Domestic Violets (4 page)

I swoon for a moment. I’m like some dumb kid with unfortunate skin at his locker. But then I see my dad on my computer screen, smiling at me below the headline V
IOLET
W
INS
P
ULITZER FOR
F
ICTION
. He’s looking at me all smug and accomplished like he’s so smart, and I think of that stupid T-shirt. It’s a good question. What Would Curtis Violet Do?

Chapter 5

I
n most companies
, no one really notices you until they need you. And even then, when someone wanders into your office or IMs you and finds that you’re gone, they just assume you’re doing something constructive. Sitting in some horrible, pointless meeting. Stealing office supplies. Weeping gently in a bathroom stall on the fourth floor. Once you’ve established yourself as reasonably competent, you can pretty much come and go as you please.

And so, as the day wears on and on, I’ve decided to go.

There are few things as exciting as going over the wall in the middle of the afternoon. On the other side, the air is fresher and the sun is a little more brilliant in the blue sky. There are always people walking around, driving places, and I wonder if they’ve gone over the wall, too. Are there currently hundreds—thousands—of unmanned cubes and offices in D.C. right now while we all do whatever it is we’re doing here on the outside?

I worked at MSW for a full six months before I even knew what MSW stood for, which is Management Services Worldwide. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but, in a nutshell, my company helps other companies be better companies. We have courses and expert speakers and pie charts and business models and acronyms and PowerPoint presentations that throw around ear-splitting words like “synergy” and “best practices” and we have Webinars and binders of information and it’s all designed to help your organization work more efficiently. My job, as director of marketing copywriting, is to write ads and press releases and brochures about how if you don’t use MSW your company will sink into bankruptcy, your wife will leave you, and you will die alone beneath a bridge.

It’s all very fulfilling.

Like most people who have jobs like mine, it was all meant to be temporary. I would write and publish my novel, and then I’d retire from corporate purgatory and become a member of the Community of American Letters.

That was seven years ago. In a climate in which simply having a job is an accomplishment, mine represents failure.

When I arrive at my doctor’s office, I stride toward the reception desk where a woman named Glenda sits. Glenda is an elderly black lady who’s worked for my doctor for as long as he’s been my doctor, but she never seems to recognize me. I can’t blame her though, considering I’ve never made an actual appointment and every time I’m here I claim to be someone different.

“Can I help you?” she asks.

“Yes. I’m Paul Hewson, here to see Dr. Mortensen.”

Paul Hewson is Bono’s real name, incidentally. Last time I was here, I was Gordon Sumner, otherwise known as Sting.

Glenda looks at a giant desk calendar. Dr. Charlie shares his practice with two ancient doctors, and so everything here seems like something out of an issue of
Life
magazine.

“What time was your appointment?”

I look at my watch, which says 3:45, and so that’s what I say.

“Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Hewson, I don’t seem to have you down.”

“Oh, no worries. I can wait awhile.”

As she jots Bono’s name down, I walk by the waiting room and through a door leading to the examination rooms. An old woman reading
Highlights
looks up but doesn’t seem concerned that I’m blatantly cutting in line. As obnoxious as this all sounds, it’s actually authorized. Dr. Charlie was my college roommate, and he’s too nice of a guy to tell me that I’m not Barbra Streisand and that maybe I should actually make an appointment like a normal person.

A few nurses smile at me, assuming that I’m someone else’s problem, as I sneak glances into rooms. One of Charlie’s partners dozes at his desk over a file while listening to Rush Limbaugh. A young mother sits in an examining room with a little boy dressed in only socks and tighty-whitey underwear. She’s ignoring him as he drums on her thigh with tongue depressors. I round a corner and see a poster on the wall diagramming the human respiratory system, which looks very much like the D.C. Metro map. Then I hear Charlie’s voice. He’s yelling, but not in an angry way. I follow the shouting to find my friend standing in a doorway, hollering into a very old man’s ear.

“Two pills, Mr. Halgas! One in the morning, and one at night before bed!”

“Twice a day? But I only took the other ones
once
a day. I don’t like all the pills. I’d prefer just one.”

“I’d prefer to have more hair and a Bentley, Mr. Halgas. But sometimes we can’t get everything we want. Those last pills weren’t working, that’s why you’re here now. You’ll feel better, OK? I promise!”

“Well fine then,” he says. He’s wearing a green cardigan sweater and Velcro sneakers. As he shuffles down the hallway toward reception, he puts on one of those hats that only old men and Samuel L. Jackson can wear.

“Say hi to Lorraine for me, Mr. Halgas!” says Charlie. “I’ll see you next month!”

