Sputterpub's Blog

Tracy enters the office after James ends the call from Gus. She closes the door and leans against it. Her skirts aren’t as short as they were before the event, but she still shows a shapely leg, knee-down.

“The Giannis are vibrating,” she reports. But she needn’t have closed the door to tell him that, so James knows there will be more. “Three calls from Gino, two from Sal, only one from Tony. Sal wants to sic the health department on the deli. I know, I know…it will cost Sal as much as anyone else.

“Listen,” she says with decision. She walks toward James’s desk but then veers and starts to pace before it. “It’s not my place but I can’t help saying something. I can tell that you’re not happy right now. I’m not sure why, but I suspect you may understand yourself. What I want to say is: oh, a few months ago, something happened to me. Some things. I had a man die on me. I actually cared for Rich. But when anyone dies close to you, it makes you look at life a little differently, you know?” James nods, but Tracy isn’t watching. “I got possessive about my life. I got angry about the fact that I had been letting Rich do things I didn’t want. I decided I’m not taking it any more. I’m going to learn to speak up. Softly I hope.

“You’re clearly not happy, James. Maybe you need to blow off this Portals thing. Or maybe it’s something more.” By now, James is smiling quietly at her. She meets his eyes for a second. He thanks her with unusual warmth. He watches her leave his office, soft dark hair shining as it moves when she walks, and involuntarily remembers her pinned helpless under Rich, his bad heart exploded within him.

Tracy is on a break when the call comes in from Jane. James and his twin sister usually don’t speak often, but they’ve lately been discussing a nursing home for their mother. They’re not particularly close to each other, or to their mom, against whom they hold their names among many other banalities. Being twins, however, they’ve been hyper-aware of other twins; after meeting Charles/Carol, and Michael/Michelle, they know it could have been worse.

“James,” he says by way of answering his phone.

“Jane,” she answers. “What are you up to?”

“Contemplating illness, and playing with a paper clip.” He reaches for his paper clip assortment, piled in a square pocket at the right front of his middle desk drawer. He starts to unbend one.

“Mom’s illness?” This is in reference to the slight stroke their mother just suffered, while having the bluing bleach rinsed out of her hair at the neighborhood salon, when the cold porcelain of the shampoo bowl finally cut off the flow in her one till-then open neck artery.

“No. Actually, I’m supposed to be contemplating the theme ‘My Favorite Illness’ for a psychobabblative meeting tonight. Shall I do our stones?”

“What’s favorite about stones?” Jane rejoins without hesitation.  James and Jane bear no resemblance to each other, except that they both have a tendency to kidney stones.  None of the boy/girl twins they’ve known look alike, except an interesting set James met recently: Jack (female), who works at the bank the firm uses; and her brother Jim. They’re interesting because they’re each gay, and because Jim is actively HIV positive, meaning he has health care resource material helpful to James and Jane with respect to their mother.

“That’s true. I guess I only mention them because I’m at a loss for a subject, and because I passed one last week. I’m getting good at it. I recognized the pain when I woke up Friday, called in sick, downed two Vicodin, and took to my bed with a gallon of cool water. I drowsed and drank and drowsed and drank. Passed the thing about 3 PM and was wiped out for a day and gut-tender for three more. But when I compare it to the first time…”

“It still hurts. You’ve just learned how best to cope with a day of hell.”

“They say it hurts more than having a baby.”

“Not. I’ve done both. I’ve done kidney stones four times, and babies twice. Babies hurt more. But you know what hurts most? A shot of novocaine behind and between the upper front teeth. Now that’s pain…”

James’s other line rings. Tracy is still away from her desk. James should just let it go to voicemail, but he has a hard time ignoring a bell. He releases Jane and picks up the other call on its fourth ring.

He shouldn’t have done it. The voice is Sal Gianni’s, and the conversation is long and unrewarding. By the time James extricates himself, he feels frustrated and rushed. His phone rings again. He almost manages to let it go, but…

“James.”

“Honey?” It’s Hannah’s voice, but she never starts a conversation that way.

“Yes?”

