MODERN TIMES - PART II

         A freezing rain was falling when Sprague left at 8:30. The pavement was slippery in spots. Twice he nearly fell. He was short and stocky. It helped him keep his balance. At times he used his briefcase somewhat like a tightrope walker would use an umbrella. His car was parked two blocks away. By the time he reached it, he was soaked. He had left his umbrella at home. The locks had not iced over. He got in, the car started and he was on his way home for his Christmas.

         The idea came to him to stop at the market to pick up a store-made potpie, but when he drove by he found the market had closed early. ‘I’ll have soup or pasta,’ he thought, trying to remember the varieties of soup he had in the cabinet. Hot soup would be good. Maybe there was a partial loaf of French bread in his freezer he could heat in the oven while the soup warmed up.

         Naturally on Christmas Eve parking in his neighborhood of townhouses was at a premium. He had to park a long way up the block from his house, so that by the time he put the key in the door his coat was soaked through. Shedding it immediately on entering the house, he walked upstairs to change out of his wet clothes. He put on dry socks, sweatpants and a sweatshirt and went downstairs to the kitchen.

         ‘Ah, split pea, just the ticket tonight.’ Opening the can, he dropped the solid contents into a pot and turned on the heat. At the same time he turned on the oven and put the frozen piece of French bread inside. He had cut it in half length-wise before freezing it. ‘Since the pea soup is a green, I don’t need a salad’, he rationalized. While the soup heated and the oven fired, he looked at the mail that had come that day. Most of it was junk. Standing there, he felt a definite chill.

         The house Sprague lived in had belonged to his parents. Much of the furniture dated from their time. Sprague had moved in after the death of his father, his mother having died five years previously. He gave his sister, who lived two thousand miles away, a down payment for her share of the house and now continued to shell out a mortgage payment to her monthly. There was interest on the loan, but at a very low rate.

         He sat on the couch in the living room and put his feet up. His mother’s Afghan sat on the top of the couch. He pulled it down over his legs and felt warmer. He gave the soup fifteen minutes. He picked up the Wall Street Journal that came to the house in the mail and began to leaf through the Marketplace section. He was not a heavy investor in the market, but he found the articles interesting. His habit was to read this section in the evening and the front page in the morning over breakfast. He saw a blurb on the front page that the Journal would not be published on Christmas Day, which meant he would have to find something else to read tomorrow evening and the day after Christmas.

         The timer on the stove rang; fifteen minutes were up. He lifted the lid and saw the soup was bubbling a little. He took a wooden spoon and gave it a stir. It had not stuck to the bottom of the pot, a small victory. Taking a bowl from the cabinet and the ladle from its hook on the wall, he filled his dish three-quarters full, leaving a little in the pot for a second helping. He carried the dish carefully to the kitchen table, put it down and then went back to the refrigerator and took out a large bottle of apple cider. His glass was not tall, but wide. It was inherited from his father. He had two left, the others having broken over the years. The cider went back into the icebox and the glass was placed to the right of his soup bowl.

         His table was no more than a card table shoved into a corner of the kitchen. Without moving it from the wall, only one guest could eat with him, sitting on a folding chair similar to the one at his place. He folded his newspaper carefully and put it to the left of his meal and sat down to begin to eat. A look of disgust came over his face. He muttered, ‘Damn’t, how stupid can you get, the bread’s still in the oven.’
Walking back to the stove, he opened the oven door. A blast of heat steamed his glasses. He backed off quickly, muttering another curse. ‘Why can’t I remember that it does that every time?’ He waited until his glasses began to clear before reaching in with potholders to extract the cookie sheet that held the bread. He put it on a paper plate. As he turned to open the refrigerator to take out the margarine, a patch of blue-green hit his eye from the direction of the table. He looked up. Sitting resplendent in a long caftan at the table in the chair he was not using was Elaine Roberts. She was wearing her glasses; her short dark blonde hair was pushed up on her head in loose curls. He looked back into the refrigerator, grabbed the margarine and refocused on the table. She was still there.

