Temporary Insanity

by Leslie Carroll

  “So, tell me, did you get it?” Gram asked, when I arrived home, slightly tipsy, later in the evening.

  “The job?”

  She nodded, jabbing with a fork at a piece of burnt rye bread that had gotten lodged in the toaster oven.

  “Gram, stop that, you’ll get electrocuted. Here, let me do it.” I gently edged her away from the toaster and pulled the plug before attempting to extricate her toast. “Yes, Rafe’s boss offered me the job. She seems nice enough—I mean, Rafe has worked for her for several months and never complained—but there’s something a little…I don’t know…off-putting about her.”

  “Does she have short hair?” Gram asked.

  I smiled.

  “That’s it, then. I’d watch your back if I were you. Remember Ramona.” She went over to the sideboard and pulled out two turquoise tapers, placing them into her silver candlesticks. “We’re only having omelets for dinner, but in honor of your new job, I think we should get a little festive, don’t you?”

  When I hugged her, I felt the bones of her rib cage beneath her blue and white kimono-style cotton bathrobe and realized how frail my once-voluptuous granny had become. I was still angry with Eric Witherspoon, though I hadn’t regretted my initial decision to move in with him; and yet, perhaps the way things turned out had been for the best. Gram needed me now. And I needed her now, too.

  I told Gram about my plan with Izzy and Dorian to produce our own show, asking for her thoughts on the subject.

  She clapped her hands. “Good for you! You’re too talented, and too smart, to wait around for some dopey director to call you. Is there a part for me?” she winked, primping a little. “I can still do my high kicks.” At which point, Gram rose from her chair, hiked up her skirts, and demonstrated a few steps that would have made a Rockette jealous.

  “Do you want one? Seriously?” I would have found something appropriate for Gram, too, if she meant it.

  Gram shook her head. “No, but thank you, sweetheart. So what will you three produce?”

  I shrugged. “That’s the tough part. Long-dead playwrights don’t get royalties anymore, but long-dead playwrights also wrote plays with too many characters for us to afford to produce them. And large-cast classics aren’t always done too well on a shoestring anyway. Shaw in the basement is usually even worse than Shakespeare in the Park.”

  “What about a new play?” Gram asked. “Don’t you know a dramatist who would kill to have his play produced anywhere in the city, even if it were performed on a sewer grating?”

  I laughed. “Between Dorian, Isabel, and me, we probably know several good writers, but casting directors don’t always trust new material, either. And the whole point of showcasing ourselves in something is to entice them to show up!”

  “Sounds like you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” Gram observed.

  I nodded. “But we’re tired of growing old while sitting on our butts waiting for the phone to ring. So we’ll think of something.”

  Irony of ironies, the Association of Research Marketing and Promotion Industrial Trends is only two blocks north of Newter & Spade. Sometimes it takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place. This means that I can arrange to meet Natalie and Marlena outside the office for the occasional lunches and stealth manicures. I arrived at my new place of employment and burst out laughing at the gilded signage behind the head of Terry the receptionist.

  “Well, you’re in a good mood for someone just starting a job,” she observed. “Probably because you don’t know Ms. C. Hunt very well yet,” she added under her breath. “Hey, something must be pretty funny.”

  I pointed to the wall behind the reception desk. “Look at the sign.”

  “What sign?” Terry asked me.

  “The one above your head. The one you work under. The name of this company. Check out each one of the capital letters. What do they spell?”

  Terry rose, turned around, and read the wall. “A…R…M…P…oh, shit! I never noticed it before.” She uttered a long, throaty laugh. “Shit, that’s funny. I’ve gotta call my sister. She’ll think it’s a riot. Oh, hold on a sec, Alice! Terry slipped a tasseled bookmark into her Scotto-line novel and opened the center drawer of her desk, retrieving one of Claire Hunt’s envelopes. It contained a set of keys to the main suite, the ladies’ room, and her own office.

  I headed over to the desk where Rafe used to work and saw that the door opposite it was closed. Ms. Hunt hadn’t arrived yet. I picked up the phone and dialed Rafe. I caught him packing for his tour. “First of all, thanks for the welcome note you left for me,” I told him, perusing a card he’d stuck into one corner of the blotter. Then I started to laugh again. “Secondly, did you ever realize that the acronym for this place is ARMPIT?”

