The Third Person

by Emily Anglin

  Kai had come in looking for me one day, without calling me in advance. I’d come back from lunch and he was waiting on the bench against the wall beside Jude’s desk, across from Adair’s open office door. Jude had given me a look that asked, “Do you want me to call you into a ‘meeting’?” I shook my head, winked, and smiled, implying that he was okay. Since then, Jude had taunted me about my gentleman caller; the running joke was that Kai had love potion on his eyes. Jude was in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the amateur theatre company that puts on plays in the square in front of city hall in the summer. Kai actually did call sometimes, but not too much. I’d let Jude run with the joke.

  Back in my office, I called security and explained the situation. They said they would look into it and get back to me.

  There was a knock on my office door. I opened it, expecting to see Jude, but it was Kai.

  “Hi,” he said. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Come in.”

  “Do you have time to go for a walk?” he said. I remembered that Adair was out of the office. I felt very tired, like I could hardly stand. I closed the door behind him.

  “Lie down with me for a minute,” I said. I took his hand and pushed the chair out of the way and we dropped together to the floor, as my phone started to ring on my desk. I pictured Donna, her hair wet in the rain of the fall day, and her raincoated silhouette, the solidity of her being, and I closed my eyes until the ringing stopped. I pulled one of Kai’s arms around me.

  “Katherine. I can’t. I have to go. I have an interview.” Kai’s voice was too loud, his breath blowing the hairs against my ear.

  “An interview?” I said, opening my eyes and looking at his, about two inches from mine.

  “Well, an information exchange, I guess, is a better way to describe it. A conversation.”

  “With who?”

  “With your old boss. Donna. They’re creating a new team, possibly hiring a few new people, a kind of big-picture consultancy committee, for rethinking how the city interacts with the public. I thought for sure you’d be part of the meeting. That’s why I came by.”

  The phone rang on the desk again. I needed to get up anyway. I hoped it would be Donna, inviting me to come talk to her about what Kai was describing.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hi, Katherine? It’s security again. Just calling to let you know that we’re working on this issue. Hopefully we can figure out where these calls are coming from. For now, though, be safe and let us know if you want a walk off the property later on.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks. But I’m pretty sure this person is just looking for information about her job search. It’s my job to help with that. She just doesn’t quite get how things work.”

  “Nonetheless, we need to be better safe than sorry, okay? This doesn’t mean you go without pay. It just means you stay safe. Work should be a safe place.”

  “That sounds creepy, Kath,” Kai said, when I’d explained it all to him. “Why didn’t you tell me you were getting those calls? Did you tell anyone? I think it’s clearly better if you go home. If this woman is in the building and she’s calling you repeatedly, there’s a word for that.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Okay, but it’s true. And it’s not your fault.”

  “Of course I know it’s not my fault,” I said. “Why would it be my fault?”

  “Donna said you’ve seemed stressed lately. Now I understand why.”

  “Donna said that?”

  “Well, not in words. But she said she cares about you, and I got the feeling she was worried.”

  “Do you think that’s why I wasn’t invited to this meeting?”

  “I have no idea why you weren’t. I know you were worried because you used the information-gathering strategy to get in with her, and then used it to leave soon after, but I never thought she would have any problem with that. She’s a pro herself and knows how things work.”

  “I want to be on that committee. I need to stop hoarding information and share it. That’s the big-picture idea I have to offer.”

  “Okay, well, I’ll tell Donna what’s happening and ask if I can reschedule another time to meet with her. And I’ll ask if you can come with me. The rest of them can go ahead today. For now, I’ll go with you.”

  “No,” I said. “That isn’t necessary. I’ll take a cab. I’ll be fine.” I didn’t want Kai coming over, didn’t want the afternoon to lead to an evening, the prospect of drinking a bottle of wine together, the rain against the window an excuse for him to stay, falling asleep together on my couch, then morning and the unknown.

  I walked out of my office, gestured for him to follow me out, and thanked him for coming in a professional tone, so my neighbouring colleagues would think we’d been in a meeting. We walked together out to the hall, and then to the elevators. He hugged me as I waited for the elevator to rise to my floor. I stepped into the elevator alone, and as it closed between us Kai leaned his head toward me and raised an eyebrow, lifting one hand to his ear with his three central fingers folded in and the pinky and thumb outstretched, the shape of the kind of old receiver phone we know from movies and childhood, the platonic form of the telephone that hangs above us in the sky like a star-sized disco ball, littering the universe with myriad moving fragments of itself.

  When the elevator doors opened, I could see that it was raining again, as it had been for most of the fall. The custodian who mopped up the water tracked in daily now by comers and goers stood still, ahead of me, his back to me, in the centre of the dark, high-ceilinged mezzanine, looking outside at the deepening grey and blue of the early evening beyond the glass doors, with one foot on the locked wheel of his bucket and one arm resting on his mop, a visual echo of my grandmother’s triumphal pose in the picture in my office, but empty of the drama that charges any shared tableau.

