Bleak Read online

  I smile. Summers spent at the Hartford branch of Avis car rental taught me that nothing can be gained by taking your anger out on the person behind the desk. The meaner you get, the more entrenched they get. I can’t tell you how many times I told customers that upgrades weren’t available when shiny Town Cars were sitting thirty feet away in the parking lot. For the powerless, there are few things more satisfying than a power play.

  “Are you sure about that?” I ask, leaning forward.

  Henry nods. “It’s out of my control. The system won’t accept forms later than the four-week cutoff. It’s automatic.”

  “But you’re human resources,” I say admiringly. “We all know that you guys secretly run the company. A decision doesn’t get made by upper management that isn’t first vetted and approved by you.” I have no idea if this is true, but it sounds good. More than that, it sounds like something I’d like someone to say to me. “Can’t we type in a code and override the system just this once? I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t very important.”

  He blushes but doesn’t deny his importance in the corporate hierarchy. “I wish I, could but we don’t have the ability. The program doesn’t allow for any exceptions. All I can do when I want days off is fill out the form and hit send just like you do at your desk.”

  It’s inconceivable to me that there isn’t an override command. Every program has an escape clause, even missile launch programs. That’s the whole point to computers: They’re fluid little machines that respond to a tincture of numbers stroking.

  But it’s obvious to me that even if there is a code, Henry doesn’t know it. He’s only an associate. Knowledge is something that increases with salary.

  “What about personal days?” I ask, changing tacks.

  Henry shakes his head sadly. “I’m afraid you’ve used up all your personal days. There were two in January”—a long weekend to Vail with my sister—“one in April”—nobody should have to work on her birthday—“one in June”—an irregular pap smear that turned out to be nothing—“and one earlier this month”—damn it, I knew that stupid house share on Fire Island was going to fuck me—“so there’s nothing until next year.”

  I sit quietly for a moment, considering my options. The only thing left is to call in sick. I tried to do it on the up-and-up and not take advantage but clearly the company doesn’t want truth from its employees.

  Sighing deeply, I thank Henry for his time.

  “It won’t work,” he says as I stand up. Surprised, I look at him. I have no idea what he’s talking about. “Calling in sick. It won’t work. The computer records all requests for vacations, even the ones it doesn’t accept, and will remind management that the day was asked for if the employee calls in sick.”

  I sink down into the chair again. “Seriously?”

  “Oh, yes, it’s a very smart program,” he explains proudly, “and wonderfully efficient. It’s a huge improvement over the old one. Do you remember when you had to fill out time sheets by hand? We’d spend all morning on Monday entering the information. Now it instantly pops up by three o’clock on Friday.”

  As Henry continues to list the many advantages of his evil little program, I stare at him, looking for horns. With his polite smile and perfectly parted hair and chirpy “have a nice day,” he’s the archetype of soulless corporate cog. I always knew Satan was a bureaucrat.

  It’s obvious to me now that Henry has the ability to override. With the flick of his wrist, he could not only grant me vacation days but make August 21st a national holiday. But he won’t. He’s a company man. The only reason he was so helpful in arranging my leave of absence is sabbaticals are in the handbook; compassion is not.

  When he finishes his litany, Henry shakes his head again. He seems sympathetic, but I’m not fooled this time. “The only thing I can suggest is getting special dispensation from the managing partner.”

  His telephone rings, signaling the end of our conversation. It’s meant to seem like a coincidence that a call came in just when he’s done with me, but I recognize the forces of evil when they trill in my ear.

  Day 799

  I cut Glenn a slice of apple pie while he runs his hand up and down Carrie’s thigh. His fingers tread so high along her leg, they brush her crotch, then reverse direction and graze her knee. Carrie is wearing a pair of tan cords, which he rubs at with an almost desperate determination, as if he can make her pants disappear if he just presses hard enough.

  Embarrassed, I concentrate on the knife as it slices through the warm graham cracker crust.

