"How are you, Bob?" he'll always stop me now to say.
"Fine, Art. You?"
"That's good. Horace White tells me he gets a big kick out of you."
"I like Horace White a lot, Art. He's a fine man."
(My facts are wrong but my answer is right.)
Horace White approves. Does Lester Black? Johnny Brown will go growling to him in dissension when he learns I'm his boss. Black probably won't care. It's out of his area, and Black is ready to retire anyway and spends much time out of the office sailing.
I did my best to dissuade Kagle from going to Toledo (and knew, of course, I would fail. My conscience is almost clear.
"Stay in town, Andy. You know Arthur Baron wants you here."
"I'll tie it in with a supermarket promotion," he responds with one of his conspiratorial winks. "Heh-heh. You'll see.").
"Kagle in Chicago, Bob?"
"Toledo."
"There? He told Laura Chicago. What's there?"
"He might come back with a supermarket promotion."
"He shouldn't be the one to do that."
"He phones in every day. I know where I can reach him. He asked me to cover the office."
"Good, Bob. We'll have to start making our preparations for the convention. I'd like it to go very smoothly this year."
"I think it will, Art."
"So do I. Horace White gets back to town next week and he and I'll start setting up our meetings upstairs. Are you ready to make some enemies?"
"If I have to."
"You'll have some friends."
I'll have some speeches, too. I'll need Kagle for the convention. He'll do that well, claiming credit for having engineered the changes himself and professing gladness at having shed administrative responsibilities he did not want and being free at last to do the type of work he really enjoys. No one will believe him. But that won't matter. After that, I won't want him around.
"What will you want to do about Andy Kagle?" Arthur Baron will ask.
"I think I'd want him to open the convention."
"I think that's good."
"I think he'll do that well. He'll smile enough without being told."
"And afterward?"
"I don't want him around."
"Would you want to keep him on as a consultant or use him on special projects?"
"No, Art."
"He could be useful."
"But not here. I think it might be a bad idea to have him around."
"I think you're right, Bob."
"Thanks, Art."
Of course, I can't fire Kagle. (If I could fire people, I would fire Green, and I would fire the typist Martha, who is still going crazy slowly but not fast enough to suit me.) I can merely indicate that I don't want him around and the company will move him somewhere else. I wish somebody else would fire her before I have to make Green do it.
"Art," I might say. "Have you got a minute?"
"How are you, Bob?"
"Fine, Art. You?"
"That's good, Bob."
"There's a girl in Green's department with a serious mental problem. She's going crazy. I think she talks to herself in imaginary conversations. She laughs to herself. It doesn't really help the appearance of the department to have her there."
"Is she happy?" he might ask.
"Only when she laughs," I answer. "But she stops typing then and her productivity suffers."
"Tell Green to get rid of her."
If he says that, it will signify he wants me to start issuing instructions to Green and take dominion over his department. If he says:
"I'll talk to Green."
That means he wishes us to maintain our departments separately (and I will not be downcast, for there's an advantage in having Green's department to shift blame to).
If, with an expression of sobriety, he asks:
"What would you do?"
"She probably has a fair amount of sick leave coming to her," I'll answer. "And after that her major medical hospitalization insurance can take over, if she wants to use it. People who go on voluntary sick leave for mental disorders almost never try to come back."
"That's good, Bob. It sounds like the kindest way for her."
"The jobs aren't held open. We can tell her that, if she reapplies. One of the nurses can tell her she needs a rest."
"But I'm happy here. I smile and laugh all day."
"It's just for a little while, dear. We — they — have to cut down."
(Sick leave is what I am holding in reserve for Red Parker.)
(He'll think I'm slipping him a favor.)
(Wait till he tries to come back.)
(I'm so smart I ought to be President.)
