What He's Poised to Do: Stories (P.S.) Page 13

  Schiff and Mortenson, the two principals at the firm, had trained together, and each was convinced of the other’s skill. In fact, the name of the practice was itself a testament both to that conviction and those skills. Schiff, the younger of the two, had suggested that Mortenson’s name should come first, in keeping with alphabetical order and the superior experience of the older man. Mortenson parried Schiff’s proposal by arguing on behalf of euphony and meter, the way the name would be spoken by men when they spoke it. He was giving up his dominance, but he was justifying his decision with reasons of wisdom, and in this he further demonstrated his preeminence. For the most part, this was the way the talents were assigned: protocol to one man, strategy to the other. They knew that they were held in balance by one another, and that this balance was what kept them from tipping toward either collision or drift.

  Schiff’s parents were German immigrants, and he had kept on in that same spirit. He had skin that was pink like a baby’s and arms that at first seemed short but were in fact only thick. The features of his face were mostly absent, pushed down into the pudding of his flesh. He had the appearance of something not just fat but fattened. His girth made dressing an ordeal for him, which was probably why he insisted on automating the process: each day, he wore a light-blue shirt beneath a dark-blue coat, and brown pants above black shoes. The only bit of improvisation he permitted himself was his tie: one day a solid yellow, one day green, one day red, all rendered in the fullest and most deeply satisfying shades. He was older than his years, older than all of ours. “We have tagged a specimen of Tristissimus hominum,” Mortenson liked to say of his partner, with comically formal pronunciation.

  Mortenson was another kind of species: easier to tag, harder to be made to understand that he had been tagged. He was not as fat as Schiff; he was not fat at all, except if you watched him for a while and began to understand that he thought that he deserved everything around him. All his features were on the sharp side of strong, from nose to ears to chin. There was only one part of his anatomy that had no point: his head was a perfect bald dome, as round as if it had been scooped out from something. He was a decade Schiff’s senior but quicker, healthier in body and mind alike, the kind of eternally young middle-aged man who would sometimes leave the office in the afternoon to swim laps for an hour in his health club’s pool. He had held on to youth with the same effortful ease that characterized nearly everything he did. His enthusiasms—for cars, for women, for the law, though not all of it—were too present in him, and Schiff was always bringing him back to the moment by placing a heavy finger upon some line or other of testimony or statute. “I can’t be bored for you,” Mortenson would say to Schiff, his eyes twinkling, but he could be, and was, excitedly. He had given himself fully to the law as practice, to the artifice of it that men like Schiff insisted was merely a protective cover for a dense moral core, and he held an ever deeper belief that the core, far from pure, might itself be broken open and inspected for even more precious traces of artifice.

  At home, as at work, Mortenson was Schiff’s counter. He was married, to a second wife only slightly more than half his age, but he was not very serious about the matter. He liked to take the secretaries out for lunch and to treat them to drinks after work. The secretaries never lasted very long in his employ, though I noticed that they didn’t seem to leave angry. It was another one of his many talents. When secretaries left, I would sometimes get a call in the evening and orders to open the office in the morning. That’s the door I was looking at in my rearview mirror as I drove away from the office. The door was closed, but it had opened a memory. When I got to the edge of the parking lot, I thought I was far enough away that it was safe to relax, because I was safe from that memory. I was wrong on only one point, which is enough.

  I ARRIVED AT WORK one rainy June morning, fresh from my first year of college, bearing a note of introduction from my father, who had attended college with Mortenson and was now a professor of political history at the local university. He was a principled man, my father, though his first principle was to seek validation.

  “Gregory Tipton, junior,” Mortenson said, though I went by Jim and always had. He read my father’s note, which I had not been permitted to see, with a hard light in his eyes that softened to something more hospitable by the time he reached its end. Then he came to his feet, motioned for me to follow, and took me to the file room. “Get acquainted with the place,” he said, and left me there.

  I got acquainted with it at once, and then spent the rest of that long summer wishing I had not done so with such swiftness. The room had no windows. It was lit by massive fluorescents. Three of its walls were lined from ceiling to floor with beige filing drawers, while the fourth contained, in addition to the door, a map that showed the countries of those continental cabinets: which of them were inhabited by past judgments, which by pending arguments, which civil litigation and which criminal. There was exactly one piece of art in the room, a picture of two fish jumping from a stream side by side, tails fully fanned.

  After my first morning there, I emerged to find Mortenson smiling and chatting with a secretary. “Go get yourself some lunch and then alphabetize and file the pile by the door,” he told me. That took care of the afternoon and the next day. The hours piled up and I filed them away, too. On the morning of the third day, a knock sounded at the door and Schiff appeared. He stood in the doorway until I invited him in, then took a seat dolorously and asked me how I was enjoying the file room. When I murmured something about getting an education, he cleared his throat to take me off it. “The files are history, but what’s history? Merely markers of time that can’t be recovered.” This was, I would come to learn, his dominant mode, a grave melancholy that he intended as philosophy but was in fact autobiography. “Well, this is what Mortenson wants you to do, so you should work,” he said, “and I should go.”