The old geezer grunts good-bye, waving his prescription in the air. And then I find myself thinking of Mr. Halgas having sex. His saggy, old-man body is entwined with Lorraine’s, who I can only assume is his wife but who looks like Barbara Bush in my mind.

Mr. Halgas’s penis is fine, at least in this scenario I’ve made up. So, what in the hell’s wrong with mine?

Charlie’s writing something in a file. “How’d you get by Glenda?” he asks me.

“I hit her over the head with my shoe. Don’t worry, she’ll be fine in a few hours.”

Mr. Halgas exits through the door, and now we’re just a couple guys looking down an empty hallway. “Is he gonna be OK?” I ask.

“Mr. Halgas? Shit. He’ll outlive us both.”

“Damn, I need to find a new doctor. I’m only thirty-five.”

Charlie does some more scribbling and drops his pen into his shirt. “So, have you knocked up your wife yet?”

I suspect that Charlie speaks more casually with me than many of his other patients.

“Funny you should ask. You got a second to talk?”

“It’s weird. It feels like it goes . . . dead.”

I’m scanning Charlie’s diplomas, sitting across from him. He’s looking at my file, and I’m flattered that I even have a file, considering my insurance company only has the vaguest proof that I’ve ever even been here. His face is stoic and professional. “Dead? What do you mean by that exactly?”

“No feeling. Nothing. Anna will be right there waiting for me, and it’s like a complete failure. Sometimes it even shrinks. An anti-boner.” Even as I say this, I can feel my penis going numb, like it can hear me.

“You know, that would be a good name for an all-lesbian punk band,” says Charlie. “The Antiboner.”

“You think maybe we could focus here?”

“You’re not eighteen anymore, Tom. Have you and Anna ever tried, you know,
manual
stimulation? Maybe switching things up a little? Being creative?”

There’s another quick scene in my head, thrown together suddenly. Mr. Halgas isn’t there this time. It’s me and Anna and we’re in an awful hotel trying to role-play. She’s dressed like a slutty maid, but she’s got this overly thoughtful look on her face, like she thinks this is all a really bad idea.

“The thing is,” I say, “that actually makes it worse. It’s like, if we ever try something out of the ordinary, I’m
thinking
about it then, you know. And that’s the fucking kiss of death. Thinking. It’s like thinking about a two-foot putt. You’re screwed.”

Charlie nods. “That’s a good analogy.”

“It might be a simile. I can never remember the difference.”

“Seven years,” he says, “that’s a big age gap for kids.”

“I know. On the bright side, it’ll give them both something to be mad at us about.”

He worries the end of his stethoscope like a doctor on television with a prop. He’s gained some weight since I saw him last month, and his hair seems to be receding before my very eyes. “Do you ever get morning wood?” he asks.

“Excuse me.”

“Morning wood? Or, if you’d prefer, morning missile. This is actually a medical question, I swear.”

I think about the morning version of my penis. That would also be a pretty good name for a band: the Morning Version of My Penis. “Sometimes, I guess. Not like when I was twelve, but, you know. Why?”

“When you’re sleeping, you’re unconscious, obviously, and you’re totally relaxed. So, if there’s action downtown when you’re asleep, it’s proof to me that your problem exists in your stupid head. You’re just psyching yourself out. That’s all. Anxiety manifests itself in weird ways. I’ve got this little boy, a patient. He has this rare form of narcolepsy. Whenever he gets stressed, like if his parents are having an argument or he’s got a pop quiz at school, he just goes to sleep. He doesn’t faint or pass out, he just falls asleep, on the spot. That’s what your johnson is doing, falling asleep to cope with stress. Your cock has narcolepsy.”

God bless my dopey friend in his white coat. This is his favorite part of being a doctor, wowing people with all the shit he knows. When someone in the dorms was super hungover back at school, he’d sit with them all morning and explain exactly why they felt so shitty. “There’s ethanol in alcohol, and that causes dehydration. When you’re dehydrated, your brain actually shrinks and pulls away from your skull. Here, have some more Gatorade.”

“Don’t you need to, like, look at my prostate or something?” I ask. It dawns on me that that’s the first time I’ve ever asked someone that.

“Well, as nice as that sounds, no. We’ll worry about that in ten years. Right now, your malfunction isn’t in your ass, it’s in your brain. There’s a lot of stress in the world. Watching the news is stressful. Trying to get pregnant is stressful. Your body is reacting to that. Anna is stressed about it, too, I’m sure. But the girls don’t have to worry about rising to the occasion. They have it easy. Well, aside from actually having to carry and birth the babies. Some of them find that difficult.”

