Résumé With Monsters (12 page)

"It's not that," Philip said, "It's this. Listen."

He read the beginning of the motivational pamphlet:

How would you feel if, right after the wedding ceremony, your wife turned to you and said she was leaving you for the best man? If your answer is "discouraged" or "betrayed" then you can sympathize with the plight of many modern employers. For far too many employees, loyalty is a dead word. Employees are job-hopping at the first sign of adversity. If they aren't given a raise during their first month on the job, they are out the door. If the economy takes a turn for the worse and the boss asks everyone to be patient and hang in without a raise, all he gets is a lot of blank, cold stares. "Tough luck," Mr.
Gimee
says, "I'm out of here."

But if you think loyalty is dead and buried, you just might have another think coming. One disgruntled employee, let's call him Bob, quit his job when his employer, suffering heavy financial losses from real estate deals gone sour, was forced to cut employee salaries in order to meet the overhead. Bob left and found himself being interviewed by another employer. This employer said, "I see, Bob, that you have lots of experience, but I see that you have rarely worked at a job for over two years. I am afraid this sort of job-hopping is not what we are looking for. We suspect that you won't be happy here either, that the minute the going gets rough, you will be gone. Frankly, we are looking for people who have worked at one place for a very long time, and who are now seeking employment due to a layoff or the dissolution of their company. I wish I could hire you, but I can't. If you are fortunate enough to find an employer that will overlook this record of discontented drifting, I hope you will give him the loyalty he deserves. That's loyalty spelled L-O-Y-A-L-T-Y."

Philip stopped and tossed the pamphlet on the desk, resting his case. There was more, in the same vein, but surely the portion he had read was sufficient.

"Well?" Ralph said. "Are you suggesting that loyalty is spelled differently? Are you suggesting that it is an outmoded virtue, and that these pamphlets are old-fashioned or corny?"

"No, of course not," Philip said, wondering just what sort of mental aberration
was
responsible for this interview. "I am just not convinced that these pamphlets are really that positive. They seem to be weighted toward—"

"Phil, it's a hard world we live in. It's getting harder all the time. I guess there are some hard truths in these little pamphlets"—here Ralph picked the tract up and waved it between his thumb and index finger— "but we can't just stick our heads in the sand. No sir, we have to come to grips with the issues. I offer an honest wage for an honest hour, and I don't think it is too much to ask for a little
goddam
respect and loyalty because it is my
goddam
money that is paying the
goddam
salaries and there is not a
goddam
day goes by that I don't worry about letting everyone down. You see me in this office late at night. You think I am sitting in here reading
goddam
Penthouse magazine or snorting cocaine? I am in here working my ass off so that we don't go under. I'm doing it for all of you. Why hell, if anything, this pamphlet isn't strong enough. It doesn't talk about the kind of loyalty we employers have. It's a kind of loyalty that burns your guts out, I can tell you that. My doctor says I've got an ulcer that could win prizes."

Ralph ran a hand over his face, as though testing to see if his features were still intact and not irreparably distorted by emotion. He sighed. His shoulders sagged.

"I'm glad we had this talk," he said. "I think it has helped clear the air." Philip realized he was dismissed.

Philip returned to his computer terminal.

In all caps, on the screen, someone had typed,
I'M NOT WEARING ANY UNDERWEAR

Philip turned and saw Monica, her ragged smile full of salacious intent. Philip cleared the screen.

He left work early, punching out without saying goodbye to Monica. It was raining hard and the highway was crisscrossed with small, treacherous rivers. Philip took an early exit—to avoid an accident, he thought. When he found himself on the street where Amelia was rooming with her sister, he realized his subconscious had plans of its own.

The lights were on in her house, so he pulled up to the curb and got out. He'd just say hi. Maybe she'd offer him a cup of coffee. It was a little after nine, not late really, and maybe he could talk to her about MicroMeg. They never talked about it, and—really—they had to.

It wasn't Philip's novel that had torn them apart. It was MicroMeg—and what had happened there.

Philip darted out of his car and into the earnest rain. He made the porch and was pushing the doorbell when he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, that the driveway contained a second car, something silver, low to the ground and polished.

A broken gutter uttered a thin stream of water that licked the back of Philip's neck.

A reservation, a doubt, flared like an arsonist's match. Then the door opened, and Philip blinked at a broad, muscled chest.

"Yeah?" The man was wearing red briefs and nothing else.

A woman, dark-haired and wearing a blue negligee, clung to the man's right arm. Philip knew Amelia's sister from his days of watching the house. She looked at Philip and said, "Who's this?" She turned and licked the man's bicep.

The man said, "You got me."

"Rita? Who's there?" Amelia pushed past the two of them.

"Philip," she said.

"Hi," Philip said.

Amelia was wearing a yellow bathrobe. The make-up was gone from her face, and she looked defenseless. A dab of cold cream adorned the end of her nose.

“I got off work, early," Philip said. "Thought I'd drop by."

"Yeah," Amelia said.

The man and the dark-haired woman had gone away from the door. The woman suddenly laughed, a piercing, lascivious shriek, conjuring, somehow, an explicit and precise image of oral high jinks.

Amelia flinched slightly, shoulders rising as though someone had clutched the back of her neck. "That's Robert, Rita's boyfriend," she said. "You can see why I want to move out."

"Yes," Philip said.

"Are you okay?" Amelia asked.

