Helen Phillips - The Beautiful Bureaucrat

Which she did.

The waitress winked and spun off.

“A toast.” He raised his coffee cup. “To bureaucrats with boring office jobs. May we never discuss them at home.”

Getting evicted had made him flippant. But her hands were damp and unsteady, slippery on the ceramic handle.

“Home schmome,” she said.

“Diagnostic Laboratory,” he said. “Agnostic Laboratory.”

He was looking at the diagnostic laboratory across the street. A truck had just parked in front, blocking the “Di.” Their favorite kind of coincidence.

“Good eyes,” she complimented.

Hillary was the type to let them stay the whole night, and they did, drinking infinite coffee and creasing the sugar packets into origami and eating miniature grape jams straight out of the plastic squares, trying to stay awake.

* * *

Itwas Hillary who woke them the next morning, sliding a pair of pancake breakfasts drenched in strawberry goo onto their table. Joseph had pleather patterns from the booth’s bench imprinted in his cheek. As he sat up, he looked to Josephine like a very young child, far too young to be married.

“On the house, kids,” Hillary murmured.

Josephine stared at the large tattoo of a green snake winding up Hillary’s forearm. She couldn’t tell whether the woman was thirty-five or fifty-five.

“I tell fortunes, that’s why,” Hillary said, noticing her noticing the snake. “I’ll tell your fortune anytime there’s not a Saturday-morning breakfast crowd banging down my door, okay, sugarplum?”

Josephine smiled politely. She and Joseph didn’t believe in fortunes.

* * *

Onlya few of their things (both pillows, a folding chair) had been stolen off the sidewalk in the night. They arranged the small storage unit nicely, a tidy stack of boxes, the bed and bookshelf placed as one might place them in an actual bedroom. He slung a weighty arm over her shoulders and they stood in the doorway, gazing at their stuff. As he heaved the orange door downward, she kept her eyes on the jade plant — hopefully hearty enough to handle this.

* * *

Itdidn’t seem to put the stranger off when they arrived at his door laden with luggage, as though they were ready to move into the sublet right that second, which they were. Within a couple of minutes, he’d explained the history of his name and shown them the entirety of his humid one-room apartment: a snarl of grayish sheets on the futon, whirlpools of old batteries and receipts and junk in every corner, a stately red electric guitar gleaming on a wall hook. A subway train strained past the single soot-colored window on an aboveground section of track, the same line that would moan them toward work on Monday. Throwing dirty socks and boxers into a duffel bag, grabbing the guitar from the wall, the stranger explained that the government was after him because he’d won the lottery, so he had to take a drive and sort some things out.

“If anything happens to those plates, I’ll die.” He pointed at four plates perched precariously upright on the narrow shelf above the mini-stove. Their green vine pattern encircled scenes of English gardens, maidens and gentlemen strolling among roses. Josephine nodded; she was always careful with things.

He left in a rush, gratefully shoving the cash they handed him into the duffel, and there they were, four walls, never mind the state of the toilet.

They collapsed onto the gray sheets. She held Joseph from behind and smelled his neck to block the other smells in the stranger’s apartment. When she woke she realized the gray sheets were white sheets that hadn’t been washed in months, if ever. It was dusk, the apartment plunging swiftly into a dimness deeper than the dimness of its daytime state. She felt woozy, overheated.

Outside, in the shadow of the aboveground subway track, there were no restaurants. They walked. With each step he tapped her left thigh with his right hand, a habit he’d developed in the early days of their relationship — the one tic of his that soothed her.

Eventually they came to a bodega: string cheese and peanuts and yogurt and M&M’s. They sat on the loading dock of a factory that emitted the richest, yeastiest aroma, an aroma that made them hungry even as they ate. They walked around the factory, looking for a door where they could enter and buy whatever was producing that smell, but the whole building was impenetrable. If not for the fragrance, the place would have seemed abandoned.

“Beautiful night.” He kicked his heels against the concrete loading dock.

At first she thought he was being sarcastic. Because she had just been longing for bread, greenery.

“I wouldn’t mind a tree,” she said.

“I wouldn’t mind a pee.”

Unamused, she curled her arms around her legs.

“The sky,” he comforted. “The graffiti.”

* * *

Theywere standing outside the door of their sublet, confused by the stranger’s keys, when down the hallway a door opened a crack, a huge dark dog there, straining and snarling as though it had three heads.

Josephine shivered that instinctual shiver; she’d always feared dogs.

“It’s okay,” he said, jabbing the key harder at the lock, and she saw him jabbing a key at the lock of the cheapest room of the fanciest hotel in town, exquisitely exhausted on their wedding night; ’tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free, ’tis the gift to come down where we ought to be ; he wore an ill-fitting suit they had gotten at a store in a strip mall, where they were attended upon by the nicest man in the world, a man whose severe eczema pained them so much that they didn’t notice what poor advice he gave about how a suit ought to fit.

“It’s okay,” Joseph kept saying. Finally the key found its angle; he opened the door and she fell through it into the dank safety of the stranger’s home.

After the twenty-seventh file on Monday morning — DE ANGELIS/HEKTOR/PAUL — Josephine was already antsy, bored, though she tried to fight the feeling. She became suddenly desperate to know what, if anything, resided in her desk. All the drawers slid open easily, revealing only emptiness and paper clips and pads of Post-it notes, except for the lower right-hand one, which remained stuck even when she yanked.

She knew she needed to return immediately to the great stack of files, yet she stood up and kicked the drawer. Her sensible dark shoes were scuffed already anyway. A second kick, a third, a fourth, then a ferocious tug, and the drawer squeaked open half an inch. She tugged more, pleased by her progress, but it was yet another empty drawer. She stared into it, its silent gray angles, before sitting back down and picking up DEAN/MALCOLM/ALEXANDER.

Right then The Person with Bad Breath opened the door, in response (she presumed and feared) to the sound of shoe kicking metal. That mouth, that nose, those eyes — they still somehow failed to coalesce into a face. When her eyes closed for a brief instant in a blink, all she saw of The Person with Bad Breath was a blank space where the image of a face should have been.

“All is well?” The Person with Bad Breath said.

Josephine had yet to receive any instructions about what name or title she ought to use for her boss; her failure to ask now meant that she never would.

“All is well,” she murmured dutifully, stroking DEAN’s paperwork.

The Person with Bad Breath lingered in the doorway, which gave Josephine the opportunity to gather her courage and ask the obvious question, the question that had been hovering ever since she opened RENA MARIE IRONS’s file on Friday.