Marcelo in the Real World (7 page)

“It doesn’t matter.” She’s actually speaking faster than I would have preferred. There are words and phrases that elude me. But one of the things I learned at Paterson was to let people talk even though I don’t understand every single thing I hear. As they go on the meaning becomes clear. It took years to train my brain not to question the meaning of every single word that lands there.

She continues, “So I’m ready to hire Belinda and your dad tells me to hold off because he wants you to work here this summer.”

“I understand.”

“Now you know.”

“I am very good at concentrating. If Jasmine shows me how to do something, I will learn.”

We reach the end of the hall. Behind a glass partition there is a woman sitting at a desk bigger and somehow more elegant than the desks of the other secretaries. The woman is looking into a small mirror while applying lipstick, the color of which I have never seen before. I think that perhaps this is what the word “carmine” looks like.

“This is Juliet,”Jasmine says to me. “Holmesy’s secretary.”

“Mr. Holmes,” the woman says, correcting Jasmine.

“Whatever,” Jasmine says.

“So,” Juliet says, smacking her lips together, “you’re the new
mail boy. Mr. Holmes told me you would be arriving today. He wants to see you, so I’ll call you when he has a free minute.”

“Why?” Jasmine asks. “What does Holmesy want with him?”

“I don’t believe that is any of your concern,” Juliet says.

“He works for me,” Jasmine tells her.

“And you work for Mr. Holmes.”

“Wrongo mundo, Julie baby. I report directly to the boss, his father.”

“I’m sure you do.” Juliet’s lips twist upward at the corners as she says this. Then, glancing in my direction, she says, “I’ll call you when Mr. Holmes is ready to see you. I assume he’ll have the same phone number as the young criminal that used to work with you?”

Jasmine leans over Juliet’s desk and points her index finger at her. “Listen to me carefully. I’m going to tell you directly what I will tell Holmesy when I see him. He is not going to do any work that his secretary or executive mucky-muck or whatever your title is, is supposed to do. He’s not going to file or copy or do anything that
you
can do. And he’s not going to be Wendell’s errand boy either. All work requests from you or Holmesy or Wendell go through me. If Holmesy needs work done that is above your intellectual abilities, he can ask Wendell there to do it for him.” Jasmine points at the office directly across from Juliet.

In the quick second that I look at Juliet, I see her nostrils flare. Then she says to Jasmine, “Oliver Wendell is helping his father with the Vidromek litigation. He’s not here to do dummy work.” She looks at me when she says the last two words.

Jasmine turns to me and says, “Let’s go before I lose control and do something that lands me in prison.”

“Delighted to meet you,” Juliet says. But when I look at her, she does not have anything that resembles delight on her face.

When we are down the hall, Jasmine exhales loudly. “That woman is a bona fide bitch. And I’m being extremely literal. Listen to me. If she or Holmes or little boy Wendell asks you to do anything, anything whatsoever, you need to tell me immediately. Do you understand?”

“Yes. I know Wendell. He is not a little boy. He is about three years older than I am.”

“Yeah, well. He has the emotional maturity of an eight-year-old.”

“I played tennis with him once. Not tennis exactly. He hit the ball to me and I hit it back to him.” I am about to tell her what Yolanda said to me this morning but I stop myself in time. Instead, I say, “He is going to Harvard.”

“Yeah, yeah! He thinks he’s God’s gift to womankind. The only good thing about having him around this summer is that it’s fun to see him miserable. He hates having to spend the summer here while he could be out racing yachts or something, but his father is making him do it, God only knows why.”

“God knows why,” I tell her. I wonder if mentioning God in the workplace is also something that should not be done, along with praying or quoting Scripture. In any event, Jasmine does not seem to mind.

“Anyway,” Jasmine says, “that’s why I told you I wasn’t happy you were working here.”

It takes me a while to recollect the conversation we were having before the encounter with Juliet.

“I agreed to have you work with me, you might as well know, only because your father is giving me an extra two thousand a month and I need the money. But I would still rather have Belinda, two thousand or no two thousand. Just so you know.”

“I understand,” I say again.

“The early mail run is easy because there aren’t too many lawyers around. They get here around nine and work ‘til all hours of the night. That’s the corporate culture here.”

