Just One Catch by Tracy Daugherty Page B

after receiving his diploma, he perused the want ads in the paper. The following Monday morning, he went back to the city to canvass employment agencies.
    An outfit on Beaver Street, in Manhattan’s Financial District, sent him to the General Motors Building, which he knew so well from his Western Union days, to an interview with the Manhattan Mutual Automobile Casualty Company. He was crushed to discover that the lovely Miss Peck (or Beck) didn’t remember him. Another secretary, a Miss Sullivan, followed by her boss, talked to Joey for a few minutes, then offered him a job as a file clerk for sixty dollars a month. The company provided liability insurance to taxis, limousine services, and independent travel operators. Files proliferated whenever an accident occurred; Joey’s task was to shuttle them to and from the appropriate desks until they were no longer required, at which point they were banished to the basement storeroom or to the even more morguelike warehouse in midtown Manhattan for the deadest of dead records. Joey dreaded entering these shadowy catacombs, where people’s lives were piled up and discarded. On the other hand, he liked seeing how fragmented bits of information could be cataloged, cross-referenced, saved—the abstract made concrete, shuffled and reshuffled into manageable form, or mixed until surprising new information emerged.
    On most days, his mother packed him a lunch of seeded rolls, canned salmon and onion, and apples, oranges, or bananas. He discovered he could waste time easily while pretending to search for a file he’d already found. He also learned that stairwell landings between floors, as well as the dead-records storeroom, were trysting places for his slightly older colleagues. A young woman named Virginia, who had been to college, liked to flirt with him, and he developed a major crush on her. He would follow her into the storeroom, excited and a little frightened. Her first intimacies with him were verbal—titillating confessions: troubles with a lawyer and an adjustor in the company, both of whom she was dating, and both of whom wanted her to be more “accommodating.” She also said an elderly married man in an office upstairs always asked her out for drinks and dinner after work. He was sweet and polite, and merely enjoyed her attentions, but he seemed sad. Joey was astonished at the subterfuge, desperation, and shenanigans that underlay otherwise-decorous lives. Virginia’s amours with others made her all the more desirable—and a bit beyond him.
    Joey hated returning to Coney Island in the evenings after work. He delayed the subway ride as long as he could. One night, he asked his friend Lou Berkman to join him in the city for an opera. Joey had become enamored of classical music, listening to the radio, and he had gone to see Carmen at the Met one Saturday afternoon. The performance had involved live horses onstage, and he couldn’t stop regaling everyone he saw about the spectacle. With Berkman, he seriously miscalculated; his friend had no patience for the dancing or songs; the seats were cheap—high up and uncomfortable—and the score, Wagner’s Tannhäuser, was hard for the boys to follow. Berkman swore off opera for the rest of his life. Joey found himself between worlds: longing for something more than Coney’s dead ends, yet unable to learn enough, fast enough, to run with the sophisticates he witnessed all around him in the city.
    At Casualty, two of his colleagues got drafted. One of the boys’ mothers threw a large dinner party in her son’s honor at her house in the Bronx. The family was Italian. Though Joey had known a lot of Italian kids in Coney Island, he had never been invited to eat in any of their homes. This was his first full Italian meal and he didn’t understand the concept of multiple courses. He stuffed himself on spaghetti and meatballs before watching chicken, vegetables, and