I might even start using Red Parker's apartment again when he's no longer with the company. It will not dawn on him for a while that he's not with the company but outside it, and there will be major medical benefits for me in his major medical insurance policy. His job will be filled. (He will be filed.) The opening he left will be closed if he tries to come back. (He probably won't. He'll get used to doing nothing and jumping about aimlessly on reckless vacations.)
People who go on voluntary extended sick leave for anything but surgery or serious accidents almost never try to come back. They don't feel up to it. (Even people who've been out awhile with hepatitis or mononucleosis have a hard time making their way back. They lack pep.) (Long after they've left, somebody who enjoys keeping track of people (in the army, it was our public relations officer) drops by to tell us they're dead (or suffered a "cerebral vascular accident," and then we know they really are gone for good. Or bad, ha, ha).
"Did you hear about Red Parker? Or Andy Kagle? Or Jack Green?" someone like Ed Phelps will stop by to say, if Ed Phelps isn't dead by then too. Ed Phelps will be dropping in often after he's retired (like Horace White with his wheelchair and metal canes after he falls ill, or pushed into the office on a stretcher on wheels, waving hello limply as he rolls past, by an inscrutable Black chauffeur in meticulous gray livery. How will I look when I'm eighty and toothless? I'll have no teeth — periodontal work will not preserve my deteriorating jawbone forever — and my ankles and arches grow worse. My nose will be closed, and I'll breathe through an open mouth. My fingers will roll pills. I've met me already in hospitals and photographs. How will I smell? I know how I will smell. I smell that smell now and don't like it) because he will have no place else to go. It would not surprise me if Ed Phelps began showing up at my army reunions (in place of me. I've never gone) as another surplus survivor. (We really have no need for that many survivors anymore.) "I'm not sure what it was," he'll keep repeating about Red Parker. "I wonder who'll take care of the children. How many did he have?"
No one will know or care. With everyone else at the company these days I try to maintain an artless and iridescent neutrality. Jane knows I've stopped flirting with her.
"What's the matter, big boy?" I hear her on the verge of baiting me. "Get cold feet? Afraid your mean little wifey might find out? Or maybe you're just afraid you can't get it up often enough for a young girl."
Jane is not a person to say anything like that, or even think it, but I witness the scene anyway and wonder how I can get out of it. Outside the office, I have begun training myself assiduously and realistically for the higher responsibilities that lie ahead: I am organizing speeches and I am playing golf. I am outlining the speeches I will need for the convention (mine and Kagle's) and for the corridors at the company.
"Gee whiz," goes one. "You're surprised? How do you thinkI felt? You could have knocked me over with a feather."
(I wrote that one in a minute.) And I have got myself new golf clubs and clothes. My daughter thinks I look good in my whites and pastels and in my peaked caps. (My daughter is most pleased with me when I look handsome.) My wife is perplexed. She thinks I've gone back to golf because I want to flirt with college girls at the different clubs I'm invited to. I don't know how to flirt with college girls anymore and wouldn't want to if I did. They're kids. (And none seem to be sending out signals to me or any other golfer my age. They send them out to good tennis players. I have decided not to flirt at parties or anywhere else if my wife is with me and might be embarrassed, and I wish she would stop flirting when drunk and stop embarrassing me.) I'll give her more money. I take private lessons secretly on public courses weekends and accept invitations I get to private clubs. My wife won't take up golf again because she knows she won't excel at it, and she hates going to a club for lunch or dinner because of the people she finds there. All of them are divorcing. Everyone everywhere seems to be coming to an end. I'll buy another house. My wife wants that. It will please my daughter, who is keenly sensitive to friends in families with more money and not mindful at all of those with less, like the college graduate on the land-fill truck who says he wants to get her into a car at night in order to give her driving lessons. (I know the kind of lessons he wants to give her. I'd like to kick him in his stomach and jaw with my knee. How dare be deal in dirty thoughts about my buxom sixteen-year-old? How can she know so many people and still be lonely?) We'll have to buy a bigger house because the kitchen table in this one is too small.