by Siel Ju
She gave me more drafts to circulate.
By noon that day, I realized there wasn’t much for me to do. Now that I was set up, the job really came down to a couple hours a day. I scuttled about the office trying to look occupied. I stretched things out, drinking glasses of water between tasks, sorting the recycling in the copy room. I spent inordinate amounts of time in the bathroom, sometimes sitting on the toilet, but mostly standing in front of the mirror, picking at my reflection without purpose. Whenever another woman walked in, I gave her a wide grin through the mirror, like I’d been hoping she’d drop by. Usually, the women flashed back equally big, friendly smiles, even the ones that had never met me. Some introduced themselves and we made pleasant, meaningless conversation and inexplicit plans for lunch sometime in the far future. In this way I started some small friendships based on idle gossip. The boss Brian had just bought a Jaguar, I learned, though no one had gotten a summer bonus that year. Roy the copyeditor had called in sick. At first people speculated that he’d gone to Burning Man, but then the news came that he’d gotten his appendix removed.
The day dragged by this way until I finally ended up asking Maureen if there was anything else she needed help with.
Maureen looked up, surprised. “You’re so much faster than the last girl!” she said. “We’re going to run out of things for you to do!”
I smiled uneasily.
“Let’s see here.” Maureen turned, eyes scanning about her desk. “Well, everything else is really—I mean, this is really unexpected.” She opened her email and started clicking around frantically. “Let’s see, let’s see.” Then she stopped, and looked up at me. “Do you like driving?”
“Driving?” I said blankly, then nodded slowly. “Sure.”
“Well it’s just that we’ve got this for Roy,” Maureen put her palm on a stack of proofs on her desk, “and this late in the day it’ll be hard to get a messenger to go all the way to West Hills. Where do you live?”
“It’s okay, I’ll go,” I said.
“Are you sure? I know it might seem a little—beneath you—but sometimes I deliver proofs too, in a pinch.”
“I don’t mind, really. I like driving.”
“Keep track of the mileage. And just call it a day afterwards. We’ll say you were here until six.” She winked.
When Roy opened the door his Mohawk was matted and skewed left, giving him the attitude of a truant child woken up from a nap. He was holding an empty CD jewel case. As soon as he saw me he reached to take over the heavy stack of proofs, and in doing so, dropped the case. It bounced on his front step, cracked loudly into two flaps, then bounced again, less tendentiously, to land on the lawn.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t need it.”
“Really?” I said. “Okay.”
I picked up the pieces and followed him in. The house was airy and furnished with pale, natural wood, spare and blocky, vaguely Japanese. Tinny music played, barely audible. At first I thought it was coming from another room, then realized it was the earbuds, plugged into the laptop on the coffee table. “What are you listening to?” I asked, then wished I hadn’t. I probably wouldn’t know the band.
Roy set the stack down next to the laptop, then sat down on the couch, carefully, which reminded me about the appendix. He pulled the earbuds out of the laptop and soft, synthesized music came out the speakers. A whispery female voice breathed out a spare, three-note melody that hovered over haunting open chords. The effect was probing and plaintive, like a reminder of an intense, past longing I’d almost forgotten about. Roy looked at me with his usual subdued smile. I smiled back. At this he ejected his CD drive and handed me the CD. The music played on. “You can have it,” he said. “I just ripped it.”
“Are you sure?” I said, taking it. Inwardly, I was elated. Though he’d offered the CD to me off-hand, I felt his gesture showed he thought me one of his kind, the kind that knew about new music genres and underground indie bands. Roy nodded. He clicked on his laptop like he was going to change songs, but then he didn’t, just scrolled. His expression was that of loose concentration, like he was really thinking about the music. He was wearing well-worn jeans and a dark brown T-shirt that said “Life is Golden.” Both looked thrown on. I wondered if he’d been out late the night before. I pictured him at some intimate music venue I’d heard of but never been to, wearing this same expression as he listened to an up-and-coming singer-songwriter. I imagined him sticking around after the show, having a serious conversation about the state of the recording industry with the performer, drinking obscure craft beers and getting home around three. Or maybe he got in at dawn, and had just woken up. At this point I realized I hadn’t figured Roy’s wife into my scenario. I started to picture what she might look like when Roy reached for the stack of proofs and began to leaf through the papers abstractedly.
