Helen Phillips - The Beautiful Bureaucrat

“Well, just the date in the final column,” Trishiffany clarified. She stood up straight, hands on hips, tapping her red high heel in a gesture typically associated with impatience, yet the gesture was contradicted by the patient smile on her face.

“I wasn’t told that I’d ever be asked to delete anything,” Josephine resisted.

Trishiffany sprang back and whipped out an ID card.

“I am your su per ior,” she said, thrusting the card at Josephine.

The ID meant nothing to Josephine, but official documents always made her nervous. That old anxiety of the DMV, the IRS.

Trishiffany smiled dazzlingly and came around to stand behind Josephine’s chair.

“The Database is confidential,” Josephine said, capitalizing the “D,” trying to cover the spreadsheet with her hands, certain The Person with Bad Breath would appear at any instant.

“It’s just a Processing Error,” Trishiffany said; Josephine heard the capital “P” and “E.” “I work in the Department of Processing Errors. I have clearance. I could read any file front to back any day of the week, J-doll.”

“I made a processing error?” Josephine murmured. She had been so meticulous with the Database. She never wanted to return to those nineteen months of unemployment, that desperate feeling. She didn’t need to understand her job; she just needed to keep it.

“Oh no Jojo,” Trishiffany said, relishing the rhyme. She leaned voluptuously over the desk once more in a manner perhaps intended to be comforting. “It’s a higher-up mistake. It happens. Please locate OLGUIN by her HS number.”

Relieved, Josephine obeyed.

“There she is!” Trishiffany chortled. It was odd that she laughed. It didn’t seem like the right time to laugh. “Go ahead and delete the date.”

Josephine deleted it, one click, two clicks.

“Good girl!” Trishiffany said. “I’ll take OLGUIN’s file to Storage.”

Josephine turned her attention back to BRAAK/MARCUS/TODD, hoping Trishiffany would leave. But instead she perched on the desk and examined the walls. Josephine typed BRAAK’s HS number into the search function.

“These walls ,” Trishiffany groaned. “Are they driving you crazy yet?”

Josephine looked up. “Why doesn’t someone repaint them?” she said.

“That work order was put in eight years ago, Jojo doll. They’ll get around to it. But let’s talk about something nice instead. How about your husband?”

Josephine stared darkly into the Database. Trishiffany didn’t take the hint.

“Like, where did you meet him?” she persisted. “I want to meet a prince like him.”

“College,” Josephine said.

“Oh! Boohoo, too late for me.” Trishiffany sighed. Then, rejuvenating herself: “When did you know you loved him?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You mean you don’t know if you love him or you don’t know when you knew you loved him?” Trishiffany demanded.

“Yes.” She was unwilling to cooperate.

“Okay, fine then.” Trishiffany eyed her. “What’s he like?”

“Brown hair, brown eyes, average height.” Josephine felt disinclined to elaborate, to explain that sometimes his hair seemed dark brown and sometimes light brown, that his eyes vacillated between coal and hazel, that he was tall when he stood up straight and short when he slouched, that he was at times lanky and at times stubby, that he could look like Dracula or like a woodsman, that once somebody had assumed he was Austrian, that another time a stranger had pegged him as Egyptian. How would she ever describe him to the police?

“Oh!” Trishiffany gasped. She was full of gasps and sighs. “I meant, you know, his personality.”

Cynical, tender, thoughtful, realistic, pessimistic, calm, passive, anxious, eccentric, sensible, wry, courageous, clever, fidgety.

“I’m sorry,” Josephine said. It was too hard to think about him. When she thought about him, her body got chaotic with panic. “I don’t know how to describe him.”

Trishiffany’s made-up face drooped downward, and Josephine saw that she was crying.

“Your mascara,” Josephine warned. She assumed runny mascara was the kind of thing that would scandalize a woman like Trishiffany. “Don’t cry!” she added, trying not to let it sound like as urgent a plea as it was. She couldn’t stand Trishiffany’s inexplicable tears.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Trishffany said. “It’s just that I can see how much you love him. And it’s so cute that you guys have the same name!” She catapulted herself off the desk and over to the door, where she paused. “They always drive the girls crazy but don’t let them drive you crazy, okay?”

Young woman after young woman sitting at this same desk, listening to that same banshee silence, thinking about other lives — Josephine’s neck tensed.

“They’re just walls, after all,” Trishiffany concluded.

Josephine was still trying to remember if she’d let Joseph’s name drop when the door swung open again; Trishiffany had some final zinger.

But it was The Person with Bad Breath, reflective eyeglasses masking any expression.

“Hard at work,” The Person with Bad Breath said. A command, not a question. Josephine could smell the breath from where she sat behind the desk — the mint veiled nothing.

She didn’t know whether to dawdle or rush on her way back to the stranger’s apartment, and she ended up doing something in between, dashing ahead for a while and then hanging back. The three-headed dog was silent as she searched for the correct key. Before she’d inserted the key, the door opened.

Joseph held a large red fruit in his right hand.

“You!” she said, furious and overjoyed.

He pulled her into the room and double-locked the door behind her. Then he handed her the fruit.

“What’s this?” she said.

“A pomegranate.” He sounded tired. But also, maybe, elated. That note of elation or whatever it was — it made her uneasy.

“Where the hell were you?” she said, wishing she were the kind of person who could recognize a pomegranate when she saw it.

“Working,” he said. “It was urgent.”

“You didn’t call.”

“It was urgent,” he repeated. “An emergency.”

“I thought your job was boring.”

“There was a deadline.”

“You should have called.”

He cupped her neck with both hands and smiled at her, a frank smile, his eyes direct into hers. His irises were nearly black.

“You should have called.”

He nodded.

An ice cream truck passed down below, its gleeful tune crackling through a malfunctioning speaker.

“If you ever do that again,” she threatened.

But he was already heading into the kitchenette to fry four eggs in lots of butter.

He flipped the eggs with his typical ease, yet she noted certain things — the swift rhythm his fingers tapped on the spatula, the shakiness of the water glass in his hand.

She didn’t want to speculate. It was hard not to speculate.

“Did you—” she said.

“Grab me the pepper?” he said.

She passed him the salt, the pepper, the plates.

They sat cross-legged on the floor in the candlelight, their knees touching. He told her about the new sublet he’d found for them — a garden apartment not far from here, on the same subway line, a tad farther from downtown but nicer than this place. And soon their credit would be restored and they could get their own place and start the different kind of life anew.

“Hug me,” she said when they were done eating. She could hear that she sounded whiny, like a small child. But he owed it to her.