A. Yes. But I also said that he fondled my thigh as he touched my wrist, and as he fondled and touched, he was also giving me the x-ray male gaze at my bosoms, so that I was filled with disgust and a terrible sense of not being valued for my bookkeeping contributions to the workplace, and that my career goals were not being respected. My morale plunged way down at that moment, especially since he left no doubt in my mind as to his intentions when he commented on the Acey-Five Motel, which everyone knows is a place for, well, let’s say dates, and then shocked me by displaying his aroused state within his pants.
Q. Did your employer ever ask you to wear short skirts?
A. He very strongly suggested this to me, and once, while doing so, he handed me a pen in a filthy sexual manner, while he leered at my body and filled me with a traumatic fear that he would suddenly tell me a dirty joke or off-color anecdote. This pen episode was one that planted the nightmare seeds of post-dramatic stress that I suffer from today, along with an aggravation that is not good for my infected ectopic effects as well …
Plus there is the sudden hemorrhaging like in the car that I have mentioned and the chronic infection flare-ups.
Q. I’m well aware of your client’s various ills, sir. I’m sorry, Miss, did you want to add something?
A. He also made suggestive and sexually explicit remarks about pulling up my skirt so that he could gaze at my distorted coccyx and see it for himself, and he made it clear that he wanted to do this in a cruel and immoral fashion.
Q. Didn’t you, at the time of this occurrence, state that you hadn’t played “doctor” in a long time, but it might be fun? And subsequent to this occurrence, while you continued to work and to get pay raises at Anthanna, you wore nothing but a diaper, bra, and high heels as The New Year at a year-end office party, did you not? And you also dated your employer, and even stayed overnight at his home on several occasions when his wife was out of town, isn’t that true? And didn’t you tell a fellow employee, the purchasing agent, that your employer was, and I quote, “a bad lay who could use some help in the hard-on department”? Aren’t all these things true? And aren’t there many other stories like these, most notably, perhaps, the “salami party” story?
I object, I object, I object to this bald-faced slander of my client, who has been martyred enough! This is a case of harassment, insult, and vile innuendoes concocted by this misogynist’s cronies!
A. These things are all distorted a lot, and are not what they seem to be at all. And I would never use such gross language as what you just said, to the purchasing agent, speaking of which, she is a sex-crazy busybody divorcée, and who also runs to the boss with all the gossip, as she has a crush on him to beat the band. Talk about short skirts! Now, she looks like a real tramp!
Q. But you did date your employer, did you not?
A. I may have gone to dinner with him once or twice, but I was in a post-dramatic stress syndrome at the time from the shock of fondling and unwanted compliments concerning my physical nature and modes of dress, and I did not know in a responsible fashion what I was actually doing. My employer took advantage of me at these times, since I also had a brief amnesia-type condition that was caused by an internal spinal hemorrhage that came about through workplace stress. I actually thought that my employer was my pastor, Pastor Ingebretsen.
Q. The stenographer will see to it that that name does not get into the record? Thank you. Now, Miss. Did you ever stay atyour employer’s house while his wife was away, and while you, as a matter of fact, were still married?
A. I had, I have been told, arthritic brain swellings at the time.
Q. Is this a photograph of you and your employer in bed together at the Acey-Five Motel? And isn’t this other woman, who is standing at the side of the bed, the purchasing agent of the company?
A. I think that I have to lay down now because of the agony of my spinal infection flaring up with stress factors, but I must first state without fear that my employer is a liar who leered at me with a gaze and violated my thighs and shocked me with crude jokes and remarks upon my clothing choices. He is also not above doctoring innocent photos. Now that’s all for now, please.
Here, here! Let her lay down on the table! And you can keep your eyes and your hands to yourself, counselor!
Q. I beg your pardon?
“Writers who have little or no respect for their characters, or who actively dislike or disdain them to such a degree that even the most sympathetic reader finds herself unable to care for them, would be well advised to study and make critical notes on every story appearing in The Atlantic Monthly since 1970.”
— Crafting the Short Story, 5th Edition.
How about The New Yorker?
“Too … hip?”
One wonders how the author of this exercise in barely disguised misogyny would like it if the nightmare seeds of post-dramatic stress were planted in his mind.
Speaking of “the author” of the above, it should be remarked that upon a first reading of the text, it seems glaringly apparent that the said text is imaginative, i.e., fictional. However, recent events make it clear that this is an accurate transcription of an actual deposition, the deposed being one Charlotte Ryan. Further investigation has revealed that Anthanna Air Conditioning and Motorcycle is part of a business consortium that also includes Aquatic Ship Scaling, Inc.
A scherzarade
THE SCENE IS SO BANAL AS TO MAKE ONE weep in desperation, and yet, what an overwhelming sense of life!
“Nice of you to give your weekend, Ms. Paluka.”
“Oh, that’s all right, Mr. Pepp, I’m very interested in this account, it’s a real learning experience working on it. I’m grateful, really, for the opportunity.”
Surely, Mr. Pepp meant “give up.”
How careful she’d been about the clothes she’d packed for this working weekend — including her nightclothes! Sensual, she thought, yes, but not frilly. Expensive.
(Earlier, assuming that these two savvy and aggressive reps of a savvy and aggressive microchip firm did not just appear on the page without rambling through a lot of actual life, a bartender in the hotel lounge might well have been permitted a regular-guy cliché.)
In the hotel room, Mr. Pepp’s, since he is the senior junior assistant sales and marketing representative, while Ms. Paluka is his junior senior assistant, they get down to work. They prepare carefully, even exhaustively, for the meeting the next day with the big client. After a break for a room-service omelet with a crisp and somewhat reckless Chardonnay, she takes off her trim jacket, and suddenly feels wonderfully vulnerable, yet powerful and womanly in her white silk blouse.
Out with the laptop computers and the other stuff!
Time passes remarkably quickly when one is exhausting one’s self with demanding tasks in the unforgiving yet electrically charged world of microchips!
Mr. Pepp glances at Ms. Paluka’s breasts, breasts that slowly, and despite her M.B.A. from Stanford, heave, beneath the lustrous and creamy silk of her blouse. She pretends not to notice, and yet, a faint flush starts at her neck and rises swiftly toward her ears. How she wished she had a cigarette! Yet she had heeded the Surgeon General’s warnings and given them up several years ago. That Techmaxcon did not permit smoking, even in the immaculate parking lot, had had something to do with it. Thanks a million, Techmaxcon! she often breathed. She could actually smell the gas!