by Paul Hina
over Susannah as she sways against the swimming in her head and into the breeze of Ben Webster's horn.
"Would you do me a favor?" she whispers, as if she were trying not to disturb anyone.
"Sure."
"It's a little strange," she says, her eyes still closed.
"Strange doesn't bother me."
"Could you hum the chorus of 'Wake Up, Little Susie' for me, but at a slightly slower tempo than normal."
"Sorry?"
"I told you it was strange."
"I'm not sure I even remember—"
She stops him, and starts humming the song herself. He quickly remembers the song, and takes over for her. And, with its slower tempo, it's a terribly sad song. And even though he can feel the vibration of the sounds he's making, he hears it as if it were coming from someone else's throat.
As Simon makes his way toward Laura's makeshift office at the university, he's not in the best frame of mind. It could just be an echo from last night's wine, but he's feeling a bit spacey. Sleep did not come easy for him last night. His mind was alive at the prospect of taking this new job, of working so closely with Laura.
And time is not on his side. He feels strongly that if this is a decision he's going to make, his dad should know his answer before it's too late. Somehow, he feels like his dad wants to know his decision, wants to know that his work will be in good, familiar hands, and that—even though it may be pure fantasy—Simon will be there to look after Laura, if not in a romantic way, then perhaps in the same fashion his dad had looked after her.
Outside of the obvious things that have been swarming around his head, he'd like to say he's preoccupied with the work of building his dad's archive. But he's spent an awful lot of the past twenty-four hours thinking of nothing but Laura. Something about her has stuck to him. Strange that, no matter how hard he tried, and though he'd only just seen her, he couldn't quite remember her face. It would be on the edge of his mind, floating in the periphery, coming into focus, and then she would just evaporate. He could remember her voice—the way it cracked when she faced the precipice of Sy's death. He remembered the easy gesture of her pushing her hair from her face. But not the face itself.
He had total recall of the beautiful incongruity of that baggy college sweatshirt over what he imagined was a very different shape of body beneath. And the smell of her—the sweet fragrance of something soft and comfortable—swirled around him sporadically over the past twenty-four hours.
The door to the classroom/office is slightly ajar. The lights inside are bright. He looks at the hallway clock. It's just after ten a.m. He peeks inside the small window of the door. She's there. Laura. And the face he'd been trying so hard to remember is suddenly in front of him, and it's so breathtaking that it seems like it was a gift to have forgotten it just so that he could discover it again—the symmetry, the lazy loveliness.
She's leaning against the desk rummaging through a small stack of papers, and her head is swaying back and forth like she's listening to a song. And then he hears it. She's singing. But she's singing so softly that her lips are barely moving. He moves to the other side of the doorway, on the door's open side, and listens. He can hear her a little better but still can't make out the words. Her voice is nice though—even and confident.
After a couple seconds, he's able to make out a melody. She's singing the old Temptations song, "It was Just My Imagination." He can't help but smile at this. She's gotten a little bit louder and her shoulders are twisting to the song. And she is so beautiful—the way she moves. She's wearing a red, sleeveless button-up top, and, unlike yesterday, he can see the shape of her body. And he can't tell if the feeling that churns in his chest is from a day of building her up, but it is a feeling that pushes and hums. It could just be that he's planted the seed of her possibility in his own head, or if Susannah and his dad were responsible, but, either way, it is firmly planted now. And growing.
He knocks at the door and pushes it open enough to stand in the doorway. "Busy?" he asks.
She looks up, clearly embarrassed, suddenly very self-aware.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to surprise you," he says.
"No, it's—I just wasn't expecting you."
"You a big Temptations fan?"
She looks at him with a quizzing crinkle between her eyes.
"The song you were singing, it's an old Temptations song."
"You shouldn't eavesdrop," she says, giving her attention back to the papers in her hands, looking almost ashamed.
"What? I was only standing there a second. Don't worry about it. It was nice."
