This is a rewrite of a true-life tale about the strangest job I’ve ever had. It was so strange, in fact, that I’m having a hard time structuring the story. This is the fourth version of it, so far.
Practically Paris
I found the advertisement in an uppity publication for American expats: Administrative Assistant needed for position in busy and important tourism sector. Must love touch typing and the Japanese. Although I had an innate, adverse reaction to the word “administrative”, I liked ‘busy’. I liked ‘important’, and I’d almost majored in East Asian studies, which came mighty close to loving the Japanese. The company was called Practically Paris All Star Assistant Services. The name alone should have steered me away from the venture, but I had arrived in Paris with a one-way ticket and very bad advice. I needed a job that didn’t require a hairnet.
The office was located in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, a no man’s land of cyber cafés and Laundromats with fax service for 2 euros. I showed up for my interview wearing tailored grey pants and a pink cashmere sweater and was surprised to be informed by a woman with remarkably long hair that my interview would take place outside. It was late October and I was underdressed, but the little garden was charming in its melancholic state of disarray and I didn’t want to make a poor first impression by complaining about the cold. I wrapped my voluminous scarf around my neck, twice, Parisian style, and waited for the director.
After a length of time long enough to eradicate any remaining feeling from my extremities, a fat little man swooped out of a ground-level apartment and came scurrying towards me with his hands in the air.
“I’m sorry, yes?” He pointed to the table I was leaning my elbows on. “Jasmine?”
I stood up out of my chair. “It’s Courtney, actually…”
“Nesrine,” he hollered over his left shoulder. “Some tea for our guest!”
He turned towards me and pumped my hand vigorously. The enthusiasm of his gesture forced me to bend at the knees.
“So, you like to travel? Can you manage the difficult ones?”
I leaned forward, not sure if I had heard him correctly.
“Well, some of them are difficult. How is your truly phone voice? After everything that has happened, the Americans are wanting an American voice. Can you do accents?”
I had been concentrating on his strange diction and choice of subject matter, but a sudden shift of my attention allowed me to focus on his outfit, instead. Mr. Maniben Nayek Kosamblya Surat was wearing medical scrubs and a stethoscope. Because I was in an interview situation, (a very cold one, I might add, I had to rub my ankles against each other in order to keep the blood flowing to my feet), I didn’t feel that I had the right to ask questions. So he was in medical scrubs. I had on a pair of underwear with flying Eiffel towers on the waistband. Who was I to judge? Maybe the stethoscope enabled him to take the pulse of the “busy and important tourism sector”. Maybe he was a part-time veterinarian. I needed a job.
When Nesrine came outside with a pot of tea, I took the opportunity to examine the office she emerged from. Its front door and windows were made completely out of glass and there was a pretty wooden bench set outside the door. So far, no one else had come in or out of the office. It looked small, cozy, and better yet, quiet. I felt like I could work there. In my mind, I fast forwarded several months ahead to the balmy days of April and saw myself sipping a Cote de Rhone in the courtyard, chatting away on the telephone with the concierge of the Ritz. I dreamed that I would meet the kind of people who could help me establish a happy, legal life in Paris; cultural ambassadors with polo playing sons and four different pairs of boat shoes, members of UNESCO and Michelin-starred chefs. Why I thought I’d meet such people through a company with fourteen syllables in its name (headed by a chap with ten syllables in his), escapes me. I was young and excited and recently single. I wanted to learn to blow smoke rings and shrug like the disaffected Parisians I saw in the cafés.
In between energetic slurps of tea, Maniben explained that the bulk of my time would be spent corresponding with Japanese and American businessmen on the phone or through email. Once I had an idea of what they wanted out of their French getaway, I was to arrange exclusive jaunts around the country for the happy travelers and their attention deficit children. I would find a translator to take the Japanese wives shopping. I would send young bankers up in hot air balloons with their impatient, size 4 girlfriends. I would reserve stately yachts with wall-to-wall carpeting and fill them up with Ivy leaguers celebrating their twenty-fifth reunions.
For the unfortunate people who could not afford to experience the garish wonder of the Champs Elysées from the comfort and safety of a chauffeur driven sedan ($1,400 for two hours), I was to dazzle them with the limitless selection of public tours we arranged with a series of partners all across the capital. Maniben declined to tell me who these partners were, (“one should not ask too many questions when action is an option!”), but he assured me that the common folks would be thrilled with the dinner cruises and midnight bus tours we offered at oh-so competitive prices.
