Being Invisible (8 page)

Wagner said hi to her back.

Jackie turned ever so slowly. She wore more costume jewelry than usual with the familiar gray suit. “Fred,” she said simply, and went to sit down back of her desk. She gestured at him. “Fred, we’ve known each other a long time. ... Is that some kind of moral pressure you’re applying, standing there like that?”

“I wasn’t asked to sit.”

“After all this time we’re being
ceremonious
?” Jackie asked incredulously. He took one of the straight chairs and brought it before the desk. Jackie resumed. “You know me. This isn’t a finishing school, and I certainly don’t care about anybody’s private life. But there’s a point where some things extend from the private sphere.”

She plucked an unsharpened pencil from a leather cup of writing implements that sat next to one of those decommissioned blue-glass high-tension-line insulators that are sold as paperweights. She put the eraser end near her mouth but had not yet bitten it.

“Jesus,” she said. “This is a hell of a thing to have to deal with but I don’t see how I can dodge it and keep my self-respect and maybe yours too. Morton wanted to do it, but I said, No sir, he’s not only under me, he’s my friend since I joined the firm.”

“Morton?”

“Morton Wilton,” Jackie said with special feeling. “He’s been here for months. You know that.”

“I’m not sure exactly what he does,” said Wagner. Aside from being indecently fondled by her, of course.

She laughed at the bright blue blotter on her desk. “Well, you don’t keep up with things, I must say. He’s executive vice-president. He’s our boss. Well, there’s technically still the president, Mr. Grayling, but as you know he’s not very active any more.”

“I’m just one of the troops, Jackie,” said Wagner. “I just write my copy and go home.”

She lowered her chin. “Are you still working on that novel?”

He was startled. “You know about that?”

“You told me. How else would I know?”

Obviously she was telling the truth. “I’m sorry. I forgot. I always intended to keep it a secret until I had finished it at least, but it’s taking so long I guess I ran out of patience.”

“My lips are sealed,” Jackie said. She seemed to be taking pains to be considerate, which care was not characteristic, irrespective of their old office “friendship,” which was scarcely that: they had simply found themselves in the same place for some years.

Suddenly Jackie colored. “Damn! It’s being even tougher than I anticipated.” She took off her glasses. She cleared her throat. “Your, uh, lunchtime, uh, visits...”

This absolutely could have nothing to do with invisibility: he was sure of that. But still...

“Yes. I do go out to eat lunch. Delphine however stays in the office and studies Spanish. Did you know that?”

“It’s not like you to use levity,” Jackie said. “I’ll admit there’s something ridiculous about it, but it just can’t be tolerated, Fred, and you know it. Aren’t there more discreet places than the men’s room? Can’t you wait until after work?”

“Jackie,” Wagner began soberly, “I won’t joke if you stop being mysterious. I don’t begin to get your allusions. They may be well intentioned but they’re simply not intelligible.”

He received what was a level look if there ever was one: the several furrows of her brow were firm and parallel.

“All right, then. OK. I understand the stalls in the men’s room are being used at lunchtime for homosexual activities. I have been informed that you have been recognized as one of the participants. Speaking for myself, I never condemn anybody for any sexual tastes, barring those for children, animals, and the feebleminded.” Which meant that her condemned list was actually extensive. Wagner was seeking distracting thoughts at this moment. Jackie went on: “But some things are out of order in an office, and I don’t think we’re being unreasonable in saying this one very much is.”

Wagner at last asked, “And just who said I was doing this?”

She shook her head. Jackie’s hair today was that kind of brown that looks red around the edges when the light comes from behind. “Let’s not get into names. Someone told Morton, Mr. Wilton, and Mr. Wilton told me.”

“It isn’t true, you know,” Wagner said.

“Oh, it isn’t?”

He cried, “Of course it isn’t, for God’s sake.”

“Don’t shout at me!”

“I’ll throw this chair through your window,” Wagner said, “unless you stop nodding in that smug way.” He was surprised by his own fury.

Jackie was not frightened. “Any more of that talk and I call the police. You want to get tough, mister, you got the wrong lady.”

“I’m just trying to get your attention,” Wagner said, imposing control on himself. “It’s not personal. Somebody is slandering me, and I just wonder who and why.”

