After This (2 page)

 

sional the following Saturday, as if it was more than he could bear, or
imagine—as if, she thought later, he was ready to send her to
perdition or ask her for a date.)

 

The banging at the door was his excuse to turn away—some
people had their coats in there—and while he stood with his back to
her she dressed again and unlocked the door and walked out. She
smiled at the taunts and jeers of her friends and when someone asked,
“Where’s Mike?” she said, “I think I killed him,” which got a great
laugh.

 

Mike Shea became a medic during the war and was now married,
working for Pfizer. To this day he can’t look at her straight. To this day
she can’t quite convince herself that the sin was as grave as it seemed.
(She thought, in fact, of telling the priest as he whispered his furious
admonitions that she weighed barely a hundred pounds and was as
thin as a boy and if he would adjust his imagination accordingly and
see the buds of her breasts and her flat stomach and the bony points
of her hips, he would understand that even buck naked, her body was
not made for mortal sin.)

 

She can’t quite convince herself, these ten years later, that
anything at all like it will happen to her again.

 

She finished her sandwich, gave an extra quarter to the waitress,
who also wore no wedding band, and headed back into the breach.
I
N THE LOBBY
of her building, people fresh out of the wind were
huffing and puffing like swimmers just crawled up on shore. She
rode the elevator with a group of them and then ducked into the
ladies’ room before she headed for her desk, ten minutes over her
hour.

Pauline was there already, at the desk just across the aisle, facing
her typewriter but with her hands in her lap and her shoulders
slumped under the good wool of her handmade dress, her big, freshly
powdered face watchful and, no doubt, full of news. “Nice lunch?”
Pauline asked, batting her eyes at the clock and flicking her tongue
over her teeth, as if to indicate she had finished her own some time
ago.

“Nice,” Mary said and bowed her head. She felt some guilt: she
had not, this lunch hour, invited Pauline along.

 

She uncovered her own typewriter, feeling Pauline’s eyes on her.
Although their desks both faced the front of the room, their
typewriters were off to the side so that Pauline’s eyes on her—on her
back when she turned to type, on her profile when she turned to her
desk—had become by now a condition of her employment.

 

“I didn’t see you leave,” Pauline said. “I just got a sandwich and
brought it back here.”

 

“Sorry,” Mary said. “I had some errands to run.”

 

Pauline eyed her. It would be Pauline’s way to say, No you didn’t.
It would be Pauline’s way to refuse the decorum of the fib, to embrace
the painful honesty. It would be her way to say, You just didn’t feel like
having lunch with me. Which would have been true, of course. And no
less embarrassing, regrettable, awkward, no less vigorously denied,
because it was true.

 

But Pauline had another conversation to pursue. She lifted her
hands and put them over the top of her typewriter, she scooted her
chair as close as it could get, a familiar routine, so that her breasts
were pressed against the keys. She mouthed something, a name—Mr.
Someone-or-Other—and rolled her eyes and cocked her head toward
the front of the room. “Adele,” she mouthed. Mary looked up, she
couldn’t help it, toward the desk where Adele sat, her back to them,
her dirty blond hair draped perfectly over her lovely shoulders. “Rita,”
another girl from the office, “saw them both,” Pauline whispered. “At
lunch.” She paused, her eyes joyous, her lips pursed, her cheeks drawn
in, as if the piece of news were butterscotch in her mouth. “Adele was
crying,” she added, only mouthing the words, or only speaking them
with a breathless wheeze in place of where the words might have
been. “Crying.” She pantomimed, dragging her own manicured finger
down her cheek.

 

Pauline had a large face, a strong jaw, and blue eyes forever
darting, gesturing, scanning the room, scanning the faces and the
backs of passersby—salesmen, bosses, other girls from the secretarial
pool—taking everything in with one set of eyes, avid and hungry, and
then turning another set, triumphant, well satisfied, to Mary, leaning
over her typewriter to report what she’d seen, a bit of gossip, a bit of
outrage, a bit of indecorous truth (did you see the shine on his coat,
the bad toupee, the yellowed tooth, the pimple, the belly she’s
getting?), all of it the same to Pauline, all delightful to savor, all
evidence to be used. Evidence of what, Mary sometimes wondered—of
the decadence and the decay, the homeliness,

 

the paucity of good intentions that plagued the world? Evidence that
no one else’s life, despite whatever false appearances, was any better
than her own.

