Hirsch enjoyed the atmosphere in the office, the nearness of the women in the other room, the smell of their perfume, their laughter, certain unexpected glimpses of their flesh, a woman’s thigh when she crossed her legs, or her full white breasts when he leaned across her desk to look down her blouse. Aside from which, there was the incomparable satisfaction of balancing accounts. Why, then, had he composed a letter of resignation? Why had he purchased a hunting rifle when he had no intention to hunt? He liked to imagine being charged by a lion. The women would be hysterical, the men paralyzed with fear, but Hirsch would stand his ground calculating the precise moment when he must squeeze the trigger, not too soon lest he miss, not too late lest the lion spring. And then the shots like a car backfiring in the street and making the leaves rustle in the trees.
Hirsch daydreamed about the women in the other room. He undressed them in his mind, as the saying goes. He shackled their wrists and ankles to bedposts. That was not unusual. He imagined that Walt and Charlie did the same, perhaps Solly too. Or perhaps Solly daydreamed about more attractive women, though he was seldom among them, being bound to the office like Hirsch himself, and even more so, having so much more responsibility and often having to stay late, unlike Hirsch, who left at five, or rather a few minutes later to avoid the crush at the time clock. They were not all unattractive, of course. They were blemished, rather, or flawed. Hirsch was blemished too, though his blemishes were fairly well concealed. He was neither short nor tall or fat or thin. He had regular features. He wore glasses. He tended to be clumsy but that was neither here nor there. He was deferential and eager to please.
Solly was bald. He also wore glasses. He would have been forty at the time, or thereabouts, ready to make the leap from middle management to the higher echelons of the organization. All the top executives drove big cars that they could barely maneuver into the narrow street when they came out of the company garage toward evening. Solly drove a
medium-sized car and lived in Long Island in a medium-sized house with his wife and three children. From time to time Hirsch took a peek at the photo on Solly’s big desk. It told him nothing. He would have liked to learn the history of Solly’s marriage. Had there been romance? Had there been that magical moment when the protagonists made their declarations of love in long speeches full of poetic locutions? Had they perhaps previously been at odds or had a falling out as in those books by lady novelists in another century? Hirsch could not imagine how Solly might speak intimately to a woman. Hirsch knew only himself, and from this knowledge all his other knowledge derived.
In the subway Hirsch heard the sound of music over the roar of the train. The sound of the music was in his head. It made him think of crepe-paper curtains in open windows rustling in a summer breeze and the lazy, distant drone of a plane high overhead in the summer sky, so high you could hardly see it, but there it was and the child said, “Look! Look! There it is!” In that time and that place there were three of them, himself and two others, that is. But all around them there were other people too, young mothers with infants in carriages and their milk so sweet, their breasts so full and white. He remembered the young mothers and the sloping lawns and the still, hot air. In the park he looked out at the world from beneath a woolen cap. And his eyes so big. In that time and that place women wore long skirts or dresses and high heels and nylon stockings and the sky was always blue. And you saw a squirrel run up a tree and heard the shouts of children playing in the vast green fields. And there were beds of flowers and little ants and dogs on leashes and bikes and roller skates and baby carriages and bouncing balls, so much noise and movement and color and light, it was dazzling and you wanted it all and you said, “Me! Me! Me!” and she looked too, or maybe she didn’t hear you. And the sun so bright and a pale quarter-moon still in the sky and you played in a shallow pool of water and he pushed you on the swing and you ran around in circles in the playground and climbed the monkey bars and sat on the seesaw and he sat on the other end. They had a doorman in those years and a canopy outside. The lobby was dark and cool with a gilded mirror and a marble floor. It was hard to get the carriage up the stairs in front so you often went down the basement ramp to get to the elevator. The super always tipped his hat at the women coming by but you distrusted him. He had a wife that no one spoke to. The building was full of young women with babies. It was after the war. The men had come home. The sky was always blue and the rain cooled the air and it snowed every year. He had a little shovel and a sled and rubber boots and a hat with flaps that covered his ears but earmuffs too and woolen gloves and a heavy coat that made him round and clumsy so that if he fell he might roll away, roll down a hill like a rubber ball and into traffic and far away. Then someone might find him at the side of the road, wet and frightened, and take him home.
He got off the train and walked home. Harriet wasn’t there. He found her author’s number in the book and phoned. The phone rang and rang but no one answered. Each time it rang it was like someone screaming in his head. He stared at the receiver, looking perplexed.
Hirsch made his own supper and looked out the window. He ate it standing up. When he got into bed in the middle of the night, she pretended to be sleeping but her body was frozen and her teeth were chattering. “Keep me warm,” she said, and there were tears in her eyes.
He remembered when they had come back to the city on the coldest night of the year. There was no heat in the house and they had lain in one another’s arms, unable to sleep. Then he had taken her. In the morning snow began to fall. They went into the street and built a snowman. She wore high boots and a woolen hat. When they came back upstairs there was heat in the house and he took her again. Then he read a book. The subway had broken down. Harriet made egg salad sandwiches for lunch and something hot to drink and spent the afternoon sketching Infusoria. Towards evening she phoned her author and they talked for a while. Hirsch tried to listen in but couldn’t make out what they were saying. They must have talked for an hour. He made his own supper and ate it standing up.
