Not long after hitting send, Tom was let go, and if not for the paltry severance, we might have been inclined to think that his was not another in a series of layoffs, but an outright firing. But the truth was, Tom was probably in the pipeline already. His e-mail just hastened things along, the way pneumonia can spell doom for a cancer patient.
LYNN MASON WAS STILL
running late to the twelve-fifteen meeting on that Tuesday in May, so Chris Yop continued telling us the story of Tom Mota’s chair. That very morning he had looked up from cleaning his desk to find the office coordinator standing in his doorway once again, arms folded. “So she says to me,” he said to us, “‘I see you put Tom’s buckshelves back.’ So I act totally ignorant, I say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what it is you’re talking about,’ and I go back to cleaning my desk, but she’s not leaving, so I look up again and she says, ‘And I see you no longer have his chair, either.’ So I say, ‘I would appreciate you not harassing me anymore. There are rules against that sort of thing in the employee handbook.’ And she says, ‘You think I’m harassing you?’ And I say, ‘Yes. And I don’t appreciate it.’ And she says, ‘Well, maybe we should take it up with Lynn.’ And I say, ‘I would welcome that,’ and she says, ‘What are you doing right now?’ and I say, ‘Well, unlike some people, I’m trying to get some work done. Some people actually generate revenue around here, you handjob.’ I shouldn’t have said that — I was just, you know, pointing out the difference between an office coordinator and a copywriter like me who generates revenue. So she says back to me, ‘Oh, sure, I understand how
incredibly
important you are, how everything would just
crumble
all around us without you, but if you wouldn’t mind, will you follow me, please?’ And I say, ‘Follow you? Follow you where?’ And she says, ‘Lynn would like a word.’ ‘What, now?’ I say. And she says, ‘If you can pull yourself away.’ And I say, ‘She wants to see me
right now?
’ She doesn’t say another word — just motions for me to follow. So I get off my chair, that piece of crap — I mean, my ass is like on Novocain on that thing — and together we head down to Lynn’s office. I mean, what choice do I have? If she’s telling me Lynn wants to see me, what choice do I have?”
We asked Yop how long ago this was.
“Maybe an hour ago,” he said. “So we go down there. I’m not going to lie to you. My heart’s going. I’m forty-eight. This is a young man’s game. Who’s going to hire me if I get shitcanned? I don’t know Photoshop. Some days, I don’t even understand Outlook, okay. You know me and the e-mail. I get shitcanned, who’s going to pay me what I deserve? I’m an old man. I get paid too much. But I gotta go down there. The office coordinator goes in first. I follow her in and close the door. ‘Okay,’ says Lynn. And you know how she can lean forward at her desk and look at you like she’s about to carve your skull out with her laser eyes? She says, ‘Now what’s going on?’ The office coordinator comes right out of the gate — first, I stole Tom’s buckshelves. ‘Where’s the proof?’ I cry out. I mean she’s not letting me talk. ‘Huh? Where’s the proof?’ I ask. She doesn’t answer. Then she tells Lynn I’ve been harassing her. Me harassing her! I can’t believe my ears. But what she doesn’t say a thing about, not one word about — she says
not one word
about the chair. The whole point is the chair! That’s the reason we’re here! I was trying to protect my chair. So I say, ‘What about the chair?’ And she says, you want to know what she says? She says, ‘What chair?’ What do you mean, what chair, right? So I say, ‘Come on, what chair.
The
chair. My chair.’ And she says, ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about, this chair.’ To Lynn she says this! She denies there was ever a chair! So I say, I’m so pissed off, I say, ‘COME ON, WHAT CHAIR! You know what chair, goddamn it!’ And there’s silence, and then she says, ‘I’m sorry, Lynn. I don’t know what he’s talking about.’ And I say, ‘YOU GODDAMN WELL KNOW WHAT CHAIR! She knows what chair, Lynn! She tried to take my chair away from me. My
legitimate
chair.’ So there’s silence, and then Lynn says, ‘Kathy —’ Kathy — did any of you know her name was Kathy? She says, ‘Kathy, can you give Chris and me a minute please?’ So ‘Kathy’ says of course and Lynn says, ‘Can you shut the door, please, Kathy?’ and ‘Kathy’ says, ‘Sure,’ and we hear the door close, and my heart’s going, you know, and Lynn says, ‘Chris, I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to let you go.’”
