West excerpt
1
“I’m going anyway.”
Jim Hawthorne had said the sentence only seconds before, and now he repeated it. A sense of repetition seemed in order. On the other end of the line, a voice, the voice of Otto Lowell, rolled on in elegiac tones and dirge-like rhythm. Jim turned west from his broad office window twenty-one stories up, looked over a block of sprawling bright green trees, a thin border of interstate where silhouettes of cars sped at each other without colliding, a few minor condos rising up modestly from the greenery, a grove of ugly cranes further north menacing the skyline, dwelling albatrosses ready to sway and break tragically, and out toward the red six-thirty Miami sky in July. Jim had no clue what words Otto was using, but Jim vaguely knew the import of them—a girl had broken Otto’s heart. Jim’s recollection of her was informed mainly by her hatred of whatever situation she happened to be in. The only occasion Jim could remember well involved a small restaurant on South Beach, the Ice Box (appropriately named, it turned out) where Jim, his ex-girlfriend Vanessa, Otto, and this lady, whose name Jim couldn’t recall, had gone one Friday night. The service that night was poor and, for that matter, so was everything else—a bad expensive wine that stung of vinegar, Jim remembered, and cold scrawny sole, delivered with maximum attitude after eons—and Otto’s friend embarrassed the waitress by announcing first that she (Otto’s friend) would never be returning to the Ice Box and second that she (the waitress) really should find another line of work. It seemed OK to Jim at the time, if only a little excessive, because the waitress herself was equally rude. But Jim, never one to discriminate among rudeness, knew immediately Otto’s girlfriend would rip Otto’s heart to shreds. Six months later, it happened. So now was the time for the usual regrets, vows of retribution, resignations to loneliness, a surrender to debauchery, and Otto was touching all the bases. To stop the river of words, Jim offered his solitary thought a third time, “I’m going anyway,” and he capped it with the coda, “if you want to come.”
“I just told you, I’m coming.”
Huh? Jim had to scramble through the circuitry really to hear it. The air in the office, its usual electric hum and invisible currents, the low level clicking and murmurs slipping out of offices, the distant sonic scream filtering out his ears—everything seemed to go still around him. He heard nothing but the sound at first, the voice breaking through, then the idea, the message: Otto Lowell, stock broker of many travails, who had more customers sue him in arbitration before the National Association of Securities Dealers than any other broker in the entire Southeast region of the United States, whose problems hadn’t subsided much in the six years since the tech meltdown in 2000, when Otto almost quit the business amid a raft of outraged clients, and yet who did not quit after Jim got some good results and managed to save Otto’s job with sentimental entreaties to the brokerage firm’s general counsel, and who then threw himself manically back into his work with the same kind of wildly reckless recommendations that had got him in trouble to begin with, only this time in the gilded world of the housing boom, spiraling ever upward in the summer of 2006, and who never, in all the years Jim had known him, ceased coming unglued—this man would be riding along with Jim to Key West.
The practicalities organized quickly in Jim’s mind. Otto would be riding, Otto would be talking, Otto would be whining. Otto would be sleeping in the same hotel room—is that what they had talked about, the same room?—for what Jim figured would be the next two days. Did Otto snore like a whale? Jim was sure of it. Did he have more manic compulsions? Sleep walking, night terrors, night sweats, bed hopping, bed wetting? Otto had a thick, graceless body and a glassy, zoned-out face, a coarse beard forever surging out the skin, and short sandy-blond hair. An ugly, ungainly man, but Jim’s client nevertheless. Someone with all the makings of a friend, without quite being a friend, which is why Jim felt resentful.
“You’re coming, really?” Jim shifted tone. How inconsiderate, how epically stupid Otto was to accept Jim’s offer. Jim had a trial in federal court to attend, if only ceremoniously, to announce a settlement for his client. This was a business trip. Otto Lowell was not invited. Only he had been.
“I’m coming. Sometimes you’ve got to say fuck it.”
“That’s fine,” Jim shot back, impressed momentarily by the pithiness of Otto’s remark, “but you’ve also got to keep your life in order. Going berserk is never a great idea. I don’t know exactly how long I’ll be there. Anything could happen.” Jim had no reason to believe anything would happen.
“I can’t work anymore. I sit here and boil. I think about her and if I think long enough I explode. I charged my secretary yesterday. Just fucking charged right at her, sent her running back to her desk. I think I’m going crazy. Ya see, Jim, it’s not that I want to go. It’s that I have to go. I got a BlackBerry, a laptop. That’s a business. The branch manager doesn’t care. He’s on his way out anyway, I heard. I seriously need to relax, ya know what I mean? Blow off steam, know what I mean? I know some places.”
Jim knew some places, too, none of them good, and he had every intention of paying them a visit. But Otto, whether by design or not, was a saboteur. A night of harmless irresponsibility with Otto along could transform into a night of bloodletting and unending hell.
