A Firing Offense (17 page)

Costa reached behind him and opened the door of an old wall cabinet. He pulled out a bottle of Metaxa and two shot glasses.

“Too early for you, Niko?”

“No.” He poured a couple of slugs with efficiency and we knocked glasses. He sipped and watched as I threw mine back in one quick motion, returning the little glass to the table with a hollow thud.

“You drink like a Spartan,” he said.

“Like my
papou.”

“Your
papou
could drink. But he gave it up when your parents sent you to him.”

“I miss him,” I said.

“He would be proud of you,” Costa said. Like most immigrants he equated my white collar with success.

“I’m doing fine,” I said.

“It’s time you found another woman.”

“I’m not against the idea.”

“The girl you’re with. She’s Jewish?”

“Yes. She’s my friend, like I told you.”

“Friends, okay. And the Jews are good people, very smart in business. But it’s not good to mix, you found that out. Marry a Greek girl.”

He finished his drink and poured two more shots. A gray cat with green eyes did a figure eight around my feet then jumped up onto my lap. Costa reached across the table and picked it off me, tossing it to the other side of the room.

“How is it here in the neighborhood now,
Theo?”

“Not too bad,” he said, and shrugged. “When Toula was alive, I worried more. They took her purse once, when she was walking home with groceries.” His eyes were a faded brown and watery, more from long afternoons of drinking than from bitterness.

“It’s not the same town it was,” I said.

“You don’t even remember how good it was,” he said, suddenly animated. He pointed a finger at my chest. “When I first came here, your
papou
and me swam in the Potomac on hot summer afternoons. Now it’s so dirty, I wouldn’t even throw a photograph of myself into that river.”

I laughed as he finished his shot. I turned the bottle around on the table and read the label.

“Five star, Costa?”

“Yes. Very good.”

“Do you think you’ll go back to Greece?” I asked, wondering why anyone would remain a prisoner in a house like this, in a city where the only common community interest was to get safely through another day.

“No, I plan on dying here. Believe me, Niko,” he said, without a trace of irony, “there is no place in the world like America.”

LATER THAT DAY LEE
and I drove down to Southwest and walked along the water, checking out the yachts in the marina. Continuing west, we ended up at the fish market on Maine Avenue.

Most of the good fish had been picked over by that time of day. I bought some squid, at one forty-nine a pound, from a cross-eyed salt who was attempting to stare at Lee. We took it back to my apartment.

After removing the ink sacks and the center bone, I sliced the squid laterally into thin rings, and shook them in a bag with a mixture of bread crumbs, garlic, and oregano. Then I fried them in olive oil in a hot skillet.

We ate these with lemon and a couple of beers as we watched the first half of the Skins game. For the second half we napped together on the couch in roughly the same arrangement as the night before. We woke as the afternoon light was fading. I drove her back to her car at the store and kissed her good-bye.

Back in my apartment I warmed some soup on the stove. From the television in the living room I heard the stopwatch intro to
60 Minutes
and felt that familiar rush of anxiety, announcing that my weekend was ticking away.

Two hours later I dialed the international operator and reached Greece. For the next ten minutes I was shuttled around to various women who worked the switchboards. Finally I reached my mother at her home in a village near Sparta. I had last spoken to my parents on the day my grandfather died.

We spoke superficially about our lives. She ended most of her sentences with, “my boy” or “my son.” I tried not to confuse the ethnic inflection in her voice with concern or, especially, love. As our conversation pared down to awkward silences between pleasantries, I began to wonder, as I always did, why I had called.

I turned in early that night but lay in the dark for quite a while before I finally went to sleep. Though I forced myself to wake several times during the night, I was unsuccessful in stopping Jimmy Broda from haunting my dreams.

I
WAS NEARLY
done shaving my weekend stubble when Ric Brandon called early Monday morning. He instructed me to change my plans for working on the Avenue and report to the office.

I finished shaving and undid my tie, switching from an Italian print to a wine and olive rep. I changed my side buckle shoes to a relatively more conservative pair of black oxfords that had thin steel plates wrapped around the outside of the toes. I put on a thrift shop Harris Tweed, secured the apartment, and drove to work.

When I reached the receptionist’s desk at half past nine, the office was already bustling with Monday morning’s full fury. Calls from customers who had been stiffed on their weekend deliveries were automatically being forwarded to the wrong extensions. All terminals were printing, and everyone, though they were moving fairly quickly, carried Styrofoam cups of hot
coffee in their hands. The usual line of delivery drivers and warehousemen had formed at the personnel office to complain about Friday’s paycheck.

Marsha was screening the call of an angry consumer, but dug deep for a smile as I tapped her desk and set upright the “Elvis Country” plaque that had been knocked on its side.

Aside from a couple of new plants, the office had not changed in the week of my absence. There were several rows of used metal desks with laminated tops. The desks displayed photographs of children; notes written on small squares of adhesive-backed paper, stuck on the necks of clip-on lamps; rubber figurines from the fast food deathhouses, this year’s being the California Raisins, running across the tops of computer terminals—all illuminated by the green glow of florescence.

I removed my jacket and had a seat at my desk. Marsha had arranged my mail in stacks, separated by solicitations, trade magazines, and important co-op advertising credits and checks. I tossed the junk mail after a quick glance at the return addresses, then went to the employee lounge for a cup of coffee.

When I returned, Ric Brandon was at my desk, his elbows leaning awkwardly on the soundtreated divider that separated Gary Fisher’s cubicle from mine. He was wearing a boxy navy blue suit with a white shirt, and this year’s popular tie among the fast-track M.B.A.s, a green print.

“Where’s the funeral, Ric?” I said, and sipped my rancid coffee.

