Easy and Hard Ways Out (7 page)

Sincerely,

Pythagoras

P:p

O SOLE MIO

a. A Matter of Symmetry

Mario LoParino had just turned thirteen, a bright, unhappy, already cynical child living a hair above the poverty level in East New York, when his father lost virtually the entire family savings after an impulsive investment in pork bellies. He topped the disaster off by contracting an incurable cancer of the liver, cheerfully proclaimed his intention to rebuild his life, and promptly committed suicide.

“We were saving up to move,” LoParino often mentioned to Brank. “Ten years. We couldn't collect on his insurance. He hanged himself from a light fixture. Very ingenious, too. Well planned. We found out later he'd taken books out of the library. How to hang yourself. It's amazing what you can find in the library. Jesus, I had
some
repair job on that fixture.”

LoParino's mother was still living, a broken old woman who earned her sustenance by bagging American cheese sandwiches for a vending machine company.

“I think the thing I resented most about my father was he always came into the bathroom to take a crap just when I was taking a shower. I mean, even though I'd shower once a week on a Sunday at ten
P.M.,
that's the exact time he'd pick to relieve himself. And when I'd complain about the sounds and the smell, he'd say, ‘Why are you getting so excited? I'll be through in a second.' Did you ever shower when someone was crapping? I'm telling you, it's no bed of roses. And when he'd flush, you know, the water in the shower would get scalding for a full minute. To this day I can't take a shower without being afraid someone will rush in for a lightning crap and flush.”

LoParino was the first engineer Brank had met when he came to Auerbach Labs.

“Place here stinks,” LoParino had commented by way of welcoming the new employee.

As weeks went by, Brank learned that LoParino had occupied seven different apartments during that year alone, and that, in each, he'd rigged the electric meter, gas meter, and telephone so as to greatly underpay the respective utilities.

“Honesty is not really one of my strong points,” he'd mentioned after a month. “My morality seems to depend on whatever fattens my wallet.”

It did not take long then to size LoParino up as a sullen, amoral, criminal, semi-psychopath; Brank, of course, had liked him immediately.

Brank was certain LoParino was going to be fired soon, probably when the F24BZ was completed. A daily skirmisher with the supervisors, LoParino had once called Steinberg a corduroy asshole. He was asking for it, screaming for it actually, even as Brank himself had done so many times in the past, screaming on the inside, denying on the outside. But Brank knew.

LoParino now worked in the Electronics section of Auerbach Labs, having been transferred there shortly after the trouble with Steinberg. The trouble had started a month after he'd been hired, when LoParino made himself asymmetric.

“Oh, Mario,” Steinberg had moaned that Monday morning. “Mario, you can't. I mean … that's crazy, crazy.”

LoParino had sauntered to his desk.

“Another chapter coming up,” Wizer had said softly.

LoParino opened his notebook, began to sketch circuit diagrams. On his chin was half a beard; the left half was bare, the right had a neatly trimmed triangle of hair. Above his upper lip was half a mustache. One eyebrow had been shaved off. The left side of his head was crewcut, the right side long, as usual, hair hanging down over his eye in front and his shirt in back.

“Mario,” Steinberg had said forlornly, and had gone in to see the Chief Engineer, at the time a man named Fieble who carried a black lunchbox.

“I'll speak to him,” Fieble had promised, munching on a Malomar.

“I think it's not good,” Fieble had told LoParino later.

“Why?” asked LoParino.

“It's different. It's not symmetrical.”

“Why must we always submit to the tyranny of symmetry?” said LoParino. “There's nothing that says our left halves have to be like our right.”

Fieble considered that and reached inside his lunchbox.

“You know,” said LoParino, “I've always felt that Malomars stand to other cookies as egg creams do to other sodas.”

“Really?” said Fieble, quite pleased.

Later he asked Steinberg, “Tell me, does he do his work?”

“He's excellent,” Steinberg had answered. “Brilliant, I would say.”

“Then leave him alone.”