  My sister continues to talk about the renovations for her new kitchen—the concrete countertop, the stainless-steel appliances, the dazzling red cabinets from Ikea—as if nothing is amiss. It’s like she doesn’t even notice his extremely inappropriate behavior. The longer she raves about the Walker Zanger backsplash in shades of silver and gray, the more I want to say, “Um, I’m right here. I can see you.”

  It’s always been like this. Glenn has a pathological need to hold on to my sister. The first time we met, he ate sushi with his left hand so he wouldn’t have to release hers. It was hilarious watching him trying to maneuver the chopsticks with uncoordinated fingers. He kept dropping pieces of dragon roll into the soy sauce, splattering the white tablecloth with pretty, abstract patterns.

  Back then, I thought it was cute if a little insecure. I figured he’d get over it.

  Eight months later, it’s worse. His oily tentacles are in constant contact with her body, chaining her to his side so she can’t draw a breath he doesn’t share.

  It’s a problem for me. A mild annoyance has spiraled into intense dislike. I’ve stopped inviting Carrie out for dinner because Glenn always comes along with his octopus hands. I would have made up an excuse to get out of tonight but there was just no way. I always cook dinner for my sister on her birthday.

  “I’m not so sure about the red,” Glenn says. “It’s really bright and shiny, which might look dated in a few years. I think we should go with something more classic like ashwood.”

  He uses the word we with a natural sense of entitlement like my sister’s kitchen is his kitchen, like—even worse—my sister’s apartment is his apartment. Carrie has spent her whole life saving to buy a place. The money our maternal grandparents left her has been sitting in the bank for fifteen years waiting for this moment. Thirty thousand dollars became sixty-two thousand became the down payment for a five-hundred-square-foot co-op on Fourteenth Street.

  It has nothing to do with Glenn. He showed up just as she was signing the mortgage contract.

  Over a pint of vanilla Häagen Dazs, Ruby looks at me. She’s thinking the same thing. Unable to stand Glenn any more than I, she finds his tendency to explain Carrie to her—the way he sometimes says in response to one of her teasing comments, “Well, what Carrie meant to say was…” —intolerable. She’s known my sister for twenty-five years, since the very first day of Miss Teddy’s kindergarten, when they had to write their name in pastel-colored finger paints. He’s known her for twenty-five seconds.

  “Yeah, cause blond ashwood isn’t already dated,” Ruby says. “Hello, 1993.”

  “Red sounds great,” Lionel says in the silence that follows. Carrie and Glenn are oblivious to it, but the room is filled with Ruby’s crackling anger. She’s about to snap. “I think it’ll look fabulous with the polished concrete counters. What are you thinking about for the floor?”

  “Slate,” Carrie says.

  Ruby’s impatience, justified as it is, somehow gives me patience. I know Glenn is a decent guy. He has a job, cleans up after himself, calls my dad Mr. Carstone and buys Carrie thoughtful little gifts for no reason. For her birthday, he went down to the florist to pick out a bouquet, rather than have his assistant order flowers over the phone.

  He makes my s
ister happy. That has to be worth something.

  Feeling unusually fond of annoying old Glenn—some things are merely a case of mind over matter—I ask if he’d like more coffee.

  His cup has been empty for at least ten minutes.

  “I’ll get it,” Carrie says, grabbing his mug. As she gets to her feet, Glenn squeezes her ass with both hands like he’s testing the ripeness of a melon.

  And just like that, my goodwill evaporates. I look at my watch and calculate how many minutes until I can get him out of my apartment.

  Lionel reads my expression and asks how things are at Hertzberg. He’s a former lawyer who dropped out and went to cooking school. He’s now a line cook at one of Mario Battali’s restaurants in the Village. He works even longer hours under more arduous conditions and is blissfully content. It’s taken Ruby a while to get on board with the new career—she didn’t sign on to genteel poverty in a Lower East Side tenement—but now she fully appreciates the difference between living with someone who’s happy and living with someone who’s not. Accepting the new status quo, she’s started taking on freelance graphic design assignments to supplement her painting income.