“All I mean,” Jim said, losing momentum, “is maybe the best way to get over this is sit tight.”
“I can’t sit tight. I’ll go mental if I have to sit tight for two seconds. That’s my whole damn point.”
And though Jim wanted, and had tried, gracefully to back out, he could not be blunt because, at the moment, he felt for the guy, poor Otto, and his helpless way of destroying whatever good things might have happened in his life. It was no use. The plans were set.
“Roseanne!” Jim cried into the bowels of the office, where sound registered and disappeared.
Outside Jim’s office, her glass cubicle was empty, like it was most times except when she was on the phone or, most seldom, working. Jim peered down the wide hallway, the ceiling reaching high, bordered on both sides by large square abstract paintings, smears of dark colors with amorphous beasts or vague decapitated figures at play, or in agony, or both—an obscure museum of modern art, perfect for a law office. Open offices emitted the low rattle of lawyers on their phones, at work on their keyboards, dozing through the Internet. Work had resumed, and Jim felt at least that bit of reassurance, though he wasn’t sure it had ever stopped. Roseanne rounded the corner heeding Jim’s distress signal.
She was small and thin, balanced way more steadily than seemed possible on sky high stilettos. The feat was even more impressive by the quick way she moved, hastened by Jim’s urgency. Jim worked hard never to make it known whether he was serious or not, and in the quiet law office on a late Friday afternoon, urgency was hard to come by. Still, Jim managed to force it, this bubble of urgency, by the threat of a gathering bad mood. Her hair changed weekly and, this day, it was straight, dark, and silky. Another day it would be pulled back in a high ponytail. Another day it would be wavy and draped like damp quilts down the sides of her face. She kept a perpetual tan, fortified by her South American honey hue, and had disproportionately large, fake breasts. Jim had gone through many secretaries, and she was like most of them. On the job eight months, she had the hang of things. Jim’s maddening dictation, for one, full of stops and starts, grunts and mumbles, belches and tired sighs, on-the-fly revisions, incomprehensible instructions appearing parenthetically and out of any discernible context, elaborate clauses inserted in the most basic sentences, trailing off to nowhere, forgetting the original subject. And then there were the hard early lessons, made harder by Roseanne’s reluctance (like so many of Jim’s secretaries) to admit she did not know how to do things, like cite cases properly, or find them on the database Westlaw, and how she fell like so many others into the easy traps of confusion, the subtle differences in names between the state and federal courts or, most confusing, private arbitral forums, and their more splintered divisions of trial and appellate courts, and the wholesale move adopted virtually everywhere to the paperless docket, requiring everything, pleadings, motions, briefs, memorandums of law, notices, affidavits, exhibits, to be scanned and filed electronically, which in turn required a system of esoteric usernames and passwords—always a forbidding jumble of numbers and letters that defied memorization—to be maintained and matched to the appropriate court, and with this went the babble of local rules and parochial administrative orders requiring things to be done by certain deadlines, and in rigid formats, which had to be comprehended, summarized in fragmented notes, and inserted in Jim’s electronic calendar on Outlook. There were mistakes, there could not help but be mistakes. The wrong things filed in the wrong courts, the overlooked deadlines leading to panicked, slapdash preparations, things not faxed, things not emailed, things not served, things not uploaded, things not downloaded, privileged communications sent to opposing counsel, the disastrous attempts to speak with confused, irascible clients—it was hard going merely to reach a level of competence. Roseanne’s mistakes had met the same condemnations from Jim as the prior secretaries, but Jim took these disciplining sessions in stride, becoming officious, detached—a cold, clinical chiding, usually for such things as, among other classic routines, The Sudden Disappearance, or The Inexplicably Prolonged Disappearance, or The Catastrophically Ill-timed Disappearance (In The Middle Of A Shit Storm), or The Interminable Lunch, and of course who could forget, Adventures In Problem Solving. Jim laid out his code of behavior in stentorian tones, careful not to charge the gates of self-control. None of his secretaries had cried, as far as he knew. And Roseanne, otherwise fierce in her determination not to be bullied by a bunch of lawyerly horseshit, took her corrections quietly, careful to listen, equal to Jim’s bloodless lack of emotion, with the obligatory pronouncements of never letting it happened again. Jim had to speak with her less and less. He felt happy she’d work out, her duties might expand, he the professional, she the administrator, a seamless combination of effort, leading to a contraction of his hours, responsibilities would begin to slough away, life would be easier. But then the tone of their relationship changed irrevocably one cloudless Saturday in May when he encountered her sunbathing topless on South Beach.
