David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

Meanwhile, I was understandably tired and disoriented, and also frazzled (what today would be called ‘stressed’), and hungry, and more than a little irritated, and was seated in a recently vacated 57vinyl chair in the main waiting area, with my suitcases at my feet and dispatch case held against me in such a way as to hopefully obscure the dampness of my suit’s left side, in direct view of the desk of the DDP’s horrific secretary/receptionist, Mrs. Sloper, who on this first day gave me the exact same look of incurious distaste I would receive from her for the next thirteen months, and wore (this I sure remember) a lavenderish pantsuit against which the abundant rouge and kohl were even more ghastly. She was maybe fifty, and very thin and tendony, and had the same asymmetrical beehive coiffure as two different older females in my own family, and was made up like an embalmed clown, the stuff of nightmares. (Her face looked somehow held in place with pins.) Several times, at moments when there was enough of a gap in the mass of personnel to constitute a real line of sight, this secretary and I glanced at each other with mutual hatred and revulsion. She might actually have bared her teeth at me for an instant. 58A few of the personnel seated or standing all around the room and connected hallways were reading files or filling out forms that might conceivably have had something to do with their assigned work, but most of them were staring vacantly into space or engaged together in wandering, desultory workplace conversations, the sort (as I learned) that neither start nor ever end. I could feel my pulse in two or three pemphigoid cysts along the line of my jaw, which meant that they were going to be really nasty ones. The nightmarish secretary had a small framed workplace cartoon on her desk’s edge which featured a crude caricature of an angry face and below it the caption ‘I have got one nerve left… AND YOU’RE GETTING ON IT!’ which some of the administrative workers at Philo High had also displayed and expected people to applaud the wittiness of.

The fact that I was being paid for sitting here reading an insipid self-help book — my Service contract’s period of employ had legally commenced at noon — while someone else who was being paid stood in a long line of similarly paid people simply in order to find out what to do with me: It all seemed massively wasteful and inept, a prime illustration of the view held among certain members of my family that government, government bureaucracy, and government regulation constituted the most wasteful, stupid, and un-American way to do anything, from regulating the instant-coffee industry to fluoridating the water. 59At the same time, there were also flashes of anxiety that the delay and confusion might signify that the Service was considering whether to maybe disqualify and eject me based on some distorted record of allegedly unsavory behavior at the elite college I was on leave from, either with or without sirens. As every American knows, it is totally possible for contempt and anxiety to coexist in the human heart. The idea that people feel just one basic emotion at a time is a further contrivance of memoirs.

In short, I was there in the main waiting area for what felt like a very long time, and had all sorts of rapid, fragmentary impressions and reactions, of which I will include here only a few examples. I can remember hearing one middle-aged man who sat nearby saying ‘Simmer down, boyo’ to another older man seated kitty-corner to me across the doorway to one of the hallways extending out from the waiting area, except when I looked up from the book both these men were staring straight ahead, expressionless, with no sign of anyone needing to ‘simmer down’ in any conceivable way. Emerging from one radial hallway to traverse the edge of the waiting area and down another hallway was at least one good-looking girl, whose creamy pallor and cherrywood hair drawn to a knot with a store-bought bow I saw peripherally but then when I looked directly could see only the back of (i.e., the woman) as she went down the hall. I have to confess that I’m not sure just how much detail to actually indulge in, or how to keep myself from imposing on the waiting area and various personnel a familiarity earned only later. Telling the truth is, of course, a great deal trickier than most regular people understand. One of the waiting room’s wastebaskets, I remember, contained an empty Nesbitt’s can, which I interpreted as evidence that the REC’s vending facilities might well include a Nesbitt’s machine. Like all crowded rooms in summertime, the place was hot and stuffy. The smell of the sweat from my suit was not wholly my own; my flared collar was curling up slightly at the tips.

By this time, I had removed the mass-market paperback from my dispatch case and was reading it with partial attention — which was all that it deserved — while holding a ballpoint pen in my teeth. As I may have already mentioned in passing, the book had been given to me the day prior by an immediate relative (the same one whose wastebasket had contained the rumpled letter concerning my IRS posting from that other, less immediate relative) and was titled How to Make People Like You: An Instant Recipe for Career Success, and in essence I was ‘reading’ the book only to place certain tart, mordant margin-comments next to each bromide, cliché, or cloying bit of inauthentic pap, which meant just about every ¶. The idea was that I would mail the book back to this immediate relative a week or two hence, along with a voluble thank-you note filled with the gestures and tactics the book recommended — such as e.g. using the person’s first name over and over again, emphasizing areas of agreement and shared enthusiasm, & c. — the overwhelming sarcasm of which this relative 60would not detect until he then opened the book and saw the acerbic marginalia on every page. At school, I had once done certain freelance work for someone enrolled in an interdisciplinary course on Renaissance ‘courtesy books’ and the semiotics of etiquette, and the idea here was to allude to texts like Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman and Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son in the marginalia so as to make the implicit scorn all the more withering. It was just a fantasy, though. The truth was that I would never mail the book and note; it was a total waste of time. 61

Crowded offices’ waiting areas have their own special choreography, and I do know that at a certain further point the configuration of personnel sitting and standing around altered enough that I enjoyed a sustained line of sight, over the book, into a select bit of the inner office of the Deputy Director of Personnel, 62which office was basically a large wood-framed cubicle inset against the rear wall of the waiting area, the entrance to which was just behind and to the side of the nightmarish secretary/receptionist’s desk, from which position she easily could and (one got the sense) often did shoot out a bony lavender arm into the space of the DDP’s doorway to prevent someone from going in or even standing there knocking without her special nihil obstat. (Here being a veritable law of bureaucratic administration, it turned out: The more compassionate and effective the high-level official, the more unpleasant and Cerberusian the secretary who barred one’s access to him.) Mrs. Sloper’s desk’s multiline telephone’s handset had an attachment that let her rest it (i.e., the attachment) on her shoulder and be able still to use both hands for her secretarial tasks, without the violinish contortion of the neck required to hold a regular phone against one’s shoulder. The little curved device or attachment, which was tan plastic, turned out to have been mandated by OSHA for certain classes of federal office workers. Personally, I’d never seen such a thing before. The office door behind her, which was partly ajar, featured frosted glass on which was inscribed the name and very long, complex title of the DDP (whom most of the Angler’s Cove wigglers referred to by the facetious sobriquet of ‘Sir John Feelgood,’ which it took me several weeks to understand the Hollywood context and reference of [I detest commercial films, for the most part]). My sight line’s particular angle was through the partly open door into a wedge-shaped section of the room inside. Within this section was a view of an empty desk with a name-and-title-plate so long that it actually extended beyond the width of the desk at both sides (i.e., of the desk), and a small bowler or rounded business hat hung at a slight angle from one of these protrusive sides, its brim occluding the last several letters on the plate so that what the desk’s sign averred became: