Personal Reference
Dear Hallanote,
Among the detritus, the falling leaves of sales pitches and charitable appeals and utility bills, like a bit of shiny gold foil at the top of a pile of rubbish, your request for a personal reference was at the top of my inbox. A name on the email subject heading that I haven’t seen in years.
Betsy.
You have found me on a peaceful morning at the coffee shop enjoying an almond croissant and a flat white, preparing for yoga. Her name has made the calm needed, the measured breathing, the concentration impossible.
Your name counteracts this. Hallanote is such a pleasing combination of syllables, the buried words acting at the edge of my subconscious, bleached of meaning and reengineered to pass through the blood brain barrier. The soothing murmur of the committee and highly paid consultants. A gray rock. Good work. I’m not paid to name things anymore. I imagine you are something between media and tech. Maybe a workflow tool, something that claims to add thoughtfulness to the process.
The professional part of the query is easy to dispense with. She will be perfectly adequate for whatever task is needed in your corporate hive. She will stand in the conference room and eat birthday cake without complaint. I’m sure that she meets whatever qualifications were posted. Whether you hire her or someone else will depend on whatever unwritten, unspoken goals and biases exist at your company. She was beautiful when I knew her, but I am sure that won’t be a factor. Not at an endeavor with the high-minded name of Hallanote.
You have also asked me to rate her character on a scale from 1 to 10, with ten being the most reliable saint-like person in the world and one being a narcissistic fabulist.
I haven’t worked in years. I’m no longer familiar with the players or the game. What I have managed to do with this time was to write a crown of sonnets. They are terrible. One forced rhyme after another, but how many people right now, this moment, among all the endeavors of humankind, how many are writing a crown of sonnets? One, maybe, two? This is the unique perch from which you disturb me to pass judgment on my memories of another human being.
You should ask someone else. Anyone else. Go to the convenience store next to her old job. Flash a picture of her and ask the attendant if she were kind. And efficient. Were her cards declined? That would be better information. Surely, you wise and abstractly connected geniuses of the stern but warm typography, the large ‘H’ in Hallanote like two pillars of support to the lower-case letters, know how little my words are worth.
Perhaps some basic Google search combined with an algorithm will discount my words appropriately. Maybe there is very little at stake for her in my response. I imagine if she really wanted to do the work of Hallanote, she would have chosen a better personal reference. Without context, you can’t know why I am such a wildly inappropriate choice for the bland comments that would reassure a HR department that they aren’t getting a despicable boat rocker.
She was the reason that I was let go and the sparked rumors from that firing is the reason that I was unable to find further employment in my field. Even that has turned out okay. I live a near idyllic existence. Every day I wake when I please and walk down the hill on the hiking trail to the village that sits by the lake. They serve coffee at the bookstore and the only bar and grill in town looks out onto the water. If I keep to my routines and forgo the capitals of Europe, I have enough money to die in my sleep twenty years from now. If my life now lacks variety, it has made up for it in scenic efficiency as I move against the backdrop of the piney hill and lake, switching them just by spinning around. I’ve worked hard on this version of myself.
You have jumped to conclusions. You think I was some kind of sexual aggressor. Something that the well-crafted policies of Hallanote would have weeded out long ago. I was not the ogre in this story. That role belongs to someone else higher up the ladder than me. I was a victim of jealousy. I was fired to remove an obstacle. Betsy was troubled by her relationship with this man. Who started it and how eagerly it was entered into by both parties, how much the trappings of the office added to his appeal, whether she was the first or one of many that he had plucked from the cubicles, I can only speculate about because I have never talked to him about his half of the equation. You are only asking me to comment on her character.
At happy hour, she complained about him. How she had to wait around for the least bit of attention. How his wife had found out about another affair and was watching his every move. She complained and I waited. I nodded and listened without offering judgement. Eventually, we found other things to discuss and that sliver of fake time, the hour between work and home, gradually lengthened. I think with more time she might have fallen in love with me. One night at her house, had it not been for an inopportune call from him, we would have been physical. The call broke the mood. I tried not to overhear the conversation that she took behind the closed door of her bedroom, but I did hear my name a few times. I knew there would be trouble. She came out of her room with apologies. At her door, she kissed me on my cheek. She dismissed me and I walked down the hallway and pushed the elevator button. While I was waiting, she came out again and kissed me for real. It was a little thing she gave me before she gave the rest to him.
A week later. I dropped a five page love letter written in blank verse on Betsy’s desk, and thirty minutes later, I was called into the boss’s office and fired. I could tell you about the positive work evaluations of the last decade. None of that mattered. And besides, every incompetent person on the planet has a drawer full of them. When I left the office, security joined me with a box and marched me to my cubicle. Phil and Louie stood so close to me that I could smell their competing aftershaves. I had played softball with them and ate wings and drank beer with them in the amber glow of victory. Whatever he told them that I did was terrible. That wouldn’t let me touch my computer again. No farewell email from me.
Standing on the sidewalk with my box of office knick-knacks at my feet, I called her and she didn’t pick up. I tried texting her and I was blocked. I don’t know what she could have done but she was the only other person in the world that knew that my firing wasn’t right. I wanted her to say something. I could understand if she needed the job, but a year later she quit and what she did after that, I have no idea. The boss was brought down a month later by the messy ending of the previous office affair. His wife forwarded some torrid emails to the entire company. The affair was with the head of the HR department and involved the shiny black conference table in the large conference room. I got all this from a guy in the mailroom who was sympathetic to me and forwarded the emails. I blush when I think of the language.
I’m going to recuse myself from the character question other than to say that she didn’t sleep with him to move herself forward in the company. Do your own math to get the number between 1 and 10. I imagine that she did it out of boredom. Sometimes in the clockwork of my perfect repeating day, I get bored. I know that if certain opportunities presented themselves to me I would take advantage of them, just to make the next moments more bearable. At thirty, she had just started to hear mortality in the blood rushing by her ears. I don’t blame her for reacting poorly, and in my book, boredom is an adequate excuse for anything that doesn’t hurt someone else. Of course, I, on the surface of things, was hurt. And the very thing that offended the lothario never happened. It was very dry kindling that had burned me up.
I’m not nostalgic for the relationships that I have had. The thinking I spend in the sock drawer of the past is about the women that I could have slept with. The ones where both parties had made some initial declaration, but fate or common sense stopped the proceedings. I still think of Betsy occasionally. What’s new about this decade is that sometimes I don’t think about anybody. Sometimes the geese honking above the lake and the sunset breaking into ripples is enough. Hallanote, you should ask me for a character reference on this lake. You should ask me about the blue under the blue with the reflected clouds sailing through. Those are adapted lines from the ninth sonnet in my crown.
I know that he’s not the subject of this query, but I saw the boss once more at the bar and grill. You should hire him. Except for his troubling lack of boundaries, he was good at his job. He was on a vacation with his family. He started talking to me at the bar, and I could tell that he had completely forgotten that he had fired me. I wonder who he thought I was. He expected to have all the same claims upon me. To pontificate his smallest musings, assured of my attention.
I asked him how Betsy was and then the memories were upon him like a cave full of disturbed bats. He looked back at the holiday card family that he was hiding from at the bar, like they were a life raft. I like to think that at that moment I was offering his soul a chance at true salvation. Just the briefest, mangled, stuttered, under his breath apology would have been enough. My therapist said this was a grandiose thought. I don’t know. Can you feel little and grandiose at the same time? My better self says hire her, Hallanote. Hire her for God sakes. You should run to her with the news that all is forgiven.
Cordially, cordially, cordially.
Send.
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Reader Comments
I enjoyed this story a lot. Mark Jacobs