A week later, the Chief Engineer wore one brown shoe, one black. And a week after that, he was fired by Rupp, who loved symmetry and thought marshmallow cookies a sign of weakness. The new Chief Engineer, Ardway, took nearly three months to become established and never did feel on solid enough ground to say anything to LoParino, though he did have him transferred.

b. Gondoliers

Pat looked down the row of desks and benches at her boys. At Lubell writing furiously in his notebook. At LoParino lazily working his slide rule and making mandolin music. At Chin-Tao Wong reclining in his swivel chair, lost in thought. At Mills clicking the switches on racks of instruments. At Coletti squinting his eyes to fight off the cigarette smoke as he soldered in a resistor. Her boys.

Boys. Boys. Pat smiled to herself, an inward smile, a mixture of sweetness and wistfulness and bitterness. She was forty-four years old and had three fine, happily married brothers and five nephews and a lab full of men who worked for her and whom she mothered. That's me, she thought. The unwed mother. Perhaps her own mother had been right after all. Perhaps the best thing for her would have been to be a nun, to drop out of life and marry the Lord. It would've been easy, marrying the Lord. The Lord didn't care if you were skinny and had no tits at all and were a little bowlegged and never learned to use makeup. And she wouldn't have had to worry, as she did with all the other men, about seeming too intelligent, about catching Him in factual errors. No sir. Not the Lord. He was smart as a whip.
Omniscient
. And presumably, a good lover too. Wouldn't care about her preposterous inexperience in bed. No sir, not Him. A good lover.
Omnipotent
. But best of all, really best of all, if you wanted to marry Him, He never said no. That's what really sets Him apart, thought Pat. No discrimination.

Pat was amused. Even now, in the evenings when she sat with her mother amidst the sheet-covered furniture and the unfinished games of dominoes, even now, every so often, the old woman would turn to her and say, “Trish, it's still not too late. It's not such a bad life, Trish.” And Pat would just smile at her and hold her rough hand until a TV commercial would distract the old lady and scavenge her trend of thought. Maybe it really isn't that bad a life, thought Pat, but the one I have now isn't that bad either. And just briefly, because the years had taught her discipline, a lightning image of Allen crossed her mind, him standing there in the hall on a weekday evening, that concupiscent grin on his face, telling her teasingly, “I thought you might want a break from your studying. A sex break. Something to relieve the—”

She rose abruptly from her leather chair, stretched in a most unfeminine fashion, and casually ambled down the aisle toward Lubell.

“How's the logic coming, Larry?” she asked.

Lubell looked up from his notebook and quickly thrust a schematic circuit diagram in front of her face. “Oh, uh, actually, Pat, I was just about to ask you, uh, maybe you would know whether I should use a wire-wound or a carbon—”

“You're the engineer, Larry,” said Pat, dodging the onrushing diagram. “You're the one who has to decide.”

“Yes,” said Lubell, “I know. But we don't have the wire-wound in stock right now so I figured—”

“Larry, truthfully, I don't have the time for these details. I'm sure your judgment will be correct.”

“And the switches,” said Lubell plaintively. “I don't know whether to make them—”

“Larry! Larry, no details. You decide. You decide. It's your job, Larry, it's your ball of wax. You're an engineer, this is your job.”

Lubell fell back in his swivel chair, distraught. Built like a Tinker Toy, with a disk head, a larger one for his body, and stick arms and legs, Lubell was burdened in life by an inability to cope with the obvious. Once, when describing to Coletti how LoParino had attacked him in an argument, he said, “He called me a prick. Now what do you suppose he meant by that?” Lubell was well liked in the company because he was a hard, dedicated, and loyal worker who was superbly efficient at accomplishing nothing and posed no threat to anyone. Before Pat had approached his desk he was diligently engaged in his favorite activity, copying the contents of one notebook into another. This was a wonderful trick for appearing to be doing constant, feverish work, and the supervisors never caught on.

Pat stood over his desk and looked down at the picture of his wife, a plain woman wearing a print dress and sheepish smile. How often Pat had thought, for no reason, embarrassedly, maliciously,
I'm prettier than she is. I am
, and felt a horrible yet satisfying pride, much better than if she'd just been smarter. Much better. And yet also, a paradoxical and ironic twinge of sorrow for Lubell, that this was the best he could do. On the wall behind him were an
IEEE
diploma, a
CCNY
Bachelor of Engineering degree, and a reprint of a tiny, one-paragraph article he'd once had published in a technical journal. He'd overheard the idea for the article in the company cafeteria.