No, Jim recalled, observing her promenade now in an unstoppable reverie, she was not lying on her belly, backside up, with only a side-view exposure down the pale perimeter where her arm made its subtle arc. She lay full bore to the sky, with her head on a backpack to prop her body at a small angle, her arms fallen to her sides, and her round unnatural breasts, spread apart by gravity but aimed up in royal confidence. She’d had them done, rather beautifully, in Mexico, Jim later learned, but his first sight of her bare chest, her stretched out skin tanning in the sun, her astral nipples stiffened in a prevailing northerly breeze, drew him close among other groups lying in the sand before he had any clue it was her. Observing this scene in what Jim considered his candid way, sidling toward her through the laid out groups in a vague line to the Atlantic, he had a startling moment of recognition and, in that instant, she noticed him too, and the opportunity for casual escape disappeared.
“Roseanne,” as if he’d run into her in the grocery store.
“Oh my god, hi,” reaching for something, anything, with which to cover up. In Jim’s memory she is adorned in large round sunglasses with white Gucci insignias on the side and, for what amounts to her next and last article of clothing, a bikini bottom, such as it was—a triangle of white spandex overlaid with a gold thatched pattern, tied on the sides in dramatic loops like oversized shoelaces.
“He-e-ey … Whacha doing?”
“Nothin’. Just getting some sun.”
“It is a beautiful day,” gazing every which way but at her. “The sun is burning up.”
“Yeah,” Roseanne said.
“Uh-huh,” Jim said.
“So, uh, what’re you up to?”
“Oh, nothin’. Same. Gettin’ some sun.” You pasty white freak. Wrap it up.
“It’s so hot!” mock fanning herself with her dainty hand. She’d found her white T-shirt and hoisted the ends under one and then the other arm. Jim watched this maneuver, logged its every detail into his permanent memory banks.
“Yeah,” Jim said, “it’s so hot. I’m going swimming in the ocean. Cool off and all.” Joining me? No? Just kidding. Ha! I’m a very old authoritarian who has to go now and fling himself into oncoming traffic.
“Well, bye.”
They never spoke about this, but the vision of her, mixed with Jim’s searing embarrassment, came to him whenever her blouse lay open, or her shirt gave focus to the hard shape of her breasts, or when she moved in her languid way, or when she remained in his general vicinity. To stave off distraction, he plied her with instructions. In this mode, he intercepted her promenade down the hallway.
“I need you to call the hotel,” he said, a notch below drill sergeant, “which one is it?”
“Um, the Sheraton?”
“It’s not the Sheraton, that’s on the other side of the island. It’s the . . .” Jim thought about it, his mind reeling, about to drift into her shirt, then snap: “The Hyatt! Call the Hyatt and tell them I need to upgrade to a suite. Find out how much.” They walked side by side, Jim a head and a half above her, eyes fixed through a triangular window in the small-conference room at the end of the hallway, entranced now with the diamond shape the light made off the condo across the street. “One room,” Jim said, “one room, sorry, I can’t do it,” maintaining his thought just long enough to surrender her to her desk.
He walked back to his office. He was overwhelmed. He was sick to his stomach. Events stacked on top of one another. He had the sudden sensation of a cymbal immediately after having been thwacked by a drumstick, but not a sissy drumstick, a big motherfucking John Bonham tree-trunk of a drumstick. He felt the descending vibrations, the escaping wash of sustained brass copper alloy crash. Yet he calmed himself with the knowledge it would all go away, the days would pass, little would be asked of him, the seventeen boxes of indexed folders and tapes and exhibits lined up on the long table in the small conference room would not be needed, Otto would be subdued in his despair, all clouds would lift.
Jim’s phone rang. “It’s two hundred dollars more.” Jim marched over to Roseanne’s desk. “A night?” Roseanne pushed a button on her phone. “Is that per night?” she asked. She swung her head around. “Yes.” Her eyes ignited, hung on Jim in expectation. “They have one suite,” Roseanne explained. “It’s the very last one. Some kind of miracle they even have that.”
“Why?”
“Some festival.”
“Goddamn those festivals.”
“Well?”
“Is the client up to date on his bills?”
“I’ve got no clue.”
“I think he sent us a check for fifteen thousand dollars.”
“What should I say?”
“Screw it,” Jim decided. “The guy’s got ten million in Nevis. Forget I said that. Get the suite.” And while she made the switch, observing by her tone the seriousness of her task, Jim let his eyes slip down her profile into the open crevice of her purple blouse and slide over the crescent hump of her fake breast, with the faintest brown freckles alighting the perimeter, which made Jim stir, and abruptly he walked away.
