Brief Encounters with the Enemy Page 14

  It was fortunate for me that Molly and Lola arrived the following afternoon. They found me standing in the foyer wearing rubber gloves and holding a brush. “The lease has expired,” I said. There would be no painting that day.

  To Molly’s credit she helped without complaint. Lola helped too, loading and unloading the dishwasher. She liked pushing the buttons. The three of us cleaning made me feel like we had come together as a family again, like there was hope for us again.

  In the pantry, I found Molly bent over sweeping crumbs into a dustpan. I grabbed her from behind. Her ass was soft and round.

  “Come and help me make the bed,” I whispered.

  “There’s still so much to do,” she protested, but she followed. In the bedroom, the gray afternoon light was coming through the window one last time.

  “So this is the master bedroom,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was impressed. She had never been in it once. The realization was painful. Still, I took some pride, as if the room belonged to me.

  We lay down on the bare mattress and made out. She let me unbutton her shirt. She let me feel her breasts. Her breasts were smaller than I remembered. I liked them small. We would finally have sex on something other than a futon.

  “Lola,” she whispered, “Lola is here.”

  Lola was always here, always somewhere nearby. She was the sentry that stood between her mother and me. She was the thing her mother never left home without.

  “She doesn’t know,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, “she does.”

  What did she know? She was innocent and oblivious. What could she know about what was happening between the adults? She could not possibly define what was going on. It was a mystery to everyone involved, including us.

  But perhaps it was possible the little girl did know something. Something more than us even. Perhaps she only needed a few more years to be able to find the right words that would help her explain the thing—at least to herself. Twenty years from now she’d recall this as the summer she spent playing in that strange house with that strange man. She wouldn’t even remember my name. I’d be a memory by then.

  Molly was on top of me. Her bra was off but her pants were on. I grappled with her belt. “No, no, no,” she kept saying, even as she pressed down on my chest with her hands, bearing down as if she wanted to push me through the king-size mattress. She looked so beautiful in the gray light. “I love you,” I said. I love you. I waited for her to rejoin.

  And shortly there came the reply, from Lola of course, shouting up three flights at the top of her lungs, “THE DISHES ARE DONE!”

  The efficiency was small again and reentry was painful. Fred the subletter shook my hand and said “Till next time, Jake,” but there wasn’t going to be any next time. He gave me the last month’s rent in cash again, but I didn’t bother to count it. I had more important things to do, like get ready for my first day of school. There wasn’t much to prepare, of course, what with my recycled lesson plan, but I was determined to start the year off right.

  The next morning I came around that familiar country bend driving fast, with the school in the early light, two stories in red brick with a chimney. I parked and got out and walked briskly. Fall was in the air. “Welcome to the history of the world!” I planned to say to my students. I had rehearsed it. It would be a dramatic opening line and it would get their attention. They’d look at me with eager, anxious eyes, not knowing what to make of me. Then I’d launch into the great migration out of Africa where it all began, thousands of miles away, thousands of years ago. We’d be allies not enemies, my students and I. In the end, they’d adore me.

  As I neared the main entrance, I was surprised to see Dr. Dave standing there beneath that eternal school motto, “Give your best …” Here comes the soldier-teacher! He looked tan and rested in his blue jeans. He would have stories to tell me of his adventures. “Thanks for getting the mail,” he’d say. We’d laugh about it.

  “Welcome back, Dr. Dave,” I called. But he didn’t respond. He only stared as I approached. I thought of his house, the disorder that I had wrought over the summer, the disruption, the transgression. But I had been meticulous in restoring everything to its proper place—all secrets were safe. I had made sure of it.

  On the last evening, I had stood in the garden looking up at 14 Misty Morning Way, sentimental and forlorn. The only house I had ever lived in … Had I lived in it? Or had I merely stayed. Molly and Lola had already left for home, and I spent my last few moments watering the garden one final time. The poor and ravaged garden, beguiling, chaotic, struggling to stay alive. No amount of water could have offset the terrible effects of such a dry summer, but I had tried my best. These were my thoughts as I turned off the hose and squished across the soaking lawn and through the sliding glass door to get my bags of clothes. My bare feet had left little wet footprints on the carpet, but those would dry soon enough.

  It was only now, walking up the stairs to where Dr. Dave stood waiting, that I realized with great and unbending certainty that it was not the heat that had killed the plants and flowers. I had drowned the garden.

  OPERATORS

  It was in January that Wally came back from the war. He came back to great fanfare that I felt was undeserved. He had departed to great fanfare too—which also was undeserved. I didn’t tell anyone what I thought. Instead, I said what everyone said. I said it was a shame that after everything he’d been through, he had to come back to such cold weather.

  It was cold that winter. It was getting colder. Each morning when my clock went off, I would lie in bed with my eyes closed and the covers pulled up around my neck, listening to sounds and thinking about life. Life in general, life in the abstract.

