is waif
FACE OF THE COMPANY
I woke up sweating on the floor of Jean’s office with a feather stuck to my mouth. I could smell my own sweat instantly and I wondered if maybe that’s what had jolted me awake. I wish Jean’s office wasn’t so hot. A lot of the interns slept in their boss’s office, but most were cool and nice, and mine was hot and humid. I grabbed at the little hamburger clock on Jean’s desk and smiled when I saw it was 8 am. I probably had a solid hour before she came in so I laid back down, stuffed a duck carcass between my legs, and tried to ignore the rain smacking against the windows. Rain used to calm me down when I was a kid. I think that was true for everyone. Now it’s more like grandma’s white noise machine. It gets in my head, messes up my ability to think. And these days it freaks me out, makes me think about Mom on the shore, waves lapping against her window in what used to be central Brooklyn.
“‘Kill the duck outside please, Lawson. You smell horrible.’”
Last year when grandma’s house in Queens flooded, my parents decided to get divorced, which was all fine by me except it made my commute near impossible. Dad took Grandma back upstate, which was also fine by me. She’d become so depressingly mean in her old age, I couldn’t stand to be around her. She would lie in bed, next to her incessant white noise machine and look blankly at me with senile eyes. And I’d sit across the bed from her ‘cause I knew it made Dad upset when she was alone too long; I was just trying to do good by Dad and be a good grandson. But every time she looked like she had dozed off and I would go over to turn off the machine, she’d jolt awake and ask me something like ‘why was I so short?,’ or ‘did I have a girlfriend?.’ And I’d shake my head or say no and she’d cough in disappointment and rest her head back down. So in a not-small way, I was pretty happy Grandma was gone. Talk about short and single, that woman couldn’t even use her legs. I shouldn’t say that, and anyway that’s not the point. The point is: Dad went upstate and Mom moved to an apartment in Canarsie off the L, which nowadays barely runs. Even before DeBlasio got hit by that train, there was too much water for the trains to run with any real consistency. So now, I usually sleep at work, and usually don’t see Mom. But I shouldn’t complain; lots of kids my age don’t work, and even the ones that do don’t have cushy jobs in The Shack, where no one bothers them when they fall asleep slumped over their boss’s chair.
I woke up for the second time that morning to the hamburger clock crying out that 9am had rolled around. When I say no one bothers you for falling asleep, I don’t really mean it. You can’t sleep during work hours and you can’t sleep if your boss is around, so I felt pretty lucky the alarm woke me before Jean did. I popped up and ran to the bathroom to run my shirt under the hand dryer. Sometimes you forget you work at a fashion company until you’re running coffee into a meeting and the designers kind of flinch when your sleeve brushes their nose as you hand-me-downs you might as well work with the guys who scrub the barnacles off the side of the building. So I make sure to dry off my shirt as much as hand them their latte. And then Jean pulls you aside and says you embarrassed her and that if you want to dress in your brother’s possible, which actually isn’t my brother’s. I’m an only child and the shirt was a gift from Mom.
When I got back to the office, I saw the carcass I had tucked between my legs was up and quacking around, which was no good at all. The ducks weren’t even supposed to be in the building ‘cause of health codes, but there was nowhere else to deal with them, so it was definitely a don’t-ask-don’t-tell situation. I grabbed the little rainbow hen by the legs and she screamed and kicked and bit me while I tried to get a good grip on her neck. I had almost wrung out the shrieking thing when the door swung open and Jean walked in. I expected her to shout, but she looked sad more than anything. she shook her head and said, “Can’t you do that somewhere else?” I mumbled an apology and tried not to make too much eye contact.
“I have an early meeting,” she gestured at the open door. I began to apologize again, but she cut me off: “Kill the duck outside please, Lawson. You smell horrible.” I walked out, duck-in-hand, as she closed the door behind me with a sigh. She wasn’t too bad - not that mean most of the time, just kind of troubled. She walks around the office looking at the ground, getting snapped at by other designers and then snapping at the interns. I can’t imagine she likes her life. I wonder if she has a family at home or maybe her mom is trapped far out like mine. Maybe she hasn’t seen her in months and when she does it just upsets her. Maybe she spends her days picturing her poor mom squatted and scared on a wicker chair in the living room as water seeps under her door and vines crack through the wall behind her. Maybe, like me, her childhood home was also swept up by flash floods. Maybe she also watched her stuffed animals float down Flatbush Ave.