On paper, the job seemed fairly interesting and the pay was better than it needed to be. Better yet, Maniben promised me a Visa if I stayed with the company for two years. Two years, at that time, seemed like an eternity, but I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice. Because I neglected to follow the path of the more disciplined college graduates who accepted jobs as teachers or paralegals at American-owned firms before they left the states, I found myself in a snow globe of administrative confusion upon my arrival. In order to hire a non-EU member as an employee, a French employer had to prove to the government that the candidate’s nationality was an essential component of the position. Thus, the fact that I spoke fluent English didn’t make me any more interesting on paper than the myriad of overqualified Scandinavians who spoke fluent English, Spanish, French, Swahili, and sign language, of course. But at Practically Paris All Star Assistant Services, 80% of our clients were American-born. Maniben was sure that the post 9/11 government would understand the importance of having a person with an American accent on the other end of the phone. The Americans weren’t flying to Europe anymore. They were scared and resentful; they were coming up with pseudonyms for French Fries. The French government needed the American tourists back as much as Maniben. At the end of our interview, Maniben assured me that he could get me a Visa in three months, maybe six. I took one more look around the courtyard before executing the dispassionate shrug I’d been practicing in the corner of my flat for two weeks. I told him I’d take it.
Maniben said I could start the next day and that I would be paid at the end of each week, in cash. This worked out very well because I didn’t have a bank account. I agreed to come by the next morning at nine, and I left without entering the office.
Clearly, this was part of Maniben’s plan. The office of Practically Paris All Star Assistant Services was roughly the size of a sleeping compartment in a Eurorail, minus the mystique and the romanticism of rail travel. There were four computers placed throughout the room at varying heights, along with three different printers and six or more phones, each one a different color. During our interview, Maniben informed me that I would be working with Avel, the “officer of supplies”, and Nesrine, the accountant. I stood in the doorway, flanked by Maniben, and smiled wanly at the situation before me. My mathematically challenged brain couldn’t imagine how in the world Maniben expected to fit another body in there legally. And then he pointed to my desk. Two years seemed very far away.
The office was laid out in the shape of a narrow rectangle, with an L-shaped desk for “meetings” up front, a counter and a stool for Avel in the back right hand corner, and a long row of overflowing file cabinets lining the left side of the office. There was a door in the back of the room that led to a miniature bathroom, with a toilet so low, you had to be a contortionist to use it. The desk that I was assigned to was nothing more than a fold up table, propped in front of the bathroom door to the left of Avel’s counter. Maniben pushed me gently into the office and placed one hand on my shoulder.
“There is the machine for hot water,” he said, pointing with his free hand to an electric kettle balanced perilously atop a box of colored folders. “And there is Avel. You have to bring the tea bags, though.”
I stared forlornly at my new post and at my new colleague. I took in the preposterousness of it all; my temporary desk in a remarkably disadvantageous position, the sterile, lifeless stare of this Avel fellow and the claustrophobic nature of the office itself.
“I stand up at my desk,” said Maniben, following my gaze. “Like Hemingway, yes?”
I was fairly certain that Hemingway had never worked in such conditions. If my eyes didn’t deceive me, I was going to have to go through a fairly arduous set of movements any time someone wanted to use the facilities. In order to provide access to the bathroom door, I would have to get out of my fold-up chair, clear off and fold-up my table, and wait patiently out of earshot while the party in question went through several private arrangements with their digestive system. Judging from the size of the room, I would need to physically leave the office in order to do this. The distance between the front door and the bathroom door was only twelve feet.
By all accounts, Nesrine, Avel and myself were the only employees at Practically Paris. The recent revelation that Nesrine was employed as Maniben’s accountant, and not as his assistant, caused me some distress. I moved my gaze from my unfortunate work station to the sweat-panted creature towering above it. No one in their right mind would want that man to serve them anything edible. I had the sinking suspicion that the iniquitous role of coffee bitch was about to fall to me.
In every stage of life, there is an Avel. He is the person who sweeps in front of your seventh grade crush at the very last moment to ask you to dance, forcing your lost prince to ask Samantha Benzak instead. He is the overheated, discombobulated fellow bumbling his way down the aisle towards the middle seat that you thought would stay empty. He is the C list guest that polarized the seating arrangements at your friend’s wedding, causing the bride to promise that “she owed you one” when she put him next to you. He is the sloth that smells of spilled cereal and Salvation Army couches. He inspires both pity and gratefulness in the hearts of those that encounter him. No matter how lonely, how desolate you are, you’ll never be worse off than him.