  I could hear the salt trucks on the street below and the sound of the wind whistling through my apartment as if the place were haunted by ghosts from a thousand years ago. It was twenty degrees outside. It was fifteen degrees. It was ten. It was going to get lower before it got higher. Everyone was saying that this was the worst winter they could remember. I had asked the landlord to weather-strip the windows but he didn’t have the time, plus it wasn’t in the lease, so one weekend I took matters into my own hands and did it myself, trimming the sheets of plastic, sealing them around the window frames, and blow-drying them so they tightened like a drum. But I must have been careless with my work, because the plastic sheets expanded and contracted whenever the wind blew, as if the windows were taking deep breaths. Lying in bed with my eyes closed, with the clunking and creaking all around me, I would try to puzzle out my dreams from the night before, dreams full of symbols—lightbulbs, doorknobs—dreams that seemed to ride the cusp of nightmare and lingered in the background the next day.

  Each morning that January, on my way to the train station, I would buy a newspaper from the newspaper guy on the corner. “What’s the word today, buddy?” I’d say.

  He wasn’t interested in small talk. He wore a coat over his coat. He wore a hat pulled down so you couldn’t see his eyes. He wore a scarf wrapped twice around his face and tied in a knot. I paid him in change but he never bothered to count it.

  The word was that the war was going to end soon. Our man had taken over. Our man had supplanted their man. Their man was on the run. We were on his tail. Any day now, the newspaper said.

  Walking to the train station, I would examine the little box of numbers on the front page that outlined our progress from the day before. On our side the casualties were generally light, generally insignificant, one or two here and there, sometimes three or four, never more than five, while on the enemy’s side the casualties were gruesome, occasionally horrific, almost always at least one hundred, sometimes several hundred, and once, when two of their battalions had been cornered in the valley, eight hundred and twenty-one.

  Turning the corner, I would bend in half against the wind that came off the river and caught me in the face and whipped the newspaper in my hands and whipped under my coat and up around my suit and t
ie. Up and down the street in front of the houses, the American flags were whipping too. Far away across the ocean, where the action was, it was warm, it was sunny, it was seventy-eight degrees. Every day the little box of numbers on the front page announced that it was seventy-eight degrees, and every day we inched closer toward catching their man, and every day I boarded the 8:02 and took a seat next to one of the regulars, who liked to make small talk, who said, “What’s the word today, Zeke?” But I wasn’t interested in small talk. I would recline in my seat with my cup of coffee and stare at the advertisements above my head of the handsome young men in their spotless uniforms, standing on the beach or on the mountaintop, smiling at the camera and draping their arms around their buddies’ shoulders as if they were having the time of their lives. “You too can help,” the advertisements read. “You too can make a difference.” Outside my train window, the frozen landscape of the city passed by, the suburbs first, then the schools, the factories, the warehouses, Walmart and Kmart, the fix-it shops, the scrapyards, the ghettos, and finally, thirty-two minutes later, coming fast over the bridge, the office buildings would appear, office buildings lit up twenty-four hours a day, including the one that in a few minutes I would be entering. This was the great progression of civilization.

  In the reflection of the train window, I would look at my face, and I would wonder if—at the age of twenty-eight—I was still young, and if I was still handsome, and in the last quarter mile I would drift off and have a brief but vivid dream, a straightforward dream in which all symbols were apparent, in which I wasn’t on a train heading toward any cubicle on the forty-eighth floor but far away, tracking down their man with my gun, with my uniform, with my night-vision goggles, getting closer and closer to the glory.

  We threw a welcome-home party for him. Some of the girls spent the morning decorating the conference room with signs drawn in blue and red markers, which said things like WELCOME HOME, WE’RE PROUD OF YOU, YOU’RE OUR HERO.

  When the managing director came around to my cubicle collecting money for refreshments, I gave him three dollars.

  “He sure is someone special,” the managing director said. I knew for a fact that he hardly knew who Wally was.

  Who he was was the guy who delivered the mail, the mailboy, and I was the one who’d gotten him the job. It had been my job first. His father had asked me to put in a good word for him and I had. I’d known Wally since high school, where I was the valedictorian and he was a regular student in regular classes. Everyone had expected nothing from him and great things from me, but I’d made some bad choices and squandered some good opportunities and ended up having to sign on as “dispatch administrator,” which meant mailboy. I’d worked three years in the subbasement, sweating in every season, before getting promoted to the forty-eighth floor. Wally had worked three months in the subbasement before he signed up for the army. Now everyone thought he was special.

  “He sure is,” I said to the managing director, and then I said what a shame it was that he had to come back home to the cold weather.

  The managing director obviously wanted to talk more, to heap more praise on Wally, more unearned praise on someone he didn’t know, but it was ten o’clock and my phone was ringing. Everyone’s phone was ringing. It was time to get to work.

  Bringg, bringg, the phones resounded through the cubicles, one hundred phones lighting up at once as if we were the command center for something important. Bringg, bringg. I watched the managing director walk away with my money and then I put on my headset and pushed some buttons the way a fighter pilot might push some buttons, and I said as pleasantly as I could, as naturally as I could, “Good morning. My name is Zeke. How may I help you today?”

