What He's Poised to Do

Soon enough she had joined me in the file room two mornings a week. Schiff visited more than once each morning, and for a little while I was worried that I had miscalculated his interest in her. After all, behind his dolorous façade was a man, and a man would not have been immune to a girl like Lisa. But then his visits stopped, and it occurred to me that maybe his concern had been for me. I could see why. I knew things about the file room that she did not know, but she was a quick study, and by the third or fourth day she was correcting my errors or suggesting ways that work might be organized more efficiently. “A smart person wouldn’t do this,” she said, which made me dislike her a little and, predictably, want her even more. Lisa knew this and did her best to magnify matters. When we were having lunch, she directed her attention—both toward me and away from me, it is true, but she directed it. And I did what you do with direction: I followed it. “What are you doing?” she liked to say to me, no matter whether she had caught me looking or caught me not looking, and the tone was not coy or supportive but rather belligerent. I should have told her I was thinking of other girls, or even that I was thinking of her, or that her system for improving the file room was foolish, but instead I said too much by saying nothing at all. Days before, I had been certain that I wanted her but wouldn’t act on it. Now I was less sure that I wanted her and less sure that I was capable of resisting. I had a clear line to my uncertainty and she was tangling it.

I HAD BEGUN TOYING with the idea that my future might involve, if not exactly writing, the management of written language toward some previously envisioned end, and in that spirit I started to ply Lisa with notes I left on her desk on the mornings when she did not join me in the file room. Most were officious in the extreme, which I intended as a form of modesty: “Ms. Foster,” I’d write, “I hope you do not believe it has escaped my notice that you are filing your nails when you should be filing affidavits.” Or, “I cannot express my disappointment strongly enough, so I will leave it to your evidently prodigious imagination, which you seem to be exercising rather than focusing on work.” In the letters, I was authoritative, presumptuous, even rude.

One evening in the file room, I kissed her. I suppose it was predictable, but that did not make it any less miraculous for me. I credit, at least in part, her car. She drove a Toyota, brown with black vinyl, that baked hot in the afternoon sun, and she refused to leave the office until it had cooled off a bit. Since temperatures were routinely reaching ninety degrees, she was always there past seven, and just as I had gotten used to being the only one in the office late, I grew accustomed to being there late with her. We didn’t always talk—it seemed too intimate—but sometimes I would drop by her desk to ask if she had received “Mr. Tipton’s letter.” One night, she came by the file room, even though she was supposed to be at the desk. She brought a transistor radio and a can of soda. “Care package,” she said.

I did not answer. Or rather, as an answer, I slid my hand along the underside of her arm, closed my grip around her shoulder, and kissed her. She didn’t return the kiss, not exactly, but she didn’t pull away either. It was impossible to tell how she was feeling about the moment, and that was intoxicating to me. We kissed for a long time, and when I reached for the top button of her blouse, she pushed my hand away and unbuttoned it herself. Then she turned off the three long fluorescents that lit the room and backed herself against a wall in such a way that it seemed as though I were pushing her there. I waited for her to hike her skirt until I became aware that she was waiting for me.

Afterward, she excused herself and vanished downstairs to smoke a cigarette. I watched from the window as she puffed small clouds into the parking lot, looked back up to the eleventh floor, gave a wave of her fingers, got in her car, and drove off for home. No time had passed. I went back to filing.