THE ORIGINAL BOSS WAS his father, whom he could not turn from a decision, get praise out of, or beat in an argument. After delivering advice or an admonishment his father would say, “I just want you to be prepared for the world.” One day his father recounted an exchange that had occurred at work: “The boss said to me, ‘You always say no, you never say yes.’ I said to the boss, ‘You have plenty of people around here to say yes, how many do you have to say no?’ And do you know what the boss said to me? The boss answered, ‘How many do I need?’” He nodded, agreeing with the boss’s point, which his father did not seem to have understood. When he brought home a good report card his father said, “The marks don’t matter so long as you do your best.” This was unsatisfying because he was never sure that he had done his best. Still he did not doubt his father’s good will. (A psychiatrist later said that his trust of the world was due to his trust of his father—“a considerable gift,” the psychiatrist added.) He was expert at getting praise from teachers, being better mannered, spoken, and dressed than most of the students, as well as quicker and pleasanter-looking. And when an occasional teacher did not take to him he did not feel it reflected on him: the teacher either had an odd temperament or was stupid. Not that a teacher’s approval gave him much pleasure: if a teacher liked him he usually doubted the teacher’s judgment or more likely felt he had misrepresented himself to the teacher. In college he allowed himself to enjoy the approval of one professor of English who liked his themes and then his poetry. Once in conference in the professor’s office when he had made a clever remark the professor leaned across the desk and touched the back of his hand. “I was Adam to his God,” he told a friend later. The professor died in his senior year, and campus talk made it clear that the professor had been a homosexual. He wondered whether the professor had liked him because the professor was a homosexual or whether it mattered. When he took his first steady job the boss was a large-headed, thick-necked, dainty-fingered, pot-bellied, bad-breathed doctor of philosophy in history who smiled inadvertently at learning of someone’s ill luck, had a watery eye, visited distant cities to hear boy choirs, and cleaned his fingernails with a letter opener. One day when he was about to go to lunch with this boss the boss couldn’t decide whether to wear a topcoat: “I hate paying a quarter to someone for hanging it up.” “Then leave it,” he said. “They’ll think I’m cheap,” the boss said. “They won’t notice,” he said. “Don’t kid yourself,” the boss said. The boss ended by not wearing the coat and overtipping the waiter. This boss was incompetent and came in for public criticism, which forced the employer, who did not want to seem weak, to keep the boss in the job till retirement, at which point the boss had a stroke. One day in a restaurant he ran into the boss propped up like a dummy in bright clothes and eating soft food. At the end of a short conversation he said, “It’s been good seeing you,” and as he walked away the phrase “like this” occurred to him. He made this man a villain in his second novel, which diminished the novel; and he realized that an unresolved, resolvable problem is no subject for fiction. The next boss was a man ten years his junior who preferred to deal with contemporaries. The new boss tried to be the opposite of the predecessor by doing things like listening to and advising on the personal problems of staff members, by soliciting suggestions on professional matters from the nonprofessional help and then apologizing when the suggestions couldn’t be used. Having tried to be thought well of by everyone, this boss will quit in exhaustion. The next boss will also be young, and soon a pattern useful to the corporation will be set: young men moving quickly through the job, the job having become a testing place and stepping stone. He will realize that if this had been the case when he was young he would have attached himself to one of the bosses and moved up behind. He will have developed certain skills reputed to be inimitable, so that new bosses, ingratiating themselves with old employees, will say to him things like, “When I was a kid, a kid, I knew your work. I may not have known who was doing it, but, by God, I knew someone was doing it.” One day he will walk into the boss’s office and the conversation between the boss and an assistant will stop. The assistant will have been saying, “We can’t ask him to do that,” and he will realize that they had been talking about him and that he is seen as an aging loser whose illusions about himself should not be disturbed.