Electric City, page 3
There were times, during Jane’s last real job, singing old Gershwin and Kern and Porter standards in smoky little European clubs, when such a genteel, anonymous atmosphere would have seemed immensely appealing. Jane had grown tired of artfully tossing her head back, narrowing her eyes or jutting out a hip to give the act some pizazz. (She had never been under any illusion that her voice alone had been enough to carry it off.)
Jane always provided an imaginary wardrobe for herself in any daydream. Now she could see herself in comfortable shoes, Katharine Hepburn slacks and a tweedy old cardigan, reading serenely in the world conjured up by the ad. Of course, in real life, after a few weeks of reading newspapers she would probably go berserk from underutilized adrenaline. But still, she thought she could come up with enough gentle enthusiasm to engage Mrs. Webber’s interest for twenty minutes or so.
Later that afternoon, she was able to get in touch with Bob Manalatu where he worked out, a hard-core gym swirling with testosterone and probably veterinary-strength steroids. The large Samoan had helped her out in her very first case. His ability to project an amiable ruthlessness, not to mention his awesome size, was very comforting. She told Bob she wanted to hire him for an hour or so.
“Someone giving you trouble?” he said with a kindly, protective air. “Do I have to hit anybody?”
“No. It’s not a muscle thing at all. All you have to do is show up in an office and act weird enough in the waiting area to give me some time in the boss’s office alone.
“To be honest, Bob, I want to take something while she’s distracted.” Jane sketched out the scenario. Both of them would be posing as job applicants, and there should be plenty of other people in the waiting area.
“Maybe we can just bust in there after hours,” said Bob. “What kind of security they got?”
“Oh, let’s just try it this way,” said Jane, who could easily imagine one of Bob’s huge feet kicking through a door, and one of his giant hands yanking out an alarm system. “Anyway, aren’t you busy after hours with the band and all?” Bob played bass in a Hawaiian band.
“Just Thursday through Saturday. Yeah, I guess I could do what you wanted. I can think of a couple of ways to shake things up there.” He gave a throaty chuckle.
“I only need a minute.”
“Got any particular stunts you’d like me to pull?”
“Surprise me,” said Jane.
The next day, Jane arrived promptly at nine at the shabby old office building that someone had forgotten either to wreck and replace with a black glass office tower, or restore and then charge fat rents to trendy tenants.
On the seventh floor she found an oak door with a frosted glass window on which the words “Columbia Clipping Service. Please Enter” were painted in black letters.
The waiting area had some nice old oak trim, and a worn old red carpet on the floor. The tables and chairs were vaguely Danish modern with Naugahyde upholstery. A dusty plastic philodendron, listing slightly, sat in the corner.
Jane got one of the last chairs. Applicants, many of them reading paperback books, lined the room. They were all steadfastly ignoring each other. In chatty Seattle, where a shared elevator ride was a good enough reason to start a conversation, their lack of eye contact could be attributed to the fact they were preselected for quietness, that they were all competing for a job, and perhaps to the fact that they had been infected with the humiliation and self-loathing that affects almost all but the most brazen job seekers.
The applicants were mostly women, and Jane felt well disposed toward all of them. After all, they had answered an ad for “a quiet individual who likes to read,” which set them apart in a world where everyone was encouraged to be noisy and oozing self-esteem all the time. A lot of the other ads Jane had read were looking for “energetic, highly motivated self-starters.”
After about fifteen minutes, the chairs had filled up and people were beginning to line the walls, some leaning against them reading. Soon Bob Manalatu arrived in all his glory.
At about six foot eight, and God only knew, somewhere approaching three hundred pounds of Pacific Islander bulk, Bob stood out from the crowd. He managed not to smile at Jane when he came in, and surveyed the room with his bright, dark eyes. His beautiful satiny face remained impassive.
