What He's Poised to Do: Stories (15 page)

“Well, I don’t like the whole business of it,” Schiff said. “It’s distasteful.”

“Also, in the film, many of the Africans are wearing American T-shirts. And not just any shirts. Did you know that after sports championships are played, the shirts announcing the victory of the losing team, which have of course already been printed, are shipped to Africa? It’s like there’s an alternative reality there.”

“Or here,” Schiff said. And that is how it went: Mortenson moved from subject to subject, like a child discovering the very process of discovery, and Schiff functioned punctuationally, always with a heavy sense of judgment. It was like watching two painters work side by side; Mortenson with more colors in his palette, Sciff furnishing the sense of form.

Toward the end of the meal, they turned to practical matters, specifically to personnel, and to the sense that they would have to settle a few questions before they went away again. They were traveling often that summer, as they were handling a pair of cases involving police shootings of unarmed young men in central Florida and southern Georgia. After they had returned from the previous trip, one of the secretaries had left—the rumor, as usual, was that it had to do with Mortenson—and Amy, one of the other secretaries, was out on maternity leave. “We’re down two,” Schiff said, “and we need someone new.” They discussed the issue in front of everyone, which was their way.

“What’s your feeling about Lisa Foster?” Mortenson said.

“Who?”

“The Foster girl. I told you the other week. We got a letter of application. She wants a summer position. Or we could promote Jim here to a real job.” He swiveled the chopstick toward me.

“Promotions take time,” Schiff said, sighing with a heaviness that would have, in another man, been comic. “Lisa is her name? Her father’s the doctor?”

“A hell of a doctor.”

“Let’s have her in for an interview.”

“I jumped the gun on this one,” Mortenson said. “I had Stacy schedule her for tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll be here,” Schiff said.

No one asked me, though I would, as it turns out, be most affected by the whole business.

W
HEN
L
ISA
F
OSTER FIRST CAME
into the office, it was out of the rain. She shook off a coat and then lifted the damp hair away from her face. It was light to the point of white, even when wet. I knew her from around town: her father was a doctor who had treated my mother for something mysterious years before, and who had come by the house with a dignified look on his face while she was dying. He was an unhealthy man himself who somehow managed to look like a matinee idol. His wife was a compact blonde whose features were harder than she would have wished. And yet they combined perfectly in their daughter, who was short and buxom, a bit flat in the nose and deep in the eyes, and so powerfully attractive that when she entered the office I stepped out from behind the filing cabinet and took her coat without thinking.

“Thank you,” she said, and the way she neglected to say my name told me that she knew it. Mortenson appeared and took her into the conference room, where Schiff was waiting. I sat and covered the front desk for Stacy, who was late. Or rather: I pretended to cover for Stacy and I watched Lisa Foster. Her face did not look like the face of a stranger. Everything about her reminded me of another woman, but when I thought of those other women I was reminded of her. Inside the room, Mortenson asked questions with false seriousness, and Schiff occasionally gave an equally false laugh.

She got the job, of course. I don’t think it was ever in question. Her father, it seemed, had also treated Mortenson’s wife on a matter some years before. “Just in time,” Mortenson said, though he did not elaborate. They put her behind a boxy desk up front that was fenced in by a putty-colored partition. She said hello every day to everyone as they came through the door. To me, she gave a little wave that at first seemed like no more than professional obligation. When I decided, quite independent of any evidence, that she was not the kind of woman to act out of obligation, I started waving back.

L
ISA WAS A TALENTED GIRL
—she was a fine painter who was also taking classes in architecture—but perhaps her most important trait was her lack of belief in herself, which in turn produced a fine brand of aggression. When I made a comment, she would contest it, no matter what it was. If a joke failed to find its mark, as it often did, she would tell me flatly why it was unfunny. “I’m assertive, not aggressive,” she told me. “One is about protecting your own space; the other is about moving into someone else’s.” I accepted the definitions but not the diagnosis. That first week, she stopped me as I went downstairs for lunch. “I’ll join you,” she said. “Let’s eat in the little park.”

