by Rita Ciresi
I couldn’t fathom why Karen ever described him as a laid-back boss, until I guessed he probably was watching us closely at her request. Still, he didn’t have to treat us like toddlers in imminent danger of falling into the deep end of the pool. I blamed myself, in part, for his compulsion to play camp lifeguard. Trust me was a phrase that usually came out of the most untrustworthy of mouths, and clearly recognizing that, he seemed to single me out as the one who needed the closest supervision. Maybe because he knew I had my eye on Karen’s office, he kept his eye on me. Or at least he seemed to have his eye on me. When he wasn’t carefully phrasing his orders over the phone—our conversations were rushed when they weren’t punctuated by uncomfortable, half-second silences—he left polite commands on my computer using the All-in-1 messaging system.
Tired of his close supervision, I told the secretary, “He can’t leave town often enough.” My heart sank when I saw his car was in the parking lot. He owned the Audi, not the Beemer. I couldn’t help noticing he also owned—in spite of that one wretched tie—a good wardrobe, which was more than I could have vouched for most of the male specimens at Boorman. Sometimes when I passed him in the hall coming or going to the vending machines (where I found, to my dismay, I had regained my own childish taste for root beer), I remembered the Saturday I had bumped into him in the hall. He hadn’t looked half-bad in his shirtsleeves.
Too bad his demeanor was less than appealing. One evening as I signed out at 7:00 P.M.—remarking to Gussie that I wanted to be taken out for a round of margaritas when this blasted project was finally over—Gussie smiled and said, “Here comes your shadow; maybe he can take you.”
I turned. The least likely candidate for a wild night out on the town approached: Eben Strauss, with a look on his face equivalent to the frown the dental hygienist always gave me when I admitted I never flossed.
“Miss Lisa’s here late again,” Gussie told him.
“So I see.”
“She’s in here every weekend.”
“So am I.”
“You’re working her to death, Mr. Strauss.”
“Am I?” he asked me.
“At last count I was still breathing,” I said, handing him the clipboard.
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said, scrawling his signature and dropping the pen back to the clipboard. He practically lunged to hold the door open for me, which forced me to edge by him so closely I brushed against the tweed of his jacket.
The sun hung low in the sky beyond the lab. He walked next to me, in an awkward silence that he finally broke with, “We appreciate the long hours you’re putting in.”
“No problem.”
“Once this project pushes through, you can get back to your family.”
“My family lives in Connecticut.”
“But your husband—”
“I don’t have a husband,” I said.
He looked embarrassed. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where he had gotten that cockamamy idea, until I remembered the Saturday I took Dodie on a tour of Boorman. He must have seen my signature—L. and D. Diodetto—on Gussie’s clipboard when he himself signed out. Still, plenty of times he’d gotten close enough to see that my left hand was bare of everything but paper cuts.
“You have a brother, then,” he said.
“I don’t have a brother.”
The confusion on his face was so interesting, I didn’t bother telling him it was my cousin who’d been temporarily incapacitated by diarrhea in the men’s room. Let him think whatever he wants, I thought, and no doubt he did, because he dismissed me by saying, “I must have you mixed up with someone else. Have a good evening.”
He waited for me to pull my car out first so his Audi could escort me, at a respectful distance, down the long winding driveway that led to the street. “Did I ask for a chaperon?” I muttered to myself, tempted to pump my brake so he’d have to stop short. I feared he would follow me to make sure I didn’t stop at the nearest cantina. But in my rearview mirror I saw that after I turned left, he turned right—probably back toward that rural area where I had gotten lost driving around with Dodie. I also lived to the right, but my gym was in the opposite direction.
Sure that Karen had put him on my trail, I ventured to comment the next time I spoke to her: “Mr. Strauss is always supervising me.”
“Maybe Dr. Schoenbarger told him to.”
“I never thought of that.”
“He always left me alone, but I’d been working there for four years before we moved under him. After you prove you can do a good job, he’ll probably ease up.”
As far as I was concerned, that couldn’t happen fast enough, and I marked on my calendar—with a sickening smiley face—the day we would meet with the bigwigs in Communications and Marketing to discuss sending off the spinal block onto the market.
My mouth felt dry as I entered Boorman’s executive boardroom for that much-anticipated meeting. The long table reminded me of the bowed galleys of slave ships in catechism movies. As I took my place at one of the plush, wheeled chairs along the side, I feared that in the background would rise the monotonous sound of a drum, and I would have to start rowing. After all the long, horny hours I had spent in the gym, I probably could have outrowed all the Ivy Leaguers at the table, some of whom probably actually had sculled down the Housatonic or Charles Rivers. But I wasn’t at this meeting to exhibit my newly acquired athletic prowess. I had been invited to present the boards I had drawn up with the designers and the typesetters, which showed the final form of the information manual that would be included in every new package of the spinal block before it got distributed to operating rooms across the country.
