The Deep Whatsis (8 page)

“Dr. Look?”

“He’s a shrink but he’s not a bad guy. You gotta go see him for insurance and legal purposes, get a clean bill on your mental health, it won’t take ten seconds.”

“Barry,” I say, “I didn’t hit her. I swear I didn’t.”

“Maybe you didn’t,” he says. “Or maybe you did and you just don’t remember because you don’t want to admit it to yourself. You’ve repressed it like in those movies.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I say.

“When I was eight years old I was fucked in the ass by my uncle Charlie, and I didn’t remember a thing about it until last year.”

Suddenly he bursts out laughing. “I’m kidding you. Dr. Look will fix this, alright? Now thank me for saving your job and get the fuck out of my office.”

“I’ll call you from LA,” I say as I leave. “And thank you.”

“No, you won’t call me,” he says as he lights another Newport. “And if you do I won’t pick up.”

As I’m stepping onto the elevator
to return to my office, HR Lady comes rushing after me. I pretend to hit the “open” button but it doesn’t matter as she manages to wave an arm between the doors and they part. I tell her I’m on my way home post-Barry and then to LA.

“Now?” she says.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m going home to pack.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” she asks.

“Am I? What?”

“Juliette.”

The elevator opens on three and HR holds the door for me so that I’ll follow her out toward our grim task. But I don’t.

“Eric, this is your floor,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “Why don’t you take this one yourself?”

She cocks her head to the side, says “You know I can’t do that. You’re her boss, you have to do it, I have to accompany you, those are the rules.”

“Well maybe we could put it off till I get back from LA?” I say. The elevator starts beeping that annoying beep because she’s still holding it open.

“What good would that do?” HR says. “At this point Juliette probably knows what’s going on, waiting will only make it worse.”

“I get that, OK, so what about just not doing it.”

“Not doing what?”

“Not firing her.”

HR looks at me, the doors start to push in slowly against her arm, and the beeping gets louder. “We have to,” she says.

“According to who?”

“Are you really asking me this?” she says.

Our eyes lock for a moment, a moment of truth as it were, and maybe she’s picturing it, the same thing I am, the refusal to fire Juliette being the first volley, ending with me gathering the troops in the fishbowl and announcing that the cruel game is over, the departed will be returning soon, and then HR and I standing there, raising our arms in heroic triumph as a light applause ripples through the group, turning into a thunderous roar of gratitude.

“Eric, this thing is going to take my arm off if you don’t get out here,” she says.

When we get to my office, Juliette Chang is waiting dutifully in a piece of uncomfortable midcentury furniture. She has
her laptop propped up on her knees and she’s working or at least trying to appear like she’s working when we arrive. My assistant gives me a look, I know that look, it’s the “You’re really late for a meeting” look, and indeed Juliette’s been waiting since nine to chat with me, she thinks about Smirnoff or something. But a forty-five-minute wait is the least of her worries, and it’s nothing compared to what I’ve already put her through; in fact, it’s so respectful for me to even show up it’s almost like I’m promoting her, giving her a gift, a bottle of pinot or a few days off or something.

She sees us approaching and looks at me with a big smile; it’s the broadest and phoniest of smiles and she’s been leaning on that smile since she landed at Tate right out of college thirty years ago. Then I see her eyes flit over to HR, she sees the two of us walking together, our strides in synch at this point, and now she knows. She has to know; she’s known all along, she’s known since the day I got here and started firing all the people her age, but the smile stays pasted on, exactly the same, only the degree of effort changes.

A minute later we’re sitting in my office, Juliette and HR and me, and the door is closed. We all get seated and she is just staring at me.

“I’m, um,” I say, not really looking at her. “We’re in a tight position and we, um, due to some client requests we, um, we have to make some deep cuts. I’m very sorry to say this but we’re going to have to—”

“If you think I didn’t see this coming you’re wrong,” Juliette spits out. “For weeks now, months even, I knew. Everyone knows.”

“I’m really sorry, Juliette,” I say. HR begins her speech about our very generous severance package we’re currently offering but Juliette won’t let her even get to the benefits part.

“I’ve come to this building almost every single day of my life for thirty years,” she starts. “I have a sister upstate who suffers from severe diabetes and she can’t work and so I support her and her child.”

“Juliette,” I say, not having any idea why I am interrupting her or what I might say next.

“You know at my age I’ll never get another job in this business. You know how much this means to me and yet you went to all these pains to make it look like you were my friend and we were on the same team.”