I tell Charlie about hearing Anna’s sex dreams. This information seems to cement something in his mind, and he begins rummaging through his desk drawer until he sets a little box of sample pills on his desk. I recognize the logo from the commercials that come on whenever I watch sports.

“Fortunately, the good people at Pfizer are looking out for guys like you.”

“You just keep those in your desk, like Skittles?”

“Take one forty-five minutes before you’re ready to go. Works every time. Trust me.”

“Umm,” I say, but humiliation claims the rest.

Reading my mind, Charlie leans forward, resting his elbows on his desk. “It’s just to get you back in the game, man. You need to be out of your own head. That’s what these babies are for. When you’ve got your confidence back up, you can sell whatever you’d got left on the street to teenagers. It’s all good.”

My BlackBerry makes a little chirp and vibrates in my pocket. It means I have a text message, and there’s only one person in the world who texts me. Katie has written:

“What’s wrong?” Charlie asks.

“Nothing. It’s just work.”

“You guys gonna survive all this doomsday stuff?”

As I get up to leave, I shrug, because, in truth, I have absolutely no idea.

“What does your company do again? I can never remember.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say.

“Hey, dumb ass, aren’t you forgetting something?” Charlie tosses me the sample box. “Go home, Tom. Fuck your wife. You’ll both feel a lot better in the morning.”

I think of Mr. Halgas again in his Velcro sneakers. Like him, I’m hating the prospect of medication. But, also like him, I’m begrudgingly beginning to accept it. “You know, I still have a few minutes. You sure you don’t want to look at my prostate? Just for a second?”

Chapter 6

B
ack at the
office, I head for Cubeland. This is what we call it, Cubeland, where everyone who isn’t a manager works. Every floor has one, row after row of tiny little work cells. Each cell is personalized with cat calendars or Dilbert cartoons or coffee mugs, but they’re all uniform in their sadness. The tension here today is as palpable as air pollution. Nearly every computer I see is turned to a news site, and articles are up about how we’re all spiraling toward a national state of bankruptcy. Lehman Brothers is officially gone, as in, it no longer exists. A girl in a navy blue dress is loading knickknacks from her desk into her gym bag. Another guy a few cubes down is talking on the phone. “Mom, I don’t know,” he says. “Seriously. We know nothing. No one does.”

I suppose I’m nervous, like everyone else, but, in truth, I only half understand what in the hell is going on, or who Lehman Brothers or any of the other floundering and/or destroyed companies are in a practical sense. Terrorism, natural disasters, and little blue erection pills: those things are tangible. But right now, my fear of the economy is like my fear of algebra in high school.

For no legitimate reason, I take a detour past Katie’s cube, but, sadly, she’s not there. There are a few random files strewn about and an old yogurt carton. The I’
M A
P
EPPER
sign above her computer is crooked, like always, and there’s the picture of Katie and her boyfriend, Todd. In my head, I refer to him as Todd the Idiot, which is a name he earned last year at the company holiday party when he threw up into an arrangement of poinsettias in front of everyone. Next to their picture sits my heart-shaped squeeze ball. If I were a less mature person, I’d steal it back—along with her dancing hula girl bobble head—but I control myself.

In my office, back at my computer, there’s an unholy amount of e-mails, 97 percent of which can be deleted immediately. There’s one from Katie, buried in the middle, asking if we’re going to 7-Eleven today for our biweekly meeting. She’s also wondering if she should start looking into food stamps. Another e-mail is from my boss, Doug, the vice president of marketing and corporate communications.

I sit down and am prepared to feel the appropriate amount of anxiety, but I’m interrupted by a knock on my door—my
open
door. In my career, I’ve found that only annoying people knock on open doors. I know that’s a generalization, but, using my peripheral vision, I can see that my theory remains rock solid. There’s another knock, and for reasons I can’t quite explain, I pretend as if I don’t hear it. Staring at my monitor, I’m a busy professional man totally unaware of the person lurking in the doorway.

“I know that you know I’m here, Tom, so you can stop ignoring me.”

When I look up, I act surprised to see Gregory Steinberg. And then I smile as big as I can. “Hey, Greg, I didn’t see you standing there.” Gregory is one of those guys who insist on being called Gregory, and so I insist on calling him Greg.

“Yeah right,” he says. His face is an unhappy mix of lines and corporate scowls. “So, I suppose you’ve been in meetings for the last two hours, right?”

