Office Girl

by Joe Meno

  “You don’t know it?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. How about ‘Stormy Weather’?”

  “‘Stormy Weather’?”

  “‘Stormy Weather,’” his stepfather repeats. “Do you know it?”

  “I guess. You want me to sing it with you?”

  “Yes. Sing it.”

  “Okay,” Jack says, trying to remember some of the words.

  His stepfather begins: “Can’t go on … everything I have is gone …”

  And then Jack murmurs along, “Stormy weather … since my man and me ain’t together …” his voice moving together with his stepfather’s.

  David smiles happily, hearing Jack sing, forgetting the rest of the words. He nods a little to himself, his gray-blue eyes losing their focus then. Jack looks over at his stepdad and frowns.

  “David?”

  “Hm?”

  “I’m gonna go now. I’ll let you rest. You’re gonna be all right. I’ll be back tomorrow. Okay?”

  “No.”

  “No. You need to rest. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay? I’ll stop by tomorrow. Same time. How’s that sound?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Thanks, Jack. You’re a good kid. I liked you the moment I met you.”

  Jack laughs and kisses his stepfather’s blue-veined hand and walks out into the hallway. Everything outside of the room seems to be at odd angles. And then he is moving down the hall, quicker than he thinks he ought to, toward a destination he does not know or fully understand, his wet shoes making accusatory sounds against the dullness of the multicolored tiles.

  AND HE RIDES TO ODILE’S APARTMENT.

  Jack rides up on his blue ten-speed bicycle, not expecting to find her there in front of her apartment building, but there she is, in her pink wool mittens, with her green hood lowered over her ears, and she has a small card table setup, beside which is pretty much everything she owns: her bicycle, a boom box, stacks and stacks of books, all of which have pink price tags on them. A garage sale without the garage, right in the middle of the snow. And there on the front of the card table is a small sign Odile has made, which announces: Garage Sale. Hooray. Jack looks at the sign and smiles and then he looks up at Odile. At that moment, Odile has a box full of thrift-store clothes which she is trying to close up with a roll of packing tape, but it doesn’t look like it’s going so well.

  “Did you sell anything?”

  Odile peers up at him with a frustrated smile. “No. Well, just one thing. This big white penis-shaped lamp I made a few years ago in a sculpture class.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Yeah. Good for me,” she says, and fixes a pink price tag that has fallen from an old peacoat.

  “I came by to tell you something.”

  She peeks from under the cover of her green hood and says, “You did?” a little fearfully.

  “I did.”

  “Okay.”

  “I was thinking about it and it turns out you were wrong about a few things.”

  “Like what?”

  And here he realizes he does not know how to say what he’s thinking. He wants to say: First of all, you were wrong about pop music. And art and all of pop culture. And all kinds of things. Because all of it matters. Even if it is awful. Everybody knows all the bad movies and the bad songs on the radio. Because it’s the only thing anybody has in common anymore. It’s all anybody has. So you were wrong about that and you were wrong about us and you were wrong about me, but he doesn’t actually say any of this out loud. He looks at her, at the soft shape of her face, her eyes, and tries to get his words straight.

  “Well?” she asks, and he just stands there and decides not to say anything.

  Then he murmurs, “I dunno. I thought you ought to know you were wrong about some things, but now I don’t know what they are.”

  She looks at him and smirks. “Wow. You rode all the way over here to tell me that?”

  “I guess so,” he says, picking up one of the old paperbacks she’s trying to sell, some sci-fi thing. He puts the book down and sees the bizarro comic book Odile discovered at some other garage sale, Abstract Adventures in Weirdo World.

  “You’re selling this comic book?”

  “I’m taking a bus out to New York so I don’t have a lot of room for anything,” she explains.

  “Oh.” And he picks up the comic, flips a few pages, and then sets it back down. Beside the comic book, placed next to some of her drawings she’s trying to sell—one of a hippo, another one of an Eskimo—is her small green notepad. Her idea notebook. He holds it up before her, more than a little surprised.

