When she returned, she looked old. Bill studied her face in amazement, wondering how it had happened so quickly.
“Did they give you any …”
“They gave me six months’ severance,” said Bill.
“So what are you going to do?” she whispered. “What are we going to do?” She stared at something on a table. “Bill.” She put her hands to her face. “I don’t … Is this what you’ve been wanting all along? I can’t believe this is happening to me.”
“To you?” Bill shouted and slammed his hand against the wall. The brass scale and sifter fell to the floor. “What about me? I’m the one who has numb hands and feet. I’m the one who’s been fired.” Again, she put her hands to her face. “But you know something,” he shouted. “You’re right. Something has happened to you.”
He pushed his way past the people gaping at him, out through the door with the horseshoe nailed over it.
NIGHT OFFICE
It was several days later that Bill returned to the Marbleworth Building to pack up his things, very late at night, when the offices were vacant and he might be spared the final degradation in front of his colleagues. As he walked from the all-night garage on Milk Street, he was gripped by a strange nostalgia and peered glumly at the empty storefronts and office buildings that he’d barely noticed through the years and might never see again: Prudential Securities, Milk Street Café, Commonwealth Investments, Milk Street Florists. He entered the dim lobby of the Marbleworth. Out of habit, he craned his neck up to examine the massive clock over the revolving glass doors: 12:48. By this hour, even the cleaning staff had gone, and the only sound in the deserted building was the restless rumble of the elevators, which never shut down, and the ticking of the night watchman’s punch clock. The night watchman himself was almost asleep in his swivel chair behind the front desk. He snorted and sat up when Bill presented his temporary ID. “Working late, eh?” he mumbled. Bill nodded. “Fresh air coming in with you. Always like that fresh air.”
Bill was passing along the dark hallway toward his office, brooding about his bleak prospects for future employment, when he saw a small light under Harvey Stumm’s door. He paused, thinking that the vice president had forgotten to turn off a lamp. Then, to his astonishment, he heard someone talking. The thought came to him that Plymouth was being robbed. He had once seen a television show about corporations raiding each other’s intellectual property, and he turned to creep back to the reception and telephone the police. On second thought, that course of action could possibly activate a light on Stumm’s phone and thus alert the thief. As Bill stood motionless and frightened, uncertain about what he should do, he again heard a low mumble behind the closed door and this time it was distinctly the voice of a woman. Screwing up his courage to a degree surprising even to himself, he pushed slightly on the door and found that it opened.
Never before had he seen the inside of Stumm’s office. Unlike the tidy place he expected, piles of rumpled documents and papers lay strewn about the tables and floor. Standing in the middle of the room was Mrs. Stumm.
“What are you doing here?” she gasped when she saw Bill.
“Mrs. Stumm … I didn’t expect …” Bill stammered, equally shocked.
Something moved at the desk. Bill turned and noticed for the first time a man sitting there, peering back with a look of embarrassment and panic. His eyes were swollen and bloodshot, and he wore a drab T-shirt with some bicycle logo. For a few moments, Bill continued to stare at the man. He was Harvey Stumm. “Harv?” Bill whispered in disbelief.
Stumm flushed and looked down at the floor.
“What … I … I’m sorry,” said Bill, feeling as if he’d walked in on a couple making love. He began backing out toward the door.
“Please, stay where you are, young man,” said Mrs. Stumm. Her bulbous lips began quivering. “Now that you’re here. Do you see what this job does to my husband? And to me, I might add. And I don’t get paid. Here it is, the middle of the night, and we have to haul ourselves to this crummy office to go through the week’s junk. I can’t keep this up.”
“Betty,” protested Stumm, still staring down at the floor.
“No, Harvey,” said Mrs. Stumm, “don’t try to hush me up.” She pushed her reading glasses up into her wiry gray hair, rubbed her eyes, and squinted into the fierce light pounding from the lamp on the desk. “Mr. Chalmers should know what he’s in for. In another few years, they’ll be working him as hard as they work you.”
Bill started to inform Mrs. Stumm that he had been fired but decided that he would rather not engage her in conversation.
