The Tweed’s office was located in an old, rickety wooden building that propped off the ledge of a hill on a side street a block from the downtown area. The building was a two story house converted into an upper and lower apartment complex.
The office was on the upper floor, level with the street, and performed double duty as the front room of the Tweed’s home. A door in the middle led into their kitchen. A bathroom was through a door in one corner of the kitchen and a door on the opposite side led into a small bedroom. A final door led out onto a long, narrow back porch with a bench swing and a fine overlook view of the surrounding area.
I arrived for work at nine. As usual, the Tweeds were asleep on the floor. Their bed was a futon which folded up into a couch. They slept in sleeping bags. My arrival amounted to their alarm clock.
It was a bit creepy to step around them and go to my desk while they then staggered out of bed. Fortunately, they slept in their clothes.
“Morning,” I said over my shoulder.
“Morning,” Art muttered.
Margaret didn’t say anything. She liked to be Greta Garbo in her dreams.
While I turned on the computer and began typing, they folded up the futon and went into the kitchen. Tweed had an espresso coffee maker he’d bought on their honeymoon in Greece. In five minutes I could hear it hissing as it steamed up a four swig amount of black mud. He diluted it some by pouring a pound of sugar into his cup. There was room left for two of the four swigs. Margaret took the other two. It was a system they worked out on the honeymoon.
Then came the daily tense hum of the morning argument. It was a version of planning the day. Probably a system also worked out on their honeymoon. For some reason, they never seemed to agree on what to do, and had a fair amount of vicious criticism about what each of them had already done.
Finally, Art emerged from the kitchen with his thimble of mud and cheerily greeted me like I’d just arrived. He looked like the reincarnation of Ichabod Crane. Very thin, with a long pointed nose and face, coke bottle glasses, and a thick mop of dark brown hair that tangled wildly in all directions. He didn’t know how to use a comb or anything. Everything about him screamed eccentric intellectual. It passed as his charm.
He set down his mud and enthusiastically rubbed his hands together, cackling as he did so. He preferred this to daily vitamin supplements.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“The frost is on the pumpkin and the fodder’s in the shock. The day resounds with possibility. Batten the hatches! Storm the ramparts! Let no man dare oppose the juggernaut of our march to destiny!”
“I see you’re meeting with a prospective client today.”
From the kitchen, Margaret called out. “Art! Hurry up. Leonard will be late for day care.”
Leonard was their four year old son, like I mentioned previously, who occupied the one and only bedroom. He was a precocious and fun little fart. Except in the evening when he was sent to bed. Then he was a monstrous little brat who could completely disrupt adults for hours.
Tweed sagged heavily, his boisterous enthusiasm squashed in an instant, and flipped his wife the bird, vigorously thrusting his middle finger toward the kitchen door. He took a deep breath to compose himself and went to get Leonard.
Margaret did not like to be called Marge. You could get eyeballed into shreds if you tried. It was rule number one Art had confided to me. She emerged from the kitchen with her own thimble of mud, followed closely by Leonard and Art, who hurried out the door and off to day care.
Margaret came over and flipped on the meter on the wall next to me.
“You forgot to turn on the timer,” she said. “You have to remember. We can’t bill the customer accurately if you forget.”
She enjoyed pointing out people’s faults. And being my boss.
Before she left, she leaned over me from behind to check on my typing. Her long, straight black hair fell forward from her face and brushed against my cheek. She swirled it around like a feather duster and leaned over a little farther to ostensibly look closer, but it was really to press her breast against my shoulder.
She enjoyed flirting. Her husband rarely noticed, even when she did it under his nose. Flirting wasn’t juicy enough to catch his eye.
I didn’t find her particularly attractive. To say the least. She had a dumpy body with almost no waistline and wide, lopsided hips. Her teeth were slightly malformed and she was self-conscious about it. When she was forced to laugh, she tried to do so without exposing them to view, often covering her mouth demurely with the back of her hand till she had suppressed the hilarity down to simple, controllable mirth. Her complexion was rough from the tiny pockmarks that covered her cheeks.
Still, a hard nipple nudged firmly against your flesh, was difficult to ignore.
Tweed returned. She holstered her nipple.
“It gives me the creeps,” Art said, closing the door behind him.
“What does?” she asked.
“Leonard has started calling the day care lady mommy. It’s creepy. Maybe we should keep him home.”
“We can’t operate a business with him running around all day.”
“I don’t like it.”
“He’ll be going to kindergarten next year. Relax.”
The Tweeds had a little tinkle bell fastened to the top of the front door. In case a customer walked in while they were duking it out in the kitchen. It tinkled now.
Wayne Skindle entered the room. He was an older guy, probably in his late fifties, with long white hair in a pony tail. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit. He had a skin condition that prevented him from wearing shirts and pants. It was some kind of fungus he’d picked up from living out in the woods and not washing his hands properly or using the wrong leaf for makeshift toilet paper. I didn’t press for details. It was something even if you were nosey you probably wouldn’t want to know.
It was his book I was typing.
