Office Girl

by Joe Meno

  “Really,” she says. “I’m not proud of it. But it just keeps happening.”

  “Okay,” he says, feeling his heart sink a little. “Okay. Well. Here’s a tough one: Do you think I have a big forehead?” he asks. “Or is it perfectly proportioned?”

  “What?”

  “My forehead. Is it too big? Or is it just large enough to be called handsome?”

  “No. It’s okay.”

  “It wouldn’t prevent you from going out with me?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Duh,” she says.

  “Okay. So what do you think of telephone sales?”

  “I’ve done it before. For a couple years. I don’t mind it. But I’ve actually been thinking about moving to Greenpoint, in Brooklyn. I have a friend out there and she said I could stay for a while, until I get my own place. Our lease is up at the end of the month and my roommate is a little nuts and so I’m thinking about going to New York. I just don’t know. It’s so big and I don’t want to get swallowed up.”

  “Oh,” he says, feeling his heart sink again. He switches off the tape recorder and stares down at it, then shoves it back into his coat. “Well, I’ve never been to New York, but I hear it’s for assholes.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Well, that’s what I heard. Cool people don’t live there anymore. They all live here. In Chicago.”

  “Yeah, right,” she says, smiling larger than he has seen her smiling before, a dimple peeking out along her left cheek.

  And here he smiles, seeing her smile, and pushes his glasses up against the bridge of his nose and says, “I was thinking. Do you mind me asking how you spell your name? Because I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before.”

  “Odile. O-d-i-l-e. It’s my grandmother’s name. Which is maybe why I like her so much. We’re kind of like twins.”

  “It’s a really great name.”

  “Really? I don’t know. My brothers, all of them have these really boring names. And for some reason, because I was the only girl, my mom decided to get creative. So … I dunno. I used to hate it. I used to get teased about it all the time in grade school.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I tried to get my parents to change it. They told me I could if I wanted. So I started signing my name on my papers at school as Jennifer. And sometimes Kelly.”

  “So they let you change it?”

  “Yeah, I dunno, they were really weird like that. They once took us all to the Empire State Building because one of my brothers was doing a history project about it.”

  “That’s really nice.”

  “I like them okay.”

  “So did you change it back? Your name?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know. I guess I realized at some point it didn’t matter what my name was. People still thought I was the same person. And anyways, like I said, I really love my grandma, so I got used to it.”

  “I never knew any of my grandparents. They were all dead before I was born.”

  “That’s too bad. My grandma, she used to give me a little glass animal every year for my birthday. You know, those little pink glass animals? I still have them. Most of them are broken but I still have about five or six of them.”

  “Which is your favorite?”

  Odile pauses here, thinking. She stands up and then crosses over to a small desk and lifts up a tiny pink animal, made entirely of glass. She hands it to him.

  Jack stares at it, at the odd angles of its joints and limbs, and asks, “What is it supposed to be?”

  “A unicorn.”

  “A unicorn? Where’s its horn?”

  “It’s broken off. It broke when I moved here.”

  Jack looks down and sees, on the animal’s head, a small rough circle where the horn was once attached.

  “So why’s this one your favorite?”

  “I don’t know. I like it better now that it’s broken. It’s kind of down on its luck. It seems more realistic for some reason.”

  Jack nods and hands it back to her. Odile sets it down on her desk and then returns to the bed. The two of them sit beside each other on the bed for a long moment, the sound of the radiator in the other room ticking off the seconds of their stilted breaths. Odile hums a little something to herself and then sighs.

  “So,” she says.

  “So.”

  “So.”

  “So are you really seeing someone right now? Or did you just say that so I wouldn’t try anything?”

  Odile nods and then shrugs her shoulders. “I mean, he’s not my boyfriend or anything. We’re just seeing each other. We never talk unless I call. It’s kind of over, I guess.”

  “It is?”

  “It is. So what about you? You’re not seeing anyone?” she asks.

