Easy and Hard Ways Out Read online

  Ardway, who always took copious notes at conferences, wrote on his pad, “I. Prototype system acceptance tests—fucked.” He delayed looking up as long as he could, feeling Rupp’s acid stare eating into the top of his wire-haired head, feeling his Adam’s apple expanding in his throat.

  “Well, Saul, it’s just that at this moment in time—”

  “We can’t deliver,” filled in Rupp.

  Ardway began to look around the room, his gaze flitting, birdlike, coming to rest only on the doors, the doorknobs. The third man in the room spoke.

  “I think, Saul, that a better way, a su-pe-ri-or way to phrase that would be, or might be, that we can’t deliver with the present effort or the present time-money allotment.”

  The man was Vincent Marchese, Vice-President of Manufacturing, theoretically equal on the organizational level to Rupp, and above Ardway. Marchese had a large, cascading belly that slurped over the top of his slacks like a runaway glacier. He wore heavy brown pants with cuffs that gently lapped at the laces of size 13 EEE shoes. He kept his thumbs hooked inside anachronistic suspenders and smiled self-satisfiedly. He was a big, churlish, self-important, self-made, long-winded, vain, and pompous bullshit artist who’d never quite graduated from high school and had been able to advance to where he was only through the unusual and unscrupulous route of being the best at his business. He delighted in executive conferences, his greatest enjoyment being to talk very slowly, come to an apparent end of thought, and then, when others began to speak, saying with feigned exasperation, “Do you mind if I finish, please?”

  Rupp, who’d been staring at his row of industrial psychology books, walked listlessly over to the one-way mirror behind a picture of himself at a mental institution ground-breaking ceremony. He stared at his secretary in the outer office, hoping for a spontaneous thigh-revealing stocking adjustment, or at least a period of nonworking reverie that he could catch her at, but the girl was typing diligently. He turned back to Ardway.

  “Henry, three months ago I asked you for your worst-case delivery time, and the date you gave me was last week. For ultimate safety, I added two weeks to your own worst time, and now you’re sitting here and telling me we won’t be able to meet even that.”

  “Well, it’s still possible,” said Ardway. “I mean, it’s just not probable. I mean, we’ve had these setbacks, you know, that—”

  “Mr. Redberry isn’t interested in setbacks,” bellowed Rupp, moving away from the mirror. “And neither is A. I’m going to have to explain this to them, you know.” He pounded his fist on the table. “Jesus! How the hell am I going to explain this? And what do we tell that Colonel McGuinn when he comes, huh? What do we tell McGuinn?”

  “Did you ever notice,” said Marchese, speaking in low tones, “that McGuinn has a pear-shaped head?”

  “That’s an interesting concept, Vince,” said Ardway quickly. “I really think you’re right about that.”

  “Vince,” said Rupp, “let’s stick to the issues here. Pear-shaped head or not, the guy will want to see what the Air Force bought. And we can’t show it to him.”

  “That’s true, Saul,” said Ardway. “Very true. We certainly can’t show it to him.”

  “And his aide, what’s-his-name, Cramer or Kreemer or something,” said Marchese. “Did you ever observe that he has no chin, or the absence of a definable chin feature?”

  “You know,” said Ardway, “I think you’ve hit it dead on again, Vince. Remarkable perception there.”

  “Vince,” said Rupp, “we have to come up with a plan as to what to tell A and Redberry.”

  “I would say we re-quire some-thing that em-pha-sizes the pos-i-tive ac-com-plish-ments, some-thing con-struct-ive—”

  “Right, something—”

  “Do you mind, Saul? I mean, I don’t interrupt you, now do I?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Do I?”

  “You just did.”

  “Then we’re even. As I was saying, something con-struct-ive that em-pha-sizes that what hap-pened was be-yond con-trol.”

  “That we were misled by others,” said Rupp.

  “That certain subordinates purposely mis-stated or mis-repre-sent-ed their de facto sit-u-a-tions.”

  “To enhance their own personal ambitions,” said Rupp, brightening, looking at Ardway. “Yes, I think that’s good. Constructive. Very constructive, since that way Mr. Redberry and A will clearly see whose fault it was and can take steps to separate them out.”