Yop stopped speaking. He shook his lowered head slowly. There was silence. “I was speechless,” he continued after a while. His voice had dropped. “I asked her if it had something to do with Ernie Kessler’s chair. She says no. She says it has nothing to do with Ernie’s chair. ‘Because I don’t need Ernie’s chair,’ I tell her. ‘Honest — I’ve been sitting on one of the cheap plastic ones for the past week and it’s fine. It’s a fine chair.’ And she says, ‘This has nothing to do with Ernie’s chair.’ I can’t believe it. I can’t believe what she’s telling me. So I say, ‘Is it the mistakes? Because I’m getting better,’ I tell her. ‘It’s how my brain works sometimes,’ I tell her, ‘but I’m getting better. Most of them get caught when we run spell-check anyway. I know it’s not ideal in a copywriter, I appreciate your patience,’ I say to her. ‘But I am getting better.’ And she says, ‘It’s not the mistakes, Chris.’ ‘So what is it then?’ I ask. ‘It’s nothing personal,’ she says to me. ‘It’s just business.’ ‘Is it because I make too much money? Is that it?’ And she says, ‘No, not exactly.’ ‘Can I maybe take a cut in pay?’ I ask. I’m asking her, ‘Can I take a pay cut and stay on?’ ‘It’s not exactly the money, Chris,’ she says. So what the hell is it then, right? ‘Now, listen,’ she says. ‘We’re going to give you a month’s severance, and COBRA will cover your health benefits through the year. It’s really nothing personal,’ she says. She keeps saying that — it’s nothing personal, Chris — so I figure it must be something personal. ‘So what is it then, Lynn?’ I ask her. And maybe my voice cracks a little. ‘If it’s not personal, what is it?’ ‘Chris, please,’ she says. Because by now I’m breaking down . . .”
We asked him what he meant by that.
“I started crying,” he said. “It wasn’t just the job,” he added. “It was the whole feeling of being me. Being old. Thinking about Terry. Not having a kid. And now, not having a job.” He and his wife had tried to conceive for years, and by the time they gave up, they were considered too old to adopt by the agencies. “I was thinking about having to go home to Terry and telling her I’d been shitcanned. I didn’t want to cry,” he said, “god knows, I just got overcome. I put my head down, and I lost it for a minute. I just wasn’t in control. So, you know, I had to leave. I never cried in front of someone like that before. I couldn’t stick around. ‘Come on, Chris,’ she says to me. ‘Come back. You’re going to be fine,’ she says. ‘You’re a fine copywriter.’ This is what she’s saying to me while I’m being shitcanned. I haven’t talked to her since.”
We couldn’t blame him for being upset, but it would be just like Yop, tough-acting Yop, to give up the chair he fought so hard for just like
that
if it would save his ass, and if that didn’t work, it would be just like Yop to beg for a cut in pay, and if that still didn’t save his job, Chris Yop would be the one among us to break down. Tom Mota wanted to throw a computer through the window; Chris Yop threw himself at Lynn’s feet.
Just before Lynn showed up, fifteen minutes late for her own input, we asked Yop what he was still doing here.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t go home, not yet. It doesn’t feel right.”
But should you really be
here?
we asked him. In Lynn’s office?
“Well, Lynn and me,” he said, “we didn’t get a chance to finish our conversation. I broke down. I left. You guys don’t think I should have to
leave
leave, do you, when we didn’t get a chance to finish our conversation?”
No one replied — meaning, well, yeah, Yop. You should probably leave.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking around. “This meeting’s been on my calendar for a long time.”
ALL TALK TAPERED OFF
when Lynn finally arrived. When the time came to get down to business, we got down to business. We didn’t fuck around in input meetings. We fucked around before them and sometimes we fucked around after them, but during them, there might be the occasional wisecrack, but otherwise we were solemn as churchgoers. Any one of us could be let go at any time, and that fact was continually on our minds.
Lynn Mason was intimidating, mercurial, unapproachable, fashionable, and consummately professional. She was not a big woman — in fact, she was rather petite — but when we thought of her from home at night, she loomed large. When she was in a mood, she didn’t make small talk. She dressed like a Bloomingdale’s model and ate like a Buddhist monk. On the day of the twelve-fifteen she was dressed in an olive-hued skirt suit and a simple ivory blouse. What you really admired about her, though, were her shoes. As aficionados of design, we — the women among us especially — sat in awe of their sleek singularity, exquisite color, and contoured elegance, marveling at them as others might the armrest of a chair by Charles Eames, or the black wing of a Pentagon jetfighter. Each pair — and she must have had fifty of them — deserved their own Plexiglas display case at the Museum of Contemporary Art, next to that polyethylene thing and those neon signs. We had never seen anything so beautiful as those shoes. When someone finally got up the nerve to ask her what brand they were, no one recognized the name, leaving us to conclude that they were made by boutique Italian designers who refused to export their product, but which Lynn’s friends picked up for her on their international travels, because everyone knew Lynn never took vacation.
