What I'd heard during the first hour of training should've spooked me enough to run out of the room and never look back. But I kept myself glued to the chair. Clutching at respectability had gotten me nothing. What little had remained of my savings was just enough to cover the rest of my son's college education, so I had to become flexible, to bear the unthinkable: to become a salesman, a furniture consultant, to be euphemistically precise.
About twenty of us sat in the windowless classroom at eight in the morning, checking each other out. The men were dressed in suits and ties, the women wore formal attire, too, as if we were executives attending a technology conference, not a sales 101 drill at the headquarters of YourRooms in Florida.
"Let's start with an introduction. From first row, left to right," the instructor, McNeal, said. I figured he was about my age, fiftyish. Not a hair was amiss on his head, but other than that, his appearance was so indistinctive that in a year I'd be hard pressed to remember who he was. He looked like a company lifer, at the zenith of his slow but steady rise from a floor salesman to corporate functionary. I'd met scores of them. In the Soviet Union, he'd be a party or union boss at some organization the size of YourRooms.
McNeal asked some basic stuff, which I thought of as throat clearing, then said this, "How many of you are married?" I doubted he genuinely cared but probably wanted to warm us up toward one another. From the corner of my eye I saw my first-row neighbors raise their hands, but I just cringed and neither raised my hand this time nor when he asked how many were single. I was the third kind: divorced, with an adult son in college, and still too shocked by my drastic impoverishment to look for a mate.
"How many of you are Christians?"
What a strange question. In which safe of YourRoom had he spent the past twenty years?
He counted with his finger. "Ten."
I glanced around to see the ones who obediently answered his call.
"And how many of you are Catholic?"
Next he'll be asking for atheist, agnostics, and Jews. Who should I be? I looked around mechanically. The three people who raised their hands as Catholic were different from the ones who were Christian, yet McNeal wasn't surprised.
"Excuse me," I said. "I don't understand."
"Don't understand what?" McNeal said.
"Aren't Catholics, Christians?"
"Where are you from?"
"Queens." I knew he wasn't asking if I was born in Volgograd. He'd think I was kidding if I told him the truth.
"Oh." He turned his attention to the manual and told us to open it on page five.
"I'm sorry, but I still don't understand."
"What is it again?"
"Aren't Catholic people Christians?"
He stared at me as if surprised to see such a dimwit being hired by the company. "Hmm," he said. "Page five."
I whispered to the guy on the right, "How can one be a Catholic and not a Christian?"
"You don't understand," he whispered back, shrugged, and opened his manual. "It's not the same." The others glared at me. Had they been listening at all? Or, maybe, they just wanted to get on with the program on account of the easy five-hundred dollars we would be paid for each of the four weeks of training.
* * *
We all acted surprised when Jesus, the young Puerto-Rican programmer, hadn't shown up for the class after the third day. McNeal crossed his name from the roster with a red pen. Scowling like a boot-camp sergeant he said, "By the end of the class training, half of you won't be with us. Of the remaining, half will be gone by the end of the store-floor training. Only one will still survive three months of selling. One. Who would it be?"
"Why Jesus?" I couldn't suppress the question. Jesus couldn't have been defeated by the rote learning of the proper customer greeting. His talent had shone through in the scene we all rehearsed from the play Modern Microfiber vs. Suede. "Was he let go?"
McNeal fixed his eyes on me but didn't deign an answer. I went through Jesus's possible transgressions. Was he Christian or Catholic? I didn't remember. He seemed to be astute and diligent in class. He dressed neatly and was getting the hang of this furniture thing, even becoming enthused over the gliding rockers in sectional sofas. What happened to him?
From then on, we were short one trainee almost every day. People didn't act doomed when I last saw them, nor did they share their suspicions or news with anyone, so I couldn't tell if their abrupt departure was voluntary. Just in case, I redoubled my efforts in class.
Li Lee had become my neighbor, having moved upfront from the decimated second row. I liked how our names alliterated: Ilya Levin and Li Lee. If she hadn't told me how many years she worked as a programmer, I would've thought she was twenty-five, not forty. Had I still been the head of IS department, I'd hire her in a minute.
For the tenth time that day, we were practicing greetings. I was the furniture consultant that round. "Welcome to YourRooms. Is this your first time at our store?"
"Yes, yes," Li Lee said with a polite nod, covering her smiling mouth with the back of her hand.
"We are running a special on Bedroom Inspiration and Wooden Expression," I made up the names of the furniture lines. "Twenty percent off this week, if you open a line of credit."—Li Lee giggled behind her handy shield—"Which room, or perhaps rooms, are you looking to furnish?"
"... are you looking to furnish today," Li Lee corrected me using her regular face, then put on the shy Chinese girl personae again.
"Are you looking to furnish today?" I repeated. We both rolled our eyes (after checking that McNeal stood with his back to us).
Li Lee pushed the manual aside, then grimaced and spoke in a mocking tone, but quietly, so McNeal wouldn't hear, "I'm looking for a sweater."
"Madam, we're out of sweaters. Would you care for a bedcover instead?"
"I wear extra small." She lowered her gaze.
"In this case, twin size would be perfect for you."
"Do you have a changing room?"
"Yes. This is it," I opened my arms. "This is our changing room." I couldn't get rid of the feeling that we were playing house. Between the two of us, Li Lee and I could design and program an entire sales system for YourRooms, instead we were being programmed to become salespeople.
McNeal turned around and stared at us, so I filled my lungs with air and exhaled audibly. "Welcome to YourRooms. Is this your first time in our store?"
"Yes, yes," Li Lee said.
"We are running a special on Bedroom Inspiration..."
* * *
McNeal had underestimated the attrition rate. By the end of the two weeks of class training, only nine of us remained, including Li Lee. Li Lee, the alliterative lily of my hope for happiness in what seemed like my afterlife.
The size of the paper on which my first paycheck was printed looked familiar, but I clenched my teeth and stuffed the check back in the envelope to avoid the urge to pick at my wounded pride and see the amount again: I used to make that much in four hours.
I walked into my apartment and assessed it with a critical eye. The one bedroom would probably look decent to most people, but its dingy frugality and vibrant neighborhood was all too obvious to me. It would be to Li Lee, if I ever got the nerve to ask her out and bring her here.
A sense of hopelessness overwhelmed me: I was down and out, an abandoned man past his prime, an adult orphan reduced to having to peddle furniture for a living.
My cell phone vibrated and buzzed. It was Zhenya, my ex, texting me to give her a call. I put it off. Her familiar manner of speaking irritated me. We were ghosts to each other. We'd had a wonderful family, or so I'd thought, until three years before, almost in unison with my job separation notice she wrote a dear-John to me. Later, I learned that she'd moved in with my best friend. Apparently, they'd had a decade-long affair right under my nose. Imagine that. Was it something a decent woman would do after a thirty-year marriage, two children, and a grandchild? Why and for what? Our friends were treating me as if it was I who'd done something wrong, as if only men could possibly look for greener pastures, in such late divorces the sympathy automatically on the wife's side. So in a way, our friends had divorced me, too.
My cell came alive again. "Cmng nxt wk wntr brk." Nathan, my youngest, the genius. He listed his late evening flight to Ft. Lauderdale and added "Hurrah!" Uplifted after seeing an exclamation mark in the otherwise typically abbreviated text, I flexed my muscles and shadow boxed. Maybe I wasn't yet done with life. Ten years from now, I'd be remembering this time with nostalgia. I still had hair on my head, I still had energy to work, I could still fall in love, I could still look forward to my son's success. I was still a man.
