Stingy Brim Trilby



  Stingy Brim Trilby

  Copyright 2014 Bull Garlington

  But what about your soul?

  “What?”

  “Your soul. What about—it’s a joke, man”

  Attorney Jim Finnegan smiled slightly, the merest purse of his lips, then nodded to the copy guy. “Ok then, I’ll pick these up at ten sharp.”

  “Good times, man.”

  “Of course.”

  Finnegan walked back to his office. He stopped at his secretary’s desk. Marge stopped what she was doing and devoted her attention to Finnegan

  Finnegan began laying documents on Marge’s desk. As he would lay them one down, Marge would date stamp the document with the electronic date stamp which sent the document index number to her desktop while placing a razor-sharp, blue, nine-digit number and date onto the front page.

  Each copy was fringed with colored tabs, each tab denoting a mistake, addition, question or revision. Each tab was numbered, the numbers recorded on Finnegan’s desktop and mirrored on Marge’s. Later, Marge would resolve each tab, find it on the desktop and record her resolution.

  Finnegan then produced a collection of pink pages, each with a paragraph carefully double-spaced. Finnegan waited until Marge had loaded a blank pink page into her printer then read each paragraph slowly as she typed it into the computer then reprinted her own copy.

  Each paragraph was instructions to Marge.

  When they finished, they laid the pages side by side, proofed them, signed them and date stamped with the aforementioned machine.

  “I’ll be in my office.”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you think the copy guy is weird?”

  “Impeccably so, sir.”

  “He seemed to make a joke about my soul.”

  “But you don’t have one, sir.”

  Finnegan stared briefly. His lips almost pursed. This outpouring of mirth was not lost on Marge.

  Finnegan’s soul sat on the edge of a couch across from them, shocked and appalled.

  Finnegan’s soul spent a lot of time on that couch. It knew Marge like the back of its hand. It watched her peel sticky notes off of documents everyday and could trace the arc her infuriated eyebrows had worn into the space above her desk like a groove in a rock. Finnegan’s soul knew the precise moment Marge would say perfunctorily and with solid precision—

  “As if I ever make a mistake,”

  --and mouth along with a grin.

  Finnegan’s soul knew by the timber of a folder’s slap that it was lunch and it would follow Marge down to the Cajun joint over on State where she would eat an ungodly amount of crawfish, her fingers and lips greasy with butter and roux, then share her private glee as she paid for each lunch from petty cash, annotating the expenditure as “copies per” in some client’s case. It was atrociously illegal, against everything she stood for, could get her boss disbarred and was just ferociously wicked. It made the craw daddy’s taste divine.

  Finnegan’s soul rose each morning to wallow in Finnegan through ablutions as regular as sunrise; stare out the window of the morning train, trying to read band flyers and decipher graffiti as Finnegan read briefs; and weather Finnegan’s inglorious routine with Marge where Finnegan’s soul lately found itself a surprised spectator. It used to stay in Finnegan’s office but no more. Finnegan’s soul found Finnegan profoundly fucked up, incomprehensibly neurotic, proactively irritating, a pedantic conversationalist, and a goddamned overtaxing rule oriented nitpicking jackass. Until lately, Finnegan’s soul thought it was merely the occulted voice of reason in the conflagration of urgency that was Finnegan’s waking mind. It had since learned it was really a separate being, a governor of sorts, a kind of curator for Finnegan whom Finnegan’s soul was more often referring to lately with exaggerated, nearly British disdain as ‘Shitbag’.

  One day Finnegan’s soul just said ‘fuck it’, threw its spectral hands in the air and walked off the job.

  Negotiations ensued. Shitbag spent some time entangled in a nameless dread, a sort of insect, cardinal, kind of vegetative haunt until Finnegan’s soul wandered back into the office out of sheer habit, looked at the pile of meat Shitbag had turned into, and realized there were vestigial responsibilities—avatarish addendums—to respect. They were enjoined. But Finnegan’s soul would not go into Shitbag’s office under any circumstances. The man defended lawyers who defended intellectual property patent troll lawyers for the love of god. Finnegan’s soul had standards. He split off each day, decleaved himself of Shitbag, and fell in love with Marge.