2
Jim drove home under a series of trees that made an imperfect canopy down the main artery to his neighborhood. It had got dark. He bypassed cars without a tremble. The banyan trees overhead seemed to wrap him, like passing under the giant wings of condors. Jim had a condition at moments like this, or at any moment really where his concentration lacked some extraordinary stimulation, where his mind would drift into turgid darkness, beyond daydreaming, probably a trance, a waking hypnosis. Often people talked to him, and he caught random phrases like picking up seaweed in the ocean and responded with similar, often echoed, phrases, but he was on another planet. Ordinary functions like walking or driving became possible only by operation of his deepest reflexes, until something, a sound, a shove, a raucous laugh, the befuddled expression of someone receiving his unaccountable response, jolted him back. And then he was off again. In his car, a one-year-old Porsche 911 Carrera, he drove like this. An ultra-fine summer shower broke through the trees and by some physical maneuver on his part, beyond cognition, he had raised the lever to get the windshield wipers going; he had flipped on the foglights. It was, Jim considered, a condition of chronic boredom. But then he dismissed the thought because he did not feel bored or, if he did, he was suitably bored. Things were happening in his life. He was, for one, going to Key West, on his client’s dollar. And there he would be a semi-tourist, eating at the best places he knew, the A&B Lobster House, Mangi Mangi, Pepe’s for lunch, the hippie hideaway Blue Heaven, and he’d indulge all the clichés he could, sunsets on the decks at the Pier House, and the cheesy bars on Duval Street, Sloppy Joe’s, and Captain Tony’s, the dingy place around the corner claiming to be the real Sloppy Joe’s where Hemingway drank, and he’d go to Hemingway’s house where, for a king’s ransom, Hemingway had installed the first swimming pool in Key West, and he’d go to the Winter White House where Harry Truman spent one hundred and seventy-five days of his presidency, and to the freak-show of Mallory Square, and somehow too Jim would work. Though there would be nothing to it, a trial in federal court was scheduled. The thought of the spacious oak-paneled courtroom, the judge far across the room high up on the bench presiding in the concussed laze of Key West, Jim commanding proceedings from the oak-block lectern—that would be something, something to pull him out of the depths of his trance. Yet it wouldn’t happen. They were in Settlement-land, and Settlement-land was a damn good place to be. What else? Jim was thirty-six, had never been married.
In the past year he lived with a woman, age twenty-eight, who was a reporter for the local NBC affiliate. Before Jim met her he had never heard of her or seen any of her stories, which ran during the six A.M. broadcast and usually dealt with such themes as neglected cats, preferred sunscreen at the beach, and tips for multi-tasking during rush-hour. “This is Vanessa Rodriguez,” she would say, in her put-on deeper voice, keyed down for authority, with a Bluetooth in her ear, a Starbucks tall latte in her hand, driving down the interstate with the camera fixed on her profile, “reporting live from I-95.” After they started dating Jim could not stand to see any of her stories, and then he could not stand to see her, a statuesque girl with rich almond eyes, the high cheekbones of a supermodel, auburn hair—fantastically beautiful. What was wrong with her, Jim could not say. She would burrow down next to him on the couch and start conversations on her cell phone, that was one thing. She would change whatever show or football game or baseball game he was watching to skip through the channels, finding nothing. She would sing in the car, in a horrible soft voice, so light you couldn’t hear the words, only a persistence of whispers. She would wake him at the ungodly hour she would have to rise for work, suggesting he might see her to the door, which he would not. She would ask him to pick up things at the store, so many things—the gallons of milk, the peach yogurts, the low-fat cottage cheeses, the loaves of bread, the sheer stockings and winged ultra-thin Kotexes and Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia and blueberries and strawberries and whatever the hell other triviality she could think of to destroy Jim’s straight, happy, Porsche-driven ride home. These were meaningless things, Jim knew. Idiotic excuses to kill a relationship. But, for Jim, they would do just fine. More likely, their doom lay in the fact that their first night together was a drunken affair, having met at a loud bar, both of them becoming blitzed, he on gin and tonics, she on limoncellos, and then later they consecrated the misbegotten event with laborious, failed sex. Jim believed that a relationship that begins as a drunken one-night-stand stays drunk. Everything was off-kilter and in perpetual disrepair with her. Their moods never matched: her happiness, his gloominess, his sleepiness, her early rising, his excitement over sports, her utter boredom, her love of travel, his grim uneasiness in airports—with the hangover crashing down afterwards, setting up camp in Jim’s head for the season. This was the first time Jim had lived with a woman, his grand experiment in domesticity, without vows or legal binds, the same woman to sleep with, to wake up with, to eat dinner with—for what turned out to be about three months. She left him, to Jim’s relief, for another guy. Some tattoo-strewn music producer named G-Money who drove a black Mercedes with tinted windows and tricked out spinning hubcaps and who could not be found outside the vicinity of deep thumping bass beats and clouds of top notch smoke. Jim had helped her move into the guy’s mansion on Hibiscus Island where, with the smile of someone having come out the end of a punishing ritual still standing, Jim shook his successor’s hand. A fish, Jim remembered, a cold sweaty limp extremity, attached to a deeply vacant guy behind a shield of sunglasses. Experiment over.
“I’m going anyway.”
