Dying Wishes (29 page)

A couple of
thirtyish eager beavers in pinstriped suits and rolled-up shirtsleeves passed
by, earnestly trashing Hartford’s only daily newspaper, the
Courant
.
 
One of them waved a copy for emphasis as he
attempted to impress his colleague with a badly thought-out diatribe on
unnecessary sensationalism and the general incompetence of the paper’s
publishers. That subject exhausted, he sniffed the air suspiciously and
sneered,
“
Somebody’s smoking.”

I immediately
wished for a cigarette.
Ah, the good old days.

I pulled a
notepad from my purse, intending to organize the myriad projects and deadlines
Bellanfonte
had flung at me during our meeting that
morning. Instead I found myself reflecting on the events that had led up to
this moment on a park bench.

One month ago my
business card had read, “Sarah Kathryn Lawrence, Manager of Marketing and
Investor Relations,
TeleCom
Plus.” I had been
recruited to
TeleCom
some three years earlier when
the company was an up-and-coming telecommunications equipment distributor in a
burgeoning market. Within a mere two years,
TeleCom’s
management had bungled every opportunity that came their way until the
stockholders, weary of watching the value of their investments erode, openly
rebelled. When the price per share dropped below half its original value with
no bottom in sight, I resigned and went home to review my career options.

When I walked
away from my mahogany-paneled office, I was looking at eighteen years to
retirement. I had a hefty mortgage on my condominium at The Birches in
Wethersfield and a car payment. My son Joey and daughter Emma were both
self-supporting, but my two elderly cats, Jasmine and Oliver, expected to eat
regularly and ran up astonishing vet bills fairly frequently. Since I had no
intention of ruining my five-year relationship with Armando Velasquez—the sexy,
Latino comptroller of
TeleCom
Plus—by marrying him,
shared domestic expenses were not in my future. I still had to make ends meet,
so the question was, how did I plan to do it?

I admitted to
myself that I no longer enjoyed schmoozing clients or enticing prospective
customers into buying some product or service they really didn’t need. Truth
be
told, marketing had never really appealed to me. It’s
just where my skills had landed me in the booming economy of the ‘80s, but in
the early days of my career, I had been one hell of a good secretary. What’s
more, I enjoyed hands-on work far more than I did the meandering meetings,
cocktail hours and client lunches of my ensuing marketing years.

With all of this
in mind, I decided to bag the whole management track and return to my
administrative roots as the esteemed
aide de camp
to a top gun. I would
bask in reflected glory while avoiding the stresses of client handholding and
personnel supervision.

On Sunday
morning I snapped open the
Courant’s
employment section and saw BGB’s ad
for a “seasoned executive assistant” to support a nationally acclaimed estate
law expert on a temporary basis. In addition to a thriving law practice, he had
a heavy speaking and writing schedule and needed a special assistant for the
next six months. Perfect, I thought. I can get my feet wet and walk away with
no hard feelings at the end of that time. My workday would be stress free, and
at 5:00 p.m. I would leave it all behind.

I carefully
stripped down my résumé, substituting phrases like “Marketing Assistant” for my
executive titles and striking out most of the supervisory functions I had performed.
The result was a still truthful, albeit streamlined, summary of my job
experience, guilty only of sins of omission. I faxed it off. By Wednesday I was
chatting up Paula Hughes, BGB’s human resources manager. On Thursday
Bellanfonte
himself interviewed me briefly.
 
When I was offered the job on Friday at a
very fair salary, I accepted with alacrity.

“You’re crazy,”
said my elderly, outspoken neighbor Mary Feeney.

I love Mary, but
she’s hardly one to be calling anybody crazy, being more than a little dotty
herself. Mary retired in 1985. She now spends her days annoying The Birches’
property manager, who had once been unwise enough to chastise Mary for an oil
spot left on her driveway by her disreputable Chevy sedan.

“You managed a
staff of ten. Now you’re going to regress to typing and filing?
Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”
She blew a raspberry and hung up.

“You’re out of
your gourd,
Mamacita
,” stated my daughter
Emma, who has never fully recovered from one semester of high school Spanish.
“You were a libber, for God’s sake, and you made darn sure I got my paralegal
certification. Now you’re telling me you’re going back to fetching coffee?”

“There’s far
more to administrative work these days,” I countered stubbornly.

“Uh huh,” she
muttered in disgust and disconnected.

“No way, Ma!”
exclaimed my long-haul trucker son Joey when I delivered my news to him along
with the spaghetti dinner he had requested for his Sunday night stopover.
“You’re a manager, for crying out loud. Now you’re going to type somebody
else’s letters?”

“For the
moment,” I said, patting his whiskery cheek, which always startled me a little.
“It’s temporary, remember.”

“If that is what
you really want to do, then of course, you must do it,” said Armando later that
evening in his delightfully accented baritone, “but frankly
mi
corazón
, it sounds just a little, how do you say it in
English,
loco
?”

“Loco,” I told
him a tad tersely. “It’s
loco
in Spanish and loco in English. Nuts,
crazy, wacko.
All the
same thing.”

He took my hand
in his and brought my fingertips gently to his lips. In the interest of not
ruining a perfectly good evening, I allowed him to change the subject.

And so, like a
rebellious teenager, I presented myself on Monday, June 16, to BGB’s training
coordinator, Beverly Barnard, for my first orientation session. My training,
which I was certain would be a breeze, had been scheduled during one of
Bellanfonte’s
lecture tours to give me time to settle in,
as he had phrased it. Hah! The truth was that the big weasel had slithered off
to lie low during what was known throughout the support staff, I later learned,
as Hell Week.

