Inappropriate Behavior: Stories Page 4

  Knowing all of this about myself, I can, I think, be forgiven for a moment of stuporous inactivity, a stunned paralysis of movement and speech, even of thought. I find it hard, however, to let myself off the hook, for by the time I was able to move, Smith, along with the rest of the seventh floor, was gone, and I was left all alone. I knew I should do something, that seemed clear. But what? How does one react to a grown man crab-walking across a parking lot with an attaché on his chest, especially when that man, or his actions, have apparently inspired some sort of cult following among the people with whom one works? I thought at first to move, quickly, to flee, to get out of that building, use my sick time for a few days until I figured out what to do, or figured out a way to never go back. But then I caught sight of Smith, walking, as normally as Smith could, across the parking lot to his car. I saw him get into a gray Saturn, and as soon as he did I sprinted from my desk down the seven flights of stairs and made it to the parking lot just in time to see him drive away. He turned left out of the parking lot and I ran madly to my car to tail him.

  When I got onto the access road, I could see Smith’s car heading west on the highway, so I floored it and jumped two lanes of traffic to follow him. Just as I hit the highway, my cell phone rang. It was Marcie.

  “When are you coming home?” she said as I wrenched my neck to hold the phone while keeping both hands on the wheel. I was doing nearly eighty, and Smith was still well down the road. The late September sun hung blandly in my windshield, and I reached up with my left hand to lower the visor, dropping the phone from my neck as I did. I managed to shift my hips and catch it in my lap, but not before swerving into the service lane, then swerving out against an angry, guttural horn blast from a semi to my left.

  “I’m just going out for a quick drink with some friends,” I shouted into my lap as Smith began a rightward move across traffic, some quarter mile ahead of me.

  “Friends?” Marcie’s voice came from the phone, dubiously.

  “Some of the guys from work.”

  “I wish you’d come home,” she said. “I have something incredible to show you.”

  I saw Smith exit onto Dunleavy. I swerved, said to Marcie, “I won’t be late,” then flipped the phone closed while executing a nifty move between a school bus full of band members and an SUV. I had to hurry, or Smith would get lost in side streets.

  When I got to the top of the exit onto Dunleavy, I saw Smith’s car turn into a strip mall six blocks down the road. At least he wasn’t going home yet. As badly as I wanted some answers, I wanted no part of Smith’s home life. There are things in this world you just can’t get out of your head, and Smith’s house, I knew, would be one of them.

  His car was parked in front of a Walgreens, so I parked nearby and went inside. I could imagine catching Smith in an aisle where you’d rather not be caught, perhaps foot care or fungicides or protective undergarments. But a fairly good look around the place brought no sign of Smith. I was approached by a retarded boy in a blue smock who asked me if he could help me find anything. When I told him no, he moved on to someone else, a woman who said, “Yes, cough syrup,” at which point the retarded boy called someone to help the woman find cough syrup.

  I left Walgreens thinking Smith must be in another of the shops in the strip mall. But when I got to the parking lot, the gray Saturn was gone.

  Not knowing what else to do, I went home. On the way, now driving with the last of the sun at my back, I thought about how silly all of this was. That I would go chasing after Smith like some sort of madman, as if Smith had any answers, as if the incident I had witnessed even merited answers. I realized now that Schmelling’s antics in the parking lot were nothing more than that, antics, some sort of frat prank that he and his acolytes never outgrew, a symbolic thumbing of the nose at the IC and the conformity it bred, and if Smith and some of the others were a bit carried away by the whole thing, that was their problem, not mine.