Jim Hawthorne had said the sentence only seconds before, and now he repeated it. A sense of repetition seemed in order. On the other end of the line, a voice, the voice of Otto Lowell, rolled on in elegiac tones and dirge-like rhythm. Jim turned west from his broad office window twenty-one stories up, looked over a block of sprawling bright green trees, a thin border of interstate where silhouettes of cars sped at each other without colliding, a few minor condos rising up modestly from the greenery, a grove of ugly cranes further north menacing the skyline, dwelling albatrosses ready to sway and break tragically, and out toward the red six-thirty Miami sky in July. Jim had no clue what words Otto was using, but Jim vaguely knew the import of them—a girl had broken Otto’s heart. Jim’s recollection of her was informed mainly by her hatred of whatever situation she happened to be in. The only occasion Jim could remember well involved a small restaurant on South Beach, the Ice Box (appropriately named, it turned out) where Jim, his ex-girlfriend Vanessa, Otto, and this lady, whose name Jim couldn’t recall, had gone one Friday night. The service that night was poor and, for that matter, so was everything else—a bad expensive wine that stung of vinegar, Jim remembered, and cold scrawny sole, delivered with maximum attitude after eons—and Otto’s friend embarrassed the waitress by announcing first that she (Otto’s friend) would never be returning to the Ice Box and second that she (the waitress) really should find another line of work. It seemed OK to Jim at the time, if only a little excessive, because the waitress herself was equally rude. But Jim, never one to discriminate among rudeness, knew immediately Otto’s girlfriend would rip Otto’s heart to shreds. Six months later, it happened. So now was the time for the usual regrets, vows of retribution, resignations to loneliness, a surrender to debauchery, and Otto was touching all the bases. To stop the river of words, Jim offered his solitary thought a third time, “I’m going anyway,” and he capped it with the coda, “if you want to come.”
“I just told you, I’m coming.”
Huh? Jim had to scramble through the circuitry really to hear it. The air in the office, its usual electric hum and invisible currents, the low level clicking and murmurs slipping out of offices, the distant sonic scream filtering out his ears—everything seemed to go still around him. He heard nothing but the sound at first, the voice breaking through, then the idea, the message: Otto Lowell, stock broker of many travails, who had more customers sue him in arbitration before the National Association of Securities Dealers than any other broker in the entire Southeast region of the United States, whose problems hadn’t subsided much in the six years since the tech meltdown in 2000, when Otto almost quit the business amid a raft of outraged clients, and yet who did not quit after Jim got some good results and managed to save Otto’s job with sentimental entreaties to the brokerage firm’s general counsel, and who then threw himself manically back into his work with the same kind of wildly reckless recommendations that had got him in trouble to begin with, only this time in the gilded world of the housing boom, spiraling ever upward in the summer of 2006, and who never, in all the years Jim had known him, ceased coming unglued—this man would be riding along with Jim to Key West.
The practicalities organized quickly in Jim’s mind. Otto would be riding, Otto would be talking, Otto would be whining. Otto would be sleeping in the same hotel room—is that what they had talked about, the same room?—for what Jim figured would be the next two days. Did Otto snore like a whale? Jim was sure of it. Did he have more manic compulsions? Sleep walking, night terrors, night sweats, bed hopping, bed wetting? Otto had a thick, graceless body and a glassy, zoned-out face, a coarse beard forever surging out the skin, and short sandy-blond hair. An ugly, ungainly man, but Jim’s client nevertheless. Someone with all the makings of a friend, without quite being a friend, which is why Jim felt resentful.
“You’re coming, really?” Jim shifted tone. How inconsiderate, how epically stupid Otto was to accept Jim’s offer. Jim had a trial in federal court to attend, if only ceremoniously, to announce a settlement for his client. This was a business trip. Otto Lowell was not invited. Only he had been.
“I’m coming. Sometimes you’ve got to say fuck it.”
“That’s fine,” Jim shot back, impressed momentarily by the pithiness of Otto’s remark, “but you’ve also got to keep your life in order. Going berserk is never a great idea. I don’t know exactly how long I’ll be there. Anything could happen.” Jim had no reason to believe anything would happen.
“I can’t work anymore. I sit here and boil. I think about her and if I think long enough I explode. I charged my secretary yesterday. Just fucking charged right at her, sent her running back to her desk. I think I’m going crazy. Ya see, Jim, it’s not that I want to go. It’s that I have to go. I got a BlackBerry, a laptop. That’s a business. The branch manager doesn’t care. He’s on his way out anyway, I heard. I seriously need to relax, ya know what I mean? Blow off steam, know what I mean? I know some places.”
Jim knew some places, too, none of them good, and he had every intention of paying them a visit. But Otto, whether by design or not, was a saboteur. A night of harmless irresponsibility with Otto along could transform into a night of bloodletting and unending hell.
“All I mean,” Jim said, losing momentum, “is maybe the best way to get over this is sit tight.”
