It had been a bad day. In the history of my bad days, it may have been the worst. I don’t remember what the hell caused it. It doesn’t matter. I had just returned from Washington and it was the end of the day. Janet had been a pain in the ass through the day, calling with minutiae.
“Ben, your wife’s on Line 2,” Maggie called through the intercom.
“What now?” I asked her in a voice that was strained with this fourth call of the day.
“How much chlorine should the poolman put in the pool?
“Huh?”
How much….”
“I heard you. Why are you asking me this?”
“I don’t want him to do it if it’s not right.”
“It’s his fucking job,” I said hanging up the phone.
“Ronald, a doddering member of the “man’s” kitchen cabinet popped into my office.
“Let’s chat about the news release,” said the unctuous, badly graying short fellow who was a constant boil.
“Hello Ronald, what’s up?”
“Your punctuation is all wrong and you need to have the ‘man’ make this announcement, not the company.”
“Why does he have to announce the company’s selling a limo and a Piper Tri-Pacer anyway? Who the hell is going to run that?”
“You missed the whole point. He’s selling them to enhance the company’s value to the shareholders.”
“You mean that the hundred grand is going to fall to the bottom line and have an impact on a company with $9 billion in sales.”
“Oh yes.”
Zelda, the bitch of an office manager who had been there since day one and had probably been sleeping with the chairman since that time wandered in. “Oh, hi, Ronald,” she creaked, neither expecting nor receiving an answer.
“Thanks, Ronald, I’ll work on it, call you later,” I said, dismissing him.
“Yes Zelda.”
“I’ve got the 20,000 golf balls monogrammed with the company logo and the 10,000 Zippo logo’d lighters too. Where should I put them?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I thought they’d be good PR to give out to reporters.”
“There aren’t that many reporters in the world…”
“Your wife’s on line 4,” called Maggie.
“Just a second, Zelda.”
“What now?” I asked, slumping down, trying to hide from everything.
“Do you know Wanda Ryberion lives on our street.”
“Who?” I responded, falling into it now.
“The movie star.”
I punched line three, disconnecting the whale.
“Zelda, did you buy tees, flints and fluid also?”
“No, but I will.”
“Oh God. Look, don’t do anything. Don’t buy anything else, nothing.”
“But…”
“I’ll talk to you later.”
The phone calls and people kept coming, like a string of claymore mines, filled with absurd queries, along with memos, letters and the walk-ins to “just get a handle on what you’re doing.” Five straight hours of tedious jabber for which my response was never correct. And it had been going on for weeks, since the first day.
There was clearly a cabal of old-timers at the company who were on my ass for whatever power they perceived I had after only a few months. There was no power, of course. I was a newcomer with a green beret and ostensibly close to the man. Coming from the news business I wasn’t particularly political enough to notice that they were anything more than one of those gnats or fleas Churchill had talked about and responded to them in my usual blunt, oafish manner. You know, fuck you and leave me alone to do what I have to do. It really didn’t matter at that point because the whole gig was hell to me, from the daily suit to the work which seemed pointless. When I put it together with trying to figure out how I was going to get a divorce, Maggie who buzzed in my head every moment for reasons I tried to figure every moment, and that second guessing that comes when you’re so out of place you’ve no idea where the hell you are, I felt beaten.
That beaten that wrings your body and tells you every fuckin thing you’ve done, maybe ever, was wrong. Looking back, though, it may well have been the best day. And maybe it’s even the beginning of everything. Or at least what everything is now and has been for better than 20 years. It may well have been the baddest day then, but it may have the best day, because I can now think of worse days.
“Maggie, come in for a moment,” I called through the intercom or phone or however we communicated in what I assumed passed for a businesslike fashion back then.
I can’t remember what she was wearing. That’s strange for me, because if I am certifiable, and hell, most will tell you that they’re hopeful it’s only a severe eccentricity and not clinical psychosis; if I am certifiable, it is that obsession with Maggie. Now it’s not a bad obsession, I don’t think. In fact, it’s a pleasant one, but one that drives me crazy when it’s flawed and it’s flawed when I can’t remember something about her. And that’s a function of remembering too much about her, and more than 50 years. Everything she wore, everything she said, the way she moved, the way we made love the first time, the 50th time, the way she ate, the way…hell, you know what I mean. But on this bad day which may have become my best day to that point, I can’t remember what she was wearing. And I should. And I can’t remember what she did with her kid that night either.
But I remember her walking into my office and I remember thinking, trite as it sounds, that she was the single most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. It didn’t matter. There was something else and I was about as confused as the first time I read Chaucer in Middle English, or in any English.