“No,” Jackie said firmly. “I don’t think it’s that at all.” She raised a hand to stifle his protest. “I’m not saying I believe them, Fred, but I don’t think it’s malicious.”

“
Them
? Then there are more than Wilton?”

“I told you someone informed Mr. Wilton. It isn’t Mr. Wilton’s accusation. Obviously he has his own private washroom.” She swiveled rapidly from side to side in the chair. “Look at the problem I’m facing. It’s hard to believe the whole story is a total invention. If what you say is true”—he bristled, and she was quick to say again that she was not necessarily indicting him—“still someone must be doing something in there. Why else would it have been reported?”

“Who’s out to get me, Jackie?”

“No,” said she. “That’s the wrong tack to take, Fred. The question that interests me is: If not you, then who?”

He glared at her. “I submit my resignation.”

She sniffed disdainfully. “Don’t be asinine. No, the problem remains. What’s going on in there? Obviously I can’t investigate personally.”

“I’ll tell you this,” said Wagner, seething. “I have never, in all my years here, seen the least suspicious thing in the men’s room. True, I don’t linger there when my own business is done, nor do I squat down and count the number of legs in any one booth at any one time.”

Jackie widened her eyes. “One of them sits with crossed legs on the toilet seat.”

“You seem to be an authority on the subject.”

“I am anyway in authority in this department.” Her respect for him was not increasing.

“Look,” Wagner said. “If the report came by way of your friend Wilton—”

“What do you mean by saying ‘friend’?”

He paused for a moment and then resumed. “Wilton should investigate for himself, stay in some lunchtime and catch the culprits redhanded, if that’s the appropriate figure of speech in this case.”

Jackie said, “You’re going to answer my question.”

“Aren’t all bosses friends?” It was not brave, but it wasn’t bad.

“I don’t know how far you can get on sarcasm, Fred,” Jackie said. “I really don’t.”

“All right then,” said he. “I’ll be straightforward. I neither give nor receive homosexual favors in the men’s room, and if I find out who says I do, I’ll kick him in the teeth and then sue him. But I won’t serve as your spy in the toilets.”

He rose and marched out. This was the first time he could ever remember having finally held his own with Jackie Grinzing. It was ironic that this kind of success would have come in response to a defamatory accusation.

W
AGNER’S FACE STAYED WARM
from anger for so long that it began to itch. He did little work for the next hour, so distracted was he by the outrageous charge against him. Could it be a case of mistaken identity or did he have a secret enemy somewhere in the office?

As if more wretchedness were needed, he soon was sitting in discomfort: he needed to take a pee but had a horror now of being seen, by secret eyes, crossing the threshold of what had formerly been one kind of sanctuary. However, at last he was sufficiently uncomfortable to resort to invisibility. He did not like to do it, being altogether in the right as he was, and he was also concerned as to whether vanishing so often might take its toll on his system—perhaps one had a quota that could be exceeded—but he had no other option at this moment.

But before he could dematerialize Mary Alice Phillips appeared in her usual importunate condition. She handed him a piece of copy.

“Do you mind? I know there’s something wrong, but I just can’t put my finger on it.”

He suppressed a sigh and quickly read what she had written about a self-draining soap dish. There was an accompanying photograph of a little vessel of acrylic, slightly higher at one end than at the other, where a tiny downspout-shaped place of egress had been provided for accumulated water. To the brief description of this device Mary Alice had added: “No more snotty soap!”

Wagner winced. He explained. “This is vivid, but not in good taste.”

“Yet it’s what I always think of when I want to use a bar that’s been sitting in the wetness,” said she.

“That may be true,” said Wagner, his distended bladder throbbing, “but terms like that give the product an unpleasant connotation to some people, and they wouldn’t buy it. Our copy is supposed to sell the goods, after all, not claim attention for the pungency of its style.”

Mary Alice grinned. Owing to the faint freckles that appeared at such a moment, this was her most advantageous expression. Had she grinned more often, she might have been thought of as cute. “Then ‘toejams’ and ‘boogers’ are ruled out?”

“I should hope so,” said Wagner, suggesting by his attitude that he wished to rise and therefore she would be kind to step back from the entrance to the cubicle.

