A Meaningful Life Read Free

lived in constant terror that one day his job would be snatched from him by a smart subordinate. He firmly believed that an office boy with pluck and stamina could rise to be editor, and he was accordingly careful to select his office personnel for cowardice and lethargy. In fact, he’d never had a spot of trouble with office boys, but he’d once been forced to make life so miserable for a junior copy editor that the man had finally quit, a little hysterically. The somnolent Lowell Lake was just his sort of man, and Crawford had seen to it that he rose swiftly through the ranks to a position where he served as a buffer against any threat from below. The road to the editorship lay through the managing editorship, and even if they got Lowell, it would still be possible for Crawford to pick them off before they were able to gather for another spring. Under these circumstances, Lowell’s sudden display of unprecedented energy was alarming indeed, and Crawford scarcely knew how to deal with it. It contradicted nature and defied experience and confirmed his darkest and most secret fears that someday they would contrive to get him no matter what he did to stop them.
    â€œAny idiot could do this kind of work,” Lowell snarled, regarding a piece of paper as though some outrageous insult were written upon it. He initialed it viciously, put it in his Out basket, and picked up another. “Any idiot,” he repeated.
    â€œNow, see here, Lake,” began Crawford hesitantly.
    â€œDo you realize that I’ve never fixed a pipe in my life?” Lowell raged. “What do I know about plumbing? I’ll tell you what I know about plumbing. I don’t know shit about plumbing.”
    â€œHas everybody around here gone stark staring mad?” bellowed Crawford in desperate mimicry of his hero. He stuck the cold stump of a cigar in his mouth and stormed into his office, braying the name of the senior copy editor, who promptly appeared, only to be told to go soak his head.
    â€œI’ve got it figured out,” Lowell told his wife that night as they prepared supper together. Lowell was cutting up the vegetables and his wife was cutting up the meat. “I know what my problem is. I’m not having a meaningful life. There you have it in a nutshell.”
    â€œI knew there was something the matter with you this morning,” said his wife.
    â€œThere was nothing the matter with me this morning,” said Lowell, taking a big swallow of his gin and tonic. He’d been drinking gin and tonic since he came home, and by now he was pretty drunk. “I mean, that wasn’t it. It was something else. Do you realize that something has been the matter with me for years? Years?”
    His wife looked at him over her shoulder with an expression of perplexity tinged with alarm, as though she considered it possible that he was on the verge of confessing a secret passion for Arlo Povachik, their middle-aged, half-witted doorman who was seldom on duty when he was supposed to be. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” she said. “You’re not being very clear. Maybe you can explain it better.” For a computer expert, she did not grasp concepts very easily, if at all, but she was tenacious and seldom gave up. Her mind was capable of worrying an unclear concept for hours on end, shaking it like a rag doll until she had found out whether it was good for her, bad for her, significant in any way, or utterly meaningless. In recent years, Lowell had grown wary of this apparently incurable tendency, and he was usually able to nip it in the bud with a swift, simplistic lie. He lied now, drunk as he was.
    â€œI don’t know what was the matter with me this morning,” he said, unsteadily pouring himself a fresh drink with more gin in it than tonic. He returned to the table and began to slice up the carrots every which way. “I must have been having a