So Much for That (30 page)

When he eased on top of her, Carol’s distorted, twitching face bore superficial resemblance to the expression she’d worn when he caught her slathering her pussy with Suave, but was probably closer to the wobbly grimace of a patient about to submit to a colonoscopy. Since Carol obviously wasn’t going to help, he rose up on one hand and with the other tried to position his disabled ward for entry, wondering if you could
organize wheelchair access to a vagina. Pushing at her, he cringed as his dick buckled. He tried one more time by keeping his middle finger underneath the shaft like a makeshift splint, but with one, he had to admit, graceful maneuver Carol was out from under him and standing beside the bed. “I can’t.” Shaking despite the muggy July, she reached for the nightgown scrunched behind her pillow. “I’m sorry. I tried, but even if you could get it in, Jackson, I can’t do it. It’s too repulsive.”

Carol was not a theatrical person, and he didn’t really believe that she rushed to the toilet to throw up. But she did flee to the bathroom and close the door, and she was gone for a long time.

Y
es, Mr. Pogatchnik, it’s just that—”

“You hear me? Not on my time. I’ve cut you plenty slack because of your wife, Knacker. But I’m not running a hospice here. A business is a business.”

Jackson peeked around his partition. Spattered in freckles, Pogatchnik had short legs, a short neck, and short, Vienna-sausage fingers. In that red-and-white striped shirt, big-butt Bermudas, and a backward baseball cap that from this angle looked like a beanie, he needed only a large lollypop to complete the picture of an overgrown toddler. He was the only one in the office with enough natural padding to stay warm in summer togs; by contrast, in mid-August Shep was wearing a down vest, and he’d learned to type in gloves. Pogatchnik clearly took the Alpine gear as admonition, and since June the cycle had only accelerated: Shep arrived in a woolly scarf; Pogatchnik cranked the AC down two more degrees; Shep arrived in ear muffs.

“I’m afraid the phone lines at the World Wellness Group are only open during business hours,” Shep was explaining in a calm, inhumanly even tone that sounded like Carol. “While I’m on hold, I do keep fielding calls for Randy Handy—”

“What did you just call my company?”

“I mean, Handy Randy, of course. That was just, you know, a slip of the tongue.”

“You’re on thin ice, Knacker. Under the circumstances, you figure it’s smart to confuse the name of your only employer with jerking off?”

“No, Mr. Pogatchnik. I don’t know why that came out of my mouth. You must be making me nervous, sir. On account of your—displeasure.”

Fucking hell. It was like listening in on a pipsqueak draftee during basic training, quailing in front of his sergeant back in the days before the volunteer army began coddling the troops with Oreos. It made Jackson mad, and maybe it wasn’t fair, but mad at Shep. The groveling in the next cubicle made him feel personally betrayed. What do you want to bet that “Randy Handy” slip really was a mistake, and not the sly, purposive subversion that it should have been? A recently installed office rule, the “Mr. Pogatchnik” routine was at least not Shep’s ass-lick innovation. In an era when everyone from restaurant patrons to prime ministers went by first names, the absurd formality had gratifyingly warped to the tongue-in-cheek; though the fat red-haired toad was too stupid to notice, all over the office “Mr. Pogatchnik” rang with overt sarcasm.

“Personal calls are personal calls,” said Pogatchnik. “Which you make at lunch, on your own cell.”

While organizing work crews throughout the rest of the morning, Jackson chewed on a mystery that he’d never got his head around. The rest of the staff had always liked Jackson, or at least they put up with him—and tolerance, in such close-quartered, shoulder-to-shoulder work, believe it or not was something. But they’d always
respected
Knacker, even if back when Shep called the shots they hadn’t always liked him. He’d run a tight ship. Caught you taking a slug from an open white wine bottle in a customer’s fridge, and you were out on your ear. His lofty business principles may have been subject to mockery behind his back, but his workforce was still proud that stand-up practices brought in a host of repeat customers. When a licensed plumber had left behind a gaping hole in a living room ceiling, Shep would opt for a meticulously cut Sheetrock patch, which was cheaper for the customer, even though replacing the whole panel would’ve taken half the time and made Knack twice the money. He’d put in estimates on the low side when he sensed a homeowner was hard up. He’d stood by his price quotes, too, even when a job turned out more fiddly than they ex
pected. It was their fault, claimed Shep, that a job took three times longer than it was supposed to; they should have seen the problems coming.

