Pink Slip

by Rita Ciresi

  Bible references apparently didn’t make him too nervous. He gazed down at the thick portfolio and told me it was all the paperwork that circulated during the meeting and copies of the legal documents that would clear the spinal block for the market.

  “This is a good drug,” he said.

  “Are there bad ones?” I asked, forgetting my audience. Luckily he missed—or pretended to miss—the gist of this remark as well, because he made reference to a current, well-known lawsuit against one of our rival companies over an antidepressant that had bizarre side effects—reportedly causing patients to hallucinate and kill themselves.

  “That’s a bad one,” he said, “and someone’s going to pay for it.”

  Strauss left the boards in the art shop; I handed over his legal documents. We said good-bye, nice to have spoken with you. When Strauss extended his hand, it felt warm to the touch, probably because he had gripped, a little too tightly, the top of the thick art boards to keep from dropping them.

  I returned to my office. During the next hour at my desk, I sank into the kind of depression worth medicating. The spinal—block project was over and done with, and I nursed a letdown similar to the kind I felt after my birthday or Christmas or the end of a semester—that feeling of what now? and so what? I gazed outside. It was summer—mating season—the time I seemed programmed to begin an affair. Then I’d walk away, when the leaves started to fall, without much regret. Now my days loomed before me—dull and uneventful. That night I would leave at five o’clock and go back home to what? Another exciting evening of rearranging the bras in my underwear drawer, plucking the foil gum wrappers and used Kleenexes out of my messy purse, or balancing my checkbook (just to make the task more interesting) in the nude? A thrilling session in hot pursuit of stray eyebrows and chin whiskers with the only male companion in my life, a trusty metal implement known as Tweezerman? There was always my corporate novel to work on. Although I had reworked the first two chapters of Stop It Some More—toning down the emphasis on sex and cultivating a hot romantic interest between the art-shop director, an aspiring cartoonist named Donna Dilano, and the chief financial officer, a stern taskmaster and ex-member of the Yale rowing team known as Thomas Akins—I realized how stymied I felt by lack of material. What did I really know about the inner workings of a corporation? I needed a juicy subplot to catch the reader’s interest.

  As if in answer to a prayer, my computer buzzed. I turned to my keyboard and logged on to All-in-1 without even checking to see who sent the message.

  My Italian is rusty. Does your last name mean what I think it means?

  The top of the screen identified the sender as Strauss, E.

  My radar had been down so long, it had gone completely awry. I no longer knew how to read the signals—faint and cautious as they had been—and the message surprised me. Oh, I thought. So that’s why he walked me to the art shop.

  A real feminist, I suspected, would have been offended. I was horny and intrigued. Strauss, E. was hitting on me. Or at least I hoped he was hitting on me, as boldly as he knew how. Discretion, of course, was necessary in the halls of Boorman. His, I thought, had been brilliant to the point of literary—or at least it called to mind the sexy, silent disapproval expressed by my favorite romantic hero, the haughty Mr. Darcy, toward the high-spirited Miss Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.

  Strauss, E. was not Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy. I was sure he never went hunting with the hounds nor drank anything stronger than root beer, never mind an occasional polite sherry. He’d look like Mickey Mouse in white gloves. But for that matter, I’d look like something out of junior-high-school drama class in a tulle gown and ringlets. After a half hour of being cooped up in one of Austen’s parlors, you’d have to scrape me off the ceiling.

  We are who we are. And here, sad to say, was who I was back then—a girl whose idea of thinking things through went like this: Hey, I’ve never been in an Audi before. I wonder if it has leather seats. I thought: Great shoes, nice shine, and even though he’s obviously worn them at least once, I bet they still smell good enough to eat. Then I thought: God, he’s older than I am, but not by much if he has only five years at Boorman. He also wasn’t much taller than I was. But I didn’t have a thing for height. Having grown up surrounded by short men, I was conditioned to finding anything over six feet utterly gratuitous.