After I filled
out half a dozen employment forms, the balance of my first morning was devoted
to a mind-boggling introduction to BGB’s word processing and document management
software, all of which had been customized to meet the specific needs of a
large law firm with offices in multiple states. The training was conducted in
spacious, state-of-the-art quarters equipped with ergonomic everything on the
thirty-sixth floor. As I enjoyed the comfortable surroundings, it occurred to
me that I had never seen my workspace, and I asked Beverly where I would
actually be located. I had a vague notion of a small but nicely equipped outer
office leading to a tastefully furnished inner sanctum, suitable quarters for
the firm’s biggest rainmaker and his executive assistant. If my office turned
out to be a big smaller than those to which I had been accustomed, well, I
would graciously adapt.

Beverly ushered
me up an enclosed flight of stairs and down a narrow aisle, stopping in front
of one of the offices that rimmed the exterior wall of the thirty-seventh
floor. I peeked inside. Piles of paper and
Redwell
files overflowed a large desk, and cardboard file boxes were stacked
everywhere. A credenza behind the desk held books and more files, and a
computer workstation filled the gap between the two pieces of furniture. I was
surprised that the office hadn’t yet been emptied of the previous occupant’s
things, but no doubt that would happen before my orientation was completed. I
had noticed a painting crew in an office down the hall. Perhaps this one was
next on their list. With fresh paint and some nice floor plants, it would suit
me fine.

Beverly
consulted a pocket directory,
then
turned away from
the office into which I had been peering and pointed to a cramped,
nasty-looking little cubicle, one of dozens that faced the exterior offices.

“This is you,”
said Beverly. “See you after lunch.” She disappeared back down the aisle.

For several seconds
my brain refused to engage. The pod, as I would soon learn a secretarial
workspace was called, was about twelve by six feet and surrounded by elbow-high
barriers. Two desks and two chairs, all
circa
1950, were crammed against
the front of the enclosure. A computer workstation occupied fully half of each
desk. A clerical worker tapped away at the keyboard on the right side of the
pod. She was possibly the most stunning black woman I had ever seen. Soft,
brown curls fell to her shoulders, her skin was the color of milk chocolate,
and her figure, what I could see of it, was curvaceous. She looked up and gave
me a warm smile, charmingly framed in dimples.

“Welcome, pod
mate! I’m Charlene Tuttle, Victor
Bolasevich’s
secretary.” Her eyes were pure turquoise and as untroubled as the Caribbean, of
which they reminded me.

I can only
imagine the picture I must have made with my head swiveling in disbelief from
the door of what I now understood was
Bellanfonte’s
office to the pod and back again.

“You’re
kidding!” I blurted, and Charlene’s smooth brow furrowed.

I mumbled
something about having a headache, blundered to the main elevator lobby, and
gritted my teeth during the plunge to the Metro Building’s second-floor
cafeteria, where I swallowed two
Advils
, nursed a cup
of tea, and rehearsed how I would confront my new boss at the first
opportunity.

Since
Bellanfonte
was safely on the west coast, however, there
was no one to confront for the moment. I reminded myself that however ludicrous
my situation might be, it was only temporary. That thought got me through the
afternoon training session on the firm’s hellishly complex system for recording
each lawyer’s time in six-minute increments, and shortly after five, I slunk
home through the rush hour traffic on autopilot. Two glasses of Pinot
Grigio
later, I had convinced myself that first impressions
were often
misleading,
I was probably overreacting,
blah
blah
blah
. I put
myself to bed.

But the next day
was more of the same: training on spreadsheet software, training on the
telephone system, training on electronic mail and calendar maintenance. Again,
my only break was at noon, and I returned to the thirty-seventh floor to take
another look at my workspace, determined to be objective.
 
After all, I lectured
myself,
the firm could hardly be expected to invest in quarters they would soon be
abandoning. Had not
Bellanfonte
himself shown me
plans for new offices atop the
CityView
building on
which ground would be broken any day now?

On this day I
took the interior stairs down from the firm’s data processing department on the
thirty-ninth floor. As I passed thirty-eight I gazed wistfully at the elegant
reception area in which clients awaited their expensive attorneys. Then I
proceeded doggedly to thirty-seven. This time I noticed an array of cheesy
photographs on the stairwell walls, four eight-by-ten enlargements of old,
Caucasian
men. The prints were amateurishly framed and hung
askew on carpet tacks banged into the walls.
Portraits of the
founding fathers, no doubt.

The door leading from the stairwell to the main corridor jammed on
some duct tape that patched a three-corner tear in the carpeting, so I had to
yank it open. I turned right and traversed the narrow aisle until I came to the
half-empty double pod outside
Bellanfonte’s
office.

Dismayingly, nothing had changed. Once again, Charlene sat at her
computer, typing busily. My space, which struck me as an odd term for quarters
so small, was still cramped, dusty and surrounded by cartons of files. The
cheap veneer on the desk was held in place with tape in several spots. The
computer station looked relatively new, but the transcription machine had a
headset that would have done the Marquis de Sade proud.

“So how’s it going?” asked Charlene in an attempt to make
conversation as I stood there numbly.

How on earth do you stand this?
I wanted to shriek, but Charlene appeared to be perfectly
composed. “It’s an adjustment,” was what finally came out of my mouth,
and
one I have no intention of making,
I finished silently. I sank into the
antique secretarial chair and held my leather shoulder bag in my lap like a
shield.

“Yes, I remember,” Charlene offered sympathetically. “Listen, I
really have to visit the women’s room, and there’s nobody else around to answer
the phones. Hey, why don’t you give it a try? These three are Donatello’s
lines, and these two are Victor’s. The top two on your console are your lines.
The others belong to me, the land analyst in the office next to Donatello’s,
and the paralegals behind that partition over there. Just punch this button
here whenever you see it blink more than twice, and whoever’s line it is will
roll over into your console. I’ll be right back.”