Marcelo in the Real World Read online

  “Where is Jasmine?”

  I like those kinds of questions. “She went to the post office.”

  “Shit!”

  This is an unexpected response. Then I see a small stack of documents on the counter and I understand that she needs Jasmine to do something for her. I catch her looking at the big, white clock that hangs above my desk.

  “I told her I was bringing her some documents that needed to be bound before eleven.”

  I know about binding documents because Jasmine pointed out the machine in the back that is used for the task, but Jasmine has not yet taught me how to use it. “She will be back by ten.” I turn around to look at the clock. It is nine-thirty.

  “Harvey needs these for a Board of Directors meeting that we’re having here at eleven.”

  I look at the documents that she has placed on the counter. “There are only six documents there,” I say.

  “I need ten copies of each, and each one of them has to be tabbed and bound.” She is not looking at me. She is writing on one of the request slips on the counter. She presses so hard on the slip as she writes that the slip tears. “Shit! Tell me this is not happening to me.”

  I don’t think she is asking me to tell her this. I don’t know what “tabbed” means and I don’t know how to bind, but I can make copies, so I say, “I can make the copies. I can start.”

  She looks at me. “Aren’t you supposed to be re…I mean, slow or something?”

  How can I answer that? I know in this case what follows after she stopped: “retarded.” So Beth somehow expected me to be retarded or slow or something, and I said something or offered to do something that deviated from that expectation. But where did she get the expectation that I was retarded? Who put it there in the first place?

  “Hey, are you there?” She is snapping her fingers at me. “I guess if you work here it means you can do the work, right?”

  I don’t respond. But I don’t think that the conclusion to her assumption is necessarily correct.

  “You see these yellow stickies? These are the places where the tabs are going to go. You need to take them off the documents when you make the copies, but then you need to put them back on so you can place the tabs.”

  “What are tabs?”

  She looks at the clock on the wall. There is a grimace on her face. I have seen kids at Paterson make that grimace seconds before they break down in tears of anger and frustration. “I really don’t have time for this. Here’s the request slip. I got it here in time for it to get done on time. If the firm can’t hire decent support…Harvey is going to have to deal with it. I did my part.” All the time she says this, her hands are in the air moving about. I wonder how it is possible for her to feel what she appears to be feeling over a simple task like copying and binding.

  At ten Jasmine arrives. She is carrying a plastic bag, which she places on her desk. She comes over and looks at the six stacks of documents that I have made: Ten copies of each of the documents that Beth left with me. I can tell she is wondering what I am doing.

  “Beth,” I say. I hand her the torn request slip. “They need to be tabbed and bound. There is a meeting at eleven. She was very upset that you were not here.”

  Jasmine nods. Unlike many of the other people who work at the firm, Jasmine is always calm. Even when she is angry, like at Juliet for example, you can tell that the anger does not affect her. The reason I can tell is that her breathing never alters. A person who is truly angry has physical reactions that last for a while, even after the event that caused the anger is gone. “You started with the copying,” she says. She picks up the top copy from the first set. “There is no table of contents. How do we know where to put the tabs?”

  I walk to my desk and show her the six documents that Beth brought with the yellow stickies. Jasmine picks one up. “This is the way she brought them?”

  “Yes. Like that, with yellow stickies to mark where she wanted the tabs.”

  “So you took the stickies out to make the copies and then you stuck the stickies back on Beth’s original. You stuck them on the same page they were before, right?

  I pick up a piece of paper from my desk and show her my list of page numbers where I found the stickies. I don’t have to tell her what they are. I force myself to look carefully at Jasmine’s face and see the smallest of smiles beginning to form. “Okay, let’s get this done so Beth doesn’t have a nervous breakdown.” She says this as if Beth has had nervous breakdowns before.

  We work in silence except for when I read out a page number. Jasmine sticks the tabs in all the copies and then she brings out the binding machine. She shows me how to place the document between two plastic sheets before it is placed in an electric press that makes the holes and binds it. After Jasmine does a few, she stands to one side and waves for me to do it.

  I look at the clock. It is now ten-thirty and Beth needs these at eleven. I know what to do, but I don’t think I can go fast enough to finish fifty-six documents in half an hour. “I am not sure,” I say.

  “About what?”

  “Marcelo is not as fast as Jasmine.”

  “Marcelo is wasting time talking about it while he could be doing it.”

  Then she goes to her desk and puts her headphones on.

  The first document I try comes out wrong. I do not align the plastic covers correctly. I decide to put that one aside and move on to the next one rather than ask Jasmine how to fix it. The second one comes out right, but it takes me three minutes to bind. There are only a few manual movements required, but somehow the knowledge that time is passing is slowing me down. Then I think that perhaps this is the assignment that will send me to Oak Ridge. Wasn’t that the deal? “Each assignment will come with its own rules,” Arturo said. “Your success will depend on your ability to fulfill those rules.”

