Personal Days (8 page)

II (B) ii (a) 7:
Lizzie soon reverted to the style of dress she wore when she first started there. Pru described the look as Eccentric Librarian. A pencil could always be found tucked behind Lizzie’s ear, or impaling her scrappy chignon.

II (B) ii (b) 1.1:
Jonah and Laars were the first to be disenchanted by Grime.

Laars thought it was obscene that the Sprout hired someone so soon after getting rid of Jill. Admittedly Jill wasn’t the most dazzling human being, but she was solid, a hard worker who got the job done. Grime’s role was unclear, and Laars imagined he was getting paid more than Jill ever did.

The thing is he won’t shut up,
Jonah complained to Crease.
Also I have no idea what he’s saying half the time.

Jonah was also probably upset because he used to say
Cheers
when getting off the phone. With the appearance of an actual British person on the premises he couldn’t say it without feeling fraudulent.

II (B) ii (b) 1.1.1:
Actually, when Grime said it, it sounded more like
Chairs.

II (B) ii (b) 1.2:
Most of them were used to Jonah’s mustache by that point. That did not mean they liked it. Jonah wasn’t sure
he
liked it, but shaving it off would be admitting defeat.

II (B) ii (b) 2.1:
Laars was suspicious of Grime’s connection to the Sprout. Were they friends? It seemed like they’d worked together somewhere before. Also he’d seen them both toting athletic bags on the same day—did they face off every week on the racquetball court?

II (B) ii (b) 2.2:
They heard the Sprout say
How’s the Cracker?
to Grime. It took a second to figure out:
Graham.
The Sprout never bestowed nicknames on any of them, a fact that left them curiously dejected.

Jenny said she overheard the Sprout saying to Grime,
Operation JASON—working like a charm!

Operation JASON? Naturally they assumed it had to do with the broken CD of files that Maxine threw in the trash.

Jonah asked Jules to get in touch with Jason, but he didn’t know how to anymore. He thought Jason might have moved to Madrid.

They began to doubt that Jenny heard what she heard.
She
began to doubt it. She said her boyfriend was renting all these spy movies.

II (B) ii (b) 2.3:
One day Pru received a mysterious message from Grime:

floor?ds////////////// J\A\S////////////////////////////////////////////\

It went on like that for a while, winding up with

]////////////////
O
\

???????
///////

It was like typographical Rorschach. Later Grime explained that he thought he’d already sent the message and then saw that his slash key was absolutely filthy, so he started scrubbing it with a wad of paper.

That still didn’t explain
floor?ds.

Or
J\A\S.

II (B) ii (b) 3:
Grime and Lizzie went out to lunch together once, alone, accidentally. She bumped into him at the post office and they decided to stop by the new fish and chips stand, sample his native fare. The chips were presented in fresh copies of the
Telegraph
and
The Guardian,
adding to the overall cost. The lunch went fine, a few laughs, maybe not as many sparks as she’d hoped. Lizzie was so cute when she said
sparks.
The food was pretty bleh but at least her Diet Coke was properly carbonated.

What killed her was that on the way back, about half a block from the office, Grime picked up speed. She asked where he was going as she raced to keep up. He said it was probably a good idea for the two of them to enter the building separately. He didn’t want people to get the wrong idea about them.

Was Grime playing hard to get? There was nothing to do but laugh nervously. In truth she wanted to cry or kick him in the shins, but his sudden skittishness also made him that much more attractive. She tried to imagine the kind of woman he went for and in her mind she conjured up Pru in a leopard-skin teddy.

Lizzie favored pencil skirts and pencils in her hair and those shirts with cuffs that buttoned up halfway down the forearm.

II (B) ii (b) 4.1:
The next day Grime swung by the Red Alcove after lunch. Pru and Lizzie were studying the Victoria’s Secret catalog in a non-ironic manner. Jenny was sipping a green tea latte and looking through last month’s
Allure,
stopping on an article about green tea lattes.

Grime did a fake-embarrassed cough and said,
Ladies.
He said he had an important question, maybe the most important question ever.

They all straightened up, chins thrust fetchingly forward, eyes widening.