She stands up from the desk, rests the papers she's holding on top of another stack of papers. He can't quite tell if she's upset with him or just embarrassed.
"What were you doing?" he asks.
"I just started going through the first box—nineteen seventy-one to ninety seventy-three."
"That's how far these go back?" he asks, approaching the box on the desk.
"That was right before you were born, right?"
"How old do you think I am?" he asks, a little too defensively.
"Relax, I'm kidding," she says, clearly over her embarrassment now, but not so much that she's not prepared to rib him a little to even the score.
"That was before he finished his undergraduate work," he says, rummaging through the stack of papers on the desk.
"It's mostly his essays from the time. There's a paper on Whitman, one on Keats—the kind of things you'd expect."
"How much do you think he kept?"
"It's not comprehensive. And it's already been curated to a point. He was well aware of what he wanted in the archive."
"So, he organized this stuff recently?"
"Yeah, he and Susannah put a lot of work going through all these papers over the past year."
"You run across any early poems in these papers?"
"A couple, but I've only just started rummaging through things."
"Anything worth talking about?"
"They're alright. Not great. But they definitely show promise," she says, leaning against the desk again. This is a subject where she clearly feels confident.
"So, you're just looking through this stuff. You don't have any immediate plans to catalog what you're finding."
"I figured I'd go through this box, see what's there, separate things into categories and then start making a record at that point. Then again, I haven't developed any kind of system yet. Remember, I'm not the one with the experience of building an archive," she says, looking at him. "Hint. Hint."
"Got it," he says, meeting her smiling eyes.
She grabs the papers from him, places them back in the box from where they came, and puts the top back on the box.
"You decide what you're going to do?" she asks.
"I've certainly been thinking about it."
"And?"
"It's difficult to say. It's not as simple as accepting or declining the offer. There are a lot of variables involved in a decision like this."
"Like?
"Like leaving a job where I've spent years building a reputation for a job that might not last more than one year."
"That doesn't seems like much of a variable."
"Not as it is, no. But looking at these boxes, not to mention the manuscript boxes that we both know hold new material to be published, and from my experience with this kind of thing, it's going to take longer than a year."
"How so?"
"Well, let's just focus on the boxes of old material. We need to develop a system of tagging and meta-tagging everything. We need to separate notes from drafts, drafts from completed material, and that isn't always easy to determine. We need to catalog everything, and not just in bunches. For example, we wouldn't just categorize an essay on Keats as one item. Each individual page needs tagged, collated, catalogued, digitally scanned, and then securely repackaged in a way that makes for easy future reference in both digital and hard copy formats."
"That does sound like
a lot."
"We haven't even addressed the new material: the editing, the production, the promotion. And I'm not going to do this if I don't have a hand in every single bit of it. And I'm sure that Dad would feel the same way. There is a PR angle to maintaining a poet's reputation after they're gone. And that's in the best interests of the university as much as it is ours."
"So, what? You want them to draw up a new contract?"
"I haven't even looked at it yet. Maybe all my concerns are already addressed. But the length of the contract suggests to me that they either aren't being realistic, or just aren't seeing the bigger picture."
"There is some stuff in the contract about the new material, but I'd need to read it again to see—"
"You haven't signed it yet? Please tell me you haven't signed it."
"No, I haven't signed anything."
"Good. We're going to need to renegotiate the length of the contract if we're going to do this. I won't do it for less than a two-year contract, and I won't even sign that if it doesn't have an option for additional years, if necessary."
"Really?"
"This isn't something you want rushed. It takes time to do this right, and with only two of us, it's going to be time-consuming. And, besides, the old papers aren't even going to be what takes up the bulk of our time."
"You've really been thinking about this, haven't you?" she asks, but doesn't wait for an answer. "I expected it would take longer than the year, but that's a lot longer than I expected."
"You got somewhere else to be next year?"
"No. I'm here to see this through to the end."
"That brings me to my next variable."
"What's that?"
