Lightning Rods

by Helen Dewitt

  You could argue that a deal that asks you to do something physically disgusting for a limited period, and gives you free use of your own mind in exchange, is actually not such a bad bargain.

  You could argue that the type of person who could come up with this kind of argument is wasted outside the law.

  Renée stood up suddenly. She had noticed a small pharmacy on the ground floor of the building. She crossed the road again, and in the pharmacy she bought a pair of plastic gloves.

  She returned to the park. The turd lay undisturbed in the sweet young grass. She drew on both gloves, and she picked up the turd in her right hand and went back to sit on the bench. She crossed one leg over the other, resting her arm on her knee. Her hand in its plastic glove rested on the cashmere of her skirt; the turd reposed in the plastic-gloved palm of her hand.

  She sat looking at it coolly.

  If you are fastidious you actually spend a lot more time than other people dealing with things that disgust you. Most people don’t notice their surroundings; they don’t notice a thin film of soap around the bathtub, they don’t notice the streaks of dirt on their windows after it rains, they don’t notice the flecks of grease on their stove or the grime in the cracks at the bottom of their trash can. They don’t have to deal with things that disgust them because hardly anything does. As long as they have a toilet that flushes and a shower that works they think they’re living in a clean environment. But if you’re fastidious you notice all this stuff that nobody else sees, and you have to deal with it on a daily basis. Because you know one thing for sure. If you don’t deal with it, nobody else is going to.

  At last she stood up. It was as if her body knew what she wanted to do better than she did. It walked to a disposal unit that said “Pet Waste Only” and it lifted the lid and dropped the turd inside. Then it walked to a unit that said “Litter” and it peeled off the plastic gloves and dropped them in. Then it turned and crossed the street and went back into the building.

  AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

  “I’ve decided I want the job,” said Renée, sinking gracefully into the chair in front of Joe’s desk.

  Joe laced his fingers together on the desk.

  “Renée,” he said, in a low, unhurried, thousand-dollar-suit voice. “As I’m sure Lucille explained to you, much as we’d like to take on someone with your qualifications we just don’t have the openings. Didn’t Lucille explain that to you?”

  “Yes, she did,” said Renée. “She said it wasn’t for most people, and it was for the woman in a thousand who could make a real contribution to the organization and expected to be compensated accordingly. Now, as I’m sure you’re aware, any organization which, by the underemployment of African-American personnel, excludes all African-Americans from this sort of opportunity regardless of their qualifications, is in violation of the Equal Employment Opportunities Act.”

  Joe sighed. For this he had paid Lucille $1,000? He might as well just have gone out and bought another suit for all the good it had done.

  “Look, Renée,” he said. “With the best will in the world, what you’re asking is impossible. In the first place, just increasing the number of African-Americans in the workplace is not going to solve the problem. Even if you had an office that was staffed 100% with African-American personnel you still wouldn’t be able to guarantee anonymity, for the simple reason that then you’re talking about personnel with a range of pigmentation among themselves, with the result that there would be no way to keep people who made use of the facility from identifying the members of staff who had provided it. I’m sorry, but we’ve got to face facts. And besides, if you think about it, where will it all end? You could just as well say that an office should be 50% Hispanic-American, or 50% Chinese-American, or what have you. I’m sorry to disappoint you, because you’re a pretty exceptional applicant and I hate to see talent go to waste, but you’ve got to be realistic. No single office is going to be able to be that big of a melting pot.”

  Renée crossed one leg over the other, and clasped her hands around her knee.

  “Joe,” she said. “You seem to be laboring under a misapprehension.”

  “Oh really?” said Joe.

  “Yes,” said Renée. “You seem to think this is my problem.”

  Joe hesitated.

  “You seem to think it’s up to me to come up with a solution,” said Renée. “But you’re the one who’s got I don’t know how many companies into a mess. Thanks to you every single one of your clients is now in flagrant violation of the Equal Employment Opportunities Act. That’s not my problem. It’s your problem.”

  Wow, she thought. This is great.

  Renée had never realized just how satisfying it could be to be confrontational. As a PA you hardly ever get to do this kind of thing. Once in a while you can tell an airline, or a caterer, or a courier, that their level of service is unsatisfactory. You can tell people that your boss is on another line. But how often do you actually get to tell someone that he’s racist and it’s up to him to do something about it? Never, that’s how often.

  Joe was thinking Shit. He was also thinking that the female of the species is more deadly than the male. Whoever said that was absolutely right.

  “Look,” said Joe. “I hear what you’re saying. I’ll tell you what. I’ll have a word with Lucille. I’ll see if she has any ideas.”

  Lucille agreed to throw in another visit to the office as part of the original thousand-dollar package.

  “Look, Lucille,” said Joe, when Lucille strolled into the office at 5:37. “I don’t know what you said to this gal, but it seems to have had exactly the opposite of the desired effect. She’s got some bee in her bonnet about Harvard Law School.”

  “Oh really?” said Lucille.

