Chang-Rae Lee - Aloft

Kelly is an attractive, big-boned blonde with a pixie, girlish face that makes her seem much younger than her mid-fortyish years, the only thing really giving away her age being her hands, which are strangely old-looking, the skin waxy and thin like my mother's once was. Kelly comes to us from the South, the Carolinas, which I mention only because it's obvious what an unlikelihood she is around the office, with her dug-deep accent and sprightly way of address and her can-do (and will-do) attitude, all reflected in the fact that her clients know exactly her days and hours. After the clock clicks 3, there's always a surge of call volume for "Miss Stearns," which I field as best as I can, though mostly they insist on working with her, even if it's just a simple matter of changing a flight time or booking a car.

I suppose I come off like everybody else here on the Island, meaning that I'm useful to a point and then probably a waste of time. I completely understand this. Whenever I call a company or business and realize I've been routed to the Minneapolis or Chattanooga office, I feel a glow of assurance, as if I've been transported back to a calmer, simpler clime, and though I know it's surely all hogwash I can't help but fall in love just a little with the woman's voice on the other end, picturing us in an instant picnicking in the village square and holding hands and greeting passersby like any one of them might soon be a friend.

This is partly why I can talk to Kelly about almost everything, including the sticky subject of Rita, as she in fact has the stuff of kindness and generosity bundled right onto her gene strands, along with the other reason — namely, that she can summon the forgiveness of a freshly ordained priest. I should know, for she's forgiven me for certain transgressions, for which almost any other woman could only summon the blackest bile.

You'd think she'd steer clear of me forever. This is not to suggest she's a pushover. I'll just say for now that we were intimate in the period after Rita decided to leave and did but then came back only to leave again, which Kelly always recognized as a difficult time, and she ultimately decided that whatever judg-ments were due me would be presided over not by her but by some more durable power, whose reckoning would be ever-lasting.

Another call comes in for Kelly but it's not a client. It's that tough guy again, the one sounding like Robert Mitchum, though even more diffident than that, and certainly charmless, and to whom I'm pretty much done showing patience. His sole name, as far as I know, is Jimbo (how he self-refers). I've had to field his calls the last few times she's been late, and was pleasant enough at first if only because I had the feeling he was her new boyfriend, which I don't think anymore, nor would I care about it if I did. Kelly introduced us once when he came to pick her up, Jimbo not even bothering to shake my hand, just offering a curt nod from behind his mirrored wraparounds. But the more I do think about it, I don't like the idea that Kelly has anything to do with him. There's a streak of the bully in his voice, a low whine that makes me think he's the sort of man who not so secretly fears and dislikes women.

"It's practically three-thirty," he complains. "She should be there."

"She's not."

"Did she call in?"

"No," I tell him. "Look, don't you have her number by now?"

"Hey, buddy, how about minding your own business, okay?"

"That's what I'm doing."

"Well, do yourself a big favor and shut your sassy mouth."

"Or what?"

"You'll know what," Jimbo says, all malice and mayhem.

"Why don't you come down here and show me, then."

He pauses, and I can almost hear his knuckle hair rising.

"You're a real dumb fuck, you know that?" he says low and hard, and he hangs up.

I hang up, too, banging the handset back into the cradle.

Where this will lead I don't know or care. These days every thick-necked monobrow in the tristate area likes to pretend he's a goodfella, some made guy, but having been in the brick-and-mortar and landscaping business I have plentiful experience with all varieties of blowhard, including the legitimate ones, who for the most part don't even hint at their affiliations.

notice that the other people in the office have hardly looked away from their screens, except for Miles Quintana, our newest and youngest Parade travel professional, who ack-acks me a double machine gun thumbs-up, shouting, "Give 'em hell, Jerome!" He's young (and historically challenged) enough that he thinks I'm a member of the "Greatest Generation." He's seen Saving Private Ryan at least two dozen times and can describe every battle-scene amputation and beheading in digital frame-by-frame glory, and despite the fact that I've told him I was only born during that war he continues to see me as the re-luctant hero, as if every graying American man has a Purple Heart (and Smith & Wesson.45 automatic) stashed away in a cigar box in his closet. Of course I'm sure he's playfully teasing, too, just slinging office shit with the old gringo, and if this is the way that a guy like me and a nineteen-year-old Dominican kid can get along, then it's fine by me.

Miles is the office's designated Spanish speaker (our office manager, Chuck, proudly taped up the Se Habla Espaii ol sign in the front window the day Miles joined up), and part of the company's efforts to attract more business from the large and growing Hispanic community in the immediate area. The interesting thing is that Miles, though a perfectly capable travel agent, is actually not so hot at habla-ing, at least judging by the conversations he has with clients in the office and on the phone, when he uses at least as many English words and phrases as he does Spanish, if not more. In fact I can confidently say that one need not know any Spanish to understand him when he's in his translation mode, which employs gesture and posture more than speech. Still, he continues to get referrals from the Colom-bians and Salvadorans and Peruvians and whoever else they are waiting their turn at his desk, proving that it's not always the linguistical intricacies that people find assuring, but broader, deeper forms of communication. This jibes with my own sharp-ening feeling that I can hardly understand anybody anymore, at least as far as pure language goes, and that among the only real things left to us in this life if we're lucky is a shared condition of bemusement and sorrowful wonder that can maybe turn into something like joy.

My phone rings again and I'm ready to communicate with limbo once more, in whatever manner he'd like to take up. But it's Kelly on the line. She's calling from her little maroon econobox, which I notice double-parked across the street. I wave.

"Please don't do that, Jerry," she says, sniffling miserably. I can see her dabbing at her nose with a peony-sized bloom of tissues. She's wearing big sunglasses and a print scarf over her hair, like it's raining, or 1964. "I don't want anyone there to see me."

"Are you all right? You sound terrible."

"I don't have a cold, if that's what you mean."

"Do you want me to come out there?"

"Definitely not, Jerry. I'm looking pretty much a fright right now."

"I'm worried about you, Kel."

"Are you, Jerry?"

"Of course I am." Her tone is alarmingly knowing, even grim. I press on, not because I want an impromptu lecture (which I'm pretty sure I'll get), but because my friend Kelly Stearns does not talk this way, ever. I say, "I don't want to butt in because it's none of my business. But that guy called for you again, and I don't need to ask what you're doing with him to know that it can't be too happy."

"It's not, Jerry. I've told Jimbo that we won't be seeing each other for a while. He hasn't accepted it yet. But that's not the problem."