  When I got home, Marcie was again very glad to see me. She met me at the door, already unclothed, and the next thing I knew, she was on her knees in front of me. When she finished, as I hung there, leaning against the front door to support my shaky legs, she took me by my limpening member and led me to the studio. There was the sketch, but now a full painting, finished and beautiful, maybe her best work yet. My face and white shirt were colored by the setting sun through the glass of the window, which she had somehow portrayed without showing any glass at all. My tie was an iridescent stripe of blues and greens and reds woven together to produce an effect of color the likes of which I’d never seen. My hand against the windowpane was the picture’s most stunning feature. I seemed from one angle to be waving; from another, I held up my hand as if to say, Stop! From still another, I was a startled man bracing himself against the glass, which, as I’ve said, was both there and not there at once, which led to an even more eerie effect, that of a man trying not to fall as the building behind him leaned. I was completely carried away by the painting, so much so that I hadn’t noticed Marcie’s hand moving on me, working me back to a state of arousal. Before I could speak, Marcie dragged me to the ground and climbed on top of me, inserting me into her as I became fully hard again. This may have been the single—or double, or triple, I lost count—greatest sexual experience of our marriage, and by the time we were done, even the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet were tender from pushing against the canvas drop cloths.

  After, lying together on the floor beneath the easel, beneath the painting that could very well be the best American portrait since Whistler’s Mother, I told her about Schmelling, that today, instead of crawling, he crabwalked, told her I’d figured it all out, that he was some poor midlevel schmuck who was never going anywhere and that his way of rebelling was to put on this weird act in the parking lot every so often. I wanted to tell her about following Smith, about the way things seemed out of place at the IC that day, about having to avoid the manager, about the retarded boy at Walgreens, but I never got the chance. As soon as I got it out about Schmelling and the crabwalk, she leaped to her feet as if someone had poked her with a cattle prod. I tried to call for her, but she was already gone from the room. She’d run into our bedroom and locked the door, and standing there in the hallway, naked and cold and covered with the sticky, drying liquids of our love, I could hear her crying.

  After trying the door and calling for her a couple of times, I, not knowing what else to do, went to the guest bathroom to take a shower. While I was in there, lathering and rinsing and trying to guess what in the world I’d done wrong, I could hear her stomping about outside in the hall between our bedroom and the studio. I wasn’t that alarmed, really, at least not as alarmed as I realize now I should have been. I mean, I lived with Marcie, she was my wife, and she was temperamental, and much more of a believer, or at least much more receptive, to the things in life that float beneath the surface (which, as I said before, we create for ourselves as need be). Marcie was the artist, the woman of moods and funks and elations, and I was the calm, levelheaded one who kept us grounded in the world and made the work she did possible. It was the perfect arrangement, it seemed to me, each of us using our own skills and bents and frames of mind to make our marriage a true union, to make up one body that was prepared to meet the world on whatever terms it asked of us. I still had no idea what I’d done wrong, but I decided it didn’t matter—I’d get out of the shower, towel off, and then go to her and hold her until she calmed down, and I’d say I’m sorry and I’m sorry and I’m sorry again, for whatever I’d done to upset her. And then the door opened, and she flung back the shower curtain and threw in the painting in six neatly razored, beautifully colored strips.

  I jumped quickly to dodge the initial burst of whatever she was throwing at me, but when I saw it was the painting and that it was being ruined by the water, I tried to pick it up somehow. She stood there, tiny and furious, wreathed by steam.

  “Just leave it,” Marcie said. “You’re the one who killed it.”
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br />   “Marcie, what are you talking about? I thought—”

  “No, you didn’t think, you son of a bitch. You didn’t think at all.”

  “What are you . . . why did you do this?”

  “I could ask you the same thing, couldn’t I?” She was really screaming now, trying to talk through the kind of tears that should be saved for those two or three times in your life when unless you cry like that there’s no way to go on living, the kind of tears that leave you completely at their mercy, when you can’t even control your arms and legs and spine anymore, so you flail around in some kind of rhythm that only your sobbing knows. “You . . . murderer!”

  When I stepped out of the shower, she got control of herself enough to run from the bathroom. She returned to the bedroom and locked the door and stayed in there and cried all night long. I lay on the couch and watched a show on Animal Planet about otters and their lives until I fell asleep. When I awoke the next morning, early, she was already in the studio, with that door locked as well. I figured it would be best to leave things be for a while, to go on in to work and give her some peace, and then, when we’d had a chance to clear our heads, talk about it tonight.

