My boss always stopped before Maurice’s door, in memory of their morning chats in a simpler, more innocent time. He spoke over the threshold, the barrier, as if Maurice had flayed himself and hung his fiery skin on a clothesline like a tattered rug that cordoned off an oily corner in a welfare hotel room. My boss stood there, scraped one dissenting Hush Puppy against the other.
He couldn’t think of what to say, except to ask Maurice what he was reading. Maurice was never without books. They were, like his skin, a form of privacy, his screen. The weight of the books that accompanied him through his hours was also a rebuke to the company. Maimonides, Saint-Simon. “Ricardo’s analysis of rent,” he answered one morning.
I learned, indirectly, at the black table, where we dealt in false impressions with the aplomb of black marketeers, that Maurice had had some serious problems as a teen trying to find himself in East St. Louis and later as an athletic superstar at college in Baton Rouge. From him, we heard almost every day that he would one day work in television. That’s where the influence on culture really was.
Meanwhile, he had a complicated relationship with other blacks who crashed the perimeters of his cultural preserve. Unfortunately, that took in so much, he was argumentative about almost everything, from Soul Train, the black version of American Bandstand, to Aesop, “the great black moralist.” Maurice thought of this as rigor. He’d start off on how fantastic realism had long been a part of African culture but the white critical establishment pulled a fast one by letting the South Americans take credit for it.
“Mother, this is too lovely,” Virtea told him. “You are a scream.”
He withdrew, saying that it was time for him to make a dash. An old hand from maintenance reminded Virtea that Maurice was, in fact, painfully shy, and she should be sympathetic when he tried to come out of his shell to them. Virtea said the strands of long hair on his nasty sweaters proved that the caped crusader wasn’t too shy to do the Mess Around.
The company Christmas party was held in our floor lobby, between the banks of elevators and the coffee station. There were plates of morose Santa cookies on the receptionist’s hastily cleared desk, a poinsettia brown around the edges, and a string of taped-up lights. The lethal Christmas punch that put us in mind of English pond life was a tradition. Aqua celestis, the old hands called it. The ingredients were a secret. The brew peeled the wax from the sides of cups. Theories about the recipe were disgusting and, after one swallow, absolutely convincing. Morale worsened by the glass.
Bonuses were small, sales poor, and projections so laughable that many employees didn’t put in an appearance until after the Big Boss’s seasonal toast. By this drink it grieves me to tell you that we spent it all. My boss, whose list of holiday books, which included one on how to dress to enhance fertility, was having a spectacular flop, chugged three cups and went to wage war in toy stores.
Our honeymoon was long over, but he would not yell at me for my idiotic mistakes like a real boss. I saw the wisdom of the secretary’s motto: Not only did I not do it, but you made me do it. The milder his reproaches, the more keenly I felt his disappointment. Whenever he came up to me, from behind, to ask a question to which I never had an answer, I was, invariably, eating a second lunch at my desk, and not only was I covered with crumbs, I was in the middle of a personal call, long distance.
It was the Christmas cease-fire, but the white partitions did not come down. The clusters formed according to rank: editors remained with editors; publicity people with publicity people; and evidently the Black Caucus had gone fishing. I began to experience the reality of the phrase “social death” and missed my boss, as when the only person you know at a party has fled to another room, leaving you to pretend that you are fascinated by the barometric pressure gauge on the wall.
“So this Knut Hamsun, is he in town?” Little Boss asked the Power Bitch.
Some of the employees took advantage of the occasion to stuff their book bags with office supplies. The most that I had been able to decide about them was that they suspected that interoffice mail transmitted germs and that they went to shrinks. Insurance forms often fell into the aisles. My fellow secretaries and I seemed to have taken our work habits from the CIA’s Freedom Fighter’s Manual of Sabotage Techniques: Come late to work; delay completing tasks; call in sick so as not to work; telephone to make false hotel reservations; damage books; break light bulbs and windows; cut down trees; drop typewriters; spill liquids; leave lights on; telephone giving false alarms of fires and crimes; threaten the boss by telephone.
A lithe, dewy secretary, the office beauty, floated toward the elevators with a cord, possibly that of an answering machine, wagging from the bottom of her Annie Hall coat. Delfina was the department’s balletomane. Her neck lengthened and the bun on her head tightened week by week. A biochemical salt tablet was forever dissolving on her tongue. She had a slightly affected Foxcroft drawl when she spoke, which wasn’t often, since she let a perpetually ironic gaze say everything.
Delfina was so aloof that Little Boss, who thought of the lowest form of love, the office romance, as another corporate perk, went so far as to intercept her getaway with “I nearly did a triple soutenu turn after that last glass of heaven.” She paused to blow away the come-on he had laid before her like a dried rose. “Looks like a dick, only smaller,” she was known to have said to a flasher. The cord was plainly visible between her white stockings. Little Boss’s leer was bound to slide in that direction.
Maurice announced an international call for the managing editor. He called out again, like the Philip Morris bellhop. Little Boss grumbled about his secretary as he tried one after another of the dead buttons on a nearby phone, which gave Maurice enough time to signal Delfina that her tail was showing. It had retracted into her coat by the time she turned in the elevator, and she bestowed on her prince a smile of mischievous luminosity.