“I am not happy about being here either.” I hear these words come out of me and I’m not certain that it is me that is saying them. “I would rather be working at Paterson taking care of the ponies.”

Jasmine looks at me steadily for the longest time and then nods like she agrees. She opens the door to the mailroom and pushes the cart inside. “This door needs to be locked every time you leave the room and I’m not here. I’ll give you a key. No one comes in here but you and me. If someone needs a file, they stand on that side of the counter while we get it. I’ll show you how the filing works. People used to come in and get files on their own and then one got lost and the firm got sued for malpractice. Since then no one is allowed in here, not even the cleaning people. At the end of the day, we put the trash baskets right outside the door. Okay?”

“Yes.”

“So let’s get that laptop of yours hooked up.”

J
asmine connects my laptop to the law firm’s system so now I can get e-mails from all the lawyers and staff. As soon as she leaves the room, I decide to check out the term “cognitive disorder” on the Internet. The term is unlike anything I’ve ever heard Arturo use and I am curious to find out what he may have meant by it. It cannot be that Arturo thinks I have a cognitive disorder. There are so many serious mental illnesses that are referred to as cognitive disorders: dementia, schizophrenia, paranoia, hallucinations (auditory and visual). I decide that Arturo used a shortcut term to describe a reality difficult to explain. That is the only explanation that makes sense. Would Arturo want me to work at the law firm or attend a regular high school or go to college if he thought I was not in touch with reality? All my life he’s fought against anything that separates me from the normal.

I hear the telephone on my desk ring. The ring is loud, louder than any telephone ring I’ve ever heard, and for some reason the ring sounds as if it is transmitting rage.

“Hello,” I say.

I hear a woman’s voice: “Mr. Holmes will see you now.”

“Now,” I repeat.

“Yes. Now. As in immediately. He only has a few minutes before his eleven o’clock. If you could get here right away that would be wonderful.”

“Okay.” I stand up. I’m not sure I can find Stephen Holmes’s office on my own. Then I hear Jasmine’s voice. She has been sitting at her desk all along and I didn’t know she was there.

“Let me guess, Holmes is summoning you.”

“Now. He wants to see me now.”

“It’s always now with Holmesy.”

I stand there a few moments feeling embarrassed.

“What?” she asks.

“I have forgotten how to get to his office.” She stands up and motions for me to follow her. “I will memorize where everyone sits as soon as I get back. I was going to do it as soon as we got back from the mail run but I got carried away looking up something.”

Jasmine does not seem annoyed by the fact that she has to walk me to Stephen Holmes’s office. She seems to be preoccupied with thoughts of her own. “You might as well try to stay on Holmesy’s good side. He likes it when you ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over his office and when you appear to be in awe of every word that comes out of his mouth. Okay, there it is. When you’re done, or better yet, when Holmesy’s done with you, just walk out of his office, turn left and then another left and you’ll be in the mailroom. Left and left. Okay?”

“Left and left,” I repeat.

Then she turns around and leaves. I’m standing in front of Juliet, who is clicking rapidly on her keyboard. “Go in,” she says without looking up.

I walk in and see Stephen Holmes behind a big glass desk. Everything in the office appears to be made of glass and extremely breakable. Stephen Holmes covers the mouthpiece of the telephone with his hand and says, “Sit down, Gump, I’ll be right with you.”

At first I think that someone named Gump has come into the room, but then I remember that Gump is what Stephen Holmes calls me ever since I hit the tennis balls with Wendell at the summer barbecue. “Your son is a regular Forrest Gump,” Stephen Holmes said to Arturo after Wendell and I were done.

“What exactly do you mean by that?” Arturo responded. I remember how all the people sitting on the patio suddenly stopped talking.

“You know,” Stephen Holmes said, “just like Forrest Gump in that movie, with the Ping-Pong.”

I remember how Aurora yanked Arturo back down in his chair. I remember also Stephen Holmes and Arturo later that evening as they stood together underneath the tree house and they didn’t know I was up there. Arturo was explaining how the tree house was fully equipped with electricity and how Yolanda’s classmates had designed and built it. Then he said, “By the way, don’t ever call my son names again.” The tone of Arturo’s voice was different than any I had ever heard before. I heard Stephen Holmes chuckle and then say: “Don’t be so touchy, Art.”