We went across the street to a bench, which was in a shady, quiet spot that seemed all the more so after the hot, crowded stretch of road we had to cross to get there. We put our sandwiches out on the table and weighed down napkins with bottles of juice. Afterward, she smoked a cigarette. That first day, we didn’t have what I would call a full conversation. She made observations about the people in the office and I agreed, usually readily. She knew Mortenson was a wolf even before Stacy confessed to her in the women’s bathroom. “He takes her to motels,” she said, “not because he can’t go to her place, but because he kind of gets off on the sleaziness of it. He’s a good judge of character, though. She said she does, too.” Schiff, she held, was a great man. “But the kind of great man no one will ever know. He’s so shy. He turns away from me when I’m talking to him. And to have a man that large turn away? It’s a blow to the ego.” She told me that her life as an artist was, while not temporary, not necessarily permanent. “Not that I’ll ever stop painting, but I have a feeling that later on I might want money, or things that I can get with money. I don’t know how I’ll handle being poor down the line.” She said she enjoyed working in the office, that she imagined that she was ordering the world, or at least giving order to a part of it in a way that might spread outward, like a healthy disease.

The next day at lunch, I was a little bolder, sometimes frowning at things she said, sometimes laughing. The third day, I spoke up. “I remember coming to this park as a kid,” I said. “Fourth of July.”

“Really?” she said. “Me too. I was afraid the fireworks would fall on me, and I hid under that tree over there.”

“Oh, I remember you now,” I said. “The coward.” Insulting her, even in jest, was not an easy thing, but it yielded the desired result. She laughed and moved closer to me on the bench; between us there was a thin band of heat. She had also fallen silent, which was rare, and I had time to study her: the way her clothes, which were always tight, seemed insensible to her dimensions. That night, when I thought back on the day, I felt a thickness in the pit of my stomach. I had a girlfriend back at college, almost, and another girl who was waiting if that didn’t happen. Lisa could have been a summer fling, but she was not a summer fling. Her center of gravity was too low. It was wrong of me to hope for her, because my life was loaded up, and she was not the thing that would, if added, make it lighter.

Still, if I was content not to have her, I also did not want to watch her go elsewhere, and I made a point of keeping our lunch plans at least twice a week. For her part, she clearly felt some displeasure at her own excitement as well, and so she leveled the frame by reminding me of her power at every opportunity. She started to mention a recent ex-boyfriend named Alan and a number of unnamed suitors. There were also accompanying gestures, like reaching up to arrange her hair and, in the process, showing me the undersides of her bare arms before bringing down those arms and folding them across her chest. The whole effect was masterful; she aroused excitement while at the same time foreclosing any possibility of acting on that excitement. Because it was what I wanted, too, it drew us closer together.

“So,” Lisa said at the beginning of the third week, at the end of lunch, as she lit her cigarette. “Good weekend?”

“Not much to speak of,” I said.

“Well, then don’t,” she said, laughing. “I’ll tell you about mine instead. I had a friend in town from college, and we went to a party on Saturday night.”

“A good party?”

“A long party. A leave-at-four-in-the-morning-not-quite-remembering-your-own-name party. We smoked a ton of who knows what. But I wouldn’t say it was good. At the moment, I’m more into peace and quiet. Trying to focus on work.”

“Office work or painting work?”

She tapped out the cigarette. “That’s an interesting question, although you might not know it.”

I scowled at her. “Thanks, I guess.”

“I mean it. People think that because I paint, painting has to come first. But painting is observing, so it always comes second. What comes first is observing: a party, or my family, or this office. Yesterday I was watching how Schiff stands when he’s waiting for the elevator. He bows his head and turns one leg inward, like he’s trying to disappear. How can a big man disappear, really? He’s disrespecting physics. But it’s like he thinks that the elevator ride might be his last, and he’s not sure that he minds the idea.”

“You got all that from watching him for a few minutes?”