  Ardway, growing increasingly panicky, brought a fat manila folder from the floor to the desk. He pictured himself amidst a group of workers being whirled in a giant centrifuge, A at the controls. Finally, he and two section heads are pinned in agony to the outer wall, “separated out” as dead weight while the rest of the group, hard workers, laugh and joke near the center. He wondered what he would tell his wife. “I have memos,” he said. “Things that happened.” He opened the folder. “Here. Brundage not delivering his thin films … I point this out in my memo of the twenty-fourth. Steinberg’s lateness because of absenteeism … my memo dated the eighth. Transistor manufacturer’s problem … my memo of the nineteenth. Pat’s failure to bring through the leveling module when she promised … my memo of the thirtieth. You see? Here it is. It’s not me. These show everything clearly. Clearly. It’s documented. I’m covered completely. It wasn’t me, these show it.”

  He nudged the folder over to Rupp, who pushed it away. “Mr. Redberry and A are businessmen, Henry. They don’t care about folders.”

  “But it wasn’t my fault!” said Ardway. “You should see the reports the engineers give me. You should see how they leave out their umlauts, their commas, how they don’t leave sufficient margins. How could I accept reports like that? The next thing you know they won’t be numbering their equations. And then we’ve had this problem with the stealing, and with the paging maniac. Believe me, Saul, it wasn’t my fault.”

  He clutched spasmodically at the memo-filled manila envelope.

  “Henry,” said Rupp, “the buck’s gotta stop somewhere.”

  “Yes,” said Ardway, “but why here? What’s the difference if it stops a little lower?”

  “Maybe,” said Marchese, “it doesn’t have to stop at all. Maybe it could just, sort of, slide a bit.”

  “Vince,” said Rupp.

  “What I mean is, that is, the essence of my thought here is that maybe Henry would be willing to tell us from this point what we have to do to meet the deadline, if, in fact, we can, by extra work, meet it.”

  “I say we leave things as is,” said Rupp.

  “No, wait,” said Ardway. “Wait, I think Vince has an excellent concept there. Just give me till tomorrow. I guarantee you an estimate.”

  “We don’t want estimates,” said Rupp.

  “I mean an exact estimate,” said Ardway.

  “Then it’s not an estimate,” said Rupp.

  “All right then, it’s not an estimate, it’s a, a—”

  “A prediction,” said Marchese.

  “We don’t want predictions,” said Rupp.

  “No, no,” said Ardway. “Not a prediction. No, sir. Not a prediction. A, uh, uh—” He daubed the perspiration from his face with a handkerchief. “A, uh, uh—”

  “A commitment,” said Rupp. “A do-or-die one.”

  Ardway stood up. “I just have to check with my staff,” he said, and then, muttering, “and this time, they’d better …”

  “First tell us if you can do it, and then what effort you need,” said Marchese.

  Ardway walked to the door.

  “As far as the ‘can do it’ part,” said Rupp, “I think you’d better leave out the ‘if.’”

  “I will,” said Ardway. “I will.” And on his pad he wrote “NO ‘IFS.’”

  AUERBACH LABORATORIES

  Inter-Office Memorandum 11/19/66

  From: Pythagoras

  To: W. Murphy

  cc: V. Fish, H. Ardway, S. Rupp, A.

&n
bsp; Subject: Bathroom tissue quality

  To put it bluntly, the toilet paper now being stocked in the Mens’ rooms is the excessively thin, institutional kind that breaks off in one’s rectum after even minor stress. As this is not conducive to high-quality work output, particularly for those of us who are somewhat constipated, your cooperation is requested in rectifying this situation.

  Sincerely,

  Pythagoras

  P:p

  O SOLE MIO

  a. A Matter of Symmetry

  Mario LoParino had just turned thirteen, a bright, unhappy, already cynical child living a hair above the poverty level in East New York, when his father lost virtually the entire family savings after an impulsive investment in pork bellies. He topped the disaster off by contracting an incurable cancer of the liver, cheerfully proclaimed his intention to rebuild his life, and promptly committed suicide.

  “We were saving up to move,” LoParino often mentioned to Brank. “Ten years. We couldn’t collect on his insurance. He hanged himself from a light fixture. Very ingenious, too. Well planned. We found out later he’d taken books out of the library. How to hang yourself. It’s amazing what you can find in the library. Jesus, I had some repair job on that fixture.”

