Marcelo in the Real World

by Francisco X. Stork

  “I am afraid that if I talk to Arturo, he will not let me help the girl or maybe the girl will get more hurt.”

  There must have been a look of guilt on my face, for I hear Jasmine say, “That’s okay. There’s no need to feel ashamed. We feel what we feel.”

  “My father always does what is right.” I can almost see the words in front of me, floating in the air like solid objects.

  “You shouldn’t feel bad about not telling him. It’s okay to want to get more information before you approach your father.”

  I wrap the uneaten sandwich in a piece of wrinkled foil. I smooth the foil as best I can and place the sandwich in the paper bag next to the cookies and apple. I want to change the subject of my thoughts, so I say, “I have something I need to confess to you. You may not like it.”

  “What?” I see on her face the look of nervous anticipation I hoped to see.

  “This morning I listened to the CD you lent me: Keith Jarrett’s version of the Goldberg Variations. On my laptop, with the headphones.”

  “Instead of doing Wendell’s work?” She is dismayed at my transgression.

  “No, Wendell was not in this morning. There was nothing for me to do, so I listened to the CD.”

  “Oh, no. How could you? You failed to exercise the immense skills required in your new job.”

  “I know,” I say. I try to look as if I’m sorry to be so irresponsible.

  “You’re right. I don’t like it.”

  “No, that’s not what I thought you wouldn’t like,” I say.

  “Then what?”

  “I have a CD of the Goldberg Variations at home. It is by a pianist named Glenn Gould, and I think Glenn Gould plays the Goldberg Variations more correctly than Keith Jarrett.”

  “More correctly? More correctly? Is there such a thing as more correctly?”

  “Yes,” I say. But in fact I’m not sure “more correctly” is grammatically correct.

  “Okay, fine. I’m going to skip the ‘more correctly’ discussion for the time being. I can’t believe you said that. You are so, so wrong. But let’s leave that aside for now. I want you to answer me this: Who is the better artist, who has the most talent? Your Glenn Gould interpreting Bach’s Goldberg Variations ‘more correctly,’ as you put it, or my Keith Jarrett improvising, creating on the spot? Answer that for me.”

  But I can’t. I am unable to answer her question. I am at a total loss. I see the skills and talents required for both types of playing and I am stuck. She waits for me to answer, beaming warmth. I can feel the warmth coming from her all the way across the table. And the warmth reminds me of the fire I saw in the girl’s eyes.

  “I must help the girl somehow.”

  “I know.” She is still beaming.

  “But I don’t want to hurt my father.”

  The warmth coming from her fades now. “I know.”

  “What would Jasmine do if she were in my place? Would she forget about the picture? Does Jasmine think that I am acting strange?”

  “That’s one of those questions that can only be answered by you.”

  “I know. But why can’t Jasmine give me her opinion?”

  “Because my opinion would not be based on all the factors that need to be taken into account. I’m not you. I don’t feel what you feel for your father or for the…girl. I am not situated to lose what you might lose. Every time you decide, there is loss, no matter how you decide. It’s always a question of what you cannot afford to lose. I’m not the one playing the piano here. You’re the one that needs to decide what the next note will be.”

  “But how do I know the next note is the right one?”

  “The right note sounds right and the wrong note sounds wrong.”

  We do not speak on the way back to the firm. In the elevator, as we ride alone and in silence, I ask myself: If I do nothing to help the girl, if I let things be, what do I lose?

  CHAPTER 18

  On my way back to Wendell’s office after lunch, Juliet says to me, “I hear you got promoted.”

  At first I decide not to answer her but then I ask, “When is Wendell returning?”

  She opens the top drawer to her desk and hands me a note. I recognize Wendell’s handwriting. “He came in while you were at lunch,” Juliet informs me.

  Hey Marcelo,

  What did I tell you? Ask and it shall be given. I’m out for the rest of the week on a little relaxation cruise. Juliet will tell you what to do. Remember: Sandoval and Holmes above all. Stay out of Juliet’s clutches if you can.

