The Kissing List (7 page)

O
n Monday, Vita wears a khaki-colored wool suit (Jones New York, $90) with a double-breasted jacket that has linebacker-size shoulder pads and a straight skirt that rides dangerously low on her nonexistent hips. Her roommate, Mel, comes out of her room in a sheer floral nightie that Vita covets. Vita envies almost everything about Mel, including her blunt-cut pageboy, her entire wardrobe, and her skill at flirting. Mel is as good at picking up guys as Vita is at getting job interviews. The only thing that Mel has that Vita doesn’t want is a big rack.

Breasts are spiritually heavy, Vita thinks; they are for grown women, and she is just twenty-three with a top-notch degree from a fancy school and a few awards.

“Lose the shoulder pads.” Mel has a real job and doesn’t have to be at work until ten.

“I can’t. They’re sewn in,” Vita says helplessly.

“Then cut them out.”

“I don’t think they’re that bad.”

“Oy,” Mel says, disappearing into the bathroom. “You look like …” The toilet muffles the rest of what is likely a snarky remark. But Vita doesn’t care—this is a good uniform for investment banks and hedge funds, where she has been temping for the past couple weeks. At places of high-stakes finance, it is useful to pretend to be as harmless as a librarian or a houseplant. It is also helpful to be a quick study of complicated phone systems and difficult, nearly unpronounceable names: Wojciechowski, Desmerais, Fuchs, Inoue. The men at investment places are mostly nice, if not a little dull, but they can’t be blamed, since they spend sixteen hours a day tinkering with spreadsheets to assess the value of intangible things or converting dollars to pesos to francs to yen in such a way as to generate small percentages of profit on big piles of money.

She has learned that Kronenbourg is a beer, and the dinar was the currency of Yugoslavia. Also: bankers entertain themselves by making bets on the usual manly pastimes like football and basketball, and then on wildly stupid things like whether someone can drink a whole water cooler in a single day or eat a
stick of butter in under an hour. (The answer is no. She discovered a half-gnawed cube in the break room refrigerator. Teeth marks on butter are like hair in salads. Surprisingly disgusting.) Any glimmer of interest that Vita had in investment banking has been swept into a dustpan. It’s a locker room of nerds ruled by real loud assholes and human calculators, and let’s face it, Vita earned a middle-of-the-road B in intro econ.

A guy—not her boss; her boss is a married man with curly red hair—flings a copy of the
WSJ
across her desk while she is organizing receipts for an expense report. Tiny slips of paper whirl to the floor, not that the guy notices.

“Look, my deal made the front page of the second section,” he booms.

“That’s cool, Ted.” She knows his name because he is one of the few men with whom she has personal exchanges. She feels shy around him because she finds his tiny German-style glasses a little sexy, and unlike all the other guys in their dry-cleaned and cuffed Dockers, starched white shirts, and razor-cut helmet hair, he wears fancy jeans. “How was your weekend?”

He sighs and fiddles with his gold-plated fountain pen. This is what they all do when asked about their weekends, which, as a rule, are nothing more than a continuation of the week. Confronted with this question while they’re sitting at their desks, they take sudden interest in their collections of Star Wars figures and water pistols.

“You’re not missing much,” she offers. “Ebert says this is the worst year for movies.”

V
ita mostly likes temping. It’s like being in the witness protection program. Every week, and sometimes every day, brings a new placement where no one knows her, where no one knows that she graduated summa and won a slew of awards from the history department, and no one is disappointed in her decision not to go to graduate school. It’s a good way to test her mettle, to find out who she is apart from what she has accomplished, and whether people will like her for what she can learn on the fly and not what she has the potential to be. She has been a file clerk, a secretary, an admin assistant to the head of marketing at New York Road Runners; a receptionist at a private equities firm where they have Picassos and Mirós and carpet so plush you can’t hear yourself walk; an assistant’s assistant (talk about power); and a nerve soother and doer of simple calculations in the employee stock purchase plan at a company preparing to merge with another. (“The basic idea is your one share of X will become one-half of Y,” she tells person after person, and most respond with some variation of
Oh my God! You’re a genius!
, which is both alarmingly flattering and simply alarming.)

