by Peter Mattei
HR Lady is in her office staring at her computer when I come in. She is twisted up and over, and her body position tells me she’s in a bad mood.
“Eric,” she says. “Thank you for coming in early.” Then I tell her I want to meet with Barry alone, because I feel bad for dragging her into this and I want to let Barry chew me out privately and if she was around he might mince his words.
“Barry never minces anything,” she says, and it is true. Barry Spinotti is an old-school adman from Brooklyn, a deranged pit bull, in other words, and everyone knows it; it’s the one thing I like about him. Other things I like about him: he’s fleshy, he dresses in cheap suits he buys at the Today’s Man on Lexington Avenue, and he is always eating smelly food at his desk.
“Alright then I’ll be honest with you,” I say to her as if I am going to offer some new information, but I don’t. “We all know Barry doesn’t like me. Our conversation is likely to get ugly and I don’t want you to have to be a party to it. He might threaten to fire me, or at least to call up Jean-Christophe and ask him to fire me, and I want to save you the embarrassment of being between us. I don’t want you to have to choose between your allegiance and friendship with me and that of your boss.”
She looks at me funny. Maybe she’s surprised to hear me admit that we were friends, her and I, or maybe she in no way thinks of us as friends, why would she? We’re not actually friends at all, even though we’ve gone out on occasion and drank together, but the company always paid, and maybe that’s a good definition of what friendship is: having a drink with someone when it’s on your own dime and not your firm’s. By that count we were not friends at all. And complicating things was the time we got thoroughly trashed and made out for five seconds by the entrance to the F train, although that never happened, and because I imagined it I sometimes think it did. What would transpire, I wonder, if in fact I said to her: stop, Helen, please let’s stop this cruelty, this soul-crushing work of ours, forget about your boyfriend who nobody has ever seen, forget about this stupid business and this stupid town, let’s move to Sebastopol and get dumb jobs and just live like people do. What would she say? Probably nothing, probably she would think I was nuts, after all she already thinks I am nuts, but maybe she wouldn’t think that, maybe she doesn’t think that, maybe she thinks we are in the same boat, sinking together.
“It’s bad,” she finally says.
“What is?”
“She never came back to work from the hospital, she was treated and went home. I spoke to her last night, she said she was tired and needed to rest but would be back in today.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I say.
“Let me finish,” she says. “I don’t want to join you in Barry’s office any more than you want to go there. I spoke to a doctor at Mount Sinai and he said her contusion isn’t serious, that it will heal normally, but that it was possibly caused by the impact of a fistlike object.”
“What’s a fistlike object?” I ask. There’s something vaguely porno about the term, and normally I would have brought this up in a slightly offensive way but I decide that now is not the time; indeed I take that as a sign of positive growth. She looks at me as if I am an idiot. “No, seriously, I’m totally lost, please help me,” I beg.
“She was punched in the face!” she says.
“Really?”
“There’s no point at this point in lying to me, Eric!” she spits, and I realize that it’s all on the line now so I decide to go emo on her. I pause and look her directly in the eye, or eyes, as it were, my eyes to her eyes, rights to lefts and vice versa.
“I’m only going to ask one thing of you,” I say. “Well, actually, two things.”
“What are they?”
“No, one thing, just one, I take that back. Because I can’t ask you to simply believe me, can I, since after all as you know I’m a liar. You’ve heard me lie countless times to all those people we’ve had to fire this year, not to mention our clients, so why would you believe anything I said to you now?”
“What is it?” she says.
“All I ask of you is: let me see Barry by myself for fifteen minutes. I promise, this whole thing will work itself out.”
“You’re repeating yourself,” she says, not blinking even once.
Heading down the hall toward Barry’s corner I can begin to smell the smoke. Despite decades of legislation in this area, Barry still smokes cigarettes in his office. When I get there he is on his speakerphone, eating a greasy egg-and-sausage sandwich, sucking on a Newport Light and leaning over toward his Smoke Eaters air filtration device, which sits on the edge of his big black lacquer desk which must have been quite fashionable designwise in, like, 1983. The Smoke Eater (possible tagline: LET THEM EAT SMOKE™, no, not that, maybe ENABLING YOUR ADDICTION ACCOMPANIED BY AN ANNOYING HUMMING SOUND™) looks like a rice cooker, but a little smaller, like one of those white noise machines you put next to your bed so that you can’t hear the screaming down the hall, and it whirrs to a start when Barry presses the top of it and blows smoke toward its round gob, which sucks it in with an unhealthy whine. What a disgusting man, I think, how many awful chemicals there must be lodged in every crevice of every tissue of his body, which may be why at sixty-whatever he’s still working here, still alive, preserved in chemicals, he’ll never die because technically he’s already dead, he’s undead, he’s pickled by fear, lies, and nicotine.
“I gotta get off the goddam phone,” he says to whoever he’s talking to. “Nye,” he says to no one in particular but since that is my name I know he must mean me, “get your hipster ass in here.” Then he stuffs his breakfast sandwich into the fleshy maw located in the center of his colorless face and keeps pushing until most of it is jammed in there and then he begins chewing, bent down over the desk so that the egg yolk drips out and runs down his chin like yellow chicken cum onto the crumpled tin foil in front of him. “Where’s your cohort?”