“I know you told me earlier, but when are you going to be home tonight?”

“Around ten thirty. What’s wrong, Hannah?  Are you okay?”

“I’ll be all right. I’m just a little ill.”

“What is it?”

“Really. I’m okay. I have a slight fever. Around 100°. No other symptoms. I came home early. I’m cozy in bed. I’ll see you later.”

James is envisioning. Bright eyes. Flushed skin. He starts to grin while looking upward unfocused. “Hannah,” he says. “I just realized I’m not going to the meeting. I’m coming home.”

Hannah hates hot feet, so she often moves barefoot around their house. And she moves quickly. Every year or so, she clips the little toe of her left foot on a table leg or other furniture. Maybe she breaks the toe or probably it’s just a sprain, but she has to elevate her foot, apply ice, and sit still for a couple of days. James loves it. Hannah doesn’t mind it, after an initial indignant rebellious twenty minutes.

But Hannah’s toe-spraining is an injury, not an illness. James is looking at the columns of illness definitions, and he can’t fit this domestic mishap into the category. He continues to ponder the subject now and then as he works on the plan to unravel a family-owned business conglomerate, consisting of an adult movie theater and an Italian delicatessen. The two businesses are about equally profitable, but that doesn’t make division any easier; James’s mission is to effect the most tax-advantageous split of two businesses among three now-hostile brothers, each of whom is spiteful enough to want to cause tax problems for the others even if it hurts himself. The Gianni brothers’ problems are about emotions rather than taxes, James knows, so he’s giving them some time to react and adjust. He told Tracy to hold all calls from them. This is why James has time to consider a favorite illness. And that’s fortunate, because the seminar meets tonight, and it’s small enough that absences or silences are noticed. The partner who pushed James to enter the Portals Program has become very active in it; Edward will hear about it if James isn’t prepared. And Edward, who’s as much of a hound as Rich Adams was, also’s as much of a rainmaker. Add the fact that he’s the only partner of African descent, and you’ve got what James knew: a shitty situation.

“Stomach-ache is pretty bad. Which is better: sore throat or headache? A cold is usually obnoxious, always inconvenient, but not that bad…except that one isn’t ill enough not to work…unless one is Tracy…” James ruminates without success. “Adams dying on her didn’t keep her away from the office, but she misses three days whenever she has a cold.” Tracy is the secretary who best understands James’s verbal fastidiousness – she may mess with the margins but she takes care of the apostrophes – so he’s always aware of her absences. Tracy is also the person who pokes apart James’s philosophical logjam today.

She first inserts when she puts a call through from Gus. She buzzes James on the intercom to announce the call, but before he takes it, James asks, “Quick. What comes to mind when I say ‘Favorite Illness?’”

“Fever.” There is silence on the line after she says the word. She continues. “Sometimes I just get a little fever. No other symptoms. It makes me drowsy, sensual, a little delirious. I rather like it, provided I can stay home. Now,” she summarizes, “shall I put Gus through?”

Augustus Murphy is a psychologist. He spends most of his professional time evaluating alleged stress injuries for worker’s compensation insurance carriers. He is also James’s best friend. They were accidental freshman roommates, and they continued to share a home until Gus married Patty after grad school. Back in the days when they were both going for undergraduate BAs, Gus in psych and James in English, James edited Gus’s writing, and wrote his transitional paragraphs, while Gus did the social science course work for James.

When Patty entered their lives they became a companionable threesome, and then Hannah fit in too, so the friendship continued through wrong turns into teaching, and beyond that to psychological evaluations and tax law. Gus and Patty have two sons; those boys and James’s nieces are the closest James and Hannah come to parenting.

Gus and James talk on the phone every couple of days, and lunch together every Friday. This call is nothing special. Except that when James describes the Portal assignment, Gus suggests, “Diabetes. That’s your favorite illness. Talk about that.”

James knows about diabetes, because Gus has it. Gus thirstily presented with the disease twelve years ago, and it was James’s job to understand the condition. He read books, joined the national association, and helps Gus adjust his insulin doses. James is the scientist, at least when it comes to words. He’s not strong in math. If he had been, he’d probably be an engineer instead of a lawyer.