Of course, Jackson himself rarely ran over the allotted time, since he was fast—
slapdash
, Shep sometimes called it, and the word had stung. Jackson was fast but he was good, or good enough—and good enough was good enough. Polished workmanship was wasted on these outer-borough hovels. Most of the dumps they repaired were originally working-class housing stock, built for laundry workers or for that matter for tradesmen like themselves. Unless the place had been gutted and renovated from the ground up, the kind of la-di-da jobs that Shep had specialized in just made the rest of the house look worse. You know, he’d install a new closet door and frame, and it’d be the only door in the place that was parallel to the floor. The effect was to make the rest of the joint look like a funhouse, all out of kilter—as if he’d smeared “Clean me!” on the side of a dusty van.

Back in the Knack days, Jackson had enjoyed an elevated status for having the ear of the boss, almost like being an unofficial VP. But when Shep sold up, and Jackson’s managerial job description did become official? His co-workers’ deference flew right out the window. By contrast—this was the mystery, and Jackson had to admit that it griped him a bit—despite all the razzing about that “escape fantasy” and despite all the public groveling before “Mr. Pogatchnik” and despite having become an overnight nobody like a fairy-tale prince who’d turned himself into a frog, Shep still commanded a regard that never sank below a surprisingly high baseline level. Christ, the guy couldn’t have humiliated himself more completely. Still, whenever a really sticky job came in—like the one this morning where knocking a hole for a pass-through window between the kitchen and the dining room entailed busting through a solid foot of concrete—to whom did the guys turn for advice? Helpful hint: it wasn’t Burdina.

W
hen lunch came around at last, Jackson forced himself to sidle up to Shep’s station. He’d begged off lunch to do “errands” so many afternoons that his avoidance of his best friend was becoming too obvious.
The trouble was, he was now committed to omitting from his conversation everything he was going through with Carol; just as in boxing, none of his topics could target below the waist. While he could always resort to Mugs and Mooches, a tirade wasn’t as satisfying when its purpose was purely diversionary. “You have to make some call, or can you grab a bite?”

“Forty minutes isn’t enough time to get through to a human being at that switchboard,” said Shep. “The thing is, I got sent a bill they totally refused. It’s for fifty-eight K and change, too. The secretary at Goldman’s office said it may have been some number entered wrong. One digit off, anywhere on the form, and they refuse to pay the whole thing.”

“You realize what a fair whack of their ‘administration costs’ are, don’t you?” said Jackson. “According to Carol, these companies hire scads of people whose whole job it is to find ways
not
to pay the medical expenses of people they’re supposedly insuring. She says these fucks are so good at it that on average they manage to weasel out of thirty percent of the bills they get sent.”

“Yeah, well, whenever they ‘weasel out of it,’ or some middleman transposes a number, the full bill goes straight to yours truly. I’ve got forty-five days to appeal this thing, and it’s already been a month. After the forty-five days are up, I’m stuck with it. And this is just one glitch. These minions at Wellness query everything. Goldman says they even tell him which drugs he can prescribe. He wanted Glynis to use Dermovate along with a course of cetirizine for her skin rashes, but no—Wellness nixed them both. They said use
calamine lotion
. Which is a joke. No explanation, as usual. I guess they’re not obliged to provide one. But these people aren’t doctors. I don’t understand how business graduates of two-year junior colleges are making decisions about what to prescribe my wife.”

“Health insurance is health insurance,” boomed from behind them.

“You got any coverage whatsoever, and you’re
complaining
?” It was
Mr.
Pogatchnik, who regarded eavesdropping as a privilege of high office.

“That contract costs me a fortune, Knacker.”

“Yes, I realize it’s a major line item. In my day—”

“It’s not your day. Haven’t we got that straight yet?
It’s not your day
. Repeat after me?”

“It’s not my day.”

“So don’t imagine you have any idea. When you ran this joint, you were covering a fraction of the workforce I run now. I may have replaced that Cadillac plan you had for Knack with a serviceable little Ford Fiesta. Still, in just eight years, per head? The small-business employer premium has
doubled
.”

“Hey, it costs what it costs, right?” said Shep, and Jackson was relieved to detect, for once, a seditious glitter in his friend’s expression.