By then I was used to the whole corporate dog-and-pony show, and I played along as if my life depended on it. I knew that for this presentation I was supposed to wear a navy suit and a bold but not too strangely colored silk blouse and thick gold earrings that spoke of my confidence and power. I knew I was supposed to mingle beforehand in the conference room and drink just enough coffee to wire me, but not enough to swell my bladder. I knew I was not supposed to yawn when I sat down, or look at my watch for the next one to two hours. I knew I was supposed to shut up when the boss man—for it was always a man at Boorman, with the exception of Peggy—assumed his seat at the head of the table, and that the ensuing silence meant the meeting had started.
Eben Strauss commanded attention not by rapping his coffee cup on the table, nor by tapping his silver pen on his leather portfolio, but by staring impassively to signal his impatience with the few guys still joking around at the end of the table. Since this was my first meeting with the men (and two women) of marketing, Mr. Strauss asked me to stand and introduce myself.
The wheel of my chair latched onto my neighbor’s, and we had a slight tussle before I raised myself up and said, “Lisa Diodetto. Thank you for asking me, Mr. Strauss.”
“Strauss,” he said, and I remained standing, positive I had said his name right, so why was he repeating it back to me? “You can call me Strauss.”
“I just did,” I said, which for some reason provoked a round of laughter.
“He goes by his last name,” one of the original jokers at the other end of the room told me. “Nobody calls him by his first name except Peg.”
Thanks for telling me, I felt like saying—angry because Strauss had made Karen and me call him Mister when all the rest of these guys called him by his last name.
There followed some mild heckling of the man everyone claimed didn’t look like an Eben, or a Bennie, or even a Ben. Someone—although I later found out it was a division manager—even made so bold as to say, “What was your mother thinking of, Strauss, when you were born?”
“I imagine she was sedated,” Strauss replied.
“Strauss is so polite he probably didn’t even cry when he came out.”
“He probably shook the doctor’s hand.”
“He probably held the door open for the nurse.”
“He probably
had a thousand-word vocabulary.”
“He probably said, Yes, yes, all this fuss is all very well, but could we please get down to business?”
Laughter. A few mild-mannered hoots. Strauss looked down at the table—and smiled. The teasing was clear evidence that they all liked and even respected him—if they didn’t, they would have been sweet as pie to him to his face, saving their nastier numbers to perform behind his back.
Strauss cleared his throat and told me I could sit down—thus calling further attention to the fact that I was ass enough to still be standing. We got down to business. The meeting was a blasting bore; it went on—in common office parlance—like the orgasm of a thirty-five-year-old woman, i.e., forever. I made my presentation—and was thanked by Strauss for my brevity—then spent the last half hour with my legs crossed against the evil effects of the coffee. When our business finally was transacted in exactly twice the amount of time really needed to move through the agenda, I bolted from my chair and hightailed it down the hall to the ladies’ room, where I audibly sighed as I emptied my aching bladder.
While I was washing my hands, I examined myself in the mirror. Something seemed off. Of course, my skin had that sick PMS look, and a light dusting of office lint covered my lapel. I looked closer. Then my hand flew up to the side of my head. I looked down to the floor and ran back to the stall. I was missing an earring. It was either in the hallway, or back in the boardroom, or—a worse scenario yetlying crushed in the parking lot. I had just given a major presentation looking like a lopsided talking head. I pulled off the other earring and put it into my pocket. I had to return to the meeting room to retrieve my boards, and I carefully retraced my path on the hall carpet, trying not to give off signs of panic. But I was frantic. The earrings (bold clips that I bought at Bloomie’s when I got the job) were eighteen-carat gold and cost me half a week’s salary. I couldn’t afford to replace them.
The meeting room was dark and empty. The wastebasket was stuffed with squished paper cups; a lone yellow pencil lay on the table. I flicked on the lights and scanned the floor by the easel where my boards were still propped. Then I yanked out the chair I had sat in during the meeting and dived under the table to fetch my big clip, which lay on the carpet, dull and innocuous as an oyster on the bottom of the ocean floor.
Half a second later a pair of men’s shoes—nice—looking cordovan loafers, with the kind of high gloss that seemed to announce they were Italian—entered through the glass door. The loafers came around the side of the room, then stopped when I reached forward to grab my earring and my head knocked—loudly—against the top of the table.
Tears came to my eyes. “Fanculo,” I blurted out.
Pause. Then a voice said, “I haven’t heard that word in years.”
My face heated up. I continued crouching on the floor. “I guess you’re not a Scorsese fan, then,” I told the disembodied voice, which I didn’t immediately recognize, for it had a touch of Brooklyn in its formation of word and years.
“I saw Mean Streets,” the voice said, and I bumped my head again as I crawled backward out from the table, and emerged, wild-haired, to confront the man who did not want to go by Eben or Ben, and whom I now knew had clearly wukked hod, all dese years, to get rid of his Brooklyn accent.
He blinked at me.
“Did you like it?” I asked. “The movie, I mean?”
“No,” Strauss said. “Too violent.”
