Right Livelihoods

by Rick Moody

  Angie’s inexplicable sick-out started soon after the unpleasant conversation above. Duane Kolodny couldn’t understand it, because Angie was one of his best workers. He’d hired her away from a dead-end job long before Ellie had joined K&K. Why would Angie go unreliable on him? Dolly covered for her for a few days, and then Dolly told Duane, or this was what she told Ellie, that Angie just couldn’t take another minute in an office that featured boy wonder Chris Grady. “Oh, bullcrap,” Duane had said. “He’s our number one earner.” In fact, Chris was one of the top earners in the whole region for K&K’s parent company. And he was about to pitch the head of personnel at a local Fortune 500 conglomerate on their entire health insurance plan. If he got the account, it would secure K&K until well after Duane Kolodny’s demise.

  Ellie was meant to conduct a new round of job interviews the next day. It was a rainy, angry morning in late summer, and the applicants would probably be coming in late. She took off her raincoat and her hat and put them in the coat closet, and she pulled the umbrella stand out of the closet and set it by the front door. Her duck-handled umbrella was comical, protruding above the rim of the faux-wood-veneer umbrella stand as if it didn’t want her to leave it behind. She loved ducks.

  The unpleasant smell coming from the minifridge was as it always was. There was a leak by the front door where Ellie eventually set a metal bowl to collect the rain. And, after much disuse, the suggestion box, it seemed, contained a suggestion, one folded into eighths or sixteenths by some obsessive party. Here were the words of the new suggestion that Ellie now held in her hand: Worldwide revolution now. Throw off your chains.

  The stress was beginning to get to her. The stress of the office, of the office that was changing so fast during the Chris Grady regime. You could see it all, as plain as the cancerous mole on your forearm. This piece of paper she held was practically a Communist suggestion, like you’d expect from someone who had read too much Marx in college. Still, Ellie couldn’t seem to talk about it with anyone else. She couldn’t seem to bring the suggestion box up with Dolly or Bonnie, because now that Angie was on sick leave or fired or whatever she was, now there were only three plausible authors, and two of them were her remaining friends in the company, namely Dolly Halloran and Bonnie Stevenson.

  She couldn’t talk about it, and so she lay awake at night, thinking about the idea of worldwide revolution. If she could just figure it out, if she could just slot the right people into the equation, then she could do something useful for this company she had so ably served for six years.

  Her back really hurt a couple days a week—a throbbing, disquieting pain—and she couldn’t seem to find a desk chair in the catalogue of office furniture that had the right kind of lumbar support. There was a trainer at the gym she kind of liked, and he would have recommendations for an ergonomically designed chair, but she hadn’t spoken to him about it, and she kept imagining something was going to happen to her on the StairMaster. She would be ground up in it. People got swallowed whole by escalators, after all. People who’d just gone to the mall to buy shoelaces.

  She called her father, told him she was looking forward to coming home, though this was not true. He told Ellie that he’d heard her mother had been released from the detox. And she hadn’t answered his telephone calls, he said. While this was not an unusual situation, since they were unmarried and separated, it was worrisome. Ellie told her father she just wasn’t getting what she needed from her job. Her house, she said, was fully outfitted with furniture that you assembled from kits. She bought foods that were low in calories, and she tried to eat only organic things, and everything was straightened up, she had straightened everything up, she liked to have the magazines on the coffee table at right angles, she told her father, she understood that celebrities were marrying and divorcing at alarming rates, and that people would do anything to be on television. But this was not, it turned out, enough.

  “Honey,” he said, “try volunteering.”

  Everyone had stayed in the Southwest except the youngest child, and in the interrogative sun, the unrelenting sun of the desert summer, they had their upheavals and their difficulties, rarely regretting. Meanwhile, she was here in this state where she was always expecting to round a corner and find a scorched valley below her, empty as far as she could see. She was expecting vistas of cacti and the sounds of coyotes, but in the East everything was claustrophobic and heartbroken, especially after the third suggestion.