“What it costs is too damn much,” said Pogatchnik, who would no more be aware of his reputation for the flabby, faux-profound tautology than he would understand the word itself. “I just renewed, too, and
your wife
was cited as one of the justifications for jacking the price. I sure hope you’re sweet on the lady, ’cause she’s costing me a mint.”

“I am very fond of my wife, thank you.”

“Anyway, all the new hires are on contract, no benefits. So count yourself lucky.”

“I do count myself lucky,” said Shep numbly. “But the new guys. If they get sick, or their kid does. What do they do?”

“Emergency room, or suck it up. Point is, it’s not my problem. The way it oughta be, in my book. They want some fancy insurance package, they can buy it themselves.”

“Private plans…” said Shep. “You don’t pay them enough…”

“I pay them what I pay them. Pretty decent wages, too, since otherwise most of these wets would be packing pork or picking grapefruit.”

“But this medical stuff can be—life and death,” Shep submitted with a nauseating tentativeness. “Offering no benefits seems—a little harsh.”

“I am what I am, right? I’m not handing out ice cream. I’m a businessman. If I don’t turn a profit you’re
all
out on the street. Besides, am I responsible for buying my employees groceries? Am I supposed to find them apartments? Aren’t food and shelter matters of ‘life and death,’ too?”

“Fair enough,” Shep conceded.

“Next thing you know I’m supposed to spring for their flat-screen TVs and premium cable fees. Which, by the way, would be a hell of a lot
cheaper than fucking health insurance, even if I threw in a new dinette set and a book of all-you-can-eat coupons for Pizza Hut.”

“Yeah, I been meaning to ask,” said Jackson, “I wanted to swap my sausage for pepperoni.”

“I hire people,” Pogatchnik bullied on, not the least interested in banter that put his ingrate employees and management on the same side. “I don’t adopt them. Least of all do I adopt their whole goddamned families. You two—for now—I’m stuck with. But I’m telling you, this shit, this big communist cradle-to-grave employment shit, is
over
. It doesn’t make any earthly sense that just because I take on an employee to clear other people’s hairy drains, suddenly I’m supposed to pay for his ingrown toenails. The insulin for his diabetes because he eats too many Krispy Kreme Bavarian custards. His hernia operation after he bangs his squeeze on the side with too much gusto. His ten-year-old’s ADD medication, if only because nobody admits to having a kid anymore who’s thick as pig shit. The five months his blind, harelipped, one-legged premature baby with the mind of an eggplant spends in intensive care, when it should have been thrown out with the bathwater. Not to mention the billions of dollars his wife’s terminal cancer costs before she kicks the bucket anyway, since nobody in this country can die anymore without dragging the entire economy down with them.”

Pogatchnik’s pause baited Shep to take offense, but ever since “So long, asshole!” his self-demoted employee had been a paragon of restraint.

“Unless I quit being held ransom for health insurance, for this whole crowd?” Pogatchnik carried on. “Handy Randy would go under. Realize that’s one of the main reasons American companies are moving overseas, don’t you? Health insurance. Hell, I’d move this outfit to China, too, if only my Mexicans could commute to Queens from Beijing. You guys came to me today, you could have a job. That’s all. A job is a job. As for cancer, you’d die on your own dime. So you chumps don’t like the World Wellness Group, you know where the door is. I’d replace you with a couple of Guatemalans at a fraction of the salary who’d be grateful for the paycheck, who wouldn’t give me any lip, who wouldn’t
misspeak
the name of the company kind enough to employ their sorry
asses, and who wouldn’t have an
attitude problem
because one of them is delusional and still thinks he’s the boss.”

“Just used up fifteen minutes of our lunch break,” Jackson muttered once they’d escaped to Seventh Avenue. “Not enough time for the line at Brooklyn Bread. Guess we’ll just walk. Bastard.”

“He is who he is, right?” said Shep, and they launched toward Prospect Park.

I
hate to admit it,” Jackson said on ninth Street, “but Pogatchnik has a point. I don’t know what those new-hire sons of bitches are supposed to do when they get run over by a delivery truck. Still, plenty of those guys have big families. How’s a little operation like Randy Handy going to cover all their medical expenses? I’m not sure why it should have to.”