Some text marched across the computer screen on Stumm’s desk, making beeps as it did so, and Mrs. Stumm frowned. “What’s that?” she said to her husband. “Aren’t we done with that one?”
“Not yet,” Stumm said. He took in a deep breath of air, which made a hollow, sucking sound in his throat, and began rifling through the stacks of paper on his desk. “It’s the McCormick file,” he muttered. He looked at Bill, shaking his head, and said, “Frank McCormick buries me with correspondence. That’s his strategy.” Then he began typing rapidly at his keyboard, as if running after the words skittering off his screen. “Can you get me …”
“Yes,” grumbled Mrs. Stumm, “I know what it is.” She lumbered heavily around the room, poking one pile of papers after another. A box of half-eaten sandwiches fell to the floor. “I saw that McCormick stuff a minute ago. Now, where was it? It was on a shelf, I think.” She went to the bookshelf, which held a row of burgundy leather volumes containing the Plymouth annual reports, and grabbed a handful of papers. “Here’s some of it,” she said and slapped the papers down on her husband’s desk.
She turned to Bill, who had advanced only a single step into the room. “You don’t know the pressures he’s under,” she said. “It’s not right what they do to him. It’s not right.” She swept aside a pile of memoranda and letters and sat down on the sofa. “My husband has been working for Plymouth fifteen years now, since the time it was on State Street. He has a long record of excellent service to the company. You would think that by now we would have a little time to ourselves. Bosh. Harvey hasn’t taken a vacation in three years.” She sighed. “Just look at all this crap.” She waved her hand at a stack of papers. “What is this crap?” She began reading aloud from one of the documents: “It is anticipated that new subadvisory agreements substantially similar to the current subadvisory agreements for these segments will be proposed …” She let go of the piece of paper and it fluttered to the floor. “Useless. This stuff is useless.”
“It’s not useless,” Stumm said angrily to his wife. Scowling, he retrieved the document from the floor. When he was again behind his desk, he said, “You shouldn’t talk about things you don’t know anything about.”
“Useless,” repeated Mrs. Stumm.
“You’re always talking about things you know nothing about,” said Mr. Stumm. He glanced at Bill and then again at his wife. “If you want to help me, then help me.”
“I never asked to be dragged up here in the middle of the night.”
“Then don’t come next time.”
“Ha,” Mrs. Stumm shrieked and laughed wildly. “I’d like to see you go through this stuff by yourself.”
Bill was so stunned by the scene that he momentarily forgot his hatred for the vice president and felt only raw sympathy, even a strange sense of shame. In a sickening flash of memory, he recalled a moment from childhood when he had witnessed a fellow student steal another boy’s lunch money and had felt unaccountably ashamed. As if watching were doing. Yes, he watched and did nothing, he was a victim and a victimizer himself. Another pair of beeps came from Stumm’s computer.
“Maybe I could help you look for the McCormick files,” said Bill weakly.
“Oh, no,” said Stumm.
“Harvey, let Mr. Chalmers help you,” said Mrs. Stumm. “You’re working yourself to the bone.”
Stumm shot his wife an ugly look
and continued typing at his keyboard.
“He’s too wicked proud,” Mrs. Stumm said and propped up her thick legs on a glass tabletop. “He doesn’t want anyone to know that he gets so far behind. That’s why we have to sneak up here in the middle of the night.”
“Goddamn it, Betty,” said Stumm. “Don’t say things like that.”
“I … I had no idea,” whispered Bill. He found that he could no longer look at Harvey Stumm. When he did, he felt ashamed. He was beginning to feel ashamed of everything in his life.
“It’s all true,” said Mrs. Stumm. “And now Mr. Chalmers knows, don’t you, Mr. Chalmers. You’ve caught us. Hasn’t he caught us, Harvey? He’s caught us.” She took off her glasses and wiped them on the sleeve of her loose yellow shift. “What are you going to do, Mr. Chalmers, now that you’ve caught us?”
“What? I don’t know,” said Bill slowly. He was hardly listening anymore.
