Office Girl (4 page)

“Paul is probably the first person I actually enjoy having sex with, because he's a couple years older and totally unapologetic, while the other four people I've slept with always wanted to talk about everything beforehand, and during, and even after. I lost my virginity back in high school, when I was a senior, working on the school yearbook. It was with a boy I did not like but I knew he was smart and I thought I could trust him. It was more like a social experiment than actual sex, at least to me. We only did it twice because he had a girlfriend who was away at college, and he never mentioned it to anyone, and I think I will always be thankful to him for that. The first time we did it he came on my skirt and I didn't know what to do so I just laid there. For like a half hour. Seriously. Anyway, he used to kiss too hard. He kissed like that because he watched too many porno movies, I think. And then there was Brandon, who I dated freshman year, and a boy I met a party who I never saw again, and then this other guy, Will, who I was seeing off and on for a while—a photographer who I met in art school, who doesn't even actually take pictures anymore because he's a waiter right now—and once he wrote me this long letter asking why I didn't make any sounds during sex and I happen to think it's more sexy if you are quiet and he said I needed to start acting like I was having fun with him in bed, so I decided right then it was probably not going to work because what I've figured out is that it never gets any easier once you fall in love with somebody. Even with Paul.”

Odile pauses at a stoplight on Orleans, just after the bridge. The snow comes down like a bad feeling.

She looks up, catching a single snowflake on the tip of her pink mitten. The snowflake is lopsided and quickly melts.

She glances around and watches the city fall off into darkness.

You murderous city.

You oafish palace.

I'd like to burn it all down.

What am I doing here? What am I even doing?

What do you do with the rest of your life when you realize you don't like anything?

She decides the only thing to do now is quit.

Okay. She will quit. It will be easy.

Because Odile has quit seventeen jobs in the last three years already.

ORTHOPEDIC SUPPLY COMPANY.

Four days later Odile looks in the ads and takes a job as a third-shift phone operator at a small orthopedic supply company. Apparently, phone operators are on call twenty-four hours a day to attract every possible orthopedic customer available. All Odile does is answer the phone and take down the orders for inserts, braces, slings, and crutches, and talk to podiatrists and orthopedic surgeons from Dallas to Cleveland, answering questions like, “Do you have splints for small children?” She enters the customer's name and credit card number into the computer, and then files her nails, or plays solitaire, or draws dirty pictures on the scraps of paper in the corner of her desk. With her pink ruffled blouse on, the one she found at the other thrift store, the blouse which she sewed back together herself, Odile stares down at her uneven cuticles, talking to an podiatrist from Peru, Illinois. It is one a.m. and he is restocking all of his supplies and is being very thorough about it. The orthopedic supply company plays instrumental melodies over its intercom system throughout the night, and Odile, unconsciously tapping her foot along, is surprised by how many of these songs she actually knows. She takes off her shoes, placing them side by side beneath her desk, and leans back in the chair, entering the podiatrist's order, trying to decipher the instrumental music overhead. “Barry Manilow,” she says to herself a number of times each night, without humor.

THERE IS A BROOM CLOSET.

Because of her new job answering telephones at night, Odile stops sleeping normal hours. And because she is not sleeping normal hours, she begins to make a number of questionable decisions. For example: in her second week answering phones, Pete, another operator, who has shaggy brown hair, asks if Odile smokes, and she says sometimes. She thinks he means cigarettes but when she follows him out of the office into the hallway, then down the hall to a broom closet that is unlocked, he takes out a small, tightly wound joint, and she sees he means pot. Now what? She used to smoke pot when she was in high school but she started getting very paranoid and she was always afraid someone she loved, like her mom or one of her brothers, was going to get in a horrible accident and she was going to be too stoned to know how to help, and so she stopped smoking dope when she got to art school because her mom and brothers were so far away, but here is this guy—who is maybe, what, twenty-four, twenty-five?—and his smile is kind of dopey but cute, and they are sharing the joint and then they start making out a little and she knows he's not the one she wants, that the one she wants is already married. But this is a little like real life too, isn't it? and she's feeling slightly stoned and so she opens her mouth, taking her gum out, and sticks it to the side of the closet door. And they start kissing again, which isn't all that bad. At first.

But then Pete puts his hand on her hips, then on her shoulders, then up the back of her blouse, and there is a mop and a broom and a dustpan on a long handle that are all poking Odile's neck but Pete does not seem to notice, because he is whispering nothings in her ear like, “You're so hot. This is great. I mean, you're a great kisser.”

Odile is pretty sure nothing in the broom closet is all that great. The muzak, blaring over the office speakers from down the hall, sounds like real music being held underwater against its will. It is an instrumental version of a Carpenters song. Pete, his face throbbing red, has gone quiet finally. He has his pants unzipped, and what does he expect her to do now?

He looks down and then she looks down and she rolls her eyes a little.

“What?” he asks.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Nothing. I just thought … you know …”

Odile sighs a little. “I'll give you a handjob but that's it.”

Pete silently weighs his options and then agrees.

