The Beautiful Bureaucrat: A Novel

by Helen Phillips

  SIX

  When she returned from work, he wasn’t at the stranger’s apartment. She pulled a postal notice off the door and stepped inside just as she heard the three-headed dog heave itself against the door at the end of the hall. Her hands felt weak and her eyes hazy. She added the postal notice to the stranger’s feral pile of mail on the bedside table. She sat down on the futon. She called Joseph’s phone. It went straight to voice mail. She didn’t leave a message.

  She opened the mini-fridge. There was half an onion and some expired sour cream. She was hungry and not hungry.

  She decided to do good things. She lit the candles. She gathered up all the dirty laundry, sheets included, and tried to remember if the stranger had said anything about the location of the building’s laundry room. But then she realized she had no quarters or detergent, and the thought of remedying those problems felt insurmountable. Anyway, they’d made it this far without doing laundry.

  She found couscous and chickpeas in the cupboard. She found curry powder. She cut up the onion, turned on the burner, made something, ladled the concoction onto two of the stranger’s green heirloom plates, spread the blanket on the floor, put a pair of candles in the middle, folded paper towels into napkins. She was pleased at her resourcefulness, notwithstanding her failure in regard to the laundry. She knew he would come in the door any second; every move she made, she imagined him walking in on that particular tableau, of her slicing or stirring or serving or folding, and she anticipated the exact expression he’d make, the thing with the eyebrows, the faux surprise, pretending he’d forgotten that she too could cook.

  The food was cooling on the floor. She called his phone again; voice mail again. She turned on the radio balanced on the ledge in the stranger’s shower stall and pretended the newsman’s voice was Joseph talking to her from the other room, making measured and tranquilizing predictions about the future and the stock market. She waited, then devoured her food. She called him a third time and left a peevish voice mail. She texted him a single question mark.

  Time passed; more than an hour. She called him again, told his voice mail that she was kind of freaking out. She vacillated between worry and rage. She couldn’t stand to spend another second inside this apartment without him. There was a rotten smell emerging from the closet. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder if he’d left any sort of note. She shuffled through the stranger’s unruly mail. The postal notice that had been on the door earlier slipped to the floor. She picked it up. She was about to stick it deep into the middle of the pile when the familiar letters caught her eye.

  In the intended-recipient box: JOSEPHINE NEWBURY.

  But they hadn’t told anyone the address of the sublet.

  She examined the notice. FIRST DELIVERY ATTEMPT FAILED: Package could not be delivered/signature needed. There was no information about the sender. Her fingers were quivering. She blew out the candles. She turned on the overhead light. A train ached past the window.

  She now detested the automated lady who repeatedly offered her the option of leaving a voice message for Joseph Jones. Who, after many messages left, informed her that Joseph Jones’s voice mailbox was full. She saw that her text had never been delivered. She considered calling the police. She imagined them laughing at her. A husband a few hours late getting home. Sorry, baby, you’re not the first. The overhead light stared her down. She turned it off and sat awake on the bed for many hours.

  SEVEN

  At her desk on Friday, logging files into the Database, Josephine began to believe she was the only person in the entire building. It was so silent in 9997—no noise but the sound of her fingers on the keyboard, her fingers opening the files—that she sensed a scream beneath the silence, a shrill shriek she recognized as the flow of her own blood in her ears, yet it sounded like a banshee trapped in the walls. Those pinkish clawed walls—she generally avoided looking at them, but today she got stuck staring at the mysterious smudges and old fingerprints, as though the walls themselves might reveal his whereabouts.

  Tonight she would call the police, and the parents, who had warned them what would happen if they left the hinterland. Her mother had stood in the beige kitchen of their hinterland rental, talking about the thing she’d seen on the news: Nowadays, gangs of teens in the big cities would just come up to strangers at random on the street and punch them. Just punch them in the face! As part of some gang initiation or something. And that was just the kind of horrid thing that happened in some places and not others. And what if, say, Josephine were to be pregnant at some point, and a gang of teens just punched her on the street? What then? Her mother knew exactly how to kill her every time. Her conversations with her mother were a list of things she thought but didn’t say. Why would you move to a place where you don’t know a living soul? (Haven’t you noticed that our life here is not progressing, Mom? That we’re stuck? That we’re getting flattened by the freeways?) You’ll be all alone there! (What about Joseph, Mom?) Friendless! (I’ll be with Joseph, Mom. Love of my life, Mom.) But by then her mother was crying—melodramatic tears, yet still tears.

  Friendless! Friendless! It lingered like a curse.

  The door shot open. Josephine seized up, expecting The Person with Bad Breath, but it was Trishiffany who paraded in. She stood before Josephine’s desk in a suit the color of a stop sign, hugging a single gray file to her breasts, her hair voluminous.

  “Hi there, Jojo doll.”

  Josephine’s gratitude at seeing another human being—wearing vivacious red, no less—was somewhat undercut by the inappropriate use of the nickname; her mother always insisted that everyone call her Josephine, and so they had. She opened the file at the top of the extra large crop on her desk (BRAAK/MARCUS/TODD) and tried to look busy.

