Jack O'Connell - Box Nine

In her tiny office, Eva applies the last, slightest brushstroke of blush onto her cheek. She looks quickly at the smudged mirror, then closes the small black plastic case and slides it into her pocketbook inside the bottom drawer of her desk. She raises her hand to brush at her cheek and stops herself, thinking, Leave well enough alone. She doesn’t like the idea that anyone might notice that she wears makeup, but without it she thinks she has the face of a corpse, cold as ice, white as a sheet.

She can tell already that it’s going to be a beaut of a day. The Reader’s Digests are in and she’s got two carriers out sick. She’s already called for a couple of floats from down the main branch, but nobody’s promising anything. She’ll handle it. If she has to, she’ll call Gumm and ask him to forget about taking today off. And he’ll give.

She pulls her middle drawer open and takes out her eleven-inch clipboard and several preprinted forms which she inserts under the clip. Then she folds all the forms over the top of the board to reveal a blank yellow legal pad. She takes a just-sharpened pencil from her cup and holds it above the pad. She breathes slowly and quiets her whole body, lifts her head, and remains completely still, listening.

Eva’s office, which had once been a storage closet, borders the locker room. Eva takes notes on everything that is said in the locker room. The conversations are always the most banal, boring exchanges, but she notes them anyway. She thinks that it’s a general rule of life that no information is so small that it can’t, at some point, maybe in the far future, be put to good use. So she keeps this private record in her files at home, an ongoing transcription of the locker room small talk, the complaining and swearing and taunting. Poor Ike Thomas, the bruising he takes.

Eva smuggles her legal pad of shorthand notes home every night, then, after a supper that’s been planned a week in advance and is a nutritionist’s dream of balance and freshness, she indulges herself. Eva’s one great treat is music and last year, after making supervisor, she went out and blew a wad on a Bang & Olufsen stereo system that she’d fantasized about for months. It cost almost ten grand and she had to take a loan from the credit union, but each evening around six-thirty, when she slides in the CD of selections from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung , which was the first piece of music she bought, she knows it was the absolutely correct decision. She sits in a corner, in a swivel secretary’s chair, and types up her notes on a heavy black Underwood manual that had belonged to her mother. At times she has to take a break and sit with her head down at her knees in an anti-faint position. She thinks this is because of the incongruity caused by the banality of the words she reads in relation to the majesty and power of the music that’s entering her ears simultaneously. She always has a tall glass of orange juice next to the typewriter, ready to revive her, put her back on course.

Eva read a biography of Wagner when she was an adolescent and for a time, during the heat of her mid-teen years, he was her fantasy lover, the guy she dreamed about at 4 A.M., bathed in a thick sweat.

Last week she dreamed about Ike Thomas. She’s sure there’s no meaning to this, but she can’t shake loose from the fact that it happened, that somehow this strange and silent man, the brunt of the locker room’s collective stupidity, invaded her subconscious and came to her dream-mind, trudged up her front walk with a bursting-full mailbag, every letter in it addressed to Eva Barnes, her name in an ornate, calligraphied script. And he spent all night pushing the letters into her mailbox, like some circus trick, like some magic act. The letters kept fitting in, dozens, thousands, there seemed to be boundless room inside.

She blocks out the memory, fine-tunes her hearing, waits for the first voice to come. As always, her timing is perfect. They start filing in, in the same order, every day: old Jacobi first with his ancient grey metal lunchbox that looks like it could house an entire breadloaf, then the new girl, Bromberg, in her fluorescent-red, oversized glasses and too-short skirt, then Ike Thomas, quiet, hunched over a little, his eyes on his own feet. Five minutes will go by, until the late-bell is just about to ring, and in will come Rourke and Wilson, both a mess, shirts untucked, hair sticking out everywhere, just about announcing to the whole post office that once again they’ve slept together. Eva thinks she should have bounced Wilson when she had the chance.

The first voice comes from the new girl, Bromberg:

BROMBERG: Hey, Thomas, I hear Stephenson is out today. Why don’t you take two routes and really kiss the bitch’s ass?

JACOBI: Leave the boy alone, Lisa. He just loves a woman in uniform. Isn’t that right, Ike? And all this time I thought you were gay …

BROMBERG: I think they’re both gay. The bitch and the schmuck. You should really ask her out, Thomas, you could be like fakes for each other.

JACOBI: Fakes? What, fakes?

THOMAS: Beards. Okay. The word is beards, Bromberg. Jees.

JACOBI: What does she mean, fakes?

[ 7 a.m. bell ]

THOMAS: She’s saying it wrong. You never heard of a beard? It’s like when someone pretends to be, you know, involved with someone else.

ROURKE: We got donuts. Lisa, you owe two bucks to the kitty.

BROMBERG: I paid this week. Ask Thomas, he saw me pay. I paid.

WILSON: Is Stephenson really out again? What an asshole, I swear, that guy never works …

BROMBERG: Stephenson and Ogden are both out. You two just made it. The bitch would’ve been on you …

JACOBI: Billy, you ever hear of a beard, the word beard , okay, but not, like, on your face? Like another meaning.

ROURKE: What are you fucking babbling about? Jesus, it’s early.

WILSON: Who had the cruller? Jacobi, was the cruller—

ROURKE: Shit! Goddammit, I spilled the—

THOMAS: I’m sorry, you should’ve—

ROURKE: You goddamn asshole, Thomas, you’re such a shithead—

WILSON: Here, Billy, let me …

BROMBERG: You know, for two people in the sack so much, you two still bitch a lot.

ROURKE: That’s gonna be five bucks to get the shirt dry-cleaned, shit-for-brains.

THOMAS: What cleaner’s do you go to? Five bucks?

ROURKE: Five bucks.

THOMAS: It’s like three bucks, Billy. Three-fifty, tops.

ROURKE: Aw, Christ, look at this, I’m a mess here. Jacobi, you got an extra shirt in your locker?

THOMAS: I’ve got a shirt, Billy.

JACOBI: Can’t help you.

ROURKE: I don’t want your freakin’ shirt, you doink.

WILSON: Here, honey, let me wipe it. It’ll be fine.

BROMBERG: Jacobi, you got the school today?

JACOBI: Haven’t seen the schedule. I think Stephenson was due.

BROMBERG: You ever notice how Thomas never gets the school? Never.

THOMAS: I’ve taken that route plenty of times. I used to get the school and the library. And the elderly towers on Sapir.

JACOBI: I hate those towers. You ever notice how every one of those old people gets TV Guide? Every goddamn one.

BROMBERG: What I’m saying is, Thomas never gets the school. I swear.

THOMAS: I get the school. God.

BROMBERG: I’m saying there’s got to be something between him and the bitch.

THOMAS: For God’s sake …

JACOBI: That right? Hey, Ike? You all over the woman or what?

[ Locker door slams ]

ROURKE: Shithead getting pissed?

THOMAS: Look, I’m sorry about the coffee, okay? Can we just get to work?

JACOBI: Every bone in me says this is going to be a mother of a day. Billy, you going to the Bach Room after?