As “Officer of Supplies”, Avels’ job included, but was not limited to, the refilling of the staples, restocking the paper, sharpening the pencils, and conducting “ink tests”; an independent venture that saw him removing the cap off a pen, writing “Avel” on a piece of paper and deciding whether or not the pen had a satisfactory amount of ink left inside. He did this with all of the pens in the office. He did this twice a day.
Avel was the proprietor of exactly two pink polos and one pair of grey sweatpants. When the weather cooled he brought out his one and only sweater, a brown and white concoction made out of the kind of synthetic blend that ends up in the “free” crate on some stranger’s yard. Avel smelled in a way that I can only describe as torturous and omnipresent.
You would think that you would get used to a body odor of such grandiose prevalence, but I never did. Maniben, on the other hand, smelled endlessly of cinnamon. It wasn’t a bad smell, per se, but mixed in with Avels’, the pint-sized office of Practically Paris stunk like an expired tin of potpourri from some out-of-the-way Christmas Shop in a tired strip mall.
Nesrine didn’t seem particularly interested in Avel’s existence. According to Maniben, she only came in twice a week to “put things in order”, but she’d agreed to come in an extra day to show me the ropes. Besides her fairy tale length hair, the poor girl didn’t have a lot going for her, physically. She had some sort of speech impediment that made it sound like she was forming all her words through a mouthful of chewing tobacco and I discovered early on that she was extremely dyslexic. Accordingly, she had no more business being an accountant than I did, but it was clear that she loathed Avel with a nightmarish passion and I felt that it was important to have her on my side.
Nesrine spent most of the morning pointing out the different computers and email system to me, before moving on to the wired labyrinth of telephones. The phone system was so complicated, I had to take notes. The first phone sat on the L-shaped table near the front door and I was instructed never to answer it, not even if I was alone in the office. Answering the white phone was Avel’s job, and he reiterated this through a series of grunts and a trip to the bathroom when Nabila pointed to the phone. I was surprised he didn’t pee on the telephone itself in order to mark his territory.
Next up was a black phone with a strip of purple gaffing tape on the back end of the receiver.
“This is the V.I.P line. You’re in charge of answering this, Hello, Practically Paris All Star Assistant Services, this is Courtney, how can I help you?” She looked at me like she was waiting for me to chirp out the phrase in singsong, but after I treated her to my masterful shrug, she moved on.
“Now this one, this is for the people going on the public tours.” She picked up the receiver of a grey portable phone. “This one, you have to answer, Practically Paris All Star Tours of Paris?”
I repeated the phrase in my head.
“So they’re two different companies?”
“Sort of. I’ll explain. And that one-” she pointed to a second portable phone by Avel’s station, “That one is for incoming calls for Maniben.”
“Does he travel a lot?” I asked, glancing across the courtyard towards his apartment.
“Never. He just has a lot of thoughts. And that one,” she pointed to a black telephone nailed into the door frame by the bathroom, “is reserved for his wife. Just answer “hello”? She’ll always ask for Maniben.”
Nesrine used both her hands to bring the dark cloak of her hair over her shoulders. “That’s pretty much it. I mean, you’ll learn as you go. There’s really nothing to it. Do
you have any questions?”
Of course I had questions. I didn’t understand what Avel did, exactly, nor why he got to answer the white telephone. I didn’t understand why we had so many godamn telephones, nor why any prospective client would entrust his or her dollars to a travel consultant with a temporary desk in front of a latrine, but at that point, I didn’t care. If payday arrived and I wasn’t presented with my promised wage in cash, then I would care. At that moment, I was more concerned with whether I should have brie or camembert on my mid-afternoon sandwich than with anything related to the tourism industry. (Although, in retrospect, stinky cheese does bring in the tourists).
My first days passed in the vacillating haze of indifference and excitement that marks
the beginnings of so many jobs. I wrote up a series of cheat sheets which I taped to the side of the phones I was responsible for answering, and after a while, it all became mechanic. Most of my conversations on the V.I.P line took place with people’s secretaries or wives looking for reassurance that The Hotel Raphael was still a four star establishment, because hadn’t she read somewhere that they were struggling with mold? Were the back streets safe? Was it true that Parisian waiters spit in your food if you asked for sauce on the side? What it warm enough for sandals in January?
