Personal Days by Ed Park Read Free Book Online Page B

days.
    Toastmaster
    Jules, mad Jules, does many things now that he’s no longer with us.
Getting fired is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,
he says. But they all say that.
    Most of his hours are spent at his much-photographed restaurant in which everything is cooked in a toaster oven. How did he scare up the money? As things went sour for him at the office, he began moonlighting as a valet at an exclusive strip club on Eleventh Avenue. The tips must have been fantastic and Pru jokes that maybe
he
was the one taking it all off.
    The toaster-oven place has one of those trisyllabic names that are all the rage now. Terrapin, Parapet, Happenstance? We can never remember. We regret not making it to the grand opening. Maybe it’s just Restaurant.
    Business was so brisk the first month that he bought two more toaster ovens and hired a part-time toastmaster to help out during the busy lunch hour.
    Circumflex, Herringbone, Anagram?
    Some of us finally visit him for lunch, a field trip. We’re happy he’s doing so well. The goodwill lasts about five minutes before we become completely jealous.
    He keeps making weird remarks about the office, not to make us feel bad but because he’s still obsessed with it. He wants up-to-the-minute details on Maxine, whom he’s never even met.
    You don’t know what it’s like working alone,
Jules says.
There’s no one to talk to.
    Is he bored already? Now we’re disappointed. Our interest was in seeing someone thrive, post-firing. And not just doing another office gig but pursuing the creative life, if putting things in a toaster can be called creative.
    We all have our little side projects that we don’t like talking about. Jack II takes blurry Polaroids of urban detritus and unusual pavement cracks. Lizzie goes to Central Park or the Met most Saturdays and sketches. Laars has lead-guitar ambitions. Sometimes when he doesn’t know you’re there you can see his left hand squeezing out imaginary notes as his head nods to a secret beat. Pru knits more than she cares to admit, sweaters and scarves and baby socks for distant nieces. When Crease took over Jason’s desk, he found a hundred poems sealed in an envelope. And surely the aloof Jonah has an alternate life—weekend woodworking, novel in drawer, libretto in its fifteenth draft.
    Celery, Colophon, Venison?
    All present agree that Jules looks better than before. At his low points, back in the office, he resembled someone you might find in a film for a college psychology course: sleep-deprived, robotic, convinced that it was OK to apply electric shocks to small plasticine dolls labeled MOM and DAD . Now a photo crew from a Japanese magazine arranges his collar and smoothes his hair and dabs his brow.
    Cataract, Polyglot, Rolodex?
    We help ourselves to more lemonade and order the eggs Benedict.
Is this how you get salmonella?
Lizzie wonders.
    The photographer says,
Big smile!
    The deletionists
    Pru reads novels on the subway for her book club, stern-looking paperbacks with matte covers and enigmatic titles. She gets a record-breaking
four
personal days a year, which she negotiated when she was hired, and traditionally she’s used them to finish a novel she couldn’t put down. She likes curling up on the couch but she says she actually gets the most reading done while on the subway. We imagine her getting on the train with a tote bag full of books and reading as she loops around the city, from Herald Square up to Inwood, from Astoria to Coney Island.
    She’s read several that have
-ist
in the title:
The Pragmatist. The Vertiginist. The Deletionist.
Then there’s a crop of books with the possessive form of a famous person’s last name, followed by a noun.
Napoleon’s Pencil. Freud’s Knickers. Shakespeare’s Quandary.
    Lizzie says she hates books, which is somehow adorable. She uses her personal days for manicures and things like that. In May, Laars called in sick and went to the movies instead. It was three in the