Office Girl (10 page)

“Hi,” he says.

“Hello,” she says.

“I really hate going to the dentist,” he announces as much to himself as to anyone else.

But the girl nods.

“I really do. I don't know why. Are you nervous at all?” he asks.

The girl looks up and smiles, surprised. “I'm okay.” She directs her attention back down to the magazine.

“I used to be nervous whenever I had to go to the doctor when I was a kid,” he says. “My parents are doctors, though. Which is weird when you think about it. But they're shrinks. So that doesn't really count. Actually, my father and mother, and also my stepfather, are all psychiatrists. Or psychologists. I forget which.”

The girl nods.

Jack retrieves the silver tape recorder from his pocket, pointing it directly at her. “Do you mind if I ask you a couple questions? It's for this project I'm working on. I try to interview different people when I meet them. It's just this thing I do. Is that cool?”

“—”

“Or do you mind?” he asks again. But the girl does not respond, only turns her attention back toward the magazine.

“Okay. How about this. Here's an easy one to start off. Do you think my forehead is too wide? Be honest.”

The girl breathes a little hassled breath through her nose.

“No. Okay, what famous person would you be and why?”

The girl looks at him and frowns and then says, “I'm just here to get my teeth cleaned.”

Jack nods and smiles. His eyebrows are raised as he points timidly. “It's just … you have really great dimples.”

“Thanks,” she says, but does not look up.

“I usually don't notice people's faces, but you …”

The girl nods, afraid to look him in the eyes.

“They're just nice-looking. Your dimples. That's weirdsounding. Talking about someone else's dimples,” he says.

The girl stands, sets down the magazine, and then crosses the small waiting room to the receptionist's desk. She whispers something to the receptionist, who peeks over the edge of her modernist furniture to stare derisively at Jack.

Jack then finds himself standing, forcing the tape recorder back into his pocket, feeling incredibly embarrassed. His face is now bright red. He gathers up his things, pulling his hat and gloves back on, and leaves in a hurry.

AND TO HIS MOTHER'S APARTMENT.

Before the elevator doors close in front of him, he has already decided that he is done, done with human relations of any kind—that all these feelings are hardly worth it. He is going to talk to his mom, who is a psychiatrist and probably the most reasonable person he knows. He's going to tell her everything. The elevator doors begin to close before him as Mrs. Canarski from the fourth floor approaches with her famous toy poodle. But Jack does not try and stop the doors from closing. The elderly lady looks at him as if she has just been slapped. The poodle barks a sharp note in protest. The old woman, struggling to hold the animal, spills a bag of groceries, and a single orange rolls inside the elevator. The doors close. It is quiet. It's the first time there's no noise and Jack looks down and sees the single orange lying at his feet and then it is like a moment from a dream; it is happening but not yet happening. And he feels like something in him is giving up. Something's changing.

The apartment is quiet when he enters; he mumbles an awkward hello but hears no answer. What now? He is feeling worse than he has in months and so there is only one thing to do. He locks the top and bottom locks of the front door, and then tiptoes into his mother's bedroom, the bedroom she shares with her fourth husband, a man named Reg, and he opens the medicine cabinet and begins sorting through his mother's prescriptions. He takes a Valium and then a Xanax and then another Valium, swallowing them with a glass of cold water, and then he takes a handful of each and puts these in his pocket. And then he walks around the empty apartment, his footsteps filling the air as he makes his way to the corner of the den where the ancient hi-fi stands. The stereo, with its cassette player and turntable, once belonged to his grandfather, his mother's father: it is brown and beige, the knobs enormous and etched silver. He can still see his grandfather's fingerprints along the dials if he squints. He flips through several vinyl records—also pieces of his grandfather's collection—and finds the one he has in mind, Debussy's
Children's Corner
suite. He slips the record from its cardboard envelope and places it on the turntable, leaning in close to hear the tiny zip as the needle meets the plastic surface. He turns the volume up as far as it will go, hearing the piano begin to twinkle its upper ascent. There along the antique table are several magazines strewn about, magazines that his mother's patients often page through while they are waiting for their appointments; he reaches for the bottom of the stack and finds an out-of-date
Cosmopolitan.
Carefully, listening to the precarious music build, he turns the pages of the magazine, opening it to a swimsuit pictorial, which features a gorgeous green-eyed model, her décolletage nearly spilling out of her flimsy top. He leaves the open magazine on the coffee table and then begins to pull down his pants.

Moments later he is in his white briefs, thinking of the girl from the dentist's office, of her dimples, and then of Birdie, in her bed, of how serious and soft her body seemed to be, and then how sad everything is, how wrong it all goes, in the end. And then he's not aroused anymore. Even masturbating seems to have become a serious problem. And so, in his underwear, he walks out into the hallway to the closet, takes out the vacuum cleaner—its pink body a horizontal cylinder with wheels, its apparatus a single, lengthy hose with nozzle attached—and plugs it in. It is the sound he likes, the whir of the machine's motor blades, and also the sensation upon his skin, which is both touchless and clean. In its artificiality, in its machineness, it is unruinable, it is perfect, his relationship with this particular device a remnant of his weird experiments as a teenager when he would masturbate for hours on end, imaginatively using various household items. And so he turns the vacuum cleaner on, pressing the nozzle against his chest. But it is still too personal, the feeling of what he is doing, and so, wanting to feel less like a person, wanting to become totally anonymous, he pulls his white T-shirt over his head and leaves it there as a blindfold.