  I stop. I take a deep breath. I close my eyes. I think, of all things, of shoveling manure at the Paterson stable. I think of the slow movement of the shovel, of filling the wheelbarrow and wheeling it outside where later a truck will come to haul it away. Harry used to say to me that I shoveled manure as if each shovelful was gold, so carefully did I do it. This is the way I need to work now, slow and steady but continuously. What else can I do? Can Marcelo be someone other than Marcelo? When I open my eyes, I see that Jasmine has turned around and is looking at me. I look in her face for worry or for anger that I am not working fast enough, but instead I see her look at me in silence without any reproach.

  At ten fifty-five I see Beth at the counter. She looks first at the documents I have bound, then at me, and then at Jasmine.

  “I don’t believe this,” I hear her say.

  Jasmine removes her headphones but doesn’t stand up. “Did you say something?” she asks Beth.

  “Didn’t I put on the request slip that Harvey had a meeting at eleven and we needed the documents bound by then? He’s about halfway done and people are already here. Harvey needs these to hand out as soon as the meeting starts.”

  “Harvey should have given us the documents with more leeway.”

  “I brought them in at nine-thirty. An hour and a half ago. I don’t care, I have a copy of the request slip to prove it.”

  “You’re going to have a heart attack. Look at you.” Jasmine is seeing what I see. Beth’s face is so red it is beginning to turn purple. Her hands are grasping the counter so hard that her knuckles are a pale white. She is starting to shake.

  “Why aren’t you helping him? If you helped him this would be done by now.” Now Beth is yelling at Jasmine. I go back to the binding. “What is it with you? Do you want him to fail so you can get Belinda? Is that it?”

  I stop to look at Jasmine. I wonder if that is the reason she didn’t help me. Jasmine slowly gets up from her chair and stands in front of Beth.

  “Everyone in the firm is going to hear you yell. Is it really worth it? Harvey’s going to get his documents in half an hour. That’s the same time he would have gotten them if I was working on them. A
nd it’s a one-person job. I can’t help him.” Jasmine walks to the table where I am working and picks up one of the documents that I recently bound. “Look. The binding is perfect. They wouldn’t have come out this good if I had worked on them. I would have rushed the job and there would have been mistakes.”

  There’s a moment when Beth looks as if she suddenly discovered that an audience of people witnessed her outburst.

  “You’ll have to deal with Harvey,” she says. “I did my part. I brought them in on time. I have a copy of the request slip.” She walks away.

  Now Jasmine looks at me and shakes her head. I don’t know what that gesture means. Maybe it means that I shouldn’t believe anything Beth says.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “For what?”

  “You did not tell the truth to Beth. The documents would be bound by now if Jasmine had done them. It took Jasmine thirty seconds to bind a document. The fastest Marcelo could do it without making mistakes was two minutes and twenty-five seconds.”

  “You timed it?”

  “I had to in order to determine my optimum speed.”

  “Your optimum speed.”

  “At Paterson we call it optimum speed. It means finding the best speed to accomplish a task given who you are. Everyone has one.”

  “Unbelievable,” she says. Then, “You better turn on your optimum speed to finish those documents before Harvey comes in here huffing and puffing. You think that Beth was high drama, wait ‘til you see Harvey act out.”

  “The documents will not be done in time for the meeting.”

  “But you knew that already. All you had to do was multiply your optimum speed by the number of documents you still had to do.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t speed up.”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  “It was not possible to meet the deadline without making mistakes.”

  She walks over to me. “Everyone here thinks their deadlines are important. Some are and some aren’t. Nothing will happen, the world will not end, there won’t be any lives or, heaven forbid, money lost if the documents are not there at eleven. The worst that can happen is that Harvey will have to say that the documents will be there in a few minutes. But he won’t say that because the documents will not be discussed or even opened during the meeting. Harvey wants the people at the meeting to take documents when they leave. So the eleven o’clock deadline is all about Harvey looking good. He wants the reports on a table when people come in because he thinks that will impress them.”

  “It is not important to impress people.”

  “It is extremely important!” She shakes her hands as if with fear, but I can tell the shaking is not real. “The meeting breaks up for lunch at noon. We can take the documents then and Harvey will still look good. I’ll go see if I can keep him from having a cow.”

  “It was Marcelo’s fault.”

  She looks down. I thought I was the only one afraid to look people in the eye, but she seems afraid as well. “Listen, there are some real deadlines where people will, maybe not lose their lives, but they’ll lose money if they’re not met. It takes a while to recognize them.”

  “Even if I recognize the deadlines, Marcelo can only work so fast.”

  “What we’ll have to do is divide up the work. You’ll work on the jobs that are not time-sensitive and I’ll do the others.”

  “I am very good at concentrating when I can work at optimum speed.” I try to say this in a way that is funny, but Jasmine does not smile. Then it occurs to me to say, “Belinda would have met the eleven o’clock deadline.” I mean to phrase this as a question, but it ends up being a statement.

  “Yes.”

  Then I see her walk out of the mailroom. She is going to stop Harvey from having a cow.

  CHAPTER 9

  I make more and more progress each day I work at the law firm—progress as defined by Arturo, as in being able to successfully complete the assignments given to me. I can walk the streets if I stick to a memorized route and follow a computer-printed map and if I don’t focus on the words and sounds of the city. Words are everywhere. Words, it seems, cover everything. There are words on buildings and on windows, on cars and on people’s clothes. There are people sitting on the sidewalk holding signs like SOBER AND HOMELESS. If I stop to take in every word I see, I will never get to the courthouse where I go almost every day to file documents.