“I can’t sit tight. I’ll go mental if I have to sit tight for two seconds. That’s my whole damn point.”
And though Jim wanted, and had tried, gracefully to back out, he could not be blunt because, at the moment, he felt for the guy, poor Otto, and his helpless way of destroying whatever good things might have happened in his life. It was no use. The plans were set.
“Roseanne!” Jim cried into the bowels of the office, where sound registered and disappeared.
Outside Jim’s office, her glass cubicle was empty, like it was most times except when she was on the phone or, most seldom, working. Jim peered down the wide hallway, the ceiling reaching high, bordered on both sides by large square abstract paintings, smears of dark colors with amorphous beasts or vague decapitated figures at play, or in agony, or both—an obscure museum of modern art, perfect for a law office. Open offices emitted the low rattle of lawyers on their phones, at work on their keyboards, dozing through the Internet. Work had resumed, and Jim felt at least that bit of reassurance, though he wasn’t sure it had ever stopped. Roseanne rounded the corner heeding Jim’s distress signal.
She was small and thin, balanced way more steadily than seemed possible on sky high stilettos. The feat was even more impressive by the quick way she moved, hastened by Jim’s urgency. Jim worked hard never to make it known whether he was serious or not, and in the quiet law office on a late Friday afternoon, urgency was hard to come by. Still, Jim managed to force it, this bubble of urgency, by the threat of a gathering bad mood. Her hair changed weekly and, this day, it was straight, dark, and silky. Another day it would be pulled back in a high ponytail. Another day it would be wavy and draped like damp quilts down the sides of her face. She kept a perpetual tan, fortified by her South American honey hue, and had disproportionately large, fake breasts. Jim had gone through many secretaries, and she was like most of them. On the job eight months, she had the hang of things. Jim’s maddening dictation, for one, full of stops and starts, grunts and mumbles, belches and tired sighs, on-the-fly revisions, incomprehensible instructions appearing parenthetically and out of any discernible context, elaborate clauses inserted in the most basic sentences, trailing off to nowhere, forgetting the original subject. And then there were the hard early lessons, made harder by Roseanne’s reluctance (like so many of Jim’s secretaries) to admit she did not know how to do things, like cite cases properly, or find them on the database Westlaw, and how she fell like so many others into the easy traps of confusion, the subtle differences in names between the state and federal courts or, most confusing, private arbitral forums, and their more splintered divisions of trial and appellate courts, and the wholesale move adopted virtually everywhere to the paperless docket, requiring everything, pleadings, motions, briefs, memorandums of law, notices, affidavits, exhibits, to be scanned and filed electronically, which in turn required a system of esoteric usernames and passwords—always a forbidding jumble of numbers and letters that defied memorization—to be maintained and matched to the appropriate court, and with this went the babble of local rules and parochial administrative orders requiring things to be done by certain deadlines, and in rigid formats, which had to be comprehended, summarized in fragmented notes, and inserted in Jim’s electronic calendar on Outlook. There were mistakes, there could not help but be mistakes. The wrong things filed in the wrong courts, the overlooked deadlines leading to panicked, slapdash preparations, things not faxed, things not emailed, things not served, things not uploaded, things not downloaded, privileged communications sent to opposing counsel, the disastrous attempts to speak with confused, irascible clients—it was hard going merely to reach a level of competence. Roseanne’s mistakes had met the same condemnations from Jim as the prior secretaries, but Jim took these disciplining sessions in stride, becoming officious, detached—a cold, clinical chiding, usually for such things as, among other classic routines, The Sudden Disappearance, or The Inexplicably Prolonged Disappearance, or The Catastrophically Ill-timed Disappearance (In The Middle Of A Shit Storm), or The Interminable Lunch, and of course who could forget, Adventures In Problem Solving. Jim laid out his code of behavior in stentorian tones, careful not to charge the gates of self-control. None of his secretaries had cried, as far as he knew. And Roseanne, otherwise fierce in her determination not to be bullied by a bunch of lawyerly horseshit, took her corrections quietly, careful to listen, equal to Jim’s bloodless lack of emotion, with the obligatory pronouncements of never letting it happened again. Jim had to speak with her less and less. He felt happy she’d work out, her duties might expand, he the professional, she the administrator, a seamless combination of effort, leading to a contraction of his hours, responsibilities would begin to slough away, life would be easier. But then the tone of their relationship changed irrevocably one cloudless Saturday in May when he encountered her sunbathing topless on South Beach.