  “You’re selling this too? What about all your ideas in here?”

  She only frowns.

  He flips to a page and says, “What about handing out candy at a bus stop? Or …” and he flips again. “What about dressing up like a parrot for a day?”

  “I don’t know. I thought when I got to New York, I could come up with some new ideas.”

  “How much are you selling it for?”

  “What?”

  “How much are you selling it for?”

  “Really?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “A buck?”

  Jack reaches for his gray wallet, finds it in his back pocket, opens it up, unfolds a dollar, and then places it in her right pink mitten. He then slips the green notepad into his jacket and glances away, putting his left foot down on the left bicycle pedal.

  “So you’re really leaving, huh?”

  Odile nods, staring at him for a moment, and then turning away. “I’m scared,” she says. “I wish somebody I knew was going to be there too.”

  “What about your friend Jeannie?”

  “She’s great but I really don’t know her all that well.” And then she says, “I kind of wish you were coming.”

  “Yeah.” He knows that even in one million years it would never happen. “So what about our art movement?” he asks, not really smiling.

  “Who, us?”

  “Yeah.”

  Odile frowns a little, her cheeks looking red. “I guess it’s over. Eventually, I guess, they always come to an end. Like the Situationists. Or Surrealism. And then something new always starts.”

  “Yeah. I guess,” he says, beginning to feel the stiltedness again, and the cold. “Well, I’ll probably see you at work in a few hours then.”

  “Sure,” she says, slipping the dollar bill into her coat. “Thanks. For buying something, I mean.”

  “Sure.” And he pushes his glasses up against his face before he sets his other foot on the pedal.

  And then she says his name and the way it sounds is so polite, so small, like they are strangers all over again. “Jack?”

  “Yep?”

  “If I didn’t know you, I’d probably never have gone.”

  “What?”

  “If we never met, I’d probably be working the same job the rest of my life.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because no one’s ever taken me seriously before. And you did. So, well, I don’t know. You know.”

  “Some compliment. Look what it gets me.”

  “It’s true. I don’t think I’d ever have the guts if I hadn’t met you.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Thanks. I mean, it’ll be good to have a friend in New York. Whenever I want to be surrounded by assholes.”

  Odile smiles, looking at him again.

  “Okay. See you later,” he says.

  “Bye,” she says, and then she is looking down at her roll of packing tape. And the sun is in her hair and then it is like they have never even met.

  AND AS HE RIDES.

  He thinks about what he will tell her before they say goodbye. He imagines he will kiss her softly once more on the mouth, then on the cheek, and say good luck with everything, and then watch her walk off, fading directly into the distance. And as
he’s pedaling, he is so involved thinking about these various goodbye scenarios that he’s almost hit by a car again. He swerves out of the way of a gray sedan and a delivery truck beeps at him, and so he ends up riding onto the sidewalk. And a dog barks at him from the end of its leash and he thinks about recording it and then he remembers his tape recorder is gone. So are all of his tapes. And as he rides he listens to the sounds of the city, for the first time in as long as he can remember, without recording any of it. And it all sounds so magnetic, so different. It all sounds so new. And who does he have to thank for that?

  AND THAT NIGHT. WEDNESDAY NIGHT.

  When he comes into work, Odile is not there. And she does not march in twenty minutes late. An hour goes by, then two, and Jack begins to realize she is not coming. Not at all. And the way her cubicle looks, with her not in it, the sight of her black office chair not teetering around and around, the drone of her unanswered telephone, the absence of her shadow on the gray carpeted floor, all gives Jack the feeling that the office walls are made of paper, that the office, without her, is just pretend.

  ON THURSDAY NIGHT.

  Odile is not at the office again. Nothing. Nada. Zip. There are no odd questions, no weird suggestions, no excited pantomimes from the cubicle next to his. Only work and the ringing telephone and the occasional off-remembrance: sniffing White-Out, an elevator of silver balloons, riding on a bus beneath a white sheet, touching someone else’s hand.

