What He's Poised to Do

“Promotions take time,” Schiff said, sighing with a heaviness that would have, in another man, been comic. “Lisa is her name? Her father’s the doctor?”

“A hell of a doctor.”

“Let’s have her in for an interview.”

“I jumped the gun on this one,” Mortenson said. “I had Stacy schedule her for tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll be here,” Schiff said.

No one asked me, though I would, as it turns out, be most affected by the whole business.

WHEN LISA FOSTER FIRST CAME into the office, it was out of the rain. She shook off a coat and then lifted the damp hair away from her face. It was light to the point of white, even when wet. I knew her from around town: her father was a doctor who had treated my mother for something mysterious years before, and who had come by the house with a dignified look on his face while she was dying. He was an unhealthy man himself who somehow managed to look like a matinee idol. His wife was a compact blonde whose features were harder than she would have wished. And yet they combined perfectly in their daughter, who was short and buxom, a bit flat in the nose and deep in the eyes, and so powerfully attractive that when she entered the office I stepped out from behind the filing cabinet and took her coat without thinking.

“Thank you,” she said, and the way she neglected to say my name told me that she knew it. Mortenson appeared and took her into the conference room, where Schiff was waiting. I sat and covered the front desk for Stacy, who was late. Or rather: I pretended to cover for Stacy and I watched Lisa Foster. Her face did not look like the face of a stranger. Everything about her reminded me of another woman, but when I thought of those other women I was reminded of her. Inside the room, Mortenson asked questions with false seriousness, and Schiff occasionally gave an equally false laugh.

She got the job, of course. I don’t think it was ever in question. Her father, it seemed, had also treated Mortenson’s wife on a matter some years before. “Just in time,” Mortenson said, though he did not elaborate. They put her behind a boxy desk up front that was fenced in by a putty-colored partition. She said hello every day to everyone as they came through the door. To me, she gave a little wave that at first seemed like no more than professional obligation. When I decided, quite independent of any evidence, that she was not the kind of woman to act out of obligation, I started waving back.

LISA WAS A TALENTED GIRL—she was a fine painter who was also taking classes in architecture—but perhaps her most important trait was her lack of belief in herself, which in turn produced a fine brand of aggression. When I made a comment, she would contest it, no matter what it was. If a joke failed to find its mark, as it often did, she would tell me flatly why it was unfunny. “I’m assertive, not aggressive,” she told me. “One is about protecting your own space; the other is about moving into someone else’s.” I accepted the definitions but not the diagnosis. That first week, she stopped me as I went downstairs for lunch. “I’ll join you,” she said. “Let’s eat in the little park.”

We went across the street to a bench, which was in a shady, quiet spot that seemed all the more so after the hot, crowded stretch of road we had to cross to get there. We put our sandwiches out on the table and weighed down napkins with bottles of juice. Afterward, she smoked a cigarette. That first day, we didn’t have what I would call a full conversation. She made observations about the people in the office and I agreed, usually readily. She knew Mortenson was a wolf even before Stacy confessed to her in the women’s bathroom. “He takes her to motels,” she said, “not because he can’t go to her place, but because he kind of gets off on the sleaziness of it. He’s a good judge of character, though. She said she does, too.” Schiff, she held, was a great man. “But the kind of great man no one will ever know. He’s so shy. He turns away from me when I’m talking to him. And to have a man that large turn away? It’s a blow to the ego.” She told me that her life as an artist was, while not temporary, not necessarily permanent. “Not that I’ll ever stop painting, but I have a feeling that later on I might want money, or things that I can get with money. I don’t know how I’ll handle being poor down the line.” She said she enjoyed working in the office, that she imagined that she was ordering the world, or at least giving order to a part of it in a way that might spread outward, like a healthy disease.

The next day at lunch, I was a little bolder, sometimes frowning at things she said, sometimes laughing. The third day, I spoke up. “I remember coming to this park as a kid,” I said. “Fourth of July.”

“Really?” she said. “Me too. I was afraid the fireworks would fall on me, and I hid under that tree over there.”