 

“I knew something was going on there,” Pauline said returning to
her stage whisper. And then, louder still, “Something rotten in
Denmark,” just as another girl from the pool walked between them,
turning attentively to the sound of Pauline’s voice. Pauline raised her
eyes to her. “Oh yes, rotten indeed,” she said and gave the girl a “tell
you later” smile.

 

Mary lifted her own steno book. Only about six pages old, it still
had its cool, slim heft and straight cardboard covers. By the end of the
month, its pages would be bloated with the pencil strokes of her
shorthand, its back would be cracked and its edges softened. And then
she would begin another. The march of time.

 

Pauline’s eyes were still on her, even as Mary found her place and
set the open book upright on her desk. The goal, Sister Clare had
taught them in school, was shorthand so neat and so legible that
anyone can pick up your steno book and type your letters for you. So
neat and so legible, she had said, smiling at them from within her
wimple, that if you elope on your lunch hour, another secretary can
finish your letters for you that afternoon.

 

She looked over her shoulder, glancing at Pauline, even smiling a
little, but Pauline only tilted her head again toward Adele’s back. Mary
nodded. This was the kind of moral dilemma Pauline often got her
into. Mr. Someone-or-Other, Pauline had mouthed. Adele at lunch
with him, crying. But Mr. Who? She turned to her typewriter,
Pauline’s eyes still on her. She would like to ask “Who?”—but to do
so, in that same mouthing whisper Pauline had used, would be to
enter too fully into Pauline’s tale, Pauline’s bitter triumph, and, in
some way, into Pauline’s unhappy life.

 

But Mr. Who?

 

This was the dilemma Pauline put her in: as much as she would
like to know the story, the gossip, the whole tale, she hoped not to
hear that desperate breathlessness in her own voice. As much as she
wanted to know whatever it was that was worth knowing about the
secrets and complications and (yes, even) failings and foibles of the
people in the office—and she had to admit the few days that Pauline
ever missed work were always long and dull—she did not, with equal
longing, wish to be a part of the whispering spinster chorus at the
edge of other, more interesting lives. She did not want to be one of the
gray-haired harridans, one of those brittle and bitter middle-aged
virgins who can never be sure that the world is indeed as full of deceit
and ill will as they claim, or whether it’s their own tainted version of
things that creates the ill will and deceit in the first place. She did not
want a life drained of kindness and compassion and humor. It was as
much as she had prayed for an hour ago in church, now that the war
was over and she no longer prayed for the boys. She had prayed for if
not a better life than this daily, lonely one, a better way to be content
with it. And then the sudden windstorm, the stream of strangers
either bent into it or leaning back to resist it, tears running down all
their faces in this valley of tears. George putting his hand on her
shoulder. God’s answer.

 

Never kid a kidder.

 

“Maybe,” she said to Pauline, not looking at her, just turning her
head a bit to speak to her from across the aisle and over her shoulder.
Not whispering either. “Maybe it was just the wind.”

 

It was the lack of a reply, clack of typewriters within the silence,
that made her finally raise her eyes to Pauline’s face, which was blank,
her jaw thrust forward beneath the neat pink lipstick.

 

“The wind,” Mary said again. “It was making everyone tear up.”

 

Pauline examined her face for a few seconds more, her jaw set.
And then she smiled a little, not kindly, raising her eyebrows and
slowly shaking her big head. “You are naive,” she said, as if con-
firming something she had already spent a good deal of time
discussing, elsewhere. “You really are.”

 

Mary shrugged. “I suppose. But that wind was making everyone
tear up.”