“Actually, I wouldn’t mind at all if you told them,” said Mrs. Stumm. “They should know that they’re working my husband to the bone. And me.” Her lower lip began quivering again. “We have a life. My father is sick. Look at Harvey. Look at his head. Just look at how he’s losing his hair. He’s only fifty-three years old. Do you know what’s causing him to lose his hair, Mr. Chalmers? Stress, nothing else. His father kept his hair until the day that he died.” She glanced at Bill’s thinning head and nodded. “I can see it’s happening to you too. I’m sorry for you.”
“Betty, can you stop now?” said Stumm. He stood up, looking old and tired.
“I can stop,” said Mrs. Stumm, “but that doesn’t erase the fact that Mr. Chalmers has caught us.”
“I’ve been fired,” said Bill.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Stumm. She looked at her husband with raised eyebrows. “Really. You didn’t tell me that, Harvey. You didn’t tell me that you’d just fired Mr. Chalmers. Then you have nothing to bargain with. Mr. Chalmers will blab to his heart’s content.”
“Bill,” Stumm said in a small, pathetic voice, uttering his name for the first time since he’d arrived. “Please.”
Bill would not look at the other man. “I’m not going to blab,” he said. “I don’t give a shit.” At that, Bill turned and left the room, closing the door behind him. He was suffocating. When he got to the end of the hallway, he pressed his cheek hard against the window and looked out at the huge blackness of sky and the glittering lights of the city and the faint throat of line where the dark sky met the dark sea. If he could, he would have jumped at that moment just to have ten seconds of black air hurtling past, stuffing his mouth, cleansing his insides. How he wanted to be clean. Possibly he’d been heartless with Stumm. He’d hardly spoken while the man was stripped naked. He could have said something to Stumm, touched him. Far below, a row of streetlamps suddenly blinked on like a strand of pearls. For God’s sake, what was he thinking? It was he who had been fired, not Stumm. Stumm had undoubtedly loaded the pistol. Stumm hated him.
Still shaken, Bill went to his office, turned on the light, and began numbly assembling the cardboard packing boxes on his chair. He stared at the Ralph Morgan print of three storks, as if seeing it for the first time, and wondered whether he should ship it to Lexington or just leave it for the next occupant of the office. His eyes roamed slowly around the room, moving to the desk lamp that had always irritated him, the Windsor chair that Melissa had gotten him for his thirty-fifth birthday, the rug that he had won in a college poker game. His beige Gateway computer, all of its business files having been deleted the day he was fired. With a weary sigh, he slumped in his chair.
Two hours later, when he’d emptied his desk drawers and file cabinets and bookshelves, eight numbered boxes stood stacked by the door. Halfway through, his legs had buckled under him and he’d tumbled to the floor. He was immensely tired. He took one last look around the room where he’d spent the past nine years and turned off the light. As he passed down the hall for the last time, he hesitated again outside Stumm’s door. The room was silent and dark.
On the sidewalk, Bill’s legs felt heavy and slow, and he found that he had to walk one tiny step at a time, like an old man. Glancing this way and that down the empty street, he was grateful that no one was watching. He had never worked this long into the night, even as a student, and he had foolishly exhausted himself. Twice he fell, without pain, his legs simply giving way. The pavement against his face smelled of burnt rubber and pumpernickel.
BAY WINDOWS
Rain on the roof. A throbbing sadness, where his sleeping and waking minds almost met in the haze of half-consciousness. A dream retreated, and he reached into the abyss. Then, slowly, he opened his eyes. It was Friday. No, Saturday. Rain. He could hear the swish of an automobile passing over a wet street. Downstairs, two men were shouting, Melissa’s voice interceding, then the grind of an electric power tool, crushing the scampering little feet on the roof. “Melissa,” he called, wishing that she were lying there beside him in the gray light of the room. After a few moments, he realized that he had probably only imagined her name. He could smell where she had been in the bed.
The illuminated clock on the vanity read 9:38. Nine thirty-eight, Saturday morning, the twenty-third of August, another day of nothingness. Four days since he’d been fired from his job.