His gaze—too insistent—disconcerted me. I held out the prize in my palm and said, “I lost my earring.”
He continued staring. “I think you’ve lost both.”
I shook my head and pulled the spare out of my pocket. “I pulled this one off in the john—”
The word john clearly made him uneasy and made me realize that in spite of my efforts to the contrary, I was turning out to be a clone of my mother, at least in terms of vocabulary.
“I mean, I looked in the mirror—in the bathroom—and saw the other one—the first one—the one under the table—was missing—”
He nodded. “Lucky you noticed. I left something behind too.” He went over to the head of the table and retrieved his leather portfolio from the floor, where he had placed it when the tons of written material circulating at the table began to come his way.
After shoving both the earrings into my pocket, I went over to the easel. Strauss was looking at my feet—probably checking out my shoes. I didn’t mind that my Via Spigas gave his loafers some competition. But then I sneaked a peek down at myself and realized that my lunge under the table had caused my navy stockings to bunch at the ankles.
How do girls who grew up poor dress rich? By donning a Tahari suit over underwear riddled with holes. By wearing Via Spiga pumps that cost a hundred dollars a pop with fifty-nine-cent grocery-store-label panty hose underneath.
Between the panty hose and the fanculo—never mind the reference to the john—Struss had my number now. His disapproval seemed as palpable as the stagnant air in the meeting room, suffocatingly still after having the door closed for the past two hours. Why else would he be watching me so intently as I took down the boards? His silence unnerved me and seemed to say, Young lady, your behavior needs serious adjusting.
“Here, let me help you with those,” he said.
“It’s just cardboard,” I told him. Then I remembered he was a vice-president, the boards were unwieldy, and I had a long walk back to the art shop.
“You can carry this,” he said, giving me his portfolio, which seemed a fair trade, at least until I got it in my hands and realized it weighed more than the boards themselves did.
He turned left—instead of right—after asking where we were going, which prolonged even further the long trek back to the art shop. He thanked me again for all the hard work I had done in Karen’s absence and asked me to refresh his memory: exactly how long had I been with Boorman?
“Since the end of spring.”
“You haven’t had much of a summer, then.”
“Nor have you,” I said. “When will you take vacation?”
“I rarely take vacation.”
The thought made me crazy, that I would have to suffer through the rest of beach season with this veep making sure I dotted my i’s and put a healthy loop on my p’s and q’s. “How long have you been on board?” I asked him.
Strauss recently celebrated his fifth anniversary. “Karen and I came in together,” he said. “Of course, we didn’t really get to know one another until just recently.”
“That’s right,” I said. “She said our division used to be with Communications.”
“That’s right. The search is on for a new VP in that area.”
I wondered what crime the last one had committed. He probably came in two under par while playing Dr. Schoenbarger in golf “Boorman doesn’t seem to have a lot of turnover among the management,” I said.
“We’re all happy to be here.”
Speak for yourself, I felt like telling him. For we had just passed by the window, and I saw, once again, that it was a great day for the beach. “Well,” I said in a too-hearty voice, “I’m certainly glad I made the move here.”
“Where were you before?”
“In publishing.”
“That’s right. Karen told me when we were introduced.”
“Actually, I don’t think she did.”
“Funny. I was sure she told me then.”
“Funny. I’m sure not. You were in a meeting—”
“I’m always in a meeting.”
“And you stood up from the table and said, ‘Welcome on board’—”
“Are you sure?”
“—and you had on a red tie—” I said, leaving out the word ugly.
“I hope you’ll forgive me,” he said.
“For the tie? Or for saying welcome on board?”
He frowned. Obviously he didn’t think either one was a crime. “No, for forgetting.”
We had reached a set of glass doors, and I held one open for h
im. He didn’t like that. Or maybe it bothered him that when he went through the door first—reaching back to hold it open for me—the two-inch heels on my pumps brought our eyes practically even. But if he minded that, how could he take working for Doctor Peggy, who at worst could be called Amazonian, and at best, statuesque?
“I hope you don’t mind me carrying these boards back,” he said.
“Why should I mind?”
“You seem to object.”
“I don’t object.” And then I had the guts—or the brazen coglioni, as Dodie might say—to add, “Dr. Schoenbarger, however, might call you on the carpet for it.”
He smiled. “She knows—and forgives—my bad habits.”
“That’s nice,” I said, although I doubted the Doctor would approve of him carrying a couple of three-pound pieces of cardboard for a girl who regularly lifted weights. The truth was, his portfolio was four or five times heavier than those boards and threatened to bust my right bicep. “What do you have in here?” I asked. “The Gutenberg Bible?”
Then I blushed, because I remembered he was Jewish, which meant I had just committed what was getting to be the great sin of the 1980s—being culturally insensitive—until I remembered Jews read the Bible too, although they were subjected only to what I thought of as the “Hollywood half”—full of Universal Studio-like floods and fires and earthquakes and big-busted women writhing over golden calves and being turned into pillars of salt.