I learned a lot about upper class American tourists my first week at Practically Paris. Contrary to public opinion, they don’t all carry fanny packs, but they do assume that everyone outside of the United States is out to get them. They come with requirements: they need ice cubes in their drinks, A/C in their rooms, and all-inclusive passes to Eurodisney in their pockets. The American obsession with Disneyland has never ceased to amaze me. Why anyone would cross the Atlantic to spend three days in a row with a man in mouse costume is truly beyond me, but in addition to nighttime rides on the Bateaux Mouches, overpriced dinners at Maxims and macaroons at La Durée, overnight stays at Eurodisney were our client’s favorite pastime.
Although I had only been in Paris several months, being single and a daydreamer gave me an advantage in the tourism industry. I’d spent the better half of my unemployed summer walking around the city and jotting down addresses that called out to me in that soft, Parisian way. I gravitated towards the type of creaky bistros with impossibly low lighting and vertiginous magnums of wine cast off to the side of the tables. I loved watching the men fill up their companions’ glasses without breaking conversation. They only filled the glasses halfway, a little at a time, with a nonchalance that thrilled me. By the time I started at Practically Paris, I had a fairly long list of darling French restaurants; places where a glorious cacophony of conversation and dropped silverware escaped through open doorways while waiters rushed about with platters of gratin dauphinois and carafes of red wine.
Although I didn’t have anyone to go with to these places, I dutifully noted important details like the size of the green salad, the color of the steak, and the heft of the foie gras on a bed of lentils. I recommended places to our clients without trying them myself, and I felt a petal of pride rise within me when someone called or emailed to thank me for the recommendation. In an effort to de-Americanize our clients, I chose out-of-the-way places in dark and creaky places that a concierge wouldn’t dare recommend. I learned how to differentiate between authentic and coy. You could tell from the list of cheeses on the menu, from the proximity of the tables and the expression of the diners. You could tell in the way the waiters expertly whisked away a tablecloth to prepare it for the next party, whether or not, a restaurant was authentic. This proved to be my own, private quest. Mr. Maniben Nayek Kosamblya Surat showed absolutely no interest in offering our clients an “authentic” experience. I learned this when I’d been at Practically Paris long enough to rub against dark underbelly of our many operations.
Besides juggling five different phones and coping with the impossible aroma of Avel’s recycled polos, Maniben turned out to be categorically insane. After the first day I met him, he took to covering up his medical scrubs with a horrid pair of black leather coveralls. Because he was bald and vaguely frog-like in appearance, the leather coveralls gave him the allure of a medieval blacksmith who worked after hours as an S&M master. I also discovered the reason for the second portable on Avel’s desk. Maniben was the kind of director who was inherently distrustful, the kind of person who hired people in order to have a legitimate excuse to meddle and to spy. It didn’t matter what kind of work we were doing, it mattered how we went about doing it. Although the only people we received into the office were translators and hostesses desperate for work, (anyone else would have called the police once they saw the size of our office), Maniben was fastidious with details like posture and nail length and the state of our shoes. Somehow, Avel escaped such criterion; he never changed his sweatpants the entire time I was there.
Maniben’s apartment stood directly in front of the Practically Paris office, separated only by the little cobbled courtyard in the center of the building. Because the façade of the office was made out of glass, Maniben could see directly into our office. In the warmer months, when he had his front door open, we could see directly into his apartment as well- a foxhole that consisted of a fridge, an electric kettle, a lazy boy, and a desk with no chair. It turned out that he did prefer to work standing, just like Hemingway. Just like he had said.
He harassed us with calls throughout the day to comment on things he could see from his position. It was an unnerving ritual, made stranger still by the way he went about it. He began every phone call by introducing himself with his full name, as if we didn’t know who was calling. As if we couldn’t see who was calling, because all I had to do was turn around in my chair to see the little fellow staring out his doorway at me, sputtering non sequiturs into the receiver. “Hello, Courtney, this is Mr. Maniben Nayek Kosamblya Surat. I notice you have a used tea bag at your work station. We must keep things professional.” “Hello, Courtney, this is Mr. Maniben Nayek Kosamblya Surat. Your hair looks more accommodating in a ponytail, please.” I was slouching, I was idle, I wasn’t typing fast enough. He even called me once to ask how many times Nesrine had gone to the bathroom.