  Rafe cracked up. “I wondered how long it would take you to figure it out. Yup, I knew…but I didn’t want to scare you.”

  “That’s very reassuring,” I said. “Haven’t the people who run this place noticed it? I mean, how could you not?”

  Rafe chuckled. “I have no idea. Believe it or not, the subject never came up while I was working there, and I didn’t want to be the one to raise it. Is she in yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay, well, if you’ve got any questions, I’ll be home until Wednesday, so give a holler if you need me. Otherwise, in case of emergency, call my cell.”

  I thanked Rafe and hung up the phone, then started to familiarize myself with my new surroundings, but after only a few moments I became extremely distracted by the man who walked by my desk. He did a double-take, then turned back to speak to me.

  “You’re not Rafe,” he said.

  “You’re astute,” I replied. My God, he was gorgeous. I mean, stop-traffic, hold-the-phone, who-the-heck-is-this-guy gorgeous. He resembled Tom Selleck in his heyday, though Tom Selleck in his heyday would have wished he looked that good. Bang! I was smitten. Down for the count.

  “I’m Tony DiCarlo,” the man said, extending his hand.

  I shook it. “Alice Finnegan. I’ve taken over for Rafe Bowden. He got a national tour.”

  “Are you an actress, too?” Tony asked.

  I nodded.

  He shook his head. “It’s a tough life. Well, a pleasure to meet you, Alice. That’s my office, right over there,” he added, pointing a few feet down the hall from Claire Hunt’s room. “Don’t think I’m rude if I keep the door closed all the time.” Tony lowered his voice to a whisper and put his finger to his lips. “I’m a smoker.”

  “Your secret’s safe with me,” I whispered back.

  Tony gave me a wink, then headed into his own room, shutting the door.

  IlikemyjobIlikemyjobIlikemyjob! Rafe had never mentioned Tony. I wonder why.

  At around ten A.M., Claire Hunt came in, looking like an advertisement for Talbots. She bade me a cordial good morning, solicitously asked if I was acclimating myself, told me to see her in half an hour when she would have some letters for me to type and send out, and retreated into her office.

  Only three hundred feet uptown from Newter & Spade, and it felt like I was a world away from my former temp job. I’d come with a recommendation from my predecessor, my new boss seemed to be relatively courteous…and, my God…Tony DiCarlo was the most physically perfect specimen of a man I’ve ever laid eyes on. I wasn’t sure I’d ever grow accustomed to talking with him without staring.

  A few minutes later, I looked at the clock; it wasn’t yet time to collect my assignment from Ms. Hunt, so I e-mailed Izzy to tell her about Tony. People’s looks ordinarily didn’t register with me that way; this was a first. For example, Sean Connery could walk by me on the street and I would scarcely notice, unless he actually bumped into me. Okay, well, maybe not Sean Connery. “You have to come over here for lunch someday and see for yourself,” I gushed to Izzy. “He’s like every woman’s fantasy—the kind that couldn’t possibly come true because no one looks that good in real life.” The only thing about him that convinc
ed me that Tony was flesh and blood and not computer-generated virtual virility was that he smoked. I’m no big fan of cigarettes, but it was reassuring to be reminded that no one, not even Tony DiCarlo, was perfect.

  I stepped inside Claire Hunt’s office for the first time. Her framed undergraduate and MBA diplomas took pride of place on one wall. “Tasteful” prints decorated two others. Nothing was out of place on her desk, bookshelves, or credenza (atop which were a couple of elegantly framed photos of Ms. Hunt with a younger woman I assumed was her daughter). Her inner sanctum, like her personal appearance, was fastidious. And when I retrieved a few letters from her “out” box, I learned that even her handwriting was meticulous. Claire Hunt wrote the drafts of her correspondence in flawless parochial school penmanship. It was almost a shame to retype it.

