Nothing To Lose (A fat girl novel) (11 page)

The janitor for his dorm – not like any janitor he ever knew – cleaned the bathroom and not only brought his mail but invited confidences, gave advice, took shoes to be soled, clothes to the cleaner, wanted to serve but wasn’t subservient. The janitor called him Mr. O’Neill. “Good morning, Mr. O’Neill.” “Good morning, Mr. Kassabian.” The civility and grace of this exchange alone would have kept him feverishly loyal to Princeton and all it stood for.

He would get top grades and let his personal style shine through. Let the chips, or the ‘cheeps,’ as his mother would say, fall where they may. He wondered why his mother could say ‘chips,’ for ships, but insisted on saying ‘cheeps,’ for chips.

He chose to underline, not hide, the nagging details of his life, and his attitude gave him a social recklessness that intrigued the very people who might normally ignore him. He became a person about whom people spoke obsessively. Did you hear what he said at dinner last night? Has he told you about his grandmother?

When the once-a-week sit-down dinner included a thin, gruel like soup, Luis would detain the waiter. “Uh…Bill…when my mother ordered soup in a restaurant, she would always tell the waitress to ‘dig down and get it thick. You know, from the bottom.” But she didn’t say thick, she said, ‘teek.’ ‘Jew deeg down and get eet teek for me, too, okay Guillermo?” The table was convulsed but there was always the occasional stage whisper: is it any wonder they’re over-represented on the relief rolls?

The blessings and friendship of Fred Burdette, whose father, Lionel, was chairman and chief stockholder of the Burdette chain of department stores, added about ten pounds of charm to the things Luis was known for. The assumption was that Luis was devoted to Fred and Fred found Luis diverting. In fact, it was the opposite. Fred was devoted to Luis and Luis, because the devotion was diverting, couldn’t really see what Fred was all about. In any case, they had a talkative relationship that passed for intimacy.

During the fourth week at school he received a postcard from Barbara Traynor that must have momentarily straightened Mr. Kassabian’s curly hair: This is to let you know I’ve had the abortion. He or she is now lying in some garbage dump or floating in some sewer – wherever they throw such things away. Warm regards, you shit.

That day he went back to see Regina Cross. “Ah, you’re here,” she screeched. She wasn’t exactly one to play her cards close to her chest.

“I wanted to thank you for the two jobs.” I wanted to fuck you. “I’m mopping and selling ads. If I sell a lot of ads, I’ll give up the mopping.”

“You’ll be terrific.” She sounded like a stage manager bolstering the understudy who has to go on,

“Want to have a cup of coffee?”

“Sure.”

That night, he made love to Regina Cross and found that her freckles stopped at her breasts, which were white and smooth. It was hard to believe she was nineteen years old. She had the figure of a twelve-year old. Her face looked frightened all the time but she was surprisingly passionate.

“I’m on the pill,” she had whispered, which he took as a request. He hadn’t planned to have sex, merely grope but after the stark, bold confidence, what else could he do? I’m on the pill translated into I don’t know what you’re here for but I’m ready and willing to fuck.

“Want to do sixty-nine,” she said when they were well under way.

“Sixty-nine?”

“Yes, you know. You eat me and I’ll eat you.”

He knew what it was but the casualness of the request almost knocked him off her narrow bed.

Regina Cross’ father was a surgeon and her mother was an amateur golfer of some renown. Regina was an only child, squeezed into the life of two overburdened careerists. She wanted to be a doctor, too.

None of this interested Luis. He couldn’t feel any sense of responsibility for her waiflike, bereft look. It wasn’t his fault her parents had been too busy to make her feel secure. What was he supposed to do? If he didn’t screw her, she’d look elsewhere.

“If you’re looking for a stable relationship with warmth and attention, you’re in the wrong place.” He said it in a joking manner on their first evening together but it was still a warning. “I’ve got to keep my grades up and I’ve got to work. That doesn’t leave much time for anything else.”

“I know,” she said.

