Fraud

by David Rakoff

  “You’re right,” I tell him in Hebrew. “She doesn’t like the chickens.”

  Have you ever had one of those moments when you know that you are being visited by your own future? They come so rarely and with so little fanfare, those moments. They are not particularly photogenic, there is no breach in the clouds to reveal the shining city on a hill, no folk-dancing children outside your bus, no production values to speak of. Just a glimpse of such quotidian, incontrovertible truth that, after the initial shock at the supreme weirdness of it all, a kind of calm sets in. So this is to be my life.

  At that very moment I saw that I would never live on a kibbutz. I would not lose my virginity that summer to any of the girls from the group. Indeed, I would not care to do so. I am grateful to that macho blowhard. He made me consciously realize what I had always known but been somehow unable to say to myself: He’s right, I don’t like chickens . . . I like men.

  Now I live in the city that might best be described as the un-kibbutz. Where nobody would dream of touching a live chicken. Where whatever spirit of collectivist altruism people might have had dried up long ago, and where the words Karl and Marx generally bring up associations of Lagerfeld and Groucho.

  At socialist summer camp in northern Ontario, I and the other children of affluent professionals would gather under the trees every day to sing before going in to lunch. One of the songs was always “The Internationale,” that worldwide hymn of the proletariat. One summer we were even taught to sing it with our left fists raised. We were, none of us, by any stretch of the imagination what could be described as prisoners of starvation or enthralled slaves, admittedly, both catchier metaphors and easier to scan than “Arise, ye children of psychiatrists.” But they had little to nothing to do with us personally. Yet for those few moments when we were singing, those words seemed so true. How can I describe to you that eleven-year-old’s sense of purpose? Like the patrons of Rick’s bar in Casablanca who manage to drown out the Germans with the “Marseillaise,” I was overcome by the thrill of belonging to some larger purpose, something outside of my own body. The sheer heart-stopping beauty of a world of justice and perfection, rising on new foundations. And that one line, “We have been naught. We shall be all.” Naught. What a wonderful word to describe my insignificance. It spoke as much about my wish to be delivered from this preadolescent self as it did to any consciousness of liberating the masses, but it held such promise of what I might hope for that even now, as I write this, I can still call up that old fervor. It still makes my breath catch in my throat.

  LUSH LIFE

  We were a quorum of spores, a federation of fleas. Present yet wholly insignificant. Collectively mobilized, we might at best have hoped to rise up as an unsightly mold or a bothersome itch. Mostly, though, we got drunk. This, we decided, was how we would survive our jobs as assistants in publishing.

  Youth is not wasted on the young, it is perpetrated on the young.

  With disturbing regularity, the end of the work day found us at the old Monkey Bar, the Dorset Bar, the Warwick Bar, all attached to serviceable and somewhat down-at-heel hotels. Midtown Manhattan used to be full of just such comfortably shabby establishments where career waiters with brilliantined comb-overs and shiny-elbowed jackets might serve marvelously cheap albeit watery drinks, along with free snacks: withered celery sticks; pretzel nuggets accompanying a cheese spread of a color that in nature usually signals “I am an alluring yet highly poisonous tree frog, beware!”; chicken wings kept barely, salmonella-friendly warm in a chafing dish over a Sterno lamp; and a bounty of unironic, faux Asian, pupu platter dough cylinders, pockets, and triangles that were—oh glory!—fried. Dinner and forgetfulness all for ten dollars. We were also provided a welcome degree of anonymity. In unhappening bars like these, we would never have to run into our classmates from college whose twenties were not turning out to be wretched, who were now making upward of six figures in their law and finance jobs. Those with expense accounts tended not to frequent a place, as we did, simply because they had heard that the management didn’t stint on the miniature pigs in blankets.

  We were not mining coal. We were not even waiting tables. We worked in books, and we did so willingly. Complicit believers in the mythic glamour of a literary New York and our eventual and rightful places therein. Yet still we gathered like wounded veterans of some great war, crystallizing around our despair, our outrage fueled by our outsize sense of entitlement. In truth, in the only work that paid less than being an editorial assistant, you at least got to eat as much chicken as you wanted once the oil had been turned off for the night.