 

Pauline continued to smile, shaking her head, and Mary, turning
back to her work, smiled too. She had escaped the spinster chorus
only to join the naïve. And here was the other part of the moral
dilemma Pauline embodied. Would it have killed her to play along? To
have told Pauline, Oh my! You’re kidding! What a scandal! If gossip
gave Pauline pleasure why deny her? Surely there was little enough
pleasure for Pauline outside of work. A mother she’d nursed through
cancer, a brother she was estranged from because of a terrible wife, a
small apartment and a cheap landlord and an unending series of
contacts with people—a grocer, a butcher, a waitress, a salesclerk, a
bus driver—who did not meet her expectations.

 

Feed my lambs, Jesus said. What was the cost of a little kindness
toward someone who found her pleasure in being unkind? What was
the good, as Sister Clare at school used to say, in loving only the
lovable?

 

Oh my, you’re kidding, what a scandal! Would it have killed her to
play along?

 

She whispered a quick mea culpa, resolved to be less naive, and
then let herself settle into her work, the pleasure of the speed of her
fingers and the neat, dark strokes of her own shorthand, her confident
spelling and punctuation, her sense of purpose and community as the
busy sound of her own typewriter joined with the busy sounds of the
typewriters beneath the hands of all the women in the room. This
much she was sure of: if she kept busy, kept her mind to the task at
hand, let herself sink into the busy industry of her job, her shoulders
straight and her ankles crossed beneath her chair, her desk neat—
blotter, stapler, paper clips, dictionary, the surface dusted with a tissue
every morning and every afternoon—if she

 

simply worked, worked well, efficiently, competently, then time would
pass. Time would march on. Not merely the afternoon hours but the
weeks and months. The lunch hour would come and then five o’clock
would come and then the evening would come, and then the weekend
again, and then another. Christmas would come and mad April again
and lovely summer and fall. The war would begin and the war would
continue and the war would end and time would pass with all that
behind us now, another life (she would have put her palm to the worn
gold on his belt), and all that was ahead would pass, and none of it,
looking back, would seem to have been very much time at all, even
though looking ahead it had seemed endless. If she kept her back
straight and her ankles crossed beneath her chair and her hands over
the keys, if her fingers struck them quickly and rhythmically and the
sound of all their industry filled the room, and if she remembered to
take some pleasure in it, the sound, the industry, the feel of Pauline’s
eyes on her back, even after Pauline herself had gotten up to take
dictation in one of the offices, if she found some pleasure in the
changing light as the afternoon moved forward, in the fading perfumes
of the other girls as they passed her desk, in the good smell of the
paper, the carbon, the old building itself, then time would pass and
when she stood to cover her typewriter and to run another tissue over
the surface of her desk, to smile apologetically at Pauline already in
her hat and coat and waiting like the schoolgirl she surely must once
have been for the stroke of five (adding, in her hissed stage whisper,
“This isn’t the first time they’ve been seen together like that”), she
could tell herself another day gone and not so bad at that and what
else to do when you’re a single girl of thirty still at home, the war over
and no prospects in sight, your body not meant for mortal sin or a
man’s attention or childbearing, either, it would seem, what to do but
accept it and go on—a walk to the subway, the air chilled even further
without the sun but the wind not nearly so bad as it was, and the
ten-stop ride among the crowd of other office workers, and then the
walk home, spears of crocus and daffodil rising out of the hard dirt
around the caged trees and along the brick foundations, not so bad.

 

She unwrapped the lamb chops from their white butcher paper
and peeled a few potatoes and opened a can of peas. Her father came
in with the newspaper under his arm and then swatted her on the hip
with it as he went to the table to sit down. And then Jimmy came in
still wearing his overcoat to say, “What’s this? What’s this?” And then
told their father with his hands on his hips that George was taking
“our miss here” out to dinner. And her father lowered the paper and
smiled at her—his round, florid face and his sparse white hair which
he no longer bothered to slick down with water or tonic, being mostly
housebound and hardly out of his slippers all week long—and only
began to pout a little, Jimmy too, when she set the plate of lamb chops
and the mint jelly and the mashed potatoes and peas in their bowls on
the table and then pulled off her apron and said, “I’m just going to
take a shower.”