         “Hello Jack, Merry Christmas!”

         “How did you get in here? I thought you were dead.”

         “I am dead; I just came back to visit you to see how you are doing, maybe for old times sake.”

         He carried the margarine and bread to the table, picked up his knife and spread the ersatz butter on both slices, and then looked up at her again. She had taken her last trip down the steps at age fifty-nine, but this Elaine looked more like the woman he knew at forty-five, when their partnership had been three years along. Her weight had not been much different then at fifty-nine, but her face was fresher. She had been a heavy smoker and as the years went on, the ravages of tobacco showed in her face. The caftan did not emphasize her stomach, where most of her weight was distributed. He could not remember a time she did not have a ‘belly’, even in their days at Cox & Dubinsky.

         Why was she using “Jack”? He could only remember short periods of their business relationship when she called him that. Usually it was “John” or “Mr. Sprague”. He took up a piece of bread, dipped the end into the soup and bit that portion off.

         “Still eating a lot of starch, eh Jack? Where is your salad? You always did eat poorly.”

         “Did you come here to lecture me again, Elaine? You know it will get you nowhere.”

         “Oh, I think you will want to hear what I tell you tonight. I am on sort of a mission of mercy. I have tonight off for good behavior, but tomorrow morning I will be back under the thumb of Angel Claire.”

         Sprague was now supping the soup directly from his spoon. His face showed a registration of a thought and he put the spoon down. “Angel Claire is the man who walks out on Tess when he finds out she has had a child by Alec D’Urbeville.”

         “You and your books, Jack. This angel is not a man.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, “And sometimes it is hard to believe she is an angel.” Her voice was always deep and in death it had retained the same tone of imperial disdain that it carried in life. She raised it again. “The soup smells good.”

         “There is a little in the pot if you want some.”

         “I don’t think we spirits can eat regular food, but thanks anyway. I can’t stay too long; my new day begins at midnight when she’ll have me scrubbing toilets or picking up trash. That’s what I am trying to tell you about the afterlife, Jack. What you were in life will be more magnified there. Unfortunately for me, I was the worst bitch in the world and I could not be magnified, so the powers that be turned my world upside down. Your ex-partner, who lorded it over everyone but perhaps you, now spends much of her time on her hands and knees scrubbing floors, or at a desk typing piles of memos and letters, half of which are sent back for re-typing because I have erred. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for eternity. Do you how long eternity is, Jack?”

         He got up and walked to the pot to refill his bowl. He looked at her and shook his head in the negative. “What does this have to do with me? I’m not a bitch. I treat people well, I think.”

         “Do you now, Jack? My first day there I had to sit while Angel Claire showed me videotapes from my life. There I was, bossing my sister around when I was young, ignoring pleas for help from others in law school, being the dragon lady at Cox & Dubinsky. I was the terror of the typing pool and the person the young interns hated most and I was proud of it. Finally she slipped in a tape of our office. There I was throwing a typed letter on Trish Malloy’s desk, barking at her ‘What kind of substandard work is this, Mrs. Malloy. You’ll stay here until it is done right.’ Looking at the tape I could see how terrified she was of me. Remember I would always order a toasted English muffin from Beano’s on the corner? I would send her to pick it up and if it weren’t toasted to my liking, I would send her back with it. Angel Claire’s tape must have had three hundred of these muffin episodes, and her tape showed Trish, almost in tears, handing the muffin back to the man at the counter.

         “The worst was the time I could not find my file on the Graham estate. I was sure she lost it or she had been thrown it out in the trash by mistake. I had her hunting high and low all over that office, coming back to yell at her every few minutes. You were on vacation that day. You did not see her, with all the weight she carried, having to climb into the dumpster out back. I pulled a chair up to it and she stood on it and leaned over the edge. She was wearing a dress. I reached up, put my hands on her butt and pushed her into the container. I looked in and there she was, on her back, on piles of papers and boxes, her dressed pulled up, crying. Do you know how many times Angel Claire has done the same to me, and believe me, I don’t get pushed into a dumpster of paper. Of course, I had left the file upstairs in my dining room, that was the worst of it, which Angel Claire points out every time she pushes me into the dumpster.