  It is the same with sounds. It seems that most of my brain needs to be turned off in order to function effectively. Hundreds of people have no problem assimilating different sounds. They walk and talk on cell phones. They dodge cars while having conversations. At first I was surprised at the number of people who walked the streets talking to themselves. Jasmine had to point out to me the tiny microphones dangling in front of their faces.

  Every day during my lunch hour, I walk to a small park in front of the law firm building. I sit there eating my tuna sandwich, a granola bar, and an apple. I observe. Lately I’ve been looking at women, trying not to stare at them, seeing if I can determine whether they are attractive. I suppose that this is the result of the conversations that Wendell and I have been having. Actually, they are not conversations. Wendell lectures and I listen. Almost every day Wendell shares with me his vast learning on the ways of womanhood.

  I am walking to the mailroom after lunch when Wendell grabs me.

  “Just for a few minutes, Marcelo, please. I’m going crazy here reading this crap.”

  “Jasmine is waiting for me to go to the Registry of Deeds,” I say.

  “Think of it as your daily good deed,” he pleads.

  I sit down.

  “Do you know what I spend my time doing?”

  “Reading crap.”

  “Right. I have to go through thirty-five boxes of crap, looking for memos and letters and reports, some of them in Spanish.”

  “Do you speak Spanish?”

  “Sort of. I’ve taken three years of it in school.”

  “I used to pray in Spanish with my grandmother when she lived with us.”

  “No kidding. Speaking of praying, I’m praying that Jasmine will go out with me. I can’t understand why she won’t. Does she ever talk about me?”

  I think about his question but decide not to answer it. Instead, I ask him a question of my own. This is something I have learned from Rabbi Heschel. When you don’t want or know how to answer a question, ask a question. I ask, “Is Jasmine beautiful, in your opinion?”

  Wendell’s face brightens. “You have come to the right person with that question, my friend.”

  I wonder whether anyone considered normal has ever called me “friend” before. Even Joseph never called me “friend,” although we were. It makes me happy to be called “friend” by Wendell.

  “Yes, you can say with absolute certainty that Jasmine is beautiful.”

  “Therefore,” I say, “if a woman looks like Jasmine then she too is beautiful.”

  “It doesn’t always work that way, Mr. Spock.” Wendell has taken to calling me that whenever I say something that is logical in nature. “Jasmine has luscious black hair, but a blonde or a redhead or even a totally bald woman can be just as beautiful. Sometimes thin is nice, and sometimes a man craves a little more substance. But yes, as an initial point of departure, if a woman looks like Jasmine, you can safely assume that she’s beautiful. But don’t limit yourself. Be broad-minded, so to speak, in your appreciation of beauty.” Wendell laughs to himself.

  “Who else is beautiful?” I ask.

  “Here at the law firm just about every secretary is hot in some form or another. It’s the only redeeming quality about this place. Except maybe for old Margie. But even then you can tell that she was beautiful, oh, eighty or so years ago.”

  Women are Wendell’s special interest, I say to myself.

  “You have three kinds of feminine beauty,” Wendell says. He sounds like Mr. Rafferty, my social studies teacher at Paterson. “
Earthy, Elegant, and Elemental.”

  “Can you give me examples, please?” I immediately regret asking this question. I am already ten minutes behind schedule and Jasmine is waiting for me to go to the Registry of Deeds.

  “Certainly. Let’s take three beautiful women here at the firm. Each of them represents one of the three categories of beauty I just mentioned. First you have Earthy Martha. Earthy women are well endowed in a motherly, mammary kind of way. They are sexy in an abundant, easy, natural manner and give freely of themselves. Sex is part of their nurturing nature. The attraction of man for the Earthy Woman originates from his childlike desire to be possessed, thereby eliciting in the woman the desire to protect.

  “As for the second category, Juliet there across the hall is a representative of the Elegant Woman. Elegants are usually on the thin side. Their demeanor is cold and unapproachable. They are extremely conscious of their effect on the male species and wield that knowledge to their advantage. They call forth man’s competitive drive. The attraction here is based on man’s need to conquer and tame, but also to hoard and deprive others of the prize. Elegants are trophies, showy possessions. Just being seen with them generates envy in others. Hence my father hired Juliet.”

  Wendell is suddenly quiet.

  “Jasmine must be an example of Elemental beauty,” I say.

  Wendell snaps out of his reverie and slaps me on the knee. “You got it. You’re learning fast, my boy.” Wendell sits back in his chair. His tone is different than when describing the previous categories of beauty. He sounds solemn and serious. “Elemental beauty is less dependent on physical attributes than the other kinds of beauty. Theoretically, I suppose, it is possible for a woman to be an Elemental Woman and not be physically attractive. Have you heard of the Periodic Table of Elements?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “It is a chart of all the elements of matter arranged according to the number of atoms in each element.”

  “Right on. Why did I know you would know the answer to that question?”

  “I learned that at Paterson.”