Naturally, I’d been dodging Kevin ever since, so when elevator D stopped on the way up to Margie’s floor, it goes without saying that it was Kevin standing there when the doors opened.
“Well, hello,” he said. “What are you doing traveling above the fortieth floor?” His eyes shot to the envelope I was hugging to my chest.
“Just making a delivery,” I said.
“Isn’t that what messengers are for?” He stepped inside and the doors sealed shut.
“Robert doesn’t always trust the messengers,” I said.
“Really? Even with all the cameras around?”
My bowels stirred.
“There’s one now.” Kevin pointed up at a convex lens on the elevator’s ceiling. “Smile.” He pitched his head close to mine, like we were posing for a selfie.
Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I was being careful enough, wasn’t I?
The letter envelopes I used for the cash were the un-see-through kind, and I brought them from home already sealed—there was nothing suspicious about that, was there?
“This is you. Forty-two.” Kevin woke me up to the fact that the elevator doors had opened again. “Be careful now; you’re not accustomed to being up so high. Ha.”
I stepped out soundlessly.
He was staying on to forty-three. “Talk later?” he said.
I nodded as he disappeared between the closing doors, wondering: was he trying to tell me something? All this talk of cameras and being careful.
I considered the envelope inside the envelope in my hands. It would only look more suspicious at this point if I changed my mind and returned to my floor without delivering it, right? So I forged ahead as planned to Margie’s office; handed her the envelope; recited my line, “Robert would like you to look at these documents right away”; and then bolted back to the elevators, before she could get a word out in response.
Back on forty, the moment I stepped through the glass doors, I knew something was amiss. Desk after desk, cube after cube, in our open-office space had been abandoned. Computer monitors flaunted screen savers of aquarium fish and outer space. Desk phones blinked red with unheard messages. Only a few unimportant women remained working at their stations, along with a couple of interns. Then I noticed everyone else, fifteen or so guys, gathered around the big screen in the south conference room.
I should note here that the “few unimportant women” still at their desks were the other three women who worked on the fortieth floor besides me. None of them held any significant position of power, so they were as good as invisible in terms of access to Robert—or anything interesting going on in the conference room.
At first I thought it must have been a sporting event that had the guys so intrigued, but then I recognized one of the faces on-screen—it was Jason Dillinger, from our very own office. He was on one of those news shows where all the guests have totally opposite political views and they’re just supposed to duke it out till one of them gets their mic cut.
Dillinger must have scored a point because Robert threw up his fist and the rest of the conference room cheered.
I paused to take in this scene for a moment because I’d recently finished binge-watching Friday Night Lights and was still particularly susceptible to the nuances of male bonding rituals. It was so clear to me (and perhaps only me) how every man in that conference room looked up to Robert, how they tried to talk like him, think like him. They rolled up their shirtsleeves to just below the elbow like he did, and wore their dress shoes, like him, without socks in the summer. When he threw up a fist, they cheered.
To the outside world, Robert had a terrible reputation. His ways of doing business were not always considered “politically correct” or “fair” or (if Margie Fischer was correct) “entirely legal.” But in this office, he was a role model, a maker of men—good old-fashioned, quintessentially American men. Men like they just don’t make ’em anymore.
Hats off inside. Tuck in your shirt. Hold a door. Know how to change a tire, and for Chrissakes change your own oil. No Titan man who worked directly under Robert would ever be found sitting on the subway when a woman, child, or elderly person was in view; in fact, he would most likely be found standing even if the entire car was empty.
To the outside world, Robert’s traditional ways could be misinterpreted as sexist, but really it could all be boiled down to a single maxim: Don’t be a wuss. And it applied to everyone across the board, man or woman. Genitalia aside, if you weren’t self-sufficient, if you weren’t tough (tough as stewed skunk, tough as an old boot), Robert had no time for you. Which I believed was why he’d taken a shine to me. I wasn’t one to ask for help when I needed it, just like a good ol’ boy.
Robert spotted me gawking at the conference room then and waved me over.