Basic Forms

by Skolnik, Fred;

  The downtown train was packed. This, however, did not prevent the dapper little man who was leaning against Hirsch with considerably more weight than circumstances warranted from busily moving his hands around and then regarding him with bland gray eyes that would not turn away. Hirsch couldn’t move. His arms were pinned against his sides, the briefcase pressed against his ribs. The briefcase, though empty, was an onus. He hated having to bring it to the office each day, but ever since the two government auditors had announced that they had reached what they termed the critical stage of their investigation, everyone in the office had been under orders to look very busy.

  Walt and Charlie, the government auditors, had been around for as long as anyone could remember, though opinion was divided as to which of the two had been the first to arrive. They occupied an unused storeroom just behind Hirsch’s desk, converted into a little office with a fluorescent light and numerous shelves and cubbyholes for their papers, but as a result of some falling-out over precedence or

  seniority spent most of the time, when they weren’t at the coffee dispenser, ridiculing one another’s findings. Both, in fact, seemed to be compiling their own separate reports, which had by this time grown to such gargantuan proportions that rather than toting them around all day, as had previously been their custom, they had taken to keeping them under lock and key in the bottom drawers of their respective desks.

  Hirsch punched in and climbed the stairs. Accounting was on the third floor. He sat down at his desk and listened to the clatter of typewriters and adding machines in the other room, punctuated by old Mr. Kroll stamping papers in his little cage. From the sound of things, you would have thought the entire universe was simultaneously being invoiced for services rendered, the nature of which had never been entirely clear to him, though he had once been given a guided tour of the upstate plant together with the other office workers. His own desk was also covered with papers, which he was forced to hold down every time Solly, the head of the department, came dashing by twirling his tie like a propeller and thereby producing all sorts of unanticipated aerodynamic effects. As always, Walt and Charlie tried to sneak up on him from behind to catch him out in an unproductive moment, even going so far as to walk on tiptoe and hold their fingers to their lips, but as they could not refrain from whispering insults at one another the effect of surprise was generally destroyed.

  “If only you’d learn to keep your mouth shut,” Walt said testily.

  “Look who’s talking,” Charlie replied.

  Both of them wore glasses and were equipped with an incredible variety of writing implements. Walt, who struck everyone as the shrewder of the two, was in the habit of removing his glasses and wiping them ostentatiously whenever he had a particularly cutting remark to make, as if to say that even though he couldn’t see a thing he knew exactly what was going on. Charlie went away on frequent hunting and fishing trips. He always wore a woodsman’s checkered shirt to work on Fridays as well as a huntsman’s peaked cap.

  “What do you do with all those fish you catch?” Solly asked him.

  “He shoots them,” Walt said.

  Solly had no fewer than six pipes in the pipe rack on his big desk and a framed photograph of his wife and three children just to the right of the blotter and at a slight angle so that their beaming faces shone directly on him when he sat in his oversized leather swivel chair ruminatively tapping the rim of his glasses or scanning the columns of the Wall Street Journal before calling his broker to cash in on a world crisis. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” he said apropos of nothing, having summoned Hirsch to his office for a review of the department’s position, “so if you’ve got to piss in the gutter, don’t lift your leg too high. And I’ll tell you something else. Those two jokers in there give me a pain in the ass. Personally I think they’re a pair of queers. So watch your step with them.”

  Hirsch did not take Solly’s words lightly, as his principle function in the office was to keep Walt and Charlie at bay. It was Solly himself who had given Hirsch the title of liaison officer, in keeping with his general effort to organize the department along military lines, regarding himself, no doubt, as some new breed of man, the accountant-adventurer, leading a small but valiant army in a hazardous campaign against various industrial powers and government agents. At times, indeed, things got so hectic in the office, the air so charged with tension, that it did come to resemble a kind of advance command post deep in enemy territory, with messengers darting in and out of Solly’s office with such frenetic haste that they sometimes overshot the mark and had to rein themselves in at the last moment, pivoting abruptly on one foot while executing a series of precarious little hops in order to change direction and turn in at the right door.

  Hirsch himself wore crepe-soled shoes and spent more time than was considered necessary in the men’s room. When he came out, Walt and Charlie were inevitably waiting for him at the coffee dispenser, and though they were never so indelicate as to refer directly to the length of his absences, they did escort him back to his desk like arresting officers, glancing nervously and alertly around as though moving him through a hostile crowd. Hirsch realized that his own activities were under suspicion. God knew what ancient crime Walt and Charlie were capable of unearthing. At times it even seemed to him that he had become the sole object of their investigation. How else could he explain their recent habit of inviting him out to lunch occasionally at the Automat or even for a game of pool if not as an attempt to weaken his defenses and catch him off guard? Walt and

  Charlie generally brought their lunches to work, egg salad sandwiches which they ate standing up in the doorway of their room so that they could keep an eye on the lunchtime traffic in the corridor. The sandwiches were identically wrapped in wax paper, as though part of a standard issue distributed to them each morning by their supervising officer along with their briefcases and pencils. Hirsch supposed they were both unmarried, as they never made disparaging remarks about one another’s wives or children, which would have been a curious omission otherwise. Oddly enough, they both bought egg salad sandwiches in the Automat too.