  “Work’s all right,” I say with little enthusiasm. It’s hard to get excited about photocopying and redacting. “The same as always, except I’m locked in a mortal battle over vacation days with human resources. They’ve scheduled the Jarndyce and Jarndyce party and—”

  “That’s fantastic,” Carrie calls from the kitchen. “I thought it’d never happen.”

  “Me neither. It’s on the twenty-first and HR won’t give me the days because it’s not enough notice.”

  Ruby licks ice cream off her plastic spoon. “What are you going to do?”

  “I have an appointment with the managing partner tomorrow. I’m sure he’ll be reasonable. I mean, it’s a party in Los Angeles for my book. It’s not like I’m asking for the days so I can sit on a beach.”

  “Will Moxie be there?” Carrie asks, returning with two steaming mugs. She puts them on the table and sits down next to Glenn. He immediately starts caressing her shoulder.

  I shrug. “There’s a good chance. They kept changing the date to accommodate her schedule.”

  “You should drop Moxie,” Glenn says. “I can think of at least ten other girls who would be better in the part. She’s washed up. You should get Rooney Mara or Jennifer Lawrence. Why don’t you?”

  Although I’ve explained a million times to Glenn that I have nothing to do with the movie, he doesn’t get it. He thinks my name on the book gives me complete creative control. Usually I take the time to correct him, but the image of his hands clutching my sister’s cord-clad ass is fresh in my mind and I don’t bother. “You’re right, Glenn. I’ll call Rooney’s agent tomorrow. It’s so good that you’re here to think of these things. I mean, all those people in Hollywood and all they could come up with is washed-up Moxie Bernard.”

  He smiles uncertainly as he tries to decipher my tone. He might work with computers all day, but he interacts enough with people to recognize sarcasm.

  “I like Moxie,” Ruby says, perhaps just to be contrary. “She’s a movie star, and they’re supposed to be self-destructive. It’s part of their glamour.”

  Carrie agrees with her. “Yeah, Jennifer Lawrence seems grounded. We want Marilyn Monroe.”

  “And Judy Garland,” Ruby tosses back.

  “And River Phoenix.”

  “And John Belushi.”

  They go back and forth, throwing out the names of dead celebrities like they’re bingo numbers and creating their ideal J&J cast. Glenn watches, waiting for an opening to insert himself, but it never comes. Ruby glances at him out of the corner of her eye, smug and delighted by his inability to keep up. There’s nothing like the bond formed over pastel-colored finger paints.

  Before they leave, Carrie grabs a sponge to start cleaning, but I wrestle it from her grasp and push her out the door. The birthday girl never does dishes. Besides, there’s not that much left aside from some plates and glasses. I’m an organized cook and always wash as I go.

  Lionel and Ruby hang around for a few minutes to review the worst offenses of the evening. Mild-mannered Lionel, who always takes the high road, shudders as he recalls the crotch rubbing. “It’s not normal. Casual touching is casual. That’s heavy petting like in sex.”

  “Ha!” Ruby shouts triumphantly as she pokes her husband in the chest. Then she turns to me. “I keep telling him it’s indecent, but he doesn’t believe me.”

  Ruby I-told-you-so’s all the way to the elevator, and even as I smile at her self-righteous delight, I resolve to be more accepting of Glenn in the future. Successful relationships are a rarity for the Carstone girls. We tend to attract emotionally stunted men on the rebound. My last short-lived misfire was with a recently divorced hedge fund manager who bought me plastic underwear and kept an eight-by-ten glossy of his high school girlfriend on his nightstand. Whenever we had sex, he’d turn the photo down so she couldn’t see.

  Compared with him, Glenn, even with his uncontrollable touching to bridge the unbearable distance between him and Carrie, which amounts to inches but must feel like miles when measured by his compulsion, is a paragon of sanity.

  In life, every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction, and relationships are no different. Each positive creates a negative. Happiness itself produces a toxic byproduct like a paper-manufacturing plant or a nuclear reactor. Glenn’s creepy caressing hands are the knives in the Little Mermaid’s heels.

