Crowded offices’ waiting areas have their own special choreography, and I do know that at a certain further point the configuration of personnel sitting and standing around altered enough that I enjoyed a sustained line of sight, over the book, into a select bit of the inner office of the Deputy Director of Personnel,62 which office was basically a large wood-framed cubicle inset against the rear wall of the waiting area, the entrance to which was just behind and to the side of the nightmarish secretary/receptionist’s desk, from which position she easily could and (one got the sense) often did shoot out a bony lavender arm into the space of the DDP’s doorway to prevent someone from going in or even standing there knocking without her special nihil obstat. (Here being a veritable law of bureaucratic administration, it turned out: The more compassionate and effective the high-level official, the more unpleasant and Cerberusian the secretary who barred one’s access to him.) Mrs. Sloper’s desk’s multiline telephone’s handset had an attachment that let her rest it (i.e., the attachment) on her shoulder and be able still to use both hands for her secretarial tasks, without the violinish contortion of the neck required to hold a regular phone against one’s shoulder. The little curved device or attachment, which was tan plastic, turned out to have been mandated by OSHA for certain classes of federal office workers. Personally, I’d never seen such a thing before. The office door behind her, which was partly ajar, featured frosted glass on which was inscribed the name and very long, complex title of the DDP (whom most of the Angler’s Cove wigglers referred to by the facetious sobriquet of ‘Sir John Feelgood,’ which it took me several weeks to understand the Hollywood context and reference of [I detest commercial films, for the most part]). My sight line’s particular angle was through the partly open door into a wedge-shaped section of the room inside. Within this section was a view of an empty desk with a name-and-title-plate so long that it actually extended beyond the width of the desk at both sides (i.e., of the desk), and a small bowler or rounded business hat hung at a slight angle from one of these protrusive sides, its brim occluding the last several letters on the plate so that what the desk’s sign averred became:
L. M. STECYK DEPUTY ASSISTANT REGIONAL COMMISSIONER FOR EXAMINATIONS — PERSON which in a very different sort of mood might have been amusing.
To explain the context of this sight line into the office: Closest to me in terms of the personnel also sitting there waiting for something were two young unhatted males in two of a series of slightly different vinyl chairs at a slight angle to my left, both holding stacks of folders with color-coded tabs. Both seemed roughly college-age and wore short-sleeve shirts, poorly knotted ties, and tennis shoes, in contrast to the much more conventionally adult business-style dress of most of the rest of the room.63 These boys, too, were engaged in some kind of long, aimless exchange. Neither crossed his legs as he sat; both their breast pockets had arrays of identical pens. From my angle of sight, their badges reflected the overhead lights and were impossible to parse. Mine was the only luggage in our area, some of which luggage was technically encroaching on the nearer kid’s part of the room’s floor, near his off-brand sneaker; and yet neither of them seemed aware of or curious about the luggage, or me. One might normally expect a kind of instant unspoken camaraderie between younger people in a workplace crowded mostly with older adults — rather the way two unconnected black people will often go out of their way to nod at or otherwise specially acknowledge each other if everyone else around them is white — but these two acted as if someone their approximate age were not even there, even after I raised my head from How… Success twice and looked pointedly their way. It had nothing to do with the skin thing; I had a good antenna for the various ways of and motives for not being looked at. These two seemed practiced at screening out input in general, rather like commuters on subways in the larger cities of the East Coast. Their tone was very earnest. E.g.:
‘How can you constantly be this obtuse?’
‘Me, obtuse?’
‘Jesus.’
‘I’m not aware of being the least bit obtuse.’
‘…’64
‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about.’
‘Good God.’
… but I couldn’t determine whether it was a serious argument or just cynical collegiate titty-pinching to pass the time. At first, it seemed impossible to believe that the second kid was unaware that his protests of being unaware that he was obtuse played right into the hands of the colleague who was accusing him of obtuseness, i.e., being unaware. I was unsure whether or not to laugh, in other words. I had come to a ¶ in the book that explicitly recommended loud laughter at someone in a group’s joke as being more or less an automatic way to signal or invite inclusion in that group, at least for purposes of conversation; the crude illustration was a line drawing of someone standing just outside a group of laughing people at a cocktail party or reception (they were all holding what were either shallow snifters or badly drawn martini glasses). The turdnagels, though, never turned their heads or even acknowledged my laughter, which was definitely loud enough to be audible even against the background noise. The point here being that it was at an extension of the angle over the shoulder of the ’nagel who denied having been obtuse, more or less pretending to be looking past them at something else in the way of someone whose attempt at eye contact or some moment of camaraderie has been rebuffed, that I enjoyed a momentary view into the actual office of the DDP, in which view the desk was empty but the office was not, for before the desk one man was squatting on his haunches before a chair in which another man65 hunched forward with his66 face in his hands. The posture, together with the movement of the suit coat’s shoulders, made it pretty clear the second man was weeping. No one else among the crowds of personnel in the waiting area or standing in the lines that now extended out beyond the three narrow hallways67 into the waiting room seemed aware at that moment of this little tableau, or of the fact that the DDP’s office door was partly open. The weeper was facing away from me, for the most part,68 but the man hunkered down before him with a hand on his padded shoulder and saying something in what you could tell was a not ungentle tone had a wide soft flushed or pinkish face with lush and (I thought) incongruous sideburns, a face slightly out of date, which, when his eye caught mine (I having forgotten, in my interest, that sight lines are by definition two-way) in the same moment when the loathsome secretary, still speaking on the phone, now saw me staring past her and reached out without even having to look at the door or its knob’s position in order to pull it closed with an emphatic sound, spread (the administrator’s face did, i.e., Mr. Stecyk’s) in an involuntary expression of compassion and sympathy, an expression that seemed almost moving in its spontaneity and unself-conscious candor, which, as explained above, I was not at all used to, and which I have no idea how my own face registered my reaction to in that moment of what felt like highly charged eye contact before his stricken face was replaced with the door’s frosted glass and my own eyes dropped quickly to the book once more. I had not had my facial skin provoke such an expression before, not ever once, and it was that soft, bureaucratically mod face’s expression that kept obtruding on my mind’s eye in the darkness of the electrical closet as the Iranian Crisis’s forehead impacted my abdomen twelve times in rapid succession and then withdrew to a receptive distance that seemed, in that charged instant, much farther away than it really could have been, realistically speaking.