He swivels to look out the window while they talk about the elegance of the illness. It’s terrible to have, except that the treatment is the prescription for any healthy life: good food, exercise, low carbs, low stress. With understood diabetes, the doctor is not in control; the patient is making the adjustments between food, exercise, condition and insulin. The patient acts as his own pancreas. James appreciates that. He also appreciates his new telephone headpiece. He has a tendency to carry his stress in his neck, and he spends a lot of his business day on the telephone; until he bought the headpiece he kept exacerbating his pain by cocking his neck to hold the phone while he wrote. Now he can look at the view, take notes, type at his computer, peel an orange.

Gus is lower tech. He’s still using an old-fashioned headset, and he’s living with chronic neck pain. He’s also resisting the idea of an insulin pump. After twelve years on insulin, the man is experiencing a side effect or two; he’s getting less sensitive to low sugar symptoms and more likely to have trouble in bed. If James were Gus, he’d try a pump.

No. James likes knowing about diabetes. James likes being able to counsel Gus. But it isn’t his favorite illness.

James is quietly grumpy, as usual. Exquisitely critical. He’s sitting in his new office, gazing without intention at the dictionary stand near the doorway, resisting the “assignment” he’s been given to work on this week. He considers the Portals Program, with its seminar training toward self-actualization, and he diverts himself by paraphrasing the claim so familiar to his generation: “Aura flossing has been shown to be an effective, despair-preventive artifice that can be of significant value when used in a conscientiously applied program of psychic hygiene and regular professional care.”  He almost grins as he conjectures that the Crest paragraph, or the Superman prologue, or the introduction to the old Star Trek show, are our culture’s “oral tradition,” but he overpaves that smile with a straight-lipped frown at the realization that those shabby TV bits are as close as our culture can come to a glorious oral tradition. “Pathetic,” he spits within, as he swivels his chair a bit to the left. “Pathetic like Portals.”

James takes a deep breath and settles his chair facing forward again. He looks at the dictionary with momentary appreciation. It’s a 1903 Funk & Wagnalls, in well-thumbed but otherwise good condition. It sits open on an antique walnut stand. It doesn’t have definitions for new-fangled words like airplane or fax machine, but its pages have a lovely, parchment-like quality, and the book has the feel of history. So many hands have turned the pages, so many eyes have searched the print: how many minds have grown upon it? Then James recalls its most recent historical place, and he sours again.

He inherited the dictionary and the office three months ago. Its former inhabitant died unexpectedly in the place, at the age of 48. Rich Adams had been an asshole. James always despised him, and can’t regret his demise.

Rich, like James, was a word-junkie. Many lawyers are wordsmiths, but some are more precise than the rest. They’re the ones who gravitate to tax work. It was perfectly logical for James to assume Rich’s partnership position as well as the office. And James doesn’t disagree with the positioning of the antique dictionary. Rich put it on the stand by the door as a sign of his belief in defining terms before proceeding with argument. He used to make underlings look up words in the book before he’d allow them to present a murky position. James might have continued the tradition, except that the dictionary now signifies nastiness to most of the firm. Rich was never discreet about his womanizing. Far from being sensitive to issues of sexual harassment, Adams had been the sort of man who found a woman’s relative powerlessness arousing. He was a hound around secretaries, paralegals, even the occasional associate, but he steered clear of his peers. He’d been very driven and successful in his field, so his wife hadn’t had to work, but James was convinced that Rich wanted it that way. He and Hannah spent enough time talking with Mrs. Adams at firm functions that they knew she didn’t have to stay home to cook or care for kids, and they read in her the despair of a wasted woman.