She had beautiful, springy, gleaming red pubic hair, her sole sexual advantage. Still, he liked to make love to her although he found it difficult to listen to her plaintive cheerfulness whenever he said good-bye. At Thanksgiving, he stopped screwing Regina Cross. No matter how he tried to rationalize it, he did feel responsible and he knew he would never love her.

Within a week, he was in a new bed with a new girl.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said.

“What’s there to tell? I’m here.”

“Oh.” She looked understanding. “What you’re trying to say is that it doesn’t matter what happened before.”

“Sort of.”

The second girl didn’t last more than two weeks and then there were others. He told them all what kind of a person he was. “I’m always broke. I have two jobs. I have to keep my grades up. I come from a poor family. Worse than poor.” The blacker the picture he painted, the more he screwed. That first year at Princeton, he screwed his brains out. There was always a bed, a car, a secluded spot. The girls were clever and audacious about finding a place to do it. They wanted to arrange it. They wanted to prove how resourceful they were. And they were. They were anxious for experience and experience to them meant sex.

Later, when he tried to remember those years, he couldn’t think of a single name or reconstruct any of their faces except for Regina. She stayed with him and thinking about her always made him sad.

Chapter Ten

When Louis was in his junior year at Princeton, a representative from the First Commercial Trust Company took him to lunch at the Alchemist and Barrister, the most elegant eatery around the campus.

“Let’s be honest with each other,” said the representative, Mr. Saladino. “My company is very interested in hiring young men like yourself for our trust division. I like what I see. You know how to listen and…I would guess, you’re smart as hell.” When Luis failed to comment, he continued: “Being smart as hell is important, but,” – it was a big ‘but’ punctuated by a large swallow of his drink –“not as important as you might think. Looks, for instance: very important. A certain look. Voice. Tone of voice. Very important. Your voice has no discernible regional accent. It’s strong – a pleasant voice.”

“As long as we’re being honest,” said Luis, “why should I go with you?”

“Aha. Why, indeed?” He threw his hands into the air as if to show Luis there was nothing hidden there. “No reason. We’re solid, a growing company, but so are others. We promote from within and have high starting salaries – like others. Soooo.” – a big ‘so’ during which he pushed himself away from the table –“…we have to make it attractive. What would make it attractive for you? You tell me.”

Luis realized if he asked for too much he would be thought to have poor judgment, and if he asked for too little he would be thought to be a small thinker. “The work’s the main thing,” he said. “If the work’s not challenging, all the perks in the world won’t make it right.”

“Well answered,” said Mr. Saladino, raising an eyebrow in admiration. “However, we like to ease our young men into city living by helping them out. How can you struggle to live and also do your best work? We’re prepared to pay half the rent on an apartment up to one thousand a month and, initially since the wardrobe is work-related, we will open a charge for you with Paul Stuart with a two thousand-dollar credit.”

“It’s a generous offer,” said Luis. “I’ll certainly keep it in mind.”

He had not expected to take the job. He didn’t particularly like Mr. Saladino or the ten other reps that offered similar positions during the next few months. There was a basic insincerity that disturbed him. As if conducting business was rooted in pretense. They wanted him as a prototype. He saw himself as an original. They wanted him to walk primly. He was ready for dynamic leaps. His roommate, Fred Burdette, repeatedly offered the entire Burdie’s chain of department stores, that his father controlled, as a job source, but Luis wanted to test his own muscle and drive.

As a stopgap, he accepted the job with First Commercial Trust and arrived for work on July 5th, one month after his last day of school. The first week, they sent him home with a history of the company and its divisions as well as a sheet of do’s and don’ts:

Only dark blue or gray suits, please. And let’s see some cuff below the jacket sleeve. Dark shoes that tie are in. Boots, high or low, are out. Three bootblacks make the rounds each day, no cost to you. Hairstyles with a definite part inspire confidence. Cologne or jewelry – other than a simple watch or class ring – is distracting to others. A slim wallet – without picture bulge – is desirable. No slang expressions. Hello is preferable to hi. Good-bye is preferable to bye. Introduce yourself as Mister (your last name) and address customers as Mr., Mrs., or Miss., never Ms. During a business lunch, consider eating fish, omelets or veal and drinking wine or nothing. Red meat and hard liquor are associated with excesses people don’t want in their bankers. Hamburger is what children eat. Enough said.