  Bonnie Stevenson announced that she was going into business with Angie Roehmer. The two of them intended to start a boutique that competed directly with K&K on some large accounts. They had a catchy name for the operation, which was Reconstruction Inc., and they had a really great logo, sort of an antebellum southern porch in a pale blue, on the top of the letterhead. The business plan had been in place for some time. Maybe the insurance sector needed to be reconstructed, the way these two campy entrepreneurs saw it. Rates spiraled upward and drove everything in the region, drove the way people did everything they did, the way they walked through a building lobby or played on a swing set. You could easily trip in a mall stairwell and disfigure yourself. A scary ride at the amusement park might cause you to go into a tailspin of depression and affect your earnings potential.

  It was Bonnie and Angie, and they were in it together, they had taken the whole office for a ride with their negative attitudes and their hatred of men. Ellie Knight-Cameron wasn’t one of those people; she kind of loved men. At any rate, the women’s conspiracy was figured out, or it would have been all figured out if Ellie had not found yet another suggestion in the suggestion box the very next day, the first full day after Bonnie left the firm, having been ordered out by Duane, ordered off the premises and her laptop taken away from her and her pens and paper clips impounded.

  Still, when you tallied only these dramatic incidents at K&K, you missed the rhythm of work, the flow of how people lived, which was in eight-hour increments, or really in four-hour increments because of lunch. Everyone went out for lunch at a place up the block, even if the cappuccino machine was on the fritz. The women of K&K, back when they were in it together, they all went out. It looked bad if you stayed at your desk for lunch. It looked like you were showing up the other women of K&K by working harder than they were working. This was the unspoken agreement. There was a rhythm of work, and it was all about insuring against the unpredictable. Of course, there were other things that were as difficult as office life: church, local politics, the playground, high school dances, but all Ellie did was work.

  Among her interviewees on this particular day was Chris Grady’s friend with the sideburns, one Noel Goodrich. The guy she’d met at the bar. He was dressed in khakis, blue blazer, loafers without socks. He had a cyst or something, some kind of permanent skin blemish beside his nose that she hadn’t noticed in the light of the bar.

  “What are your hobbies?”

  “What are my—”

  “We feel that hobbies are indicative of keen appreciation for life’s—”

  “Well, I guess I like to—”

  “Cooking?”

  “Cooking, hell no!” Noel said. “Well, I like to grill. I like to wear the chef’s hat outside. Really my hobby is . . . my hobby is, uh, professional sports memorabilia. Shoulder pads, for example. I have signed shoulder pads. Sports have come a long way, you know, in terms of neck injuries.”

  “You’re concerned about neck injuries?”

  “And fire prevention.”

  “What kinds of insurance do you carry?”

  “Paternity insurance?” Sensing it was an ineffective joke: “Actually, I don’t have any insurance.”

  “You don’t have renter’s insurance? Dental insurance?”

  His eyes were bloodshot. His future was in the bag. Almost immediately after Goodrich left the office, Chris came over to Ellie’s desk. Somehow she had failed to notice earlier that his fingernails were a bit longer than a guy would normally wear them. And there was a strip under his no
se where his razor had not performed effectively. Not to mention the damp spot on the elbow of his shirt.

  “I can’t live with the coffee around here.” Maybe he blamed coffee for the spillage on his elbow. “Could you go out and get me my half-decaf mochaccino? With whole milk? And, uh, don’t forget a receipt?”

  She watched his trim figure bob away. His foppish Hollywood hair. The floppiness of this coiffure elicited contempt in the majority of K&K employees. Ellie would beat on Chris Grady with a stick in the puppet theater production of dreams. Now that the office was really shorthanded, Chris had no natural predator. He didn’t have to worry about the office manager. He’d been waiting most of his short, privileged life for this turn of events. He’d sat in the stands at various athletic contests, as though he had webbed feet, cheering his pathologically narcissistic brother, and now was his chance to shine. At last he could begin upbraiding waitresses and using the phrase “Don’t you know who I am?”