Rumor had it that Rich used that dictionary stand as an apparatus, and rumor was confirmed three months ago. James won’t ever know whether it was true that Rich did paralegals frontally and secretaries doggie-style, but half the fourth floor will never forget the Thursday afternoon when they heard odd hysterical yells, and tracked them to Tracy, bent over the dictionary stand in Rich’s office, skirt up and pantyhose down, with dead bare-assed Rich collapsed on her back and pinning her panicked self. Tracy is so short her feet barely touched the ground. Rich was so big there was no way she could get his dead weight off her without help. The scene was so bad it was comic, but James doesn’t share that opinion with anyone except Hannah.

Tracy is still with the firm. She came through the experience surprisingly well. James first assumed he’d have to dump the dictionary and stand, which he would have regretted; they are attractive and occupy a spot in the office which won’t serve for anything else. But the consulting psychologist said no: this is almost like getting back on the proverbial horse – the furniture isn’t the issue.

James certainly isn’t going to direct employees to use that book. Nowadays, they settle their semantics by reference to the e-version of the Oxford English Dictionary, on James’s computer. He longed for the OED when it was thirteen volumes and he had neither the shelf space nor the money, back in the early 70s. Now he had both, but the set was up to twenty books; he traded the dream of fondling the actual pages for the portability of electronics.

He’s using his OED now. The only unpleasant condition to his promotion is the Portals Program. All of the senior partners agreed that James was Rich’s proper successor, but two of them expressed concern about James’s management abilities. James didn’t argue about that. He knows himself, and he’s never taken or given supervision well. His people skills could always use a bit of polishing, but James has other interests. His flaw is nothing compared to Rich’s, but the partners were being very careful, and one of the two complainers was evangelical about some program he had just completed. They made a condition and James agreed; now he’s three sessions into a ten week seminar on Understanding. This week’s homework is to consider (for sharing discussion) the theme: My Favorite Illness.

The topic first made him think about Hannah’s little toe. The woman who would be his wife, if either of them believed in the institution of marriage, his life partner (as he thought of her), his Hannah has a tendency to rush around. She doesn’t often relax. Even their vacations are planned to the minute, so they see a lot but the pressure never lets up. Sometimes there isn’t even time allotted for lunch. Hannah tends to diet so that may be deliberate on her part, but James has a fast metabolism; he needs to eat every four hours.

It was the story that seduced her a month ago. Mark would probably go to his grave concluding that it was the peaches, no matter what she said. He’d always remember the erotic plumpness of the just-picked orbs, the squirt of nectar that bathed his tongue. But she was aroused by his lecture about early human history. Mark painted a word-picture for her, of tribes in Mesopotamia and parts north of there, three millennia before Christ, and Julie’s nipples stiffened like the air was cold. Her salivation then had nothing to do with food.

“Imagine two very differing approaches to life in the area,” he said as they ate peaches outside after lunch. They sat next to each other on a redwood bench with their backs against the attached table, beneath 3 o’clock shade. “Between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers agriculture flourished, and a matriarchal society developed, because agriculture is of course about cycles and renewal, fertility is worshiped, the productivity of the female is esteemed.

“Just to the north, grain for people didn’t grow so well. There were lots of tall grasses, but that was fodder for horses and oxen and other large animals. A society based on herding large animals favored men, with their greater upper body strength, and instead of fertility and renewal, that culture valued power and cunning.”

Julie started to comment about white hats and black ones, but Mark wouldn’t let her interrupt.

“It wasn’t quite that obvious,” he warned, but then he added, “not that you’d know it from the way I’m telling it,” and he chuckled a little.

“There was a downside to the matriarchal culture: it wasn’t friendly to strangers. A new guy in town would have to start at the bottom of a very long ladder; it took a lot of toil and a bit of luck to be fully adopted into the tribe. In the herding culture, on the other hand, a stranger could make good by winning a fight or negotiating a smart bargain. And the herders got around more anyway, which was a big advantage: interacting and getting new ideas. But it was the ease with which the culture of big bad herders absorbed strangers that made its dominion inevitable.”

And then he brought it home for her. In the soft shade of an old peach tree, Mark observed that the big boys got around more, and welcomed strangers better, and Julie stiffened with excitement as she realized that the successful men in the herder culture had to be those with the narrowest focus; it was the slash-and-burn guy who would have survived to produce the most kids. She flushed with the pleasure of discovery at the same time that she burned with the dismay of realization – suddenly she saw her own culture, westward-leaning America, at the point of a 6,000 year-old arrow, aimed at pyrotechnic self-destruction.