“I don’t know why they send me this stuff,” he said. “I can just look at it online.”
He said this in an inward, wondering tone, but I instantly felt chastened, like I should have known not to bring them, not to take part in this meaningless bureaucratic task. I looked down at my lap and saw the awkward way I was holding the CD and the broken case, one in each hand. I put the CD between the pieces, then held the case closed with two fingers. I was about to get up when Roy spoke again.
“They really shouldn’t be making you do this,” he said, this time sounding collusive and empathetic. “Maureen always puts off calling the messenger, then it inconveniences other people.”
This mollified me. “It’s okay,” I said. “I like driving.”
“I just don’t want you to think you have to like, do everything everyone on the team wants you to do. You can push back, if you want. We’ve had a lot of turnover, in your position. For a while we just had to make do with temps and then things really fell through the cracks.”
“Oh,” I said, mortified. “I’m actually a temp. I mean, temp-to-hire.”
“Oh really?” he said. “Sorry, I didn’t know that.” He paused to think for a minute, then smiled. “I hope you’ll decide to stay.”
I was flattered that he thought it was my choice. “I want to,” I said. “Everyone seemed so nice.” Then I cringed. I hadn’t meant to sound so kiss ass. To mask the cringe I put on a grin. I tried to make it look enthusiastic but could tell from the pull of the skin that it probably looked jumpy and uncomfortable.
He didn’t seem to mind though. In fact he seemed a bit self-conscious himself. “Thanks,” he said, his voice sincere and small.
On the way home I started wondering if maybe I did actually want this job for real. Obviously, it was a step down, but maybe it would pay okay once I was brought on full time, and this team assistant thing seemed to be what I was capable of right now. I liked that no one expected too much of me. I imagined Roy coming back to the office and how we might become friends, the young, cool duo at the agency with apathetic expressions and exploratory haircuts. I considered asymmetrical bangs.
The next afternoon, I actually asked Maureen for Roy’s proofs. I left even earlier, around half-past three, and when Roy opened the door, went in boldly. He got me water, and when he did he poured a glass for himself too. We sipped quietly, indie rock on low on his laptop, the shared gesture of drinking somehow intimate and liquescent. We sat close together, almost touching, chatting about the proofs as he paged through them indifferently, methodically.
Then he said, “This is boring.”
I shut up.
“No, I mean,” he hesitated. “We don’t have to talk about work.”
“Okay,” I said uncertainly. I wasn’t sure if he was asking me to leave. I looked up at him and realized he wasn’t. His face was suddenly quite close to mine, though his eyes still had that indolent expression, like he wasn’t going to make anything happen but was fine with whatever might.
“Did you like The Supplies?” he said.
It was the CD he’d given me. “I did,” I said in as neutral a tone as I c
ould muster up, acting as if I didn’t notice he’d closed up the space between us. Of course I was panicked and surprised. I’d badly wanted his approval, maybe even had a bit of a crush on him, but I really hadn’t considered that he might really want to start something up with me. I’d actually spent the entire evening before listening to the album, trying to come up with intelligent things to say about it. I’d dug around online to read about the band on Pitchfork, but that had confused me further. The album reviewer seemed more interested in showing off how urbane he was than giving readers a clear sense of the music. He started with a quote from an alt lit writer I hadn’t even heard of, then compared The Supplies to a whole bunch of bands I didn’t know. After a while I gave up and went on Myspace to listen to the band’s older songs, but I couldn’t tell these tracks apart from the new ones. I’d gone to sleep with the CD on, hoping to internalize it through osmosis.
“I liked the looping minimalist patterns,” I said, rehashing what I’d read in the review. “Sorry, I forgot to bring it.”