“There's just so many things,” he said to Pat now.

“I know,” she said soothingly, almost tenderly. “I know. Just take them one at a time, Larry. I'm sure they'll work out.”

She smiled reassuringly as she glided past the benches of Coletti and Mills. Opposite poles. Give Coletti his Knicks and his Jets and a can of beer and he was set for life. Ambition contained in a rectangle with a twenty-one-inch diagonal. But he was happy, unlike Mills, who'd been going to night school for endless years, trying to claw his way up to being an engineer, forced to take more and more classes as the university cut the credits out from under him. She moved on to Chin-Tao Wong, whose desk was packed with jars of vitamins, and wheat germ, bottles of mouthwash, packets of special skin creams. The little anti-bacteria fan he kept trained on visitors tousled her hair.

“Well, when do you think you can give me the compensating circuit, Chin-Tao?” asked Pat.

“Oh, two week. Maybe three,” said Chin-Tao, nervously.

“But yesterday I thought you said about two days.”

“I did.”

“Did you change your mind then?”

“Oh, no. Two day is when I could give it to you. Two week is when it ready.”

He popped a tablet into his mouth. Some deviant Oriental humor, thought Pat. Nothing I could hope to embrace there.

She moved to LoParino's desk and saw immediately that he was sleeping. Snoring loudly. On the wall above him hung a reproduction of a painting depicting Christ chasing the money changers from the temple. In a corner of the picture was written “Regards to Mario, from J.C.”

“Mario,” said Pat, putting a hand on his shoulder.

Chin-Tao giggled.

“Mario,” said Pat, shaking him.

“That's disgusting,” said Lubell.

LoParino began to tilt over, and with the tilt he shuddered himself awake.

“Mario, you fell asleep,” said Pat.

“Whuh? Uh? Oh. Oh.” LoParino rubbed his eyes and the long half of his hair. “Oh, man. Oh, gee. Jesus, I must've just zonked off.” Abruptly he lurched from his chair, staggered down the aisle and out of the room down the corridor in the direction of the water fountain.

“He is some pisser,” said Mills to Coletti.

Pat went back to her desk near the front of the room and sat down. He is some pisser, she thought. They all are, but he especially. LoParino returned, dripping, sopping wet, apparently having put his entire head under the stream of water. As he passed near Lubell, he shook himself vigorously back and forth like a dog, showering Lubell with droplets.

“Animal,” said Lubell.

Pat thought back to the time after Fieble had been fired, and she'd applied for the Chief Engineer's position, and Rupp had called her to his office. “It can't be,” he'd said softly. “I know you're qualified, Pat. God, except for Brundage and maybe
A
himself you're far and away the best technically in the company. But you know yourself, Pat, the Chief Engineer has got to be able to handle men, and a woman just isn't going to do it. It can never be. It's got nothing to do with you, it's just the way things are. Men in a group are simply going to resent like hell taking orders from a woman. They won't do it.” And that had been that. End of upward mobility.

Ardway's secretary came in. “I have a message from Mr. Ardway,” she said to Pat.

Pat looked at her. “Tell him I'm in the shower,” she said.

The girl considered that for a moment, did not see any showers in the vicinity, and went on with her message. “Mr. Ardway would like to see all section heads in his office first thing tomorrow morning.”

Uh-oh, thought Pat. The nitrogenous wastes are about to strike the rotating air foils. Just then, the sound of a mandolin playing “O Sole Mío” began to waft through the lab. Pat looked up and saw LoParino making the familiar tongue and lip movements and simulating rowing motions with his arms.

“Oh, brother,” said Pat.

“What is that?” asked Ardway's secretary prissily.

Pat turned slowly and looked up. She spoke deliberately. “Haven't you ever seen a gondolier, for chrissake?”

AUERBACH LABORATORIES

Inter-Office Memorandum
11/20/66

From: S. Rupp

To: S. Brine