If I had been in America, I would have quit. I’d never worked in a place where the toilet took on such significance, and I was starting to have the impression that I worked with people on the brink of madness. But I was getting paid weekly in crisp 500 franc bills for a job that demanded six or seven percent of my brain power and I suppose I was intrigued by the strangeness of it all. Outside the wooden doors of 17 Villa Saint Jacques, small dogs and small women went about their business, Paris was normal, Paris performed. But just inside our courtyard, there existed a world where black overalls and sweatpants passed as business attire, where one plus one equaled whatever Nesrine wanted it to, and mysterious calls from a woman claiming to be Maniben’s wife arrived at the end of each working day. If he did have a wife, I don’t know where he kept her. His apartment was roughly the same size as our office.
After three weeks, I settled into the bizarre rhythm of life at Practically Paris. My shift started at 1pm in the afternoon, when our American clients were getting out of bed. From 1 to 4, I corresponded via email with secretaries and receptionists, arranging private tours for our VIP clients all across France, along with shopping excursions and romantic dinner cruises along the odiferous Seine. In the early evening, I sent faxes to companies with uninventive names like “My Bus” and “Paris Tour”, informing them which of our clients would be taking part in their Twilight DaVinci Walking Tour: Arago Paris!
Thanks, in part, to Nesrine, I finally discovered why Maniben had been so reluctant to go into detail about the “partners” we collaborated with on these public tours. For the people who couldn’t afford private tours, we served as a filter, offering them a live voice or at least, a live typist, to answer their questions and suggest suitable public tours for them and their family. I pitied the person that landed on our low-budget website instead of someone else’s because we charged them through the nose for our advice. Although Maniben went out of his way to disguise this inflationary system, I figured it out after I booked my first client on such a trip. She called me, irate, from the Eiffel Tower Bus office with a receptionist behind her and a brochure in her hands. Why, she demanded, were the forty people in line behind her paying $20 for a double-decker bus tour that had cost her $60? In time, I learned to explain that my time cost money. All those emails we’d exchanged, my helpful tips and information, the Google map I’d emailed to her with directions from The Hard Rock Café to her hotel, all these things took time, and wasn’t time worth money? It was a disingenuous speech that made my stomach turn. The situation was only aggravated when Maniben came up with The Names.
Maniben told me early on that he wanted our “non-VIP” customers to have a special experience with Practically Paris. “Even if they can’t afford the private tours,” he explained, “we want them to be having an exclusive sentiment.” It was imperative that I establish an emotional connection with these clients, because they would be looking to me for guidance on the phone and through their emails. To me, an emotional connection meant that I shouldn’t make fun of their antiquated concerns about their upcoming trip to The Other Side. To Maniben, this meant that I should begin referring to myself through metaphors.
It was, in the history of my working life to date, the strangest request I ever received. Maniben assigned me three aliases to employ in the office. The first was “Constance”, the second was “Prudence”, and the third was “Grace”. When I asked him why I couldn’t continue using my real name, he told me that that our customers were drawn to the values of a company. If I had a name that embodied the type of values and mores that resonated with the customer’s own feelings, he or she would be more likely to trust Practically Paris with their deepest hopes and dreams.
I kept my mouth shut when I was assigned a desk two breaths away from the toilet. I kept my eyes closed when Avel slurped away an entire quart of vanilla-flavored yogurt every day at three-thirty and I hadn’t quit when I discovered that we were swindling mainstream, hardworking Americans. But I wasn’t going to start answering the phone with a noun.
“This is ridiculous! No one will believe that these are real names!”
“But they are real,” he said, blinking rapidly with frustration. “These are our values.”
“Prudence?” I shouted, looking around me for aid. Avel was busy separating the pens into three categories; out of ink, almost out of ink, and “full”, and Nesrine was out and about somewhere, spelling things wrong.
“No one will believe my name is Prudence.”
“They will if you prove yourself to be so.”
“But they don’t sound real!”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, visibly disappointed by my inability to grasp the reasoning behind his plan. “The important thing is that they know what you stand for.”
What use was it, arguing with a person who knowingly employed a dyslexic accountant? Who considered leather overalls to be appropriate business attire and saw nothing wrong with overcharging people for thirty-minute bus tours through congested parts of Paris? What did it matter, really, if a bunch of people on another continent referred to me as Prudence, Efficiency, Dedication or Grace? Once the clients sniffed at their hotel soaps, took a little stroll and stuffed themselves with some Camembert, what did it matter, once they arrived?