  Hooch, happily, was still one luxury we could afford. Our drunkenness was twofold: there was the liquor, and there was also the intoxication brought on by the self-aggrandizing conviction that we happy few, we Cheery Boozehounds, were the new incarnations of that most mythic bunch of souses: the Algonquin Round Table. This pipe dream sustained not just us, but I suspect countless other tables of publishing menials all over town. So desperate were we to assume the mantles of Parker, Benchley, and their ilk that we weren’t going to let some silly thing like a dearth of wit or the complete absence of a body of work on any of our parts deter us. With enough four-dollar drinks sloshing through our veins, even the most dunderheaded, schoolyard japery qualified as coruscating repartee. “What do you want? A medal or a chest to pin it on?” would elicit merry cries of “Oh, touché!” as we clutched our martinis, throwing our heads back in mirthless, weary laughter.

  That represented the high point of the discourse, before our tongues thickened and our moods darkened unpleasantly. As the evenings wore on, a hostile, gin-scented pall fell over everything, and our glittering aphorisms were reduced to the wishful and direct “I hope my boss is dead right now.” Paying the bill, we stumbled out into the street and back to our apartments, where we spent the rest of the night jealously reading the manuscripts of those who actually wrote and didn’t just drink about it. Rising, unrefreshed, we would return to the office and, rubbing alcohol and cotton balls in hand, get down to work swabbing, leaf by leaf, the potted plants in our bosses’ offices, a vain attempt to stop the outbreak of white fly that was going around the floor.

  At least, we consoled ourselves, we were assistants, not secretaries. It’s a loathsome distinction, the almost meaningless difference between field and house slave. We all of us, secretaries and assistants alike, had much the same duties—filing, photocopying, taking dictation, and making reservations for meals we would never get to eat—although the secretaries made significantly more money than we did. What we could not see in our fugue state of self-pity at that time is that there was an all-too-real distinction. Unlike the secretaries, whose salaries dwarfed ours in the moment but would probably stay where they were for years to come, our penury came with the promise that we were bound for better things; we would be mentored, promoted, and one day raised to our rightful stations as book editors, our faith in the East Coast meritocracy restored.

  Still, every April, when National Secretary’s Day rolled around, many of us took sick days, genuinely nauseous with worry that we be mistook and there, on our assistants’ desks, would be the asparagus-fern-and-baby’s-breath-surrounded long-stemmed roses with the card from the boss who “just couldn’t do it withoutcha!” It would be too raw a truth telling, like getting a “Happy Anniversary of Our Loveless Marriage” card.

  There would be only one way out, and that was up. But, we were told, dues would have to be paid. It would take a very long time, and it would happen only to the very best among us. (This was before many of us realized that there was, of course, another way out. Out.)

  We spent an inordinate amount of time minutely parsing our own movements. I don’t recall us being competitive with one another so much as practicing a kind of Kremlinology, attaching disproportionate significance to our message-taking skills, complimenting one another on our collating acumen—no small feat from under a hovering cloud of job hatred—and hoping against hope that o
ur bosses had noticed the crispness of our penmanship, the ease with which the table at Michael’s had been procured, and the precision of the right angles of the papers on our desks; aerial photographs of patchwork farms of Post-it yellow and While You Were Out pink.

  Impressing the higher-ups became our constant purpose. How sad to realize from the vantage point of years later that, like the poor gnat on the bull’s horn, the answer to that perpetual question, “What do they think of me?” was: they didn’t. At all. At best we might hope for the sporadically noticed but generally benignly ignored presence of Asta, the dog from the Thin Man movies. And there were times when it all seemed like a fantastic whirl of Nick and Nora Charles, with us sitting in the backseat, tongues lolling out, blissfully purling drops of saliva into the passing breeze, just so happy to be along for the ride. (“Yes, sir, Mr. Rushdie, right away.”) But there was always that danger in feeling like pals—or, more perilously, colleagues—with one’s boss, a delusion that by definition will bite you in the ass. No one ever shot the scene of what it was like to be Asta on the cold, bright, hung-over morning after an evening of badinage and hours of genteel tippling. A morning where Myrna Loy, her hair matted and a taste for blood in her rank mouth, baits and emasculates William Powell until he lashes out and finds the closest and easiest thing to kick, which is guess who? We were the help, and it was best not to forget it.