There was a cold spell that winter. Once Harriet slipped on the ice and bruised her knee. Hirsch fell more than once. The icy wind tore into his face and he could hardly breathe. When he got home he stood against the radiator until the heat penetrated his clothes and burned his flesh. He thought of taking a hot bath. When he lay in the tub Harriet came in and stared at him. “What are you doing?” she said. As a child he had loved hot baths and the games he played in the water, and she too would come in and scrub him and once she screamed at him.
It was an expensive apartment and they both had to work to keep it up. Harriet might have wanted to go to school to finish her doctorate. But she didn’t hold it against him. This was how she preferred to live. Who could blame her? Hirsch liked the apartment too, the size, the location, the trees in the back, the sparrows, the lights in the windows across the yard, full of mystery. They had three rooms. The living room was very big, with space for everything they owned, for all of Hirsch’s books along a single wall, the ones in hard covers toward the bottom, the ones in soft covers toward the top, and Harriet had a desk where she drew with a special pen, and they had their music and their big stuffed chairs and a new sofa and various odds and ends, leaving the room
uncluttered. The bedroom was big too. There was a big leather
chair beside the double bed. Hirsch liked to sit in it and watch Harriet dress. She sat at the edge of the bed rolling on her stockings and then stood up to adjust her garter belt and sometimes asked him to close her bra and her broad back made him want her.
They parted in the street. When they parted he sometimes wondered if he would ever see her again. He could imagine himself coming home to the empty apartment and waiting for her to return, waiting hours, into the night, and then hearing her heels on the pavement below, and his heart leaping as he ran to the door.
These visions assailed his senses at unexpected moments. He thought of her on the subway and he thought of her
in bed, just as he thought of the girls in the other room when he sat at his desk balancing accounts. Walt and Charlie watched him as though they could see him think. Solly came by twirling his tie and Mr. Kroll never stopped stamping his papers. Sometimes Hirsch got called downstairs to the office of a vice president or the company treasurer. Then he had to be prepared to explain every figure in every column of
every account he’d signed with his big red marker. Solly would come down too sometimes but never said a word. It was up to Hirsch to acquit himself. The treasurer’s office was on the ground floor, next to the Xerox machine. The treasurer sat at a bare desk waiting for things to sign. He signed requisitions, quotations, reports. Hirsch brought him thick folders full of figures and stood off to the side as he studied them, actually adding up the figures in his head, though Hirsch always affixed the tape from the adding machine, which was de rigueur in the accounting trade. When he asked a question Hirsh replied quickly and decisively and the treasurer nodded his head to indicate that he was satisfied with the answer, or perhaps to indicate that he had heard the answer, for Hirsch could not be certain how much the treasurer relied on these answers. No doubt he had other sources of information and was in fact checking the reliability of the department and its staff rather than being entirely dependent on it. Hirsch was certain that he acquitted himself very well, making a strong impression with his terse replies. Once the treasurer had asked Hirsch about the government auditors upstairs and Hirsch had seized upon the occasion to reply at length, offering his personal impressions. Once the treasurer had asked Hirsch a few questions about his personal life and Hirsch had had to prevaricate to avoid embarrassment.
When Hirsch returned to the office after these interrogations Solly inevitably said, “Nice job,” if he hadn’t accompanied him to begin with, in which case he said, “Nice job,” the moment they were out of the treasurer’s office. This was flattering, it gave Hirsch a good feeling. Inevitably Solly stopped to chat with the treasurer’s secretary, a handsome young woman who also ran the Xerox machine. She wore a variety of short skirts and always had on a white blouse. She kept fresh flowers on her desk and was always chewing gum. Hirsch wondered if she was married and looked for a ring. “How’d you like to get some of that?” Solly would say as they trotted up the stairs.
As always, Walt and Charlie were waiting at his desk when he returned from these sessions. They knew where he had been and always tried to extract information from him, often asking seemingly innocent questions, such as the kind of flowers the secretary had on her desk or the color of the skirt she was wearing, and from these seemingly trivial exchanges
opening locked doors and piecing together, Hirsch was convinced, a far broader picture of company affairs. It must have been a special talent they had, taught at headquarters to all field operatives before they were handed their briefcases, their pencils and their egg salad sandwiches for the first time and told in rousing tones to hit the streets. Hirsch didn’t imagine
that their two auditors were any different from the thousands of others roaming the country in pursuit of inflated costs. They would show up wherever government business was being done. They were relentless, they were remorseless. They were even somewhat frightening, Charlie with his pockmarked face and Walt when he rolled his shoulders and stepped in front of you waiting for an answer. How could Hirsch resist them when they invited him out to lunch or to a game of pool on Friday afternoons?