  LoParino’s mother was still living, a broken old woman who earned her sustenance by bagging American cheese sandwiches for a vending machine company.

  “I think the thing I resented most about my father was he always came into the bathroom to take a crap just when I was taking a shower. I mean, even though I’d shower once a week on a Sunday at ten P.M., that’s the exact time he’d pick to relieve himself. And when I’d complain about the sounds and the smell, he’d say, ‘Why are you getting so excited? I’ll be through in a second.’ Did you ever shower when someone was crapping? I’m telling you, it’s no bed of roses. And when he’d flush, you know, the water in the shower would get scalding for a full minute. To this day I can’t take a shower without being afraid someone will rush in for a lightning crap and flush.”

  LoParino was the first engineer Brank had met when he came to Auerbach Labs.

  “Place here stinks,” LoParino had commented by way of welcoming the new employee.

  As weeks went by, Brank learned that LoParino had occupied seven different apartments during that year alone, and that, in each, he’d rigged the electric meter, gas meter, and telephone so as to greatly underpay the respective utilities.

  “Honesty is not really one of my strong points,” he’d mentioned after a month. “My morality seems to depend on whatever fattens my wallet.”

  It did not take long then to size LoParino up as a sullen, amoral, criminal, semi-psychopath; Brank, of course, had liked him immediately.

  Brank was certain LoParino was going to be fired soon, probably when the F24BZ was completed. A daily skirmisher with the supervisors, LoParino had once called Steinberg a corduroy asshole. He was asking for it, screaming for it actually, even as Brank himself had done so many times in the past, screaming on the inside, denying on the outside. But Brank knew.

  LoParino now worked in the Electronics section of Auerbach Labs, having been transferred there shortly after the trouble with Steinberg. The trouble had started a month after he’d been hired, when LoParino made himself asymmetric.

  “Oh, Mario,” Steinberg had moaned that Monday morning. “Mario, you can’t. I mean … that’s crazy, crazy.”

  LoParino had sauntered to his desk.

  “Another chapter coming up,” Wizer had said softly.

  LoParino opened his notebook, began to sketch circuit diagrams. On his chin was half a beard; the left half was bare, the right had a neatly trimmed triangle of hair. Above his upper lip was half a mustache. One eyebrow had been shaved off. The left side of his head was crewcut, the right side long, as usual, hair hanging down over his eye in front and his shirt in back.

  “Mario,” Steinberg had said forlornly, and had gone in to see the Chief Engineer, at the time a man named Fieble who carried a black lunchbox.

  “I’ll speak to him,” Fieble had promised, munching on a Malomar.

  “I think it’s not good,” Fieble had told LoParino later.

  “Why?” asked LoParino.

  “It’s different. It’s not symmetrical.”

  “Why must we always submit to the tyranny of symmetry?” said LoParino. “There’s nothing that says our left halves have to be like our right.”

  Fieble considered that and reached inside his lunchbox.

  “You know,” said LoParino, “I’ve always felt that Malomars stand to other cookies as egg creams do to other sodas.”

  “Really?” said Fieble, quite pleased.

  Later he asked Steinberg, “Tell me, does he do his work?”

  “He’s excellent,” Steinberg had answered. “Brilliant, I would say.”

  “Then leave him alone.”

  A week later, the Chief Engineer wore one brown shoe, one black. And a week after that, he was fired by Rupp, who loved symmetry and thought marshmallow cookies a sign of weakness. The new Chief Engineer, Ardway, took nearly three months to become established and never did feel on solid enough ground to say anything to LoParino, though he did have him transferred.

  b. Gondoliers

  Pat looked down the row of desks and benches at her boys. At Lubell writing furiously in his notebook. At LoParino lazily working his slide rule and making mandolin music. At Chin-Tao Wong reclining in his swivel chair, lost in thought. At Mills clicking the switches on racks of instruments. At Coletti squinting his eyes to fight off the cigarette smoke as he soldered in a resistor. Her boys.