The only problem with temping is that Vita is a terrible typist. At Kelly Girl, the first temp agency where she tried out, she did so poorly on the typing test, they told her she wasn’t qualified for secretarial stints. “But there’s always a demand for good receptionists,” the job specialist explained before handing her a banana. “Pretend you’re answering a call.”

“Now do you regret not taking typing back in high school?” her mother chided during her weekly parental check-in. “Everyone
should be able to fall back on typing when they decide to waste their college education.” She could hear her father chuckling in the background.

The other problem with temping is not with temping per se but with work itself. School taught her the world was full of possibility, revelations, complexity in more shades of gray and gray black and white gray than you could imagine. Freud estranged her from herself, Marx made her feel like a tool (especially at her fancy, class-perpetuating school), and the postmodernists took a mallet to language. A sentence of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, the subject of her senior thesis, could be read a multitude of ways. Was Rowlandson happy among the Indians who dragged her from her home, her teapots, and her children? Did she secretly want to sleep with them? Or did she find their way of life savage, their worship of many gods not only confusing but the work of the devil? Almost ditto for Vita, except her captors are client-relationship supervisors and risk managers and strategizers (the best of them product-agnostic!). The problem with temping is that Vita may wind up with no people at all: if not history, then what? If not the “real” world, then the “realer” one? The analogy explodes bit by bit.

W
hat do people do? That’s what Vita wonders at 9 a.m. on Wednesday at a midsize midtown company that specializes in consolidation while she shadows the temp supervisor (not a temporary herself) through a maze of workstations. She is wearing a coral-colored pencil skirt (a hand-me-down from generous Anna) and a short-sleeved black sweater with pearl
buttons. The skirt’s matching jacket hangs in her closet gathering dust because it’s too much color for New York.

“I coordinate our temporary needs,” the temp supervisor explains as Vita nods enthusiastically. “You can’t imagine how many temps we use, not that we have high rates of absenteeism, but with vacations and special projects and our generous family leave policy, we use temps all the time.”

The office is a stormy sea of grays and blacks.

“Right now, in fact, we’re in the middle of a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether it would be more cost-effective to create our own permanent in-house temp pool.” The woman smiles. “This is you,” she says, gesturing to a desk separated by a low gray partition from a glassed-in corner office with closed venetian blinds that suggest deep REM. “I’m not sure what time Dom usually comes in, but I’m right over there.” She gestures to a cubicle with a well-tended fern balancing at an intersection of partitions. The fern looks real, but Vita can’t be sure. “You brought a book, didn’t you? If I were a temp, I’d read all the time.”

“Yeah, I mean yes,” Vita says. Lately she has been trying to weed casual speak out of her corporate vocabulary. “I have a book on business.”

The woman brightens. “That’s terrific. We have so many temps who aren’t really interested in what we do.”

What do you do? Vita wants to ask but doesn’t for fear of being disappointed.

“I think they’re all aspiring actors and artists who temp because, you know, those are hard businesses to break into.”
The temp supervisor, whose name Vita has already forgotten, gives her head a sad little shake. “Anyway, Dom may have an external meeting for all I know. Let’s see … Maybe June, his permanent girl, left you something.” She scans the desk, but it’s as clean as freshly poured concrete. “I don’t suppose so, since she’s out with the flu. Well, in any case, make yourself comfortable.”

While waiting for her boss, a VP in HR, she pretends to read
Built to Last
, a book on best business practices that Ted told her
will make you see what it’s all about
. In fact, she has simply removed the jacket wrapper from the business book and put it on a novel about emancipated slaves who are themselves slaveholders. It is a fascinating read because the author presents research (census records, quotes from expert historians, journal entries, and so on) that he admits to fabricating. Vita looks up from a description of the slave quarters and watches people move purposefully back and forth from hallway to office, from break room to elevator bank, their expressions urgent. Consolidation? Shrinking? Human resources? Hiring and firing? A man in a three-piece suit saunters toward her cubicle, his unhurried pace making him look distinguished. Straightening, Vita hides her book in her lap.

“Hi?” she says.

“I’m Dom,” he replies. “And you’re?”

“Oh, I’m Vita. I’m your temp.”

“Hi, Vita.” He extends his hand. His palm is pleasingly soft, his grip reasonable. “Let me get myself settled, Vita, and then we’ll see what there is for you to do.”

Through the blinds, Vita can see the outline of Dom sitting at his desk. He is very still. After a bit, she knocks on his closed door. “Coffee?” she calls out.

“Come in,” he says.

She has caught Dom in midthought, a red pencil hovering over a yellow legal pad. Otherwise his desk is as blank as the front of an obsessive-compulsive’s refrigerator. “Do you need anything?”

“I need everything,” he says, “but some coffee will do. And you can type up these.”

At noon, Dom emerges from his office, an umbrella in one hand, an overcoat in the other. “I’ve got a lunch meeting until two. Can you hold down the fort?” He hands her a sheaf of papers. “If you’re not too busy, maybe photocopy these for me?” He taps the umbrella on the floor three times. “Until soon, Vita. Until soon.”

The hours unfold slowly. She photocopies the stuff Dom left behind—sheaves of country western music: “Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goalposts of Life”; “More Than a Memory”; “Size Matters”; “When the Stars Go Blue.” She sharpens all the pencils in his “Country Western Rules” mug. She entertains the idea of raising his blinds and washing his windows, but she supposes this is someone else’s job. She calls Anna. It’s funny that she’s in touch with Anna but not Sylvie, especially since there was a time when she vowed never to consort with Anna again. But Anna has turned out to be a home away from home: a purveyor of big, crunchy salads,
mostly nonjudgmental job advice, tips on sample sales and dry cleaning and air conditioners.

“Hey,” Vita says. “I’m so bored.”

“Who’s this?” Anna asks.

“Ha, ha,” she says.

“Today’s spy mission?” Anna asks.

“Gray cubicleland.”

“Duh. I mean, what company?”

“Shrink and Slash.”

Anna laughs. “It’s called work for the same reason blow jobs are called blow jobs. They blow. Just get used to it.”

“Ugh,” Vita says. “You’re so inspiring. Not.”

“Oh, Vi,” Anna says, “get on with it already.”

When Dom comes back, she hands him the stack of photocopies. Each song (including the original) is paper clipped and organized alphabetically by title.

“You’re a good worker, Vita,” he says.

She doesn’t know whether to wilt or blossom.

T
hat night, Vita is reorganizing her closet when her phone rings.

“Vita?” a male voice asks.

She wonders whether it’s Eric, a guy from college whom she recently bumped into at the gym. They weren’t friends before, but now the fact that they’re alumni of the same school and living in the same twelve-block radius seems like reason enough to buddy.

“Hello,” she says.

“It’s Ted.”

“Ted?” she says while thinking,
Ted!
“How did you get my number?”

“One of the girls in HR sold it to me.”

“What?” she squeals. She’s pretty sure it’s against company policy to give out private information.

“Just joking. We’re friends, and Deborah, that’s her name, knows that I’m …” he trails off. “Anyway, I’m doing a really big deal.”

“That’s really super,” she says. “Are you still at work?”

“Yep, but I think it might make the front section of the
Journal
.”

“Wow,” she says. “Yay!”

There’s silence, then they both start to speak at once.

“What?” she says.

“Never mind,” Ted says. “I should get back to work.”

“Well, don’t work too late.” This sounds like something her mother would say. “Ted?”

“Yes?” he asks.

“Um, well, good-bye.”

“Good night, Vita.”

T
he following Tuesday, Vita has a job interview with a trade publication that puts out newsletters with titles like “The Secondary Loan Market” and “Derivatives Today.” She is still working for Dom, though to call it work is a stretch. He occasionally waves her into his office to take dictation.

“Let’s see.” He moves around to a second chair on her side of the desk. He steeples his hands. His fingernails are lovely ovals. “Pursuant to the employee policy manual updated and revised September 1, 2008, performance reviews shall be executed …”

She appreciates that he’s aware of the power dynamic involved in keeping the desk between them. Professors who barricaded themselves behind their navy blue book-towered desks used to irk her. Since she doesn’t know shorthand, she abbreviates:
Purs. Emp man updtd & rvsd …
“Can you please repeat the date?”