Make Me Work (5 page)

“And she said she wanted me to knock her up.”

“Yup.”

I have to say, this amazes me. Rebecca and I had a terrible fight this morning before I got in the shower. She was gone when I got out. Usually, when she sleeps over with me here, she'll at least stay for coffee in the morning. I'll make a big pot and maybe Dwight and Anita will roll in and we'll all have a cup together. That's how I met Rebecca in the first place, by subletting the first floor of this house; Anita liked me so much she fixed me up with her old friend. Then she decided I had the eye for video and she hired me to work upstairs at Paradise Productions. You don't usually think, when you rent an apartment, that you're getting a whole new life, but it happened to me.

“Can I give you some advice?” Anita says. “Do it so she has the kid in the spring. Everybody told me, ‘Anita, whatever you do, don't be pregnant in the summertime.' That was the one thing I was supposed to remember. So what do I go and do?” She raises herself on one elbow and counts with her fingers. “In fact, right now would be the perfect time. She'd drop the kid in May.”

“Anita? Didn't you kind of get pregnant by accident?”

“Walter! We always thought we might try someday. It crossed our minds. Don't call my baby an accident!”

“I just meant you're not really the family-planning type, you and Dwight.”

“You're right. We're more the walk-off-the-edge-of-a-cliff type.” She selects a new ice cube from the bucket and burnishes her face some more. Then she stops, lapsing into reflection. “Do you think that's a problem?”

“No, I have a lot of respect for people who walk off cliffs.”

“You're nice, Walter,” she says. “I'm glad we found you. Now what's going on up there? You're not telling me anything.”

“Benny's molecules are attacking the other molecules. Benny's are winning.”

“Oh, good. We're up to the molecules. What's after that?”

“The scientist comes on and starts talking.”

“Right. Stop it there,” she says. “Let's think this through. We have the nice molecules. Why do we need a scientist talking about them?”

“Because Benny said we have to?”

“Yeah, but that can't be the reason. Scientists are boring. People turn off when they see scientists. No offense.”

“What do you mean ‘no offense'? I'm not a scientist.”

“But maybe you played a scientist once. Like that guy in the commercial who says, ‘I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV.'”

“I've never played a scientist.”

“Well, forget it, then,” she says. “What am I apologizing to you for?”

“I think we should crowbar the scientist in. Benny wants him.”

“I know, I know,” she sighs, rearranging herself on the floor and resting her arms on the medicine ball her belly has become. “Don't you sometimes wish Benny never found his niche in life?” Then she starts to giggle, but that jostles the baby too much. “Ow. It always kicks me when I laugh. It hates it when I'm happy.”

Benny is Benjamin Silk, our client. Anita and Dwight are actually fond of Benny, partly because he's one of their best accounts, but also because he sees the world the way they do, as a collection of bites—verbal ones in Benny's case, the maxims and mottoes by which he manages reality. “Niche in life” is one of his favorites. He found his, and now everybody else had better find theirs. Me in particular. Benny sees me up here, an out-of-work actor writing video scripts, and he pegs me for a guy wandering through life in his boxer shorts, trying to remember what he did with his niche. He would like to save me from this fate. But that's the problem: I think niches are fate. Consider the unlikely people who manage to rendezvous with their niche. I've known a carpenter named Tilt and a tree surgeon named Wilde. Rebecca goes to a dentist named Payne.

And then there's Benny Silk himself. The first time I encountered him I thought he was the most abrasive person I'd ever met. Then I found out his line of work: abrasives. Benny's the marketing director for an abrasives manufacturer. If it can scrape the surface off an object, if it can grind something down to a nub, if it can scour, sand, buff, or polish to a deep luster, Benny's company makes it. But he wasn't always in abrasives. He's done laminates and films, adhesives and coatings. Did a long stretch in lubrication. They all had their rewards, but they weren't his niche. Then Benny entered the realm of grit and found himself. He became an abrasives evangelist. “You gotta be rough to be smooth, son,” he barked at me the moment we met, apropos of nothing except perhaps my scratchy chapped hand crushed in his lotion-soft one.