Bob wore a massive aloha shirt revealing his barrel-sized, pillowy arms. Mirrored sunglasses hung on a cord around his thick neck. He wore a Walkman with the headphones stretched to the max (a tinny buzz of escaping sound came from the area around his head), black trousers and black tasseled loafers. At his side was a large Nordstrom shopping bag. It looked like it might contain an enormous lunch. The quiet individuals who liked to read seemed to be trying not to stare.
Bob sidled up to a neurasthenic-looking man with a beret and a fat paperback. “How you doing, bro,” he said. “What’s the book?”
The man looked up wanly. “Basic Chess Endings by Reuben Fine,” he said.
“I played a little of that in the slammer,” said Bob affably. “What a stupid game.”
“It all depends on your perspective, I suppose,” said the man in the beret, plunging back into the book with a frown.
Bob laughed heartily. “Total waste of time.”
“So is pointless conversation,” said the man in the beret snappishly.
“No need to get bent out of shape, friend,” said Bob, resting one huge brown hand on the man’s shoulder. “We’re all in this together. We’re all looking for work. Do we take a number or what?”
The man in the beret didn’t answer, and just then a cowed-looking young woman in stretch pants and a big sweatshirt handed around clipboards with pencils and job application forms. Everyone dutifully filled them out, and they were collected.
Jane rather enjoyed making up a completely phony life. She decided she should look like an intelligent dilettante with little work experience. She gave herself a BA in English from the University of Washington, when actually she’d dropped out of college during her junior year abroad, her major still undeclared. She listed her last occupation as housewife. She decided she’d be an impoverished widow, which was what she had been until Uncle Harold’s will was probated.
She said that before her marriage she’d worked as a clerk at Frederick and Nelson’s, a nice old-fashioned department store that had gone bankrupt and was therefore conveniently out of business in case anyone checked.
A door to the inner office opened and everybody’s head swiveled over toward it. The young woman in stretch pants summoned one of the applicants, who spent about twenty minutes in the office, then left in a kind of nervous flurry, while a second applicant was ushered in. It really was a humiliating way to interview for a job, thought Jane. Couldn’t they set up appointments so these people weren’t all furtively eyeing each other?
Jane was called in third, and had by now worked up a vigorous resentment at the way Mrs. Webber was treating all these out-of-work people. As she left the room she caught a quick glimpse of Bob reaching into his Nordstrom bag.
Mrs. Webber’s office had the same low-overhead look as the waiting area. She sat behind a desk littered with papers. There were some steel file cabinets and a few African violets that on closer inspection were revealed to be fake and in need of dusting, just like the philodendron.
Mrs. Webber, however, looked much more soigné than her surroundings. She was a little too perfectly groomed, with ivory makeup that gave her a rather ceramic look. Jane recognized her from the picture she’d seen. She wore a very nice dark blue blouse in heavy silk that Jane wouldn’t have minded owning, and a double strand of pearls that looked real.
Jane glanced over to the side of the room. There, on a shelf above the radiator next to a jade plant, was the slightly squashed box Clark had described, down to the orange and black label. It looked forgotten, and there was something pathetic about Irene’s few possessions sitting there.
Without looking up from Jane’s application, Mrs. Webber fired off a few of the details. A very low salary, some skimpy benefits, hours from eight to five with a half hour for lunch, a week’s vacation after a year. She looked up at Jane, as if expecting her to leave. “How does that sound?”
Jane thought it sounded wretched, but she smiled shyly and said it sounded all right.
“You know how a clipping service works?” demanded Mrs. Webber. “You’d be given a bunch of papers to read— the same ones over and over again so you get familiar with the area. We read papers from all around Washington State here. Our clients are national, but we’re just part of a network of offices. It’s cheaper to send the clippings around the country than the whole newspaper.”
Mrs. Webber sat back and scrutinized Jane. Jane heard a faint plonky sound coming from the waiting area. It was a familiar sound but she couldn’t place it. Mrs. Webber didn’t seem to notice.
“So you haven’t worked for a while, huh?” she said, gesturing to the application.