  “No, I’m … I’m kind of going through a divorce right now.”

  “Kind of?”

  “I’m definitely going through a divorce right now.”

  “Wow. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five. Almost twenty-six.”

  “And you’re already divorced?”

  “Yep. That’s one life goal already crossed off my list. And I feel pretty good about it. Not really. Actually, I feel pretty bad about it.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So,” she says, “what happened?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we can talk about it some other time. It’s kind of complicated.”

  “Okay,” she says. “So do you want to see something amazing?”

  “Sure,” he answers, smiling at her giddiness.

  She leans over and reaches beneath the bed and pulls out an old-looking comic book, Abstract Adventures in Weirdo World, and hands it to him. Jack smiles and begins to slowly turn the pulpy pages, taking in the weird geometric shapes, the absurd juxtapositions of body parts and animals.

  “What is this?” he asks.

  “It’s a comic book I found. I got it at a garage sale a couple months ago. It’s by this guy Frank Porter who I never heard of.”

  “It’s pretty psychedelic.”

  “Yeah, I think this one is from 1974 or so. I went and looked him up in the library. Apparently, he made all these comics just to amuse himself. Because he couldn’t be around people. You can see he was totally into R. Crumb’s style. It’s so trippy and globular-looking. I think this was like a year or so before he stopped making comics. He was only like twenty-four, twenty-five. And then he just gave it up and became a janitor.”

  “Wow.”

  “But he drew hundreds of these comics before he stopped making them, and then, after he died, his sister found all of them. I think he ended up hanging himself. I’m pretty sure this is actually kind of valuable now.”

  “Hmmm,” Jack says, inspecting a panel of a triangle with arms, lighting what appears to be a joint.

  “It’s funny. I think about him a lot. Like how old people are when they give up, you know? Like before you just accept that your life is going to be the same as everybody else’s. Before you do anything great.”

  “I don’t know,” Jack says. “I think about that a lot too.” He flips to another page, seeing a pyramid of silver lines, which upon closer inspection reveal a nude female shape. “These are really weird.”

  “I know. And nobody knows about him. He’s kind of my biggest influence. As an artist, I mean. Him and my dad.”

  “Your dad?”

  “Yeah, because he works all the time. At first I thought making hotel paintings wasn’t cool. But now I think it’s pretty great. It’s all he does all day. And people actually see what he makes. Even if they are kind of bland. I mean, the other thing is that when I was a kid, my dad had all these art books and everything, lying around, and he would explain them to me. Like Magritte. And Gauguin. I know the reason I want to be an artist is because of my mom and him.”

  “That’s pretty cool. My father’s a shrink. We didn’t have any art books lying around when I was a kid. The only cool t
hing we had growing up was the DSM, which lists all the things that can go wrong with your head. That and The Joy of Sex. But I don’t think either one of my parents ever opened it. They got divorced when I was like five or so. And then she got remarried. To another shrink, this guy David. He’s pretty great actually. I kind think of him as my actual father. He’s the person I call if, you know, I’m ever in trouble.”

  “That’s nice you get along with him.”

  “Yeah. But then my mom divorced him too, when I was like eight or nine. And then she married some dentist. But we still talk. My first stepdad, David, and me.”

  “My parents are so weird. They’re still like teenagers around each other. They still like holding hands. They still smoke a lot of dope, though.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Yeah.” And then they both look down at their feet for a few seconds before Odile asks, “So, do you want to see this thing I’ve been working on?”

  “Sure.”

  Odile stands up suddenly and snatches a small green pad from her bureau and then hands it to him. “It’s this notebook I’ve been putting all my ideas in. They’re more concepts of projects than actual projects. Kind of like Yoko Ono.”

  Jack nods and flips through it. There are small pencil sketches, quick drawings, and lists. On one of the lined pages it says, Dress like a ghost on the bus. Beneath that it says, Buy some parakeets and turn them loose in front of a playground, or, Act out a scene from a famous movie on the subway, or, Create a banner for some nonexistent event, or, Put on a puppet show in a hospital emergency waiting room.

