Jim Gavin - Middle Men - Stories

In the email he sent last night, or early this morning, he told her he would be in the city tonight, ready to show her the prototype. He encouraged her, only half joking, to bring along some of her venture capital friends. The Man Handle, he explained, would appeal to the very men who had the power to invest in it. Indeed, it was a tool that no depraved capitalist could do without. He sketched out his business plan, which had evolved over the last few days from a few bullet points of satirical bombast to something that actually seemed plausible and real, and then he took some time to tell her how things had been going for him, personally, since they last spoke that night in the cab. In June, the house flipper had disappeared, without paying Bobby for his last month of work. After that he answered a Craigslist ad—“$$$$ Sales Pros Needed $$$$”—and got hired to sell ad space for an East Bay newspaper conglomerate. It was horrible and he discovered, once again, how much he hated sales. At some point he stopped going to work and by now he was pretty sure they had fired him. He was broke and the walls were closing in, but in this moment of darkness, he had found inspiration. Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man Handle: the thing pretty much marketed itself. However, his sudden lack of income and increase in free time was causing friction with his latest batch of roommates. The guy farthest down the hall, a programmer from Lahore, had caught Bobby using his laptop a few times, and Bobby knew that it was only a matter of time before the guy slit his throat with a bejeweled dagger. Looking back, it was a pretty macabre email and it worried Bobby that her response was so short. Nora usually wrote back in a tone and style that was as equally paranoid and macabre, but this time she just said that if he was around, she could meet him for a drink in the city at eight o’clock, and she named her favorite Irish pub. Even worse, she had signed her name without the usual “love” or “cheers” above it.

As he left the library, the alarm went off. A security guard asked to see his duffel bag. Bobby complied and watched the guard remove a book.

“I forgot to check it out,” Bobby admitted.

The guard then pulled out a twelve-inch length of brass pipe that had been wrapped in black grip tape, the kind that went on skateboards.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“It’s a prototype.”

“Of what?”

“The dumbest thing ever invented.”

Bobby grabbed the bag from the guard and brought his book to the front desk.

“Please get in line,” said the young librarian, a cute and supremely archetypal librarian — shy, bespeckled, and wearing a green cardigan, the kind Nora used to model. Bobby had wanted to talk to this librarian for the last couple weeks, but it seemed that whenever he had a book to check out, the desk was occupied by some miserable crone who would give him grief about his fines. Now, with a clear-cut opportunity, Bobby felt suddenly embarrassed by his appearance; he wished he had shaved, but all of his roommates’ razor blades were dull.

The librarian stood a few feet back from the desk.

“This will only take a minute,” said Bobby, putting his book on the counter.

“You can’t check out reference books,” said the librarian.

“Just me, or everybody?”

“Everybody.”

“I’m joking!” Bobby handed her the book. “What’s your name?”

“Catherine.”

“I’m Bobby.”

She nodded, and Bobby felt good when he got outside. He finally knew her name, at least. In the distance he could hear the final movement of the carillon. Before he got on his bike, he turned back to the library, a block of dusty green marble reposing in the milky afternoon light. It looked like the palace of a Babylonian king.

• • •

Earlier that morning, on her flight back from Los Angeles, Nora examined a laminated safety card that depicted plucky cartoon figures surviving a series of airborne catastrophes. Whenever she got on a plane, some part of her hoped for a crash landing. She was interested in her own reaction to mortal danger — would she act stoically or just shit herself? — but more than anything she thought about how fun it would be, afterward, going down one of those big yellow inflatable slides.

They were somewhere over the central coast. She could see brown hills, the ruffle of breaking waves. A few clouds dotted the sky, but otherwise it would be a pure blue drop. Members of the Geneva marketing team were spread throughout the cabin, sipping coffee and cooing into the bonnets of their laptops. In the next seat, Nora’s assistant Jill scrolled through her iPod. Nora ordered a gin and tonic and when the drink came she asked the stewardess if she ever had the chance to go down the rescue slide.

“No,” whispered the stewardess, a cheerful older woman with gorgeous silver hair. “And I hope I never do.”

Then she patted Nora on the shoulder and, feeling her touch, the touch of a stranger, Nora almost melted with gratitude. She wanted to follow the stewardess down the aisle and sit with her on the jump seats. She wanted to ask for a job application.

This year’s CTI Media B2B Software Development Conference & Expo had been, as Nora had feared, a brutal dry hump. Geneva had dropped ten grand for their booth, five grand for collateral inserts in the official conference backpacks, fifteen grand to have the Geneva logo placed on water coolers and cups spread throughout the exhibit hall, and twenty-five grand to sponsor a luncheon that featured, as entertainment, a sullen stand-up performance by a former cast member of Saturday Night Live . The carpet-bombing strategy had come down from Dave Grant, and with another staff restructuring on the way, Nora had asked him how he could justify this kind of spending. Dave felt confident that the risk would pay off, not so much in the short term, for staff, but down the road, for the company. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but that’s the reality of the situation.” He showed some discretion, however, by staying in San Francisco and sending Nora to Los Angeles to handle the conference. That way, when she came back with a meager list of new prospects to hand over to sales, her name would be tarnished, not his. It was a suicide mission. Nora, who had always taken great comfort in the endless sorrow of Irish history, thought of De Valera sending Michael Collins to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

For three days the pipe-and-curtain corridors were empty; the only people she really talked to were other software exhibitors. The asset managers and hedge fund reps who did show up to sample the goods were greeted as liberators; they nodded their heads, shook hands, exchanged cards, and left each booth laden with spoil. Yesterday was especially bleak and after packing up their booth the Geneva marketing team ran up a huge tab at a trendy tapas bar. Nora considered tapas a scam, so she left early and walked by herself through the barren maze of downtown Los Angeles. Part of her was hoping to get mugged — a major trauma would simplify everything. Her responsibilities, though dreary and minor, were all-consuming, and a nonfatal stab wound seemed like just the thing to get people off her back for a while. She hailed a cab and instructed the driver to take her to the nearest Del Taco, which was the only thing she missed about SoCal. At the Bonaventure Hotel she ate her No. 6 combo in a concrete alcove above the main lobby and then spent an hour riding the glass elevators, feeling more relaxed than she had all week. Later, curled happily in bed, with a full stomach, she turned off her BlackBerry and finished rereading O’Flaherty’s Famine .

“Are you okay?” Jill asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re just staring out the window.”

“I can see the ocean.”