I spent the rest of my day killing ducks. That was my main job. Sometimes I brought coffee to meetings, but mostly I killed ducks. I don’t know what exactly the ducks are for. It’s something to do with their gland, a little pink orb we yank out from right at the base their necks. I only know that ‘cause I’m the guy that yanks them out. Other than that, it’s pretty hush-hush around here, a lot more secrets than you’d expect at a clothing company. At four, we broke for lunch. Sarafina, another intern, carted down a load of pre-sorted and pre-drained ducks, and began prepping our meal. Before Sarafina joined up, the interns just ate the allotted Shake Shack for all meals, but Sarafina changed all that. After her arrival, the ducks were transformed into po’ boys and dumplings, confit and barbeque. She was pretty clumsy – always fumbling around with fabrics, tripping over her own clothes – but in the kitchen she was a genius. Today we prepared for Peking. I was slicing cucumbers into perfectly even batons as Sarafina instructed, when I saw Jean stepping into the elevator, bag in hand. We locked eyes and I saw her face shift to some dull expression of embarrassment: mouth turned down, brow furrowed. I smiled and tried to do it in a way that said, “It’s OK that you’re leaving work now. It’s OK I’ve still got hours before I’m done. No judgment from me. I don’t know your life.” I don’t really know if a smile can say all that, but she didn’t smile back. Her face just went blank and she dipped into the elevator.
After lunch, it was time for me to finish all of the work Jean hadn’t done. Not the big stuff, just the things that I’m not even positive she knows she’s supposed to do. I sat down at her computer and popped open her cluttered desktop. I cleared away one-pot recipes and crazy expensive apartment listings in uptown Manhattan, the only dry place in the five boroughs - I mean it still rains there, but most of the water runs down to Manhattan Valley. I cleared up the desktop for a few more minutes and started replying to emails with Jean’s signature: “Sound’s good! I’ll get on it as soon as I’m back in the office... J.” I try not to read the emails. I’m not interested in finding out if they’re killing something worse than ducks, but sometimes things pop out like a word or something and that will catch my eye. This time the whole email caught my eye: “Model Casting: Men above 6 feet. Pay: 1000/day for 10 days, please bring headshot. 46th floor” Jean had been cc'd I guess so she could bring some clothing for the models to wear. I stared at the email for a few seconds thinking about what a thousand dollars would feel like in my pocket, rubbing against my thigh. And then I thought about those apartment listings uptown and hopping on a 2 train to visit Mom and removing the letter L from my life once and for all. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Mom seaside when here I had a chance to do something about it. So I emailed back, “Sound’s good! I’ll get on it as soon as I’m back in the office... J,” while I stuffed my shoes with printer paper (I’m 5’9) and took selfies on Jean’s computer until I had something I thought might pass as a headshot. Then I speed-walked through the hall, stepping over dead birds with the most joy I’d felt in a long time.
I rode the elevator to the 46th floor and followed the signs to the holding room, which was a corner office with carpet that smelled nice and were duck-blood-free. It took me a little bit to realize the only real scent on the 46th floor was me–that besides being the shortest boy in the room, I was the smelliest and ugliest. The other guys there were big and thin with tired-looking eyes and sharp jaws, but I tried not to feel discouraged. I wiped my armpits with the back of my hands and then wiped them on my jeans as a redheaded man much smaller than me called us boys in one by one to be seen. I was last because apparently everyone else had “signed-up” ahead of time. The little man anxiously swiped at his nose and squinted at me sitting alone in the office. “Come on,” he said and motioned for me to follow him. I looked at his beautiful, waterproof suit as we strutted down the hall towards large, wooden double doors. I had never seen clothes so nice. I mean I had seen them in Jean’s designs, but never worn by a real person. I always forget that this company is more than a slaughterhouse.
I felt pretty sick as the man pushed open the double doors and I stepped into a huge room with red plush walls and no windows. It had been ages since I’d seen a room without little green vines climbing up the seams of the walls. This looked like it was out of a movie. At the far end of the room was a little folding table with a woman sorting papers sitting behind it. She had curly, black hair up in a bun, and even though she was a good ways away from me, I could see a fat gap between her front teeth that calmed my stomach for some reason. The little man whispered in my ear: “What’s your name?” I told him, and he yelled across the room “This is Lawson!” Gap-tooth looked up and called me over.
“Have a seat,” she said. I sat in an old, metal folding chair and looked at my hands. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
“I don’t think so,” I muttered. I would have remembered seeing her before. Her nails were clicking on the table. Each a different shade of blue.
“I take it you’ve never modeled before.”
“I haven’t, no”
“But you think you’re right for our international campaign?”
“I – I don’t. I didn’t know it was exactly for an –“
“Lawson listen – I don’t mind someone who’s an amateur. There are thousands of beautiful men in New York City, I’m sure you’ve seen them everywhere. I need someone with personality. Someone who feels real. Do you understand?”
“I think I –“
“I remember where I know you from, Lawson,” she squinted her eyes. “You’re an intern downstairs on the design floor.” I was silent. I didn’t know if it was against the rules for me to be here. I certainly wasn’t supposed to read Jean’s email. She continued: “This is exactly what I’m talking about. We’ve been called out-of-touch. We’ve been called snobs, but we’ve never had someone like you. You’re a worker. You’re a little worker bee buzzing around this city, completely unaware of your potential. These other boys expect the world to be handed to them. You know some of those boys are fifteen! They don’t have a rain free memory. It makes them soft and stupid. But you... you are different. I can tell. Lawson, I want to make you the face of our company. How does that sound?”
I said yes, obviously. And the ten days for ten thousand dollars, turned into ten months and six hundred thousand dollars. Then ten years and eleven million dollars . I showered everyday, slept in real beds, and didn’t eat an ounce of duck the whole time. I traveled all over the country. I saw the tornadoes in the Midwest, and the hurricanes in the South. I saw fires burning in the West, and not once did I feel scared. My face covered billboards and TV screens. I went to meetings in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. I became a fashion icon. I saw a paper compare me to Marilyn Monroe. I saw a magazine call me Marie Antoinette. It said that I’d turned my back on the place I came from, that because I was now so rich I had no concern for the plight of the average American, and I didn’t recognize that the world had changed and that the climate would never return to what it once was, and I was wasting my time and stealing money from the poor by selling them things they didn’t need. But if life is short like they say, why couldn’t I be happy?
I met a girl in Chicago and married her. She was a Kennedy, so we attended Kennedy events like polo games, where horses sloshed through soaked fields as jockeys wiped rain out of their eyes. We bought a house in Chicago, and hung paintings by artists I’d never heard of and bought furniture that we couldn’t sit on. I went to charity dinners and stole silverware as a joke. We had a daughter named Toni, and we fed her almonds and grapes and gave her little rabbits carved out of chocolate. We sent her to a nice private school on the North Side. She made friends with another girl named Sadie and I started working a little less so I could stay in Chicago and cook them grilled cheese when they got home from school. I took them to see Lake Michigan and the pier and I cried once as they swam in the shallow waters thinking that they’ll never know a sunny day, a day without rain. Another time, when I was doing a shoot in New Orleans, I looked down from my hotel room window and saw camps of people spreading for miles from the base of the building. The tents were being battered by rain, and all I could feel was thankful it wasn’t me down there, sucking the blood out of the neck of a duck, saving the feathers to make clothes. I was thankful I had the means to give Toni the life I didn’t have when I was a kid.
Then, in December, my wife and I went to New York to count down the ball drop on Dick Clark’s New Year’s show. As our plane dipped over Long Island and descended into JFK, I glimpsed Canarsie out the window. When we landed I kissed my wife and told her I’d meet up with her at the hotel. I hopped in a taxi and gave the driver my mom’s address. We drove for awhile. I looked out the window and saw how much had changed. The sidewalks had eroded. The manhole covers had rusted. There were vines of ivy everywhere. Kids played shirtless under the tracks of the L train, which by this point looked like it hadn’t run in years. At some point, the driver stopped and said “this is as far as the car will go.” I paid him and got out, and saw that this was as far as anyone could go. A hundred feet ahead, where Mom’s house should’ve been, was just ocean - great, green-blue water, swishing and absorbing the pellets of rain that ceaselessly battered it. I looked out over all this and watched as seagulls landed on the L tracks jutting out into the great expanse.