  Wendell

  I fold the note. “You are supposed to tell me what to do,” I tell Juliet.

  “Is that it? Does he tell you anything else?”

  “He says I should stay out of your clutches.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny or something?”

  “I believe he was talking figuratively.”

  “I’ve never clutched anybody in my whole life.”

  She seems upset, but not at me. She doesn’t like that Wendell said that about her. It means that Wendell thinks about her in a way that is different than the way she would like him to think about her. This is how I interpret her sudden grouchiness. But then again, Juliet is always grouchy. I have never seen her smile. Suddenly I realize how pleasant it was to work in the mailroom. Jasmine didn’t smile that much either, but it was different.

  “Has Juliet ever seen Wendell’s yacht?” The question pops into my head.

  Juliet sits back in her chair with a jolt. I look up long enough to see a momentary look of fear. “Why do you want to know?” She asks this as if she’s afraid of what I am going to answer.

  “I wanted to know what the boat was like.”

  “It’s a boat.”

  “Wendell invited Juliet.”

  Her usually pale face is turning pink. I am making her upset and I don’t mean to.

  “For your information, and not that you need to know, Wendell has invited me to the boat like he has invited many others in this firm. And for your information, I know what the boat looks like, but I did not go there at Wendell’s invitation. I am not into little boys.”

  She is flustered and now she turns toward her computer and begins typing. I believe that she regrets telling me so much. It seems that lately I have been interpreting people’s gestures correctly with more frequency than ever before. But how does one ever know if those interpretations are truly correct without actually testing them out, either by asking how a person feels or by doing something else that reveals their state of mind? I decide not to pursue this line of questioning any further. I don’t know why I even asked Juliet. And why did I lie when I told her that I wanted to know what the boat was like? What was it that I really wanted to know? There was a sense of relief when Juliet said that many others had been on the boat. There is something about Jasmine not being singled out by Wendell that is comforting.

  “Are you going to stand there all afternoon?” Jasmine used to ask me that question when I got lost in thought in the middle of a task. But there was humor in the way Jasmine said it. In Juliet’s voice there is only annoyance.

  “The note said that Juliet was going to tell me what to do.”

  “And I’m a babysitter too?” She stands up and walks to Wendell’s office. She doesn’t tell me to follow her, but I suppose that’s what she wants me to do.

  She stands at the doorway. “Wendell wants all the boxes out of here. Move them down to where you are going to be.”

  “Where I am going to be.”

  “Do you always repeat what people say?” Before I can answer she starts walking again. Juliet walks as if she had a stack of plates on her head. We stop three offices down from Wendell’s office.

  “The lawyer here is out on vacation, and when he comes back he’s going to be fired, so you can use this office. Just put the pictures and stuff on his desk in a box. Don’t go through any of his drawers. He can do that himself. He’s going to get axed the minute he comes in.”

  I s
tand there looking at a desk full of pictures of children. “Fired. Axed.” I am not sure what these words mean, but because I am going to use his office, I suspect that it means that the lawyer will be dismissed from the law firm.

  Juliet is looking at me as if I were an idiot. I probably am in her eyes. She has told me so before. “Fired. Axed. As in you’re out of here. As in, to put it in a language that you would understand, hasta la vista, baby.”

  “Why?”

  “He didn’t have what it takes. He did not measure up to expectations. He was too soft.”

  Listening to Juliet talk requires additional effort. At the risk of getting her upset again, or more upset than she is, I ask, “What does it mean when a person is too soft?”

  She starts to walk back to her office. I walk behind her, thinking that she is not going to answer my question, but then I hear her speak and I speed up so I can walk next to her. “People hire Sandoval and Holmes when they want the meanest and the toughest. When other firms know that we are on the case, they know our client is out to win. You want to succeed here, you need to be merciless, go for the jugular. The guy in that office didn’t have it. He thought too much. He was always in Mr. Holmes’s office, bugging him about whether a course of action was correct. He had nerve to question Mr. Holmes, I’ll give him that. But he was soft.”

