get clear on that one here and now, I’m just saying we have to see this in a wider context. We have to try to get this in perspective.”
And nine times out of ten he would end up having to take the gal out to lunch or even dinner at a fancy restaurant to put the unpleasant experience behind her. Because if he didn’t strategically make a suggestion of this kind sooner or later it would occur to the gal that there had to be a way of identifying the person responsible and getting back at him. And since the whole point of Lightning Rods was to eliminate the spectre of sexual harassment from the modern office this was a deeply worrying thing to have occur to someone you personally introduced into the office for the specific purpose of eliminating that cause of concern.
Over dinner like as not the gal would relax and tease him about the woman in a thousand and tell him she didn’t believe for one second that there was a woman on the planet who could just take that kind of thing as all part of the day’s work. But that was exactly where she was wrong. Joe knew just such a woman. Only he was beginning to think she wasn’t a woman in a thousand after all. A woman in a million was nearer the mark.
It reached the point where if he picked up the phone and heard a woman’s voice his heart would sink. Unless, of course, the voice belonged to Lucille.
It was thanks to Lucille that a lot of safeguards were in place that it probably wouldn’t have occurred to him to think necessary, but which in the light of later events turned out to be worth their weight in gold. For example, the fake fire alarm was Lucille’s idea. Why wait for someone to try not using a condom when you can put the fear of God in them from day one? And it was thanks to Lucille that there was a c
ontrol on the woman’s side of the wall enabling her to lock the door to the disabled cubicle. Because while there was no reason to think the majority of people would not use the facility responsibly, it was just as well they should know that if anybody did get violent he would not be able to get away. Likewise, there was a device that guaranteed that the transporter would not operate if more than one person was in the disabled cubicle. Also, the door of the disabled cubicle could not be opened while the transporter was in operation; it could only be opened after the transporter had gone back to the other side.
This was to foil the type of person who not only fantasizes about a football team and a cheerleader but who takes the sexual outlet provided in his workplace as an opportunity to act out that fantasy in real life. Joe had been in no position to argue—after all, he had had that type of fantasy himself, and after all the lightning rods were living proof that the boundary between fantasy and reality is nowhere near as fixed as we sometimes imagine. And later, when the gals started hassling him over all the perceived slights they had received, he was glad he hadn’t argued. He shuddered to think what life would be like if he hadn’t taken those apparently unnecessary precautions.
What he eventually came to realize was that maybe he had been a tad undiscriminating in the applicants he took on to begin with. He wasn’t blaming himself, after all what choice did he have? If you’re recruiting for bifunctional personnel you not only need the typing skills and what have you, you also need someone who satisfies certain minimum standards of attractiveness, I mean let’s face it no one is going to thank you if he goes into the disabled toilet only to be confronted by a quivering mass of lard. And on top of that you need to find someone who is willing to do something that the majority of applicants are going to reject out of hand. Well, basically Joe had started out by accepting anyone who met the grade and wanted the job; now he was paying the price for that.
Because what he was discovering, unfortunately, was that he hadn’t ended up with a team of cool, unflappable ladies like Lucille. What had happened was he had ended up with a lot of people who were in it for the money, but who hadn’t stopped to think about what the reality of what they would have to do for the money would actually be like. In fact, unfortunately, instead of ending up with the type of person who is trying to achieve some goals, he had mainly ended up with people who didn’t have a lot of choices. He’d be looking across the desk at some gal who’d responded to an ad for rusty shorthand and 60 wpm typing, she’d be telling him what her speeds used to be before she stopped working to stay home with the kids, her husband had walked out, suddenly she was trying to meet the mortgage payments which she didn’t stand a hope in hell of doing on the level of remuneration you get with rusty shorthand and rusty 45 wpm typing. Well, obviously in one sense Lightning Rods offered her the chance to achieve a goal of keeping the house without working two jobs and never seeing the kids, but someone in that kind of situation is not going to see it in that light. He’d learned that to his cost.
Well, for a while he’d gone on taking calls from dissatisfied personnel, but there’s only so much you can take. What he wanted to say was, if you can’t stand the heat stay out of the kitchen. But a caring employer doesn’t make that kind of remark to an employee on whom a client has thoughtlessly peed. What he was finally forced to do, though it went against the grain, was to hire a staff advisor on a salary of $40,000 a year purely to talk the gals through whatever it was they were feeling. And recruiting the advisor was a job and a half! It took him two months of in-depth interviews, and time he could ill afford to waste, to come up with someone he thought could deal with the type of situation he’d been fielding singlehanded for God knew how long. He wished he could have just given the job to Lucille, but Lucille was earning so much as a lightning rod he couldn’t afford her.
AN UNUSUAL SUGGESTION
Although he couldn’t download responsibility onto Lucille’s capable shoulders in the way he would have liked, Joe did continue to benefit from the insights of someone he had identified from the first as one smart cookie. He sometimes suspected that Lucille was not entirely in agreement with the installations as he had originally set them up. The reason he suspected this was that from the first Lucille kept thinking of ways to make the service more to her liking. Unlike the other lightning rods, she never called to cry on his shoulder. Instead she kept calling in with suggestions and advice and comments.