But it did matter. It mattered a great deal. In addition to the humiliation I suffered working under these preposterous names, the fact that I was forced to employ an alias meant that I could never use any of the contacts I made at Practically Paris for my own personal gain. From time to time, a satisfied client asked if he could meet the person who organized such a delightful itinerary for his family. Would I come by The Intercontinental for afternoon tea? Invitations such as these put me in a position of tremendous discomfort. If I said yes, I would have to go as someone with a past different enough from my own to merit the existence of parents who stuck me with a name like “Prudence”. If I chose to come clean, and casually mention that my name wasn’t actually “Dedication”, I signed a death sentence for my future cash flow. No client in their right mind would shrug off the admittance that I worked under fake names as an idiosyncrasy of my imaginative boss. If they didn’t immediately call the Better Business Bureau with their complaints, they’d most certainly tell their network of family and friends and in a short time, I would find myself unemployed, penniless and worse yet, stained. It was imperative that my aliases lived and died within the confines of that office. And so I resigned myself to the curious reality that I would never meet a single person I worked for.
And round and round it went. Under a cornucopia of different aliases, I coaxed and coddled my American clients for weeks on end only to dump them on some boat cruise with a molding carpet. Maniben continued to find no fault in this plan. He envisioned my role as that of an ambassador to our client’s dream vacation. I was with them from the beginning, telling them what and what not to pack (A waterproof trench coat, oui! A ‘Palin 20012′ pin? Non!). I answered their inane questions about the climate and the prevalence of toxic dog defecation. I was gracious and effable and I was always there. In the client’s mind, if “Grace” didn’t respond, it was simply because she was running about somewhere in low heeled, suede shoes, inquiring whether or not the hotel put chocolates on the pillows because, really- wasn’t there enough temptation in the world, as it was?
Three months gradually turned into six, and the Visa that Maniben had assured me he could procure failed to materialize. For all intents and purposes, it looked like the process was underway. Nesrine certainly made quite a show of huffing and puffing her way through the application the few times she actually showed up in the office. Now, in retrospect, I wonder if it wasn’t a ruse. Each time Nesrine filled out the application, there was something horrendously wrong with it. Usually, my name was metamorphosed into a first and last name that had no more than one letter in common with my actual name, and she consistently listed the year of my birth as 2001, which would have made me approximately 8 months old. For some inexplicable reason, Nesrine refused to let me fill out the application myself and then complained about how long it took for the prefecture to send her another one. It didn’t take me long to realize that my dreams of legality were not going to be realized at Practically Paris anytime soon.
The illegality of my status combined with my false use of names was almost enough to make me realize that I had embarked on a one-way street to nowhere, but it took Avel’s promotion to send me over the edge. Although it wasn’t clear what, exactly, he was promoted to, the reason why he received a promotion was manifest. One morning, as I was rifling through the bathroom for a Band-Aid, I came across a box filled with photographs of Maniben’s wife, naked. Though, I’ll never be sure if the blond and stately woman in the photograph was actually betrothed to Maniben because I never met her, I was lead to believe she was by the childish handwriting on the outside of the box, a mentally-imbalanced scrawl that could only belong to Avel. Mariben. Femme. Confidential! Anyone with a non-lobotomized brain knows better than to write “confidential” on anything that actually is, but Avel did not demonstrate such prowess. I took down the box for closer inspection and was confronted with a flabbergasting array of Mariben’s wife in a variety of places and positions. The photographs were arranged in categories so outlandish, they could only have come from the fantastical cerebral cortex of the director himself. “Supine”, “with cat”, “al Fresco” and “Mexico” were only a few of the more arresting groupings. For the last several weeks, Avel had been displaying signs of enthusiasm near the end of the day that I’d equated with his repeated consumption of 32 ounces of yogurt. It appeared, instead, that Maniben had assigned Avel with an elusive and pervy after-school task that earned him the director’s respect and approval. I’ll never know why Avel was given such an assignment but he was clearly rewarded for his discretion. One morning, Avel was in charge of everything inanimate that existed in the office. The next morning, it appeared that he was in charge of me.
I came in on a Monday morning, six months into my Practically Paris adventure, and found Maniben in the courtyard, nervously wringing his hands.
“Courtney!” He shouted, when I pushed my way through the cumbersome front doors. “Come, come, come!” He tugged at my shoulder and pulled me towards the glass façade of the office. Pointing inside, he whispered, “Avel is now Director of Human Operations!”
I looked through the glass to the red stool where Avel usually sat, but it stood empty. The door to the bathroom was closed (I folded up and stored my table every night before I left) and I thought to myself that it would be awfully awkward if Avel came out of the toilet while we had our faces pressed up against the glass.