  Love without the huge, gaping downside is just infatuation.

  Day 800

  Impatient, I arrive for my 11 a.m. with Carson Wright ten minutes early. I know he has nothing going on—the only items on the managing partner’s schedule are his Monday morning manicure at Elizabeth Arden and his Thursday escargot with the partners at 21; in between nails and snails, he sits at his desk and reads the newspaper—but his secretary makes me wait until the clock chimes before she lets me in.

  Wright founded the firm with Hertzberg in 1967 but was quickly shunted to the side as the latter became increasingly famous for high-profile clients. Hertzberg even argued before the Supreme Court in a civil rights case I learned about in a political science class in college. Carson Wright’s name was never uttered at UConn.

  With all the hours he’s not practicing law, Carson has plenty of time to manage the firm and frequently sends out memos detailing new billing procedures. Each successive update contradicts the one before it, keeping the entire staff in a constant state of confusion.

  Wright, with his straight, gaunt face and unruly white mane that tumbles over his Brooks Brothers collar, is the villain of my novel, the puppet master who makes everyone at Jarndyce & Associates jump to his bidding.

  Uninterested in my problem, he passes me along to Victoria Penn, the youngest partner at fifty-one as well as the scariest. Famous for skewering Justice Scalia on points of Constitutional law at a Harvard luncheon, she has a withering command of Latin and a short fuse. With an ingrained sense of respect for her peers, she takes her temper out only on underlings—secretaries, junior associates, paralegals, mailroom staff, members of the cleaning crew and security guards—frequently issuing death threats whenever something doesn’t go her way. Anyone unlucky enough to be within ten feet of her when she’s angry stands in danger of losing his head to a machete. It’s mostly an empty threat—unless you’re in her office, where the aforementioned weapon is mounted on her wall as a souvenir from her trip to the Amazon.

  Victoria Penn is also a villain in the book. Actually, they all are: Hertzberg, Wright, Silver and Penn. Jarndyce and Jarndyce is a black comedy.

  Although her secretary tells me to go right in, I knock discretely at Penn’s door. She’s on the phone with a junior associate who’s
working on the London deal with her. Important documents arriving tonight need to be turned around by morning. Wendy assures her it won’t be a problem.

  Victoria rolls her eyes and notices me standing in the doorway. She waves me in. “Fuck it up, Gorman, and you’re history. The police will never find the pieces,” she says. She issues the threat because it’s expected of her, but I can tell from the matter-of-fact tone that her heart’s not in it. She appears tired. Her slate-gray eyes don’t look as icy as usual. They seem more dead than cold, like a heroin addict’s.

  Realizing she has no idea who I am, even though she’s offered to mutilate me on several occasions, I introduce myself. She nods abruptly.

  This is hardly a warm welcome, but it’s the best I’m going to get, so I launch into an explanation of why I’m there. I start with an apology for bothering her with such a minor matter.

  “Then why are you?” she snaps.

  With some effort, I ignore her impatient tone and continue with my explanation.

  “Requests for vacation time must be submitted at least four weeks prior to the proposed date,” she says. “It’s in the employee handbook, which is issued to every employee at orientation. I’m sure if I call down to HR they’ll confirm that you signed for it.” She eyes the phone but doesn’t pick it up.

  “But,” I point out in response, “the handbook also says that partners can make exceptions on a case-by-case basis.” I don’t know if this is true, but it sounds like something a law firm would put in writing.

  Victoria doesn’t belabor the point. Instead, she fixes me with her cold, vacant stare and asks why would she do that.

  Throwing myself on her mercy, I explain about the book and the option and the once-in-a-lifetime party. I tell her Moxie Bernard is going to be there and the entire cast of Getting Nowhere and probably Bella Masters, the tobacco heiress with the best hipbones this side of an Ethiopian famine, who, according to Cindy Adams in the Post, wants to be in the picture with her new bestie. I stress how important this opportunity is for my career.