Not Into What I Like

Have you ever tried to change your identity? I don't mean changing your first, last names and the middle initial, no, I mean changing your persona, the way that others will or ought to perceive you. I suppose that joining a mad religious cult or becoming a drug addict on the streets of the city would be changing one's identity, but again, I have in mind a conscious effort to do it.

It's a subject that has fascinated me since childhood. Literature and arts are full of explorations of it: The Count of Monte Cristo, Jekyll and Hyde, Michelangelo Antonioni's Passenger, examples off the top of my head, not even including the novels I've read this year, where in at least three of them this topic dominates or comes up in one way or another in countries such as 18th century France and 21st century North Korea. (Here allow me to recommend Jean Renoir's excellent adaptation of Stevenson's classic, titled Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier, with the great Jean-Louis Barrault.)

It was a marvelous opportunity.  My friend James, whose sister married into the family that owned Desmond Industries, alerted me to it.  The job was that of a public relations man for the family and for the privately  held company.  But it required someone from a higher social class than mine. I hadn't gone to the right schools with the right people, didn't speak French or German, only colloquial Puerto Rican Spanish that I had picked up while living in the islands, didn't have the proper manners, and my socks didn't reach my knees.  "You can do it," assured me James, whose own sister had climbed the same steps becoming a refined New England  princess in the process.  It would be like the carefree and clumsy Bertie Wooster trying to become the fine Mr Jeeves, a prole more aristocratic in manner than himself.

And so I bought a navy blue suit, white shirt and red necktie, all for $15 at a Salvation Army store downtown, and I headed to the mansion in Connecticut for the interview with the family.  I had prepared myself recalling from high school all the Latin sayings and cliches, and looking up some French proverbs, as well as a handful of Russian ones.  "No, not the Russian!"  warned me James, "That would be going downscale, peasantry and tsars!".  After a lookover by a couple of stiff looking servants, I was led to the library and met there by Sylvia, the attractive thirtyish matriarch of the family and chairwoman of the company's board of directors, who I later learned was separated from her husband, an executive there, and her brother Laurent, whose middle initial on the business card  he handed me was "D", making me  wonder if it stood for Desmond, because their last names were not Desmond, and neither was the last name of the founder of the company one hundred years earlier, but I didn't dare asking.

They described the job and told me that it was being held by Jacques B. a French Canadian, who, after training me,  would be leaving in three month's time for Canadian diplomatic service.  They asked me a few questions about myself, and I managed to pepper my answers with a few of those Latin and French bon mots which they understood perfectly, before Laurent excused himself saying he had a polo game to attend with writer Jerzy Kosinski.  After he left, Sylvia pulled her dress above her knees, and insisted that I join her in a drink of sherry and espresso coffee which were brought on a silver tray by one of the servants.(Yes, there was a button by her chair to ring up a servant.)  She asked me if I had read Kosinski, and I had, in contrast to the popular New York writers, whose neurotic topical novels I disdained, and she offered before I said anything that she hated them too, preferring Borges, Cortazar and Cela, the only American I've ever met who read Camilo Jose Cela. I lied and told her that I intended to read Cela in the original Spanish.  Then she asked my favorite Mozart symphony, and I said the Haffner, which happened to play on the radio as I was driving there, "Especially the second movement", and I hummed the melody for her. "Yes, the Haffner!" she exclaimed, and I figured she must have been listening to the same station.

I was hired for a month long trial period, which suggested to me that they would be testing two more candidates before Jacques' departure in three months.  They gave me a cash advance to fill my wardrobe, I bought suits and shirts and neckties, returning the sales receipts as requested.

Jacques turned out to be a pleasant chap, and a character I figured I'd have to emulate to succeed at this job.  I aped his relaxed manner, his half-smile and his light joke making, suppressing as well as I could my usual crude habits, backslapping and "a man walks into a bar with a crocodile" jokes, while we traveled to Washington where we met both Senators from the state, and to New York where we spoke with the mayor.  No hard bargains were made with the politicians, just casual conversations about the weather and sports (I needed to catch up on baseball knowledge), but however obliquely they were discussed, there were deals, favors, and promised contributions to re-election campaigns.  "Don't ever mention or even think the word 'bribe'!" told me Jacques after one visit, "We're not in Paraguay!"  He had an office at the company headquarters, and a salary paid by the company, but he reported to Sylvia.  He assured me that I wasn't to be overly concerned with the internal politics between the company and the family. "Easy does  it," he advised.

I was acquiring a new identity.  My girlfriend Marilyn confirmed it shortly before the month passed, telling me:
"You've changed!"

"Well, thank you very much, my dear lady," I replied.

"Not into what I like!", she retorted.  She used those exact words, which I've retained in memory all those years, 'not into what I like!'

Her worries would soon be over, as after a month I was thanked, paid in cash, tax free, and asked to sign a secrecy agreement.  I didn't get the job, and didn't get it two months later after they presumably tried two other candidates.   Who got it, I didn't know, and didn't care to know.  As to why, James told me, "It was Sylvia!", just as I had suspected.   She expected me to make a pass at her,  I was certain,  and I hesitated, kept postponing, waiting for the right occasion that never arrived.  Time was short, and I simply flopped.  And then, it was the matter of a test.   She tested me once, telling me in confidence that her husband's time at the company was coming to an end.  It sounded like I was the only one to know about it.   I can keep a secret, and kept it,  which was, I figured later, not what she intended me to do.  She was hoping (I suspect)  that I would share it with James who would spill it to his sister, and then it would take a path that Sylvia had planned for it.   I failed.  Women test men all the time, often realizing only afterwards that the little  intrigue  they had concocted was a test, especially when men, clueless as we often are, fail these exams.   It's happened to me a number of times,  with, as you well know,  sometime tragic results for my career and private life.

In any event,  I brought the envelope filled with cash home,  threw it on the table,  sparkling new $100 and $50 bills, and said to Marilyn, "Look baby, I'm unemployed and we're rich, let's go to Disneyworld!" Which is what we did.