Little Boss spooned out punch for the troupers, those who understood the season’s spirit and hadn’t taken advantage of it just to have a half day. Loyal copy editors were made to guess the day’s temperature in various cities of the Southern Hemisphere. A wrong answer brought another cup of punch. The Power Bitch placed herself discreetly in a referee posture and discussed with the publicity director the pressure she had been under to get her house in Amagansett ready for the holidays.
Once the punch bowls were empty people sneaked away. They tottered off in tight affinity groups. I heard the Power Bitch invite Maurice along for eggnog. Maybe she was feeling the strain of always maintaining combat readiness. Go out into the highway and hedges and compel them to come in. He didn’t answer.
By the time I got off the telephone, a security guard was making his rounds, the cleaning lady in her blue smock was dumping ashtrays in the garbage. Soon she would run a dust cloth over the enormous wall cases in the main hall, which made me think of ducal bonnets and red gowns in glass caskets. The cases contained mostly the new titles of the season, sure shots that were not helping the company out of its hole. Discountenanced already, the books would be piled all too soon on remainder tables in big bookstores like damaged altinelle bricks on a wharf. My boss once said he knew the company was in trouble because the employees didn’t steal its books.
The sky was a scrim of creeping mists, but the papal bubble car and its detractors had been visible from our office windows. Demonstrations at Rockefeller Center were audible. Feminists in chador or in the attire of the Peacock Throne’s generals, and students in ski masks or in the chains of the SAVAK’s prisoners, raised the symbols of another misread revolution. The company’s employees stepped over it all. They knifed through picket lines, squeezed around police barricades, argued with badges, ignored bullhorns. They did what they had to do to cross the street and get to the office.
The New Year had begun with a round of layoffs. The corridors were quiet except for the sounds of flu symptoms. A muzzled quality was palpable on every floor. Telephones were snatched up on the first ring, as if to shut them up
. Employees were afraid to wander too far from their desks or to be too conspicuous. An unattended desk might be jotted down or the Big Boss might come along and lop off the loudest heads, even the editorial director’s.
No matter what was happening outside, inside the office affairs had compressed around a single point: survival. Secretaries no longer gathered at the coffee station to savor the fall of a snotty higher-up type. Press clips that ridiculed the Big Boss’s high-handed, inept rule appeared on the departmental bulletin board above the premature softball sign-up sheet. Maurice didn’t bother to hide that he was the culprit.
Maurice seemed to fatten on the company’s bad luck. Natty herringbone suits replaced his usual formless sweaters. His breast pocket overflowed with silky colors. My boss discovered him showing his teeth into the telephone in the mornings, his weighty books set aside.
He unlocked his jaw and ate up every discouraging report, which earned him the distrust neighbors in hard times are said to show toward someone they suspect is feeding on a secret stash while they go without. There was something taunting in his demeanor, the strut of a man who has no intention of revealing the whereabouts of his hoard.
Maurice straightened up to his true height. Little Boss put a stop to the funkadelics of Maurice’s new radio, but he was powerless to prevent his whistling as he walked about at a smart clip. He saw red when Maurice cleaned his office, made room for Delfina, who paraded across the threshold that no one else had thought to breach. She perched on the edge of Maurice’s desk, swung her long legs, laughed in a throaty way at the mirror of her compact, and waited with him for five o’clock.
The secretaries said Delfina was making Maurice as happy as a Rasta. Little Boss made scenes. “That message was for me. It was not for my assistant. If you take a message for me, please be so kind as to put it on my desk. Do not put it on her desk. If you can’t do that, I’ll thank you not to take messages for me.”
“Well, we all commit crimes against humanity, don’t we,” Maurice said over his padded shoulder.
Maurice began to stay away from work for days on end. We never knew where he went, but go places he did, because he would return with stories that were a little revolting. He had a brutal picture of the city. We watched Delfina to see if there was any change in her ironic expression, but she hardly seemed to notice his absences. She sailed out of the elevators as usual, intent upon the mystic book of the dance and nothing else.
Little Boss turned on her one afternoon. “Why do you have an electric pencil sharpener and I don’t?”
“Because she’s a terrible person,” the Power Bitch said.
Little Boss followed his scarlet ears back to his office. The Power Bitch went also and shut the door, but not before she had fixed Delfina with a look through her thick makeup that made it clear that it was for his sake alone that she had spoken up.
I got the impression that my boss felt challenged by Maurice’s disaffection. He stopped throwing the I Ching when he had to make decisions. He discarded his Hush Puppies and cut his hair. He said he knew I was paid enough to invest in a tie, apologized, and promised to take me to lunch if his latest deal worked out well, if I owned a tie by then. He began to talk of “product.”
One morning I thought that everyone had gone out the night before and splurged on new hairdos, facial massages, contact lenses, acupuncture, résumé-writing classes, and tennis rackets. The company rallied. Executives congratulated one another, like scientists after a successful rocket test. My boss had a surprise hit on his hands, a sleeper from the slush pile. In the aisles, among the white picket fences, the sales figures made him hearty. “Look at me. All grown up and having lunch with a television producer.” Privately, he was afraid of success and called home to make certain that his children were still breathing. He also began to ask me to dial numbers for him, like a secretary should.