  Boys. Boys. Pat smiled to herself, an inward smile, a mixture of sweetness and wistfulness and bitterness. She was forty-four years old and had three fine, happily married brothers and five nephews and a lab full of men who worked for her and whom she mothered. That’s me, she thought. The unwed mother. Perhaps her own mother had been right after all. Perhaps the best thing for her would have been to be a nun, to drop out of life and marry the Lord. It would’ve been easy, marrying the Lord. The Lord didn’t care if you were skinny and had no tits at all and were a little bowlegged and never learned to use makeup. And she wouldn’t have had to worry, as she did with all the other men, about seeming too intelligent, about catching Him in factual errors. No sir. Not the Lord. He was smart as a whip. Omniscient. And presumably, a good lover too. Wouldn’t care about her preposterous inexperience in bed. No sir, not Him. A good lover. Omnipotent. But best of all, really best of all, if you wanted to marry Him, He never said no. That’s what really sets Him apart, thought Pat. No discrimination.

  Pat was amused. Even now, in the evenings when she sat with her mother amidst the sheet-covered furniture and the unfinished games of dominoes, even now, every so often, the old woman would turn to her and say, “Trish, it’s still not too late. It’s not such a bad life, Trish.” And Pat would just smile at her and hold her rough hand until a TV commercial would distract the old lady and scavenge her trend of thought. Maybe it really isn’t that bad a life, thought Pat, but the one I have now isn’t that bad either. And just briefly, because the years had taught her discipline, a lightning image of Allen crossed her mind, him standing there in the hall on a weekday evening, that concupiscent grin on his face, telling her teasingly, “I thought you might want a break from your studying. A sex break. Something to relieve the—”

  She rose abruptly from her leather chair, stretched in a most unfeminine fashion, and casually ambled down the aisle toward Lubell.

  “How’s the logic coming, Larry?” she asked.

  Lubell looked up from his notebook and quickly thrust a schematic circuit diagram in front of her face. “Oh, uh, actually, Pat, I was just about to ask you, uh, maybe you would know whether I should use a wire-wound or a carbon—”

  “You’re the engineer, Larry,” said Pat, dodging the onrushing diagram. “You’re the one who has to decide.”

  “Yes,” said Lubell, “I know. But we don’t h
ave the wire-wound in stock right now so I figured—”

  “Larry, truthfully, I don’t have the time for these details. I’m sure your judgment will be correct.”

  “And the switches,” said Lubell plaintively. “I don’t know whether to make them—”

  “Larry! Larry, no details. You decide. You decide. It’s your job, Larry, it’s your ball of wax. You’re an engineer, this is your job.”

  Lubell fell back in his swivel chair, distraught. Built like a Tinker Toy, with a disk head, a larger one for his body, and stick arms and legs, Lubell was burdened in life by an inability to cope with the obvious. Once, when describing to Coletti how LoParino had attacked him in an argument, he said, “He called me a prick. Now what do you suppose he meant by that?” Lubell was well liked in the company because he was a hard, dedicated, and loyal worker who was superbly efficient at accomplishing nothing and posed no threat to anyone. Before Pat had approached his desk he was diligently engaged in his favorite activity, copying the contents of one notebook into another. This was a wonderful trick for appearing to be doing constant, feverish work, and the supervisors never caught on.

  Pat stood over his desk and looked down at the picture of his wife, a plain woman wearing a print dress and sheepish smile. How often Pat had thought, for no reason, embarrassedly, maliciously, I’m prettier than she is. I am, and felt a horrible yet satisfying pride, much better than if she’d just been smarter. Much better. And yet also, a paradoxical and ironic twinge of sorrow for Lubell, that this was the best he could do. On the wall behind him were an IEEE diploma, a CCNY Bachelor of Engineering degree, and a reprint of a tiny, one-paragraph article he’d once had published in a technical journal. He’d overheard the idea for the article in the company cafeteria.

  “There’s just so many things,” he said to Pat now.

  “I know,” she said soothingly, almost tenderly. “I know. Just take them one at a time, Larry. I’m sure they’ll work out.”

  She smiled reassuringly as she glided past the benches of Coletti and Mills. Opposite poles. Give Coletti his Knicks and his Jets and a can of beer and he was set for life. Ambition contained in a rectangle with a twenty-one-inch diagonal. But he was happy, unlike Mills, who’d been going to night school for endless years, trying to claw his way up to being an engineer, forced to take more and more classes as the university cut the credits out from under him. She moved on to Chin-Tao Wong, whose desk was packed with jars of vitamins, and wheat germ, bottles of mouthwash, packets of special skin creams. The little anti-bacteria fan he kept trained on visitors tousled her hair.