The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 (37 page)

Alas, none moved my blood from its usual course.

Homework done, I went into the field. At the theater I watched an eye-level parade as the end credits rolled, and at coffee shops I pretended to read while women walked out. On the bus I gave up even the pretence of reading. A week of this gave me only caffeine-spiked insomnia, teeth gummy from Jujubes, and a fragment of popcorn kernel stuck in a filling.

At work e-mail piled up ethereally in my inbox, and the message light on my telephone blinked like an eye splashed with picante sauce.

Anything truly awful gets an acronym. TB. DOA. HR. The white top copy of the form that also named me a marked man lay on my chair like a metaphorical thumbtack when I returned from another lunch hour where I had walked but did not eat. The time appointed, hand-written on it in a round, feminine hand, was 11:45 the next morning.

I divided the afternoon between vending machines and housekeeping. After animal crackers, I moved my personal files from hard drive to disks, in case the next day was my last. The security guys don’t give you much time as they escort you from the building, and they don’t necessarily care if the door hits you in the ass on the way out. After yogurt-raisin trail mix, I scavenged empty copy-paper boxes and started filling them with the objects that had for three years and seven months made my desk my very own space: bobbleheads from all four major team sports and two political campaigns. The picture of me with the previous CEO at the company picnic, taken only weeks before he won an orange jumpsuit for insider trading. After cheese curls late in the day, I speculated about who might have an opening or offer a letter of recommendation.

I went home to a night of fitful sleep, tossed through dreams about voluptuous sand dunes and swelling loaves of bread, hot from the oven. But overnight, my stomach had shrunk to the size of a pea. I couldn’t eat breakfast; I nursed my coffee like warm beer while an idiot DJ talked about how many moon pies he had eaten on a dare.

The first hours at work passed like kidney stones. I watched my e-mails mounting like so many love-starved rabbits and filled a few more boxes until it was time.

At HR, before I could so much as read a New Yorker cartoon, I was whisked out of the reception area and down the hall. The receptionist knocked once on a door and opened it just wide enough for me to pass through, like the entrance to a lobster trap.

The face on the other side of the desk looked vaguely familiar. At first it was a struggle, like a baseball announcer trying to figure out the destiny of a long fly ball on a windy day: it can’t be . . . it can’t be . . . it may be . . . could be . . . looks like . . . probably is . . . has to be . . . yes, yes, it is – a Home Run!

It was her.

Visible only from the desktop up, truncated like a newscaster, and, just as cruelly, visible only from the front, was the object of my dreams – who would also serve as the agent of my termination.

Good morning. I am Irene Nalgala. Nice to meet you, Mr Brown.

Actually, my name isn’t Brown.

Sometimes there is confusion in the files. Mr. Johnson, is it?

Not that, either.

I’m sorry
. At least she was getting closer.
Mr. Jones?

Third time was the charm.

Please have a seat.

I settled for a chair.

Have you been informed of the purpose of our meeting this morning?

Not really
. My imagination, though, had done a good job of filling in the blanks.
Am I being dismissed?

She lowered her voice like a funeral director comforting the bereaved.
Oh, no, Mr. Jones. Nothing of the sort.

I waited for the other shoe to drop, and it did, on my head.

You are probably aware, Mr. Jones, that your productivity recently has not been consistent with what your supervisor tells us is your usually impressive level. Part of what we’ll be discussing in our session is the company’s policy of assisting employees who are experiencing personal difficulties that affect their performance.

The polysyllables rolled along. I nearly looked for a Teleprompter on the wall behind me, but knew my looking would only be looked at in turn and find its way into my ever-expanding file.

She passed a form across the desk. My name and contact information were already filled in; I simply had to mark boxes next to conditions from alcoholism to yeast infection. I stopped for a moment at endometriosis to ask what it meant, then wrote a particularly large X.