  In the mezzanine, the overhead lights that flicker on only in response to your steps, to save power, left me solely illuminated just outside the elevator. The custodian was so still that his lights had gone out; he could have been a statue, shadowed by the walls’ mammoth blocks of shiny stone. A pay phone stood against the wall on the far side of the open hall. Its metal cord gleamed. Now that my eyes had adjusted, one other figure emerged, sitting against this same far wall. A woman sat waiting on a bench near the glass doors that led to the elevators up to Donna’s office. She wore a tailored raincoat, and an umbrella sat folded at her feet. She sat perfectly still, in rapt concentration, studying a notebook in her lap.

  Fortified Wine

  When my friend Richard got the news that he would be moving to Maine to take a two-month-long painting master class, he offered to let me stay at his apartment while he was gone. I’d been wanting to leave my apartment anyway, because the building was for sale and prospective owners were always coming through to look at it. It was good timing. And I could keep an eye on Richard’s art for him, which would bring him peace of mind. We’d been friends since we were kids; we’d both grown up in the same mid-sized town and both moved to the nearest big city, in his case to go to art school, and in my case for a job in fundraising for an art gallery, which I’d left soon after; I’d been drifting from job to job since then.

  Richard left me a note on the hall table under a bottle of wine, telling me how glad he was that I’d be keeping his paintings and sculptures safe, and staying in his place. The brand of the wine he left me on top of the note was Vera—my first name.

  Richard had never actually had a break-in. But his apartment had a slightly unnerving story to it, which he’d explained still made him slightly nervous about leaving it unoccupied. One night a few days after he had first moved in, about two years back, he’d been reading on his couch and noticed a trail of smoke rising past his back window. He got up and looked out the window, down into the alley behind the building, and saw a s
tranger. This stranger had been sitting and smoking halfway up the fire escape that led to his balcony.

  The next night, she was sitting there again, in the same place, and then again later that week. He hadn’t seen her face, but had noted her coat, its unique shade of green, the way her hair spread in a fan across the coat’s shoulders, the solid, still way she sat, her lifting and lowering arm holding the cigarette. And then, after not seeing her for a few nights, he saw her again. In the street, during the day. In front of his place, in the same coat, with the same hair, ahead of him, walking away, quickly. And then she was gone. Though he hadn’t seen the woman since that time, he still mentioned her occasionally; I could tell that as much as he seemed to like having the story to tell, he had never felt entirely comfortable in his apartment, or leaving it empty, because of it.

  Richard’s apartment was quiet and full of art. I spent my first few nights there alone, sipping tea in silence on his low, green couch, looking at his paintings and sculptures, his curtains and knick-knacks, the lamplight coloured by tinted lampshades. I marvelled at how cozy solitude could feel, away from the company of my own possessions, which I’d moved with me from place to place since university, and which now sat in storage on the other side of the city, along with some items I was saving to sell.

  Richard was a slightly distant person who kept to himself, and I had never fully felt able to trust him, despite how long we’d known each other. But I’d accepted our quiet friendship for what it was. He had accepted me as I was too, despite some bad choices I’d made in recent years. When I’d had to leave my last job, he got me a job at the department store where his father was a manager; I’d walk the fluorescent aisles, picking up clothes that had fallen from their hangers, and direct people to the sections they were looking for. Richard would come by and visit me, and eat with me in the food court of the mall. I’d left shortly after I began, but it had helped a lot. Now, I accepted Richard’s offer to stay at his apartment with a bodily relief about my own finances that carried me like new strength, letting me walk faster and pick objects up with less effort: my things, Richard’s things, pen and paper for planning. I felt closer to Richard with him gone than I ever had when he was here.

  My fifth evening at Richard’s place after he left, I sat on his couch drinking the last of the bottle of Vera wine he’d left me, writing up a to-do list including a sublist of places I wanted to visit to try to sell things: books, some gold jewellery I’d been given as gifts in the past, a few pieces of art that I’d bought when I had a better-paying office job, my first good salary. One of these items I was thinking of selling was a piece of art that Richard had given me—not his work, but one of the sculptures his grandmother had made and left to him. I still hadn’t decided if I was going to sell it or not. But it made me uneasy, so I’d always kept it in a box.

  Richard’s grandmother had been a somewhat well-known artist, at least in her own city, in her day. She did sculptures—in a range of sizes, from a half-foot high to waist-high—of abstract human figures metamorphosing into something else. Each sculpture was named for the thing the figure was becoming: water, light, sound, love, fear, air, loss, truth. The one Richard had given me was titled Truth. It was a small one, only about as long as my forearm, of a woman with her arms reaching up to cover her face. He’d given it to me because my name, Vera, means truth, he explained. I think the figure’s posture was supposed to represent truth’s hiddenness, but to me she just looked scared. I preferred the others, which showed people transforming into tangible things like water or light, rather than into abstract concepts.

  The sculpture was in a shoebox in my storage unit, and I’d begun to look into places that might be interested in buying it, though I was afraid Richard would somehow find out if I did sell it. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But I also couldn’t help but notice how just one drop of allegory spreads and permeates everything around it; the sculpture seemed to come with its own built-in defence: if you put a figure representing truth in a box to get away from its heavy-handed metaphor, you end up making it even more heavy-handed.