  But he did not go; he stayed with one hand hovering just above the folders and began to instruct me, slowly but with unmistakable purpose, in the law. That first day’s lesson was the Jeffers case, which concerned a client who had sued his employer for unlawful dismissal. Schiff was not capable of fine movements, but his broad strokes had all the necessary detail in them: he explained the man’s position, the employer’s stance, the statute at that time, the dominant interpretation of that statute, the precedent that allowed him to locate an opening. Through it all, it was clear that the law had once meant everything to him, and now meant nothing. He was bereft but not poor; only a rich man could have lost so much. Finally, after we had toured the whole of the case, he stirred heavily. “After lunch, come by my office. I have some work for you that makes more sense than this. I’ll leave it on the table by the window.”

  His office was in the corner. As in the matter of the firm’s name, Mortenson had asserted his stature by concession, giving up the largest space on the floor to his partner. Schiff kept the place sparse. He had no pictures with which to clutter the desk or credenza, and no newspapers or magazines. The place was not empty but filled with what was missing. The assignment for me—a list of appointments I was supposed to schedule—was on the table, squared between two staplers.

  When I finished, it was late. Nearly everyone had left for the day. From Schiff’s window I could see the spire of the university lecture hall where my father held forth on Lewis Douglas and the Bonus Bill. There was, just beneath the window, a small triangular park, trees springing up from each corner, a small pond in the dead center—no more than a pool, really, for bicycles and baby carriages to circle—and spans of grass in which children tossed a ball. The afternoon light played out, and by degrees my reflection appeared on the window glass. It was unfamiliar to me, and in the midst of so much newness that unfamiliarity was a haven. I had a clear sense of becoming something I had not been before.

  Schiff visited me in the file room only once that week, and once the week after that. Each time he lectured in that understated, overdetermined manner of his, and each time
he departed with some word or another about work he had for me in his office. As we went, I came to forget the specifics of the cases he presented and to remember only the aphorisms with which he summed up each case. At the conclusion of a long case concerning workplace injury, he represented the judgment to me with this moral: life is a bell with a crack in it, and yet its tone when struck is the nearest to perfection any man will ever know.

  It is hard for me to explain exactly what I did in the file room the first part of that summer. The firm had started as a civil-rights concern but under pressure from Mortenson had shifted its business toward anticorporate litigation: a pharmaceutical company that had not adequately advertised the health harms of its products, a shipbuilder that had exposed its workers to irresponsible levels of asbestos. I summarized existing documents, copied new blanks, arranged and assembled. I did not work with any great speed, because I enjoyed staying late, past Schiff and Mortenson, past the secretaries. I liked the office when it went quiet and cool with evening light. It was as if I were the last man on Earth, and I insisted on that belief even when I heard the cleaning lady’s cart clattering its way down the hall. I felt lonely, and in full possession of my loneliness. It was the first time I had owned anything of value.

  ON FRIDAYS, Schiff and Mortenson rounded up the secretaries and the paralegals and the office manager, ordered food, and sat in the conference room. The two of them did not agree on many things, but there was no argument here: Chinese. The restaurant was run by a man who had not a drop of Chinese blood in him, but that’s how it was done in those days. We put it out, the moo goo gai pan and chicken chow mein and barbecued spare ribs, and we flipped our ties back over our shoulders and tucked napkins into our collars and got to it.

  “Pass that carton, please,” Mortenson said.

  “Here you go,” Schiff said. He was eating. He was a man who ate. But while the rest of us sat around the table and talked about our week, he held himself back from the discussion. His gaze went to the window, though he had a way of giving you to understand that he was looking at the pane of glass rather than through it.

  “It’s a nice day out there,” said one of the paralegals, a young woman with a brunette bun.

  “That it is,” Mortenson said. “Don’t you think?” he asked Schiff. Schiff didn’t answer, and this spurred Mortenson on. “I saw a movie the other day,” he said, pointing his chopsticks—and the shrimp pinched between them—at his partner. “Exciting. About a man who tries to kill the president of an African nation. It’s based on fact.” He knew which part of the sentence shone most brightly to his partner, because he repeated it. “Can you imagine?” he said. “An assassin.”

  “I don’t like it when they make a movie about something like that,” Schiff said, bringing his large head around. “The very point of an assassin is that he is trying to be as famous as the man he assassinates. The film shouldn’t conspire with a murderer to that end.”

  “What do they call the man they’re trying to assassinate? The assassinee?”

  “He is the assassination. That’s the noun for the victim as well as the process.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Mortenson.

  “It’s a fact,” said Schiff, “though not a pretty one. What we believe but cannot praise.”

  Mortenson was unwilling to be drawn into the other man’s current. “Well,” he said, “this movie has a great sequence where the assassin is assembling his weapon to practice for the fateful moment,” said Mortenson. “He is in a bedroom at the home of his girlfriend, and there is a baby sleeping in the corner. It’s a melodramatic contrast, but somehow it’s very affecting.”

  “Well, I don’t like the whole business of it,” Schiff said. “It’s distasteful.”