I passed the form back across the desk with the gravity of a chess move, then waited. She – I could not think of her as Irene, or even Ms Nalgala – scanned the form with the ease of someone who had seen every possible combination before.

It looks like we have a baseline to work from
, she said,
and it’s certainly good that you’re not facing any of the challenges listed. As I’m sure you know, however, not every potential source of difficulty appears on the form. Are there any other issues that might be drawing your concentration away from work?

One or two, depending on how she counted.
Such as?

Bereavement, financial difficulties, the end of a relationship, some other recent loss or disappointment.

I mentally checked other “no” boxes. Over the last five years not even a car had died on me. Relationships had come, fortunately, and gone. What other losses? The credit card that slipped through my still-greasy fingers and down a manhole as I walked out of a rib shack in Memphis had long since been replaced. What disappointment? Basketball? On no day, on no court, would I ever dunk, but I had grieved and moved on.

None of her “other” categories quite fit. What would fit? Someone who had worked retail lingerie might know, but not me. For now, though, I didn’t have to volunteer anything. I could ingratiate myself, maybe even declare myself later. All I had to do was sit back and wait for the next question, which was:

Are you having an intimate relationship with another employee?
My inner lawyer emerged. What was “intimate”? What was “relationship”?

Please, Mr Jones.

At least she knew who I was.

The sessions will remain confidential unless there is information connected with a crime.

“Crime”? Did she have a licence for that ass?

I told what seemed like the most useful truth.
No, I’m not having an affair with anyone in my department, if that’s what you mean.

Are you thinking of having an affair with someone here?

Funny she should ask.
It has crossed my mind.

I appreciate your candor, Mr Jones. I hope we can continue to build on this trust.

Me, too.

I might be able to reassure you somewhat. You may recall that company policy restricts only relationships within the same department. Employees are free to socialize with anyone else, as long as their behavior is not disruptive of the workplace.

As she sorted through the stack of forms that was becoming my dossier, the bare ring finger of her left hand emerged from between the pages, unlined and smooth as her magnificent lower slopes. My heart, and other organs, leapt. Yet this didn’t seem to be the time to speak.

Her delicate hands sifted through the papers a second time, more quickly, then came to rest like the wings of a disheartened bird.

I hope you’ll excuse me for just a moment. I have to find another form that we need to complete the intake session.

Ms Nalgala – or was it Dr Nalgala? – stood and walked to a file cabinet behind her desk. She crouched to open the bottom drawer and rocked back on her heels like a major league catcher.

Words formed in my brain and turned into action that I could muffle, like a sneeze in a theater, but had no way to stop.
Hold that pose!
And then two more syllables slipped out.
Baby.

She turned.
Excuse me, Mr Jones, did you say something?

Yes
, but not something I wanted to repeat just yet.
I, uh, might need to blow my nose.

There is a box of tissues on the corner of the desk. I will be with you in a moment.

I pulled a tissue out of the box and brought it to my nose. I blew once, then again. Nothing. My sinuses had become a small Sahara.

She stood up – to my eternal sadness – and returned with a final form that forced me to give my voluntary consent to counseling.

She scooped the papers into a folder with an air of finality.
We have come to the end of our session for today, but we will be in touch
– There was an idea –
to schedule your next appointment
. She said something about needing lunch before her next appointment, and I was wafted out of the room in the way that people behind desks know how to do these days.

But I was not fired. The knot in my stomach unraveled, and at once I was terribly hungry. Hungry like the wolf, as the college kids said who hadn’t even been born when the song came out. Unpacking my boxes could wait. A thought seized me. Where would she, Irene Nalgala, go for lunch if she had only a short time between appointments? The burrito cart on the next block fell by a voluptuous wayside. My destiny might be served on the steam tables.

No one seemed to hear me singing snippets of songs as I made for the cafeteria. Almost every song that included the word
love
, I discovered, could be sung instead with the word
lunch
. Who’s to say that the O-Jays wouldn’t have taken the Lunch Train, or that the Ohio Players might not have taken the Rollercoaster of Lunch? Certainly not me.

