- Remember, you can’t powerdress a resume!
These were Jeff’s last words to me as I left the appartment, slamming the door - no easy job with these damn sliding doors of his with the scarcely recessed handles. I was overreaching myself. A few months with him and I was telling myself I was something I was not. This was the undertone of his screaching delivery that weekend. He had always treated me well. Like a princess. But I had got the feeling preparing for this interview, buying suits and countless shoes, that he liked me to know my place. He was the hotshot. I had charmed my way into his life, but I oughtn’t to get ahead of myself.
What he said was true. I had exaggerated my past. Not even that. Invented it. I had held down a few pissy jobs. Had learned a little deportment, confidence, even sass when it was needed working tables in silver service restaurants. I had got a little perspective, learned to be tough working nights with a homeless charity. (An uncle, a vietnam vet, had froze on the streets of New York. I had a phase of taking it all on myself.) A couple of years of dealing with prostitutes, addicts followed. I was a mother theresa. And I intend the irony: I wanted them to remain destitute, fucked-up, needy. That’s how I can read Jeff so well. I was in a state when I met him.
Maybe I’m being hard in myself. Maybe I meant it all. But I needed a change in life. I got one. The first of many. I’ve made quite a habit of it now.
And so I walked into that place with heels and a skirt a discrete but determined four fingers or so over my knees (before I sat down of course).
If it weren’t for Jeff I would have been intimidated. The building alone would have that effect on anybody, but over our time together I had become so accustomed, tired, exasperated with architecture that it left me cold. But that’s not what I meant. It was that callenge, and that rebuke as I walked out that morning. That was something I knew, and it was something I had not known for some months. Years it had taken me to steel myself against such put downs, and yet steel myself I always had since that time with a proud anger and an unshakeable equinimity. Had he wished me luck, I never would have got that job.
You wouldn’t say Krogh was a likeable man, nor that the prospect of working for him was so appealing, but if you were one of the few who could be themselves around him there are far worser fates than to be his PA.
- How are you feeling?
This he asked once I walked up to him, with the giant airlock opening around me, framing him, and my steps echoing around me. he standing stock still as I approached, taking me in from the ground up (my first impression of a man is often of where he looks, and I took him for a leg man, if not an outright foot fetishist).
- Rather like a scene in Fall[], with the prospective secretaries lining up to be judged by Hitler.
He didn’t exactly laugh, and his mouth was pulled if anything fractionally, but then neither did he seem offended. The airlock closed behind me. I had anticipated it, and didn’t give him the satisfaction of a jump, nor even of a tensing of those leg muscles I was sure he appreciated so much.
He was a fan of pregnant pauses, and inspected me a little more.
It was a big room. A meeting room. My room was to back on to it, and his beyond that.
The interview was little but mind games. It was clear he loved power for the sake of power but why should that be a foible worse than any other.
- You have satisfied my criteria, he said. I have many. Intellectually, temperamentally you seem suited to the work. You may think I have asked few questions pertaining to the work, and that the customary questions were notable by their absence. I would only ask you to trust my methods, as I would ask you to do in a typical day at work, if there ever can be such a thing. Suffice to say I have discovered you to be up to the work. What I would say my dear (and be advised that such endearments will avowedly not become a familiar part of office life), what I would say Kirsten, is that you also fulfil all the criteria, if it is not unseemly to use such a word, of all that is beautiful, appealing, attractive in a woman. Perhaps this unsettles you?
- It does not.
- Good, because just as it would be unreasonable, illogical and unfair to choose a PA by virtue of her looks (and I would have you note that I do not find it morally unappealing from the standpoint of fairness to the women concerned as I find it weak and inefficient from the standpoint of business; if the stimulation of beautiful women was such that I worked twice as hard, believe me, you would see little else, just as you would find me with a bloody nose were it so that cocaine trebbled my output, but my dear girl it is more of a distraction) it would also be perverse to deny oneself a beautiful girl for the sake of propriety. I can only trust that your efficiency, which believe me I have gauged justly enough that you might believe in it yourself, should be adequate recompense for the distraction.
* * *
He was wrong. There was a typical day. He had a brain such that it almost seemed remiss God didn’t ship it with a super-quiet cooling fan and to him the minutiae of business life became as variegated as timbre for a composer while the rest of us can barely pick out the most divergent notes. It wasn’t interesting. It wasn’t deadly boring. It was a good job, and good primarily because the money was good.
