But nothing acceptable comes, and I give up.
"I'm really sorry, but would you please tell me your name again?"
"Maya."
"Of course. Hiya, Maya."
She giggles. "Hiya, Mr. Battle."
" Jerry"
"Okay, Jerry," Maya says, sitting down at the computer. She palms the mouse, and the screensaver (a group shot of the whole Battle Brothers gang, leaping in unison) instantly disappears, revealing the last image viewed, which is an overly exposed picture of a pasty-looking white couple doing it doggie-style on the polished deck of a powerboat. They're ordinary right-down-the-middle Heartland-type people you'd see at any shopping mall, both looking straight at the camera with an expression of the same prideful glee that fishermen have in photos when they've just hauled in a prize sailfish.
"Oops," she says, quickly clicking on the boxed X in the corner to get rid of it. But another nested picture of the same two-some takes its place; this time they're waving (the woman leaning on her elbows), like they're saying, Look, no hands.
"Sorry," I hear myself offering in an avuncular, sensitive-to-harassment-of-any-kind mode. "I'll have Jack talk to the fellas.
They shouldn't be looking at this stuff here."
"It doesn't bother me," Maya says. "It's a free country. Anyway, I'd rather have to look at porn than some dumb chart of the stock market."
"Really?"
"Why not? As long as no one's forced into anything, I don't see why I have to freak about it. I'm a big girl. Most of the guys know that just because they look at this stuff here doesn't mean I'm available to them."
"Most? Who doesn't? I'll set them straight."
"It's actually just one, but it's all right. He's harmless."
"You can say. Who?"
Maya points to the door on the garage end of the room.
"Old Sal?"
"He leaves dirty notes on my desk. He thinks I don't know it's him but he handwrites them and I know his script."
"Really?"
"Wait a sec." She goes up front to her desk and returns with a full card hand of square yellow Post-it notes, indeed marked in thick lead pencil with Sal's distinct left-hand scribble, fat and squat and bent the wrong war Rock hard for you. Will lick you clean. Prime my love pump.
"See? He sometimes leaves them for the temps, too."
I nod, certainly embarrassed for her, and for myself and Jack, and for the near-venerable institution of Battle Brothers, and although I'm ashamed of Sal and feel pity for him, I can't help but also admire the sweaty, slick-palmed adolescent tone, the undiminished gall and balls of an old dude whom I always thought of as randy from the waist-high stacks of skin magazines he openly kept in the wide, low washbasin of his grim, dank bookkeeper's office that Pop had converted from a janitor's closet, this when Pop didn't think Battle Brothers needed a time ledger man. When I was in high school I once caught him lying down on his desk with the secretary (named Roz) squat-ting on his face so you could just see his bushy head of hair poking out from her skirt as if she were sitting on a fuzzy pillow. Sal has to be pushing seventy-five now and I don't think he ever married, though he did have a long secretive affair with Pop's baby sister Georgette until she was killed in a car accident in 1965. After Pop handed over the reins to me everyone figured Sal might quit, given that I obviously didn't know or care too much about the business; when Sal came in my first day as head honcho he asked for a "meeting" after work, and I was expecting he'd demand a slice of the company and was all ready after consulting with Pop to offer him 12.5 percent and not a half point more. But all he asked me for was a $50-a-week raise and when I said I'd give him $45 he took it without another word.
"Sal is harmless," I say. "But have a talk with him anyway"
"What talk do you want, there, Jer?"
"Hey, Sally."
It's Salvatore Mondello, just arriving to work. He's dressed as usual in his low-rent white-collar style: short-sleeve dress shirt, too-short stubby tie, trim-fit gabardine slacks, worn cordovan wing tips. He's one of those handsome lanky Northern Italian types who age magnificently. His skin has a clean-scrubbed light olive glow, his hair still thick and full and streaked with enough dark strands that it appears spun straight from silver, If he had been a slightly different man he could have enjoyed a long career as one of those duty-free international playboys jetting from the Cote d'Azur to Palm Beach with a wealthy mis-tress waiting desperately in each hotel suite for him to blindfold her with his silk ascot, fragrant of musk and Dunhill 100s, and do things to her with his tongue and lubed pinky finger that her inattentive jerk husband long gave up doing.
But fortunately or unfortunately Sal is not a slightly different man, and while he is plenty smart and has let his dick lead him through life like a lot of the rest of us, I would say he did so without a companion ambition for fame or money, and so is who he is, which is basically an old local stud who worked just hard enough to pay the rent and take out fresh pussy every Friday and Saturday night. This until maybe eight or ten years ago, when I think the high mileage on his purportedly horse-sized rig (this from one of the mechanics, who early on in Battle Brothers history caught him jerking off in the john and described Sal's action "like he was buffin' a toy baseball bat") finally caught up to him and broke down, relegating him to a retirement of titty bars and dirty Web chats and twice-a-year Caribbean cruises on a popular line on which he travels free for serving as a nightly dance partner for singles and widows, though with this new hard-on wonder drug they've invented, Sal might soon fly the flag high once again.
"What, Jer, they fire you over there at the agency?"
"Not yet. I'm just saying hello today."
"Hey there, Maya."
"Morning, Sal," she answers him, without a hint of umbrage. Though not with great warmth, either. "I gotta get to work."
"You do that, honey," Sal says. When she's back out front he says, "If I could just be sixty again."
"Yeah? What would you do?" I say, remembering as I do almost daily now that I'll be that very age in a matter of nothing, just when the world tips on its axis and our propitiously temperate part of it starts to die out again, wreathe itself in the dusty colors of mortality.
"Are you kidding? Me and that amazing piece of ass would be balling all day like those horny monkeys on the nature program. What do they call them, bonobos? Those monkeys just screw each other all day, and they'll even get into some dyke and fag action when nobody's looking."
"No kidding?"
"Saw it just last night. The girl monkeys, you know, with the bright red catcher's mitt twats, will squat back to back, rubbing themselves on each other. The boys will hang upside down and play swords with their skinny units. These monkeys are different than other ones who would rather fight viciously than fuck. I guess we're supposed to be more like the fighting monkeys."
"I guess you're a bonobo, huh, Sally?"
"You got that right. What about you?"
"Probably neither," I say, thinking that there must be a third kind of monkey, only slightly more advanced, who sits high up in the trees and collects his fruit pits, indolently rioting how much he's eaten.
"How's Rita treating you?"
"You don't know?"
"Oh, Christ, Jer, don't tell me something's happened to her."
"No, no, nothing like that. She just left me. Almost a year ago, I guess."
"Oh. That's even worse. It means she's with someone else."
"Yeah."
"Do I know the guy?"
"Richie Coniglio. From the neighborhood. Hairy little guy."
"That pipsqueak? What's he do now?"