Hating Olivia: A Love Story (12 page)

“I don’t know, Liv. Are you sure about this? Do you really think you’re cut out to sell houses?”

“Why not? Everybody else seems to be able to do it.”

“Yeah, but—do you really think you can handle working with your mother? That might be tough for anybody.”

“What are you trying to say, Max? That you don’t think I’m
capable?
Is that what you’re trying to say?”

I challenged her. She was immovable. She definitely intended to tender her notice to the temple. I couldn’t come up with a good enough reason to stop her.

That night in bed it was like making love to someone altogether different. It’s always a thrill getting inside a new woman, but without Livy’s magnificent black tresses something was missing. I kept my mouth shut about it. I knew from experience that despite her beauty Livy was sensitive about the way she looked….

22.

Over the weekend Livy went out with her new MasterCard and charged a crate-load of outfits geared toward presenting her as the ultimate businesswoman. I thought the entire escapade was foolhardy and ridiculous, but I tried to be
supportive.
What the girl was going to do she was going to go ahead and do no matter what I said—I’d seen enough by now to know that. So I wished her the best.

Days pass, one disappearing into the next without a clear line of demarcation. On Saturdays we’re asked to log overtime on Ivan’s project. In our briefcases Lars and I lug in six-packs of cold beer, and instead of proofing the computer printouts—because by now it’s clear Ivan is completely oblivious to what we’re doing—we plant ourselves in front of the color television set in the lounge and take in basketball games or boxing matches while getting sloshed at double time.

One day Ivan blows in and informs us that the entire project has been put on hold until further notice. For weeks we sit on our asses playing cards, reading the newspapers, even dozing when the tedium gets to be too much, awaiting that elusive “further notice"—but it never comes.

At long last an anxious middle-aged fellow who looks like all
the others arrives and requests that we pack up our personal belongings immediately and follow him. The pied piper introduces himself as Edward Winklewhite, manager on the district level. We’re working for him now.

“What happened to Ivan Holland?” Lars asks as we troop through the corridor.

“Ivan’s project here has been terminated,” Winklewhite answers in a cryptic monotone. “He’s returned to his home office in Indiana.”

There’s something like superior self-satisfaction in his voice. Lars and I shrug at each other. Winklewhite offers no further explanation. We don’t ask for one. This is the way things are done inside the Big Telephone Machine.

Winklewhite shows us into the elevator and pushes the button for floor number five. Of course we’ve heard about what’s up there—the executive suites. Well, well, well—we’re about to be called on the carpet after all! Our asses are about to be fried! No doubt Lars’s daylong phone calls to Georgia is the evidence against us. Or maybe it’s the beer cans we toss all over the lounge.

We’re ushered into a conference room, where the centerpiece is an enormous oval table flanked by a dozen leather-cushioned swivel chairs.

“The members of the board of directors seem to have trouble operating the control panel in this room,” says Winklewhite, wringing his hands nervously. He reaches down and pulls out a console from beneath the lip of the table. “They’ve requested a new operating manual so that when they come in for a meeting, they’re not all out to sea with this darned thing…. ”

When he gingerly depresses some of the shiny buttons, it’s as if he’s activated the functions of a spaceship—lights flash, bells ring, buzzers sound, the wall panels move up and down and side
to side. A maddeningly placid voice, just like the one inside the lunatic computer in
A Space Odyssey,
coolly addresses us.

“Sorry. You have not followed proper procedure. Please try again…. ”

“See what I mean?” Winklewhite pleaded like a helpless old woman.

Without warning, a movie screen emerged from the ceiling and lowered itself magically toward the plush carpet.

Lars elbowed me in the ribs. “Now all we need is the popcorn.
…”

“Or the porn.”

Winklewhite did not find us amusing. In fact, the fellow seemed to be altogether devoid of a sense of humor. On top of everything, he was completely exasperated by now with the recalcitrant control panel. He threw up his hands and left us with a leather-bound copy of the outmoded user guide, a stack of pads, and a box of pencils.

“It’s all yours, fellows. I expect it’ll take you a few weeks to work up a first draft.”