  Hirsch sat at his desk waiting for Walt and Charlie to

  return to the coffee dispenser and Solly to be called downstairs to one of the high-level conferences that took place every other day to sort out the Company’s innumerable affairs. He tried to call Harriet at the house though he knew she couldn’t have been there, unless of course she had returned from the Library at an early hour, for whatever reason. With nothing really to do, he might have spent some time in the other room, but the girls in Accounting were singularly unattractive. Even the few who were not had some distinguishing defect: thin hair, bad skin, crooked teeth, thick legs. It was a regular freak show, as Solly liked to say. Consequently he rummaged through his desk to find his letter of resignation.

  Generally Hirsch preferred to work on it in the hour after lunch when the office was relatively quiet and in any event he could pass it off as an afterthought somehow related to his lunch break, like a crossword puzzle one hadn’t managed to finish. He had in fact made so many drafts, even consulting the dictionary now and again, that it had come to resemble more a work of literary art than a simple statement of his circumstances. The drafts were numbered consecutively and held together with a paper clip, but while a careful reading did reveal a definite stylistic evolution and increasing formal complexity, it was clear to him that it still required considerable work. Once again he tried to revise the opening section, which had always been his greatest stumbling block, meandering pointlessly instead of summarizing his argument in a nutshell. Then he tried to phone Harriet again, staring

  quizzically at the receiver as though the pretense of expecting to find her at home might in some way mitigate the fact of her absence. He held the receiver well away from his ear and let it ring and ring in the empty apartment until the switchboard operator asked him to get off the line. The moment he hung up Walt and Charlie appeared
behind him in the doorway of their room, jostling for position but nevertheless seeming quite pleased with themselves.

  Charlie looked at his watch and made a note on his memo pad, giving the watch a little shake and consulting it a second time before putting the pad away. Walt was rocking on his heels. “Just keep this up,” he said to Hirsch.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Charlie said, “the incident is closed.” He already had his hunting cap on, with the earflaps down and the peak bent back, and this time wore a faded gray sweatshirt with the letters U S still visible on the chest. He was much taller than Walt, gangling actually, and had very thick eyebrows and a pockmarked face. “And besides,” he said, giving his watch another shake, “I got a train to catch.”

  “Like hell you do,” Walt said.

  “Deer season starts tomorrow.”

  “Don’t hand me any of that malarkey. I know exactly what you’re up to.”

  “You’re dreaming.”

  “Yeah? Well, let me tell you this. Next time you go sneaking off to Washington in that stupid disguise of yours, there’s going to be a little surprise in store for you.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me.”

  “Like what kind of surprise?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “That’ll be the day.”

  “Just wait and see.”

  Charlie checked the three locks on his drawer and worked his long arms into the sleeves of his coat. Then he replaced his horn-rimmed glasses with an incongruous pair of dark ones and tossed a spent shell, which he fished out of one of his pockets, in Hirsch’s direction. “Anytime you’re in the market for a hunting weapon, check me out.”

  Hirsch took the shell and immediately incorporated it into the elaborate system of paperweights he had constructed against Solly’s whirlwind passes through the hall. Walt locked himself in his room with a fresh cup of coffee. Solly stuck his head around the corner and winked.

  It was Hirsch’s theory, shared by Solly, that it was in fact Charlie who was the senior officer and that what they were witnessing was nothing less than Walt’s single-minded campaign to usurp his authority and wrest control of the entire operation from him. This was borne out by the fact that it was always Charlie who answered the calls that came through on the special line that had been installed in their room. Hirsch had made every conceivable effort to listen in on these conversations, but it was next to impossible to make out what was being said as all the while Charlie was talking Walt stood beside him mimicking his voice and making a general nuisance of himself.

  It was another of Hirsch’s theories, also shared by Solly, though he did point out certain logical fallacies in Hirsch’s line of reasoning, that Charlie’s purported hunting and fishing trips, as Walt seemed to have guessed, were indeed nothing more than cleverly designed ruses meant to conceal a more sinister purpose. To test their hypothesis, Solly had instructed Hirsch to follow Charlie from the office one Friday afternoon, giving Hirsch the opportunity to slip out through the emergency exit while he occupied Walt’s attention with some bogus clarification of a point recently raised by the two auditors concerning toilet supplies. Hirsch was more than eager to undertake Solly’s assignment. He raced down the stairs and saw Charlie getting into a cab with his rifle, or what appeared to be a rifle, hidden in a case of the kind carried by mobsters in the gangland slayings to give people the impression they were violinists.