With his head buzzing, as it did when he had not got sufficient sleep, he stepped out of bed and immediately fell to the floor. His legs were not working. Then he noticed the bruises, blue turning to russet to brown. What colors were real bruises, he thought bitterly, earned bruises? Now he would have more.
From his vantage on the floor, tables and chairs appeared oddly angled, the ceiling seemed to curl away into shadows, and his eyes moved to the maple tree outside the bedroom window. How precious and alive the tree suddenly seemed to him. Raindrops clung to its leaves, magnifying the tiny veins and indentations, liquifying and heightening the blues and greens so that the surfaces flowed into each other in a delicate envelope of light. The entire tree seemed to swim in the air. For a few moments, Bill felt that he, too, was swimming among its leaves, a child again. Summer stretched ahead like the ocean. He had stripped off his clothes and was running around and around a tree in his backyard, the warm summer rain making mud that splattered his shins and knees, the tiny voice of his mother calling him to dinner.
Grunting, he dragged himself up to a kneeling position and watched the blue bulging of veins in his arms. He tried to stand. Again he fell to the floor, this time cutting his arm on an edge of the blanket chest, making a long gash with blood, painless. How could his body be failing him, so silently and politely? Let it happen savagely, all at once. Let it happen with pain. He wanted the clarity and purposefulness of pain. He stared at his useless legs, no longer part of him, stilts of a circus clown. He had surely done something terribly wrong. Yes, he would accept that now. Something wrong and foul to deserve these refusals of his body, but what was it? The thought occurred to him that people amputated useless legs. For these numb stilts, no anesthetic would be needed. He could do it now if he had a sharp knife. In the kitchen. He would cut away all that he could not trust. Only forty years old, he thought, cheated out of life at his prime. Because he was now fearful that he might be dying. He was dying a far slower death than the death of his father, who had gone so easily, dead by the time he had slipped to the floor of that dark accounting office that smelled perpetually of wood glue. Melissa. Had he called her name or only thought it again? If he could touch her skin, he could save himself.
An invisible wave of damp air flowed through the open window, and Bill shuddered and managed to grab the bedpost and bring himself up to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. His bleeding arm streamed onto the white bedsheets. More loud voices downstairs. Mr. Turgis, the architect, was arguing about something to do with the new bay windows, something that hadn’t been executed according to his plans, and there was a break in the drilling and cutting while he shouted at some other man, and then the tools started u
p again. The telephones began ringing, like drowning animals screaming for air.
Shortly, there were footsteps on the stairs and Melissa appeared at the bedroom door. “I didn’t know if you were awake,” she said. Her face was worn and drawn.
“I just got up.” He could not bear to tell her about his legs.
She turned on a lamp, which shone auburn in her fine silky hair. “A Mr. Jason Toothaker just called,” she said. “He says you haven’t been answering his e-mails. I told him you’d contact him.”
“I’m glad you came in. You look tired.”
“I waited up for you last night.” She went to the window and stood there looking out at the street. The rain was coming down harder now, thumping the roof and pinging on the glass of the windows. Bill wanted her to come to the bed, to touch him.
“Melissa.”
“What?” she said, still gazing out the window.
“I hear Ralph Turgis downstairs,” he commented dully. Would she not turn and look at him? Her slender hand held the cord to the drapes. He stared intently at her, hoping that she could read his thoughts and come to him.
“Yes, what about him?” Her voice was distant, annoyed.
“I was just wondering. Did we pay him to supervise the construction? I would rather not have that man in my house.”
“We’ve signed a contract with him,” Melissa said wearily. “He gets ten percent.”
Why had they ever started the bay windows? Bill thought to himself. The new windows were just one more unnecessary project over which Melissa would drive herself into a nervous craze. And they could no longer afford them.
“I’ve always wanted some curves in this house,” Melissa said. She sighed and leaned out of the open window, letting the rain hit her face. “It’s supposed to rain through the weekend. I’m glad it’s raining.”
Bill looked at his wife, her face and hair damp with the rain, and he wanted terribly to hold her. If she would not come to him, he would go to her. He rose from the bed, took a step toward her, and crumpled to the floor.