  “Also, in the film, many of the Africans are wearing American T-shirts. And not just any shirts. Did you know that after sports championships are played, the shirts announcing the victory of the losing team, which have of course already been printed, are shipped to Africa? It’s like there’s an alternative reality there.”

  “Or here,” Schiff said. And that is how it went: Mortenson moved from subject to subject, like a child discovering the very process of discovery, and Schiff functioned punctuationally, always with a heavy sense of judgment. It was like watching two painters work side by side; Mortenson with more colors in his palette, Sciff furnishing the sense of form.

  Toward the end of the meal, they turned to practical matters, specifically to personnel, and to the sense that they would have to settle a few questions before they went away again. They were traveling often that summer, as they were handling a pair of cases involving police shootings of unarmed young men in central Florida and southern Georgia. After they had returned from the previous trip, one of the secretaries had left—the rumor, as usual, was that it had to do with Mortenson—and Amy, one of the other secretaries, was out on maternity leave. “We’re down two,” Schiff said, “and we need someone new.” They discussed the issue in front of everyone, which was their way.

  “What’s your feeling about Lisa Foster?” Mortenson said.

  “Who?”

  “The Foster girl. I told you the other week. We got a letter of application. She wants a summer position. Or we could promote Jim here to a real job.” He swiveled the chopstick toward me.

  “Promotions take time,” Schiff said, sighing with a heaviness that would have, in another man, been comic. “Lisa is her name? Her father’s the doctor?”

  “A hell of a doctor.”

  “Let’s have her in for an interview.”

  “I jumped the gun on this one,” Mortenson said. “I had Stacy schedule her for tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ll be here,” Schiff said.

  No one asked me, though I would, as it turns out, be most affected by the whole business.

  WHEN LISA FOSTER FIRST CAME into the office, it was out of the rain. She shook off a coat and then lifted the damp hair away from her face. It was light to the point of white, even when wet. I knew her from around town: her father was a doctor who had treated my mother for something mysterious years before, and who had come by the house with a dignified look on his face while she was dying. He was an unhealthy man himself who somehow managed to look like a matinee idol. His wife was a compact blonde whose features were harder than she would have wished. And yet they combined perfectly in their daughter, who was short and buxom, a bit flat in the nose and deep in the eyes, and so powerfully attractive that when she entered the office I stepped out from behind the filing cabinet and took her coat without thinking.

  “Thank you,” she said, and the way she neglected to say my name told me that she knew it. Mortenson appeared and took her into the conference room, where Schiff was waiting. I sat and covered the front desk for Stacy, who was late. Or rather: I pretended to cover for Stacy and I watched Lisa Foster. Her face did not look like the face of a stranger. Everything about her reminded me of another woman, but when I thought of those other women I was reminded of her. Inside the room, Mortenson asked questions with false seriousness, and Schiff occasionally gave an equally false laugh.

  She got the job, of course. I don’t think it was ever in question. Her father, it seemed, had also treated Mortenson’s wife on a matter some years before. “Just in time,” Mortenson said, though he did not elaborate. They put her behind a boxy desk up front that was fenced in by a putty-colored partition. She said hello every day to everyone as they came through the door. To me, she gave a little wave that at first seemed like no more than professional obligation. When I decided, quite independent of any evidence, that she was not the kind of woman to act out of obligation, I started waving back.

  LISA WAS A TALENTED GIRL—she was a fine painter who was also taking classes in architecture—but perhaps her most important trait was her lack of belief in herself, which in turn produced a fine brand of aggression. When I made a comment, she would contest it, no matter what it was. If a joke failed to find its mark, as it often did, she wo
uld tell me flatly why it was unfunny. “I’m assertive, not aggressive,” she told me. “One is about protecting your own space; the other is about moving into someone else’s.” I accepted the definitions but not the diagnosis. That first week, she stopped me as I went downstairs for lunch. “I’ll join you,” she said. “Let’s eat in the little park.”

  We went across the street to a bench, which was in a shady, quiet spot that seemed all the more so after the hot, crowded stretch of road we had to cross to get there. We put our sandwiches out on the table and weighed down napkins with bottles of juice. Afterward, she smoked a cigarette. That first day, we didn’t have what I would call a full conversation. She made observations about the people in the office and I agreed, usually readily. She knew Mortenson was a wolf even before Stacy confessed to her in the women’s bathroom. “He takes her to motels,” she said, “not because he can’t go to her place, but because he kind of gets off on the sleaziness of it. He’s a good judge of character, though. She said she does, too.” Schiff, she held, was a great man. “But the kind of great man no one will ever know. He’s so shy. He turns away from me when I’m talking to him. And to have a man that large turn away? It’s a blow to the ego.” She told me that her life as an artist was, while not temporary, not necessarily permanent. “Not that I’ll ever stop painting, but I have a feeling that later on I might want money, or things that I can get with money. I don’t know how I’ll handle being poor down the line.” She said she enjoyed working in the office, that she imagined that she was ordering the world, or at least giving order to a part of it in a way that might spread outward, like a healthy disease.