Soon after the court released me from all family ties, I found out I was transferred. My organization doesn’t offer its employees much choice in these matters: I could either accept my new assignment or quit and be blackballed. That week, the enterprise sold my house, engaged a mover, and found me temporary quarters in a barely adequate building less than an hour away from the satellite office to which I was to report the following Monday. How I weary of these armatures!
I showed up that first morning wearing brown pants and a plaid shirt under a medium weight jacket for it was still early spring. I was greeted at the entrance by a small goatlike man with protruding teeth, a full white beard, and receding hairline. This little mountain man – we weren’t in the mountains, we were in the foothills – was my guide. He was wearing a beige linen suit and a light blue tie. “I’m Virgil. Is that how you dress in New York?” were his first words to me.
“It’s business casual,” I replied, extending my hand.
He tsked, turned, and led me to my cubicle.
I had a half hour till my first meeting. I fired up my laptop, checked the contents of my desk drawers, found a place for my briefcase. I was checking email when a notice for the meeting popped up on my screen. I found the men’s room – Virgil didn’t show me where it was – then entered the conference room. I sat in the only one of the twelve seats that wasn’t occupied. I was two or three minutes late. The meeting was already in full swing; I couldn’t tell what parties were on the other end of the speakerphone. I sat up straight, opened my notebook, and took my bearings. All the men and the few women in the room were wearing formal business attire. Some of them glanced at me then turned back to the moderator.
“For some reason,” he said, “the people at headquarters think the satellites are casual, almost lackadaisical. Those who fail to pivot quickly.”
Some of the people at the table snickered.
Virgil told me we got forty-five minutes, from noon till 12:45, for lunch. He gave me a card with the name of a clothing shop about five minutes away by car. Credit cards in my pocket, I walked in at about a quarter past. I perused the tie racks but almost all the ties had either broad stripes or bold patterns. Wearing clashing patterns is worse than being underdressed. I picked a foulard I liked and scooted over to the shirts. There were a lot of white and pastel shirts but none in my size. There was a line at the register. I grabbed a shirt with thin stripes and dashed to the check-out line, cutting off a matron. Some of the salesclerks and customers chuckled: men from headquarters rushing in must be a periodic entertainment for them. I let the woman in ahead of me as graciously as I could manage then endured her dickering with the cashier about the cost and composition of the cuff links she held.
They almost didn’t let me back in the building.
It took a week for me to recover from that first day, months to regain any sense of normalcy.
In that interim, I moved into the house of an older woman, that is, one almost as old as me, with heart arrhythmia. We met at the gas station where she works for now that I’m in the hinterlands I drive every day. Most of the women around here, those outside of work that is, are shaped like sausages. Sitting on park benches or standing in the aisles of department or grocery stores, I admired their casings, the flesh straining against its often pink limits. I imagined myself shaping, penetrating
“You don’t have to worry about the pennies,” she said.
Lost in my reveries, I snapped to, glanced at her name tag: Hilda.
“You can look all you want but you can’t touch until you buy me dinner,” she smiled. She still had most of her teeth.
The next night we dined at one of the local restaurants not far from the rushing sluggish river. We both ordered the local fish. Our conversation didn’t sparkle but neither did the wine. She spoke mostly about her dead husband and grown children. We ended the evening not at my nearby apartment but at her house, a new beginning for me. Her arrhythmia made our intimacy, that impossible thing, different. Her body was wrinkled but hard, not normally my ideal, but I felt I needed that hardness as antidote for the squishy others. I wasn’t sure what the handbook said about sleeping with the locals. Post-coitus, I pledged that I’d look it up, forgot about it on morning commute.
Her kids, rotten or shapely apples, didn’t roll far from the parental tree. They disapproved of me. Roger, the eldest, cornered me at the first family gathering I attended. “Has maman written you into her will?” he asked.
I found his use of French touching. I looked around him for I was literally in a corner. Roger’s fists were clenched. The others were at the dining room table, eating scraps till Hilda returned with dessert, poorly concealing their interest in our confab. “I’m not interested in an inheritance,” I protested. “I love Hilda and all the Hircines. Were she, God forbid, to die, I’d be heartbroken.”
One of the grandchildren crawled to us, pulled Roger’s pants leg. He dropped his fists. Hilda brought some larded pies in from the kitchen. We all tucked in.