  Juliet is looking at me with a look of disgust. I know she thinks I am soft as well, as she has just defined it. After all, doesn’t Marcelo think about things too much? “Is being soft the same as being meek?”

  “I don’t know what that means. What is ‘meek’?”

  I hesitate. Should I break the rule and tell her the religious uses of this term: “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth” from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount or “the meek shall possess the land and delight themselves in abundant prosperity” from Psalm thirty-seven? I decide not to respond, even though Juliet is waiting for an answer. For the first time I have doubts that the meek will ever inherit or possess anything.

  Juliet goes on, “Meek or weak or whatever, he’s gone. You need to move all the boxes in Wendell’s office to his office. When you finish that, come see me. I have some filing for you.”

  I move all the boxes into Robert Steely’s office. The good thing about this is that, in the privacy of Robert Steely’s office, I will have the opportunity to look for a file that goes with the girl’s picture. But how do I go about doing this? There are so many files. I decide to look first in the two boxes that I used when working with Wendell’s assignment.

  I find the boxes. I place them on top of the desk and proceed to go through each file. I don’t know what I am looking for. Another picture of the girl? Maybe the picture ended up in the trash box because it truly was a duplicate. There are twelve files in each box, each one full of hundreds of pages. I go through every single file, every single page in that file. Nothing. I look for pages that have paper clips with nothing attached. None.

  I sit down in Robert Steely’s chair to think about what my next step should be. Now that I started looking for the file, the need to find out about the girl has increased. It is as if the act of looking has confirmed the rightness of my quest. I look at the pictures on the desk. In one picture, two small children sit underneath a beach umbrella. In another, the same children, but older, are wearing Mickey Mouse hats and holding on to Robert Steely. Seeing his picture reminds me of the times I saw him in his office on my mail delivery runs. Juliet said he thought too much. He questioned Stephen Holmes about what was correct. I wonder if that included what was right or wrong. I never noticed anything different about him other than that he was one of the few lawyers who was not afraid to talk to me. For some reason he and I would find ourselves going to the bathroom at the same time. “We seem to be on the same kidney schedule,” he said to me once.

  I am not supposed to, but I open the top drawer of his desk. There are pen refills, paper clips that have been extended and can no longer serve their function, lots of pennies, business cards, a menu for a Thai restaurant, a small ball made from rubber bands, a drawing of a spiderweb on a sticky, a magnifying lens, three plastic spoons, a napkin, dental floss, a cough drop that is stuck to the bottom, a dozen Pepto-Bismol tablets.

  I take out the picture of the girl again. I wish so much that she had a name. I want to call her by her name. Her hair is black and short like Jasmine’s. Her eyes are black. The eyebrows are thick and form arches over her eyes. It is not a color picture, but her skin is dark brown like Abba’s or Aurora’s or Yolanda’s. My skin is more like Arturo’s, a beige color, a little browner than white but not dark brown. Abba came from Mexico and Arturo’s great-grandparents did as well. I wonder if the girl or her parents are from there too. Maybe the fact that she is like me in that respect is what is drawing me to her.

  I had not noticed the background behind the girl. The picture was taken inside. It looks like an office because I can see the edge of a filing cabinet on one side of the girl and on the other side, behind her, there is a calendar. I can tell because I can make out the sequence of dots that represent the days of the month.

  I remember the magnifying glass in Robert Steely’s top drawer. I take it out now and look closely. It is a calendar. The girl’s face covers most of it but I can tell it is a month with thirty days. On top of the numbers there seems to be a picture of a tree in autumn. Below the calendar days there are some letters. Maybe it is like the calendar that Aurora gets from the hospital every year—at the bottom is the name of the hospital, the address, and a statement about the excellent work they do. Here all those words are obscured except for two words and five numbers. Even with the magnifying glass I cannot make out the words or numbers, but maybe I can take the picture to the mailroom and enlarge it. I grab the picture and am about to go out when suddenly the door opens.