No, Jim recalled, observing her promenade now in an unstoppable reverie, she was not lying on her belly, backside up, with only a side-view exposure down the pale perimeter where her arm made its subtle arc. She lay full bore to the sky, with her head on a backpack to prop her body at a small angle, her arms fallen to her sides, and her round unnatural breasts, spread apart by gravity but aimed up in royal confidence. She’d had them done, rather beautifully, in Mexico, Jim later learned, but his first sight of her bare chest, her stretched out skin tanning in the sun, her astral nipples stiffened in a prevailing northerly breeze, drew him close among other groups lying in the sand before he had any clue it was her. Observing this scene in what Jim considered his candid way, sidling toward her through the laid out groups in a vague line to the Atlantic, he had a startling moment of recognition and, in that instant, she noticed him too, and the opportunity for casual escape disappeared.
“Roseanne,” as if he’d run into her in the grocery store.
“Oh my god, hi,” reaching for something, anything, with which to cover up. In Jim’s memory she is adorned in large round sunglasses with white Gucci insignias on the side and, for what amounts to her next and last article of clothing, a bikini bottom, such as it was—a triangle of white spandex overlaid with a gold thatched pattern, tied on the sides in dramatic loops like oversized shoelaces.
“He-e-ey … Whacha doing?”
“Nothin’. Just getting some sun.”
“It is a beautiful day,” gazing every which way but at her. “The sun is burning up.”
“Yeah,” Roseanne said.
“Uh-huh,” Jim said.
“So, uh, what’re you up to?”
“Oh, nothin’. Same. Gettin’ some sun.” You pasty white freak. Wrap it up.
“It’s so hot!” mock fanning herself with her dainty hand. She’d found her white T-shirt and hoisted the ends under one and then the other arm. Jim watched this maneuver, logged its every detail into his permanent memory banks.
“Yeah,” Jim said, “it’s so hot. I’m going swimming in the ocean. Cool off and all.” Joining me? No? Just kidding. Ha! I’m a very old authoritarian who has to go now and fling himself into oncoming traffic.
“Well, bye.”
They never spoke about this, but the vision of her, mixed with Jim’s searing embarrassment, came to him whenever her blouse lay open, or her shirt gave focus to the hard shape of her breasts, or when she moved in her languid way, or when she remained in his general vicinity. To stave off distraction, he plied her with instructions. In this mode, he intercepted her promenade down the hallway.
“I need you to call the hotel,” he said, a notch below drill sergeant, “which one is it?”
“Um, the Sheraton?”
“It’s not the Sheraton, that’s on the other side of the island. It’s the . . .” Jim thought about it, his mind reeling, about to drift into her shirt, then snap: “The Hyatt! Call the Hyatt and tell them I need to upgrade to a suite. Find out how much.” They walked side by side, Jim a head and a half above her, eyes fixed through a triangular window in the small-conference room at the end of the hallway, entranced now with the diamond shape the light made off the condo across the street. “One room,” Jim said, “one room, sorry, I can’t do it,” maintaining his thought just long enough to surrender her to her desk.
He walked back to his office. He was overwhelmed. He was sick to his stomach. Events stacked on top of one another. He had the sudden sensation of a cymbal immediately after having been thwacked by a drumstick, but not a sissy drumstick, a big motherfucking John Bonham tree-trunk of a drumstick. He felt the descending vibrations, the escaping wash of sustained brass copper alloy crash. Yet he calmed himself with the knowledge it would all go away, the days would pass, little would be asked of him, the seventeen boxes of indexed folders and tapes and exhibits lined up on the long table in the small conference room would not be needed, Otto would be subdued in his despair, all clouds would lift.
Jim’s phone rang. “It’s two hundred dollars more.” Jim marched over to Roseanne’s desk. “A night?” Roseanne pushed a button on her phone. “Is that per night?” she asked. She swung her head around. “Yes.” Her eyes ignited, hung on Jim in expectation. “They have one suite,” Roseanne explained. “It’s the very last one. Some kind of miracle they even have that.”
“Why?”
“Some festival.”
“Goddamn those festivals.”
“Well?”
“Is the client up to date on his bills?”
“I’ve got no clue.”
“I think he sent us a check for fifteen thousand dollars.”
“What should I say?”
“Screw it,” Jim decided. “The guy’s got ten million in Nevis. Forget I said that. Get the suite.” And while she made the switch, observing by her tone the seriousness of her task, Jim let his eyes slip down her profile into the open crevice of her purple blouse and slide over the crescent hump of her fake breast, with the faintest brown freckles alighting the perimeter, which made Jim stir, and abruptly he walked away.
