The Fantasy Years

JENNY GRABBED HER LUNCH from the fridge—salad with tomatoes, carrot sticks, and one small bag of Fritos. Not Doritos like real fatsos eat. She started her car. She had to be at work at nine these mornings because with the boys in school, she was freed up to work eight hours a day. She and Rick needed the money.
The voice on the radio at this hour wasn’t Rush. It was someone else. He wasn’t as funny as Rush. But he talked a lot about Clinton and liberals, too.

Bill Clinton— She couldn’t shake that nasty thought of him.
Of giving him what he wanted. She couldn’t help but see him sidling up to her, reaching over to touch her, taking her arm. Maybe brush “something” from her face and using that as an excuse to kiss her.

Or maybe he’d have his secret service agents block her from leaving wherever it was that Clinton encountered her. She saw herself fleeing him, as if in a nightmare, and in every hallway stood a muscular man with an electronic ear piece. Without a single word.

Down the hallway, another secret service agent. In front of the elevator, another secret agent. Out in the parking lot, more secret service agents. Secret service agents everywhere, blocking every exit except one: the hotel room where Clinton waited. There the door hung open. Jenny could feel herself sliding toward that room, toward that man, towards his crotch, against her own will. As if on the deck of a tilting ship, she leaned against the direction she was being pulled but was pulled anyway. It was as if she was leaning against gravity. She could fight it, but Clinton was just waiting for her with the smile on his face. That kind of boyish smile that let him charm the American people. There he sat in the room, his coat thrown over the back of a chair.

“C’mon on Jenny. You know I won’t bite.”
She woke up, shuddering.
“What?” Rick whispered.
“Nothing,” she replied. “Nothing. Just a bad dream.”

Ben hurried through the halls of Tower Investments wondering what birch forest had been hacked down to make it and how many more trees would have to fall before Mr. Towers’ pile of money was big enough? And then, as if coming to answer the question, Ben saw Mr. Towers. He swallowed dry air. Mr. Towers came toward Ben from down the hall.

Ben feigned ignorance of Mr. Towers as Mr. Towers did him. Ben pretended he didn’t notice him until they were abreast of each other. Ben knew how this worked. Like the eye game the snobs played in high school. They would only respect you if you snubbed them back. Mr. Tower’s footfalls thudded triumphantly forward, his attention absorbed in the Wall Street Journal held before him.

And then, just then, Mr. Tower’s gray eyes darted above the page. Ben moved to raise his head in a tense nod but before he could bring his head down Mr. Towers had already ducked back to the paper, then he swept past Ben to enter the suite of offices behind him.

BING! THE MORE JENNY THOUGHT ABOUT BILL CLINTON coming on to her, the more she couldn’t help but think of Clinton coming on to her. After all, she wasn’t raised to live the way people like Clinton did. She didn’t think Rick was either otherwise she wouldn’t have married him.

What did the Bible say about forbidden knowledge? That’s what she felt she had—forbidden knowledge—that no woman should have to bear. Even though she’d never met Clinton in real life, just realizing such a world where presidents acted that way with strange women bothered her. It bothered her more that some women “went for” Clinton’s advances.

She could just imagine him looking deeply into the eyes of a woman. That kind of smirky, sad look on his face. Like he was just some innocent kid of a president. She could just imagine how he showed up into people’s sad lives, and he brought his glamour and excitement.

And maybe some woman was in the crowd, just a good woman who knew her place in the world, maybe a woman who took care of her family, who loved her husband, maybe she would go to a political event because she was raised to believe she should – that’s what a good citizen participates in politics.

And maybe the woman believed that you should respect people in the world. You should respect presidents because even if you didn’t agree with them, you respected them.

Maybe that’s what she would have thought, as the next caller opened up on her, “Well, it’s about time! I’ve been on hold fifteen minutes!”

But frustration in the world of work was well distributed across the land in the mid-1990s. “So you see? You see how they are? You see what it’s like? The big fucking raise?” Mike asked, gripping and twisting his pay stub in his hand, when he got home from work.

Kath didn’t even tell him not to swear because Rex was around. Kath didn’t even say so and Mike knew she shared his anger over being lowballed at work.

“Twenty-four dollars a paycheck? I’m busting my ass day after day for this company and this is my raise?”

“Are you sure that’s the full amount?” Kath asked.
“I asked Norman when I opened my paycheck. He said it was the most they could do. 24 dollars?” For once Kath’s silence was an endorsement, Mike felt, not a repudiation of what he said.

“Shhh…There’s money in the house.”
“What?” Ben asked.
“There’s money in the house,” Randy whispered, with his finger held over his lips. Randy was the other guy who worked in IT at Tower Investments. Ben had gotten the job in IT support.

“Why are we whispering?” Ben whispered.
“Because there’s money in the house.” Randy had a glint in his eyes, that fell somewhere mischief and antipathy. Like he was relishing telling Ben to shut up.
“But…”
“We just keep our voices down. You’ll notice the only people allowed to raise their voices are the principals.” The sting of reproach lit up in Ben’s eyes. He couldn’t hide it. “I guess the principals like the silence,” Randy said, soothing and stroking
Ben’s irritation.

Ben nodded.

“Helps them concentrate on their decisions.”

Okay, Ben thought. First week. Just the first week. Things look different than they really are in any new place in the first week. Because if I didn’t know any better, I’d think Tower Investment is one of the weirdest, most hostile places I’d ever stepped foot in.

But Ben chose to apply here, he reasoned. Just like it was his choice to go to college at Pitt and end up $32,945 in debt. He had the choice. He could have chosen to go to Northwestern and ended up in $46,000 of debt like his cousin. Or he could have chosen to go to University of Chicago and ended up $50,000 in the red.

The choices were his. So was the personal responsibility to deal with consequences.

It’s just that morning moments like these didn’t make him feel any better about his past decisions. Sure it was only the first week. Sure, it was. But already Ben found the work tedious. It was like a description he’d read of war somewhere. Agonizing boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror.

Randy, his co-worker, didn’t like to talk much, either. He was content not getting to know Ben.

Randy spent most of the day playing Neverwinter Nights online while listening to Rush Limbaugh on his small AM radio. In fact, Randy was happy to let Rush do all the talking.

The terror part of the job for Ben came when one of the principals called. As Randy took the trouble to explain, whenever a principal needs something fixed on their computer, they need it “yesterday.”

And so it was Ben alone with Randy in the IT room. Ben and Randy. Rush Limbaugh doing all the talking. Until the end of Rush’s show, when Randy turned to Ben, after digesting three hours of righteous indignation.

There was a glimmer of humor in Randy’s eyes: “You liberals don’t have a real strong sense of justice.”

“Why do you say that?”

“How can you support someone like Bill Clinton?”
“Well, I…”
“Here’s a man who lies to his wife.”
“Yeah, but he—“
“He’s cheats on her.”
“But that doesn’t affect—“
“How can we trust him to be honest with us if he isn’t even honest with his wife?”
“But that’s not politics.”
“Trust is the essence of politics.”
“But that’s not what I mean.”
“But you support Clinton? Don’t you?”
“I don’t think he’s the best guy in the world.”
“But you support him to some degree?”
“To some degree.”
“It’s all relative to you liberals, isn’t it?” Randy said with a smirk and returned his attention to his engrossing game of Neverwinter Nights.