The book was about some gold rush prospectors who lived in the area a hundred and fifty years ago and had three generations of family living in a three room cabin. They bickered a lot and slept with each other’s wives and mothers and sisters and occasionally killed each other in an axe duel.
All the rest of the time they panned for gold. If one of them found some, there would be a big fight over it which led to the axe duels. Gold was far more important than sex as something that would seriously get one of them pissed off.
Sex infractions were usually handled by slapping around the offending woman. The men would then have moonshine on the porch and flick toothpicks at each other until a big ole fun wrasslin’ match would develop and everyone would whoop it up on the porch and be one big happy family again.
Very interesting stuff. Wayne had found a diary about it under the outhouse after it fell over in a storm.
“I made some of it up, though,” he told me proudly.
Wayne was a guy you couldn’t help but like. Lots of energy and boundless enthusiasm. He always looked at you with fierce eyes that waited for you to get the hidden meaning behind things he said. It could be slightly unnerving. Putting pressure on you to say something heavy with understanding.
I wasn’t good at that type of thing, so I tried to avoid his eyes and look at his chest when we talked. There were always white tufts of hair around his throat puffing out over his jumpsuit. I imagined little toy cars driving around in there getting lost in the forest. It held my attention so he thought I was listening to him.
He bounded into the room and headed for my desk.
“Hi Art. Hi Marge,” he called as he swept past them.
Margaret sneered at him behind his back.
She was very good at sneering. Excellent you could easily say. She could say practically anything with a simple sneer. Frustration, boredom, wistfulness, anger, regret, envy, incredulity, exasperation. You name it. She could do it. She could even express happiness with a sneer. I’d seen her do it once or twice.
And she had lots of different sneering tools. It was hard to tell if it came naturally or she practiced in the mirror. She could sneer with her mouth, her eyes, her shoulders, her hands, her hips. She once sneered with her feet, which was astounding as hell. There should have been a prize for that one. You had to see it to describe it. I had, and I couldn’t.
Naturally, I couldn’t help wondering if maybe Art got turned on by sneering. People were strange that way.
“How’s the book coming?” Wayne gushed. He was getting a big bang out of this author shit. Anybody would, I guess.
“I’m almost done with chapter six,” I said. There were ten chapters on my desk.
“Only four thousand to go,” he said.
He stood there staring at me. Then he flourished out, “Just kidding. I’ll bring in the next six tomorrow. They’re almost done.”
He kept looking at me like he was waiting for me to say something. He had trouble ending conversations, I guess. You always had to have the last word, like “Great,” so he would know it was over. Then he would widen his eyes like he was absorbing the heaviness of what you’d meant when you said it.
“Great,” I said, and went back to typing.
He leaned there watching me for a few seconds. It was hard to type fast with somebody watching. It made your fingers swell up till they were twice as fat and they started landing on two keys at once.
Eventually, he went off with Art into the kitchen for some of Art’s mud. I think he wrote a check in there, too. The kitchen was also the check writing room. Art took the payments. Margaret wrote the bills. It was another of their Grecian systems. They had so many you’d think their honeymoon had lasted a year over there, instead of two weeks.
Art and Wayne yapped away in there for quite some time. They got a bang out of each other having these vocabulary sword fights. It was like some people craved candy. I was too much a one word guy to satisfy this urge in Art. He had to do all the talking for both of us. Same with Wayne, since his dog was the only one around for him to converse with. Maybe that’s why he waited for you to say something when he was finished talking. The silence was a clue to his dog that it was time to bark, and he had gotten in the habit with humans, too. It was just a wild guess.
Margaret went into the layout room off the side of the front room. I forgot to mention that room. Probably because Margaret was the only one allowed in there. It was a sacred area. I peeked in once, but she gave me a sneer and I never tried that again.
She had been a stripper when Art met her. Not the tease kind, though she had the ability. Just not the body. A layout stripper.
Strippers hunched over light tables, wielding exacto blades and rubber cement. Printing shops employed them to put stuff in the right places on a page so a camera could take a picture of the page and burn a plate to stick in the printing press.
Margaret was a master chef at this stripping business. She could cement down everything so straight on a page that a surveyor couldn’t find a flaw. She could do really exotic stuff with the exacto blade.
She marched out of the layout room one day to show me how good she was. She’d managed to cut an eight point italic lowercase “i” out of an old restaurant menu she found in the trash and paste it down on a page in the middle of a word over a nine point roman lowercase “i” which had been a wrong typesetting code instruction. She left just enough paper at the top of the replacement “i” – about two thousandths of an inch – to blot out the dot of the larger nine point mistake.
To really chuckle her knuckle, she practically chortled herself into a spasm showing me how she even slid the new “i” one hundred thousandths of an inch to the left so it was perfectly kerned to the preceding “t.” Kerning was how close letters were supposed to be to each other to make your eye happy when you read something. It was impressive as hell, no doubt about it. There wasn’t even any rubber cement excess squoozing out the sides where she’d pasted it down. Pulitzer Prize achievement.
I tried not to think about if there was some sort of exotic sex stuff you could do with an exacto blade that maybe Art got a tremendous thrill out of.
Something they’d learned about in Greece.
To be continued . . .