  All of the following happen simultaneously: My heartbeat accelerates. I quickly do what I can to turn the picture against the side of my leg. I expect to see Juliet. I start to think of what I can say to explain what I was doing with the door closed in Robert Steely’s office.

  But it is not Juliet. It is Robert Steely. “Oh,” he says, jumping back. “Oh,” he repeats again. He is speechless and so am I. Then he sees the boxes occupying almost every inch of his office. “What is this?” he says without any surprise in his voice. He is expecting to receive a rational explanation. He is carrying a briefcase in his hand and it is clear he just arrived at the office.

  Juliet said that he would be fired as soon as he returned. I don’t know how getting fired works. I imagine someone tells you that you can no longer work at the law firm. It is not something that I would mind happening to me, but maybe it would be different for Robert Steely. Where will he get the money to feed his children?

  “The Vidromek boxes,” I respond.

  I look around the office just as he does and see that I left his magnifying glass on top of his desk. He will know that I opened his top drawer. I am about to say something about that, but then I see him drop his briefcase on the floor. He turns around and sits on the edge of the desk, looking at the door. His shoulders are slumped and he has turned white. “Bastards,” he says under his breath.

  Now he is hiding his face with his hands. I wonder if I should put my hand on his shoulder, but I have never done this before and am afraid. Then he shakes his head and rubs his eyes with his coat sleeve.

  “You know,” I say.

  He nods. “I didn’t think it would happen this soon. I thought I had at least until the end of the year. I thought I’d get a few months to look for another job.”

  We both look up when we hear the sound of Juliet’s high heels. She is at the doorway, standing very straight, her hands on her hips. “We didn’t expect you until Monday.”

  “Obviously.” Now for the first time I hear anger in his voice.

  “The person at the reception desk was supposed to direct you to Mr. Sandoval’s office.”

  “She must have been tak
ing a break, because I walked right in.”

  “Mr. Holmes is not in, so you should go see Mr. Sandoval.”

  Robert Steely looks at me and raises his eyebrows. How am I to interpret that look? Look, see, this is who your father is? He straightens himself up, takes a deep breath, and walks out.

  “What’s that?” I see Juliet looking at the picture in my hand.

  It has always been almost impossible for me to lie. The synapses in my brain usually travel faster than they should, but when it comes to lying, the same synapses freeze in place. I cannot think fast enough to come up with an alternative to the truth. So I answer Juliet’s question truthfully: “A picture.” Then I say something that comes as a surprise to me. “I found it under the desk. It belongs to Robert Steely.”

  The deception works. Juliet does not ask to see it. She says, “I’m going to get someone to watch him while he collects his personal belongings. You should go to the mailroom and find him a couple of empty boxes so he can take his stuff.”

  “I can help Robert Steely pack his things.”

  “No. We need someone to make sure he doesn’t take any files that belong to the firm. He is only allowed to take his personal stuff. You can’t tell the difference.”

  I think I can. Juliet actually thinks that I am stupid. I put the picture facedown on the desk, pretending that I am going to leave it there, and wait for Juliet to turn around before I grab it again. I can get to the mailroom without passing by Juliet’s desk.

  “Hey, you back to work in the mailroom?” Jasmine asks. It feels like years since I last saw her.

  “Juliet sent me to get empty boxes for Robert Steely. He is fired.”

  “Gosh,” she says. “It seems like the nice ones never stay for long.”

  “Juliet said he was soft. That’s why he is fired.”

  “Juliet’s the one that’s soft.” Jasmine taps her head with her index finger.

  I nod my head in agreement. I remember the picture in my hand and hold it out to her. “On the wall behind the girl there is a calendar. It is mostly covered by her, but I can make out two words and five numbers. Maybe the words and numbers can help us find the girl.”