Helen Phillips - The Beautiful Bureaucrat

Joseph set their plates aside. He hugged her. It was awkward to hug sitting up so they lay down on the blanket on the floor.

There had been moments, last night, when she had imagined him never returning: life without Joseph. Recalling that abandoned, bereft version of herself, she pressed her hip bones against his hip bones. She felt him respond to the pressure of her and it made her proud.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” he said.

She unsnapped her skirt and squirmed out of it.

“I don’t know,” he said, sitting up.

“Excuse me?” she said, also sitting up. She pointed at his cock, thick and solid inside his pants.

He started to say something and then stopped. He looked at the ceiling and then at her. Tonight his hair was dark and sharp, like a demon’s.

“Maybe we should,” he paused, “wait.”

She was enraged. Suspicion swelled inside her.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said ferociously.

“Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay,” he said. He lay back down, pulling her with him. He unbuttoned his shirt. He unzipped his pants. She watched him until he was naked except for his socks.

“Socks too,” she insisted.

He obeyed.

Then he reached for her shirt, pulled it over her head. He helped with her tights, her underwear, navigating them over her feet. She got on top of him. It was a relief to be so close. She found herself relaxing, moving in the familiar way.

“Did you hear something?” he said after a moment. His voice was curt, cutting through the candlelight.

“Something?” she said. She was all dreamy now and she didn’t like the way he was softening inside her.

“Someone? In the hallway?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. That dog.” She was moving her hips around him in a circle. She didn’t want to worry about whatever it was that he was worrying about.

She felt like he was trying to not come. There was resistance in his muscles. It made her angry and she pressed harder and moved faster. She put her mouth very close to his mouth and when he cried out the sound was inside her skull too. She scooted up to his mouth and knelt above him and then when he made her come she fell forward onto her hands, laughing.

“041-74-3400!” she said.

It was time to cut the pomegranate.

“I’ll do it,” she insisted, even though she had no idea how to do it.

She pulled down one of the stranger’s heirloom plates, balanced it on the narrow strip of countertop, jabbed at the pomegranate with a steak knife. Thick red blobs of liquid shot out of the fruit, spraying the wall and the cabinets. The plate flipped off the countertop and shattered on the linoleum floor.

* * *

Josephand Josephine stood guiltily on the sidewalk beneath the streetlight in the slight rain, surrounded by overstuffed suitcases and canvas bags brimming with uneasy contents. A mostly drunk bottle of cheap white wine poked out amid stale laundry. Their umbrella was broken, its elbows splayed like a bad joke. It was desolate beneath the train tracks. No cab came along. Then a cab came along, but its driver sped up when he saw them. They waited a very long time. In the building behind them, the three-headed dog stirred, as dark and frenetic as ever, and a fake heirloom plate charaded among the other three.

The cabdriver who finally picked them up told them all about the faraway farm he owned; he raised cows and grew bananas on another continent, and soon he would return to that place to live forever. Josephine felt ill with envy, but still she politely inquired about growing practices for tropical fruits.

Instead of a garden, the garden apartment possessed a dim entryway that smelled like a cellar. There wasn’t even a flowerpot. There was, however, as Joseph pointed out, a butterfly quilt on the bed.

“And the bathtub is pink,” he announced from the bathroom.

She felt bad that he felt bad for not knowing that “garden” was a code word for “basement” in housing ads here.

“I’ll take a bath,” she said, trying to be okay with things. But when she went to draw water, black gunk bubbled up from the drain. She gagged and ran to him in the kitchen.

“It’s just a baby,” he said.

She was confused for a moment, until she noticed a small cockroach plodding toward the fridge.

“I just want to feel immaculate for a few minutes a day,” she said.

* * *

Walkingoutside in the sun made Josephine feel immaculate. Peppermint ice cream and sleeping for eight hours and not having to touch any gray files and giving dollar bills to subway violinists and drinking big glasses of water and buying a 50 % off wall calendar of nature scenes from the hinterland. Joseph did what he could, though the weekend was often overcast. And though he had always been a fidgeter, though his fidgeting had been a decade-long irritant to Josephine, it had escalated to a terrific new level.

“What’s wrong with you, 041-74-3400?” she finally said on Sunday afternoon as he fiddled simultaneously with the table leg, the saltshaker, and a spoon.

“I’m scared,” he confessed.

Sympathy flooded her. She seized the saltshaker and the spoon. She knew with sudden, cool certainty that he would never again abandon her; that she would never again sit through a night alone wondering where he was. At least not until he died.

“Join the club,” she said.

“Loin the lub,” he replied.

On Monday morning, she tacked the new calendar — color photographs of fields of wildflowers — to the wall beside her desk. It hid some of the smudges. She’d resisted looking ahead to the next month’s image, so now she could spend the rest of this month in a state of minor anticipation.

But for now, Monday: One’s entire mind had to report for duty, for cross-checking.

Names swelled and ebbed beneath her fingertips. She began to forget they represented flesh and blood. Instead, it became a kind of game, the search for funny names, names that sounded as if children had made them up, any scrap of entertainment amid the endless and endlessly average names: IDA ABAGABA, TIMOTHY BONEBREAK, SADIE ELBOW. She still got a little thrill from noticing the coincidences — eighteen “F” surnames in a row, three with the middle name Eve, a SARAH JANE followed immediately by a SARAH JEAN.

Bolstered by the relative peace of the weekend, she discovered a pocket of cheerfulness inside herself, a newfound gratitude for her situation. Joseph was back and well; here she sat at this desk like the captain of a tiny ship; she knew what to do and how to do it; she was well hydrated. Tonight, after completing her allotted tasks in a methodical fashion, she would go home to him. The money was mounting in their little bank account, which had hovered right around zero for so many months. This was a life; it was a life; it was her life. These tranquilizing thoughts carried her through the day until midafternoon, when she glanced up to find The Person with Bad Breath standing quietly in her doorway. She tried to hide her startled shiver.

“Oh dear,” The Person with Bad Breath said, pointing a grayish finger at the calendar. “You mustn’t hang anything on the walls. Otherwise the painters might get discouraged when they come.”

“Okay,” Josephine said.

The Person with Bad Breath waited.

Josephine yanked the tack out of the wall. The calendar fell to the floor. Bending to pick it up, she saw old strands of hair and clumps of dust beneath her desk, decades’ worth of mustiness.

“Thatta girl,” The Person with Bad Breath said, but in that arid mouth, the colloquialism sounded wrong.