“Well, not that it’s any of
your
business, Greg, but I was in a pretty important meeting, as a matter of fact. The management team pulled me in to discuss marketing initiatives. You know, with all these little
snafus
in the financial sector, we should probably lay out an aggressive plan. They just wanted to run some things by me. Brainstorm a little.”

This is a profound lie, and I’m proud of myself for its boldness and the fact that it came to me so quickly.

“That’s not true, and you know it,” he says. If such a meeting had taken place, Greg, the director of communications, would surely have been invited, but there’s enough doubt in his twitching jaw to give me a little thrill. His hatred for me is strong today, buzzing around his head in swirls and hisses. Greg is my Dr. Evil. He is my one-armed man. Whenever he enters a room, in my mind I hear the Imperial Death March from
Star Wars
. He is my nemesis, yet, whenever I see him, regardless of the situation, I smile like I’ve just won the lottery. I do this for no other reason than because he hates it. One of the countless complaints he’s lodged against me with HR reads:

These complaints, which I have saved on my computer in a file called “Ass Face,” are among the greatest achievements of my career. I read them sometimes when things are bleak or there’s a particularly ghastly paper jam in the printer down the hall. They always make me feel just a little better.

“So, Greg, to what do I owe the honor?” My face hurts, but I keep smiling. It’s called commitment.

He sits down across from me and sets a stack of papers on my desk. It’s copy for a brochure I’ve written about one of our shitty new products. He’s celebrated my hard work by dousing it with red ink, slashing through entire paragraphs and writing suggestions in the margins. There’s nothing wrong with what I’ve written, of course. It’s actually pretty good, as far as corporate propaganda goes. He just has this compulsive need to make random changes to everything I write. He’s like Dustin Hoffman counting those matchsticks in
Rain Man
. He just can’t help himself.

“We need to talk about this,” he says, very seriously.

“Well, OK. Did you like it? I wrote it especially for you.”

Across the top of the first page he’s scrawled, “NO CONTRACTIONS!” in big, bold letters. To further articulate his point, he’s crossed out every contraction on the page—every “it’s” and “who’s” and “we’ve” and “you’ve.” It’s a whole new achievement in douche-baggery for him, and I’m almost impressed.

“The tone is all wrong here. It’s way too casual for the audience. This is supposed to be targeted at C-levels.
C
EOs.
C
OOs.
C
IOs. You’re talking to them like they’re a bunch of interns. These are decision makers here, Tom . . . a sophisticated group.”

“Well, certainly. All the executives I know are wildly sophisticated. But we’re not cutting contractions, Greg. We’ve been over that. This isn’t Comp 101. Have you ever actually tried to read something without contractions? It sounds like it’s written by robots.”

“They don’t have time for casual. All they care about is
WIIFM
.”

I actually close my eyes here for a moment—that’s how badly this hurts me. “WIIFM” is one of those bullshit, made-up corporate acronyms, and it stands for “What’s in It for Me?” Greg uses it no fewer than ten times a day. Every time it leaves his mouth, I’m convinced that something good and pure in the world—an endangered species or perhaps a rare, exotic flower—is destroyed and Earth becomes that much more hopeless. “I’ve given them all the benefits, Greg—I’ve
led
with them, in fact, as I learned in copywriting school. I think these brilliant executives of yours will be able to dumb themselves down enough to figure it out . . . despite the contractions.”

The color of his face is beginning to match his burgundy tie. Greg is a tie guy, and I am a non-tie guy. This represents the rift among the males in our office—Business Casual versus Business Formal—and I’m almost certain it will eventually lead to a choreographed dance fight in the employee lounge.

“Seven out of ten people receiving this piece make more than three hundred thousand dollars a year.”

“Well, I’m happy for them, but if you wanna start tossing around arbitrary figures, then I can tell you that one out of one Tom Violets doesn’t care. We’re not cutting the contractions.”

Greg sighs deeply, counting to ten in his head. “That’s very clever, but they aren’t arbitrary figures. It’s all in the research that I provided. It’s called a customer profile.”

“Greg, there are starving children in Africa. And there’s this virus out there that actually eats human flesh. But still, you and I are sitting in my office arguing about this . . .
again
.”

He drops another stack of papers on my desk, ignoring my plea for social awareness. “Did you even read my messaging document?”

“No, Greg. I
did not
. I
have
never
read one of your messaging documents, and
I will
never
read one of your messaging documents. I
would not
, if you held a shotgun to my skull.”

As he shoots up from my chair, his eyes are alive with anger and his tie whips in a violent arc across his chest. “I can’t deal with you anymore!”

“See, Greg. I told you it’s annoying when people don’t use contractions.”

“I know you think this is all hysterical. It’s just a big joke to you, right? Ha-ha.”