“I didn’t want you to … I wanted you to have a …”

“Have a what?” she asks. “A sense of reality? Dignity?”

“Juliette,” HR says softly, wiping moisture from her eyes with the base of her palm. “Let’s just try to—”

“Try to what?” Juliette implores. HR hands her a folder of legal stuff to look over but Juliette doesn’t take it. Both her hands are gripping her laptop tightly and I think she has accepted it and is about to stand up, so I lean forward putting more weight on my toes in anticipation of standing up at the same time as her, and I am wondering if I should shake her hand and thank her for all she’s done for the agency or if perhaps I should hug her since she had divulged so much personal information to me just now. I really don’t know what to do or say and suddenly I have the thought that I wish there were a remote with which I could put Juliette on pause and ask HR Lady what the most
appropriate response should be from me at this time, insincere intimacy or the wise, knowing strength of a real leader, a firm handshake and I look her in the eye and say, human being to human being, “I’m an asshole and deserve to die, I know this now” or something to that effect. What is, after all, the proper way to bring about real change? The proper way to behave in the face of a human face? But before I can formulate what my action will be in response to all this, she begins to speak again.

“Eric,” she says, “I have one thing to ask of you.”

“What is it?” I say.

“Please don’t fire me.”

This is not at all what I expected.

“Without this job I really don’t have anything,” she goes on. “I don’t know what to tell my sister or her son.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

“If you were, you wouldn’t be doing this.”

I look over at HR. Is it too late to take it all back? I give her a what-can-we-do-now look but she won’t make eye contact with me. I look back at Juliette.

“There’s nothing I can do,” I say. “It’s just how it is.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Juliette says, almost happy about it, she always had lots of ideas. “I make a lot of money, I’ll take a pay cut. I’ll take a 50 percent cut. Isn’t that what you have to do, reduce the staff by half? At least that’s the rumor going around. I’ll take a 60 percent cut. Please. Will you think about it?”

Then HR looks at me and there’s a silence and it’s clear I’m supposed to say something, but I don’t know what to say. What
I want to say is “OK, I accept your offer of a 50 percent pay cut, it’s reasonable and well considered, after all, you make more than twice what anyone else at your level makes so I don’t see why we can’t—” But HR would cut me off and remind me that I don’t have the authority to accept her offer, or to make her a counter offer, I don’t really have any authority at all.

At this point Juliette is looking at me the way you would look at someone next to you after a car accident and things are going in very slow motion but you realize that you and the other person are alive although you don’t know yet if you are injured.

“Juliette, I’m sorry, but Eric doesn’t have the authority to accept such an offer at this time,” HR is saying.

“Why not?” Juliette asks. “He’s the Chief Idea Officer.”

“Yes, but anything like that would have to go through corporate and be approved by corporate!”

“Well OK then, I’ll go back to work and you’ll let me know when it’s approved,” Juliette says.

“Who’s corporate?” I ask HR. “Aren’t we corporate?”

Then I’m giving her that what-the-fuck-are-we-doing head shakey look but she’s already on her BlackBerry calling somebody, I’m guessing corporate, and Juliette and I sit there looking at her and waiting but nobody is answering on the other end.

When she turns back toward us there are tears in her eyes.

“I’m talking about the holding company!” she says, “In France! They’re the ones making these decisions. Please. It’s not up to us! They look at salary versus client billing hours
vis-à-vis the AOR contracts and they make the determinations and create their kill list. Juliette, you have to understand this is not about us!”

“How could it not be about you?” she says. “You’re the ones doing it.”

“Because we have to!” HR says.

“You have to?”

“We have to because if we don’t, we’ll get fired,” she says. “You have to understand.”

“And also, full disclosure, we wouldn’t get our bonuses,” I say, and at this HR’s jaw drops and she stares at me.

“That’s a breach, Eric,” she says. “You’ve got to leave now. This is done, it was decided months ago. Please, please understand, Juliette. There’s nothing anyone can do.” And then she turns back to me. “Please go.”

But I just sit there, unable to move.

