Duane, the way he told it, when they were all gathered in the conference room, tried to be polite about Lisa W., but in the end he’d made up his mind quickly, noting that he would never avoid hiring someone because she had a disability. He would, however, avoid hiring someone because she was sour, had crumbs on her blouse, and exhibited bad manners at a pivotal juncture in the interview process.
Chris Grady took Astrid’s position as broker, effective the next morning.
Further weeks passed, and Ellie knew what this meant. The passage of time meant that it was likely the perpetrator of the creepy suggestion box messages, the two messages that violated the civility of the K&K offices, was none other than Astrid Lang. And yet there was something mysterious about this. There was something inexplicable about a woman who had no car making hotheaded suggestions about lane closures on the Merritt Parkway. Would a woman who mostly drank tea complain about the coffee? However, inductively speaking, all the evidence suggested that Lang was the perpetrator. Therefore, Ellie Knight-Cameron forgot about the suggestion box, except once a week when she would reach absently into the bottom of the message receptacle to realize that once again it had gone unused. All was well.
Here’s the story Ellie had never told Astrid. The story about her father and the f word. Her parents, when she was young, had unusual parenting ideas. For example, you didn’t have to go to school if you didn’t feel like it. Everyone should sleep together in the same bed. You should skinny-dip with your family. You should tell your family about any romantic escapades that you had; it was your obligation. And if you were going to use drugs or drink, you should do these things with your family, so that these activities could be properly supervised. It was only later that Ellie found out many parents had quite different ideas.
And even though her parents agreed upon these unusual parenting principles, there were far more numerous principles on which they disagreed. For example, her father hated the f word. If anyone used the f word, if her brother used the f word, her father would become extremely agitated. It was not, her father said, tugging nervously on his beard, that he had any problem with the activity described by the word in question. Anyone who wanted to perform that particular activity should do so, according to the rules of consent, whenever he or she wanted to do it, with whomever he or she wanted. Anyone could use whatever part of his or her body he or she wanted to use, her father went on, as long as this body part gave her pleasure. The skin was the largest organ on the human body. This was what was good about life, the moment in which skin brushed up against skin. The little skin receptors of delight created cascading sensations in the chakras and in the perineum. In conclusion, a person should not use this f word to describe what she or he was doing, her father said, because to use this f word was to denigrate a beautiful and holy act in which waves cascaded to and from the perineum. By denigrating the act you were denigrating one of the few perfect things about being a human animal in this disappointing world, and Ellie’s father would not tolerate it.
Red-handed, that’s how her father caught her brother using the word. In fact, it was one of many times her brother called Ellie a “fucking idiot.” Soon the punishment was meted out. Her father made her brother read through the dictionary, and not one of those little paperback dictionaries but actually an old mossy copy of Webster’s Third International, after which her brother was tasked with writing down every single adjective in the f section of the dictionary, so that her brother might be able to call up possible alternatives to “fucking idiot,” such as “felonious idiot,” or “fastidious idiot,” or “fungible idiot,” or “funereal idiot,” or “fetishistic idiot.” Furious idiot, free-spirited idiot, fiduciary idiot, floral idiot, fucaceous idiot, foehnlike idiot, fluorescent idiot, foliiform idiot, facetious idiot, falsetto idiot, funicular idiot, feathery idiot, freelance idiot, fugitive idiot. It took her brother half a day to perform this expiation, during which time he wasn’t allowed to go to school. He went through three number two pencils, his hand developed a horrible cramp, and Ellie felt triumphant. A triumph that would be short-lived.
That night her mother came back from interviewing migrant farm workers, and she took one look at the pages and pages of dictionary entries Ellie’s brother had copied out onto a legal pad and began calling Ellie’s father an “uptight prude asshole.”
During the period of weeks when there was no action at the K&K suggestion box, Ellie was in fact making ready to visit her family in Arizona, a trip she did not want to make. Her father had called to tell her that her mother had turned up, after going missing for several days, in Tempe, a town that Ellie found particularly melancholy. Ellie’s mother had been detained by the authorities on a charge of drunk and disorderly behavior, somewhere near the campus of the state university, where she was not registered for classes.
Chris Grady demonstrated, in his first months on the job, that he was a man on the go. The offices rang out with the banter of Chris and Duane in the executive office in the mornings, talking about the golf they had played, about the basketball tournament they had bet on, or about an impending football game. At first this fraternity seemed like a good thing, based on Duane Kolodny’s theory that a mixing of the sexes resulted in a productive workplace. Chris was always in the office early, before Ellie arrived, and when she threw her trench coat over the couch in the lounge and turned on the coffee machine, Chris always called out to her, “Hey, babe, how the hell are you!”
To which she replied, “Don’t call me babe!”
Nonessential employees were the first to go. Christina Niccoli, the filing clerk, decided that she needed business school in order to realize her dream of working as a buyer for one of the larger department stores. Ellie herself wrote the advertisement for the Advocate in which they invited applications to replace Christina, experience a plus. She returned to the restaurant with the painting of the Acropolis in order to draft the text. Christina was a sweet kid, and when Ellie conducted her exit interview, Christina complained that Duane didn’t seem to care about the office the way he used to. In the old days — they weren’t so far in the past — Duane would occasionally call a halt to the business day and take them all out for ice cream.
Then, Annie Goldberg, the staff researcher and unrepentant gambler, disappeared. And it was a few days before anyone even noticed. Ellie asked Dolly Halloran if she’d seen Annie, and Dolly said truculently, “Who?” Of course, in the present business environment, the big decisions were made by the parent company — about rates, the deductibles, that sort of thing. Clients had begun complaining about the wind deduction, especially on the region’s marshy coast. Hurricane season was longer with the greenhouse effect. And there was the risk of terrorist activity. Annie used to keep statistics on claims, but computers could do all that now. People and their foibles just clotted up the system. The big imponderables appeared on the horizon, wrought their havoc, and left claimants to reassemble shattered lives. Price tags were in the tens of billions. Kolodny & Kolodny didn’t control the Atlantic hurricane season or the winter cold snaps. Didn’t matter what a bunch of salespeople in Stamford thought about anything; they could all drive off a cliff. Their families would collect.