Time has slowed again. I settle in, content to wait until it feels like moving, and enjoy her pearly smile.
11 by March Leyenda
“You’re not meant to be here.”
It was my first day on the job, and the place was basically a labyrinth, so excuse me if I got a little bit lost. If someone had just given me a map, I would have been on my way with a spring in my step like Dora the Explorer, but gay.
“Oopsie,” I said sheepishly, grinning at the other woman.
She had straight black hair down to her chin, and she was folded into a wine-colored leather armchair, a hardbound book in one hand. It looked like one of those Grolier Encyclopedia volumes, the maroon-covered ones people sold house to house back in the nineties. The floor was covered by a large brown rug with geometric patterns that looked like sharp flowers. It was a small room, with an unassuming floor lamp tucked into the corner behind the woman who was looking at me with an intensity I felt I had to apologize for.
I stayed in the doorway, afraid I was unwelcome. “I was just looking for the photocopy machine—”
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
Right. It looked like I wasn’t going to get any answers here, so I smiled with my lips shut and closed the door. I wasted thirty more minutes walking down the hall and finding the janitor’s closet, an empty conference room, a conference room with an on-going meeting (“Sorry, wrong room, silly me!”), and the entire Budget Office, who were not happy to see me, whispering among themselves how I was conveniently wasting company time by getting lost. They did, although begrudgingly, allow me to use their photocopier.
* * * *
A few months into my new job, I was starting to learn the office culture and the Do’s and Don’ts of my coworkers, as in:
“You candoKevin, he’s desperate for a lay, and he lives uptown.Don’tdo Lucas, he lives with his mother.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” I told them during lunch while they were spearing their cabbages with silver tines, and I was trying to catch my wayward baby tomatoes with a weak wooden spork. “I’m not interested.”Actually, I’m gay.
One of them, Barbara with a straight bob, raised her eyebrows. Her shoulders rose as she placed her elbows on the table and leaned closer. “Why not? Lemme tell ya, evenIwanna do Kevin, but we have this rule that new employees get to choose first.”
“Right,” I nodded sagely like this was common knowledge. “And how do Kevin and Lucas feel about this?”
“They don’t care,” said the other one, Miriam, with a lovely brushed-out mane that made her look like a tanned Michelle Pfeiffer fromThe Witches of Eastwick. “I don’t wanna do Kevin or Lucas either, but some people get curious, you know?”
I nodded again.
“Seen anyone you’re interested in? Lawrence from accounting, Isaiah from IT?” Barbara asked. She had a Boston accent, which I initially struggled with when she first told me to, “Take care,” and instead I heard, “Dickhead.”
“We got six hundred fifty-seven people here, honey,” she said. “It’s New York! You got the pick of the litter here.”
I didn’t know about that, but therewassomeone I was curious about.
“Who works on the eleventh floor?”
Miriam’s forehead wrinkled in concentration. “Budget people mostly.”
“Who occupies room 1105?”
Barbara gasped and grabbed my hand. “You saw someone in 1105?”
Miriam leaned across the table, eyebrows disappearing into her blonde blowout. “Was it Emily Jesston? Was she with Arnold Trusk? Or Donald O’Hara? Were they making out behind the boxes?”
“We’ve a betting pool going,” Barbara said, clapping. “So, who was it?”
I didn’t want to disappoint them, but it seemed like they were talking about a different room. “No, I saw one woman there. She was sitting in a leather chair and reading a book.”
Barbara raised one meticulously plucked eyebrow. “What? That room’s unoccupied, sweetie. It’s filled with broken computers and boxes of paper.”
They were definitely talking about a different room, so I dropped it like an unseasoned meatball. It stayed with me, though, the woman on the eleventh floor. I tried to picture her in my mind. It wasn’t that long ago, but every day the image of her was starting to soften, to blur like a faded photograph that had lost its color and sharpness.
* * * *