Mark may have misread Julie’s flush and burn. He leaned in and took a very slow kiss.

Julie may have misread Mark’s action. His kiss was so unexpected that she didn’t pull back. It was so sweet she returned it. And so it went. A month ago.

In the meantime, the dog got worse. Liz’s fury and indignation wilted into neediness. Keith and Jess bickered incessantly. Julie received an obnoxious letter from Sharon’s attorney and a demanding note from Beth.

In the intervening month, it seemed like Julie had a headache 26 days out of 30. Including today. And she had so much on her mind this morning that she forgot to watch her step, and when she stumbled and dropped her coffee mug, it shattered at her feet and soaked one leg of her khaki pants with a hot brown stain. She didn’t have other clean good pants, so she tossed them in the machine but forgot about the red hoodie. She cut her hand with a shard of the coffee mug while hurriedly cleaning the mess, and finally pulled her clean pants out of the dryer to discover permanent blotches of pink on them. At which point she noticed her headache was gone. And there seemed no other recourse but laughter. What the hell. She had dinner out tonight, at her old friend Mark’s house, and her body was telling her well.

Things were bizarre at work, and not peaceful at home. It was a good thing that Julie’s old house was large, for she and her dog had recently had to open it to Jess and Keith (between apartments and jobs, just for a little while) and to Julie’s friend Liz (recuperating from a brief bad marriage). And she missed her usual talks with her friend Mark; they’d made the mistake of trying to have sex together, and it would take time to normalize them back to comfort.

They never should have done it. They really liked each other but the chemistry wasn’t there. Mark was a slight man – 5’8″, 140 pounds, a size 8 foot – and he was only aroused by petite women, preferably pretty. Julie was 5’6″ and not overweight at 160, but she was sturdy. She wore a size 11 shoe. Her hands were larger than Mark’s. She was more handsome than pretty, and she was attracted to big men. She liked a long thigh, a strong forearm. She was a forceful woman and needed to feel a little swallowed by the man. Julie and Mark were not each other’s type.

But a month earlier they shared a romantic escapade. Their mutual friend Liz was in trouble and together they rode to her rescue. She had recently married her fifth husband, the 68-year old boy she left behind. They’d flirted in the 1950s but had gone their separate multi-marital ways. A year ago Pete found Liz again, through Classmates.com, swept her off her normally prudent feet, and prevailed upon her to forsake her fourth husband, retire, and move a thousand miles north to be his bride.

If it had just been about sex and vacations, the marriage might have worked. But Pete was consumed with his own diminishing future, obsessed with regrets about his failed marriages, and determined to spend every remaining minute with Liz-his-love. He wouldn’t fly because that would mean forsaking the other obsession – his 10-year-old dog – so he had trapped Liz in his love plans, thrown tantrums whenever her prior life intruded on his day’s activity, railed at her for daring to disagree. He tried to swallow her whole life, and within four months he managed to override the hardwiring in her that had made her want him.

Julie and Mark rode to her rescue, and on the way they tried to make love.

At first it went surprisingly well. They kissed alike – gentle, exploratory – and they were moved. Surrounded by ripe peaches, excited by conversation, on their way to bring Liz back, their mouths sought and sank together in unison. And Mark had a delicious quirk; when they pulled away from a deep kiss he wiped Julie’s upper lip with the side of his thumb, authoritative like a squeegee.

It was one of those pull-aways that undid them. Their eyes met and Julie recognized her old friend Mark, with a start. She couldn’t help giggling, and her normally elevating laugh had the opposite effect on him.

Worse…they must have rolled around for at least another quarter hour, seeking whatever frictive stimulation they could, straining with their individual minds to perform adequately for each other. Alas…

Julie no longer remembered how they got through the rest of their trip. It helped once they had Liz aboard; then they didn’t have to be alone together.

