“Right,” Chris said.
One of Chris’s pals inquired, “You work at the—?”
“Insurance,” Ellie said. “Chris was—”
“Yeah,” Chris Grady said. There was a lot of nodding. A conversation followed about which was the best kind of bar, the dingy kind or the really dingy kind. Ellie had no opinion. She could imagine bulldozing all of the bars in the Stamford area. Civilization would continue. The best kind of bar was one where you didn’t get attacked before, during, or after your appearance there. The best kind of bar was one where you didn’t go home feeling you’d been emptied of everything that was substantial about you. The best kind of bar was one where you didn’t feel like a yearbook summary of yourself or like a bunch of measurements. There was no such bar. Even though the conversation was not, you know, particularly malevolent, Ellie felt again that there was something she didn’t trust about Chris Grady. He talked about cars a lot. And sale prices of things.
Not two days later, she got to work early, like she almost always did, opened the suggestion box, having neglected it for a number of weeks, and found: You ought to throw this fucking coffee machine out the window and run over it with a car.
She reread it a couple of times to be sure she was seeing what she believed she was seeing. This fucking machine. Fucking machine. Fucking. Fucking. Fucking. The decorum that had been characterized by goddamned in the earlier suggestion had now given way to the vulgar word fucking. Of course, it was also true that in this case the suggestion did fall under Ellie Knight-Cameron’s professional jurisdiction. She was responsible for the coffee machine. Bad coffee, in her view, was almost a public service, because it gave people a problem to solve. If weather, traffic, baseball, and coffee were universally agreed upon, if everyone decided these things had been made perfect and harmonious, then there would be no reason to use human language at all. People would walk around like monks, saying nothing.
Interestingly, there was an automotive implication in both of the offending messages. In the first, it was about traffic on the Merritt Parkway, and in the second, there was the suggestion that someone should run over the coffee machine. With a motor vehicle. Whoever was writing the messages was certainly interested in cars, or had a car, or was a regular rider in a car. Users of mass transit were out.
Astrid Lang, for example. Astrid’s refusal to drive somehow went with her mouse brown hair, her bowed legs, and her grown son who still lived at home with her. She was sort of anxious about things, and that was maybe why Astrid worked in insurance. She hadn’t fallen into the business by chance. Astrid had strong feelings about disaster. She braced for impact. She was good at persuading people that they didn’t have enough insurance. Who knew what was going to happen in this era of climatic change and earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes? Astrid was convincing about these things because she was worried about asbestos in her house, or else her boiler was making that awful noise, or one of the tree limbs was going to come down, and global warming was going to bring about a precipitous ice age and a forty-foot storm surge.
Ellie stood sentinel-like by the suggestion box. She was still holding the piece of paper in her hand, a piece of unlined scrap paper, when Astrid Lang happened by. It occurred to Ellie that she should hide the suggestion, and it was this impulse that reminded her: she had told no one about the first note. The suggestion about the parkway. She hadn’t told a soul about it, and why not? She tried to think back on what she had done in the weeks that had passed. She tried to retrace her steps. Was there some kind of shame associated with these notes? Because it was her suggestion box? She was the one who believed strongly in the democratic values of the suggestion box. She was the one who had wrapped it in pink wrapping paper. She was the one who emptied it. It was as if the first note was addressed to her.
She wished Astrid good morning too loudly. She smiled brightly.
“What do you have there?” Astrid asked. Astrid was on the alert for any event, any snippet of gossip, any off-hours visit or collective dinner that could be said to have excluded her, even though she rarely attended when invited and never offered invitations in return.
“Look at this, Astrid,” Ellie said. She felt a bit of relief in handing it over, in making the suggestion a public problem, even if just with Astrid.
With a brisk certainty, Astrid fetched lavender-framed reading glasses from her weather-beaten purse. She read the message over carefully, penetratingly, before handing it back. Her expression never changed.
“That’s overreacting.”
“I’ll say,” Ellie said.
“It’s typed,” Astrid said.
Which ruled out certain people. For example, Bonnie Stevenson, who filled out most of her forms by hand and who made Christina type them into the system for her. Bonnie’s nails were too long for typing, that was her argument on the subject. She just couldn’t type, and that was the end of the discussion.
“Did I ever tell you,” Ellie said to Astrid, “what my father would do to us if we used that word?”
“What word?”
“That word. The f word.”
“No,” Astrid said, “you never told me. But I don’t really have time.”
Astrid was on her way to Duane’s office. She was intent upon the Duane Kolodny gatekeeper, Dolly Halloran, to whom she would make clear her need to see Duane. After which she would wait as long as it took. Duane was never available. If you wanted to take up something confidential or important with him, the moment to do it was right when he got in. Astrid knew this.
Ellie stood by the suggestion box for a while, shaken, as though standing by it would persuade it to pity her, and then out of desperation she turned her attention to some of the things posted on a nearby company bulletin board. A note from Duane directing the staff to use express mail services sparingly. A handbill about a time-share in a condo on Sea Island. How to recognize a choking incident.
In fact, at that very moment, Astrid Lang was resigning from K&K. Astrid had been on her way to quit when Ellie stopped her for her suggestions about the offending note. That Astrid had said nothing about quitting did not surprise Ellie. The employees of K&K had precious little information about Astrid Lang.
Astrid hadn’t let on that she was going to quit, nor did she let on about what she was going to do next, how she was going to pay her monthly bills, and, except for telling Ellie that she could keep her commemorative mug from the AAIB conference in Cincinnati, Astrid left behind no sign that she had ever been at K&K at all. Her exit was fully accomplished by lunch.
In the PM, Lisa Weltz and Chris Grady came back for additional interviews. The mood in the office was expectant but worried. The office pulsed with the electricity that is incipient change among personnel. The women suddenly were restless in their client contacts, unable to focus on new solicitations. The women of K&K now seemed to favor Lisa Weltz, though they didn’t want to risk irritating Duane, king of all he surveyed, who, it was rumored, preferred Chris. Never mind that K&K could have used both of the candidates.
During her big interview with Duane, in the afternoon, Lisa Weltz had complained about K&K compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, noting (this was what Dolly reported) that this noncompliance was likely affecting K&K’s ability to attract large institutional clients. They had no ramp to the office and no railing in the bathroom. The plumbing fixtures needed attention. Everyone in the office, Lisa Weltz observed, was able-bodied. And having delivered these pronouncements, Lisa Weltz cradled her withered arm under her breasts.