“Meaning?”
“He’s going to be looking after all of you people for a bit.”
I grimaced, and turned to face him.
“What is he, like the assistant director?”
“No, no, no, of course not!” Maniben had the tendency to move into rapid fire blinking when he was nervous. “He will just be, noting! Keeping things in line!”
I shook my head. I couldn’t believe it. It was bad enough answering to a man with a very cryptic grasp of the English language, it was worse reporting to someone who hardly ever spoke.
I closed my eyes and wondered I shouldn’t reconsider waitressing. Reluctantly, I entered the office, hung up my jacket behind the brooms and the mop in the bathroom, unfolded my table, and got ready to work. Avel arrived half an hour later, carrying the proverbial last straw in his hands, which he then passed off to me.
Avel took his new job title quite literally, and presided over every kind of operation that could be executed by a human. This included speaking, writing, eating, typing, moving, yawning, and even, yes, making use of the bathroom.
Being the owner of just one pair of pants, (with the prefix ’sweat’ included in their description), Avel was a great fan of recycling and he encouraged Nesrine and I to adopt the same spirit of thriftiness in our office lives. He took it upon himself to create a little board where he attached notices and diatribes against our selfish, unsustainable actions. One morning, after the “announcement” of his promotion, I came into work to find a copy of an email a friend from New York had sent to me. I had a diary at the time, a diary I couldn’t seem to find the courage to write in, and so I’d come up with an ingenious alternative. I would simply print and paste copies of my social correspondence in between the pages, and somewhere, many years down the road, I could look back and have a notion of what in the world I’d been up to.
The email was taped directly above Avel’s head, stuck up on the board next to another piece of paper with a carefully drawn arrow and a giant message. “IS THIS YOURS?”
I stared at the back of his head, fuming. The email in question wasn’t, exactly, safe for work, and I was experiencing a blended cocktail of embarrassment and rage. Avel coughed and checked the level of ink in his pen in lieu of a greeting or an apology. I tore the paper down in an all too-early huff (I hadn’t had any caffeine yet, my God!) and snarkily inquired if going through people’s personal trash was one of his hobbies.
“The trash is not personal,” he replied, casting an intimate look towards the bin at his feet. “And you didn’t use both sides.” He reached out his arm- bathing me in the putrid glory of his early morning eau, and carefully removed the push-pin from the accusatory note before taking it down and turning it over.
“See?” He said. “Both sides.”
Both sides indeed. Page 2 of his memo contained an Office To-Do list with an instant coffee stain at the top right corner.
“Paper costs money.”
Infuriated, I grabbed under the table for my fold-up table and assembled it in front of the bathroom door with all of the passive aggressive energy I could muster.
“This place is a little small to be leaving me notes,” I hissed, under my breath. But it didn’t matter if I spoke under my breath, over my breath, or communicated through osmosis, Avel was never a hair’s breadth away from me and he heard what I said. If I had reacted more positively to his missive, if I had apologized, grit my teeth, and decided to fume about it later, the war would have ended. As it was, I demonstrated just how much he got to me, and he put all of his energy into my unhinging.
The notes continued. And then things got dirty. Avel literally became obsessed with the trash. Anytime I left the office, he manically combed through the litter bin in search of infringements upon whatever it was that he saw as his duty. Permanent markers that still had an hour or two of life left in them, an unlabeled CD, and even a receipt from the grocery store saw gigantic, hand scrawled posters as their unique guerdon. “WHAT IS THIS”, “IS THIS IMPORTANT?”
I really let him have it after I found my LeaderPrice receipt taped up on the wall. There were tampons listed on it, for Christ’s sake.
“It’s disgusting!” I yelped. “And illegal!” (Perhaps?) “Get out of my garbage.”
Oh- how he hated it when I called it mine. He grabbed the receipt in question and brought my attention to one specific item, fifth down from the top.
“Memo Pad, 15 Francs.”
He’d painstakingly drawn a black rectangle around the article in question, and I was filled with rage and pity for this ruler-wielding Mongolian who snuck into the garbage the minute we went home.
“It’s private, Avel.” I said, trying hard not to scream.
“Then it shouldn’t be in the trash.”
I took the receipt out of his hands, folded it neatly into quarters, and then, under his watchful and visibly pained eyes, I tore the paper into eight separate pieces and put each one in the trash. My trash.
The next morning (he was always the first one to arrive and the last to leave, and because I once found a pink polo hanging in the bathroom and a bottle of detergent, I think he might have lived there) I found my receipt taped back together and hung up on the board.