“No. While my husband was alive, I stayed home,” Jane said. She was envisioning her false self as a vaguely agoraphobic woman looking out the window uneasily into a rainy garden, waiting for her husband to come home from work. “He died recently,” she added.
Mrs. Webber didn’t offer any condolences. “We need someone who can read fast and who’s smart enough to know what our clients are looking for. You get a list of them, with a number, and you code the clippings for the cutters. You have to be fast, and efficient. If you aren’t, it comes out of your hide, because we pay you a commission on each clipping.”
“You mean in addition to the salary?” said Jane.
Mrs. Webber smiled sadistically. “The salary is, strictly speaking, an advance on the commissions. If your counts get below a certain total, we take it out of next month’s check. Of course, you get a bonus if you do better.”
The way she said this last, in a tone that seemed designed not to get anyone’s hopes up, convinced Jane that the thing was structured so no one ever got a bonus.
Jane said meekly, “I do love to read.”
Mrs. Webber looked puzzled for a moment, as the plonking grew more audible. It sounded as if an instrument were being tuned.
“That’s good,” said Mrs. Webber begrudgingly, “but remember, you’re not here to read for yourself. We aren’t paying you to amuse yourself, so you have to make sure you don’t let yourself read items that our clients can’t use. Some people are compulsive readers and they can’t break that habit. They don’t make it in this business.”
Jane nodded. The low pay, the threadbare benefits, the unattractive surroundings, all of this was depressing, but what Mrs. Webber had just said depressed her the most. It seemed heartless to lure in quiet individuals who loved to read and then tell them not to.
Jane accidentally allowed a flicker of hostility to cross her features. Mrs. Webber seemed to notice it immediately, and leaned forward with a triumphant gleam in her small, glittering eyes. “I cannot emphasize this part strongly enough,” she said. “You aren’t here for your own pleasure.” Her voice lingered just a second too long on the word “pleasure.” She had pronounced it with contempt.
This woman, thought Jane, was suspicious of people who liked to read. To Mrs. Webber, reading for its own sake was a puzzling form of weakness that had to be stamped out. No doubt she had nothing but scorn for the people she supervised, smart but not particularly aggressive people, who toiled here for about fifty cents an hour more than the minimum wage.
“How did you like selling at Frederick’s?” asked Mrs. Webber now, surveying Jane with the air of a carnivorous feline who had already seized its prey, but was toying with it for the fun of it.
“I liked it,” said Jane, feeling more like herself, because she actually had worked in retail. “I liked helping people and finding out what they needed and encouraging them to go ahead and get something they really wanted and making it fun for them.”
“You liked selling?” said Mrs. Webber.
“Well, yes,” said Jane.
“I don’t think you’d be right for us,” said Mrs. Webber. “You have to be assertive to sell. And you had some time at home, doing whatever you wanted. Watching soap operas or whatever.” She curled her lip. “Here, everyone takes their break at the same time. You want me to tell you when to take your break?” Mrs. Webber snorted, as if she knew the answer.
“Well, if that works out better . . .” began Jane feebly. She felt the interview slipping away from her. It was ridiculous, because she didn’t want the job anyway. But it irked her that Mrs. Webber had seen through her and ferreted out the truth: Jane wouldn’t take at all kindly to Mrs. Webber blowing a whistle and telling everyone when to take five.
The brief silence was filled with some chords of Hawaiian music. The instrument was clearly a ukulele. “What is that?” said Mrs. Webber sharply.
“I think it’s ‘Aloha Oe,’” said Jane.
Mrs. Webber frowned and started to rise, then seemed to think better of it and sat back down. “There is a general knowledge test,” she said. “For finalists. But I don’t think you’re suited to the work.”
“Well, I guess there isn’t much more to say,” said Jane. She thought for a moment of launching into some tirade against Mrs. Webber to give Bob some more time. Suddenly, they heard a booming voice singing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” and more ukulele, followed by a sharp, peevish voice shouting, “Just stop it!” This was followed by a mighty roar and a few girlish gasps and screams.