“No, you can keep it.” He pointed at his laptop. “I’m trying to digitize.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I felt uncomfortable. My long-ingrained, self-conscious self was wrestling with the newer, more nonchalant self I wanted to become. I leaned back against the couch to seem more relaxed. When I did our shoulders touched inquiringly. I twisted slightly toward him. He was looking at me, the edges of his soft breaths reaching out to skim my face. He smiled and I smiled back. Then he leaned in and kissed me.
We kissed for close to half an hour. He moved his face in a calm, practiced way that almost felt like he was teaching me how to kiss. There was a patience to it that I was unaccustomed to, none of the sloppy, drunken overeagerness of the guys I’d hooked up with in college. In moments Roy’s hold on me felt deep and involved, but overall it was more sensitive than sensual, somewhat tentative, with an underlayer of friendly apathy. There was no pressure or context. We were like moles, nuzzling against each other in a soft, burrowing way, blind but willing to communicate. Sure, I tried to tell him with my lips. No big deal.
When I left I felt a quiet, focused sort of exhilaration. We’d made out high school style but I felt I’d accomplished something, that I’d grown up, his marriedness somehow adding to my subdued elation, as if I’d gone through some long-awaited rite of passage. It was the beginning of something bigger and longer, I could tell, by the fact that we’d only kissed, like we were capping the end of a good first date. It’s a little pathetic to think about now, but at the time my experience with Roy was the most real relationship I’d had in a long time, the kind where you actually met up during the day and talked about work and shared music you liked.
The next morning at the agency I was kindlier toward everyone. Maureen gave me proofs and I went about the aisles floatily. Afterwards Maureen invited me into her cubicle and taught me how to create PDFs from Word documents. I knew how to do this, but I let her show me because she seemed happy to do so. When her phone rang she motioned for me to stay in her cubicle. It was her husband. “He wants to try to leave early today,” she said when she hung up, “so it looks like I need to work through lunch.”
“Anything I can do to help,” I said, and she waved her hand like she wouldn’t think of burdening me, but was still grateful that I’d offered. I noticed that she was wearing two different earrings, seemingly on purpose, a star stud in one ear, then a bigger, dangly star in the other. I complimented her.
“Oh, these,” she said tugging at her earlobes, embarrassed but pleased.
This seemed to open a small door in her. Until then Maureen’s attitude toward me had been that of a kindly governess, treating me like a delicate fawn to be gently guided through a scraggly maze of corporate traps. Now, she seemed to see my potential as a colleague-confidant. She started popping her head over the cubicle wall throughout the day. “One more thing,” she’d say, and mention some random office protocol I might find useful later, then share tidbits of her life.
I learned Maureen had joined the firm as a receptionist when her kids were still young, and for eight years, took evening classes at Cal State Northridge until she earned her bachelor’s, which got her promoted to her current position. Now, her three sons were all in community college, all still living at home in Oxnard. They were prone to quitting things: Baseball teams, geode collecting, conversations with army recruiters. The animated, worried tone she took talking about her boys made them sound troubled and dangerous, but in reality they seemed simply undermotivated, destined for blue-collar work. I could imagine them spending long afternoons stretched out over their unmade twin beds with PlayStation controllers, playing Final Fantasy X.
In the past I might have been contemptuous, but listening to Maureen I felt an indulgent, benevolent warmth. Perhaps her kids would go on to fill small, necessary roles in society, laying bricks and fixing sewage systems, helping people hook up their cable internet.
Driving to Roy’s that afternoon I felt a connection to everyone I saw, a deeper sort of understanding about our relatedness that didn’t need to be defined in concrete, hierarchical terms. I took time to notice the people inside the cars, their little fidgety preoccupations. Here we all were on our various paths, which weren’t so much paths but rather oneiric somnambulations, bumping gently along in the manner of benign bacteria. This is the attitude I should have had all along, I thought, just saying yes to whatever wanted to happen, not in an overt or grabby way, but in a more acquiescent, shrugging manner.
