by Jessica Bell
“So, what kind of music are you into?” I asked, letting this newfound confidence take reign as I perched myself on a bar stool and crossed my legs in my slinky knee-length black skirt. My long psychedelic beads collided, caressing my hardly-there and well-covered breasts. “You know, the stuff that moves you. The stuff you listen to at home,” I continued after a few seconds of silence, wondering if I had asked a stupid question. The soft warm Frangelico glided down my throat, my voice sliding through my red lips like water over tanned, oiled skin. Alex’s body heat traveled from his thighs to mine as he stood leaning his elbows against the bar, slowly sipping his Vat 69. He squinted, and pouted his lips in thought toward the rows and rows of alcohol bottles behind the bartender—a very old, classy man who had worked there for thirty years and obsessively wiped the bar dry.
“The Kinks, Dead Kennedys, Elvis Costello. You?” Alex answered, turning to face me on the “you.” He slid his body a little closer. My stomach tightened in anticipation. All I wanted to do was wrap my legs around his waist and savor his touch, the poignant tenderness I imagined he hid below his black leather tough-guy exterior.
“PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Joni Mitchell,” I replied, smiling so hard my lips stung.
“Nice.” Alex nodded, took another sip of his drink and turned to face the bar again.
“Get into a bit of trip hop now and then too. Nightmares on Wax. Stuff like that,” I added, trying to get him to look at me again. His cool manner was so well executed I wondered whether it was even a manner at all. Perhaps that was just him. Naturally at ease. Sure of himself. And not afraid to flaunt it. Perfect, I thought. This is the kind if man I want in my life. A man untainted with insecurity.
“Trip hop, hey? Unusual,” replied Alex, contorting his mouth into an intrigued frown.
“Why?” I put my drink down and reached for some nuts. “Why is that unusual?” As I put the nuts in my mouth, one escaped and dropped into my crotch. I pretended I hadn’t noticed and slowly opened my legs to let it drop to the floor. Alex pretended not to notice, but I caught him take a fleeting look.
“Well, Greek girls don’t usually mix tastes like that,” said Alex, putting down his drink. He looked me right in the eye this time, as if trying to read my thoughts.
“Well, I’m Australian, so that’s irrelevant, right?” Quirky innocence invaded the tone in my voice. I didn’t want to be quirky and innocent. I wanted to be strange and mysterious. I tried to wipe the grin off my face, to appear more in control of my feelings. But it was too late.
“Right,” Alex replied, a semitone lower than usual, moving his face so close to mine I could feel his breath on my lips. I could taste his whiskey, smell his aftershave. My mouth grew moist as I imagined our tongues touching.
“I’m glad you’re not Greek,” he sighed. “I want … not Greek. I want … white skin … green eyes … long … black … hair.” With each pause he inched closer to my lips. I couldn’t move. As if my skin had been turned to stone. All I could hear was the gentle roar in his breath. As he reached the closest point before touching my lips he whispered, “Can I taste your lipstick?”
In the taxi home that night, the first song I heard on the radio was “I Want You” by Elvis Costello. And as it turned out, it was Alex’s all-time-favorite song.
Three
At Hilton Hotel. Biting nails. Reciting presentation in head with the notes of guitar scales. Standing by lecture hall door, fingers twisted behind back, toes clenched in black baby doll slip-ons. Changed shoes in the car. Watching freshly dry-cleaned suits, worn by impassive breathing corpses, walk by. Black pencil skirts and dusty patent leather high-heeled shoes on Stepford Wife splendor. Clop. Clop. Clopping. Past me like old slides. Bus boys with crisp white shirts and ugly yellow ties. Upper-class ladies in frilly blouses who eat with their mouths closed at all times, and wait for the thirty-second mouthful before swallowing, and pat their lips with expensive linen napkins.
A piece of nail gets lodged between my central incisors. I try to pry it out, exposing my teeth like a growling dog, but failing because I have no nails left to pry it out with. Middle-aged man in navy blue tailored trousers and pink shirt with collar opened three buttons down, grins at me in a ridiculing manner. His gold chain glistens amidst his thick dark chest hair as he passes below a chandelier. Rich bastard. Trying to follow trends. I bring my arms down to my sides and close my mouth, pushing the nail through my teeth with my tongue. Grimacing within, I smile back with my lips pressed together so tight I imagine them turning white.