When she entered, disrupting Chris Yop at his story, she was carrying input documents fresh from the copy machine; a scent of toner trailed behind her. Without a word she set the copies on her desk and began to collate them, moistening her finger and thumb and stapling the sheets together and passing the packet to Joe, who sat immediately to her right. “Stapler on the machine’s broken,” she explained. Joe passed the document to his right, and it wound its way to Karen Woo, who was seated farthest from him. Lynn stapled a few minutes more, then stopped to remove her leather heels. “Why does it feel like I just walked in on a funeral?” she asked, finally looking around at us. No one said a word. “I hope it’s nobody I know,” she added. She went back to collating and stapling.
Our information had come from reliable sources but it was only the barest details. Her surgery was scheduled for the following day. The tumor had invaded her chest wall. She was going in for a full mastectomy. We had questions for her — was she scared? did she like her doctors? what were her chances of complete recovery? But she had not yet said a word about it to any of us and we knew nothing of her state of mind. We might have wondered why she was at work the day before. She needed to get her priorities straight, we thought. But then none of us ever had our priorities straight. Each and every one of us harbored the illusion that the whole enterprise would go straight to hell without our individual daily contributions. So what was this fantasy about straight priorities, this dream that would never be realized? Besides, what else should she do but carry on? We had to think that by coming into work the day before surgery, she was refusing to let the specter of death distract her from the ordinariness of life that could very well be both a comfort and an armament to someone diagnosed with breast cancer. She was exactly right to come into work the day before. Unless she should have stayed at home and ordered in and played with her cats on the sofa. It was really not for us to say.
Without so much as a word about Chris Yop’s presence among us, the input documents got handed around. Everyone took a copy; Chris Yop took a copy, too. Did he really plan to sit through the entire input meeting though he was no longer an employee? Lynn took her jacket off and flung it over her chair, sat down, and said, “Okay. Let’s get this funeral started.” She began to read from the input document. When we turned the page, Yop turned the page. It was hard to concentrate on anything else. There was Lynn, reading from the input document, and then there was Yop reading from the input document, and the one had just fired the other, but there they both were, carrying on as if nothing at all had happened. Maybe she hadn’t noticed him? Maybe she had other things on her mind?
Our project turned out to be pro bono. The agency had donated our services to a popular breast cancer fund-raising event sponsored by the Alliance Against Breast Cancer. Our job, Lynn explained, reading from the input document, was to raise awareness of the event and to boost donations across the country. We would be doing so by advertising in nationally distributed magazines and on the backs of cereal boxes.
We had to wonder, was this just a bizarre coincidence? We thought she might finally say something to us about her diagnosis. We watched her, but she never wavered from her steady reading of the input document. She gave no indication that this project was different in any way from any other project. We looked around at one another. Then we looked back down at the input document. When she was through, she explained a few extraneous matters, and then she asked us if we had any questions. We told her it sounded like a great project, and we inquired how we happened to get involved. “Oh, I know the committee chair,” she replied. “I’ve been saying no for two years and I just didn’t have the energy to say no anymore.” She shrugged. Noticing something in the corner of her eye, she turned and picked lint off the shoulder of her blouse. “Any other questions?” No one said a word. “Okay,” she said. “Funeral’s over.” And with that, we all got up and left her office. Yop almost made it out into the hall when she called him back in. “Chris,” she said, “can I have a word with you, please? Joe,” she added, “get the door on your way out, will you?” Yop turned back, downcast and hesitant. Lynn got up to draw her blinds. Yop walked back in, the door closed, and that was the last we saw of them.
We set off for our offices and cubicles, immediately leaving them again to gather in small clusters, in doorways and print stations, to discuss the almost surreal pro bono project we had on our hands. During the input she had asked us to envision a loved one being diagnosed with the disease — a wife, a mother — so that we could really sympathize with cancer sufferers and design a more effective communication. Well,
she
had the disease. If someone could give us insight to sympathize with the sick for a more effective communication, who better than she? And yet not a word. Everyone knew she was a private person. And we had a reputation for gossip. We didn’t expect that she would just come out and announce that she had cancer. But she was also a very dedicated marketer, and in that respect, it was perhaps odd, despite her sense of privacy, that she did not extend herself to help us better understand the horror of a diagnosis, for example, or the misery of treatments, if understanding those things were necessary for coming up with a better ad. We didn’t know if we should believe that she just happened to know some committee chair who had pestered her and pestered her until she agreed to donate our time.