The next day I asked Yolanda why Stephen Holmes had called me Gump and we rented the movie
Forrest Gump.
When I saw the
part of the movie where he becomes a Ping-Pong champion, I understood why Stephen Holmes called me Gump. What I did not understand and still don’t is why Arturo got so upset. The main character in the movie is a very good human being.

Stephen Holmes hangs up and immediately places his feet on top of the glass desk. There is nothing on the desk but the telephone and a silver pen.

“Sit, Gump, sit.”

“My name is not Gump,” I say. “My name is Marcelo Sandoval.”

“Of course it is. Sit down, Mr. Marcelo Sandoval.”

Stephen Holmes pronounces my name Mar
ch
elo instead of Marselo, the way it’s supposed to be pronounced.

“How’s the tennis game?”

“I don’t actually play tennis,” I say, sitting down on the edge of a black chair.

“Nonsense. You’re a regular Pancho Gonzales. Hey, you know Wendell is working here this summer, helping me with some litigation. You two should go over to the club and play some squash.”

“Yolanda taught me to hit the ball back to her so she could practice. I can hit the ball back if it is close to me. If the ball is not hit directly at me, I usually don’t get to it.”

“You’ll do well in squash. You won’t have to chase the ball around like in tennis.”

“I am not good at competitive sports. It is hard for Marcelo to move quickly. I tend to think too much.”

“That reminds me of why I wanted to see you. I’d like you to help Wendell with the litigation project he’s working on. He’s a
bright kid but not very good at following through on the little details. You know, organizing, filing. And there’s tons of photocopying to do.”

“Jasmine said to check with her before I did work for you or Wendell.”

“Jasmine, Jasmine. What your father sees in her is beyond my comprehension.”

Suddenly my head feels hot. Even though I don’t fully understand, I sense that Stephen Holmes is attacking Arturo, the one thing that always makes me angry. Without thinking I say, “Jasmine must be a good worker if Arturo likes her.” I don’t care if what I say and how I say it sounds disrespectful.

Stephen Holmes grins. Actually, the thing that Stephen Holmes does with his lips can be better described as a smirk. “She must be good at something all right if your father likes her.” He smirks again. “See if you can figure out why your father keeps Jasmine around. That would be a good project for you this summer. In any event, don’t you worry about Jasmine. I’ll take care of her.”

“Marcelo does not worry.” I am still angry but the anger is subsiding. I take a deep, deep breath as I have been taught to do at Paterson.

“I know Marcelo doesn’t.” Holmes laughs. “I wish I didn’t worry about things. It must be nice to have a simple, uncomplicated brain.”

“You can if you want to.”

“Oh yeah?”

“It’s not hard to simplify the thought processes of the brain. All you have to do is stop unwanted thoughts from rising up.”

“Is that right?”

“I found the best way to do that is to memorize a passage from Scripture and then remember that passage whenever you want to stop unwanted thoughts.” I wonder if that is something that I should not have said. I remember Arturo’s rule not to talk about religious matters in the workplace.

Stephen Holmes takes his feet down and places both of them on the red rug under his desk at the same time. I can feel him studying me. I always feel a sense of discomfort when I am with Stephen Holmes. “Maybe we can go to lunch someday and you can tell me just how to do that. I’m afraid I have a conference call as of ten minutes ago. I’ll tell Wendell to take you out to lunch sometime. He can teach you how to profligate and you can teach him how to concentrate. Hey, that’s pretty good, if I say so myself.”

I stay seated, searching through my mental files for the meaning of the word “profligate.”

“Okay, Gump. You can go back to the mailroom and the auspices of your father’s protégée. By the way, how’s Yolanda doing? Is she enjoying Yale?”

Yolanda constantly complains about how hard her studies are so I’m not sure how to answer the question. I finally decide to say yes, even if this is not totally accurate.

“What’s she studying? Does she want to be a nurse like your mother?”

“Yolanda wants to study the human brain. She has a job as a research assistant at a hospital in New York.”