“I wanted to talk to you first, just the two of us,” I explain.
“Fine, good, now I can chew your ass out in private.”
“That’s what I figured, sir.”
“Close the door and don’t call me sir. I know you hate my guts.” Barry is worth at least fifty or sixty million since the agency was sold to La Groupe S. A., the holding company that owns the holding company owned by M. J-C.
“I don’t hate your guts, Bar,” I say, “I love you,” and at the moment, watching him shovel himself, this is basically true. He puts down the last bit of his egg-and-sausage, sucks at the ends of his fingers, and reaches for the smoldering Newport sitting in the battery-powered vacuum-action ashtray that sits next to the Smoke Eater. He takes a long drag on the butt and leans over toward the machine and exhales into it again like it’s some girl or cat he’s trying to get high; I almost expect him to tongue the thing.
“I assume you don’t mind if I smoke,” he says, probably reading from a script he wrote for legal reasons; by sitting here I’ve clearly given up my right to take action. “They won’t even let me smoke outside the building anymore, can you believe that? Somebody complained about the secondhand out on the sidewalk. It’s New York Fucking City, it’s Tenth Fucking Avenue.”
“Times change, I guess.”
“Oh shut the fuck up you asshole,” he says to me, and I know that this is going to go extremely positively, because we’ll end up laughing about the whole thing, the two of us, he’ll agree that the girl deserved it, even if I didn’t hit her, and he’ll tell his dumb twat secretary with the bazooms out to here to make us a reservation at Keens for lunch. I can almost taste the Kobe beef burgers and a glass or four of good Chianti to wash it down.
“Listen, you can thank me later, alright, but for the time being you’re gonna have to lay low.”
“Thank you for what, Barry?” I ask. “Other than your general awesomeness.”
“Wipe that smile off your face, you prick,” he says, meaning it, having fully cleaned up his face and hands and finished the Ne
wport off with a last desperate draw before squishing it into the bowl. “You think this is some kind of a joke? I got Helen coming in here with this. I had to basically scream and yell at her all morning.”
“Helen?” I asked. “Helen and I are friends.”
“It’s not personal,” he goes on. “But she thinks that nineteen-year-old you punched is gonna bring an action or something if we don’t treat her right, which I am not prepared to do.”
“Punched? Is that what you think, too?”
“Stop laughing at me, this is serious.”
“I’m not laughing at you, a and b) she isn’t nineteen, she’s older than that although I don’t know how much older, and c), I didn’t punch anyone,” I say. “I’ve never punched anyone in my life.”
“So you want to explain what happened?”
“She slipped and banged her head on a door in my apartment, she was really drunk.”
“Well the fucking doctor she saw says otherwise.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Barry. I had relations with her, yes, I admit that, but that was before we hired her. And it’s not going to happen again, believe me. But I never hit her.”
“Except with your dick.”
“Well, yes, true, I did hit her with my dick, so to speak.” Jesus, why didn’t I think of making a reality show about this guy?
“Then you’re dumber than even I thought.”
“Honestly, Barry, I figured you’d understand and help me out here.”
“Me?” he says. “Why would I help you out?”
“Because … we’re both trying to save this place from going under,” I say. “We’re in this thing together.”
“No we aren’t,” he answers quickly and with a bitter smirk. “I’m just working until my contract runs out, at which time I get another quarter-million shares, and then I’m gone. I got four houses, I could give a shit if this place burns to the ground. And you’re just fucking around until your next job offer, or until your father croaks and leaves you his Berkshire Hathaway stock so you can sell it and stop working and start making independently wealthy films or whatever it is you plan on doing. So cut this nonsense about saving the agency, you don’t give a rat’s ass about the agency and neither do I. Neither does anybody and that’s why we’re in the muck we’re in.”
He sighs for about a minute and a half and then looks out his window to the street below, to the press of humanity ebbing their way toward a morning of sadness and cubicles, with occasional relief provided by the internet.
“Was she a good fuck at least?” he finally says.
“We were drunk, Barry, we didn’t even screw. And I didn’t know she would hack my e-mail, that she would worm her way in here, I don’t know exactly how she did that, either, she may have blown Tom in his office, he won’t tell me.”
“She blew who in his office?”
“I don’t know if she blew anybody in anybody’s office, I’m just saying I think she may be a little nutty.”
“Well you gotta understand something,” he says, jabbing at the smoke-filled air in front of my face. “When I was your age, we could get away with this kind of shit, and you can’t get away with it anymore. Plain and simple. There’s only one thing we can do.”
“What’s that? Get rid of her?”
“No. You. We have to get rid of you.” He lets it sit there for a long beat, longer than he needs to.
“OK,” I say, “I guess it is what it is.”