I assume this is rhetorical, and so I just sit there and smile as creepily as I can.

“Well, some of us take this seriously, Tom. This brochure needs to work, because if we don’t increase our corporate sales by fifteen percent this year, we’re dead. Don’t you even understand the world around you? Do you watch the news? People are losing their jobs. But if that’s not important to you, then you just keep laughing. Just keep laughing while you still can.”

As Greg storms away, his long black cape flowing behind him, I can’t help but feel a flicker of respect. I hate to say it, but
that
was a nice exit line.

“Later, Greg,” I say, quietly, to my now-empty office.

There’s a little light blinking on my phone, and I can see from the caller ID that I’ve missed two calls today, one from my mother and one from my stepfather, Gary. It seems strange that they’d be calling me separately, but I’m too jazzed up from enraging Greg to be concerned.

“What was that all about?”

Katie, like a cool breeze, is standing at my door with a can of Diet Dr Pepper in her hand. It’s late in the day and she looks a little tired and her hair is pulled back in a ponytail. “He looked pissed.”

“Greg is in a permanent state of pissed, Katie. You know that.”

“Good point. But doesn’t it bother you when he yells at you like that? I hate when people yell at me.”

“You know how when Rocky gets punched over and over again by guys like Mr. T and Ivan Drago? That’s what Greg’s rage is like for me—it’s energizing.”

My
Rocky
reference seems to have no effect on Katie, and I wonder if this girl has even seen any of the
Rocky
movies. Do twenty-three-year-olds know
Rocky
? Perhaps I should do a focus group.

“So, where did you go today, anyway?” she asks. “I had to go to 7-Eleven by myself. You know I hate doing that. There are all those construction workers there all the time.”

“Sorry, I was out fighting crime.”

She shakes her head at me, which is something that the women in my life seem to do a lot. “Come on, let’s go smoke,” she says.

“What? I thought you were on the patch.”

She shrugs. “That’s the problem. I
was
on the patch. Past tense.”

I feign a disapproving look, but, in truth, as horrible as it sounds, smoking looks sexy on Katie. It’s like that brown jacket; it fits her perfectly. And so as she walks out of my office, I follow.

I don’t look nearly as good as Katie when I smoke, which is why I rarely do it. Well, that and all the research about how, apparently, it kills you. I take a measured puff, feel the weird burn in my chest, and blow out, without really enjoying it. There’s that little surge, like a shot of espresso, but it only lasts a few minutes, tops. Aside from these secret trips to the roof with Katie, I’ve quit smoking, but I remember my first cigarette very well. I was an eighteen-year-old college freshman. Like most kids that age, I had romantic ideas of what college would be like. I’d be an English major and I’d shave only sporadically and date girl poets with wild, curly hair. But, more than any of that, I’d be anonymous.

I realized how naïve this was the first five minutes of my first class in college, Advanced Composition for English Majors. The instructor, some kid from the MFA program in a sport coat, began passing out badly Xeroxed copies of my dad’s most famous short story, “Macy’s.” As he read Curtis’s prose aloud, he sounded like he was auditioning for something, and I didn’t bother following along. Since roll call at the beginning of the class, the other students had been looking at me and whispering about me. They’d heard, of course, that Curtis Violet’s kid was a freshman, and there I was. These kids—earnest English nerds like me—knew that the boy in the story, Henry, was based on me. My dad speaks at great length about his inspiration, and that story, which has been reprinted and anthologized more times than I can even imagine, came from a shopping trip one Christmas when I was a little older than Allie. We got separated in the holiday crowd, and so for about forty-five minutes I wandered the store alone looking at mannequins and touching cashmere sweaters until an old security guard found me. I ate a Tootsie Roll Pop in Customer Service while my dad was paged over the loudspeaker.

“That’s it,” said the grad student when he was done reading. “That’s what we’re all trying to do when we sit down to write. And until we do . . . we’ve failed. Case closed.”

After class, some kid with a goatee offered me one of his cigarettes, and I took it without hesitation. It was one of those silly acts of rebellion—a rebellion against a man who probably didn’t care one way or another if I smoked. It tasted only a little worse than this cigarette I’m smoking now.

Katie exhales toward the sky. “Are you gonna be in trouble for this?” she asks.

I’m not sure exactly what she’s referring to. I could be in trouble for keeping my boss waiting, for leaving my office for hours on end without telling anyone, for pissing Greg off, for thinking about this beautiful young girl the way I sometimes think about her. Or, I could simply be in trouble for smoking—of which Anna and Allie would definitely not approve.