  Seemingly daily, the bosses safely at lunch, I would stand at the entrance of Sheila’s cubicle, as if at a lectern: “Well, Bob came home last night.” I would begin in a small voice and then sigh, the weight of the world almost too heavy on my shoulders, the breath breaking up into a voice cracked with incipient tears. “And he cried like a baby in my arms. And he said he was so sorry and that it was me and the kids all the way.”

  By this point my face would be crumpled in weeping while Sheila’s crumpled in joy, as she laughingly lit up another cigarette, eagerly awaiting the punch line she knew by heart, reciting it along with me: “And he said that when my jaw healed, we could take that trip to Colorado like he promised.”

  Sheila was our bad girl leader. A poet and writer herself, she despised her job and didn’t care who knew it, smoking openly at her desk and standing on ceremony for no one. “These would be my pajamas that I slept in last night,” she would say, indicating the black long-sleeved T-shirt and black workout pants she was wearing. “And this,” she would add, fingering a crusted white smear on the hem of the top, “this would be spilled food. Nice. Well, they say ‘dress for the job you want, not the job you have.’ ”

  It was immediately to Sheila that I went when I received my birthday card. It was late November, months past that day in April; I suppose my guard was down. I had also by this time started taking baby steps on the path toward liberation. I was now an assistant editor, a promotion that came with an infinitesimal increase in salary and an even tinier change in my actual duties. I was given an excessively generous gift from the exacting boss whom, in spite of everything, I adored and who adored me right back (woof woof!). Opening the envelope, my eyes fell upon the card. It was one of those tinted B-movie stills from the 1950s. A woman in a smart worsted business jacket, wearing a pair of glasses at which men seldom make passes, and a switchboard operator’s headset, out of which were shooting tiny lightning bolts, was shown to be thinking, Someone needs coffee! Above her head, in screaming sci-fi acid-yellow type, was the title of this card’s purported movie: The Amazing Tale of the Psychic Secretary.

  A woman with a disfiguringly hunched back yearns for love and finally finds it with a handsome young man who adores her.

  “But what about my back?” she asks. “Surely that must repulse you.”

  “Nonsense,” said the man.

  “The fact that I might never properly look you in the face, doesn’t that make you hate me just a little bit?”

  “Not at all!” the man cried. “I think you’re beautiful just the way you are and I love you and I want you to meet my parents!”

  So, one fine Sunday in spring, they drive down to New Jersey and park in front of a lovely stone house with a beautiful front yard. They walk hand in hand up the flagstone pathway. She is on top of the world. The man rings the bell and just before the door opens, he turns to the love of his life and says, “You wanna straighten up a little bit?”

  I slid the card back into the envelope, walked to Sheila’s cubicle, and showed it to her. “Get your coat,” she said, her voice businesslike, her face unreadable.

  We went to the Warwick bar. “Don’t talk for a while. Just smoke,” she said. Then, as an afterthought, she added, “But you knew I was going to say that, didn’cha, Psychic Secretary.”

  Across from us in a darkened booth, two co-workers sat, a man and a woman. They had been there for hours because the woman’s head was lolling about on her neck as she alternately whispered lubriciously or laughed too heartily at her companion’s jokes. We had a clear view under the table, where we could see her rubbing ever higher up his thigh. He began to slump farther down the banquette, fixing his glazed eyes upon her after briefly checking his watch. A busboy appeared to clear their glasses, and without looking at him, the man said:

  “Dos más.”

  At worst, the insult had been an unwitting one. My boss had chosen to focus on the compliment implicit in “amazing” and “psychic,” while all I could see was that other word. And though I thought I might never get out, that I might be taking dictation forever, I knew it would never be as bad as standing, invisible, while some asshole barked orders at me in badly pronounced Spanish.