  “These are really great,” Jack says, smiling.

  “Yeah, I dunno. One day I’m going to do them all. Right now I’m just coming up with different ideas. I feel like … people in this city … nothing surprises them anymore. When you live here, there’s just too much going on around you, so you don’t see any of it. It’s hard to get people’s attention. Unless it’s something bad, like a murder or natural disaster or something. Because nobody in this city is surprised by anything.”

  Jack nods and looks away for a moment.

  It’s late, it’s begun to finally feel late. The streetlamps outside the window have started to shine in a way that suggests that the sun is only an hour or so away from coming up. Odile yawns, covering her mouth with the back of her hand in a polite fashion that Jack thinks is really pretty adorable.

  “I guess I should get going.”

  “You can stay. If you like. I mean, not to fool around. Just to sleep. Like I said, I don’t sleep with people unless I know them pretty well.”

  Jack thinks about how cold it is outside, of his bicycle, and the snow, and then sees this girl and her narrow but warm bed, and says, “Okay. If you don’t mind.”

  Odile nods and then pulls off her gray sweater, and she has a soft white T-shirt underneath, which traces the angular shape of her thin frame, and she is unbuttoning her pants but without standing up, which Jack finds pretty fascinating, and then this girl, this person he barely even knows, is in her white underwear, which Jack cannot help but stare at, and she is diving under the blankets, and Jack does not know what to do with himself, and so he unbuttons his shirt and decides to leave his pants on, and he begins to climb under the blankets, and she looks at him and says, “You can take off your pants,” and he nods, and turns around, and wonders what kind of underwear he has on, and he is secretly glad they are boxers, and relatively clean, and he feels an erection beginning to come on, and so he hurries beneath the comforter and sheets, and she turns away from him then, facing the wall, and there is her shoulder, and the shiny strap of her nude-colored bra, and freckle after freckle along her long neck, and he does not know if he should say something or do something else, and so ceases to think, only lies there, and in the absence of thought he listens to the girl breathing, and she turns her head toward him a little and says, “Goodnight,” and they sleep like that together for the first time without really touching each other, but the feeling is enough, at least for now, the inexplicable thrill of someone being beside you in a strange bed, and all that it might mean.

  AND AT EIGHT A.M.

  He wakes up with a crick in his neck and the girl, Odile, is still sleeping pretty soundly and so he climbs out of the bed and finds a black magic marker on her bureau and writes his phone number on the lower part of her narrow back. Her nose twitches a little as he does it but otherwise she doesn’t even seem to notice. Now she can call me or not call me, Jack reasons, dragging his bicycle out into the snow. This way it isn’t up to me at all.

  And there, outside her apartment, is a yellow sparrow barking in a gray tree limb, and he records five seconds of that.

  AND AS HE RIDES.

  He decides the next time he’s alone with her he will put his tongue in her ear. Or something.

  Really?

  Maybe. Because he’s got to try. Because she is too interesting, too beautiful not to even do anything.

  And he doesn’t want to go home and go to sleep. Because he knows he won’t, he knows he can’t. So he rides around, taking out his tape recorder, capturing the noise of different kinds of light.

  A STREETLAMP.

  A HEADLIGHT.

  A NEON SIGN.

  Each of them different.

  And then he gets some coffee and rides to the Lincoln Park Zoo and runs around recording the sounds of different animals, the lemurs, the gibbons, the birds. And what he really wants is the sound of a tiger. But it’s just lying there on top of some fake rocks, sniffing at the snow. And so he waits. He leans against the metal railing for about a half hour or so and finally, when the zookeeper opens the gate and throws in a dripping red hunk of meat, the tiger lets out a loud roar, the kind of roar from a jungle movie. It’s perfect. And Jack gets it on tape. It’s probably only three or four seconds long but that’s okay. And then he is unlocking his bicycle and riding home and then it’s starting to snow again. And wow. It’s really coming down again, like a cartoon, like it’s the idea of snow, like it’s not even the real thing. Everything is white and soft and dazzling. And Jack, in front of his apartment building, can’t help but stop and record as much of it as he can. Because it’s a marvel, an explosion, a cyclone of white and silver flakes.