  So I got dressed and drove to the office. As I started down the access road, I looked about to try to see the thing that had bothered me the day before, the missed chalk mark. But I couldn’t find it again, and as I approached the IC, as I pulled into my parking space, as I went through the huge glass doors and across the marble-floored lobby past PR and into the elevator, it seemed that someone else had found it and erased it unequivocally. Everything was in order, the way it had always been, as though during the night, fearing discovery by my wary eye, whoever or whatever had shifted things had come and shifted them back, sighing with relief over the closeness of the call, determined never to try to sneak anything past me again. The elevator disgorged several women from Marketing onto three, a janitor got off on four, and I was alone and feeling fine up to seven. I looked down at my tie, which was, coincidentally, the same tie I had worn in Marcie’s picture. I was straightening it in the shiny brass reflection of the elevator keypad just as the bell for seven rang. I reached down for my briefcase, and when I looked up, I was staring straight into the blank and pitiless face of the manager.

  My heart stopped—I really believe it did—for just a second, and then it began to move about wildly in my chest like some sort of little swamp mammal trapped in an underwater tree trunk. The manager was a bit taller than I, and he looked down at me with baggy, red-rimmed, jaundiced eyes that registered nothing about who I was or what I might be doing there in the elevator, much less attempting to get off on his floor. I was so riveted with fear that until I was shoved aside by them, I didn’t even notice the IC security guards at the manager’s elbows, accompanying him like escorts at a pageant or a dance. They moved by me and brought the manager into the elevator. I turned, still looking into the yellow sclera of the manager’s eyes, our gazes locked, until one of the guards said, “Getting off, Mr. Perkins?”

  Hearing my name snapped the spell the old man had on me. I looked back and forth quickly at the two other men to ascertain which of them had said it, which of them knew who I was, although it could hardly matter. If one of them knew me, the other did, too, and everyone else on seven as well, and everyone in the entire IC, and that meant that this otherwise unremarkable Tuesday was to be, no doubt, my last in the employ of this prestigious concern, and that tonight, instead of patching things up with Marcie, I would spend the evening updating my résumé, making phone calls, and trying to figure out how to keep paying our mortgage on nothing more than an unemployment check.

  I moved from the elevator, down the hall to the main room of the floor, and toward my desk in the corner near the window. It seemed to take forever to get there, as if this morning I were the one with feet of clay, but the time it took me to get there allowed me to notice a rather strange thing. Everyone on the floor was looking out from behind their cubicle partitions as I passed. At first, I figured this was the natural instinct to watch a dead man walking, but this was not the case—some of my coworkers winked, others smiled and gave a thumbs-up, still others nodded in that sharp, professional manner that young executives must spend hours practicing in their mirrors at home.

  Much about this, obviously, struck me as rather strange: (1) that I had seen the manager being led away in the traditional manner of dismissal, a dismissal of which I believed myself and my poor performance in Contracts to be the direct cause; (2) that, because I wanted to avoid scrutiny, I was usually among the first employees at my desk each morning—and had in fact come in even earlier than usual, owing to my night on the couch and my fitful otter dreams—but today everyone else was already there, as if they were waiting for me; (3) that they all seemed to know something I didn’t, something about me; and (4) that just as I was about to enter my cubicle, out popped Smith with a sort of Al Jolson move, a ta-da move, arms out to the side in presentation of himself, weight on one leg, head cocked, vaudeville grin on his face, and he led the entire floor in a raucous rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” which rendition would have been rather touching in its raucousness, had I even the slightest idea what I had done to merit it.

  After the song, me still outside my cubicle, there was much backslapping and carrying on, many Go get ’em, Tigers and You’re the mans, even a Well done, Perkins from an old-schooler I couldn’t identify in the melee. I thanked them all, because there seemed to be little else to do, and as I thanked them they slowly moved away, all but Smith, who stood there by my side the whole time, as if we were somehow in this—in what?—together.

  I looked at him, and he made a motion with his hand, directing me into my cubicle, a motion that said, Well, let’s go, and so I did. There was a box with all the things from my desk sitting on the floor by my chair and a bright orange Post-it note on my computer monitor. Written there in heavy black felt-tip ink were the words: Perkins! See me! Schmelling!