I don’t know how to describe it…

Yes…?

II (B) ii (b) 4.2:
He wanted to know what it meant when there was a red toolbox pulsating on the menu bar of a Word document.

Lizzie wished Pru wasn’t around at the moment, and vice versa. They both offered to take a look. Jenny stayed behind because she had to go back to her desk in a second. She was becoming a little wary of Grime.

Grime led them to his lair, loping. His head was at an unnatural angle, as if he had a crick in his neck from pubbing till the wee hours. His gait was mellow, a beachcomber’s stride. Unseen waves lapped his toes. His harem converted to his dreamtime pace as he detailed additional problems he was having with his document.

II (B) ii (b) 4.3:
En route they nearly collided with Maxine, who emitted a perfectly calibrated squeal of delight.

She was wearing something that none of them could really describe. She’d been in full plumage of late, inspiring daily fashion rundowns by the rest of the office. Jack II even started devoting part of his blog to the study of Maxine, craftily changing her name to
Minnie.
Someone was leaving lewd comments on the site. He suspected Jules.

Maxine’s new outfit was completely inappropriate for winter, in fact for any season or situation, with the possible exception of world domination. It had two kinds of pink going on, and ornate beaded strappy things, and a fairly explicit bondage motif. There were parallelograms of exposed flesh that were illegal in most states, a bow in the back that looked like a winding key. One area involved
fur.
Her hair had a fresh-from-salon bounce that clashed with the rest of the getup, but this being Maxine, everything kind of went together in the end.

II (B) ii (b) 4.4:
Pru and Lizzie instinctively flinched. They might as well have been rolling on the ground like bowling pins, with
x
s for eyes.

With the female competition out of the way, Maxine leveled her extremely hot gaze right at Grime, who stood his ground. He swayed in place, gently rocking on one heel. Maxine was saying something about Wednesday, but it wasn’t clear whether she meant tomorrow or last Wednesday.

Grime’s not-flinching was making
Maxine
flinch. It looked like a nod but it was actually a flinch. Lizzie and Pru saw it all unfold. They’re filing away the subtleties for Jack II and his blog. Maxine lost the thread of what she was saying, eyes gleaming in panic. She could have been talking about the general concept of Wednesday, its status as hump day, its complicated spelling. No one had seen her quiver like this before. It was like she’d been set in italics.

There was a historical vibe to the scene. Lizzie got so nervous just from watching that she stuck another pen into her hair.

Time was upended.
Wednesday
derived from Wotan or Odin, god of the victorious, god of the dead.

The air grew thick with non-flinches. Then the flinches burst forth. Lizzie looked away from Maxine. Maxine looked at Pru and then at Lizzie and then, finding no moral support, back at Grime.

From down the hall came a loud tinkle of coins. A can of soda fell from its perch in the sad old vending machine, the one with half its red sold-out lights always on.

The can’s tumble sounded loud as thunder.

II (B) ii (b) 4.5:
Maxine reflexively clasped Grime’s shoulder and murmured something unintelligible. It was a good reminder that she could be quite
touchy,
though she hadn’t been in a while, not to her regular admirers. When this
did
happen, traditionally, most of them were unable to stop at mere flinching. They would gasp and stagger away, extremities shaking. They would take a long slow drink at the watercooler and generally need to lie down on Jonah’s sofa for a couple of minutes, staring at the ceiling as strains of his Czech opera laced the air. On these occasions, Jonah would lend his Mexican distress frog.

But Grime barely responded to the surprise caress. A corner of his mouth rose a micrometer. The encounter had already bored him and he wanted to get back to his Word document and the mystery of the pulsating toolbox. The shoulder touching was just a neutral thing that happened. Maxine’s arsenal had failed to make a dent. Maxine’s arsenal had imploded.

She mentioned a mandatory seminar in two weeks, hoped he would help lead it. Another sexual-harassment seminar! The words caused no change in affect. His face betrayed no sign that he would attend, let alone lead it. With increasing discomfort Lizzie and Pru watched Maxine try to make an impression. An attempt to gaily link arms with him came to grief. He just stood there without any sort of accommodating elbow movement. Nothing in her experience had prepared Maxine for such pure indifference. She reversed course and disappeared.

