I left and tried the door. It had not locked. I slammed it and it locked. I went down the three flights of stairs and out of the foyer onto the sidewalk. For one strange and almost frightening moment I did not know which way I should turn to walk to the office. But how many times have I done that in the past four months. Fifty? Sixty? Turn left and go to the comer and turn left again...
“Come right in, Harris. Sit down. No, in this chair right here. You been with the company nineteen years. Know what that means to me and to you? It means I’m talking to you. If you were a six-year man or seven, or even ten, I wouldn’t call you in here. I wouldn’t talk to you. You would have been out in the street on your ass two or three weeks ago. I got to find out if you think maybe this is some kind of civil service job, you put in nineteen years and coast the rest of the way. Do you think that’s the way it is?”
“No sir. I...”
“What we provide our clients with is total service, Harris. Total bookkeeping, accounting, and tax service, and it isn’t like a franchise. It isn’t like a monopoly. There are a hundred other outfits out there doing the same thing and trying to do it as good as we do it. They are trying every day to pick off our clients. If we don’t do the job they expect, we lose them overnight. I admit freely, openly, willingly, I was wrong two years ago about you. Those records were doctored after they left your hands, and thank God we could prove it, or we’d still be scuffling around with the I.R.S. This time is different, Harris.”
“I want you to know that—”
“Shut up! When I want to hear you talk, I’ll ask a question. You’re dogging it. You’re turning in garbage. I ask the girls. They say it used to be a pleasure, practically, to cross-check what you turned in, it was so clean. Now going over your crap gives them such a pain in the ass they try to duck you and work on somebody else. More and more you are making stupid, stinking, dumb-ass mistakes in simple arithmetic even. Two weeks ago somehow you left out two whole tape totals on Acme Star. All of a sudden their gross is down by a third from what it has been running month in, month out. How could you keep from noticing it on the totals and in the summary? Why the hell didn’t you check back and find out what was wrong? No. Don’t talk. Those are not questions I want answered. This goes all one way. I talk and you listen. Harris, all of a sudden you’re too important for the little things in life. What does it cost to say hello? To use a man’s name? To smile, maybe. To ask about his kids? Three times I’ve had to take Harry off soliciting new accounts and send him to kiss the ass of one of your clients because you pissed somebody off. Harris, they don’t like it, a man comes in at a dead run, wants all the figures right now, races through the job, and runs out like a thief. You don’t talk to anybody around here anymore. No smile. No time for coffee.”
“That’s because—”
“Don’t you listen to anything? I don’t want to know about any ‘because.’ I don’t want to hear any personal problems. What I pay for is your time on the job. Off the job you can paint yourself blue and run about naked. On my time you perform. I don’t care what your problem is. I don’t care if you are supporting a bookie, or you got three wives, or you’re writing a Broadway play, as long as it all happens on your time. If you got any kind of ideas about seniority, you can forget all that shit. You got no contract and no union. You are getting just one break, and listen close while I spell it out. Starting tomorrow you are going to give me one perfect month, Marty. One single complaint about anything and you are out on your ass. And when that month is over, I am going to ask for another perfect month. Then someday I will tell you when you’ve earned the right to make one very small mistake and still stay on the job. If I shove you out on the street, I am not going to write a jerk letter saying how great you are. Anybody asks me, I’ll say you turned into dead wood and we sawed you out of the tree. I run this thing hard-nose. I pay good, and I push hard. I don’t want any comments. Just pick it up out of the chair and take it out of here, and keep telling yourself you got a last chance you sure as hell don’t deserve, the way you’ve been fucking up.”
Her hand is under the nape of my neck. I am looking at the ceiling. Her face is shoved into the nape of my neck. I feel the slack weight of her thigh across my stomach, and the weight of her right arm on my chest, the relaxed fist resting on the black, matted hair of my chest. She makes small hiccup sounds from time to time. They are the little dry sobs that remain from all the tears.
I want to get up and go over to the kitchenette and move the pan, or whatever it is, out from under the dripping faucet. Ploik, ploik, ploik, ploik.
Maybe it is better to think about the faucet than it is to think about twenty-five hundred dollars. Probably two ploiks a second, a hundred and twenty a minute. So ten minutes would be twelve hundred. Twenty minutes would be twenty-four hundred. Twenty minutes and fifty seconds for twenty-five hundred ploiks.
There is another way of not thinking. I stroke her back and turn slightly toward her. But she pushes herself up. She is between me and the wall. She kneels and sits back on her heels, staring down at me. Her little face is puffy, blotched red and white from all the crying. She snuffs and wipes the back of her hand across her nose and lip.
“My brother isn’t kidding me, Martin. He wouldn’t do that. He loves her too, because she was our grammaw and she brought us up, the four of us kids. Now she’s got the arthritis so bad she can’t even dress herself or feed herself. Joe’s wife has to do it, and now she’s going to have another kid. So like he said on the phone, he went out to the state place for old people like that, and it made him sick, it was so bad. He won’t put her out there. He’s found this place where if we come up with ten thousand dollars, they take her into this rest home for life. Like an annuity or something. He can scratch up twenny-five hundred and so can Ruthie out in California and so can my brother Lew. If I can send twenny-five hundred then she can go into the rest home. And if I can’t, then I got to go back there and take care of her, for as long as she lives, and the seventy-five hundred gets set aside for expenses, for me and my grammaw to live on. But I can’t face going back to that cruddy little town, not after dreaming about getting away from there forever.”
“I know. I know.” _
“Do you know? That rotten wind comes down out of Canada and turns you blue. The best place to shop is Sears catalogue. No movie, nothing. Oh Jesus, Martin, I gotta send that money.”
There’s no good way to tell her that five months ago I could have come up with twenty-five hundred dollars. I could have taken it out of joint savings, hoping Glad wouldn’t find out. But the five months of us, of little loans and gifts and half the apartment rent, have nibbled it down and down. I know the balance by heart. $744.21.
She knee-walks to the foot of the bed and steps off. No sound of her bare feet on the rug. But a pat-flap sound on the boards, and then the creak of the bathroom door closing, click of the latch. Sound of water running. Then a sound of flushing. Silence. Ploik, ploik, ploik.
She comes out in her robe. She has scrubbed her face and tied her hair back. She stands by the bed looking down at me.
“Martin? You said everything would be okay for us, didn’t you? You said you could take care of us. No matter what. Didn’t you say that?”
The words come sliding out of my throat, oiled words, too easy. “Don’t worry. I’ll get the money. You don’t have to worry. I can get it.”
Her smile starts, then fades into skepticism. “When? I’m sorry, but I’ve got to know when. I’ve got to see the money. Going back there is like dying. When are you going to give me the money?”