Anita and I have been editing Benny's latest project for two weeks now—an infomercial about a fabulous new line of synthetic sandpaper. That's twice the editing time in the budget, and it's still lying there dead. We can't figure out how to jolt it into life. The sandpaper in question is called Veritas Grit—christened by one of Benny's young marketeers from the Harvard Business School. Benny couldn't be more proud of this new stuff if it came from inside his own body, but he knows he's got a hard sell on his hands. Our tape claims that Veritas Grit works as well on metal as it does on wood, works even better on plastic, works wet or dry, and lasts longer than the competition's best stuff. The problem is, it costs about twice as much. People will see the price in the store and go for the other brand. We have to convince them. To this end, we've cut in testimonials from users in the field, official company demos, Tempesto's computer-animated molecules. Today we spent the morning playing with the idea that Veritas Grit is “the sandpaper of success,” before we finally dropped that, out of shame. Still, Benny wants some compelling something, and whenever clients want something and don't know what it is, they go with an authority figure. Benny has forbidden us to remove this scientist.

Dwight lurches in, a skinny six-foot-six-inch man in a red T-shirt with a yellow peace symbol on the front, sharkskin slacks, low-slung tasseled loafers, translucent green nylon socks. “How's that old rough cut?” he says. “Getting it smoothed out?”

“It's beginning to grate on us,” I say.

“It's grinding us down,” Anita says.

“Rubbing you wrong?” says Dwight, smiling brightly and joining his bride on the floor. “Going against your grain? Taking the edge off?”

“Dwight,” I say, “do you notice anything about this room?”

He tumbles one of Anita's ice cubes in his mouth for a minute as though polishing a jewel. “Hot in here,” he says around the ice.

“We can't work under these conditions, Dwight. Look at poor Anita.”

“I told Anita she should be home where it's cool,” Dwight says, patting her head. “But Anita's a big girl. She wants to work.”

Alongside Dwight's bony frame, Anita seems to have doubled in size in the heat, like bread dough. “I just want to wrap this tape,” she says to the ceiling. “I just want to finish this project and go have my baby. And I can. I can. I just have to do it lying down, without moving.”

“Dwight, get Tempesto over here to fix this air conditioner.”

“Not possible, Walter. Tempesto's working on something else for me right now. Very important.”

“More important than finishing this wretched thing?”

“As a matter of fact, that's what he's working on. I've enlisted his help.”

“No, Dwight,” says Anita. “That can't go in this tape.”

“I think it's just what this tape needs,” Dwight says. “We need to show Benny's sandpaper in action. Show people the power of Veritas Grit!”

“Benny'll never go for it.”

“Anita, don't say that. We haven't even pitched it to him yet.”

“Pitched what?” I say.

“What are you doing tonight, Walter?” Dwight asks.

“Busy. Tied up.”

“With Rebecca? She's invited.”

“To what?”

“I already invited her,” Anita says. “She thinks it's stupid.”

The intercom beeps and Susie's transistorized voice issues from the speaker. Susie is our new Korean receptionist, discovered by Dwight in the corner store just days after her family arrived in the States.
“Dwight, Tempasta on two,”
Susie says.
“Tempasta for Dwight.”

“Speak of the devil,” Dwight says.

I dive for the phone and punch line 2. “Tempesto, we're being roasted alive! You're torturing a pregnant woman! Get over here right now!”

Then Dwight clambers up and we wrestle for the phone. He wins, having the advantage of being on his feet. “What's up?” he asks Tempesto.

“Fix our air conditioner, you bum!” Anita calls out.

“Again?” Dwight says. “For God's sake, Tempesto. Do they have our stuff? Great. O.K., I'll grab Walter and we'll be right over.”

“No! You can't take Walter!” Anita cries, waving her arms like an overturned crab.

Dwight hits the intercom button. “Susie to Editing Suite B. Suite B calling Miss Susie.”

“Where is Tempesto, anyway?” I ask.

“Encountering some difficulties,” Dwight says, fanning Anita with a folded Boston
Globe
. “Anita, you're my pregnant wife. I don't want you to be unhappy.”

“Then go work on your own project and leave us alone!”

“I finished my project. I came in around three and wrapped that one up.”

“How can you work with no sleep like that?” I say.