“No funeral,” he said a little too cheerfully. He looked down at his black wing tips. “I’d like to see you in my office at eleven sharp.”

“Sure, Ric. Eleven.”

He put his head over the divider and told Fisher he wanted to speak to him “right now.” Then Fisher followed Brandon down the hall into his office, where they closed the door behind them.

I checked my watch, pulled the accounts receivable file from my desk, and reconciled my co-op credits. After that I
went through my messages. Karen had phoned twice. I took her messages, along with those from the radio and television reps, local newspapers and magazines, and direct mail houses, and threw them all away. I put the remaining stack of customer complaints under my phone, to be dealt with after my meeting with Brandon.

Fisher emerged from Brandon’s office and shot me a dim glance. He walked in the direction opposite to our desks. As he walked, he stared at his shoes.

In the next fifteen minutes the office became strangely quiet. Though I had seen this many times before, I would not have expected to feel so oddly relieved when it happened to me. Nevertheless, the signs were all around me: the walking in and out of closed doors by management, the avoidance of eye contact, and the whispering into phones as word began to spread by interoffice lines.

I called Patti Dawson and a couple of the vendors with whom I had become close. Then I put on my jacket and walked to the receptionist’s desk.

“I’m running out to 7-Eleven,” I said to Marsha. “You want anything?” Her lips were pursed and there were tears in her eyes. She shook her head, unable to speak. I felt worse for her than I did for myself. “I’ll be back by eleven.”

I passed under the Nutty Nathan’s caricature at the foot of the stairs and walked across the parking lot to my car. Then I drove to a hardware store on Sligo Avenue, had a duplicate made of my office key, and returned to headquarters.

At eleven I knocked on the door of Ric Brandon’s office. He waved me in. I closed the door and had a seat. He lowered the volume of the news program on the radio, pulled out the bottom drawer of his desk, and rested the soles of his wing tips on the edge of it.

“Nick,” he said, his delicate hands together and pointed at me as if in prayer, “this is a follow-up to our conversation in this office a week ago. Do you remember the gist of it?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to reiterate some aspects of it before we continue. In our conversation you basically agreed to play on the management side of the fence in this company, and to work more seriously at your position. This was definitely a fourth down situation, but understand that I allowed
you
to call the play.”

I had spent many nights, lying awake in bed with fists clenched involuntarily, fantasizing about this moment. Usually the fantasy consisted of me firing off a string of cleverly vulgar obscenities, but on weirdly violent nights it ended with me pulling Brandon over his desk by his Brooks Brothers lapels.

Now, looking at his reddening face and hearing his feet slide nervously off the desk drawer that he had only moments before so coolly placed them on, I only wished he’d hurry up and get this done. I must have been grinning, because his plastic smile faded, leaving his fat upper lip stuck momentarily on one of his big front teeth.

“So it was my call, Ric. How did I blow it?”

“Don’t think for a moment that I don’t wish I was sitting here praising your performance. But when you went to work in our Connecticut Avenue store, you went as a representative of management. And you let us down.”

“How so?”

“A very serious complaint was filed last week. A customer called and claimed that two salesmen, fitting the description of John McGinnes and yourself, were intoxicated during business hours. The customer also reported the smell of marijuana in the store. Can you explain this?”

I looked out of Brandon’s tiny window, across the office and through the larger window on the south wall, at the brilliant blue sky. It was one of the last beautifully sunny days of the year.

“Are you letting me go?”

“I’m afraid so, Nick.” His body relaxed in his chair.

“What about McGinnes?”

“I do only what’s right for this company. McGinnes is an
extremely valuable employee. I’m hoping that a very serious conversation with him will straighten things around. He’s the engine that powers that store. Bates and Malone are decent employees, but they’re in that store basically because I need some black faces on my D.C. floor. No, I definitely think McGinnes is salvageable.”

“You didn’t actually take that complaint yourself, did you Ric?”

“Mr. Rosen,” he said unsteadily, “took the call when I was out. He suggested that there was no alternative but to let you go. Frankly, on this point I agreed. The nature of the complaint constituted a firing offense.”

Through the window of the south wall I watched a flock of blackbirds pass across the blue sky. I rose from my chair. “Is that all?” I asked. I stared at him until he looked down at his desk, a little gray in the face but basically unmoved.

“I’ve written up your termination papers, effective immediately,” he said coldly. “You’re eligible for vacation pay, which will come in your final check. I’ll pass this on to personnel.”

I walked out of his office and softly closed the door behind me.

It didn’t take long to clean out my desk. I was quite certain that I was through with retail. I left behind industry related materials, drawing implements, certificates from management seminars, sales awards, and all other evidence of my tenure in the business. Oddly, the things I put into the plastic bag that a tight-jawed Fisher had wordlessly handed me were the most memorable objects of my career at Nutty Nathan’s: a book of matches, on the cover of which was printed “It Pays to Advertise,” which opened up to a pair of paper legs that spread to expose a thick patch of female “wool”; a caricature of me that the office girls had commissioned, with what I thought to be a rather lecherous look in my eyes and with a cigarette hanging trashily out the side of my mouth, circa my smoking days; a set of pencils with erasers shaped as dickheads; and a file of vulgarities that is charitably referred to as Xerox “art.”

All of these things I knew would end up in my apartment’s wastebasket. But on that day, like some sentimental pornographer, I couldn’t bear to leave them in my desk.

I dropped the duplicate key off with the woman in charge at the personnel office, who was busy cutting out clip art for the company newsletter, a waste of paper so heinous that as “editor” she should have been convicted of arboricide. Seaton, the controller who peed with his trousers around his ankles, stopped me in the hall to shake my hand and wish me luck. Though he was wrongfully despised by many employees for the cutbacks he was constantly forced to make, he was the only one that day with the guts to say good-bye.