“IMPORTANT. FOR TAX PURPOSES”. Even his handwriting pushed me over the edge. When he didn’t write in capitals, he brought out that damn ruler and managed to crack out one character every five seconds. The process was arduous and ridiculous and heartbreaking to watch, and it’s possible that the man had some mental issues, but I didn’t care.
I ran across the courtyard through the open door of Maniben’s apartment where I found him tottering around in his leather coveralls, throwing out used tea bags and mumbling to himself.
I told him that my privacy was being invaded. I told him that I couldn’t “work under these conditions”. I asked him what Avel’s job actually entailed.
“He’s a very methodical worker,” Mr. Surat said, with his eyes closed.
“He’s compulsive!” I felt on the brink of tears. I hadn’t felt so exasperated by another human being since my cousin’s Catholic wedding where I was forced to sit next to son of the owner of a shooting range who considered Hooters the be-all and end-all in Continental cuisine.
“We must all try to get along.”
I whined. I pined. Maniben closed his eyes and rubbed his hands together. His stoic response suggested that I wasn’t half as valuable as I thought I was and I felt terrible about myself for the rest of the week. If that strange little man preferred to lose me over the offensive Avel, than what in the world was the point of my college degree?
I made up my mind to quit the following Monday, my fortitude and sense of self worth reinforced by a weekend’s worth of wine and cheese. I woke up earlier than usual and set out what I considered to be a commanding outfit. I dressed and trained my thin, unruly hair into the ponytail that Maniben so liked, I put on a fresh pair of socks and I took a deep sip of air. It was just a job! I would find another one. You can’t be in a bad relationship if you hope to find a good one! I stared at myself in the mirror. No? Ready, set, blow.
I arrived at Practically Paris a half hour earlier than usual to find Avel already at it. This man was truly unbelievable. He was a one-man Taliban of passive aggressive activity.
He had taped up a bit of toilet tissue he’d found in the wastebin, and had managed to eek out “THIS IS WASTEFU” with a purple marker when I walked in. Even for him, rummaging through the assorted elements associated with the expulsion of natural waste was a new low. I was aghast. I felt as if I had been touched in a very dirty way.
Just as I gathered up the strength to throw a grown-up temper tantrum, Maniben ran in, his face and neck the color of a Japanese eggplant.
“You need to go.” He hissed. “They’re coming!”
Without a word, Avel removed his right knee from his stool, stuffed the toilet tissue in his pocket and left the unfinished missive on his desk. He grabbed his brown and white sweater from atop the computer and left without a word. Mr. Surat swept by me, (I still had my coat on), folded up my fold-up desk and went into the bathroom. I steered myself for a lecture on my inconspicuous toilet paper consumption, but he emerged five seconds later with a broom in his hand.
“Just sweep in the courtyard, yes?” His eyes were bright. “If they ask, you’re my maid.”
I put my hands on my hips, refused to take the broom and launched into an explanation of how I was no such thing, and what the hell was going on in the first place, when suddenly there was a conflagration of men at the office door in more leather than Maniben.
The one closest to the doorway held up a badge. Maniben let out a little sigh.
“Maniben Nayek Kosamblya Surat of 12 Villa Saint Jacques, you are being charged for the alleged trafficking of barbiturates and the false translation of medical documents. Do you have a lawyer?”
Mr. Surat said he did, and offered the men tea. Tea!
Broom in hand, I followed them outside. Maniben lived on the ground floor and his windows let out onto the courtyard. I tried to eavesdrop on their conversation, but they closed the door behind them, and in any case, Maniben’s French was absolutely indecipherable. I stood outside in the balmy summer air and slapped at the same spot for a while with my broom. Fifteen minutes later, Maniben emerged in a linen jacket with an envelope and a set of keys. He took the broom out of my hand and replaced it with the envelope.
“We tried!”
The officers and I watched as he locked up the office with Avel’s unfinished memorandum on the wall and his pens in separate categories. Maniben stared for a moment at the little office and then he spun around to face the gendarmes. I searched his face for the meaning of his words but his face was stoic and his eyes were clear. We tried to get you a Visa? We tried to offer low cost prescriptions to illegal immigrants? (Not likely, in a socialist country with free healthcare). We tried to provide Americans and the occasional Japanese tourist with a gay, if overpriced, inclusive tour of Paris? Damnit! I thought, as the heavy front door buzzed and closed behind them. I was out of work again.