Walt and Charlie did not play pool very well. Hirsch preferred to watch, though once in a while they’d urge him to try a shot. He had no idea what to do. He of course knew that Harriet’s author had a table and wondered if he’d ever invited Harriet for a game. He could not imagine Harriet playing, though he could see her leaning across the table and the skirt riding up her leg while her author stood behind her. When he mentioned having played with Walt and Charlie, she looked at him in a coy way, as though understanding his intention and perhaps not averse to creating the impression that she engaged with her author in certain intimate though for the moment innocent activities. The click of the balls made him think of the tinkle of ice in a tall glass or of cups and saucers in a tea room filled with the murmur of polite conversation and quiet laughter.
Hirsch’s attention naturally wandered when they played. Sometimes, before or after lunch, he’d duck into a bookstore and buy a book of poems which he might glance at while they played, poems in French or Spanish with the English on a facing page, and in this way he might quote the original to Harriet when the opportunity arose. Sometimes Walt or Charlie grabbed his wrist and gave it a painful twist so that they could see the cover. Walt would then mimic the Spanish or the French, depending on the title of the book. They drank beer while they played. Hirsch sometimes had one too. Then they went back to the office like the best of friends. If Solly was already back from his own long lunch break he would cluck his tongue. If not, Hirsch would resume working on his letter of resignation.
On Friday afternoons it was permissible to return to the office after lunch a little late. Solly sometimes spent a couple of hours on his break and came back somewhat flushed, probably having had one too many with the other middle management people he socialized with, or perhaps meeting the wife in town for a drink and a leisurely meal in some intimate little restaurant with dim lights and someone at the piano and afterwards taking her to a hotel. Time was managed very strictly in the Company. There was always someone hovering around the time clock in the morning and someone else there in the evening to keep an eye on things. Punching in or out for someone was grounds for immediate dismissal. Records were kept, entries were made, files kept going in and out of Personnel, where Miss Malone guarded company secrets as fiercely, said Solly, as a virgin guarded her flanks. “If you can get into her pants,” he liked to say, “you can get into Fort Knox.” Walt and Charlie concurred, having been denied access on more than one occasion and having to make do with verbal replies filtered through the elaborate hierarchy established in the Company precisely to dampen their enthusiasm.
Hirsch had spoken to Miss Malone once. She was elderly but not unpleasant to look at, despite the severity of the way she dressed and wore her hair. Hirsch had thought to flirt with her, thinking it would be harmless enough and wondering how she would respond. Once he had seen her leaving the building with old Mr. Kroll and thought he had detected signs of intimacy. She had a pointed chin and pointed breasts. Everything about her suggested hardness and angularity and yet Hirsch was fascinated by the secrets of her body and imagined it might be pleasurable to take her. Her age did not deter him; on the contrary, it was a spur or goad. But their talk had not gone well. She had looked at him with distaste, leaving him feeling somewhat foolish. As always, Solly seemed to know everything. “How’d it go?” he said when Hirsch came back.
Hirsch pretended not to understand. Solly didn’t press him. He only winked. He knew he could rely on Solly. Only once had Solly made a cutting remark. That was when Hirsch had loitered near the ladies’ room after moving his bowels. But Hirsch had been able to laugh off the entire incident as an unfortunate misunderstanding and Solly had taken him at his word. That, fortunately, had been the end of it. It had been fortunate too that Walt and Charlie had not gotten wind of the affair. He would never have been able to live it down. The men’s and ladies’ rooms adjoined one another. They were located near the end of the long. narrow corridor leading to the emergency exit, opposite another unused storeroom where it was said Walt and Charlie had originally been lodged, until they protested about the unseemliness of the arrangement and were moved to the storeroom behind Hirsch’s desk in the anteroom opposite the main entrance where Hirsch now sat like a receptionist though he was in fact a working member of the staff. Hirsch kept a photograph of Harriet in a bathing suit on his desk and more than once her fine figure had been remarked by coworkers passing by. He was proud of the photograph, believing it showed off Harriet at her best, though it was in fact an ancient picture, take
n long before they had met. He’d fished it out of one of her albums and had it framed. It showed her sitting on the beach, squinting at the camera but entirely at ease, with strong thighs and big breasts. She had not really changed. He was different now but she was not.
They often met around Times Square, at the Library or the Automat. He’d go in to get a book, then come up to the reading room where she generally sat, or meet her outside on the steps, and they’d have coffee together before going home.
Sometimes her author was there and they had their heads together and he might lay his hand on her knee and Hirsch cleared his throat and they both looked up and she batted her eyes as though surprised to see him. It was always warm in the Library but it was cold outside that winter when the snow piled up in the streets and even buried cars. They went to foreign films, some plays and a concert or two. Afterwards they took the subway home and sometimes she fell asleep with her hair brushing his cheek as he sat shivering in the swerving car and the dim lights of the stations flashed by. He could imagine himself in such a subway car, on some distant night, alone, on a journey that would never end, endlessly rocking, endlessly swaying as the train sped through the dark, winding tunnels on endless tracks. But she was there now and they were going home.
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