  ON FRIDAY EVENING AT FIVE P.M.

  He takes the elevator to the thirty-fifth floor, keeping his fingers crossed, but there is only a small Hispanic man with a black mustache sitting at Odile’s desk. And then it’s obvious. She is really gone. She has really quit. She is not coming back. That’s all. That’s it. Like that, Odile has disappeared: back into the unfriendly lights of the modern metropolis, just some other halfdreamt thought, a poorly constructed memory.

  What went wrong? What sort of mess is this life anyways? he thinks.

  Riding back to his apartment at one a.m., he sees a girl with a brown scarf riding a bicycle and he thinks it might be her but he knows it isn’t. Here he had this whole idea of what was going to happen and it didn’t happen and why didn’t it happen? He looks around the city but still doesn’t know the answer.

  Back at his apartment, he leafs through Odile’s small green notebook, her wild, loopy handwriting, reading over her ideas for prospective projects, as if somewhere between the scuffed covers there will be an answer waiting for him. But there are only a few amateurish drawings and a half-dozen half-developed ideas for art projects that they’ve already done, ideas that are already completed. And he stares at the way she dots her “i’s” with empty dots and the shape of her “k’s” like kites and then wonders what, if any of it, lasts. Does anything ever last?

  What lasts?

  What lasts?

  What lasts?

  What lasts?

  What lasts?

  And so he stares for an hour or so at all her notes, at the poorly sketched drawings for an art movement that has now come to an end, and realizes how there are all these moments, moments like just this one, there are all these moments, and how everyone lives their lives in these short, all-too-short moments. There are all these moments and what’s so interesting, what makes them beautiful, is the fact that none of them last.

  ON SATURDAY THEN.

  He does not know why but he rides his bicycle by her apartment that afternoon, hoping, thinking maybe by coincidence he will see her, but no. There’s nothing but the quiet-looking apartment buildings and the blemished snow gathering in small white hills, wetting the black tires of his bicycle. And then he rides around for a while, thinking of spring, mistaking a crocus for a small purple bird. But it is a crocus. It’s small and purple and it’s pushing its way up out of the snow.

  A MONTH LATER RIDING HOME FROM SUBSTITUTE TEACHING.

  Blue tie loosened around his neck, the top button of his shirt undone, Jack thinks about the pop quiz he gave in a history class, asking what instrument Miles Davis played. Only one kid, a black girl with braces, got it right. He smiles to himself and looks up at the stoplight on Milwaukee Avenue and sees a faded silver mark etched on a bus stop sign and beneath it two familiar words, almost indecipherable now:

  HELLO JACK

  And when the stoplight agrees, turning green, he rides on, smiling to himself, thinking of her and then: At least there’s something. At least there’s that.

  There are scribbled notes like this one—secret messages to someone named Jack, nearly unnoticeable declarations—on stop signs, on mailboxes, on garbage cans—still visible all over the city. And so.

  DOWN UNDER THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE OVERPASS ONE MONTH AFTER.

  Odile finds herself staring at an empty concrete wall before she sneaks the silver paint pen from her pocket and scrawls a scary profile of Alphonse F., and beneath it she writes these words, almost human-sized:

  DON’T. STOP. NOW.

  And then she is hurrying away, peeking over her shoulder, skulking off.

  IN THE AWFUL FILM VERSION OF THIS BOOK.

  In the awful film version of this book: Odile will be played by an unknown actress with a slight resemblance to the singer France Gall. Jack will be portrayed by an actor who happens to be a little too thin. Other than that, their performances will be excellent. At the end of the film, they will run off together, hand in hand, and board a steamship to North Africa. It will be with her beauty and his natural acting that the film will win all the awards and make the public, once again, gaze at each other with a look like love.

