Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

They all moved over to a table, the four of them, and continued talking about Seattle and Boeing and anything at all. They took turns buying rounds. English skipped his turn. He drank only coffee.

Ralph didn’t seem bitter about having put in two decades at Boeing before the big layoff. “I sell boats now,” he said.

“Can you get by all right doing that?” English asked.

“It’s touch and go. Feast or famine. My kids are gone now. My wife works.”

“But you can really score — when you score — right?”

“My second wife,” Ralph corrected himself, taking a drink from Madeline’s tray before she could even set it down. “I lost my first wife right after Boeing cut back.”

“Better bring another round almost right away,” the man in computers suggested to Madeline.

“I just went crazy,” Ralph said of that other time.

Madeline said to Ralph, “I heard about that.”

But her manner of saying it was like this: She paused, looked at him, laid down her bar rag gently on the tray, and said I heard about that, as if she’d always wanted to get the whole story. But Ralph didn’t seem to want to tell it.

The man who worked in computers revealed that his name was Elvis. “I was born in ’42,” he said. “I wasn’t named after Elvis Presley. My folks just picked it out of the air.”

“That must’ve been kind of strange, having a name like that in the fifties.”

“Other kids looked up to me,” he said. “It gave me a whole kind of mystique. I was sad when he faded out. But I was never too big on his sound, to tell you the truth.”

Elvis described something that had been going on at his office for a while, a series of events that had resulted in one of the other workers getting fired for sex discrimination. “Or rather it was sexual harassment, is the proper term,” he said.

“This guy was unbelievable,” Elvis went on. “He’s married, got three kids, or maybe four, I don’t know, and he just kind of started in on this woman who works right at the next desk. But she was like lower down on the scale — not working under him, but he had rank on her. She was just a secretary, more or less, and he was management. One day he puts this Personals ad on her desk. You know The Midnite Shopper ?”

“What a stupid rag.”

“Yeah, it is. And especially the ads, the Personals. Did you ever read those?”

None of them admitted to such a vice.

“Well, after this started happening, we all started reading The Midnite Shopper at the office. Those ads are pretty straight out. They’re all about sex. Well, this guy, Remarque — he’s Canadian — he circled one of the ads, and put it on her desk with a note on the office memo paper — a memo right? He says, Dear Louise, why don’t you answer this ad?”

“So did she?”

“Fuck no. He answered it for her.”

“Yeah? Jesus.”

“But not exactly, not really — because he was the guy who took out the ad in the first place.”

“What did it say?”

“It said like: ‘I like them bouncy. Soft. Heavy. If you’re a female between thirty-five and forty, over 150 pounds, brown hair, reply to Box So-and-so.’ She fit the description — she’s over one-fifty for sure. In fact, I’d say she’s more like over two hundred pounds.”

“Two hundred?” Ralph’s companion said.

“Over two hundred. Anyway, Remarque, he just answered her like he would’ve if she had answered his ad. He writes her this long letter, saying he admired the photo she sent him, let’s get away for a weekend in two weeks, please phone me at this number — it’s the guy’s work number. I mean, the phone is right on the desk next to hers. This guy really made a geek out of himself.”

Madeline, coming to the table with drinks, had been overhearing them. “He made it pretty obvious,” she said, “using his office phone number and everything.”

“Sure,” Elvis said. “But it was even more obvious than that. It didn’t start there, with the advertisement. It was like an ongoing thing. First of all, before any of this other jazz, he was always making remarks to her. Real quiet, so nobody could hear. But you could stand across the room and get the idea just by looking at how close he was standing. He’d be trembling. You could see it. I mean, he was overboard. He kept changing his image. First he started — he wore these like checkered, sort of plaid pants, really loud clothing for an office. And he’d look down at his pants every so often, and then he’d look over to see if she was noticing his new look. The whole office, we just observed this stuff as it was happening, day after day. I mean, it was all that was happening. He dyed his hair three or four times, different colors. That’s not an exaggeration. He wore a wig one time, too, like a Beatles haircut. I wonder what his wife must’ve thought …”

Elvis paused. He pinched the last quarter inch of his cigarette tightly, and sucked on it so hard it squeaked.

Ralph, meanwhile, turned his drink around and around on the table, as if the other side of it was going to show him something different.

They waited for the rest.

According to Elvis, what happened was that the woman, Louise, showed the letter to two or three of her girl friends in the department. The letter wasn’t signed, but they all had a fair idea who’d sent it, and within days it was being quoted, and even photocopied and sent, all around the company. On the advice of her friends, Louise sent the original to the personnel office, who forwarded it to people even higher up and more central in the corporation.

In a couple of weeks, a team of investigators came through the office doors. They were three men. In front of everyone they walked straight over to the Canadian’s desk and showed him the letter.

“We need your assistance in this matter,” one of them said.

“All right,” he said.

“Did you write this letter?”

The man refused to speak. He looked over at Louise, who was sitting as usual at the desk right next to his.

“Is this your letter? Did you send this?” another asked him.

He said, “Why don’t you just have Louise ask me?”

“Because,” the investigator said, “we’re the ones asking you.”

“Maybe Louise should ask me,” the man said. He put his hands together on the desk and stared down at them. “His face,” according to Elvis, “was as red as blood.”

“It’s a simple matter to trace this letter,” the investigator said. “You can make things easy by telling us you wrote it, if in fact you did.”

The man, his face red as blood, wouldn’t look anywhere but at his hands gripping each other before him on his desk.

“Tell Louise to ask me,” he suggested.

All the investigators looked at Louise. Everyone else in the place did, too.

She was wiping at her eyes and sniffling. She finally said to him, “Well?”

Silence.

She said, “Did you write this letter to me?”

He said, “Yes. I did.”

Nobody in the office said a word.

And here in the Alaska Bar they were also silent. From the one narrow window the daylight was draining away. Jerry’s Diner was open, its red electric sign applying to the evergreens a taint so subtle, so tantalizing, that English ached to drink it.

Elvis drained his double and chewed up an ice cube, saying, “So — he’s losing his job. Lost it already. He cleaned out his desk yesterday, and it was just sitting there empty all day today.

“And the thing is that it was just crazy! It was absurd! I mean, this woman is kind of a … pig —I’m sorry, but I have to say it. She’s fat, she’s married, she’s homely as hell. There’s nothing there. He wrecked his whole career, probably completely shredded his marriage. And she’s just, I mean this woman is just …” He lifted his hands helplessly. Words wouldn’t come.