“That's when I'm at my best, Walter. If I'm well rested, I think too much. You can really screw yourself up, thinking.”

Susie appears in our doorway in a state of excited wonder, her arms and eyelids fluttering like hovering birds. I can never decide if Susie grasps the strangeness of her fate or if she thinks crazy video people await every girl who comes to America.

“Susie,” Dwight says. “Anita's uncomfortable.”

“Too hot for mothership!” says Susie, fanning her perspiring throat.

Dwight pulls a clump of bills from his pants pocket and extracts a couple of twenties. “Take the rest of the afternoon off, Susie. Take Anita to a nice air-conditioned movie. Eat ice cream.”

“Tank you, Dwight!” Susie says.

“It's air-conditioned at home,” Anita says. “We could rent
Rosemary's Baby
. Or maybe
The Exorcist.”

“I like romantic,” says Susie, following us to the door.

“I've seen all the romantic ones.”

“Tempasta have many kidnapping!” Susie adds.

“Kidnapped?” I say. “Again?”

The radio in Dwight's air-conditioned 1964 Bonneville says that joggers shouldn't be jogging today—it's ninety-eight degrees, with an air inversion trapping car exhaust like a humidor—but as we cross Storrow Drive they're out in normal numbers, running in place as they wait for the light, poised to inject themselves into Boston's jugular vein. They look like tropical fish schooling outside our windows in their colorful shorts and shoes, gasping for air. Dwight is talking to Benny Silk on his cellular phone, taking the sports-fishing approach to client management—paying out some line, letting Benny run a little. “You're absolutely right, Benny,” he's saying into the phone. “Yup, yup, I couldn't agree more.” We cross the river and take Memorial Drive, past the Harvard sunbathers on the banks of the Charles, and by the time we turn on to River Street toward Central Square, Dwight is reeling Benny in: he will meet us after work at an industrial building in Somierville, next to Route 93, where Dwight will unveil his secret weapon of sandpaper salesmanship. Then Dwight hangs up.

“Can I make a call on that? I've never talked to anybody on a cellular phone.”

“What are you, early man? I'm riding in a car with early man?”

I call Rebecca at the TV station where she makes documentary films. I hate it when we have a fight and then she leaves, and I can't even remember what the fight was about. If she wants to have my baby, she must like me O.K., but a few sweet words would improve my day. “Guess where I am,” I say.

“I tried to call you before,” she says. “They wouldn't put me through.”

Her trying to call could mean our fight is over. Or it could mean she wants to fight some more. “Anita made Susie hold our calls. Because of the crunch we're in.”

“Then I left a message on your machine downstairs.”

“Dwight wouldn't let me stop there. We're going to rescue Tempesto.”

“Where are you?”

“Driving down River Street.”

“I hate that. Why do people have to talk on the phone in their cars?”

“Would you like to ask Dwight? It's his phone.”

“I'm mad at Dwight. That's what I was calling about. Everybody knows Anita's a nut, but what's his excuse?”

“For what?”

“For letting her work in her condition, and then taking her to this hippy dippy thing tonight.”

“Hippy dippy?”

“You don't think a belt-sander race is hippy dippy? Maybe the Merry Pranksters'll be there. Maybe we'll all drink some electric Kool-Aid.”

“I've been wanting to get a new outlook on things.”

“When I'm a week overdue, you better not pull stuff like this on me.”

“We're having a baby?”

“I meant if we ever did. Which I doubt we will, since I'm with a man from Mars.”

“This is the first I've heard about it.”

“Precisely. I've tried to bring it up about a hundred times. But you were on Mars.”

“She's mad at you, too,” I tell Dwight, holding out the phone. “Belt-sander races, huh? Fascinating.”

“I was planning to tell you,” he tells me, and then, into the phone, he says, “What did I do?” After a good long tongue-lashing, he finally gets a word in. “She insists on working, Rebecca,” he says. “I want her to stay home. I am not a slave driver. It's her tape. She's the producer. I'm the executive producer. You went to college with her, you know how she is. I need Walter there tonight. Our client has taken a liking to him. You're coming, right? I was counting on you to bring Anita. You'll love it. Tempesto? He's being held for ransom. Yes, again. Don't ask me. O.K. Bye.”