This is how my job goes. Even in a good posting, nobody wants to know where the male guest of honor is supposed to sit.

That exquisite dinner your teachers in Home Economics talked about, the pause with fresh flowers and demitasse after a perfect day of poise and elegant living, well, nobody gives a rat's ass about that.

Tonight, at some moment between the soup course and the roast, everybody at the table will get to mutilate a big dead lobster. Thirty-four captains of industry, thirty-four successful monsters, thirty-four acclaimed savages in black tie will pretend they know how to eat.

And after the lobster, the footmen will present hot finger bowls with floating slices of lemon, and these thirty-four botched autopsies will end with garlic and butter up to the elbow of every sleeve and every smiling greasy face will look up from sucking out meat from some cavity in the thorax.

After seventeen years of working in private houses every day, the things I know the most about are slapped faces, creamed corn, black eyes, wrenched shoulders, beaten eggs, kicked shins, scratched corneas, chopped onions, bites of all sorts, nicotine stains, sexual lubricants, knocked-out teeth, split lips, whipped cream, twisted arms, vaginal tears, deviled ham, cigarette burns, crushed pineapple, hernias, terminated pregnancies, pet stains, shredded coconut, gouged eyes, sprains, and stretch marks.

The ladies who you work for, after they sob for hours on end, make them use blue or mauve eyeliner to make their bloodshot eyes look whiter. The next time someone socks a tooth out of her husband's mouth, save the tooth in a glass of milk until he can see the dentist. In the meantime, mix zinc oxide and oil of cloves into a white paste. Rinse the empty socket and pack it with the paste for a quick and easy filling that hardens lickety-split.

For tear stains in a pillow case, treat them the same way you would a perspiration stain. Dissolve five aspirin in water and daub the stain until it's gone. Even if there's a mascara stain, the problem's solved.

If you could call it solved.

Whether you clean a stain, a fish, a house, you want to think you're making the world a better place, but really you're just letting things get worse. You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you're changing a patio lightbulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you'll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you'll be dead.

Time is running out. There isn't the kind of energy you used to have. You start to slow down.

You start to give in.

This year there's hair on my back, and my nose keeps getting bigger. How my face looks every morning is more and more what you'd call a mug.

After working in these rich houses, I know the best way to get blood out of the trunk of a car is not to ask any questions.

The speakerphone is saying, "Hello?"

The best way to keep a good job is just do what they want.

The speakerphone is saying, "Hello?"

To get lipstick out of a collar, rub in a little white vinegar.

For stubborn protein-based stains, like semen, try rinsing with cold salt water, then wash as usual.

This is valuable on-the-job training. Feel free to take notes.

To pick up broken glass from that jimmied bedroom window or smashed highball, you can blot up even the tiniest shards with a slice of bread.

Stop me if you already know all this.

The speakerphone is saying, "Hello?"

Been there. Done that.

What else they teach you in Home Economics is the correct way to respond to a wedding invitation. How to address the Pope. The right way to monogram silver. In the Creedish church school, they teach how the world can be a perfect elegant little stage play of perfect manners where you're the director. The teachers, they paint a picture of dinner parties where everyone will already know how to eat a lobster.

Then it's not.

Then all you can do is get lost in the tiny details of every day doing the same tasks over and over.

There's the fireplace to clean.

There's the lawn to mow.

Turn all the bottles in the wine cellar.

There's the lawn to mow, again.

There's the silver to polish.

Repeat.

Still, just one time, I'd like to prove I know something better. I can do more than just cover up. The world can be a lot better than we settle for. All you have to do is ask.

No, really, go ahead. Ask me.

How do you eat an artichoke?

How do you eat asparagus?

Ask me.

How do you eat a lobster?

The lobsters in the pot look dead enough so I lift one out. I tell the speakerphone, First, twist off each of the big front claws.

The other lobsters I'll put in the refrigerator for them to practice taking apart. To the speakerphone I say, Take notes.

I crack the claws and eat the meat inside.

Then bend the lobster backward until its tail snaps away from its body. Snap off the tip of the tail, the Telson, and use a seafood fork to push out the tail meat. Remove the intestinal vein that runs the length of the tail. If the vein is clear, the lobster hasn't eaten anything for a while. A thick dark vein is fresh and still full of dung.

I eat the tail meat.

The seafood fork, I tell the speakerphone with my mouth full, the seafood fork is the little baby fork with three prongs.

Next, you unhinge the back shell, the carapace, from the body, and eat the green digestive gland called the Tomalley. Eat the copper-based blood that congeals into white gunk. Eat the coral-colored immature egg masses.

I eat them all.

Lobsters have what you'd call an "open" circulatory system where the blood just sloshes around inside their cavities, bathing the different organs.

The lungs are spongy and tough, but you can eat them, I tell the speakerphone and lick my fingers. The stomach is the tough sack of what look like teeth just behind the head. Don't eat the stomach.

I dig around inside the body. I suck the little meat out of each walking leg. I bite off the tiny gill bailers. I bypass the ganglia of the brain.

I stop.

What I find is impossible.

The speakerphone is yelling, "Okay, now what? Was that everything? What's there left to eat?"

This can't be happening because according to my daily planner, it's almost three o'clock. I'm supposed to be outside digging up the garden. At four, I'll rearrange the flower beds. At five-thirty, I'll pull up the salvia and replace them with Dutch iris, roses, snapdragons, ferns, ground cover.

The speakerphone is yelling, "What is happening there? Answer me! What's gone wrong?"

I check my schedule, and it says I'm happy. I'm productive. I work hard. It's all right down here in black and white. I'm getting things done.

The speakerphone yells, "What do we do next?"

Today is just one of those days the sun comes out to really humiliate you.

The speakerphone yells, "What's there left to do?"

I ignore the speakerphone because there's nothing left to do. Almost nothing's left.

And maybe this is just a trick of the light, but I've eaten almost the whole lobster before I notice the heart beat.

According to my daily planner, I'm trying to keep my balance. I'm up at the top of a ladder with my arms full of fake flowers: roses, daisies, delphiniums, stock. I'm trying to keep from falling, my toes curled up tight in my shoes. I'm collecting another polyester bouquet, an obituary from last week all folded up in my shirt pocket.

The man I killed last week is around here somewhere. What's left of him. The one with the shotgun under his chin, sitting alone in his empty apartment, asking over the phone for me to give him just one good reason not to pull the trigger, I'm sure enough going to find him. Trevor Hollis.