The Deep Whatsis. Peter Mattei

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СКАЧАТЬ before I am due in the office. I could go online and search for other gyms in the area, I could just join a new one, but that seems a bit excessive. Time passes. I look out the east-facing windows at the sky, pinkish like plated salmon croquettes, and blueish like, I suppose, deskulled brains, cold enough to see steamy smoke, or was it smoky steam, rising from the oil furnaces in the three flats that lie between me and the bridge. I call and order delivery of two almond-soymilk lattes from Marlow & Sons, and then I call Silhouette, the Franco-Senegalese-Brazilian café, and try to order a bowl of fresh berries again but they don’t deliver. I hang up and look around my flat, thinking about getting some furniture one of these days and then I wait for my beverages. Waiting, I realize, isn’t the time between things, it’s the thing itself.

      When the lattes finally do arrive ($14) they are less than piping hot and I refuse them, though I do pay for them and tip the guy twenty dollars for his trouble (total $34). Three and a half hours later, at the Tate headquarters in midtown, HR Lady is waiting for me in the holding area outside my office. Her name is Helen, she is not married, reputed to have a longtime boyfriend who she never speaks about, lives alone, and enjoys foreign films and getting outside the city on weekends, according to her Match.com profile, which I looked up once. She is feigning concern about my health, wondering if I am alright.

      “Are you alright?” she asks, adding, without meaning it in the slightest, “We were worried about you!”

      “I haven’t had my Starbucks if that’s what you mean.” HR Lady uses “Starbucks” to mean coffee so around her I do too.

      “I’m talking about yesterday!”

      “Didn’t you get my text?” I lied.

      “No,” she lied, pretending she didn’t know I was lying.

      “Oh they musn’t have gone through. Fucking AT&T!” I thought it would be interesting to push the lie a little further and see if HR Lady would go along with it to the bitter end. “I was surprised I didn’t hear from you so I sent the same text again and I left you a voice mail? I think I left you two voice mails, in fact, I’m so sorry you didn’t get them, shit, Jesus, I don’t know what’s going on around here anymore.”

      “Me neither,” she says, wondering what I was up to. “I didn’t get any of them. Did you send them from your iPhone or your BlackBerry? It’s T-Mobile, right?” For a moment I thought she meant it, that she didn’t know I was only toying with her. But she kept it up so I knew she was just playing along. “You know how telcom is around here ever since Kyle was let go,” she says with a shrug and a smile and a little wave of her hands, or is it a rolling of her eyes and a look of minory contempt? I can’t quite tell. I don’t say anything.

      “Shall we do it now?” she then asks. And I say “Sure! Let’s do it! Let’s get it over with!” And then, “Ugh, what a life!” to which she says “Here we go!” with mock-ironic morbidness. Then she asks my assistant to call the copywriters, Dave and Bill.

      Meanwhile I have mail, the usual stack of bubble-wrapped DVDs from production houses touting shitty directors—“Peter Rossi Shoots Kids!” as if that’s either funny or original—and I throw them all away immediately without even considering watching a single second of this crap. There is also an interoffice envelope which feels empty. I am about to open it when Dave and Bill arrive and see HR Lady there and immediately they know.

      “I guess this is it,” one of them says with a forced chuckle. They always say that, to soften the humiliation, to own it, they always chuckle, as well they should. But I’m not concerned with Dave and Bill right now because I am too pissed off at the stupidity of my assistant who called both of them in at the same time. The rules of this are, according to the lawyers, that we can only fire one at a time, unless they are a team, and Dave and Bill are both copywriters and thus not a team. Meaning one of them, either Dave or Bill, we haven’t determined the order yet, is going to have to stand there while the other one gets the news in private. It’s humiliating, but on the other hand, the gyrations that I’ve put both of them through in the past few months were much more intense.

      Dave, for example, is forty-six and his wife just had a child not more than two weeks ago. Disgusting, ugly little knot of fat, frightening really, and when I first saw the picture he e-mailed to the department I thought perhaps the child was a bird-headed dwarf, which sounds like something I made up but actually that’s a real medical term for a kind of mutation, or birth defect, related to but not entirely the same as being a pinhead. So I had my assistant, I suppose I should include her name here at some point, it’s Cheryl, or Cherie, and she is not as attractive as I’d hoped for, but it’s too late to say anything, I had Cheryl or Cherie send Dave and his wife a cute onesie and a bottle of champagne and a warm note from me personally. This could, of course, be interpreted in a number of ways, that it was part of my slow turning of the spit that Dave was curing on, since I had begun dropping hints that he was getting the boot months ago, or that I was gifting him out of guilt at what I knew was his fate. Bill, on the other hand, was single and homosexual, although he doesn’t admit this publicly, but no one whose shirt is that perfectly pressed and shrink-wrapped into his trousers could possibly be straight with the exception of myself. I had called Bill into my office around the same time I was dropping hints with Dave, and I told Bill he was going to get a big promotion and a sizable raise, I just had to get approval from the holding company. Every so often he would ask how that was going and I would tell him they had a salary freeze or something but not to worry. Since we had decided long ago to fire both of them on the same day I thought it would be an interesting juxtaposition to compare their reactions back to back. I mean this whole business is pure evil, why sugarcoat it? In fact, why not broadcast it?

      When we finish terminating them, Damon and Terry stand hulkingly by the elevators with them, waiting to take their ride of shame down to the street, and HR Lady asks me if I want to go to lunch because there is something we need to discuss.

      “I’m not hungry,” I say, thinking that it is strange I have no appetite since I haven’t eaten anything for three-point-five days now.

      “What is it?”

      She gets up and closes the door while I open the interoffice envelope in my hand. She immediately begins to talk about this new intern in the production department on eight when I pull a single sheet of paper from the envelope and look at it.

       What’s a girl to do? Well, the sensible thing is to disappear. But some girls are not so sensible, are they? Some grrrls get so drunk they can’t remember things & then they get kicked out of the lair (so maddeningly rude & annoyingly kewt all at once) & then they try to stay in touch but that doesn’t work & then—life is strange & beautiful all at once is it not?—they go & get a new internship—where?—OMG what a coincidence!!!!

      The printout is not signed. As I read it HR Lady is asking me if I have anything to say. “About what?” I ask. Then she says they didn’t know that the girl and I had a relationship prior to us taking her on as a production intern, and if they had they wouldn’t’ve hired her, but on her first day, which was yesterday, she comes to HR Lady and says she needs to divulge something of a personal nature for reasons of personal integrity, honesty, due diligence, and all around professionalism.

      “A prior relationship?” I say as if I don’t know what the words mean.

      “Yes.”

      “A prior relationship with who?”

      “With you.”

      “She said she had a prior relationship with me? Like what did she mean by that?”

      “Well she didn’t СКАЧАТЬ