  I considered Strauss some more. He was too polite. Too cautious. He struck me as the kind of man who probably would not stop to watch a juggler on the street. He probably did shake the doctor’s hand when he was born. He probably kissed his own mother on the cheek. But he clearly had a deeply suppressed wilder streak (or at least the need to rebel against the strong hand of Peggy) if he was willing to put out a feeler in my direction. During the meeting he showed he did have a sense of humor—or at the very least, a penchant for being teased, if only by those over whom he held the power to shut up. And he had a corner office. With a view of the fountain. With books on his shelves. And his own secretary, who probably acted more professional than the so-called “professional staff” Surely she refrained from making personal phone calls on company time and forbore to peddle Tupperware, Avon, and Sarah Coventry jewelry to her coworkers. She called him Mr. Strauss and he probably never corrected her (although it took him long enough to correct me). Strauss sat at a huge desk made of real cherry, not laminated wood products. He did not keep his bag lunch and his running shoes—and stinky balled-up tube socks—in the bottom drawer of his file cabinet, nor did he write with pens that exploded blue ink all over his starched cuffs. His expense account was probably larger than my annual salary.

  He was interesting, no doubt about it. But would a company yes-man (who I suspected would never dare cop a feel unless it was written into the annual strategic plan) really risk so much to show his interest in me? I placed my fingertips on my keyboard—knowing the low electric current coursing through my body had nothing at all to do with the hum emanating from the computer—and I tried to determine how to answer, besides asking him if he was still kicking himself for taking only two semesters’ worth of Italian in college or inquiring if he had a side interest in the theory of names. Composing the reply was tricky. Because if a man in his position had to move forward slowly, inch by inch, a woman—in my position—would have to stick her neck out a bit more. Meet him slightly more than halfway, or else he might retreat.

  I typed out the three simple letters that spelled Yes, followed by a rough translation of my last name into English: God said.

  But since that alone didn’t seem adequate to provoke another response, I dared to add, Why don’t you go by your first name?

  I hit the return and waited.

  I clocked him. A minute passed, then two, then three, before he indirectly answered, My parents call me Ibby. But you might not want to tell anyone else that.

  It’s our secret, I typed, and hit RETURN.

  The phone rang half a minute later. I smiled. Gotcha, I thought, before I picked up the receiver.

  Chapter Five

  All Business

  His voice was all business when he asked if he could take me out to lunch as a way of offering his thanks for my hard work.

  “I don’t eat lunch,” I told him.

  He paused. “Do you eat dinner?”

  “I eat dinner,” I said, and realizing I had him backed in the corner, I said, “When should we eat dinner?”

  “I don’t suppose you’re free on Friday?”

  “I have a date,” I said (strategic pause), “with a rowing machine. At my gym. But you probably make better conversation.”

  He gave me one of those split-second silences that made me nervous. For a moment I felt a twinge of longing for the man I was about to stand up—the little guy called the Pacer, who rode his own scull across the display screen of the rowing machine, shouting into his megaphone, Row, row, row that boat! to which I always silently replied, Up your rectum and then some, bub, before I gritted my teeth and stepped up the speed. S
ince the start of summer, the Pacer and I had formed a very intimate relationship. He knew my strokes. He knew how to make me grunt and groan and sweat, and he always kept me coming back for more.

  Strauss could only promise to give it his best shot. When I gave him my address—after he asked if I didn’t mind being picked up, a question I greeted with my own amused form of silence—he said, “I thought you lived in the opposite direction.”

  “What gave you that impression?”

  “That night I followed you out.”

  “That’s the way to my gym,” I said. “I go to the gym every night.”

  “Do you jog?”

  “I lift weights.”

  He got off the phone quickly.

  For the next two days I alternately dreaded and looked forward to our dinner. I knew he would take me someplace dignified and quiet. I knew I would have to watch how much I drank and keep my elbows off the table for fear of knocking onto the floor three-quarters of the silverware laid out before me like heavy artillery. Above all I knew I would have to avoid bad-mouthing anyone at work or the company in general and put a lid on my famous dumb-guy jokes, which routinely sent the editorial staff into peals of laughter (example: What’s the diff between a woman and a computer? A computer can take a five-inch floppy!).