Once I got to Roy’s, I tried to adopt that attitude for our make-out session. I felt our need to be close to each other had its own quiet sense of urgency, but when we actually started touching, there was an affectedness to the encounter. He didn’t push me, and I wasn’t going to push him, so after making out for a while the kissing didn’t stop so much as just fade out, until we were just sitting, breathing, and we started to talk in calm, muted tones. In a way this seemed more adult to me, like we were in control of ourselves. It also felt like a passive dare, a weird game of chicken to see who could hold out longer. We talked about music, or rather, he talked, in an offhanded way that made it seem like he assumed I knew what he knew. He used phrases like “fluid atonality”; he compared one singer’s voice to Argentinian Malbec. Radiohead was mentioned at times, but only as a basis for comparison for other bands, not as a topic in itself. I nodded along. Roy liked repetitive, cerebral stuff, and for long minutes we just listened to songs, our bodies in slack contact. When the clock said six, he sat up slightly, and I left. I figured his wife came home soon after that, though neither of us ever mentioned her.
At night, in bed in my apartment, I replayed the afternoon in my mind and masturbated. For some reason it took me a long time to come, as if the dawdling way we made out transferred itself to my masturbating. I ran out of memory tape and was forced to start fantasizing. My fantasy had us go to a concert at The Echo. The Echo was all the way in Los Feliz but in my imagined world we took a short walk there holding hands, then stood in line in limpid postures of indifference. Once we got inside we made out in the corner, in much the same manner as we made out at Roy’s place, except it was sweatier, from the heat of the crowd. The Supplies played, and live, the band had a more thrumming, insistent beat that urged us on, so that even just kissing, eventually we came—or at least I did, standing pressed against Roy, quietly and secretively and in rhythm.
In the office on Friday though, my imagination was more sedate, realistic. I tried to puzzle out how we would make it work, this affair, once Roy got back into the office. It would probably be easier for him to come to my place after work, I thought, so long as his wife wasn’t nosy about how he spent his time. I sketched out a little diagram of my apartment and imagined how I might redecorate to make the place appropriate for the assignations. Right now my place had a dorm-room look. I had to get rid of the plasticky furniture.
I started planning an overhaul, but then got distracted wondering wh
y Roy hadn’t tried to sleep with me. When we made out he would run his hands over my body, but only tentatively, without getting probing or forceful. Was he waiting for some sign from me? Or was it because we were technically coworkers? Maybe our well-mannered make-out sessions were his way of drawing boundaries, albeit soft and mushy ones, a way for us to enjoy each other but also avoid repercussions.
Yet I couldn’t imagine Roy being this calculating or clinical. His attitude lacked that kind of shrewdness. I imagined him in a courtroom, giving the jury a shrug. Call her my lover if you want, it would say. Plus, the lack of sex was titillating in its own right. I struggled with it but didn’t necessarily want to change it. In this way I kept sending myself in thought spirals, and then got annoyed myself for stressing at all. There was something old-fashioned and juvenile about my wanting to figure this out, to define and understand what was happening in fixed terms, I thought. Let it be, I told myself.
That afternoon Maureen gave me the proofs at noon. “We have another blueline,” she said. “A one-pager. This one, we have to get to the printer tonight. If you leave now,” she looked at her watch, “you should be back in plenty of time.”
I felt my face fall. This completely ruined how I thought the evening was going to go with Roy, but of course I couldn’t say anything. I took the stack from Maureen without comment. She must have sensed my unhappiness though, because she added, “It’s a quickie, so you shouldn’t have to wait too long. You’re keeping track of the mileage, right?”
“Yeah,” I said in a mumble. I shuffled back into my cubicle and morosely picked my car keys out of my purse.
Maureen looked over our shared wall. “Sorry about this,” she said. “Really, you’ve been such a good sport about all the driving. This’ll absolutely be the last time. Roy’ll be back in on Monday.” She paused. “I mean, who takes a whole week off for a simple appendectomy?” She laughed apologetically.
