Chang-Rae Lee - Aloft

"Sal is harmless," I say. "But have a talk with him anyway"

"What talk do you want, there, Jer?"

"Hey, Sally."

It's Salvatore Mondello, just arriving to work. He's dressed as usual in his low-rent white-collar style: short-sleeve dress shirt, too-short stubby tie, trim-fit gabardine slacks, worn cordovan wing tips. He's one of those handsome lanky Northern Italian types who age magnificently. His skin has a clean-scrubbed light olive glow, his hair still thick and full and streaked with enough dark strands that it appears spun straight from silver, If he had been a slightly different man he could have enjoyed a long career as one of those duty-free international playboys jetting from the Cote d'Azur to Palm Beach with a wealthy mis-tress waiting desperately in each hotel suite for him to blindfold her with his silk ascot, fragrant of musk and Dunhill 100s, and do things to her with his tongue and lubed pinky finger that her inattentive jerk husband long gave up doing.

But fortunately or unfortunately Sal is not a slightly different man, and while he is plenty smart and has let his dick lead him through life like a lot of the rest of us, I would say he did so without a companion ambition for fame or money, and so is who he is, which is basically an old local stud who worked just hard enough to pay the rent and take out fresh pussy every Friday and Saturday night. This until maybe eight or ten years ago, when I think the high mileage on his purportedly horse-sized rig (this from one of the mechanics, who early on in Battle Brothers history caught him jerking off in the john and described Sal's action "like he was buffin' a toy baseball bat") finally caught up to him and broke down, relegating him to a retirement of titty bars and dirty Web chats and twice-a-year Caribbean cruises on a popular line on which he travels free for serving as a nightly dance partner for singles and widows, though with this new hard-on wonder drug they've invented, Sal might soon fly the flag high once again.

"What, Jer, they fire you over there at the agency?"

"Not yet. I'm just saying hello today."

"Hey there, Maya."

"Morning, Sal," she answers him, without a hint of umbrage. Though not with great warmth, either. "I gotta get to work."

"You do that, honey," Sal says. When she's back out front he says, "If I could just be sixty again."

"Yeah? What would you do?" I say, remembering as I do almost daily now that I'll be that very age in a matter of nothing, just when the world tips on its axis and our propitiously temperate part of it starts to die out again, wreathe itself in the dusty colors of mortality.

"Are you kidding? Me and that amazing piece of ass would be balling all day like those horny monkeys on the nature program. What do they call them, bonobos? Those monkeys just screw each other all day, and they'll even get into some dyke and fag action when nobody's looking."

"No kidding?"

"Saw it just last night. The girl monkeys, you know, with the bright red catcher's mitt twats, will squat back to back, rubbing themselves on each other. The boys will hang upside down and play swords with their skinny units. These monkeys are different than other ones who would rather fight viciously than fuck. I guess we're supposed to be more like the fighting monkeys."

"I guess you're a bonobo, huh, Sally?"

"You got that right. What about you?"

"Probably neither," I say, thinking that there must be a third kind of monkey, only slightly more advanced, who sits high up in the trees and collects his fruit pits, indolently rioting how much he's eaten.

"How's Rita treating you?"

"You don't know?"

"Oh, Christ, Jer, don't tell me something's happened to her."

"No, no, nothing like that. She just left me. Almost a year ago, I guess."

"Oh. That's even worse. It means she's with someone else."

"Yeah."

"Do I know the guy?"

"Richie Coniglio. From the neighborhood. Hairy little guy."

"That pipsqueak? What's he do now?"

"He's a fancy-pants lawyer. Richer than God. He lives over in Muttontown."

"I guess we all knew that little wiseass was headed for loads of dough. But he has to end up with your girl, too?"

"I know. It's not good."

"And when that girl is somebody like Rita. Christ. I've always liked Puerto Rican chicks because they're like black chicks who aren't black, if you know what I mean. But when you started up with Rita I was especially jealous. She's a sweet lady and a great cook and then she's got those big chocolate eyes and the nice skin and that gorgeous shapely round. ."

"Hey, hey, Sally. It's still pretty fresh, okay?"

"Sorry, Jer. I'm just telling you how good you had it with her.

Did you fuck things up or did she just get sick of you?"

"Both, I think."

"Probably you weren't giving her enough head. These days women expect it."

"You're probably right," I tell him, reminded now why over all these years Sal and I never got to be closer, despite the fact that I've always liked him well enough and even looked up to him like the older brother I sometimes wished I'd had. Sal has a way of making you agree with him not because he's a bully but because you don't really want to get into the full squalid array of details necessary to complete a typical conversation with him. I'd like to add here, too, that Rita didn't expect anything in the labial way, and while she clearly liked it plenty whenever I did do my oral duties, she was generally of the mind that men shouldn't get so right up close to a woman's petaled delicates, if they were to remain in the least secret and alluring and mysterious.

Or so she told me.

Sal adds, too: "Seems like these young ones like Maya up there don't even care for old-fashioned penetration anymore.

They'd all just rather be lesbians, if they had it their way. If you don't believe me it's on the Internet."

"Whatever. But if you can do me a favor, Sally, just keep it in your pants here at the office."

"What," he says, looking up front. "Has there been a complaint?"

"No, no, nobody's said nothing. But you hear about what's going on these days with sexual harassment. Jack doesn't need anybody suing the company because the work environment is, you know, whatever they call it, 'predatory.' "

"Hey, I'm not the one wearing suggestive T-shirts."

"I'm just saying, Sal, let's keep it professional around here, okay? Keep the shop going like it is."

"No problem with me, Jer," he says. "It's Jack you should worry about."

"What? He's fucking around?"

"I wouldn't know about that," Sal says. "I just think he's running Battle Brothers into the ground."

"What are you talking about? It seems like we've got more work than we can handle. Seems like the trucks are always all out."

"Sure they are. We're doing nice business, just like we have the last five years. But that's the old work. The dirt work. We get decent margins there, but nothing fantastic. You know that."

"Sure,"

"The new stuff is what's the problem. See all those new workstations and plotters?" he says, pointing to the six custom maple-wood desks with large flat-panel computer monitors and a huge plotter for making large-format prints. "That's Jack's design operation. He and Eunice spent top dollar on that equipment and software, almost seventy grand. We could probably design fighter jets on those things. But we've only been using one of the terminals, and half-time at that. The high-end construction and renovation work is out there, but we're not getting it. People know us as landscapers and stonemasons, not kitchen and bathroom designers. Jack's idea that he could become this supercontractor for the whole tristate region is an interesting idea, but he's spending all his hours driving to Cheesedick, Connecticut, to do an estimate and getting squat. I think he's finally landed a couple jobs, but I think he had to lowball to get them, and after looking at the bids I won't be surprised if we lose twenty-five or fifty grand on each. And do you know how much this new office and showroom wing is costing us? Five hundred grand, and counting."