And now it had been a month. Mark had hardly even checked in with Liz. But he had invited them to dinner at his place, that night. And Julie suspected her current weird feeling of well-being, this lightness in head and chest and unfounded optimism, must signal that she thought Mark was going to somehow ease her problems.

As if. He couldn’t make the dog’s chronic allergies or acute cancer go away. He couldn’t make Jess and Keith go away, or Keith go to work. And the last thing Mark was going to do, having just provided the getaway vehicle for Liz, would be to chase her away. But Julie knew he’d help. Mark always helped. If nothing else, his stories helped.

Odd how for cerebral Julie, the epiphanies came through her body. PUSH THROUGH THE PAIN. STRETCH THE EASY SIDE FIRST. TAKE ONE PEDAL AT A TIME.

They all started as vivid, fully physical experiences – childbirth, dance, cycling up mountains – but became metaphors for the hard stuff: the emotional travails.

Or maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe instead, Julie already had the cerebral insights when she was young and sedentary. She’d been a hyper-bright child, a voracious reader and a tireless debater. Perhaps by the time she was grown she was immune to most of the intellectual insights – been there/done that – and only the blood-sweat-&-tears of exertion impressed her.

For Julie middle-aged was athletic: heroic. She’d always been ethical, but in her 40s she was inspired to exercise and in her 50s she was driven to action. She ought to have had a costume, she was such a brave character.

Her challenges were emotional. Like someone with a hidden disability, Julie on the surface seemed nothing but blessed. Her parents, siblings, children, and close friends were all alive and at least well. Her spirit dwelled in a healthy skeleton and her brain produced plenty of serotonin. She never had trouble earning enough money, and she lived in the house of her dreams.

But she was surrounded by assassins at work (that’s what she said daily, when frustrated). Her colleagues were either morons or saboteurs. And she seemed to collect stresses at home. She wasn’t comfortable playing cards for money, but she hadn’t hesitated much before marrying (three times) or adopting difficult dogs (four times).

She was a specialist in managing conflicts of interest. Her last husband was still a client. Her business partners were her sisters-in-law. Her daughter had married Julie’s second husband’s first son (they’d only been step-sibs for three years, and because Keith was in college then, they’d never lived together as family).

The office situation was surreal. It was always Julie’s baby but early on she hired some girlfriends. That’s how her brothers met Beth and Sharon, although by the time the weddings took place, Julie had indulged her own liberal leanings and made the women minority owners in her management consulting firm. So Beth and Sharon were business partners as well as family. And Julie, again acting the Pollyanna liberal, had compensated Beth and Sharon more than their work was worth (this was not nepotism – Julie overpaid non-family, too, always with the aim of avoiding trouble).

Two mistakes. Handing over ownership did not partners make. Beth and Sharon enjoyed telling others that they were principals in the firm, but neither of them stepped up and shared responsibility or risk. Even when Julie nagged at them to help set policy they each said something like: “Speak up with my small ownership? My 10%? No way…”

And overpaying them didn’t avoid trouble. In fact it may have caused it. Beth and Sharon understood at the beginning what the deal was – extra money as it came in but no resale value for the shares – but each seemed to forget that as the years passed, and started acting like she was getting away with something, taking money for relatively little work, which led to nervousness and unhappiness that could only be relieved with more money. Or maybe they just felt trapped in their jobs, knowing that they couldn’t earn as much anywhere else, and blamed Julie for the entrapment.

Whatever it was, Julie at 54 found herself overworked and resentful. She was determined to do something so she could have time. After serious contemplation, she decided the only way to exit gracefully was to turn the business over, over time, to a worthy competitor. There would be no sale, because she knew from experience that a sales price for a service business comes out of the employees’ increased sweat or the clients’ increased fees. Beth and Sharon? They’d never brought in any new business, but they resisted change. They wanted to work another five years, and they liked the situation the way it was. If there was going to be a switch they wanted a conventional percent-of-gross buyout. But Julie was determined not to give them more money: dig into her own pocket to purchase her own clients to give them away? She wasn’t going to make the third mistake.