“No, you’re reading me wrong,” he says, motioning with his flabby arm for me to sit back down. “I can’t fire you, you’re too valuable, you’re too good at your job. Look, we searched high and low to find a sucker who was dumb enough to run this shitshow, a trendy cluck like you who looked good in press photos and would do what none of us around here had the stones to do, what M. J-C made a requirement of his bestowing of our stock options upon us. I couldn’t do it, nobody here could do it. We needed somebody of your cloth, somebody who gets into that upbeat TED bullshit and believes they’re saving the fucking planet and so on.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly, his words swimming around in the space inside my head.
“So how many left you gotta can? Two?”
“A few,” I say. “A couple few more, I’d rather not talk about it.”
“I need you to get out of here, go away for a week. Let this whole thing cool off. There’s a big shoot in LA, and the client’s not happy.”
“Yeah, new FreshIt Air Freshener product launch, but I was not planning on going, there’s too much that requires my attention right here.”
“No there isn’t, you barely come to work. Here’s the plan: you go out to the shoot, schmooze the idiots, keep the account, by the time you’re back this whole thing has gone away.”
“Done,” I said.
“You stay at Shutters? I love that place, very classy.”
“Well at least we’re aligned on that,” I say. And then he slides open his desk drawer and roots around inside it and I take this as my cue to get up. As I’m turning to go he hands me a business card.
“Wait a second, fuckface. I don’t know if he’s still in business but you gotta go see Dr. Look before you go to the coast.”
“Dr. Look?”
“He’s a shrink but he’s not a bad guy. You gotta go see him for insurance and legal purposes, get a clean bill on your mental health, it won’t take ten seconds.”
“Barry,” I say, “I didn’t hit her. I swear I didn’t.”
“Maybe you didn’t,” he says. “Or maybe you did and you just don’t remember because you don’t want to admit it to yourself. You’ve repressed it like in those movies.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I say.
“When I was eight years old I was fucked in the ass by my uncle Charlie, and I didn’t remember a thing about it until last year.”
Suddenly he bursts out laughing. “I’m kidding you. Dr. Look will fix this, alright? Now thank me for saving your job and get the fuck out of my office.”
“I’ll call you from LA,” I say as I leave. “And thank you.”
“No, you won’t call me,” he says as he lights another Newport. “And if you do I won’t pick up.”
2.13
As I’m stepping onto the elevator to return to my office, HR Lady comes rushing after me. I pretend to hit the “open” button but it doesn’t matter as she manages to wave an arm between the doors and they part. I tell her I’m on my way home post-Barry and then to LA.
“Now?” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m going home to pack.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” she asks.
“Am I? What?”
“Juliette.”
The elevator opens on three and HR holds the door for me so that I’ll follow her out toward our grim task. But I don’t.
“Eric, this is your floor,” she says.
“I know,” I say. “Why don’t you take this one yourself?”
She cocks her head to the side, says “You know I can’t do that. You’re her boss, you have to do it, I have to accompany you, those are the rules.”
“Well maybe we could put it off till I get back from LA?” I say. The elevator starts beeping that annoying beep because she’s still holding it open.
“What good would that do?” HR says. “At this point Juliette probably knows what’s going on, waiting will only make it worse.”
“I get that, OK, so what about just not doing it.”
“Not doing what?”
“Not firing her.”
HR looks at me, the doors start to push in slowly against her arm, and the beeping gets louder. “We have to,” she says.
“According to who?”
“Are you really asking me this?” she says.
Our eyes lock for a moment, a moment of truth as it were, and maybe she’s picturing it, the same thing I am, the refusal to fire Juliette being the first volley, ending with me gathering the troops in the fishbowl and announc
ing that the cruel game is over, the departed will be returning soon, and then HR and I standing there, raising our arms in heroic triumph as a light applause ripples through the group, turning into a thunderous roar of gratitude.
“Eric, this thing is going to take my arm off if you don’t get out here,” she says.
When we get to my office, Juliette Chang is waiting dutifully in a piece of uncomfortable midcentury furniture. She has her laptop propped up on her knees and she’s working or at least trying to appear like she’s working when we arrive. My assistant gives me a look, I know that look, it’s the “You’re really late for a meeting” look, and indeed Juliette’s been waiting since nine to chat with me, she thinks about Smirnoff or something. But a forty-five-minute wait is the least of her worries, and it’s nothing compared to what I’ve already put her through; in fact, it’s so respectful for me to even show up it’s almost like I’m promoting her, giving her a gift, a bottle of pinot or a few days off or something.
She sees us approaching and looks at me with a big smile; it’s the broadest and phoniest of smiles and she’s been leaning on that smile since she landed at Tate right out of college thirty years ago. Then I see her eyes flit over to HR, she sees the two of us walking together, our strides in synch at this point, and now she knows. She has to know; she’s known all along, she’s known since the day I got here and started firing all the people her age, but the smile stays pasted on, exactly the same, only the degree of effort changes.
A minute later we’re sitting in my office, Juliette and HR and me, and the door is closed. We all get seated and she is just staring at me.
“I’m, um,” I say, not really looking at her. “We’re in a tight position and we, um, due to some client requests we, um, we have to make some deep cuts. I’m very sorry to say this but we’re going to have to—”
“If you think I didn’t see this coming you’re wrong,” Juliette spits out. “For weeks now, months even, I knew. Everyone knows.”