I’m nauseous. Not because of presentation nerves, but because pink shirts make me want to vomit, for two reasons. One: they remind me of the time I was ten and put my white clothes in with the red bed sheets and mum pulled the heads off all my Barbie dolls as punishment. They also remind of when Alex got attacked by Greek rock venue mafia, and was left bleeding with a few knife gashes to his chest. White shirt stained with blood. Nothing serious. But what if it had been? I tried to scrub out the blood from his shirt by hand in the white porcelain bathroom sink. I’ll never forget that feeling of infirmity spread from my feet, through my body, to the tip of my tongue. I turned around and threw up in the toilet bowl. Then continued to scrub, and sung a stupid TV cheese jingle to distract myself from the overwhelming fear of what might happen next time.
It’s time. I walk into the lecture hall and stand behind the podium. A bead of sweat tickles between my breasts. I want to scratch it. I grit my teeth trying to wane off the temptation, the air becoming a whirlwind of angst around my head. I cough into the microphone. Feedback. Feet shuffle. Voices murmur. Silence. A stray chuckle escapes from someone who was probably so preoccupied talking to the person next to them that they hadn’t noticed I’d walked in.
Eyes focus on me as if I am an optometrist’s letter chart. With shaking legs and a blank mind, I open my mouth to introduce myself, but words do not flee. Thank goodness for modern technology. I fiddle around with the projection screen with my back to the audience while I get my bearings, muttering silently to myself to focus on Heather’s advice.
I begin my presentation. The audience pays considerate attention. They nod when I imagine they should. Laugh when I hope they would. Respond to questions when I think they could. And I’m relieved. I’m making it through this. Try to smile a little, would ya? But then the unthinkable happens. In the middle of my last slide, the button holding my dress secure around my bust bursts. I watch it fly in slow motion toward the eye of the Board of Education representative sitting closest to me in the front row. He’s wearing a deep chocolate brown suit, and cream shirt. Full head of black hair, no tie, collar button undone, nicely built, but not so much that you really notice the muscle. One look at his perfectly angular, charming face, and I completely forget where I am. I stop mid-sentence. He looks right at me and lifts an eyebrow in an encouraging manner. Is he rooting for me? Then it happens. The button gets him in his right eye.
I turn toward the screen, and focus on the first bullet point. What does it say? What am I meant to be saying about this? My hands shake and I seek out my trouser pockets. You’re wearing a dress, you idiot! I pretend to be smoothing my dress down on my thighs then fold my hands behind my back. I close the presentation like a robot. White noise fills my ears. I can’t hear myself think or speak, or even comprehend what I’m saying. But the audience applauds. It must be okay. Now they’re standing. Getting up to leave. The BOE rep stands too. He holds out his hand. I shake it. He pushes my button into my clammy palm. I smile. Am I smiling? Or do you just think you’re smiling? Smile Goddam it!
“Mighty presentation, dear,” says button boy in a British accent so smooth I can feel it on my tongue like crème caramel. “I’ll make sure you get what you deserve.” He winks. Say thank you! But before I utter a word he makes his way toward the exit. I watch his perfectly round and solid backside strut along the stained lilac carpet. He pauses at the door. Spins round on one foot. Catches me staring. I think I blush. My skin tingl
es like I’ve just opened an oven door to pull out a batch of macaroons, the only thing I ever learned how to bake. I smile and nod, crossing my arms below my breasts, then immediately letting them loose just in case the gesture makes me seem nervous. He returns the gesture and brings his hand, shaped like a telephone, to his ear. I nod.
You nod? Oh my God. What the hell do you think you’re doing?
When he disappears out of sight, I realize I am clenching my dress button in a tight fist. I loosen my grip, my fingers spreading like a blooming flower in fast forward. And with my button is a phone number, written on a tiny slither of newspaper, in handwriting so neat, one would think he’d prepared it earlier.