  On Friday night Strauss showed up at my apartment wearing a coat and tie and stayed in the doorway while I fetched my purse. He held open the door of the Audi and looked the other way when I slid into the leather passenger seat. The seat belts automatically slipped forward when he closed his door. I jumped when he hit the power locks.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Next time I’ll give you warning.” He adjusted his rearview mirror. “Are you buckled in?”

  “Your car just did it for me.”

  “That’s the shoulder. You need the lap. It’s a little bit hidden. Really reach back.”

  I groped. “Let me find it.”

  “Take your time.”

  “We could be here all night.”

  “My father set the record last time he visited. It took him close to five minutes.”

  “How old is your father?”

  “He has a few years on you.”

  “I guess I win runner-up,” I said when I finally found the end of the belt and snapped it. Although I didn’t mind the thought of Strauss leaning over me, the last thing I wanted him to do was buckle me in like a geriatric patient or a squirmy, ill-behaved kid.

  On the way to the restaurant—and it was a long drive—I found out Strauss’s father was in the carpet business. He grew up in Brooklyn—in what he vaguely defined as a “not-so-nice neighborhood”—and his parents now lived in Park Slope. He went to Cornell to lose his accent, and Harvard Business School to unlearn everything he had been taught at Cornell. He worked for another drug company outside of Princeton before he came to Ossining.

  “What exactly do you do all day at Boorman?” I asked him.

  “Is your bullshit detector down?”

  “That’s how you’ll know I’m dead.”

  “Well. I go to meetings. A lot of meetings—”

  “My sympathies,” I said, for based on my limited experience I already knew that meetings at Boorman were about as productive as complaining about the weather. “How did you wind up at Boorman?”

  “I was recruited. By Peg.”

  “You must like a challenge.”

  I provoked one of his infamous frowns. “You seem to get along very well with her.”

  “Oh, I do. I do.”

  “She’s in a difficult position, you know. But we probably shouldn’t talk shop. Should we agree not to talk shop?” Strauss asked, with a neutrality that seemed to imply, with particular emphasis on avoiding certain problematic personalities who wouldn’t approve of our meeting outside the office, unless it was at a power lunch overlooking the eighteenth green.

  “Fine by me,” I said. Although I regretted losing the opportunity to grill him about life at the top, the last thing I wanted was the ghost of Peggy riding in the backseat. That was enough to kill any romantic prospect for the evening.

  We fell silent. To avoid keeping my eye on the speedometer (Strauss, surprisingly, drove faster than I ever dared), I looked out the window at the darkening sky and thought Peggy would make a great Mother Superior. Schoenbarger was a German name though—and what little I knew of Germans beyond the usual foul association was that they brewed great beer and manufactured swell cars, but few of them shared my faith. Yet Karen had said Peggy was trying to adopt a girl through Catholic Charities. Maybe her live-in lover was an ex-nun. The thought amused me, and I filed it away as raw material for the novel. The more I wrote on Stop It Some More, the guiltier I felt—but not guilty enough to put the brakes on my runaway imagination.

  At the Italian restaurant in Dobbs Ferry there wasn’t a red-checked tablecloth or a bowl of waxed fruit in sight. The maître d’ didn’t shout, You back again? nor did the bartender holler, What’s your poison, paesan? The booths were black leather—not vinyl—and the candles hardly dripped. The menu was in both Italian and English, and there wasn’t a single meatball on it, never mind any mention of puttanesca.

  I perused the list of entrees for so long that Strauss must have thought I had trouble deciding. “They do a good veal chop,” he suggested.

  “I don’t eat meat on Fridays,” I said, not having the vaguest idea why I told this blatant lie. Maybe I thought it would make me seem more interesting, or I felt like being perverse. Maybe I just wanted to watch his reaction.