  Richard himself worked in oil paint and his work was abstract, focused on light and colour. His paintings all had the same title, Stained Glass, followed by a number. One of his paintings served as the central focus of his living room—Stained Glass Nine. It consisted of ten partially overlapping squares in shades of green, amber, and yellow, along with some vertical lines of magenta running through it like spindly veins of mercury in glass. The first night I’d sat in the apartment, I spent some time looking at it and had trouble understanding the appeal. That evening, though, when I looked up at it again from the page covered with my to-do list, I was struck in a new way by the colours and how they offset each other to create an effect of paned light. The painting itself looked like a window, and I began to appreciate it.

  My phone buzzed against the fabric of the couch cushion beside me, signalling a text. “Safely arrived. Thanks again.” It was from Richard. The time read 7:02 p.m.

  At that moment, like a deeper echo of the buzz of my phone, a loud buzz rang out from the apartment’s front hall. The front-door buzzer. In the hall, I pressed the intercom button and said, “Hello?” but no response. So, I slipped my shoes on, stuck one of Richard’s boots in the door to hold it open, and went down to the door that opened onto the street. A woman in a white parka, with the hood pulled partly back from her face, stood there holding an illuminated tablet computer in her bare hand in the cold, her boots planted in the salted ice. She smiled.

  “Hi,” she said. “I came by before and spoke to Richard.”

  “Hi,” I said. “How are you?” I wasn’t sure if this was a friend of Richard’s or some kind of salesperson, and I wasn’t sure what tone to take.

  “I’m doing well, thanks. How have you been?”

  “I’ve been well, thanks.” I wasn’t sure if I should tell her I was housesitting for Richard; I hesitated to reveal any information without checking with him.

  “I’m not sure if Richard might have mentioned this, but I’m here because of this.” She raised her hand holding the tablet, and the screen threw a rectangle of light toward me. I saw that passages on the screen were highlighted in yellow. “The Bible. Richard and I met in the neighbourhood and he said he was interested in some reading and discussion sessions about the scripture’s meaning. He said he was going to be travelling—to Massachusetts, I think? I was hoping to catch him before he left. I’ve chosen some passages. He was telling me he does paintings of church windows, I think? I’ve tried to choose some passages that he might find interesting.”

  She gestured again with her tablet, and I saw the capitalized word “Light” in one of the yellow-highlighted sections. She was attractive in a not-obvious way, with a high forehead and large eyes. I found it hard to believe that Richard had really agreed to a reading session, but she appeared to express no doubt about that, even as she seemed nervous in other ways. As she spoke, she tugged at the cord of her jacket’s hood with one hand. Maybe Richard hadn’t realized she was a religious solicitor, if that was indeed what she was.

  “I’m sorry. Richard isn’t here,” I said. The instinctive cross between sympathy and impatience that I feel when trapped with any salesperson or solicitor was making me fidget with anxiety—but she looked slightly forlorn, like this wasn’t easy for her, so I tried not to be rude.

  “Oh, that’s no trouble,” she said. “I can come back sometime soon.”

  “Do you have his number? If not, I can check with him…”

  “No, but I don’t mind coming by another time. I’m in the neighbourhood. Can I ask your name?”

  “Vera,” I said.

  “Okay, well, you have a nice night, Vera. Here,” she said. She took a notebook and wrote her name on it. “Cheri—Bible discussion,” it said, followed by a phone number. “I’m Cheri. It’s pronounced ‘Sherry,’ like the wine.”

 
“Thanks, Cheri,” I said. I closed the door and went back upstairs, wondering if I should have either discouraged her or been more friendly. To be safe, I thought I should check in with Richard to make sure everything was on the up-and-up and there were no miscommunications.

  “Richard,” I texted him. “Sorry to bother you. A woman just came by and I want to ask how you’d like me to deal with her.”

  My phone rang a moment later.

  “Vera, is everything okay?” He sounded tired. “Did something happen?”

  “Oh, everything is totally fine,” I said. “A woman named Cheri came by. She said you’d talked to her about having a Bible-study discussion with her or something… Don’t tell me you’ve converted and forgot to mention it.”

  “Oh. Her.”

  “She’s evangelical, I think,” I said.

  “I can’t figure out what group she’s a part of. You know what, though? She seems nice. We talked for a while one evening about church windows. She was out front, and I think she was going door-to-door. She said hi and we ended up talking. She’s actually pretty insightful. I thought, why not give her a chance?”

  I didn’t say anything, but I thought—plus, she’s pretty, regardless of her faith or its motive. I still wasn’t sure if Richard had romantic relationships with people of any gender identity—he seemed only to have friends, as far as I could see, and I wasn’t sure if any of those friendships went deeper, but I’d watched his eyes appreciate various human forms.

  “When you texted, I thought you meant that woman from the fire escape had come back. I freaked out a bit. I shouldn’t have called. I think I just need some sleep.”

  “What would you like me to do about Cheri? Is it okay if I tell her you’re away?”

  “It is,” he said. “I already told her I was going away, all about the master class, my work. She’s harmless. Don’t let her convert you, though. She seems like she could be persuasive.”