At my inaction Juliette looks at me and I try to impart, by the letting go of my facial muscles, the sense of abject melancholy that has taken over my entire being. I realize, of course, that what HR is saying is entirely true, that were I to even attempt to make some kind of promise to Juliette right now, and send her back to her cubicle with a sense of hope, it would be completely disingenuous, not to mention self-serving, as it would only delay the inevitable, because anything I would say corporate would overrule, and she would only have to go through the humiliation all over again. I am trying to impart all of this with a single look of resignation, and Juliette to her credit gets it, she realizes it’s really happening now, and she begins to
weep, to herself at first, the sobs pushing up from somewhere very deep within her, someplace she probably didn’t even know existed, a heretofore unknown sub-basement of her psyche. These fears had lived down there for so long that when they finally rise to the surface they are large and scary and uncontrollable, and she is sucking in air so hard and fast it looks like she is drowning. I want to say something comforting now, but it seems too late, it will only be hypocritical, so I look away, out the window. HR puts her BlackBerry away, leans in toward Juliette, and reaches her hand out toward the woman and it finally comes to rest on her knee, which is covered in a black stocking. Finally we look at each other and HR gives me a kind of “What should I do now?” shrug with her shoulders and eyes. I mimic her gesture back to her like a mirror and we sit there sharing the discomfort, or rather HR’s discomfort because at this point, to be perfectly honest, I am too numbed by my present numbness to feel discomfort; this is just something that is happening, to all of us. Then HR gets up and goes out and waves to Damon and Terry and now I am alone with Juliette for a moment. She has let go of her laptop and it has fallen to the floor and she is grabbing the arms of her chair, trying to hold on. I have no idea how long I am sitting there, trying to think of anything other than what is going on, thinking about all the things I have to do today, including making sure there is a Prius available to rent in LA and a beach-facing nonsmoking room at Shutters, when the two stolid African-Americans are in the office and they are taking hold of Juliette and peeling her panic-hewn fists from the arms of the chair. They walk her slowly and wobblingly out of
my office and over to the elevators. Meanwhile my assistant has retrieved Juliette’s jacket from her cubicle and is handing it to her as they pass, and is hugging her—she is still sobbing—and then they turn the corner and I can’t see them anymore.

Dr. Look’s office is in a downtrodden
two-block stretch of Lexington just north of Citicorpse. Every other block in this part of midtown has been razed for the erection of skyscraping hubris-temples to ill-begotten wealth but something went horribly wrong here and the block was never properly developed. I get to the address on the card that Barry shoved at me and see that Dr. Look’s office, also known as Midtown Health, Inc, sits two floors above an Egyptian souvenir and cheap-luggage shop that must be a front for something, possibly black-market kidneys, or passports. I had heard, in the couple of years that I have been at Tate, certain folkloric tales about the company’s founder, Windham Tate, being quite a philanderer, if that is the word, back in his day, which would have been the ’60s and ’70s; how he fucked every young secretary in the place and how there was actually a line item to pay them off if they went after him in court or such, and how he even had a phony doctor who would claim they were all unbalanced. It was making sense now; Barry had sent me to his fixer. I go up the stairs and try the door and it’s locked and so I figure that indeed Dr. Look has moved if he had ever been here at all, if he had ever existed; it could easily be some kind of joke only Barry would find funny. Then I see there’s a buzzer hanging loose from its wire, and
taped to the buzzer is a business card, the same one I have in my hand, only this one is stained and dog-eared. I ring the buzzer, or rather I press it, I have no way of knowing if it is ringing or not. I assume it isn’t. But then as I am about to leave, the door opens. A young goateed man in his midtwenties stands there and stares at me funny, shaking his head as if there’s something wrong.

“Sorry, I was expecting the delivery guy, you’re not the delivery guy, are you?”

“No,” I say, “I’m not the delivery guy.”

“Three days now I’m supposed to get some papers from a conference I recently attended, I’m beginning to think they just tossed them in the river.”

“I’m, I guess you would say, looking for Dr. Look,” I offer.

“I’m Dr. Look, is there anything I can help you with?”

“I was referred by my company. Tate? They said I should see a Dr. Look and I guess that’s you.”

“Oh, of course, come in,” Dr. Look says. He extends his hand and I’m thinking he doesn’t seem old enough to have gone to college and medical school unless he was some kind of a prodigy, which maybe he is. We go inside the space, which is actually a railroad apartment that was never renovated, never turned into a drivers ed school or a CPA’s office like the rest of them on this block. “Take a seat,” he says, gesturing to an old black couch that has been repaired with duct tape. I don’t know what else to do so I sit on the edge of it and watch while he opens and closes the drawers on a row of filing cabinets that take up one wall. On the other wall there’s nothing but a clock, one of
those plastic cat clocks where the eyes move back and forth and the tail wags every second. Eventually he finds whatever he’s looking for, a sheet of paper, and turns toward me. “Here it is.”