A plan came as I waited in line for purportedly “Athenian” chicken. I could see if she needed Tabasco sauce, or some other, more appropriate condiment. Or I could simply take a table that would let me watch her lushly appointed coming and going. I took my laden tray and added a slice of pie and a cookie, perchance to share, to my usual diet cola. If there had been birds in the cafeteria, they would have sung sweetly.

I lined up at the left-hand cashier and watched the right-hand line began to move faster until there stood ahead of me, at about a two o’clock position, her. And her
ass.

My blood sugar must have plunged, or at least that’s the explanation I prefer. My hands shook as I set my tray on the rails. Which was still a foot away. The tray fell, carrying me with it. I hit the floor with a clatter of stainless-steel silverware and the clank of unbreakable foodservice crockery.

I couldn’t tell if my bones had proved as unbreakable. Still shaken, with one lavish mashed-potato sideburn, I sat up and checked for damage. Others came to help, but I waved them off and gathered myself. Waiting for heads to turn away from me, daubing foodstuffs from my face, I saw the lunchtime crowd as I had never seen it before: a profusion of shoes and pants, a moving forest of legs.

Just a little above two stiletto heels rested a pair of exquisitely chiseled and delicate ankles, detailed like the ivory sculpture that fills Asian gift shops in every shopping mall.

I could clasp each of those ankles in a hand like a prized gem or a precious egg. I could polish them with my tongue. The ache of my bruises faded. The embarrassment of being spattered from head to foot with lunch vanished.

I have never been a man for ankles.

But there are, of course, exceptions.

At your monthly doctor visit, the nurse uses a special tool to cut your wedding ring from your grotesquely swollen finger. “Only one snip,” she says, as if that makes it better. “A jeweler can fix it again, good as new.”

The mutilation will still be there in your mind’s eye, a severing of a sacred bond. You will never wear the ring again: you can never get it onto your finger after this, even at night when the swelling is down a little.

Your husband picks you up out front. He’s been getting a haircut while you listened to the rheumatologist. You can smell the fresh barbershop smell of the talcum on his collar, see little flecks of dark hair on the back of his neck, muscular and strong. He can lift you in and out of the bathtub when your knees or hips, or sometimes both, are too stiff.

He opens the door of the car for you, and helps you fasten the shoulderbelt and fumble on your sunglasses. “Any new prescriptions?” he asks, as he pulls out into traffic.

“No,” you say. His hands on the steering wheel are big and square and strong, the nails neatly trimmed. You had fallen in love with his hands first. You can see the gold band on his left ring finger, and you wonder if he ever takes it off, if he ever looks for a woman besides you, a bedroom gymnast to ease himself. He’s a good-looking man, your Jeffrey. His eyes are brown as coffee, and full of good humor. He plays tennis once a week with his friends from the Masonic Hall. You feel like a chunk of slowly petrifying wood. You imagine not being able to move at all, someday. Your doctor has said that knee or hip replacements are a possibility, so long as your overall health remains good. You don’t want to think about that just yet. You don’t want to think about what will happen when your elbows freeze up.

Old people have their hips replaced. You are only fifty-six. Jeffrey is fifty-eight and has hardly been ill a day in his life. You had fibroids. You had your gall bladder out. You spent six hours on your tail in the yard once because you’d slipped and couldn’t get back up again. If you didn’t love Jeffrey more than you love yourself, you’d be jealous of his health and vigor.

You can’t believe he’s still with you. Even though he spends vacation days taking you to the doctor. Even though he is willing to help you get up off the toilet in the middle of the night when your hands can’t grasp the rail. If that isn’t love, you aren’t sure what is.

You never thought it would be like this when you married him. You and Jeffrey were going to be one of those couples that went hiking in Nepal or spent their weekends rattling around the countryside buying folk art and old milk bottles. Instead, you can hardly walk around the mall.