After the presentation I do some grocery shopping before going back to the office. I had planned on ordering take-out tonight, but I fear I’ve been neglecting Tessa. I may be busy and tired, but I do have a responsibility to feed her properly—so I bought pasta and canned tomatoes. Don’t beat yourself up over it. At least it’s not souvlaki again.
As I enter the artificially lit reception of UTD Publications, I sense a looming cross-examination on my way to my desk. My conscience is going to grill me until I start uttering my thoughts aloud again—another embarrassing habit I’ve acquired recently.
My heart beats with the fearful expectation I felt as a child when I had been disobedient—well, disobedient in my mother’s opinion. You just fantasized about a man other than Alex. What the flip has got into you? Not once during our entire marriage has this happened to me. And to make matters worse, I can’t bring myself to discard button boy’s phone number. He might have given it to me to contact him for business. This is a logical and safe explanation. One I can rely on to tame my guilt. But of course, if that were the case, surely he would have given me his business card. So stop kidding yourself!
On the surface, this English Language Teaching world represents itself as the friendliest and most accessible in its field, yet drips with the pressure I imagine an interrogation room full of FBI agents would. Each department is separated. Not by glass, but by thick soundproofed walls, and for a strange tenuous reason, our boss expects us to avoid communicating with each other face-to-face. You would think that face-to-face communication between marketing and editorial would be vital for book sales, but in my boss’s view, it distracts and causes superfluous chatter amongst us. So, email it is and remains to be, even though walking into the next room to discuss urgent issues would be easier and free us of impatience.
The editorial department is the largest room in this building that looks like a miniature White House. Bright and classy on the outside; dark and twisted within. It’s painted dark gray from floor to ceiling, and consists of six pairs of desks, separated with two-meter high partitions covered in wood grain-patterned adhesive. I approach my desk and switch on my computer, dropping my handbag smack-dab in the middle of my scattered and incomprehensible presentation notes from the previous few days. Purple Post-Its bombard my partition. Some have lost their stick and slipped through the crack between the partition and the back of my desk and fallen onto the floor. I stare at my bag’s wrinkly, flaking, blue-vinyl exterior. It looks how I feel. Old. Poorly constructed. Depressed. Cheap.
I take a deep breath initiating yet another day of tedium, getting a good whiff of the sickening amalgamation of perfume and cleaning fluid. Will any heads surface to ask me how my presentation went at least? Does anyone give a shit? I look around the room, still standing. I put my hands on my hips and screw up my mouth to the left side of my face. Waiting. For. Some. Movement. You’d think my colleagues could fathom breaking their focus to ask me how my morning was. But no. Their disregard for my presence pisses me off like an unlocatable itch.
“Jesus Christ,” I snap under my breath, as I sit in front of my computer. I hear quiet heads turn as the wheels of my seat roll me below the desk. One of the new editorial assistants giggles and clears her throat—probably nervous about causing a disruption. If I had the nerve, I’d speak up. Tell them what a bunch of inconsiderate fucks they are. But I suppose that would be “unprofessional” of me.
Heather walks in to fetch an empty coffee mug from her desk and spots me. She pauses and signals me to the coffee station with a flick of her head. Her straight shoulder-length, forty-year-old white-gray hair swings with grace. I grab my plastic container of onion soup out of my bag to heat in the microwave. My stomach is rumbling like a dog’s low growl. Not from hunger. From nerves / guilt / anger.
“So? How did it go?” Heather asks in her bouncy London accent. She puts a teaspoon of decaffeinated Nescafé into her shiny black mug; her small, almond-shaped crystal blue eyes, thinly lined with silver-gray shadow, pop against her smooth alabaster skin as she stares at me, eyebrows raised, waiting for an answer.
I tell her about the presentation, and although quite reluctant to mention button boy, I do, knowing very well that if there is someone I can trust around here, it is Heather. When I finish talking she empties her fresh mug of coffee into the sink.
“Whaddaya doing that for?” I ask, looking at the mug, then her face, then her mug again with my jaw agape.
Heather mouths the letters “PM” and starts making another coffee. PM stands for Project Manager. We have two, and they basically run the editorial department.
Sure enough in struts Dianne, one of the PMs, standing tall, shoulders spread, mousy brown hair styled as if hair sprayed in position since 1982. The three of us flash each other polite smiles as Dianne presses the elevator’s up button. She must be on her way to see the boss. Has she forgotten about my presentation too? Why are my actions so invisible? The day I never step foot in this wretched joint again couldn’t come sooner.