With that he turned on his heel and disappeared.

Lars let out a soft whistle. “A few weeks? Shit, we’ll have this fucking thing knocked off in a matter of hours!”

“Tell me about it!”

“Then what do we do?”

“Same thing we’ve done for the past seven months—play with our joints.”

Y
ou could say Lars and I had the hang of corporate life. What made our gig such a golden peach was the fact that we were
just a pair of independent contractors working for a man—Tarlecky—we never saw, directly beholden to nobody inside the Big Telephone power structure itself. Even better, we had the brains to realize that we had it made, and Winklewhite seemed to have forgotten all about us after that first day. Every once in a blue moon it happens—you hit the jackpot, and always when you’re not expecting it. Those were pretty good days….

Livy was out the door early every morning, running from here to there, showing Tudor mansions in Roseland and ersatz palazzos in Short Hills to shady mobsters, rich men’s wives who had nothing better to do with their days, and doctors, lawyers, and executives looking to escape Manhattan. The image of my girl as a hard-nosed businesswoman was at odds with my idea of her—and hers, at least some of the time—as a Sylvia Plath or Anaïs Nin in the making. But who was I kidding? Like I said before, in both the long run and the short, life is a matter of dollars and cents—artistic pretensions don’t amount to a hill of horse dung.

But there were no sales for her yet.

“Mother says it will take some time, and that the market is a little quiet right now. Besides, I have to bone up on my real estate law if I want to pass the test for certification.”

“How long before that happens?”

“A few months, at least.”

“Will you draw any salary between now and then?” “She didn’t say.”

“Well, don’t you think you should ask?”

“Look, Max, this is my
mother,
for God’s sake! Give me a break here!”

“As long as you know what you’re doing…. ” “I know what I’m doing!”

L
ars had just gotten through showing a smoker from a friend’s recent bachelor party on the board of directors’ private movie screen when Winklewhite barged in. Without a word he picked up our decoy working user’s guide and scanned the penciled-in deletions and corrections.

“Looks like you fellows have been hard at work here! I’ll bet by now you’ve completely mastered this contraption.”

“We sure have!” the two of us answered in unison, like proper bootlickers.

The manager slammed the binder shut and flashed a smile full of miniature yellow teeth.

“Wonderful! We’ll have this printed up, posthaste. Now if you’ll just follow me…. ”

We won’t need to take anything, Winklewhite assures us, everything we’ll need is at the next location. We pass several ominously closed doors en route to the apex of the building itself and directly into the nerve center of power—the chief executive officer’s suite. This is where Branford Gladstone White III calls the shots for the American telecommunications industry, where company policy affecting the entire planet is formulated, where deals are cut, and heads are made to roll.

It was as quiet as a cemetery. The scent of a holy reverence—the reverence for power—hovered in the atmosphere. Lars and I were shown to a pair of maple desks in an alcove behind the station of White’s personal secretary herself. She glanced superciliously over her shoulder at us, then picked up the telephone and began a discreet conversation. In the meantime Winklewhite disappeared. We were never to set eyes on him again.

More stacks of computer printouts. We are to crosscheck information on
certain Big Telephone personnel from across the country. The categories are marital status, age, children, number of years with the company, universities attended, political party (if known), and
dates of surveillance.
Each page was stamped
CONFIDENTIAL—PROPRIETARY USE ONLY.

“What do you figure the point of all this is?” Lars wondered out loud.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“But how the fuck did we land
up here?”

“You got me.”

“Think maybe they’re keeping an eye on us?”

“What for?”

“Who the fuck knows…. ”

It did seem awfully weird that two nobodies from the outside would be planted squarely in the sanctum sanctorum. Were we being used for some kind of experiment?

The strangest thing about the great American corporation is that one hand never seems to know what the other is up to, nobody ever tells you what’s going on or why, and the results of your labors remain completely unknown, vanishing into the air like so much smoke. And for all that uselessness and waste, the paychecks are the fattest, the benefits the juiciest, the buyouts and retirement packages the sexiest. All you have to do is check your identity at the front door and do whatever they say.