         “Granted, Jack, you’ve been much better to her. I snoop around; I see what goes on. You are not a bitch, nor have you ever been one, but Jack, you are a cold, lonely forbidding fish. That is what you are! If you don’t change, I fear for your eternity.”

         “What do you mean, why do you care?”

         She ran her hand through his second piece of bread. “You are eating too much of this stuff. Why do I care? Did you ever consider why I never married and rarely dated?”

         “I never thought about it.”

         “Of course not. You were the person I came closest to doing so with. I needed a man to be my Trish at home, and in business too. After our little episode that time at Cox & Dubinsky, I really thought it was you. You were so compliant. You never even thought of leaving those bastards, but I did. I only had to find the right person to load up with my work, and you were that person. I saw a life of ordering you about, but in the end you won. After a year or two of our partnership, with me being the Queen Bee and you turning out the work, I began to realize that as much as I tried to boss you, and as much as you seemed to listen, you would turn on your Mona Lisa smile and go your own way. You would pay me lip service, but I could never drag you out of your books or your work. You would have never taken my English muffin back to Beano’s.”

         “So why did we remain as partners, Elaine?”

         “Because you could turn out amazing amounts of work, and didn’t give a shit how I ran the office. Trish and the woman who had her job before her, I can’t remember her name, and the poor assistants, they bore all my pent-up frustration with you. You are no different today. You are in your own world too much.”

         “So?”

         For the first time a smile crossed Elaine’s face. “By the way, don’t you think it’s time you bought envelopes without my name on them?”

         He laughed too, and she continued.

         “I asked Angel Claire what might happen with your afterlife. Would you be forced to become a life of the party and wear a lampshade on your head for eternity? She did not think your case was as bad as mine. Do you remember that I said ‘what you were in life will be magnified?’ Angel Claire sees you on a small island, all alone, with a desk and manual typewriter and a large bookcase full of law books. ‘Alone’, she said, for eternity, researching cases, writing letters and memos and wills for those who do not need them anymore. When you back is turned, a messenger will come unseen and drop more work on you and this will go on forever. There will not be a Trish to help. Frank and Randy will not pop in, but I suspect I may have to type your handwritten legal memos. Angel Claire alluded to that. We would still be partners but we would never see each other.”

         “I am not sure that sounds that bad.”

         “JACK!” She was exasperated now. “Alone, no one to tell your clever thoughts to, no one to complain to but yourself.” The more she thought about it, it would not be that different than his life was now. No wonder he did not share her terror, but there was another consideration.

         “Jack, I have no idea how long you will be here, but in that lifetime to come, you may bring harm to others more deserving than you or I. Face it Jack, we were shits, pure shits, never helping anyone. You have the chance to change. I didn’t.”

         Sprague’s face lit up. “Oh repent, oh evil one.”

         “Jack, three other spirits will visit you tonight. Expect the first when the clock strikes one.”

         “Clocks don’t strike around here, they are all digital.”

         “JACK, LISTEN TO ME. Hear these spirits out. You came as close to being the one person in my life I could love. I wanted you on my terms, not yours. Now, you bastard, listen to these missionaries. It’s not too late. God knows, I don’t want to type your memos the rest of eternity. You have the worst frigging handwriting on this earth. I have to go, bye now.”

         He looked at the chair and she was gone. He thought he saw her disappear into the refrigerator. He got up and carried his soup bowl to the sink. After putting it down, he opened the door and looked in, but there was no green caftan in sight. He shook his head. It seemed like she had been here forever, but scarcely ten minutes had passed. He ran water in the bowl and the pot, added some detergent, added more water and after turning off the faucet, picked up his newspaper and headed back to the couch. A few minutes of reading would produce a long mid-winter’s nap.

******

TO: "MODERN TIMES - PART III"