  There was no hope of course, as she didn’t fit Shitbag’s schematic of the perfect woman. For Shitbag, the perfect woman was a schematic. She was cute, though.

  Marge looked like Kirsten Dunst if Dunst were playing some hotter star’s older sister. She was prim and trim. She wore clothes fitted for an English nanny: brown tweed jackets with a lot of buttons and a matching pillbox hat. She carried a clutch, never a purse—women with purses were unorganized. She wore demur lipstick, no more makeup than was necessary, and White Shoulders perfume which she actually dabbed onto her shoulders before wriggling into her blouse each morning.

  There was a most remarkable aspect of Marge’s wardrobe, however, a finishing detail that drove Finnegan’s soul insane with anticipation each day.

  Finnegan arrived every morning at 9 am. Marge arrived precisely two hours earlier. Finnegan would arrive a few moments after she’d cleared her desk. Finnegan’s soul hovered within him like an impatient six-year-old boy until the elevator doors opened revealing Marge standing there as she always was, framed in the weird light reflected off the state building, waiting, in a brand new pair of shoes.

  Finnegan never noticed. Once. Ever. Finnegan’s soul couldn’t take it! It drove him apoplectic. He had counted, since he’d started sitting on the couch, 72 entirely separate pairs of shoes.

  Marge favored Nine West pumps. But as Finnegan’s soul began to track her brands he’d noticed Sergio Rossi, Versace, and even a pair of hand-sewn one-offs from Louis Vitton that had to have cost $1,700. And oh she teased. She was merciless.

  Finnegan would walk off the elevator as if he were walking through her. Marge would perform a maneuver as stealthy and calculated as a pickpocket, accepting his papers, coat and bag while handing him a 7 shot Tazo Chai, reversing her stance and following him into his office on his very heels. It was a tango. Sometimes, they almost touched.

  He watched for the same sly recalculation she’d performed for the crawdads but the shoes were decidedly not a workplace deceit. He would wake Shitbag late at night to perform sonambulaic calculations and by his best guess, Marge spent around $600 a week on shoes, assuming she only bought 5 pair and only one pair broke a buck fifty.

  Waking Finnegan was a pain in the ass. The guy had a photographic memory and Finnegan’s soul had to put calculators and notepads exactly where they were supposed to go, in their respective drawer organizer slots labeled “calc” or “n.p.” If he forgot, Shitbag would go into apoplectic shock and search and measure every item in the apartment in the mistaken belief he’d been burgled. Sometimes, truth be told, Finnegan’s soul moved things around just to fuck with him. And once it had relabeled the drawers randomly with nonsense tags: “q.v.”, “top only,” and “January”. Shitbag blew his whole weekend trying to figure it out.

  Today, though, today was too much. They rode the elevator as always, with Finnegan’s soul restraining itself from deliberately turning the Tribune to the funnies and trying to ignore the booming, sonorous recitation of headlines in Finnegan’s mind as he read, checking mostly for spelling errors and client mentions.

  “Practically moves his lips,” thought the soul. The doors opened.

 
; She wore a sea foam green jacket and matching stingy brim trilby, a knee length skirt the color of clotted cream, and an emerald green bow tie with a pearl stud. Finnegan’s soul stood its ground as Shitbag dove into tango, and it gazed at her feet: her languorous calves in lace, her feet clad in a luxurious cloche that pushed the envelope of “business shoe” far too close to “foot fetish”. They were also sea foam green with the tiniest, primmest emerald bow tie just where the buckle would’ve been. They were positively elven. She pirouetted under the papers and coat, delivered her Chai and stepped lithely into her boss’s office. Finnegan’s soul threw it’s awkward hands toward her in a graceless plead saying only “mwaaah!” into the air behind her nearly invisible sashay.

  When Marge took errands, Finnegan’s soul wandered. It spent a