"You."
"Me? What about me?"
"I don't know you," he says.
"What's that got to do with the price of tea in China?" she asks with that crinkle between her eyes again.
He smiles at this—not having heard anyone use that phrase out loud before. It seems so quaint and innocent a thing to say, and it endears her to him even further.
"What?" she asks, looking at him.
"It'll just be the two of us doing this, right?"
"Yeah," she says, clearly wondering where he's going with this.
"We get no help and no budget to hire anyone to assist us."
"As far as I know, no. If anything, though I don't think they made it explicit, the university sees me as the assistant in this scenario."
"No, that won't work. We should have the same job title and the same salary. If we're going to do this, we'll have to be partners or else it won't work. We both have to have an equal responsibility in getting this right. We'll make better decisions with a consensus rather than having a defined leader."
"I'm glad you feel that way, but I don't think the university will go for that."
"No, they will," he says with a confidence that surprises even him. "But before we get ahead of ourselves, I'd like to know, since we're going to be spending so much time together over the next few years, a little more about the person I'm going to be spending so much time with."
"How do we do that?"
"Like this, I suppose," he says. "We need to talk. I need to have a clearer idea of who you are before I agree to this."
"Do you do that with everyone you work with?"
"Sure, I interview everyone I've hired—usually several times. But, even then, I have my own office, and I don't work with anyone side-by-side the way I'll be working with you."
"Well, you can interview me now if you'd like," she says, sitting up straighter.
"What do you think I've been doing?"
"I wish you'd have told me. I would've thought more carefully about what I've been saying."
"That's exactly what I don't want."
"So, does that mean you're going to hang out for a bit longer, then?" she asks, opening the box again, ruffling through the papers—more out of nervous energy than anything else.
"Not for too long," he says. "I don't want to be in your way. I just came—"
"You're not in my way."
"I just came to ask you a couple questions about the job and the contracts," he says. "Could I ask you something though, kind of another interview question, I guess?"
"Sure."
"Do you consider yourself a high maintenance person?"
She thinks for a second before she says, "When it comes to the work, yes, but not on a personal level. In other words, I have a certain expectation about the quality of the work I'm doing, but I don't think I'm the kind of person that allows my ego to get in the way of the work."
"Sounds like a job interview answer."
"And it just happens to have the benefit of being true," she says. "What about you?"
"Honestly, I have better days than others, but I try not to be difficult," he says. "How about my dad? Was he difficult?"
"He's particular about things, but I like him too much to be irritated by it. Besides, it's easy to not be irritated when you know you're appreciated. Your dad has always respected me. That means a lot."
"It's important," he says before running his fingers nervously over the smooth surface of the desk. "What were you planning on doing with the rest of the day?"
"Here?" she asks. "I don't know. I guess I was just going to keep going through this box, get an idea of what's in here."
"But if you haven't signed the contract yet, why work for free? We'll have to start all this again once we come up with a plan."
"There's not much else for me to do. I'm still being paid by the university to assist your dad. In the spring that meant helping him teach a class, which I ended up teaching on my own. But, now, outside of email and a couple errant things, I've got nothing."
"I guess there's no harm in it."
"Would you prefer I stopped?"
"No, do whatever you want."
She rests her elbows on the box atop the desk, places her chin on the small fist of her hand and asks, "You're going to take the job, aren't you?"
"That depends on the university— And you."
"I thought you were confident that the university would give you what you wanted."
"They will."
"Then it all comes down to me," she says, trying to sound light and jokey, but he can see some insecurity breaking through.
"Looks that way. Don't screw it up," he says, trying to make it clear he's joking, but worried it came off sounding more flirty than he intended—a new sound for him, a sound he hasn't heard for a long time.
"What can I do to convince you?" she asks, and now she's leaning forward on the box and her blouse is open enough for him to see a fair amount of her cleavage. He's sure this isn't intentional. She's just being playful in her body language, but, still, she's sounding pretty flirty, too.