  And that was all I did for my entire first day on the job. Sent out four letters. Compared to the nonstop influx of work at Newter & Spade, this was heaven. Except that I was bored and had no one to converse with. I didn’t want to talk on the phone because my desk was right outside Claire Hunt’s office. So I e-mailed Izzy a lot, checked out eBay for a while, even though I wasn’t interested in purchasing anything, and photocopied a few recipes for my boss from a new cookbook on Tuscan cuisine she’d borrowed from Terry the receptionist.

  At the end of the day Ms. Hunt summoned me back to her office and closed the door. “Alice, you did a lovely job on the letters I gave you,” she began. “And there may be several days like this one where I won’t have much for you to do. So I’m asking this favor of you…”

  I expected her to ask me to pick up her dry cleaning, call her shrink to explain why she couldn’t make either her appointments or her payments, or cat-sit for her—all of which are actual, off-the-job-description-chart requests I’ve received in former office temp assignments.

  “Just look busy, Alice.” I must have given her a funny look. “Don’t read a book or newspaper or do crossword puzzles, but you’re otherwise welcome to constructively use your time on any work of your own. As you know, I’m a vice president here, and impressions are everything. My division must give every appearance of a constant flow of output.”

  If I wasn’t mistaken, her “division” consisted of the two of us.

  “That’s all,” Ms. Hunt concluded, placing her manicured hands on the desk in front of her. The red of her nail polish flawlessly matched her suit jacket. “You may go.”

  I returned to my own desk to find an e-mail from Isabel, suggesting that the Three Musketeers have another planning session about the play we intended to produce. I started to fire back a reply when I got to thinking about Ms. Hunt’s directive to “look busy.”

  Hmmmmm. All this time on my hands.

  Use it wisely, Alice.

  I realized I’d forgotten to return Terry’s cookbook to her; it was still on my desk. I picked it up and as I flipped through it, I was hit smack-bang with an epiphany. Aha! A way to spin time into money. I typed a quick response to Izzy’s e-mail. “I still can’t come up with a good suggestion about what show to do, but I have an idea on how we might be able to afford to produce it. What do you think of this…?”

  Chapter 10

  So, while Claire Hunt kept me only marginally busy, I made it look like she was a whirlwind of activity, clicking away on my computer keyboard for hours on end…churning out a cookbook of favorite recipes and special event menus, sales of which would help to fund our production. Gram and I could hold up our end pretty well, and Izzy was a phenomenal cook with a trove of family recipes, but Dorian was little help in this regard, since the contents of his refrigerator consisted solely of anything you could mix with gin. Then Izzy had the bright idea to assign Dorian the section on cocktails, insisting that he come up with more than how to mix the perfect martini.

  And things with Ms. Hunt were progressing quite swimmingly, until…

  “I didn’t ask you to correct my letters, Alice, just type and send them.” She pointed to her original draft and my subsequent printed version of one of the letters.

  I glanced at the two documents. “But it should have said ‘to whom we owe’ yadda yadda yadda, not ‘to who we owe…’”

  C. Hunt suddenly morphed into the Wicked Witch of the West. I was beginning to understand how she’d earned her nickname around the association. “You type what I write,” she said in a steely voice.

  “I was only trying to—”

  Make them correct, I know. But why bother fixing her grammar, Alice? If she doesn’t want to appear educated, that’s her problem. Apparently, it’s a bigger deal to her to be corrected by her assistant, a lowly temporary employee.

  “Do us both a favor, Alice.” She was big on “favors,” I was learning. “Type what you see,” she said. “Always. Exactly as I handwrote it on the draft. Then bring it to me for signature. That’s it. You may go.”

  I turned and headed for the door. Claire Hunt’s voice stopped me.

  “Alice.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t think so much. Now retype these as I originally gave them to you. Thank you.”

  I sat down at my chair, completely baffled. I hadn’t made a fuss of any sort or called Ms. Hunt’s attention to the grammatical errors in her correspondence. I simply corrected them, quietly and without fanfare. But I guess she felt I was asserting a kind of superiority over her, although it hadn’t been my intention. Maybe I care too much, but being diligent, vigilant, and going the extra mile, even in a temp job, has always been my work ethic. I’d felt that letting little errors slip by unnoticed or uncorrected was a failure on my part to acquit myself properly as her assistant. After all, she’d instructed me to “keep busy” in order to make her look good; didn’t my efforts to clean up her communications count as well? I wondered how Rafe had handled things, but he’d been on the road for a month already, and since I didn’t think this qualified as an “emergency,” I wasn’t inclined to bother contacting him.