“Jesus Christ,” said Mrs. Webber, clambering out from behind her desk. Jane stepped back to let her get out of her office, then whisked over to the squashed box and pocketed the keys. A second later, she was out in the waiting area where Bob was shaking the philodendron with one hand, and waving the other, curled into a huge fist with a ukulele coming out of it, in the face of the man with the chess book.
“You know what’s the matter with you guys who wear berets?” Bob was shouting. “Nobody can tell you guys shit.” He looked over Mrs. Webber’s shoulder at Jane, who gave a tiny nod.
“Okay, I’m leaving,” said Bob, releasing the philodendron, which snapped back into place. He stashed the tiny ukulele in the Nordstrom bag, gave Mrs. Webber a beautiful smile, and made his way to the door rather buoyantly.
The man in the beret looked shaken. “I just asked him not to play that thing,” he said to everyone in the room. He flapped his chess book. “I was trying to concentrate.” A few reassuring murmurs came up from around the room.
Jane caught up with Bob outside the building and handed him four twenties. “Nice work,” she said.
He folded the bills in half and put them in his shirt pocket. “I spotted the guy right away as someone who’d snap real easy.”
“‘Michael Row the Boat Ashore’ would push me over the edge too,” said Jane, who never felt any nostalgia for the hootenanny era. “Aren’t you a little young to remember that one?” Jane couldn’t imagine Bob having been part of the folk movement in any case.
“They used to play that at vacation bible camp all the time,” said Bob. “Take care. You let me know if you need anything else.” As Jane watched him roll off down the street, she reflected on the fact that Bob never asked her any questions about what she was doing, or told her how to do things properly. He just took any assignment in stride. It was a professional quality she appreciated, especially as she wasn’t always sure just what she was doing herself.
4.
That evening, Jane drove Monica over to Irene March’s house.It seemed like a good idea to take Monica with her. She’d know more about Irene’s life, and would be able to shed more light on what they found there.
Monica was dressed like a cat burglar in tight black jeans and black cotton turtleneck, her red hair twisted into a serviceable knot, giving her pale face with its wide eyes an undeniably chic but slightly scary look.
Jane had a sinking feeling she’d come on a fool’s errand, dragged into some ridiculous little drama cooked up by the employees of the Columbia Clipping Service in their over-heated little office because their intrigues against their unpleasant boss had begun to pall. She supposed that years of reading newspapers and enduring mental abuse from Mrs. Webber had taken their toll on the fragile sanity of the people who worked there. Monica was clearly high-strung and melodramatic. Clark appeared to be an idiot savant. And here was Jane herself, hiring Bob and his ukulele, stealing from an office, sneaking around someone’s house at night, buying into the whole thing.
Irene lived on a steep little street called Argyle off of Phinney Ridge, near the zoo. Jane parked on the flat street half a block up next to a big brick Lutheran church, because she felt funny about poking through the house, and it seemed more discreet not to park right in front. There were some blue and black stickers with an eyeball logo on the windows of surrounding houses, a sign that there was a neighborhood block watch designed to foil residential burglaries. The last thing Jane wanted was to have neighbors with pitchforks or the police asking her what she and Monica were doing there, although she supposed it was better to be letting themselves in with a key than kicking in a basement window.
They walked the half block down the steep hill with special concrete treads on the sidewalk. Phinney Ridge was a neighborhood clinging to the side of a bluff, overlooking the flat neighborhood of Ballard, marked out below them with rows of street lights that were just beginning to come on. Beyond lay Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains, far away and dark blue against a peachy dusk sky beyond.
Irene March had lived in a small bungalow, half obscured by ugly old ornamental cedars. Inside, the living room was crammed with grim furniture—oily-looking upholstered pieces in ugly florals. Bookshelves lined the walls. The place smelled of old cigarette smoke.
Monica locked the door behind them, punching a button in the center of the knob. Jane felt like whispering, but forced herself to speak in normal conversational tones.