  “Now I’m absolutely the last guy in the world to want to stand in the way of people’s aspirations, but there’s a time and a place for everything. With the best will in the world you know as well as I do that there’s no way we can guarantee that ladies in different colors of skin can be inconspicuous.”

  “I see what you’re saying,” said Lucille.

  “You can talk about the Equal Employment Opportunities Act until the cows come home, you’re not going to change the basic facts of the situation. For the love of Mike, does she want people going around making insinuations and innuendos?”

  Lucille sat in the chair in front of the desk and crossed one leg over the other. “Calm down, Joe,” she advised. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. What you’re saying is what? She wants the job, and she says it’s up to you make any necessary arrangements to guarantee anonymity?”

  “You got it,” said Joe. “Jesus.”

  “Well, she’s got a point,” said Lucille.

  “What?” said Joe.

  “She’s got a point, said Lucille. “You are in violation of the Equal Employment Opportunities Act.”

  “Whose side are you on, anyway?” asked Joe.

  “I’m just stating a fact,” said Lucille. “The way I see it is, you’re lucky this came up now. Gives you a chance to do something about it before things get out of hand.”

  “But,” said Joe.

  “Let me think about this for a minute,” said Lucille. She swung her foot thoughtfully. She was wearing a pair of filmy Hanes pantyhose which made her legs a very pale tan.

  Hm.

  “Well, I’ve got an idea,” she said when the minute was up. Lucille was a stickler for detail. When she said a minute she meant a minute. Not 59 seconds. Not 61 seconds. A minute.

  “OK, shoot,” said Joe.

  “Well, the way I see it is, the problem is basically with people seeing bare legs in their natural skin color. I don’t see why you couldn’t just issue some kind of solid colored tights, or maybe something in rubber or PVC, with just a slit at the crotch. Apparently a lot of men find the idea of entering through a hole in a piece of clothing quite stimulating, so my guess is you wouldn’t have any complaints from the customers. And it would solve the
whole problem of people with different colors of skin, which when you come down to it is probably relevant to a lot of the people you’ve already got working for you. What happens if someone spends a couple of weeks in the Bahamas? You never really thought it through that far.”

  Joe opened his mouth to protest. Then he shut it again. PVC would spoil everything, but there was no way he could explain that. He didn’t really like to think about what Lucille might think about how he had happened to have the idea in the first place, so he tried not to think about it. But one thing was for sure, if he said it would spoil it, it would be only too obvious that he thought there was something to spoil. Namely, a scenario that derived from the type of fantasy that involved an element of the unexpected. If somebody just happens to be clad in black PVC from the waist down, it is really stretching probability too far to imagine that she isn’t expecting something to happen. It defeats the whole point of the fantasy. The whole thing would be ruined, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. The Equal Employment Opportunities Act had him over a barrel.

  The thing that was really unfair was that in his fantasies he had given plenty of opportunities to black gals, and for that matter to gals from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds. It’s just that there is a difference between reality and fantasy. In a fantasy, nothing ever has any repercussions. In real life, you have to weigh pros and cons, in case someone gets hurt.

  Unfortunately there was also no way he could explain this to Lucille, while as for Renée! Something told him that for all her ranting about the Equal Employment Opportunities Act Renée would not appreciate being told that her employer had had black gals, or rather African-American gals, in his game show fantasy. If you’re a salesman you tend to have a sense for these things. He could be wrong. But he sure as hell wasn’t about to go trying to find out.

  PVC

  For the next couple of days Joe tried to put a brave face on things. He tried not to think about the PVC with a slit in the crotch which the Equal Employment Opportunities Act was going to force him to implement. If he thought about it he was just going to get depressed, and in sales you can’t afford to get depressed. You can’t afford to go around thinking What’s the point? That negative take on the product will communicate itself to the customer, and before you know it all the hard work you put into getting your foot in the door will be down the drain.

  Sooner or later, though, we all have to face the facts. So he went home at the end of a long day and forced himself to confront the whole issue of PVC.

  Now, whenever you don’t like something you have two alternatives. One alternative is to change the world. The other is to change yourself. In this case, changing the world was not an option. The Equal Employment Opportunities Act was here to stay. Like it or not, PVC, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, was going to be a feature of the lightning rod installation for the foreseeable future. But if you can’t change the world, one thing you can try to change is your attitude.

  Joe poured himself a stiff Bourbon and turned his mind to the question of PVC.

  Essentially, the problem boiled down to the fact that PVC lacked spontaneity. But supposing the gal was wearing a pair of tight PVC pants, and she was doing some exercises, trying to do a split or something, and the pants split. All of a sudden she hears someone outside—no, wait. The mailman rings the doorbell. And she can’t go to the door because her pants just split and she isn’t wearing any underwear! So she goes to the window, and it’s really stiff so she can only get it up a few inches, and she sticks her head through, and she has to lean way out so she can see the mailman, because she has to tell him to leave a parcel by the door. Then she gets into a long argument with the mailman because the mailman says she has to sign for it, and while she’s arguing the lodger comes up from behind and sees the hole in the crotch and takes advantage of the situation. Or wait, maybe the gal is staying with her sister and her sister’s husband. She borrowed her sister’s PVC pants to do exercises in, but they’re too tight, not that she’s fat or anything she just has more curves than her sister so she has to lie on her back and squeeze into those PVC pants, and she couldn’t wear any underwear because the pants are so tight, and then she stands up and bends over and the pants split right up the crotch. So then she hears the doorbell and she thinks Oh shit, it’s the mailman, and she goes to the window and leans right out and then the husband comes in and he sees the PVC pants with the split up the crotch only he thinks it’s his wife—

  Already Joe could see that PVC had a lot more potential than he had originally given it credit for.