  On the way out the door she stopped in the office lounge and she decided, just because, to check the suggestion box. In retrospect, questions could be raised as to her timing. Had she checked the box on some other day, maybe the result would have been different. Had she been more willing to get Chris’s half-decaf mochaccino. Maybe the suggestion box was some kind of context-dependent prognosticatory device. If she’d approached it when feeling upbeat about things, then the box would have provided her with quite different advice.

  Because, on the day in question, what the suggestion box found to say to Ellie Knight-Cameron was All of you should be lined up and shot.

  The first death threat in a person’s life is so memorable. Ellie Knight-Cameron had never received a death threat before. In fact, the worst verbal abuse she had experienced in her life involved her brother telling her he was going to kick her ass. She had also, in her youth, been called fat. Yo, caboose! Everyone had an opinion: Was your mother eating for four? The worse things got—the more weight she put on in high school—the more she was told that this was not going to be tolerated. The more her parents remonstrated with her, the more she snuck downstairs in the quiet part of night and raided the larder. Night was the time when the clamoring in her skull was silenced, when there was no soap opera of her appearance.

  How could she be thinking of food? With this murderous suggestion burning a hole in her palm? Yet she was thinking about food, however briefly. She couldn’t concentrate on the words she’d just read. Her mind glanced off onto other things. In a couple of weeks now she was going to have to fly into Sky Harbor International Airport and face her family. In the meantime, she was cat-sitting the neighbor’s cat and it had begun leaving droppings in unusual locations. She stood there holding the typed piece of paper, as if the list of possible interpretations was so vast as to freeze in place any human being. You should be lined up and shot.

  At some point, Ellie’s perturbed mind elected to catch up with her shuddering physique, which was now on its way to Dolly Halloran’s cubicle. Her body clutched the note, wadding it, and her mind trailed after, wondering about the legal significance of the moment as she simultaneously catalogued the number and variety of telephone rings on the K&K handsets.

  “Dolly,” she said, “can you just—”

  “Not now.”

  “I found this in the—”

  “Later.”

  Still, with a kind irritation, Dolly took the note out of Ellie’s hand. Ellie noticed, in this instant, that the edges of the note she handed Dolly had been scissored from some larger piece of heavy office bond. The scissoring hadn’t been done very well. There were stray hairs, the split ends that you get with an inferior elementary school tool. Therefore, the author of the suggestion was either a lefty, like many poor operators of safety scissors, or he was simulating left-handedness in order to confuse.

  Dolly’s rugged face flushed. She mumbled What the—, after which she seemed to drain precipitously of all color. Dolly let out a plangent moan before hugging herself, strangely, as if she were the actual scissor operator and was somehow protecting the arm that had cut out the offending portion of the message. But no, her distress seemed to have little to do with scissoring. Dolly fell to the floor. She called Ellie’s name, then Duane’s name. In a kind of befuddlement, Ellie heard phones cradled in the other cubicles. She heard Chris Grady getting up from his desk. She heard the new filing clerk, Sheila, tripping on some textured rubber matting as she came running. Then Duane rushed out of his corner office as Dolly was beginning to tremble on the floor. Duane shouted at Ellie to call 911, and Ellie stood there like an idiot before at last reaching down for the phone on Dolly’s desk. Yes, yes, someone in the office was having a heart attack, yes, and here was the address, on High Ridge, yes, please, come quick. Duane held Dolly’s wrist, muttering, and then he climbed athwart her chest as the rest of K&K gathered. Duane pumped away on her rib cage, pausing to force air into her lungs in the time-honored way, then he was back on her chest, and it wasn’t hard to see that, yes, he must have been her lover. Now, in the distance, the call of a siren drifted near. It occurred to Ellie to wonder what Dolly was thinking. Was Dolly thinking about her grown children? Were the dead calling to her from their four-star accommodations in the afterlife? Was Dolly regretting that she had written this horrible suggestion and put it in the suggestion box only to be found out by the unsinkable Ellie Knight-Cameron?