  OPENING HIS APARTMENT DOOR.

  Jack apologizes to the gray cat, who he has decided he will rename, though he hasn’t come up with an interesting one just yet, and so he feeds it and then goes about the business of dating and labeling the minicassettes he has just made. When he is finished, he stands beside the narrow card table on which the answering machine sits, sees there are no new messages, and then, feeling more lonely than he’d like to admit, he presses the play button. He hears Elise’s voice, the confident lilt as she announces, “Hi, we’re not in right now …”

  We, us, we, he thinks, as he watches the small tape unwind itself. It’s been almost a month now and he hasn’t changed the answering machine message. Not because he hasn’t wanted to, but because he knows he can’t. So he presses play once more, notices the way Elise says, “Hi,” like she is just meeting you for the first time, and then he stares down at the device, thinking about taping over the message, realizing then that it is one of the few recordings he still has of Elise’s voice. No, he thinks. Give it another week and then I’ll do it.

  A few moments later the phone rings and Jack is so sure it’s Elise calling that he doesn’t wait for the machine to pick up. He holds the phone against his ear, almost forgetting to say hello.

  “Jack?” It’s a man’s voice, his stepfather’s voice, David.

  “David?”

  “How are you, kiddo? I wanted to check in and see if you got your tooth fixed.”

  “Not yet. I need to make a follow-up appointment.”

  “Did you go and see Ray?”

  “I did. But he wasn’t in.”

  “Do you want me to call him for you?”

  “No, no, I’ve just been busy with other things.”

&nbs
p; “I was hoping you and I could go get some lunch sometime.”

  “Sure,” Jack says, scratching his arm. When was the last time he saw his stepfather? Six months ago? A year ago? He can’t even begin to remember.

  “How’s this week look?” David asks.

  “Okay. Whenever you want.”

  “I’d like to talk to you about a couple things. How about this Friday?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Just a few things I need to talk over with you.”

  “Okay.”

  “So how’s this Friday at Gene and Georgetti’s?”

  “Okay. Are you sure everything’s okay?”

  “Everything’s terrific. I’ll see you then. Don’t be late.”

  “Okay.”

  And Jack hangs up the phone and sits and wonders what could be so bad that his stepfather wants to see him.

  Later, he takes a seat on the floor, and the cat, who he has now decided to call Jacques, takes a seat beside him. Together they listen to the new cassette tapes, Jack rewinding the one of Odile from the previous night, studying the soft timbre of her words, the raspy tremor of her unfamiliar voice. He rewinds it a few times, surprised by her weird answers, as Jacques the cat purrs softly in his lap.

  NEITHER ODILE NOR JACK KNOW WHERE TO LOOK THAT NIGHT.

  Anonymous-seeming stares which wander past the water cooler to the soft hazy spot at the back of the office girl’s neck as she stops to sip a paper cup of water, and then crushes the paper cup in her hand, and then his glance moves down to her bare knees, then to the hem of her soft, fluttering gray skirt as she walks back and everyone—meaning Gomez and the other two operators and maybe even the nighttime cleaning ladies—has to notice him staring. It’s weird for everybody that Wednesday night. Because Jack and Odile don’t know where to look when they pass each other coming out of the break room or when, leaning back in their office chairs, they happen to have a moment of eye contact. Because ideas have begun to make themselves known. Ideas concerning inappropriate, unprofessional, and imagined actions between members of the telephone sales department who were previously thought to be only work-related acquaintances, and near strangers at that.