  He went back to the bedroom and loosened his clothes and experimented with various fantasies involving PVC and his final conclusion was that they were at least as effective as the game show. There was a real buzz about it. Why had he ever thought PVC lacked spontaneity? Treated properly, PVC could be just as unpremeditated and spontaneous as any other type of clothing. This was actually something you could feel good about incorporating into the product, something that would add value.

  He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. He shook his head, thinking of Lucille with rueful admiration. He wouldn’t be fooling anybody if he pretended he had actually liked shelling out a grand to get out of a jam, but if this PVC was the stroke of genius he was beginning to think it was, the idea was the bargain of the century at a measly 1K.

  Plus, it would mean his worries about the Equal Employment Opportunities Act were a thing of the past.

  EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES

  Joe introduced the PVC enhancement to all his operations. He gave Renée a placement as a bifunctional crème-de-la-crème PA. He put LIGHTNING RODS IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES EMPLOYER on all his ads. And in his innocence he thought all his problems were over.

  In fact, his problems were just beginning.

  6.

  A Fine Romance

  TIME MANAGEMENT

  Renée prepared for the new job the way she prepared for everything—thoroughly.

  The way Renée looked at it was this. You were selling use of your body for short periods of time in exchange for the chance to make the best possible use of your mind. Well, why not take it one step further? Why not set aside the actual time allocated for non-secretarial functions and put it to use? Learn a language? Study accounting? Do something with the time, so that at the end of a year, say, you’d look back and what you’d see was that you’d worked on a language a couple of times a day. On top of being paid for the time, you’d have a new asset that no one could take away from you.

  She spent quite a lot of time thinking about which particular project would give her a real sense of achievement. What she finally decided was that this was the ideal opportunity to read Proust’s masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu, in French. The amount of time lightning rods were typically expected to be on duty would be just right for working through a French text. On the one hand she wouldn’t be reading a lot at any one time, so she wouldn’t get discouraged. On the other hand, it was quite a long book, so by the time she finished she’d probably have enough money for Harvard Law School. She could look at the volumes on her shelf and see how far she had to go.

  So she went to the university bookstore and bought the complete set, and she started at page one, paragraph one on her first day on the job.

  Sure enough, the idea worked perfectly. The fact that she had to struggle with the French meant she didn’t have a lot of attention to spare for anything else that might be going on. She’d go through as much text as she could, underlining words she didn’t know with a pencil. At night she’d look up the words and read through the passage again. The next day she’d read on. Within a month she was having to look up fewer words. Within six months she was reading the French almost as well as she read English—and that was entirely the result of doing it on a daily basis.

  So unlike most lightning rods she was able to look at something she’d actually accomplished with the time. It was no different from reading a book while you have a massage, or a
jacuzzi, except that she’d done it on a daily basis for six months. Instead of cluttering up her mind with bad feelings, she had actually improved her mind. And by the time she reached the end of A la recherche du temps perdu she’d have earned $100,000 just out of time spent reading Proust.

  Pas mal.

  Years later, when Renée was making constitutional history as a Supreme Court Justice, she was sometimes asked to identify the thing that had made the single biggest contribution to her career.

  A lot of women saw Renée as a role model, and a lot of African-Americans saw Renée as a role model, here was someone who had worked in subordinate positions for years, admittedly at increasingly senior levels, before swanning into Harvard Law School with LSATs in the high 170s and swanning out again to glide with apparently effortless ease right on up to the Supreme Court. What was her secret?

  Renée didn’t say “That’s my secret” because in her opinion coyness was in bad taste.

  What she said was that there was no one single thing, but she made a point of doing things right first time. Effective time management was also important.

  She did not say that there’s nothing like being on the receiving end of a proactive sexual harassment management program for letting you in on a big secret.

  No matter how mundane and routine the job in hand, most people don’t know what they’re doing half the time. If they’re setting up something new that’s never been tried before, you can make that 98.2 % of the time. It’s only when you’re in on something from the beginning, when staying in the air for 12 seconds counts as heavier-than-air powered flight, that you understand just how much is left to do. Something leaves the drawing board and the spectators cheer when it crashes into the sand, because at least 12 seconds elapsed before the crash. Naturally enough, the inventors think they’ve really achieved something if they can move on to just keeping it in the air without crashing. Naturally enough, if they break that 12-second barrier, all kinds of faults get overlooked in the excitement.