More than a few moments after that, he is lying on the expensive, multihued Persian rug, his face covered, his underwear around his knees, his right hand groping himself, his left hand holding the attachment of the vacuum cleaner near his groin, when his mother and her new husband come in. His mother immediately begins to scream, her voice ricocheting off the muted walls in small staccato bursts. Because of the blindfold, he does not see the expressions on their faces, and for this he will always be happy.

AND SO.

The girl in the cubicle beside his has the curious habit of peeking at him from beneath the jagged arrangement of her dark brown bangs. Because the phones are quiet now. It is twelve-twenty a.m. on a Monday night in February. Only forty minutes are left in this shift. The rest of the gray office of Muzak Situations has gone still. In addition to the girl in the cubicle beside his, there are two other operators on duty this evening, one of them reading a lurid paperback, the other picking at her equinelike teeth. There is the sense that each of them, all four of these phone operators, are silently occupying the territory of the other operators' dreams. In part, it's due to the subtle sounds of soft keyboards and digital drums playing overhead: it's instrumental music, the kind a person might hear in a dentist's office, which is what they are selling. Beyond the looping keyboards, there's also the air of something temporary about the office, with several cubicles still waiting to be assembled, stacks of merchandise in unpacked brown boxes, the windows blinds themselves not yet hung, as if the office has just been opened or is just about to go out of business. There is the phone and the computer before him, both of which have to be from the year 1988. And then, in the cubicle beside his, the girl keeps staring at him as if he is a bad piece of art not meant to be figured out.

“Have you ever done anything interesting?” she finally asks, blue eyes flashing green.

“Excuse me?”

“Have you ever done anything interesting?”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. Like dropping a water balloon on someone. Or stealing a bus. Or performing an emergency tracheotomy.”

“Nope. I can honestly say I've never done any of those things.”

“Too bad. Me either,” she says, looking away now. She is chewing some sort of pink gum. There is a tattoo on her wrist which kind of looks like a beehive. Is that it? A beehive? Or is it just an oblong scar? She blows a large pink bubble, pops it with her finger, and then disappears behind the turf of the gray cubicle wall. He smiles to himself, adjusting his glasses against his face, and then sees her poke her head back over again.

“Those glasses make you look retarded.”

He touches them and smiles sadly. “Oh.”

“But they're also kind of awesome. I mean in a fucked-up sort of way. I mean they definitely fit your face.”

“Gee, thanks.” He touches the black frames again and looks down at his desk.

“I'm Odile by the way,” she says, extending a small white hand.

“Jack,” he says, and gives it a careful shake.

“Wow. You have really sweaty hands,” she says.

“I know. It's why I'm not a big handshaker. I could never be a successful businessman. Or politician. Or surgeon.”

“No, probably not.” Odile nods a little and then stares at him again. “So I'm starting my own movement and I was wondering if you'd like to join it,” she says.

“What's your movement about?”

“It isn't about anything.”

“No?”

“Basically, we just sniff liquid paper and try and think of interesting things.”

“That sounds okay.”

“Do you want to join it?”

“All right.”

“The only rule we have is that you have to say yes to everything.”

“Really,” he says.

“Really.”

“Okay. Sounds good to me.”

“Okay. Here,” she says, handing him the small black-andwhite bottle of liquid paper. “Take a whiff. Then you'll be one of us.”

He holds the open bottle of liquid paper beneath his nose, its chemical pungency making his nasal passageways itch.

“Who else is in your movement?”

“No one else right now. It's just the two of us,” she says.

He nods and takes another sniff and then hands it back to her. It feels like his brain is full of pink and blue circles, each of these circles overlapping. A phone rings and Odile pokes her head back behind the cubicle. As the liquid paper's fumes quell his brain activity, Jack finds himself staring at her again and what he thinks is this:
Wow.

Question: Where do Jack's eyes go when he looks at Odile?

Answer: The freckles on her nose. Her small breasts. Her long neck.

Question: Where is Odile looking?

Answer: At her own fingernails. She is chewing on them while talking on the telephone.

Question: Does she sit still in her chair or does she swivel?

Answer: She swivels. Back and forth, and the motion of it reminds Jack of a clock ticking off the remaining moments of his life or a heart pumping full of bright red blood.

Question: Are her bangs cut by herself?

Answer: It appears so.

Question: What does he imagine her breasts feel like?

Answer: Small oranges. From Jupiter or Neptune.

Question: Is Jack still in love with his estranged wife?

Answer: Yes, he is. Of course he is. But Berlin is so far. And here.

Here is this girl.

BUT IT JUST SO HAPPENS THAT TEN MINUTES LATER.