2
Jim drove home under a series of trees that made an imperfect canopy down the main artery to his neighborhood. It had got dark. He bypassed cars without a tremble. The banyan trees overhead seemed to wrap him, like passing under the giant wings of condors. Jim had a condition at moments like this, or at any moment really where his concentration lacked some extraordinary stimulation, where his mind would drift into turgid darkness, beyond daydreaming, probably a trance, a waking hypnosis. Often people talked to him, and he caught random phrases like picking up seaweed in the ocean and responded with similar, often echoed, phrases, but he was on another planet. Ordinary functions like walking or driving became possible only by operation of his deepest reflexes, until something, a sound, a shove, a raucous laugh, the befuddled expression of someone receiving his unaccountable response, jolted him back. And then he was off again. In his car, a one-year-old Porsche 911 Carrera, he drove like this. An ultra-fine summer shower broke through the trees and by some physical maneuver on his part, beyond cognition, he had raised the lever to get the windshield wipers going; he had flipped on the foglights. It was, Jim considered, a condition of chronic boredom. But then he dismissed the thought because he did not feel bored or, if he did, he was suitably bored. Things were happening in his life. He was, for one, going to Key West, on his client’s dollar. And there he would be a semi-tourist, eating at the best places he knew, the A&B Lobster House, Mangi Mangi, Pepe’s for lunch, the hippie hideaway Blue Heaven, and he’d indulge all the clichés he could, sunsets on the decks at the Pier House, and the cheesy bars on Duval Street, Sloppy Joe’s, and Captain Tony’s, the dingy place around the corner claiming to be the real Sloppy Joe’s where Hemingway drank, and he’d go to Hemingway’s house where, for a king’s ransom, Hemingway had installed the first swimming pool in Key West, and he’d go to the Winter White House where Harry Truman spent one hundred and seventy-five days of his presidency, and to the freak-show of Mallory Square, and somehow too Jim would work. Though there would be nothing to it, a trial in federal court was scheduled. The thought of the spacious oak-paneled courtroom, the judge far across the room high up on the bench presiding in the concussed laze of Key West, Jim commanding proceedings from the oak-block lectern—that would be something, something to pull him out of the depths of his trance. Yet it wouldn’t happen. They were in Settlement-land, and Settlement-land was a damn good place to be. What else? Jim was thirty-six, had never been married.
In the past year he lived with a woman, age twenty-eight, who was a reporter for the local NBC affiliate. Before Jim met her he had never heard of her or seen any of her stories, which ran during the six A.M. broadcast and usually dealt with such themes as neglected cats, preferred sunscreen at the beach, and tips for multi-tasking during rush-hour. “This is Vanessa Rodriguez,” she would say, in her put-on deeper voice, keyed down for authority, with a Bluetooth in her ear, a Starbucks tall latte in her hand, driving down the interstate with the camera fixed on her profile, “reporting live from I-95.” After they started dating Jim could not stand to see any of her stories, and then he could not stand to see her, a statuesque girl with rich almond eyes, the high cheekbones of a supermodel, auburn hair—fantastically beautiful. What was wrong with her, Jim could not say. She would burrow down next to him on the couch and start conversations on her cell phone, that was one thing. She would change whatever show or football game or baseball game he was watching to skip through the channels, finding nothing. She would sing in the car, in a horrible soft voice, so light you couldn’t hear the words, only a persistence of whispers. She would wake him at the ungodly hour she would have to rise for work, suggesting he might see her to the door, which he would not. She would ask him to pick up things at the store, so many things—the gallons of milk, the peach yogurts, the low-fat cottage cheeses, the loaves of bread, the sheer stockings and winged ultra-thin Kotexes and Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia and blueberries and strawberries and whatever the hell other triviality she could think of to destroy Jim’s straight, happy, Porsche-driven ride home. These were meaningless things, Jim knew. Idiotic excuses to kill a relationship. But, for Jim, they would do just fine. More likely, their doom lay in the fact that their first night together was a drunken affair, having met at a loud bar, both of them becoming blitzed, he on gin and tonics, she on limoncellos, and then later they consecrated the misbegotten event with laborious, failed sex. Jim believed that a relationship that begins as a drunken one-night-stand stays drunk. Everything was off-kilter and in perpetual disrepair with her. Their moods never matched: her happiness, his gloominess, his sleepiness, her early rising, his excitement over sports, her utter boredom, her love of travel, his grim uneasiness in airports—with the hangover crashing down afterwards, setting up camp in Jim’s head for the season. This was the first time Jim had lived with a woman, his grand experiment in domesticity, without vows or legal binds, the same woman to sleep with, to wake up with, to eat dinner with—for what turned out to be about three months. She left him, to Jim’s relief, for another guy. Some tattoo-strewn music producer named G-Money who drove a black Mercedes with tinted windows and tricked out spinning hubcaps and who could not be found outside the vicinity of deep thumping bass beats and clouds of top notch smoke. Jim had helped her move into the guy’s mansion on Hibiscus Island where, with the smile of someone having come out the end of a punishing ritual still standing, Jim shook his successor’s hand. A fish, Jim remembered, a cold sweaty limp extremity, attached to a deeply vacant guy behind a shield of sunglasses. Experiment over.
Copyright Joe Z. King 2010. All rights reserved. Published by Oxen Of The Sun, Inc. No portion of this material may be reproduced, except for brief excerpts for purposes of review or critical analysis without express written permission.
