Ben Greenman - What He's Poised to Do - Stories

“A good party?”

“A long party. A leave-at-four-in-the-morning-not-quite-remembering-your-own-name party. We smoked a ton of who knows what. But I wouldn’t say it was good. At the moment, I’m more into peace and quiet. Trying to focus on work.”

“Office work or painting work?”

She tapped out the cigarette. “That’s an interesting question, although you might not know it.”

I scowled at her. “Thanks, I guess.”

“I mean it. People think that because I paint, painting has to come first. But painting is observing, so it always comes second. What comes first is observing: a party, or my family, or this office. Yesterday I was watching how Schiff stands when he’s waiting for the elevator. He bows his head and turns one leg inward, like he’s trying to disappear. How can a big man disappear, really? He’s disrespecting physics. But it’s like he thinks that the elevator ride might be his last, and he’s not sure that he minds the idea.”

“You got all that from watching him for a few minutes?”

“It’s been a few weeks,” she said. “But I’m getting sick of sitting in the beige cage. I want to be able to move around. More to see. Do you think they’ll let me switch to the file room?”

“Hey,” I said. “That’s my job.” I was trying to joke, but my tone was wrong, and it dragged across the smooth surface of the indifference I had spent weeks polishing.

“I’m not trying to take your job,” she said. “I mean to take a few half days a week to help out in there. But I shouldn’t ask you.”

“You shouldn’t,” I said. “Ask Schiff.”

“Not Mortenson?”

“I thought you were observing everything,” I said. “Schiff will just say yes or no. With Mortenson, there’s always a kind of dance.” Telling her who had power was the only power I had.

Soon enough she had joined me in the file room two mornings a week. Schiff visited more than once each morning, and for a little while I was worried that I had miscalculated his interest in her. After all, behind his dolorous façade was a man, and a man would not have been immune to a girl like Lisa. But then his visits stopped, and it occurred to me that maybe his concern had been for me. I could see why. I knew things about the file room that she did not know, but she was a quick study, and by the third or fourth day she was correcting my errors or suggesting ways that work might be organized more efficiently. “A smart person wouldn’t do this,” she said, which made me dislike her a little and, predictably, want her even more. Lisa knew this and did her best to magnify matters. When we were having lunch, she directed her attention — both toward me and away from me, it is true, but she directed it. And I did what you do with direction: I followed it. “What are you doing?” she liked to say to me, no matter whether she had caught me looking or caught me not looking, and the tone was not coy or supportive but rather belligerent. I should have told her I was thinking of other girls, or even that I was thinking of her, or that her system for improving the file room was foolish, but instead I said too much by saying nothing at all. Days before, I had been certain that I wanted her but wouldn’t act on it. Now I was less sure that I wanted her and less sure that I was capable of resisting. I had a clear line to my uncertainty and she was tangling it.

I HAD BEGUN TOYING with the idea that my future might involve, if not exactly writing, the management of written language toward some previously envisioned end, and in that spirit I started to ply Lisa with notes I left on her desk on the mornings when she did not join me in the file room. Most were officious in the extreme, which I intended as a form of modesty: “Ms. Foster,” I’d write, “I hope you do not believe it has escaped my notice that you are filing your nails when you should be filing affidavits.” Or, “I cannot express my disappointment strongly enough, so I will leave it to your evidently prodigious imagination, which you seem to be exercising rather than focusing on work.” In the letters, I was authoritative, presumptuous, even rude.

One evening in the file room, I kissed her. I suppose it was predictable, but that did not make it any less miraculous for me. I credit, at least in part, her car. She drove a Toyota, brown with black vinyl, that baked hot in the afternoon sun, and she refused to leave the office until it had cooled off a bit. Since temperatures were routinely reaching ninety degrees, she was always there past seven, and just as I had gotten used to being the only one in the office late, I grew accustomed to being there late with her. We didn’t always talk — it seemed too intimate — but sometimes I would drop by her desk to ask if she had received “Mr. Tipton’s letter.” One night, she came by the file room, even though she was supposed to be at the desk. She brought a transistor radio and a can of soda. “Care package,” she said.

I did not answer. Or rather, as an answer, I slid my hand along the underside of her arm, closed my grip around her shoulder, and kissed her. She didn’t return the kiss, not exactly, but she didn’t pull away either. It was impossible to tell how she was feeling about the moment, and that was intoxicating to me. We kissed for a long time, and when I reached for the top button of her blouse, she pushed my hand away and unbuttoned it herself. Then she turned off the three long fluorescents that lit the room and backed herself against a wall in such a way that it seemed as though I were pushing her there. I waited for her to hike her skirt until I became aware that she was waiting for me.

Afterward, she excused herself and vanished downstairs to smoke a cigarette. I watched from the window as she puffed small clouds into the parking lot, looked back up to the eleventh floor, gave a wave of her fingers, got in her car, and drove off for home. No time had passed. I went back to filing.

The next morning, she was scheduled to join me in the file room, but she stayed at the beige cage to order office supplies. Once or twice I came out to ask her some minor question, and she answered with a nonchalance that was drenched in significance. She was mine, but not if I wanted her. And she was not mine in the way she had been a day earlier, when I had been secure in her friendship, desirous of more, and well aware of the importance of suppressing those desires. Now what was wanted clouded the air between us. I stayed in the file room, out of everyone’s way, playing the radio a little bit louder than I knew was proper. In late morning, Schiff came into the file room, where he praised my efficiency and spoke to me for a few minutes about some new billing conventions that would affect the way we were accounting time on the Younce case but not the Jarney case. He did not dispense his usual aphoristic wisdom, and its absence was conspicuous. That, I gathered, was the day’s lesson, that sometimes wisdom could abandon a man. I wondered how he knew about me and Lisa.

I wanted her to stay late that night with me. I thought I had wanted things before, but I had been wrong; they were nothing in comparison to this. Instead, she asked me downstairs to sit with her in her car while she smoked. She fidgeted nervously with the lighter and left the cigarette unlit until I said what I thought she wanted me to say, which is that the previous evening had been a mistake, and that we needed to be friends above all, because she was my only real ally at the firm, and that I wished we could go back a day and undo what we had done. She agreed too readily for my tastes, and patted me on the shoulder in a way that precisely erased the kiss. With the situation now defused and her power restored, she offered me a ride home, and though I could have refused out of spite, or what I now can see would have been power, I accepted with a shrug that could not conceal any portion of my excitement.