Initially, he was assigned to solicit customers with large checking account balances and try to sell them on transferring their investment portfolios to the bank’s trust division. There was a protocol to the calls and Luis, along with four other young men, practiced the dialogue. They were to begin each call by asking: How are you today? – a greeting Luis considered backslapping and dumb.

He made ten calls his first day and discovered that people with healthy bank balances seldom answered their own phone or were available to come to the phone. He left messages with his name and by afternoon the return calls began to dribble in.

“This O’Neill?” asked a man’s voice.

“Yes. What can I do for you?”

“What can you do for me? I don’t know. You called me. This is John McNally.” The man sounded annoyed. More than annoyed.

“Oh, yes. Well, Mr. McNally, how are you today?”

“How am I today? I’ll tell you how I am. How would you like this phone up your ass? I don’t talk to people who ask me how I am today. What, are you selling something? You want to sell me something and have the nerve to leave a message for me to call you? He became angrier as he spoke.

“Yes, sir.”

“I wouldn’t have even returned the call but my wife’s lawyer is O’Neill. Must be the name. He’s an asshole, too.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why do you keep saying, ‘Yes, sir’?”

“Because you are absolutely right. I shouldn’t have asked how you were.”

“What are you, a wise guy? Who do you work for? I’m checking you out. What’s your company?”

“No company. I…work for myself.”

“I’m having this call traced.”

Luis hung up. He didn’t say ‘How are you today’ to anyone again. Three more calls were returned but no one really wanted to move their investment portfolio to the bank’s trust department and no one wanted to have lunch and find out more about it.

Within three months of joining First Commercial Trust, Luis knew the banking business was not for him. It was needlessly secretive. All information was treated on what they called a “need-to-know” basis, making employees feel untrustworthy. Progress and rewards were impossible to gauge since no one knew the objectives. During the time he worked there, he never met the chief operating officer or made a close friend.

He was mystified as to how the banking business maintained its aura of sophistication and financial muscle. Banks were the softest touches around. There was a childish optimism over the borrower’s success quotient. Inflation had left most lending institutions holding long-term loans at ridiculously low interest rates. Periodically, cash bonuses were offered to mortgage holders if they would pay up, but few were dumb enough to accept. Extravagant sums were loaned to countries that had no compunction about defecting on both interest and principal. What was the bank going to do? Go to some remote part of the world and overthrow the government? Non-federal debt had gone from four hundred billion in 1955 to eighteen hundred billion in 1973. Where was all this money going to come from?

By the time he was twenty-three years old, he decided he had given First Commercial Trust enough of his time and went to a management placement firm to help him work out his future. He didn’t even know if he was management but when the interviewer, Henry Patten, saw Princeton and First Commercial Trust and his starting salary he said it would be no problem.

He called Luis two days later. “There’s an extremely desirable situation available and your name came to mind. In your favor, you’re an unknown quantity in the field. A fresh face.”

“Is that a nice way of saying I have no experience?”

“On the contrary. It’s an advantage not having been around. They want somebody new and young and classy – all of which you fit nicely.”

“What’s the deal?”

“The situation is this: an organization that buys oil from two major oil-producing countries, Kuwait and Venezuela. You would be the liaison until you learned the ropes and possibly eased into heading the department. A lot of traveling, a lot of entertaining, ninety percent PR, until you eased into the actual buying, in which case it would accelerate into deal making at a very high level. Nerves of steel, a quiet manner…grace under pressure.” There was a long pause. “Are you interested? The major honcho interviews for this and he does it over lunch.”