  Hirsch tried to follow him in another cab but unfortunately it was not as simple as it was made out to be in the films he had seen, though there too the quarry was occasionally lost, depending on the exigencies of the plot. Charlie’s cab was quickly lost among other cabs, in a sea of cabs in fact. He had expected Charlie to get off at Grand Central Station but realized that if his destination was indeed Washington, then the cab would be just as likely to take the Queensboro Bridge to get to the airport, or perhaps even the George Washington Bridge to get onto Route 17 if he was actually going hunting.

  The cabbie said, “Make up your mind, willya,” but Hirsch could not. The cab sped north, into Harlem. Hirsch had gone to school there and thought he might stop off and walk around the campus, but he left it for another time, not wishing to be derelict in his duties and knowing that Solly was relying on him for an honest report, even if it told him nothing. Hirsch remembered those years. They drifted in and out of his mind—the sunlight, the lawns, the girls with their books held against their chests, and autumn leaves and a long drive to Yonkers and lunch at the Adventurer’s Inn and talking to a girl he knew in the late afternoon of a perfect day when shadows fell across the sidewalk in the quiet canyonlike streets. After graduation he had gone to Europe, where he might have met Harriet, as noted above.

  All this pointless activity—Solly’s special assignments, the retrieval of ancient documents to satisfy the two government auditors, the various stratagems employed to

  bamboozle them—were a blessing in disguise, for when Hirsch wasn’t fully occupied he tended to brood. When he brooded he had morbid or violent thoughts. Even when he was active such thoughts intruded, causing him to stare into space. Many people stared into space, he had noticed, so he assumed that they too had morbid or violent thoughts, though admittedly some might have had only pleasant daydreams. He too had pleasant daydreams on occasion. In this, he felt, he was no different from anyone else, though they too, that is his daydreams, often became morbid or violent.

  When he had gotten back to the office, Walt, who must have sensed that something was amiss, was standing at his desk rolling his shoulders pugnaciously and gritting his teeth. Hirsch could hardly bring himself to look him in the eye. As if to taunt him, Walt said, “Your wife was here while you were out.”

  Hirsch felt his face turning red. This would, of course, not have been the first time Harriet had turned up at the office. She had been there twice before, arriving inevitably when he was indisposed. On both these occasions she had been subjected to a crude interrogation which only Hirsch’s timely intervention had managed to curtail.

  “So you’re the little lady,” he had heard Walt say.

  “Conceivably,” Harriet had replied. “And just who are you supposed to be?”

  “Comptroller General’s Office. That’s my assistant Charlie over there.”

  “Like hell I am.”

  “There are a few questions I’d like to put to you, if I may.”

  “Fuck off, will you,” Harriet said.

  “We expect full cooperation, Mrs. H. Don’t make it tougher on yourself.”

  “Where’s my husband?”

  “In the crapper, I believe.”

  Hirsch had urged Harriet not to make such calls unannounced. It was true that Walt and Charlie had their jobs to do and could not be faulted for exploring every avenue of inquiry that might facilitate their investigation, even if this involved the private lives and personal habits of certain key members of the staff. Hirsch had nothing to hide. Beyond helping himself to an occasional stray box of rubber bands or paper clips, he was unaware of any impropriety that might be laid at his door. But he knew perfectly well that Harriet was apt to be indiscreet when the drink went to her head or even out of sheer perversity. That someone as unprincipled and ambitious as Walt would pounce on the most innocuous phrase and twist its meaning he had not the slightest doubt. It was not only his own position he had to protect but Harriet’s good name as well. His entire future was at stake.

  Harriet had never understood at what a great cost he had become what he was. Understanding had never been one of her strong points. Understanding had never even been one of her weak points. Had not Solly himself assured him that he would go very far in the organization? Had he not recently received a ten-dollar raise and a particularly generous Christmas bonus? Was he not in fact bein
g groomed as Solly’s successor? When Solly had gone away on his annual vacation it was indeed Hirsch who had been temporarily put in charge of the office. That had been a singular triumph, though he was aware that certain people had expressed doubts about whether he was ready for such a high order of responsibility. Closing the door to Solly’s office and settling into Solly’s big chair with a cup of fresh coffee and a pile of invoices, Hirsch had basked for a while in the benevolent sun of executive privilege, understanding for the first time what it was like to tower over others.

  Walt and Charlie were not long in paying their respects, tapping quite timidly at the door and then getting entangled in the doorway. As was generally the case when Walt had a request to make, he jingled the change in his pocket, as if to suggest that if Hirsch cooperated there was something in it for him as well. However, he was also deferential to a fault.

  “Got a minute?” Walt said, looking at the floor while Charlie waited in the doorway. Hirsch responded with a curt nod. Walt cleared his throat. “We’re out of staples,” he said.

  Hirsch gave him a stern look but fished around in Solly’s drawers until he found a box, placing it at the corner of the desk and indicating with another curt nod of his head that Walt might approach. Walt bowed and nodded and came scraping forward in a tentative shuffle. Then he backed away still bowing and got entangled again with Charlie, who was also bowing and nodding. Hirsch dismissed them with a wave of the hand, not even bothering to look up.