Standing there with her hands behind her back, Dianne swings backward and forward on the balls of her feet. She grins as though replaying a pleasant moment in her head. The elevator door pings open. My soup trickles into my hand and onto my dress.
“Damn it!” I exclaim, putting the container of soup in the sink and reaching for a sponge.
Dianne lets the elevator close without stepping in. “What type of container is it in?” she asks.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say, scrubbing the stain from the only decent dress I own. Blue dye comes off on the sponge. “I bought it from my local supermarket.” I throw the sponge in the sink with a heavy sigh and wipe my forehead with the back of my wet hand, eyes closed in frustration. Heather rips off a paper towel and hands it to me. I press it firmly on the wet patch to soak up the fluid.
“Well, it’s perfectly understandable that your soup leaked into your bag with a container like that,” Dianne replies, lifting her nose as though blessed with unique wisdom. She turns around to face us with swift enthusiasm, holding her Filofax in the air. She beams as revelation shines upon her face. “You should buy Tupperware. It’s one hundred percent reliable, and they come in many shapes and sizes. You can even choose colors to match the décor of your kitchen!”
What is this? Are we in some sort of 1950s TV commercial?
“Er—” I try to stall my response. The last thing I want right now is to get into a conversation about plastic boxes. But my hesitation does no good.
“I absolutely adore Tupperware,” Dianne continues, looking toward the ceiling with her head tilted. I imagine a cartoon thought bubble of her cradling a Tupperware container, like a baby, appearing above her head. “I have every shape and size for every purpose. I even put little labels on them so I don’t have to spend time searching through the fridge or cupboards. They seal very w—Oh! And don’t you just love the sound they make when you open the lid? Maybe it’s just me, but it’s very satisfying. Pshhhh. You really know that the container has done its job and kept your food fresh. Maybe you should invest in some good quality containers in order to avoid any such spillages in the future. Oh sorry, Melody, listen to me carry on like a hen being chased around a barn.”
I don’t know how long I stand there with my jaw open like a funfair clown, but Heathe
r has to close it for me. Snap—shut like a compact mirror. I have never seen Dianne get excited over anything in the entire time I have worked here. The most words we’ve ever exchanged before now was during my interview three years ago. And even then the big boss did more of the talking, while she ogled him as if he were a member of the Royal Family. I’m amazed she didn’t drown in her own drool.
“Oh, and Melody, as soon as I’m done upstairs, meet me in my office and we’ll talk about your presentation.” Wow. Finally. I force a nod of gratitude.
“And we loved the songs you wrote for the pre-junior course,” she adds, holding the newly arrived elevator door open with her foot, “and it looks like we’ll ask you to write them for the next level in the series too. Would you be interested?” Next level? Does that mean I’m not being promoted?
“Sure,” I respond in a manner that shows more appreciation than I actually feel.
“Great. We’ll speak again later this afternoon.” Oozing with pretentiousness, Dianne nods goodbye and steps into the elevator.
Heather looks over her shoulder and then whispers with her hand to my ear, “You think she’s having it off with the boss?”
“Don’t be silly,” I say, shaking my head. “She’s just in awe of the man’s superiority. Anyway, I can’t really imagine her being the type.”
“What type of person do you have to be in order to have a fling?” Heather retorts as she pours some milk into her second mug of coffee, now probably on the verge of being cold.
“Oh, I don’t know. Not so—”
“Proper? Well, I wouldn’t think of you as the type either, but you sure have the hots for button boy,” interrupts Heather, raising the pitch of her last word with a little wink.
“I do not.” I cup my face in my hands. Shame glazes my skin like hot steam in a sauna.
“Yes, you do. You should have seen the look on your face when you were talking about him.” Heather takes a sip of her coffee, winces, and pours it down the drain again. She shakes her head, scrunching up her nose. “Don’t worry, I don’t think you’d do anything of the sort, but there’s nothing wrong with a little fantasy, right? I mean, honestly, our husbands must do it all the time.” Heather laughs, snorting a little.