One day he said, “That’s a very interesting idea.”
And he said, “Um, I was wondering. Would you like to have dinner sometime?”
There was a short pause, and then Lucille said, “Sure.”
He said, “Would, um, would Friday suit you?”
And she said, “Fine.”
He picked her up after work and drove to the restaurant. She was wearing a pink suit and pink shoes. Her hair and make-up were immaculate.
They had a table in a quiet alcove of the restaurant where they would be undisturbed.
“So how’s it going?” he asked.
“It’s going just fine,” said Lucille, taking a sip of wine.
“And it’s not giving you any, that is, obviously I do what I can to screen applicants but I have to say I’ve had some girls getting pretty upset.”
“Really?” said Lucille.
“To the point where I wonder if I was optimistic in hoping applicants could approach it in the spirit intended.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Lucille, taking another sip of wine. “The way I see it is, the body is nothing to be ashamed of. Nobody gets excited about a company that provides toilets for the staff. Nobody gets excited if they provide a canteen or a gym. Why shouldn’t they provide for another physical need?”
Joe was staring wide-eyed. This was a really brilliant way of putting the point that had never occurred to him; he could have spared himself a lot of trouble if he’d thought of it.
“Now the way I see it is,” said Lucille, “if you’ll forgive my mentioning when we’re about to eat, say you go to the bathroom and use the toilet. Well, you don’t spend the afternoon dwelling on it, do you? In fact half the time you don’t even think about it while it’s going on, heck, we all know people who read on the john. The way I see it is this is no different. It takes a little longer than using the john, is all. I usually take a magazine to pass the time. Or I might do my nails.”
And now he was staring with his mouth wide open. Lucille was quietly eating her salad. Her nails were immaculate.
Just as well, since he had a delicate subject to bring up.
He said, “Uh, Lucille.”
She said, “Mhm?”
“I’m glad you put it in that perspective,” he said. “Because I want to discuss something with you.”
Lucille took a sip of wine. “OK,” she said. “Shoot.”
“I’ve, uh, I’ve had a request from a client,” he said. “He’s making kind of an issue of it, but frankly none of the people I’ve got in place are really what I’d want to trust with something of this nature.”
“I’m pretty happy where I am,” said Lucille.
“Oh, you’d stay where you are, no question about that. And if you decided you were able to make a contribution to satisfying a valuable client obviously your compensation would be on top of what you’re making now.”
“Keep talking,” said Lucille.
He took a deep breath. There was no way this was not going to be embarrassing.
“I have a request for whipping on the bare butt.”
And then, anticipating misunderstanding—
“His butt.”
Lucille said, “That’s weird.”
“You’re telling me,” said Joe.
“Why would anyone want that?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. The point is, anyway, he’s making an issue of it and if I can make him happy heck that’s fine with me, but you’ll appreciate, well, let’s just say this goes a long way beyond what most of the women who work for us would co
nsider appropriate.”
“What level of remuneration are we talking,” said Lucille.
“I was thinking $5,000 per annum. For a twice-weekly, um, session. As it happens, their conveniences are out by the elevator. You would simply take the elevator to the appropriate floor at the fixed time and go into the Ladies disabled toilet in the usual way, only this time—”
“I get the picture,” said Lucille. “Jesus.”
“I know,” he said. “Ain’t that something?”
“So I’d go there and, what, there’d be a whip in the closet?”
“Exactly, all the equipment would be waiting.”
“Isn’t this going to make a lot of noise?”
“Apparently that’s not a cause for concern.”
“Huh.”
Lucille took another sip of wine, and she said presently, “Look, Joe, I’m not saying I won’t do it. But you know as well as I do that this is beginning to be outside the original parameters which were defined in terms of making a contribution to a single employer. I don’t have to tell you what this is starting to look like. Well, you know as well as I do that $50 a session is an inappropriate figure in the context. You know as well as I do that he would have to pay a lot more for a similar sort of service in a context where he would be running a high risk to satisfy his needs. To put it another way he is getting added value in the fact that this is risk-free and completely confidential, and in my opinion that value ought to be reflected in the remuneration package.”
“What did you have in mind?” he asked.
“$15,000 per annum for two sessions a week. Alternatively, if he would prefer to pay on a per-session basis, $200 a visit.”
Lucille had to basically pick a number out of thin air, since she had no idea what the going rate was for this kind of service in circles where it was not seen as an adjunct to secretarial work. Still, it’s not a bad rule of thumb to demand three times what somebody offers you. In later years, when she had moved on to the more aggressive mores of the litigation lawyer, she found that the rule of thumb had to be revised upward to a factor of ten or twenty—but what she always said was that, though she might have started out on the conservative side, at least her instincts had always been in the right place.