  Two hundred times a day I said this, exactly this, sometimes three hundred times a day. When Bruce Springsteen came to town, I said it six hundred times. It was always “good morning” until it was time for my break at eleven-forty-five, and then it was “good afternoon” until lunch at one o’clock, and after lunch it was still “good afternoon,” all the way until it was time for me to pack up and go home. Throughout the office I could hear the voices saying “good morning, good morning, good morning, my name is …” A chorus of salutations that would last for the next eight hours and, if you weren’t careful, could drive you crazy, could enter your unconscious and reappear when you were least expecting it, like last week when I was paying the cashier at the supermarket and I handed her my credit card and said, loudly enough for everyone to hear, “Good morning. My name is Zeke …”

  I wasn’t complaining, though. No one was complaining. We were lucky. We were bored out of our minds, but we were lucky. These were good times for us, flush times. Business was booming because of the war, because the factories had opened back up and everyone had jobs, everyone had disposable income, and all the concerts and circuses were coming to town.

  The man on the other end of the phone wanted tickets to the circus. Tickets were fifty dollars apiece. He didn’t care. He wanted six. He demanded six. He didn’t say “please” or “thank you.” I tried not to take it personally. He sounded like he smoked and maybe drank, he sounded like he was overweight. He was condescending about everything. He was probably one of those guys who worked in insurance, probably sat on his terrace all day, even in the cold, drinking cans of soda and avoiding his family. Now he was trying to make up for his neglect with tickets to the circus. He didn’t say goodbye when he hung up.

  After that it was an elderly woman who couldn’t remember the name of what she wanted to buy. “Oh my goodness, what was it?” she asked me as if I’d know. She was confused by everything, she struggled with everything, she was frustrated with herself. I was patient for a while, and then I lost my patience and became sadistic, forcing her to suffer ten times over for the previous caller’s coarseness. I leaned way back in my swivel chair playing dumb, not helping her with anything until she asked for it in just the right way, and then I gave her the least amount of information I could. She stumbled, she fumbled, “Um, um, um,” the air went dead and I let it stay dead. I got satisfaction from her bewilderment, picturing her in her kitchen twirling with anxious fingers the cord on the rotary phone. It was fun for me. It was a diversion. This is how time is passed in a cubicle.

  But when I hung up, I was overcome with guilt, choked with guilt, almost to the point of tears. I thought of my grandmother, alone in her apartment, rheumatoid arthritis, suffering for years before she died. I put my elbows on my knees, I hung my head in shame, my tie dangled down. Now it was I who needed to atone.

  Next it was a girl on the line. She sounded beautiful. She sounded forgiving. She wanted to know if she could have two tickets for the Shakespeare play. “Yes, you can,” I said, my voice heavy with remorse. If she had said one kind thing, anything, I would have cried in gratitude. She sounded like she was a brunette with glasses and a nice ass. I bet she was smart and read books. I bet she’d gone to a good college and utilized her opportunities. I helped her with everything she needed and I got her great seats at a good price. I wanted to ask if she was going to the show with her boyfriend. “Are you married?” I wanted to ask. I once made a terrible mistake years ago by inquiring if the girl on the other end of the line was married. This was against company policy, but she had sounded so beautiful, and my desire had been so unbearable. I’d managed to establish a rapport with her in a few minutes on the phone, and I’d kept talking to her well after sealing the deal. Just so I could talk. I didn’t care about company policy, I didn’t care about losing commission. She had laughed at everything I said. “You sound tall,” she had said over the phone. “Are you tall?”

  “Not that tall,” I said.

  I was picturing her short, but when I met her a few days later, I was shocked to see that she was tiny, and her hair was red, and she had freckles and wore giant earrings. I sat across the table from her at T.G.I. Friday’s, looking down at my plate of salmon and listening to her voice, trying to recall the image I’d had of her on the
phone in my cubicle.

  The girl who wanted tickets for Shakespeare was happy with what I’d done for her. She left it at that and hung up. The next six callers were happy too. I was happy for their happiness. I was the portal through which they must pass on their way to pleasure. I was the faceless voice on the end of the line that enabled them to have those memorable evenings, those exciting afternoons. If not for me, the little boys and girls of the city would never be able to see the clowns and elephants. They didn’t know what I’d done for them, those little boys and girls, but I knew, and that was good enough for me.

  By the tenth caller, I was bitter again. I was callous again. I knew I would be. My mouth was dry, my ears were buzzing. Plus I had to piss.

  This is how my days go, bringg, bringg; bringg, bringg, every day pretty much the same as the day before: intimacy in intervals of three minutes or less—three minutes or less if you want to make enough commission—holding at bay my desire and antagonism, and also my boredom, and not a little regret. The only thing that made today different, that made it stand out from any of the days before, was that Wally was coming back.

  We gathered in the conference room. I was late getting there. I made a point of being late by staying in the bathroom. By the time I walked in, he still hadn’t arrived. This added to my aggravation.