II (B) ii (b) 5: Appendix I: Potential Problems

A semi-important development: Just when it seemed like Grime was the walking embodiment of cool, so unaffected by maximum Maxining that Lizzie and Pru wondered for the first time if maybe he was gay, he stopped and did this brisk John Travolta dance-floor maneuver, one index finger pointing up, the other pointing down.

Lizzie’s and Pru’s irritating maybe-he’s-gay thoughts were quickly replaced by
So that’s sort of weird, sort of something you don’t see every day.

Grime pumped away in his disco stance for two seconds, flexing a little. A barely discernible melody played on his lips.

Maybe this is what they do in England,
Lizzie thought.
Maybe this is how they walk.

Pru believed she was simply witnessing the age-old English tradition of fierce eccentricity.

They took a step back and observed him as he froze, smiled, and let out a deep baritone fart.

II (B) ii (b) 6:
It was totally deliberate. It wasn’t an embarrassing slip. It wasn’t the chance rubbing of a shoe against the linoleum or anything like that.

It was like the loudest thing imaginable, louder than the falling can of soda. Geiger counters in Japan went haywire. Satellites got shaken out of orbit, crashed into the sun.

Pru and Lizzie weren’t sure how to react. They needed a seminar for this, special counseling. They kept walking, blushing, feeling like nuns. Grime’s computer mouse was dangling off the desk edge, its infrared eye beaming out at them as though passing judgment. They helped him fix his Word document—he had opened a document header and didn’t know how to get out—and then the two of them walked back in silence, still in their mental wimples.

Later they said,
He’s insane.
Pru said it so that the last syllable trilled out as two notes, a full octave higher. Jack II offered to start a new blog devoted to the subject. Pru finally deleted the two-week-old Grime message from her phone, not without sadness.

II (B) ii (c): Appendix II: Pronouns and Abbreviations (a.k.a. P & A)

II (B) ii (c) 1:
Somehow Crease thought that Grime, being British,
must
know Half Asian British Accent Woman, but how to bring it up? Crease liked to refer to her in e-mails as HABAW or .5ABW or even just AB. They always had to pause and untangle the abbreviations.

In conversation he would just say
she
and
her
and expect them to know who he was talking about.

II (B) ii (c) 2:
Three weeks and two days have passed since he last saw
her.
He noted that patience had always been his strong suit. It was how he had managed to stay at his job for seven years, weathering storms, rising slowly through the ranks. Crease said he’d been there so long he remembered when people got excited by Minesweeper. Now it was just e-mail, surfing the Web, and good old-fashioned erotic reverie.

II (B) ii (c) 3:
Crease admitted he would be devastated if he were fired, not because he loved the job, obviously, or even because of the stop in cash flow, but because it would mean losing all hope of seeing HABAW again.

Pru said he needed to work a little harder on his layoff narrative.

At this point I’d give it a C/C-,
she said.

II (B) ii (c) 4:
Crease nearly flipped out two days ago because as he was waiting to take the elevator up, the door opened and the Sprout and HABAW got out, chatting comfortably about the weather. Their paths diverged, but he still sensed some connection between the two.

Crease’s small-talk skills needed a polish. He would carry out a HABAW conversation in his mind and get stumped after the first short sentence. He needed to be prepared. He bookmarked a weather report website and checked it every two minutes.

So if she says,
It’s so nice out,
what do I say?

You agree, and then you compliment her on an article of clothing,
said Jonah.

Then you ask for her number,
said Pru. A wave of fear and excitement passed over Crease.
No, actually, you definitely don’t.

Later he confessed to Pru,
I’m not used to beautiful women.

She gave him a what-am-I-chopped-liver look, but he was oblivious.

II (B) ii (c) 5.1:
Jack II confided to Laars and Pru about his own mini-crush on HABAW and said not to tell the rest of them, who already knew about it from Lizzie. He forgot that he’d been writing about her on his blog, in the style of a blind-item gossip column.