  Soon paramedics cleared everyone out of the area around Dolly’s desk. Only Duane was permitted to stand and nervously watch. Ellie gaped at Duane from over by the coffee station, and the others were peering above the baffles that demarked their cubicles as Dolly Halloran was removed from the premises for her emergency bypass surgery.

  It was Duane’s decision, taking the rest of the day off, and the cubicles emptied quickly. Ellie Knight-Cameron, in her capacity as office manager, made an outgoing message for the voice mail. She checked her e-mail before leaving the office, in case there was some last task she needed to discharge. And she did have a message, which was: Ellie, Noel Goodrich is hired. Look after the paperwork. Thanks, Duane.

  She was weeping uninhibitedly as she put on her raincoat, and not because of Dolly’s brush with mortality. On the contrary, she was weeping because she now had a practically foolproof method for identifying the demonic author of the most recent suggestion. How had she failed to think of it before? The font of the notes. She turned off most of the lights in the empty office, to confound anyone anywhere who might be monitoring her activities. Then, in an interior cubicle where they usually put the filing clerk, she fell into the role of surreptitious system administrator.

  First, she examined the default fonts on various people’s computers. She noted in passing that a number of K&K employees (Dolly included) did not observe company policy, which held that all the interoffice documents as well as all external correspondence should be composed in the font known as Times New Roman. This was a policy that Ellie Knight-Cameron herself had brought about—with slightly distracted blessings from above.

  She ascertained that the last two suggestions in the suggestion box were in a font called Century Gothic, a sans serif typeface. The mere appearance of Century Gothic was at odds with the general policy of Kolody & Kolodny. Sans serif typefaces, Ellie had argued, embodied a disreputable design style from the feel-good seventies. Sans serif typefaces were for organizations that favored unethical business practices. People who used sans serif typefaces would eat frozen diet dinners. These sorts of people subjected chimpanzees to horrific medical testing and they watched television interviews featuring Larry King.

  Although she couldn’t prove that any locally networked desktop computer had authored the Century Gothic messages, she did feel she was making progress. As the hour ticked around to 8:45 and then 9:30, she riffled through people’s drawers and looked at their pens and pencils. Everywhere there were signs that the official K&K orderliness was a sham, a veneer. Maybe she was crying about Dolly, of course, or maybe she was crying about not wan
ting to go back out to Arizona, or maybe she was crying because she was still in the office so late, having read, among other things, private financial data about her friends and coworkers.

  “Hello, Eric? It’s me, Ellie.”

  “Ellie?”

  “Ellie Knight-Cameron?”

  “Oh, wow. Hey. What a surprise!”

  “I’m just . . . How are you? I’m just here in the office, working late. So I thought I’d give you a ring and see how you were doing.”

  “I’m . . . I’m good.”

  “I’m just calling to say hi, really. But we are celebrating an anniversary soon, and I—”

  “We are? What is it? Our—”

  “Eric, I was kind of wondering if you had any special feelings about that time in your life, now that it’s almost twelve years since we graduated. I mean . . . Well, I guess it might seem a little abrupt me calling you like this after all this time.”

  “It does a little bit.”

  “I’ve been thinking back on that time, and I was thinking about how innocent I was then, and I’m wondering what you remember about that time. Maybe you remember some things about me that you’d be willing to share.”

  “Ellie.”

  “Eric, the right thing to do, you know, generally, is to develop some kind of life outside the office, right? Don’t you think? I have some things I like to do, you know, on weekends, but I haven’t really been doing any of those things. It seems like I’m just always thinking about the problems at the office. It’s kind of horrible. . . . Well, you know what? I don’t want to talk about myself. I’d like to hear what you are doing. Are you still playing the viola?”