  He apologized, as if he were sorry he wasn’t Catholic too. Then he said he hoped I wouldn’t think him blasphemous—in his own way?—for ordering the shrimp fra diavolo.

  “Have what you want,” I told him, and I was pleased when he looked down at the menu and made his first unguarded remark of the evening: that keeping kosher seemed to have been invented for the sole purpose of keeping women in the kitchen.

  “Does your mother?” I asked.

  “No, but she’s in the kitchen most of the time anyway.”

  “So is mine,” I said.

  “Your mother doesn’t work, then, either?”

  “Strauss,” I said, “my mother beats throw rugs—with a big wooden spoon—over the back porch railing to get the dust out.”

  He smiled. “My mother waxes the kitchen floor on her hands and knees.”

  “Beats vacuuming the ceiling. Really. I kid you not. My mother vacuums the ceiling.”

  We looked at one another, instant understanding in our eyes. Then we both hid, once again, behind our menus. He decided to skip the fra diavolo—perhaps because of the garlic factor. He got the chicken breast stuffed with fontina and artichoke hearts, and I ordered the salmone dressed with asparagus and lemon, hoping it wouldn’t skid off the table when I first cut into it, like that blasted piece of tough prime rib that ended up in my lap during my sister’s wedding reception. My mother had descended on me with a white napkin and a gallon of club soda, which only spread the stain even farther on that hideous yellow maid-of-honor dress that made me look about as svelte as a melting pound of butter.

  “Wine?” Strauss asked and I said, “Just a glass,” although I wanted to knock myself out of the sheer awkwardness of eating and conversing with a man I hardly even knew, in such a formal setting, for which I had dressed all wrong—in a velour skirt that (thank God) was black, but in a white blouse, which made me look like I should have been waiting on tables instead of being served. Or maybe I looked even worse: like I ought to get up and dance around the restaurant with a bottle of Chianti balanced on my head.

  I knocked over the salt shaker when I handed back the menu.

  “All lupo,” Strauss said. Although it could have been just another Italian phrase (like vafanculo) that he picked up during his childhood in Brooklyn, I was surprised he knew this shortened version of good luck.

  “So how many semesters of Italian did you take in college?” I asked him.

  “Just four. But
didn’t I tell you my father’s from Italy?” He seemed amused by the confused look on my face. “Mind, I didn’t say he was Italian.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I get it.” Because I had read my Levi, my Bassani, and my Ginzburg, and I knew there were Italian Jews, although I had never met one in my life.

  “But your last name is—well, your father must have grown up in the north, right?” When he nodded, I said, “My parents are from outside Palermo.”

  “Sicily is very beautiful.”

  “I’ve never been. You actually have?”

  “In college. On an archeology dig, of all things.”

  “What’d you find?”

  “A couple of bones. A bad sunburn. And a short-lived girlfriend.”

  More on that chick later, I thought. “I’d like to go. But it’s so expensive. Besides, I’m a little afraid of the language barrier.”

  “I thought you spoke.”

  “Just a bit.”

  “Can you say costs too much?”

  “After watching my mother haggle for years?”

  “And stop, thief?”

  I laughed.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” he said. “I’ve offended you.”

  “Do it some more.”

  He blinked. I blushed. Then we both took another—long—sip of water. He asked if my parents ever had gone back.

  “They always talked like they hated it,” I said.

  “That’s natural. If they had it hard?”

  “They had it hard.”

  “And you got to hear all about it?”

  “You sound as if you might have heard some of the same stories.”

  “Actually, my father doesn’t talk about it.”

  “Men of that generation don’t seem to have much of a voice,” I said. “Unless it’s raised.”

  After the wine came, Strauss admitted that his father, at least, never raised his voice, but sometimes played the ventriloquist. He said that for as far back as he could remember, on those rare occasions that his family went to a restaurant, his father—whom I dearly love, don’t get me wrong—always told the waiter what his mother wanted, as if his mother were a deaf-mute who could not communicate her own desire for the steak or the halibut.