Jim Gavin - Middle Men - Stories

“If you’re bored,” she said, offering her iPod, “I have some NPR podcasts.”

“I’m not a Bolshevik.”

Jill laughed mechanically, and reinserted her earbuds. She had no time for the curdled sarcasm of her elders; whenever she laughed, it seemed like a calculated decision. A year removed from Stanford undergrad, Jill embodied the kind of blond forthright striving that Nora associated with Viking oarsmen. Her mind was keen and adaptive, streamlining every new project with speed and precision, but Nora had never quite trusted her assistant. She sensed that the girl had no experience with failure, at least not professionally. Nora amused herself with visions of what would happen after the next restructuring. Jill weeping at her desk; Jill throwing herself off the roof; Jill running amok with a shotgun. But these were only fantasies; in the end Jill would use her severance to travel through Asia or South America and then she would write about her experience in her business school application.

The plane landed safely and Nora and Jill got in a cab together. As they swerved onto the 101, Jill called her mom. She talked loudly and without embarrassment. Nora could never get over this — it was as if Jill and her mom were friends. Nora felt obliged, finally, to turn on her BlackBerry. It was only ten o’clock and she already had six emails from Dave Grant. There was a meeting at three o’clock in the “Golden Gate Room,” which was actually just Conference Room B. Two years ago, when Dave became Executive Vice President and General Manager of Global Accounts, he renamed all the conference rooms after local landmarks. So far this was his greatest legacy.

She scrolled down farther and saw another message from Bobby. She hadn’t responded to anything he had written in the past week, even though she had been relieved to hear from him. He had a “business” idea, apparently, but she couldn’t tell if it was a joke or not, which gave her a sinking feeling that she didn’t want to deal with in the middle of the conference. Now, opening his latest message, the sinking feeling came back. The first paragraph didn’t seem to end. She kept scrolling, and the paragraph went on for another three or four pages. Entire sections were set off in parentheses and she saw a distressing number of exclamation points. She went back to the top of the email and saw that he had sent it at four o’clock in the morning.

Bobby wasn’t sleeping again.

They drove past Candlestick Park and through the gloomy hills of South San Francisco. The peninsula was shrouded in fog, but across the bay Nora could see the bright green hills of Berkeley and Oakland. He was somewhere over there, marauding in sunlight. She wrote back quickly, telling him she could meet for a drink. She would have to collect him. Get him drunk in a friendly atmosphere and then bring him back to her place and slip him a valium. It had worked before. Then she would call his mom, who was now remarried to a blackjack dealer and living in a trailer outside of Las Vegas. She would be very worried but in the end offer no real help. Nora’s parents had always been there to bail out Bobby’s parents — Bobby’s father, an independent contractor, was a better plumber than businessman — and this arrangement had been passed down to the next generation. Six years ago, when Nora announced that she got her dream job in San Francisco, everyone on both sides of the family, instead of congratulating her, said with great relief, “You’ll be near Bobby!” So now she would collect him, again, and then he would end up sleeping on her Pottery Barn couch for a month or two, eating all her food and generously offering to move in full-time, to help her out. The worst part was this: they would have a great time together, staying up late, watching crap on TV, and she would miss him when he was gone.

• • •

With a few hours to kill, Bobby decided to have a swim at the Claremont, a luxury hotel and country club in the Oakland hills. He rode his bike through campus and down Telegraph Avenue. He saw people on the sidewalk selling tie-dyed shirts, and he smelled vomit wafting down from People’s Park. As a rule, he believed in the extermination of hippies, but here he was, ten years later, still hanging around Berkeley. After he flunked out of school, Bobby thought he would return to SoCal, but his mom wasn’t there anymore, and neither were any of his high school friends. He kept trying to leave Berkeley, but then he would find a job or a new girlfriend. He paid cheap rent in the flats and he stayed in good shape riding his bike everywhere. Nora, on one of her rare visits to the East Bay, told him that he might as well learn how to play the sitar.

By the time he got across town and up the hill, he was soaked in sweat. He locked up his bike and took a path that led to the back of the hotel. Three years ago he got a job at the Claremont’s poolside café. During his orientation, as he sat between two Senagalese nationals, the hotel’s operations manager said that if anyone took more than fifteen minutes for their break, they were stealing from the hotel. Bobby actually liked the job. He walked around the pool all day, delivering gourmet sandwiches to hotel guests and club members. The sprawling patio offered panoramic views of the East Bay and on clear days you could see the Golden Gate Bridge. For a while he dated another server, who had just graduated from high school. One afternoon she stole a passkey from a maid and they fucked for fifteen minutes in the tower suite. In the fall, she left for college, and shortly after, Bobby got fired for stealing avocados from the kitchen.

Café employees used to take their smoke breaks on a balcony overlooking the tennis courts, but members complained and so management set aside a designated smoking area behind the hotel, next to the dumpsters. This was where Bobby found a high school kid in a café uniform. He asked him to get Salif, who, after three years, was still working as a cashier. “Tell him Bobby’s here,” he said. “We’re old friends.”

A few minutes later Salif arrived. He was fifty years old, tall and spindly, with yellow teeth and gray hair. Bobby once asked him what he did in Senegal before coming to the United States, and Salif told him that he had worked in a hotel.

“This is the last time,” said Salif.

Bobby laughed. “You always say that.”

At the pool gate, Salif told the guard that Bobby was a hotel guest who had lost his key card. They walked in together and Bobby threw himself on a lounge chair.

“I want an eggplant sandwich,” he said, “and a glass of Chardonnay.”

“Fuck you,” said Salif in his sharp French accent.

It was warm and sunny, but across the bay Bobby could see fog rolling over the city. The guy in the next lounge chair was snoring. All around him women shuffled around in white robes, on their way to spa treatments. Bobby once bought Nora a treatment for her birthday — he got an employee discount — but when she came she ended up getting drunk in the hotel bar and never made it to her massage.

Bobby jumped into the water and for a long time he did an easy breast stroke, so he wouldn’t splash anybody. He lost track of his laps. At some point, a bunch of kids dragged him into an epic game of Marco Polo. Volunteering to be all time “it,” Bobby torpedoed through the crystal blue depths, hearing muffled screams on the surface. Every time he popped out of the water, he shouted, “Marco,” as loud as he could. He could hear his voice echoing across the patio. The kids loved it and answered in kind. All his victims sat along the side of the pool, cheering on the last two kids in the water. Bobby trapped one of them in a corner, and then heard footsteps on the pavement. “Fish out of water!” he yelled, right before he heard a thud and a collective gasp. Opening his eyes, he saw a boy crying and holding his head. A few moms in white robes ran to him, and started calling for hotel staff. Bobby ducked underwater and swam to the other side of the pool. He grabbed his bag and left without drying off.