I ponder these things because Sunday is a day for reflection. Not having any church to go to, I recount my life not unlike those twenty-somethings newly landed in their entry level corporate jobs explicating their jobs to their uncles at Thanksgiving or Christmas/Seder time. The old men nod sagely, such upstanding youngsters, they have no idea what the young’uns are talking about.
No sooner do I escape one set of encumbrances than I find myself in another.
The ground is spongy underfoot. Hilda, cleaning after a Sunday morning fill-in shift, wanted me away. I gladly obliged, drove to the nature preserve. We both needed our space. I hadn’t been here since, no, I’ve never been here. I felt I should notice the foliage, animals, etc. Black flies, gnats, an occasional fat bee buzzed around me. Other than a few white birches, I couldn’t identify the trees. I never learned my conifers, another gap in my knowledge.
Head down to avoid tripping over another rock or stepping into another puddle, I followed the trail till I saw what looked like sunlight reflected off a pair of well-shined wingtips. I slipped into the stream, stepped into it again, I was still substantially the same man. Bugs biting, rocks and roots jutting, branches dangling, I negotiated my way uphill toward the spotless shoes. They were resting on a pristine rock. A few feet away their owner, Carstairs, upright in midstream, in full suit and tie, cast his line, brought up a fish. He appraised the trout, put it in a bucket, and turned to me. “Only one more to go,” he almost sang, then frowned. “Why are you dressed like that?”
Harold “Hal” Carstairs was dispatched by HQ to serve as deputy director of an overseas office nearly three years ago. He returned to the States to run this branch about a month before I arrived here. Water cooler gossip – I’d managed to ingratiate myself with some of my coworkers since – said he was headed for great things. In less than three months he’d transformed the place from a sleepy backwater to the top performer in the region. Though he was at least twenty years my junior, I felt I could learn from him. I watched him inspect his lure, check and recast his line. His form reminded me of a veteran quarterback whizzing a ball downfield in a late summer practice drill. He pulled up another wriggling fish, assessed it, and placed it in the bucket. “That was the closest one yet,” he said.
“Pardon?”
He seemed pleased that I had the equanimity slash boldness to question him. “I always catch my legal limit. The fish I bring in should be over the minimum length and weight but just over. That way I get them at the height of their élan. My wife, you met her, will cook them with new potatoes and local greens. We’ll just add a little...”
I thought of the casserole and cheap beer planned for my dinner. Hilda and I met the Carstairs brood a week and a half ago at the company picnic. Even the youngest, an infant, had the familiar Carstairs hauteur. One of the children, no more than seven, spoke a smattering of Mandarin and Arabic. I half-expected her to speak K
I shook hands with the gracious wife.
“She looks familiar,” I mentioned to Hilda on the ride home.
“She should, she acts in the local theater,” Hilda said. “She comes into the gas station sometimes. Her children aren’t like the other kids. They don’t ask for candy even though we place our sweets and energy drink displays in their faces. They’re always energetic yet well-spoken, polite.”
“You sound resentful.”
“Did you notice her mouth?”
I didn’t say that I wanted to plant my lips on hers. Besides, Carstairs was there. “What about it?” I asked.
“She was born with a harelip. Roger looked the family up online. You’d never know it. She comes from money, much more than Carstairs comes from. Her parents used some natural remedy to correct most of it. Her flaw magnifies her beauty.”
Carstairs was now on land. There wasn’t a speck of dirt or water on him. “There’s a dress code for the weekends. Why aren’t you following it?”
“There is?”
“It’s right in the handbook. Didn’t you read it?”
“I may have glossed over it.”
He extracted his phone from his inside jacket pocket, showed me the citation. It was right at the beginning of Chapter Three in bold. “What you wore on your first day here would have been appropriate to wear today,” he said. “You have a closetful of business casual clothes gathering mothballs. Why?”
I glanced at my mud-stained shoes and jeans. Hilda likes my dungarees, I thought.
“I don’t care what your woman thinks. Your job on the weekend when you’re not giving God his due is to reflect on your role in the organization. Proper attire promotes effective reflection. Mixing with the locals...” His voice trailed off, one of his techniques, then continued, “You’re a metrics man, aren’t you?”
“Yes. I compile and encrypt kill ratios, real or metaphoric. Correspondences to reality...”
“Enough. You’ve already said too much. Metrics people aren’t difficult to replace.”
I looked at him dumbfounded. What would Hilda think if...
Carstairs was now fifty feet away from the stream, his phone in his pocket, his back to me. He turned his head. A slight smile attenuated his haughty stare. “You may go,” he said and sauntered off.
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