  Sheila and I held our breath as we watched the woman’s hand finally make contact with the man’s crotch. They had stopped talking altogether and merely looked at one another blearily.

  As Warwick regulars ourselves, we were no strangers to this brand of inebriated, abject carnality. But these two were a little bit early, fumbling around as they did so close to Thanksgiving. They might have waited a few weeks for the holidays to start in earnest, when there is no nicer way to say you care than with an under-the-table extramarital hand job.

  Those three weeks or so of midtown Manhattan Christmas are an assistant’s dream. No work gets done, and all is romanticized melancholy. It was precisely why so many of us had moved to the city, so that we, too, could walk through our antiseptic corporate lobbies, gaze misanthropically at the wreaths adorning the travertine walls, the Christmas tree surrounded with gift-wrapped empty boxes that fooled nobody (and often in the corner, as a concession to our Hebrew colleagues, a cheap tin menorah), and in the fluorescent-lit sadness of it all feel something approaching . . . depth?

  Our bosses largely away on holiday, the phones idle, we spent our days going to the movies during lunch, returning hours later to troll the halls of the office, foraging through the gift baskets like a pack of gophers (gofers), subsisting on Carr’s water biscuits, individually red-wax-dipped balls of baby gouda, giant cashews, butternut toffee popcorn, smokehouse almonds, and fancy fruit preserves eaten directly from the jar. A diet that had our faces peppered with blackheads and glistening with oily sebum as unto the shining visages of the apostles. In the evenings there were parties, both personal and business, for other publishers, magazines, all of them overflowing with free drink.

  Dos Más had nothing on us. Limbs were stroked, kisses were had, bodies were rubbed, people we hardly knew—in kitchens with the lights out—interrupted intermittently for the opening of the fridge door for a beer; in darkened rooms on piles of coats, one or two of which would invariably need to be retrieved midclutch, with sheepish, whispered apology; in the backs of cabs, hurtling drunkenly toward one or the other’s home, “the meter glaring like a moral owl,” to quote Elizabeth Bishop, ticking away money we could ill afford. This was the true spirit of Christmas, boys and girls.

  A few weeks into my Psychic Secretary–hood, I sat in a movie theater packed to the rafters. Just before the lights went down, a woman marched up the aisle, looked at me, and aske
d: “Is that seat taken?”

  I was nowhere near the end of the row, but trying to be helpful, I asked, “Which seat?”

  Looking directly into my eyes, she said: “That seat.” She pointed. She was pointing to the center of my chest.

  “Well . . . I’m sitting here,” I finally managed.

  As if I were her college-age daughter who had suddenly announced that I was a vegetarian, she shrugged in a kind of “suit yourself” indulgence of my fantasy of existence and moved on. I looked up and down the row for some sort of laughter, some eye-rolling commiseration, or just plain corroboration that this had just happened, but I got no response. To this day I cannot explain it. Was this an emissary sent from on high at that time of year, not to trumpet the birth of the son of God, but to proclaim with heavenly proof my complete and utter insignificance? She’s right, I thought. This seat isn’t taken. It was the perfect moment for that time in my life. I mean that, of course, in the worst way possible.

  The theater went dark. Up on the screen the camera zoomed past a huge close-up of the Statue of Liberty, swooping down to find the Staten Island ferry scudding along the water, transporting our Working Girl to her office job, where we already knew she would triumph, vanquish the harpy boss, and win the love of the man.

  Sheila taught me a survival technique for getting through seemingly intolerable situations—boring lunches, stern lectures on attitude or time management, those necessary breakup conversations, and the like: maintaining eye contact, keep your face inscrutable and masklike, with the faintest hint at a Gioconda smile. Keep this up as long as you possibly can, and just as you feel you are about to crack and take a letter opener and plunge it into someone’s neck, fold your hands in your lap, one nestled inside the other, like those of a supplicant in a priory. Now, with the index finger of your inner hand, write on the palm of the other, very discreetly and undetectably, “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you . . .” over and over again as you pretend to listen. You will find that this brings a spontaneous look of interest and pleased engagement to your countenance. Continue and repeat as necessary.