690: “You can . . .”
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 20
20
“YOU CAN JOT this down, too,” she said. “A person who will tell a small lie will tell a bigger one when the occasion calls for it.”
“Got it,” I said.
“Somehow, when I woke up, I had been demoted to maid. Apparently, Guy’s idea was that I should start at the bottom. That, at any rate, was the way he explained it when I said, ‘What? Me? Make beds? Clean toilets? Are you nuts?’ ”
“NO,” SAID GUY, with that amazing grin. Then he added, “At least I don’t think so, but then”—and he wrinkled his forehead as if he really were perplexed by this thought—“I guess most people who are nuts don’t think they are.”
Ariane gave him a poke. She would have let him do very nearly anything he wanted with her at about that time, but she was trying hard not to let it show.
“Look,” said Guy, “I’m doing what they do in the training program. Starting you at the bottom.”
“I’ve never understood why the people at the top think that’s such a good idea,” she said.
“It gives you a taste of what the work is like,” he said, with that unflinching earnestness. “You get an idea of what the people you will manage have to do. You find out what it’s like to do their work.”
“So you did this, too? Started at the bottom?”
“Sure. Of course.”
“You worked as a maid?” She twisted her mouth into a pout and dropped her eyelids, to show that she was skeptical, and adorable.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I sure did.”
“How long?”
“That’s not really the point.”
“How long?”
“A week.”
“A week!”
“Well, three days.”
“Okay, I guess I can take it for three days.”
“Look,” he said, with an unfamiliar flatness in his voice, “it’s going to have to be longer than that.”
“What’s going on?” asked Ariane. She had the worrisome feeling that things were not as they seemed.
“Business dropped off after the end of the season—”
“Oh, sure, that’s bound to happen—”
“—much, much more than anyone had expected. We should have had local business in the restaurant and lounge to carry us through, but it just isn’t there. I don’t know why, but it just hasn’t materialized. Maybe people here just can’t afford us or something.”
“Are we in trouble?”
“I may be in trouble. You know, I’m expected to perform. The place has to turn a profit. So I’ve got to cut back somehow but keep us running. So I’m opening the restaurant only on weekends.”
“Oh.”
“But I can keep you on—I can keep you around here if you’re willing to do whatever needs doing until business picks up in the spring.”
“So that training stuff was just—”
“Just between us. I will teach you everything I know. I meant that.”
“If I do ‘whatever needs doing.’ ”
“Yeah.”
The next morning, while Guy was giving the restaurant staff the news, Ariane was wrestling a maid’s cart along a meandering path that led to a cluster of bungalows and asking herself whether she was nuts.
[to be continued]
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