Odile sighs again and does not know why she goes through with it. But she does. This young man, Pete, has the ugliest penis she has ever seen. It is hairy and misshapen and all out of proportion—the head of his dick looks like it has its own facial features or something. Like it's the face of an old man or a cartoon turtle who slurps soup. And it keeps winking at her. It's disgusting, but she does it, tugging away, looking at the side of Pete's sweaty face. The expression Pete makes when he climaxes is the worst thing ever: like something from a '70s porno movie, or like a clown, gagging, his mouth open, eyes rolled back into his head. She thinks she should do a series of paintings all about the stupid faces guys make when they come. Pete's face is totally ridiculous and she's pretty stoned and she can't help herself from laughing and then she does but realizes too late that Pete does not think it is so very funny.

AND AFTERWARD.

Pete dares to act like he does not know her and even ignores her when she tries to smile at him from across the aisle between the cubicles. There are only three other operators on at this time of night and what does he even care? But he won't look at her and smile back, so screw it. People are just one big useless hassle.

And so night after night, for another full week, she answers the telephone, which never stops ringing. And as she enters an order from Akron, Ohio—a podiatrist who needs a new set of crutches for a patient—she thinks,
I don't even like that guy Pete. Why do I keep doing things with people I don't even like?

And then it hits her. The podiatrist is asking how they can bill the patient's insurance company and Odile is saying something in response but really she is thinking that she cares too much about what other people think. In fact, she will go so far as to give some guy she barely knows a handjob just so he'll act as if he likes her, which is really no way to get through the world.

When she looks up—another operator, a pimply, hyenafaced squirt by the name of Kurt, winks at her. She is momentarily appalled and then turns, peering over at Pete, who refuses to make eye contact with her. Kurt is now opening and closing his mouth, making little kissy sounds. Odile can feel her face go bright red. Kurt is jerking his hand up and down in the universal gesture for “handjob” and then Odile is standing, and then her face is going red, and then she is trying to run out but trips over the cord for the copy machine, and she falls against a cubicle, hitting her head, and everyone is staring, until she can grab her green parka and hurry through the glass office door.

Now what?

It's almost one a.m. and the city doesn't even look the same.

She decides she has had enough of that job, of those particular people, and so she unlocks her bicycle and does not bother to let them know she has quit. And then she rides off. And the city is awful, there's never anything pretty, even with all this snow.

AND THE NEXT DAY SHE GETS A TELEPHONE CALL.

From the guy she had been seeing a few months ago, Will, who says he's been trying to get in touch and he explains how he'd like his pink T-shirt back. And so she says okay and he comes on over. Will's gotten a goofy haircut, it's longer in the back, and he's growing one of those stupid ironic artist beards but he still looks pretty decent. And so she smiles and hands him his pink T-shirt, the one she stole from him, the one he made that says,
I Love Soft Rock
. It still smells exactly like him, like cigarettes and generic underarm deodorant. And also his dandruff shampoo, which she happens to know is what he uses for soap.

“So how have you been?” he asks, and all of a sudden she sees what this is.

“Did you come over here for your shirt or because you wanted to talk?”

“Neither,” he says defensively. “Both. I just thought I'd stop by and see you. Or is that against the law?”

“It's not against the law,” she says, still suspicious.

“How's life?”

“That's the stupidest question I've ever heard.”

“Sorry.” He smiles a little and then squints at her and asks, “So what have you been doing?”

“I've been thinking of starting my own art movement.”

“Really.”

“It's against anything popular. Even popular art.”

“Wow. That sounds great.”

“You are so full of it,” she says, even though both of them are smiling.

“So are you still the world's worst dancer?” he asks, and she laughs because it's such a bold, ridiculous question, because he knows she thinks she is the best dancer of all time and she has no choice but to roll her eyes at him and then he walks over to the stereo and puts on a CD he brought and then puts his hands around her waist and they begin dancing and she asks, “Who is this?” and he says, “The Police,” and they dance some more, and it's become an impromptu dance contest, and Will is a pretty decent dancer and he puts his mouth beside her ear and asks, “Are you still quiet in bed?” and then they are lying in her bed, and he is taking off her sweater and then pulling down her jeans, and she is not stopping him, and she can feel his stupid blond beard against her cheek and his hand making its way down the front of her underwear and she thinks,
I wish the two of us could just go to sleep,
and so she closes her eyes and begins to dream she is in some other place, some imaginary city, farther and farther and farther away from the hands and lips and faces of all other people. And, in the dark, the condom he puts on is pink.

AND IT'S THE DAY AFTER THAT.

And Odile finds out that her roommate Isobel has to get another abortion. It's the second time it's happened. Isobel comes in and sits down on Odile's bed. Both of them are still in their striped pajamas, and together they stare down at the small white pregnancy test. There is something subtly terrifying about the pregnancy test's impersonal mechanical shape and Odile can't stop looking at it.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” is all Isobel can manage to say.

“Are you sure you did it right?” Odile asks.

Isobel nods. Her face is wet with tears. Even now, even crying, Odile knows her roommate is probably a lot prettier.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don't know. I just called the clinic. It's two hundred and fifty dollars,” Isobel says. “I already made the appointment. It's in three weeks. But I don't have any money.”

“Did you tell Edward yet?”

“Not yet. He's going to flip. I don't know what we're going to do. Neither one of us has any cash. He's not even working right now. He's just going to school.”

Odile makes a sound then that's somewhere between a yawn and a sigh.

“Do you think you could ask your parents for it?” Isobel asks.

Odile feels her face get red. “What? I couldn't. They already … I just can't.”

Isobel nods. “Well, there's no way I'm telling my folks. They took care of the last one. I'm really screwed.”