  All those exclamation marks! And why was my stuff—four copies of Newsweek, three of Time, a half roll of Life Savers (Wint O Green), an unopened Cross pen and pencil set, a spare tie (always keep one in your desk, Dad had said, one of the last things he’d taught me before his heart exploded)—in that cardboard box on the floor? It could only mean one thing. But then, why were all the others so proud of me, winking and backslapping and congratulating me with song? Could it be that they all hated the IC, that they envied my imminent dismissal? And really, what had I done that was so outrageous? All I had done was not ask any questions; really, it was a matter of respect for the IC and its decisional prowess; I had gone where they told me to go, read what they told me to read, sort of, and signed what they told me to sign, and if I had been doing such a bad job, why had it taken six months for them to notice? I had certainly not done anything like Terrence McNeil, nothing even as bizarre as what I’d watched this Schmelling do not once, but twice, in successive weeks, what he had apparently done enough times before to become a hero to everyone on seven and God only knew what other floors as well. And now he—Schmelling!—wanted to see me—Perkins! Perkins who had never done anything truly wrong in his life, Perkins who just wanted things to go easy, who didn’t make waves, who kept his head down and turned his work in on time, who had a house and a wife at home—sure, she’s a little odd, she’s an artist, try to understand—and if they wanted me to go back to PR, I’d go. It was all a terrible mistake, but it wasn’t my mistake, see, and the thing is, I was only trying to keep whoever had made the mistake from getting in trouble, I wanted to be a good team member, and yes, I should have known better, I know Contracts is far too important, Contracts is no place for a person like me, Perkins! I’ll never let it happen again. I promise.

  At that moment, I heard a noise outside the cubicle. At first I thought it was my heart again, but the sound soon grew too loud even for that. It was a clap, then a stomp, then a clap, then a stomp, and soon all the employees on the seventh floor
were doing it, clap, stomp, clap, stomp, in unison, and somewhere in the midst of it all, a woman began to sing, the words, if there were words, unintelligible, the tune a whiny, unmelodic descant above the percussion of clap, stomp, clap, stomp. I looked out and saw Smith standing across from me, sweat popping out of his forehead and that forehead red again, much more so than the day before. He was clapping and stomping and clapping and stomping, and his teeth were clinched, his mouth a rictus of pleasure and pain at once, his yellow teeth glowing against the redness of his cheeks and neck, his eyes shut tight behind the thick black frames as if he were so transported that to look on anything in a world as banal as this would be unholy, unnatural.

  Afraid to move from my cubicle, I decided—decided is too strong a word, I was beyond deciding anything—to stay where I was and wait for whatever was causing this apocalypse to come to me. But I was beyond being able to do even that, beyond being able to do nothing. As if some unseen, giant, but still gentle hands had hold of me, I felt myself being led—not drawn, but led—out into the hallway between the cubicles. It was an irresistible force, and I didn’t even try to avoid it. I knew that whatever I would see on the other side of my partition would change me forever, irrevocably, from being who I was to being someone I was not prepared to be, and I could only hope that somehow, as I had been led to Contracts and led to the window to watch Schmelling that first day, I would be led to an understanding of my new self, to adapt and grow and somehow live with what I would soon become.

  There in the hallway, the workers were lined up, clapping and stomping, clapping and stomping. The woman singing was now in a wailing frenzy of sound, and there was no longer any question about words; it was just sound, animalistic, primal, going from groaning to screaming and haphazardly hitting every octave in between. Some people were falling on the floor and rolling about in some kind of corporate Pentecostalism, still clapping and stomping all along. The room, the floor, had become incredibly hot, from all the strenuous activity of the untested muscles and lungs, yes, but also from some other source, as if hell, if you believe in that sort of thing, had opened a branch office right here on seven. I was beginning to come back to myself in some way, to realize that what was happening here was wrong, and again, that urge to flee that I had felt briefly the day before returned to me.