Enthusiasm for the profession was everywhere. The Power Bitch made overtures to Maurice under the sudden spell of peace and prosperity. “We haven’t seen your beautiful face around here in a coon’s age,” she said after one of his mysterious absences. My boss was alarmed that Maurice hadn’t reacted to having been treated like a jockey on a lawn, the sort his parents, after a stern lecture, had rushed out to paint the first non-referential color they could think of. The integrity of St. Maurice might be betrayed for the spoils of tokenism.
But Maurice took the activity around him as a short-term remission. He told Delfina that he wasn’t signing up for softball because he had bigger plans for the spring season. The Power Bitch hadn’t listened. She was too busy showing photographs of Christmas at her new country house that a guest had sent her in the mail. She had three white trees last year, she said. She was especially pleased with the batch of shots that showed her nephew in his naval cadet’s uniform. She cornered Maurice at the coffee station and urged him to take a look because she thought he’d been in the service.
“Cold busted,” Maurice said to himself. I saw him slip one of the Power Bitch’s snapshots into his pocket and take the stairs three at a time up to the executive suite. In less than an hour the Power Bitch was choking on tears and packing up eleven years of office life. She’d been fired.
Usually, when word went around that someone had gotten the sack, the neighborhood of white picket fences vibrated; editors and secretaries running around with the news collided at the coffee station. But the Power Bitch’s demise shocked her fellow employees into under-the-desk conferences. My boss heard that Maurice had pushed into a meeting. The Big Boss had no trouble identifying his antique long glass clock in the Power Bitch’s photograph, though its distinctive face was almost blurred in the background, behind her nephew’s epaulets.
Her humiliation was total. The details of what the Big Boss had said to her got around as she sobbed and pried her framed posters from the wall. Some who didn’t want to believe it arranged to leave early for lunch. Little Boss took his devastation to the men’s room. My boss said that he was sorry for her, though she was crazy to have pinched or received something so hot, so personal. Delfina alone entered the Power Bitch’s office to give her a hug.
My boss said he wished Maurice wasn’t so happy about his revenge. It was true that he positively sat on the receptionist’s desk and crowed. Didn’t Madame Du Barry’s page turn her in? Little Boss was called upstairs, to be told that he had to turn over the Power Bitch’s work to Maurice, with a generous raise. The white picket fences got another shock. Maurice resigned. Promptly at five o’clock he stretched a leg over the cartons maintenance had brought up for the Power Bitch. He took nothing with him. He left his desk as it was, like a man called away on an emergency.
On one of those bracing days when manic radio voices forecast diminishing winds, Grandfather called from a corner. I was surprised that he had found a phone booth in working order and that he knew where to find me. I was afraid he had run away again. I put him on hold and contacted the beige stepgrandmother. She wasn’t worried. He’d signed out properly. Grandfather said, “The companions of the Messiah could forget how to work. Real people can’t think that way.”
He wasn’t on the corner where he said he would be. I ran around the blocks. I saw him examining an array of mass-produced statues and ersatz Navajo blankets in front of a crafts museum. He said he had been thinking of how Uncle Ulysses’s wife used to warn my sisters and me about sticking out our lips; that if we weren’t careful our mouths would get stuck.
I didn’t remember his being around when Aunt Odetta made my sisters walk with books on their heads or took a ruler between our spines and the backs of her dining room chairs. She used to say that thought began in the mouth, that we should practice comporting our lips so that the lower one did not protrude too much, because eversion was fine for the masks of the Dan people but it made American Negroes look “deficient.”
“Whenever I enter the Public Library I have to go to the bathroom,” Grandfather said. He’d lost a glove and had been retracing his steps. I noticed
the seam beginning to come apart on the shoulder of his cashmere coat. Appearances, Jesus said, are deceptive. He slapped away my attendant arm. I guided him toward a cozy Russian deli where the small, voluble couple didn’t mind if customers sat for hours with only coffee and newspapers.
Grandfather rested his showy stick. He wouldn’t let the Russian couple bother about his coat. He moved it from floor to chair, fingered the rip in the shoulder. I’d heard that he’d had to find a new laundry because he’d frightened the Cantonese proprietor. He’d taken one of his vintage jackets to be cleaned, and when the laundryman pointed to the lining and tried to explain that he could not be held responsible for a garment that had been brought to him in such a state, Grandfather ripped apart the man’s racing forms.
He said he hadn’t been able to rest of late because “the rum element” in his building went to Barbados every night. “Been to Barbados” was slave slang for drunkenness, he explained. Grandfather’s research in the reading room. “Who filled with lust and violence the house of God?” he said sharply when I asked him to tell me about Nat Turner.
He blew at his tea, moved the salt and pepper to new positions, found his reading glasses, and scanned the iconostasis of Kodak pictures and framed city health ordinances on the wall. He said that he would like to see my office. I said I didn’t have an office and things up there were too chaotic that day for visitors. He said it was good that something was keeping me out of trouble.
High Cotton: A Novel Page 22