  But the little slap on the wrist I’d received from Claire Hunt turned out to be only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Who’d have guessed, while I was steaming full speed ahead in ARMPIT’s comfy surroundings, more or less a lady of leisure, that I was unwittingly doing an impression of the Titanic?

  “Alice, come with me,” Ms. Hunt said. It was the afternoon after the grammar conversation. The mail had just arrived and she had a sheaf of envelopes in her hand. “Bring a legal pad and a pen with you.”

  “Ummm…we’re going into the ladies’ room,” I observed.

  “Yes, we are.”

  We were the only two women in there. Ms. Hunt entered one of the stalls and closed the door. I heard the sound of an envelope being opened, followed by a few moments of silence. Then…“Alice, take a letter to Norbert Morrison of the Sacramento Bee. Dear Mr. Morrison—Alice, have you got that?”

  Can you believe this? The woman is giving you dictation from the toilet.

  Well, this was a first. “Ummm…yes,” I replied, starting to scribble away in fast longhand. She dictated the entire letter, then three more, pausing occasionally to do what came naturally. I was stunned. Was this her revenge on me for not transcribing her own drafts verbatim? She certainly couldn’t have pulled this stunt when Rafe was her assistant.

  Alice, the woman is a nut.

  My intuition had just made a good point. So working at ARMPIT had definitely become a little less rosy. At least I still had Tony DiCarlo to flirt with. Rabid feminists will no doubt want to take me to task over this, but screw ’em! Knowing I was going to have the pleasure of looking at Tony gave me a reason to wake up in the morning. What’s wrong with a healthy, single, lusty, single, horny, single girl thinking of a guy as “eye candy” every once in a while? The man looked just as amazing in a business suit (his shirts always looked so crisp, I could swear he never sweated) as he did in sportswear.

  Every week I began to count down the days to casual Friday, mostly because Tony showed up to work in his red close-fitting polo shirt
with the collar that opened just enough to expose a perfect tan. He’d taken to inviting me into his office to chat, but since he was smoking in there, he would always close the door and I used to pray with every fiber of my being that it would occur to him to make an attempt to ravish me. Didn’t he know I was having blue dreams about him at night? Wasn’t it written all over me? I needed a good, healthy pick-me-up after the Eric Witherspoon disaster. So why didn’t he try to pick me up? Did ARMPIT have no-fraternization rules, too? Was I ugly? Repulsive? He seemed to like my company, my sense of humor, and my wardrobe. I couldn’t figure it out and when I asked Gram to play the name game, she came up blank.

  This began to worry me. Not because she couldn’t parse the hidden meaning behind my gorgeous co-worker’s nomenclature, but because she seemed to be losing interest lately in things that had once given her extreme pleasure, including the unthinkable—chocolate ice cream. Her sense of fun was diminishing. Dorian saw it, too. She was less inclined to find time for his tap-dancing tutorials. It wasn’t that Dorian wasn’t paying for them—she couldn’t have cared less about the money; in fact, she gleefully espoused the philosophy that “making a lot of money is a perfectly acceptable goal if one has no other discernible talents”—but she’d lapsed into a sort of lethargy from which none of us seemed to be able to shake her.

  It was a glorious Indian summer Friday and I was headed to the subway on my way home, looking forward to a quiet weekend with Gram. I had made it my mission to do whatever it might take to cheer her up, no matter how long it took. I was passing by the building that housed Newter & Spade’s offices when I heard someone call my name. I turned around to see Ramona, coming up on my heels, gesturing wildly. I sped up, wanting to have nothing to do with her after the way she had treated me, not merely while I was temping at her firm, but at the spate of unemployment hearings that followed.

  She caught up with me when I was forced to stop at the intersection, waiting for the light to change. “Alice,” she began, slightly breathless from chasing me down the street. “I want to speak to you about something.” She motioned to the Starbucks on the corner where we were standing. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee.” She appeared edgy, agitated.