But that airlock was something I never got used to. It was installed into the building, ostensibly, because this was one of our more impressive products, these giant safe doors, but also for the impression it made on anybody who came through it whether it be for a meeting or an interview.
- When that door closes Ms Szymanska, most of my negotiation is done for me.
That airlock alone, and being trapped in there with him as he insisted in shutting the world out, made for a tension that put life into the day. And not only with him.
The building I worked in was innovative, so my Jeff told me over and over in his usual belief that since I did not react with Y-chromosome-dominant child-like delight at what he was telling me, I hadn’t properly taken it in, because it incorporated both the bulky manufacturing ‘bunker’ with its hermetic air con system, and an office complex. It was more impressive than he knew, since every day, twice, three times or four on looking out from the meeting room through the briefly open air lock you could see the technicians going about their day in their canteen the other side of a setpiece corridor set out like the shark tunnel in a Waterworld. Invariably, the bulk of them were looking in as the door must have seemed to open so seldom (at any one time some tiny fraction of the thousand plus technicians were present), and invariably, when I was looking out, many were looking in at me. I have never felt so desireable, and so powerful as when I worked for Krogh.
They wanted in, not least because the two sides of the building never met. Not least because I was unattainable by association. Krogh was right, that airlock had a power that affected everyone.
Whatever Krogh’s assessment had been based on that first day, whether it be that denied twitch of a leg or that brazen quip, he felt he had proved himself right. I had been efficient. He offered me a great deal. Tickets to big games, expensive meals. And not accompanied with him but with my own Jeff who in one sense I now had on suffrance, but in another, I had by the balls. One thing he was always reluctant to grant was a tour around the factory.
Early in the Fall of last year I ran an errand in my lunch break, and of course, lunch was by no means customary. I parked up by a chemist a couple of blocks away and got boxed in by some huckster in a jeep. I had to ask some guy walking by with his shopping to get me out. He reversed right up to the curbstone pulled on the handbrake and span the front wheels outwards. That evening I had a flat. Turns out he had nudged the inside of my dustcap so that it pressed against the valve, letting out a steady stream of air.
One of the technicians came up to me to help. Somehow I had suspected him of sabotaging the car but with his manner I couldn’t hold it against him. One foible is as bad as another, after all - that’s the way my mind works. Besides, why shouldn’t a man resort to subterfuge when the place is so segregated. I had him down as some Lothario Rosa Parkes[], and handsome besides.
He had the wheel off and we got talking. They worried about me. The last secretary had left in pretty bad circumstances. People talked of rape. He was surprised I hadn’t heard of it. I kept out of such things. Kept my head down, got on with the job at hand. It didn’t interest me. Perhaps that was what Krogh had picked up on.
As it happens I didn’t believe him. Toni had been in a couple of times, heavily pregnant and pretty contented-looking. She was a looker. Could have been a model but that she wouldn’t have dealt well with the superficiality of it all. She seemed pretty friendly with Krogh. I remember being jealous - only I had that bond with him, that brazen jocularity (I had thought of it as that all along). This was another ruse somehow.
I slept with him that night. It was passionate. It was involuntary. There was no analysing and second-guessing, no intellectualising and self-scrutiny. Something was driving me.
It was the next morning I thought it all over. I had driven home after our encounter. Jeff had been working in Denver on some project an inexperienced team were getting into a mess over. Something about glass and expansion. People were losing faith. All the same I wanted the peace of my own bed. But I couldn’t sleep.
Driving in that morning I made a decision. The moment the airlock closed behind me I stripped to my underwear. Like most days it was black and lacy. Krogh. [], looked on at me for an age. He pressed the button to activate the airlock, which began to open behind me.
- Kindly put on your clothes, Stephanie, he said, you’re fired.
He had never mixed up my name before.
I walked out as steely cold and proud as I had walked in. I’m used to change. I find it invigorating.
The doors next rolled open at eight o’clock. It was his time lock. He had explained it one time with a reference to Mark Twain, but I hadn’t been listening. The truth was he liked routine and security. That, as much as anything, was what it was all about.
All the engineers in their canteen, and the white collar staff in the shark tunnel turned to look at the irrepressible Krogh, slumped, a pool of blood around his head, or rather, some said, where his head should have been.
They told me not to read his obituary. I haven’t yet. And as soon as I am free of the police and can leave this place, I’ll be moving on.
October 29th, 2007 at 1:53 am
[…] takers and so I just never quite found the motivation to post up another. The MasterKidderMinster wrote a bit of flash fiction that he told me about a few days ago. It’s a pretty good read and a lot of fun to see the […]