"I'm fine," Philip said. "I guess I should have called. I'll talk to you later."

He left, driving home in a state of heightened misery.

He could not sleep and so worked furiously on his novel, as though he might actually flee to that fictional land where he ruled—admittedly over a disenfranchised crew that no one wanted and that one editor had called "implausible, unmotivated madmen."

He sat typing furiously, crouched over his computer as the rain came through the ceiling and an army of pots and pans uttered froglike exclamations of delight.

The novel could not shelter him. He kept seeing Amelia's face. The thought bloomed wickedly in his mind, inspired by the arrogant male loutishness of bikini-briefed Robert:
What if she finds someone else?

13.

In the morning, Amelia called. "I'm sorry," she said. "You can see why I have to get my own place." He could.

After the call, he got out of bed and showered. The cast had been removed two days ago, and its absence felt unnatural. He still couldn't move his leg at the knee and had been instructed in various exercises to restore muscle tone. He scrubbed the pale flesh and the bright scar at the knee. He thought about the general flimsiness of human beings, and the specific, blown-glass fragility of Philip
Kenan
.

As he came out of the shower, the phone rang again.

"Philip
Kenan
?"

"Yes," Philip said, instantly wary, always ready for bad news.

"My name is Richard
Klausner
, and I'm an editor at Wingate House here in New York."

Wingate House, Philip thought. Maybe the second biggest independent publisher out there.

"Sorry we took so long getting back to you, but nobody here knew what to make of your book. I loved it, but you know how it is, you have got to get a lot of heads nodding in unison these days before you can do anything. Everyone said, 'Yeah, sure, Richard, maybe you didn't notice, this book is two thousand pages long. And this guy
Kenan
is nobody, not Norman Mailer, not Stephen King, not Jackie Collins. We are talking an unknown author, with no track record, dropping a thirty dollar plus book on a sluggish market. Forget it.'"
Klausner
paused, chuckled.

"They had a point," he said. "But I was ready for them. Listen. See how this sounds. I said, 'You're right. We can't do that. I understand that. So forget a two-thousand-page book. Think five books.'"
Klausner
stopped speaking abruptly. Philip leaned into the receiver's silence, expecting more. The silence expanded.

"Well, what do you think?"
Klausner
finally asked.

"I don't follow you," Philip said.

"Five books,"
Klausner
repeated. "We take
The Despicable Quest
, and we chop it into five neat, marketable, repeat-business, cycling sales fantasy novels. That's what I told them. And guess what, Philip?"

"Ah—" Philip said.

"Yep, they loved it. You are in. Congratulations."

Philip hardly heard the rest of the conversation. He had sold his novel. After years of labor, after it had developed a bloated life of its own and had come to seem more of a parasite than a potential breadwinner, it had sold.

Philip called Amelia back but got no answer. He realized, then, that she was at work, had probably called from there during a break. He didn't have that number. He decided he would call her from Ralph's that evening.

With a moment to think, he realized that Amelia might not be delighted with this news.

She hated the book, after all.

#

That night, Bingham congratulated him, shaking his hand gravely. "May it bring you no grief," he said. They stood in the back door of the shop while Bingham smoked a cigarette. Rain hissed across the parking lot and the sky trembled with lightning. Thunder was a constant, no- nonsense, mean-dog growl rolling from massive cloud-speakers.

"I can't believe I have finally sold this book," Philip said.

Philip was so cheered by his sudden good fortune that he even announced the news to Monica.

Philip hadn't expected much enthusiasm, zombies being notoriously reserved. Her reaction was heated. She glared at Philip.

"I guess you'll get famous now," she said. "I guess you will quit here. I guess it is all over between us."

She turned quickly back to her keyboard and began banging the keys with savage fury.

Yes, I'll quit,
Philip thought. Editor
Klausner
had suggested a ten-thousand-dollar advance for the first in the series. "I'm sending along a contract and the names of a few agents. You might like to get an agent before going ahead on this. This sort of multiple book series deal can be a little trickier than the standard contract."

Ralph Pederson flew by, snapping an order from the fax and dropping it on Monica's table.

I'm quitting
, Philip thought. The impulse was to grab Ralph as he raced by and say, "I quit," but Philip found an equal exhilaration in holding the knowledge within him where it sang with self-contained power.

Philip had had a lot of jobs in his life. The euphoria of quitting a bad job was rivaled only by good sex. In the endless series of job interviews that were a direct consequence of this quitting ecstasy, Philip had often fantasized of a time when he was rich. He would continue, he thought, to go on interviews. He would listen to the fat man with three chins say, "We are important people handling important documents written by important people, and it is imperative that we work efficiently. I want you to tell me why you feel you would be a real asset to our team. What skills and insights could you bring us? What...."

He would let the words wash over him. He would nod his head and look rabbit-scared and at the end of the interview, he would shake the man's hand and thank him, as unctuous as
Uriah
Heep
, and he would walk out of the office, past all the desks of bored secretaries and clerks and typists and photocopiers, and he would take the stale elevator, crowded with men in wrinkled, sweat-permeated suits. He would land in the air- conditioned moonscape of the lobby, and he would walk quickly across the marble floor, push the glass doors open, and step into the sunlight, the slow, ponderous heat of Austin's summer, and he would shout, as though calling down angels, "I'm rich. I don't have to work there. I don't ever have to work there." He would feel as clean and clear as a pilgrim purged of sin at a holy shrine.