But Mary Alice either did not get his message or callously defied it, staying in place. “But the rest of it’s OK if I killed the snot?”

Wagner peered closely at her, hoping she spoke in conscious irony, but unhappily decided she did not. “I guess so.”

“How about ‘slimy’?”

He shook his head. “You don’t need any elaboration. Everybody knows how a soap dish gets when a bar of wet soap sits in it.”

“Of course you’re right,” said Mary Alice. “You always get straight to the heart of the matter. That’s what good writing is, isn’t it?”

He shrugged. “I guess so, but we’re not talking about Flaubert. This is only commercial-catalogue copy. There are only two considerations: not much space and it should help sell the product.”

“You could say that about serious literature too,” Mary Alice offered brightly.

“No doubt. Gus Flaubert would probably do a great job on the soap dish, only it would take him all month.”

While Mary Alice was temporarily off balance with his cheekiness towards the great master, Wagner managed to get to his feet in the available space and step out of the cubicle. For a moment, then, he was out and she was yet inside.

“Of course,” she now said, still stuck on “literature,” “there are those who were pretty wordy. Take James Joyce.”

So he was to be saved by a
mot juste.
“A case in point,” he said. “‘The snot-green sea.’” He feinted towards the water cooler and got past Delphine’s lair and around the corner without losing a step. He could be seen from the cubicles he passed as well as, at one point, through the glass door of Jackie Grinzing’s office. There was no suitable way in which he could become invisible at any point along the route to the men’s room. However, his wits were fertile, and the answer was soon forthcoming: there was another men’s room, away over beyond the reception area, at the other end of the floor, convenient to the accounting department to which he had gone some years earlier, at Babe’s instigation, to question the amount of deductions from his paycheck, and on emerging from this undignified and fruitless pursuit, he had paused to use the paymasters’ toilet.

By now Wagner had reached a remote back hallway devoid of other people, and he therefore vanished, for it would seem impolitic in this era, damnably, for him to be seen even in the accountants’ facility.

However, no sooner had he got there without incident and positioned himself before the nearest urinal than in burst a large man so bluff-mannered as to have begun to unzip his fly before he pushed open the door, and had Wagner not leaped away he would have been soaked, for this person performed as though extinguishing a brush fire otherwise soon to go out of control. Nor could Wagner have used the remaining urinal without apprehension, for it was mounted too near the other if one’s neighbor were as hearty as this guy, whose akimboed left arm not only intruded into the next space but also fanned the air as if it were an element of a pump that was emptying his reservoir.

Wagner fled into one of the toilet stalls and at last found relief. The sound he made was of little concern, for the other man could not have heard it over his own Niagara, but there came a moment when the latter had finished and Wagner couldn’t stop.

“Artie?” The man was obviously directing his question, somewhere between a loud whisper and an undertone, towards Wagner’s stall.

Since he had to keep going for another moment and if he remained vocally silent his questioner might stoop in search of a pair of feet beyond the stall-door, Wagner without hesitation, and assuming a gravel voice, said, “Al. From maintenance.”

“Oh, sorry,” said the other and was soon heard rinsing his hands and departing.

Wagner hoped he would not have to go to these extremes every time nature called, but until the air cleared and the real culprits were identified, he should probably do well to drink less coffee during working hours.

Back at his desk, visible again, he found in his Out box a new sheaf of assignments. Under the rule of Jackie’s predecessor each copywriter or, in the case of an exceptionally large book, two writers might be assigned to do all the text for the same catalogue. If there were two, they could divide the task as they wished, each taking the items individually preferred. Jackie changed the old system, which in her theory had produced uninspired copy. By the end of a catalogue a writer’s energy had flagged. Obviously the tendency was to deal first with all those products that were easy to write about and leave the tougher ones to the end, when of course the deadline was near. Thus it was often true that the very items the client wanted to push, because of the novelty that made writing about them an unusual effort, got either short shrift or what was perhaps worse, a description that was the issue of laboriousness and desperation. Anyway that was Jackie’s opinion. She offered it with a self-righteousness based on (1) her own experience as a copywriter, which was hardly unique, and (2) her current power, which was.