23.

Despite the free rein we had, the Big Telephone Machine wasn’t working out for Lars. Unlike me, he was never quite at home with the idea of sitting around collecting a paycheck for taking it easy. He was really after a job as a journalist, a sportswriter, which is what he’d done down south after college, but he hadn’t been able to land anything up here, and he was growing antsier by the day. Even visits from his Southern belle didn’t help. Sometimes he wouldn’t show up at the office for days on end, especially after a long weekend. Lars drank, and having to board with a spinster aunt (he was supposed to be looking after the old lady since her health was shaky) drove him to it in excess. Whenever he had the opportunity and a fresh paycheck, he had the propensity for going off on blind benders. He’d swill it down anywhere and everywhere—in bars, at the racetrack, even in his living room, for days running, until he couldn’t drink one more ounce. Then he’d pass out and sleep for a day or two. Where he’d end up, he himself sometimes couldn’t say.

Once in a while I’d join him for part of the ride, hitting the rat’s-nest dives on Eighth Avenue or a strip joint in the financial district (before the neighborhood went upscale), or I’d keep him company in his aunt’s parlor while he made short work of a
quart of vodka or knocked down a case of Miller High Life or Budweiser, or Heineken, his absolute favorite. When there was a decent fight card in Newark, we’d hop in the car and pay general admission at the gate….

One morning I take my seat behind the blond desk and go to work on a fresh mountain of printouts. Nine
A.M.
… nine thirty … ten. No Lars. At ten fifteen I hear a muffled groan. I roll my chair back just in time to catch my pal stick his head out from beneath his desk.

“Hey…. It was a rough fuckin’ night, Max…. I’m gonna try and sleep it off down here. Do me a favor, will ya…. Keep your eyes peeled for the man, okay?”

He crawls back into his hole, and within minutes he’s sawing wood. That’s what it had come to for Lars….

We wrapped up what we’d been ordered to do, but nobody showed up with another assignment for us. Lars spent all his time on the telephone with his Swan, who had moved north, gotten her own apartment, and was waiting to hear about a job in the city. I filled ashtrays while working my way through a stream of magnificent tomes—
The Tale of Genji, Magister Ludi, Journey to the End of the Night, She,
Simenon after Simenon. While sitting at that desk I managed to circle the globe and zigzag across vast stretches of time, all in an eight-hour day. Lao-Tzu was on target when he said, “Without going out of your door, you can know all things on earth. Without looking out of your window, you can know the ways of heaven…. ”

And as somebody else said, all good things must come to an end. Sometimes they come to an end in the guise of good news. Mister Richard Grayson summoned Lars and me to his office in Personnel one afternoon in early April to inform us that as a reward for our outstanding service and contributions to the company,

we were under consideration to be inducted into the ranks of the Big Telephone Machine itself—he was prepared to buy out our contracts with an offer Tarlecky couldn’t refuse. There’d be less money for us at first, but more in the way of benefits, including the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become part of the grandest, most powerful corporation in the entire civilized world.

I was shocked. I didn’t know what to think. As we all rapped in Grayson’s office, it soon became apparent that Lars and I had no real choice in the matter at hand. Either we accepted this shift in our status or we hit the bricks; there was no middle ground. It was always safer to be enfolded in the bosom of Ma Bell than exposed to the whims of management when those inevitable cost-cutting measures were taken, according to the personnel manager; independent consultants were always the first to go….

As Grayson droned on, I thought it over. Why, if we didn’t go along with this scheme, we wouldn’t even have a crack at unemployment compensation—for that you had to be laid off, and here we were being offered a choice position! It was nothing new—the bastards had you coming and they had you going.

My brain churned like a bottled frog as I watched Grayson fiddle with the official forms. My gut did a seasick lurch when he slid them and a pair of pens across his desk.

Well, shit … it couldn’t be all that bad to become one of “them,” could it? Would it kill me? I’d made it this far on the job, hadn’t I? And I still needed a paycheck in order to survive, right? There had to be worse things in life—like polio and schizophrenia and terminal cancer—than taking on a job you didn’t want, no?