“It’s been a few weeks,” she said. “But I’m getting sick of sitting in the beige cage. I want to be able to move around. More to see. Do you think they’ll let me switch to the file room?”

“Hey,” I said. “That’s my job.” I was trying to joke, but my tone was wrong, and it dragged across the smooth surface of the indifference I had spent weeks polishing.

“I’m not trying to take your job,” she said. “I mean to take a few half days a week to help out in there. But I shouldn’t ask you.”

“You shouldn’t,” I said. “Ask Schiff.”

“Not Mortenson?”

“I thought you were observing everything,” I said. “Schiff will just say yes or no. With Mortenson, there’s always a kind of dance.” Telling her who had power was the only power I had.

Soon enough she had joined me in the file room two mornings a week. Schiff visited more than once each morning, and for a little while I was worried that I had miscalculated his interest in her. After all, behind his dolorous façade was a man, and a man would not have been immune to a girl like Lisa. But then his visits stopped, and it occurred to me that maybe his concern had been for me. I could see why. I knew things about the file room that she did not know, but she was a quick study, and by the third or fourth day she was correcting my errors or suggesting ways that work might be organized more efficiently. “A smart person wouldn’t do this,” she said, which made me dislike her a little and, predictably, want her even more. Lisa knew this and did her best to magnify matters. When we were having lunch, she directed her attention—both toward me and away from me, it is true, but she directed it. And I did what you do with direction: I followed it. “What are you doing?” she liked to say to me, no matter whether she had caught me looking or caught me not looking, and the tone was not coy or supportive but rather belligerent. I should have told her I was thinking of other girls, or even that I was thinking of her, or that her system for improving the file room was foolish, but instead I said too much by saying nothing at all. Days before, I had been certain that I wanted her but wouldn’t act on it. Now I was less sure that I wanted her and less sure that I was capable of resisting. I had a clear line to my uncertainty and she was tangling it.

I
HAD BEGUN TOYING
with the idea that my future might involve, if not exactly writing, the management of written language toward some previously envisioned end, and in that spirit I started to ply Lisa with notes I left on her desk on the mornings when she did not join me in the file room. Most were officious in the extreme, which I intended as a form of modesty: “Ms. Foster,” I’d write, “I hope you do not believe it has escaped my notice that you are filing your nails when you should be filing affidavits.” Or, “I cannot express my disappointment strongly enough, so I will leave it to your evidently prodigious imagination, which you seem to be exercising rather than focusing on work.” In the letters, I was authoritative, presumptuous, even rude.

One evening in the file room, I kissed her. I suppose it was predictable, but that did not make it any less miraculous for me. I credit, at least in part, her car. She drove a Toyota, brown with black vinyl, that baked hot in the afternoon sun, and she refused to leave the office until it had cooled off a bit. Since temperatures were routinely reaching ninety degrees, she was always there past seven, and just as I had gotten used to being the only one in the office late, I grew accustomed to being there late with her. We didn’t always talk—it seemed too intimate—but sometimes I would drop by her desk to ask if she had received “Mr. Tipton’s letter.” One night, she came by the file room, even though she was supposed to be at the desk. She brought a transistor radio and a can of soda. “Care package,” she said.

I did not answer. Or rather, as an answer, I slid my hand along the underside of her arm, closed my grip around her shoulder, and kissed her. She didn’t return the kiss, not exactly, but she didn’t pull away either. It was impossible to tell how she was feeling about the moment, and that was intoxicating to me. We kissed for a long time, and when I reached for the top button of her blouse, she pushed my hand away and unbuttoned it herself. Then she turned off the three long fluorescents that lit the room and backed herself against a wall in such a way that it seemed as though I were pushing her there. I waited for her to hike her skirt until I became aware that she was waiting for me.

Afterward, she excused herself and vanished downstairs to smoke a cigarette. I watched from the window as she puffed small clouds into the parking lot, looked back up to the eleventh floor, gave a wave of her fingers, got in her car, and drove off for home. No time had passed. I went back to filing.