  THE END

  Acknowledgements

  Dedicated to Koren + Raymond Queneau + Jean-Luc Godard

  With sincere admiration for:

  Cody Hudson and Todd Baxter. Heaven is pals.

  Many thanks to: Lulu + Nico, Johnny Temple, Aaron Petrovich, Dan Sinker, Mickey Hess, James Vickery, Maria Massie, Sylvie Rabineau, and the Columbia College Fiction Writing Department.

  Theme music: No Age, The Duchess and the Duke, Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, Mannequin Men, Smith Westerns, Hunx and His Punx.

  Bonus Joe Meno Materials

  Following is an excerpt from the opening pages of

  Hairstyles of the Damned

  Order Hairstyles of the Damned Today.

  Hairstyles of the Damned

  by Joe Meno

  _______________________

  ONE

  She swore a lot and only listened to punk, like the Misfits and the Ramones and the Descendents, especially when we were in the car, because, although it had a decent stereo for a Ford Escort, there was a tape that had been stuck in the cassette player for about a year now and most of the time that was all it would play, and you had to jab the tape with a pen or nail file to get it to start, and the tape was the same handpicked mix Gretchen had thought was cool a year ago, which according to the label on the tape was what she had called White Protest Rock, version II.

  Gretchen’s mix-tapes, her music choices, were like these songs that seemed to be all about our lives, but in small random ways that made sense on almost any occasion. Like “Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?” Maybe it meant I should tell Gretchen how I was feeling. Or maybe it meant I should just go home. To me, the tapes were what made me like her, then love her so much: the fact that in between the Misfits and the Specials, she would have a song from the Mamas and the Papas, “Dream a Little Dream of Me” or something like that. Those mix-tapes were the secret soundtrack to how I was feeling or what I thought about almost everything.

  Also—and I don’t know if I should mention this or not—Gretchen always called other people, even our friends, “douchebags” or “douche-holes” or “cunts” or “cunt-holes” or “cuntteasers” or “cuntwads” or “cunt-heads” or even “cunt-asses,” which doesn’t even make sense when you think about it, things like that. The way she swore amazed me and again, it probably made me like her a lot more than any other girl I had ever met because she didn�
��t ever seem to mind hanging out with me.

  OK, so the thing of it was, the Homecoming Dance was like in three weeks and I hadn’t asked anyone and I wanted to ask Gretchen, but I hadn’t for good reasons: one, I didn’t want her to know I likedher-liked-her; two, I knew she liked Tony Degan, this white power dude; and also—and this is the worst thing so I hate to admit it—but well, I didn’t want the photographs. You know how they make you take your picture and everything? I didn’t want photographs of me at Homecoming with a fat girl so that in fifty years I’d have to be reminded of what a loser I was because, well, I hoped things in the future were going to change for me.

  “Do you want to go get something to eat?” Gretchen asked. “I am fucking starving, because I don’t know if you noticed or not, but I’m a big fat cow.”

  “Whatever,” I said, turning the radio down so we could talk.

  “Where do you want to go eat? Haunted Trails?”

  Haunted Trails was on 79th Street, this monster-moviethemed miniature golf course and video arcade, really the only place we or any of the other stoners and punks hung out. “No, wait, forget it,” she said.

  “All those kids’ll be there and I look so gross. I’m supposed to be on this diet where I only eat white foods, it’s like racist or something.

  Seriously. I am disgusted with myself, you know? I practically am a boy. Look at me. I practically have chest hair. I could join the football team or something.”

  “Shut up,” I said. “You just said that so I’d say how you look OK, so I’m not even saying it.”

  “Oh, you figured me out, douche-bag. No, I mean it, look at me: I’m practically a boy; I practically have a dick.” And as she slowed the crappy blue Escort to a stop at the next light, she bunched the front of her jeans up so it looked like she had an erection. “Look, look, my god, I have an erection! I’ve got blue balls! Oh, they hurt! I need help!