Garth MacKenzie’s wife was parked on a chair outside his office, rooting through her purse. She pulled out a receipt, stared through tethered glasses, and sighed a lung-clearing sigh. “I wish he would hurry up.”
Carla, the secretary, dropped a letter in her in-out box and smiled. “This time of day he’s always busy.”
“I don’t care what time of day it is. My lovely house is going to be ruined.”
“Your house?” asked Carla while admiring the tole-painted box on her desk. On the “in” side, she had painted a plump raccoon in Ray-Ban shades, bike shorts, and Nikes. On ”out” was his double in a belted lime-green leisure suit. One of the interns, that tall boy who carried a bodhran on his bicycle, said she had it backwards, that the leisure suit was wicked. She thought he was funny.
“Didn’t he tell you?” Jean, the wife, demanded.
“Ah?” Carla didn’t know what the safe answer was.
“When we were in St. Pete’s last month, some, some” — her voice climbed a ladder of exasperation — “horrible smelly rummy started feeding pigeons on our lawn. By the time we got back, they had moved in — hundreds of them, mothers, babies — and now we can’t get rid of them. They’re on the roof and in the trees. You know what they call pigeons, don’t you?” She fixed her stare on Carla and teetered.
“Ah, no.”
“Flying rats. My beautiful house is infested with rats!”
“Have you tried scaring them off?”
“We’ve tried everything. It is horrible, with droppings all over my lovely deck, my blue lawn swing, my —”
“That’s too bad.”
“Then this morning, I caught him red-handed. When I came home from Tone and Trim, he was there, the vagrant, feeding them. I told Garth that he’d been doing it all along. That’s why they won’t leave. Garth has to take care of this.”
Carla typed a letter while Webberly from Business stopped to admire Jean’s purple pantsuit, telling her, “You look younger every time I see you. Ha. Ha. How do you do it?” It was true, Carla noticed grudgingly, Jean did seem younger.
As the wife had grown tauter, something eerie had happened to MacKenzie, Carla observed. Slowly but surely, his physiology had changed. His cheeks had become soft and rosy, his beard so faint it had nearly disappeared. MacKenzie had turned into a Russian stacking doll, pear-shaped, with shrunken shoulders, broad hips, and babushkas.
“He’s almost through,” Carla noted.
As Jean walked to Carla’s desk, the secretary decided that she must have noticed the mailbox, since everyone loved it. “You should have a booth at the Christmas Craft Show,” people told her. “You’re so eclectic.” Carla smiled, keeping her pride in its place, and the wife stared back.
“Your hair really is red, isn’t it?”
“Uh.” Carla flushed as MacKenzie shuffled out, wearing his green sweater.
“You can never wear pink lipstick.” The wife stared pointedly, waiting for a response, then demanded, “Can you?”
MacKenzie couldn’t go home, he told his wife in a low voice, he had a meeting with Boomer, the publisher. Furious, Jean tossed two envelopes containing bills on Carla’s desk for mailing. Carla stamped the envelopes, one to Uptown Furs, the other to Mary Kay Cosmetics, hesitated, then put them face down in “out,” so they couldn’t see the lime-green leisure suit with the comical lines, so they couldn’t for a minute pretend they belonged.
Craving a beer, Garth looked around the black-and-white restaurant decorated with tiny photos of Chinese peasants. Boomer and Katherine were across the table. What kind of a place was this, anyway? Garth wondered. No one seemed to be drinking. For years, he’d been able to nurse a beer at work by pouring it into a Tim Hortons coffee mug and sipping it during the day, but now with Boomer and his bloody safety nurse, he couldn’t take a chance.
Garth studied the menu: olive fettuccine with gorgonzola and ricotta, curried corn bisque, calamari with garlic mayonnaise, raspberry fool in phyllo tulips. With those peasants on the wall, you’d think there’d be sweet and sour or Bo Bo balls, thought Garth, who enjoyed a good bowl of won ton soup.
At the next table, three career women were gabbing. One, according to their conversation, was married to a doctor.
“Kevin said they had a lesbian couple in maternity; one gave birth and the other nursed the baby.”
“Do you have to take hormones or is it a symbiotic thing?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did Kevin say?”
“He didn’t have a clue.”
“He’s a doctor!”
The woman leaned across the table and hissed: “He’s a pecker checker.”
Boomer pulled a notebook from his tan, single-breasted overcoat, a Sears standard for decades. Underneath was a tweed jacket and striped shirt with solid collar. Somewhere along the way, in a pit stop in Northern Ontario or rural Manitoba, he had picked up the affectation of suspenders, his trademark.
“Head office is preparing for a mid-year review.” The publisher kept the overcoat on, a warning that he was all business, too driven to care what anyone thought about his head, his hair, or his pale, shrunken eyes. “Social trends. How are we faring in that department?”
While Katherine replied, Garth gazed out the window, thinking about pecker checkers and disappointed with his lunch: cold potatoes in mustard dressing dumped on lettuce. The restaurant was one of those places that never seemed clean, he decided, where your table had one leg that was too short, where the profits, according to the menu, went to a weird religion.
An ancient woman stood on the curb, bowlegged in a knee-length mink cut like a housecoat. A pillbox hat sagged over her face, which had been painted for a silent movie. She was teetering in calf-length, spike-heeled boots from the 1970s. Cocktail boots, they used to call them, with a perky tassel on each foot. She gathered herself up slowly to cross the street, looked one way, then stepped off the curb, waving her arms wildly like she was trying to fly. Startled, Garth turned back.
Years ago, they’d hired a guy for trends, Garth recalled, but Bentley fired him for hitting on a copy boy. “No more funny fellows,” Bentley had ordered. Garth suspected the odd one slipped in now and then through the cracks. He certainly had his doubts about Blaise.
“Any inroads into beefing up numbers in Yarmouth County?”
“We’re working on it,” Katherine explained. “I’ve hired a new stringer.”
The women picked up their briefcases, as stoic as miners returning to the pit. “I’d be a lesbian,” said Kevin’s wife, weighing her options, “but I couldn’t stand the drama. With men, if you’re having a bad day, you can tell them to piss off, and they know that they deserve it.”
And then, before Garth could explain in elaborate detail all of the stories that Sports had written and all of the flashbacks he had suggested, Boomer reached for the bill and said, “Prepare for some restructuring.”