"You won't need to convince me. I'm sure we'll be fine," he says, starting to feel a little discomfort with the situation, worried that he might be misreading her. Or, even if he's not misreading her, even if she's as attracted to him as he is to her, the reality of the moment makes him nervous for the questions this new attraction poses abut the future of the job. "Look, I should go. I'll be back tomorrow though."
"But I'll see you later today, right?"
"How's that?"
"I'm visiting Sy later today, and Susannah said you'd be there. She said something about dinner."
"She did?"
"She did to me."
"I'll probably be there for awhile this afternoon, but I haven't heard anything about dinner."
"Oh," she says, and he thought she looked disappointed. "How's he doing?"
"Not well. Prepare yourself."
"What do you mean?"
"His nurse told me, after I pressed her—don't tell Susannah—that he only has another day or two."
She looks at him in a direct way, and then she stares beyond him somehow, like she's afraid to meet his eyes. "I don't know what to say. I keep thinking, 'No, later. Later.' I haven't prepared myself for getting
to the now of it," she says.
"There's nothing to say, really. I'm sure he'll be happy to see you. That's what's most important now, I think."
"I'm going to miss him so much," she says, and he can tell she's trying her best to hold back tears.
"Me, too," he says, and the sincerity of his own words, the emotions that they conjure in him, strikes him in a way that surprises him. The tragedy of his dad's future absence hits him like a wave he wasn't expecting. He tries to switch gears. "I should go. I've got some things to take care of."
"Okay, see you later today?"
"Yep," he says, approaching the doorway. He looks back before he leaves and can tell she's going to cry. He's going to do his best to hold his emotions at bay until he can find somewhere to hide.
Simon's sitting in a bathroom stall just down the hall from Laura's office, covering his face with a wad of balled up tissue, trying to stifle a cry that just won't come. Though the sadness is deep and present—a sadness for something specific he knows he's about to lose—he feels all cried out.
When he learned that his dad was dying, there was an instant acknowledgment of the fact of the thing, but the fact of the thing did not prepare him for the meaning that follows the fact.
While he stood in that classroom with Laura and heard his voice say that he would miss his father, he knew suddenly how much love was still there, how much he had been denying himself these last six years—six years of stubbornness and selfishness. He'll never get to learn the things about his dad that he could've learned in that time. He'll never get to hear his dad's stories or be able to share his own.
It does occur to him that this job offer maybe gives him the only opportunity he has left to learn more about this man who made him, this man he's often felt like an echo of, but who has always remained something of a stranger to him.
But Simon also knows how emotionally fragile he is right now, and how much Laura is already pinging all the fantasy spots in his brain. The hope that she's planted on him is real, and working with her could cause further torments. What if his attraction to her is not reciprocated? What if she turns out to be a lesser woman, less compatible for him than he suspects? It's great to have a beautiful woman to obsess over in the short term, but it doesn't seem appropriate to take a job knowing that it could, and probably would, eventually interfere with the work. He doesn't think he could get through each day if he were pining over her. The distraction and the pain of it would be too much.
He leaves the stall of the bathroom, putting the wad of tissue paper in his pants pocket, knowing that he might need it again. It's that kind of day. It might even be the day he says goodbye to his dad.
He washes his hands and runs a couple handfuls of water over his face. He wipes his face with a rough, institutional paper towel provided at the sink and looks in the mirror. He doesn't look like a guy who just hid in the bathroom to keep a cry at bay.
Out in the hallway, a couple dozen students are filing from a nearby classroom. Simon moves through the crowd and stops at the classroom door. Scott, Maggie's husband, is standing at the front desk shoving some papers into a satchel.
"Didn't know you were teaching this summer?" Simon asks.
Scott looks up and smiles. "What are you doing here?"
"Just following up on something for Dad."
"You're taking the job?" Scott asks, moving toward Simon.
"I really was the last to know, wasn't I?"
"Maggie