  “This is for you,” Trishiffany announced, shoving her gray file atop BRAAK’s.

  OLGUIN/VIOLA/PINK. A unique enough name that Josephine remembered it, vaguely, from sometime last week.

  “I already entered that one,” Josephine said.

  “Of course you did, Jojo doll,” Trishiffany cooed, leaning over the desk almost seductively, revealing her cleavage. Josephine winced at the sight of the red capillaries in the whites of Trishiffany’s eyes; her own eyes throbbed in solidarity. “But now you have to delete it.”

  “Delete it?” She turned her gaze away from Trishiffany’s excessive chest and strained eyes. She was having trouble telling whether her coworker’s tone was friendly or menacing.

  “Well, just the date in the final column,” Trishiffany clarified. She stood up straight, hands on hips, tapping her red high heel in a gesture typically associated with impatience, yet the gesture was contradicted by the patient smile on her face.

  “I wasn’t told that I’d ever be asked to delete anything,” Josephine resisted.

  Trishiffany sprang back and whipped out an ID card.

  “I am your superior,” she said, thrusting the card at Josephine.

  The ID meant nothing to Josephine, but official documents always made her nervous. That old anxiety of the DMV, the IRS.

  Trishiffany smiled dazzlingly and came around to stand behind Josephine’s chair.

  “The Database is confidential,” Josephine said, capitalizing the “D,” trying to cover the spreadsheet with her hands, certain The Person with Bad Breath would appear at any instant.

  “It’s just a Processing Error,” Trishiffany said; Josephine heard the capital “P” and “E.” “I work in the Department of Processing Errors. I have clearance. I could read any file front to back any day of the week, J-doll.”

  “I made a processing error?” Josephine murmured. She had been so meticulous with the Database. She never wanted to return to those nineteen months of unemployment, that desperate feeling. She didn’t need to understand her job; she just needed to keep it.

  “Oh no Jojo,” Trishiffany said, relishing the rhyme. She leaned voluptuously over the desk once more in a manner perhaps intended to be comforting. “It’s a highe
r-up mistake. It happens. Please locate OLGUIN by her HS number.”

  Relieved, Josephine obeyed.

  “There she is!” Trishiffany chortled. It was odd that she laughed. It didn’t seem like the right time to laugh. “Go ahead and delete the date.”

  Josephine deleted it, one click, two clicks.

  “Good girl!” Trishiffany said. “I’ll take OLGUIN’s file to Storage.”

  Josephine turned her attention back to BRAAK/MARCUS/TODD, hoping Trishiffany would leave. But instead she perched on the desk and examined the walls. Josephine typed BRAAK’s HS number into the search function.

  “These walls,” Trishiffany groaned. “Are they driving you crazy yet?”

  Josephine looked up. “Why doesn’t someone repaint them?” she said.

  “That work order was put in eight years ago, Jojo doll. They’ll get around to it. But let’s talk about something nice instead. How about your husband?”

  Josephine stared darkly into the Database. Trishiffany didn’t take the hint.

  “Like, where did you meet him?” she persisted. “I want to meet a prince like him.”

  “College,” Josephine said.

  “Oh! Boohoo, too late for me.” Trishiffany sighed. Then, rejuvenating herself: “When did you know you loved him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You mean you don’t know if you love him or you don’t know when you knew you loved him?” Trishiffany demanded.

  “Yes.” She was unwilling to cooperate.

  “Okay, fine then.” Trishiffany eyed her. “What’s he like?”

  “Brown hair, brown eyes, average height.” Josephine felt disinclined to elaborate, to explain that sometimes his hair seemed dark brown and sometimes light brown, that his eyes vacillated between coal and hazel, that he was tall when he stood up straight and short when he slouched, that he was at times lanky and at times stubby, that he could look like Dracula or like a woodsman, that once somebody had assumed he was Austrian, that another time a stranger had pegged him as Egyptian. How would she ever describe him to the police?

  “Oh!” Trishiffany gasped. She was full of gasps and sighs. “I meant, you know, his personality.”

  Cynical, tender, thoughtful, realistic, pessimistic, calm, passive, anxious, eccentric, sensible, wry, courageous, clever, fidgety.

  “I’m sorry,” Josephine said. It was too hard to think about him. When she thought about him, her body got chaotic with panic. “I don’t know how to describe him.”

  Trishiffany’s made-up face drooped downward, and Josephine saw that she was crying.

  “Your mascara,” Josephine warned. She assumed runny mascara was the kind of thing that would scandalize a woman like Trishiffany. “Don’t cry!” she added, trying not to let it sound like as urgent a plea as it was. She couldn’t stand Trishiffany’s inexplicable tears.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Trishffany said. “It’s just that I can see how much you love him. And it’s so cute that you guys have the same name!” She catapulted herself off the desk and over to the door, where she paused. “They always drive the girls crazy but don’t let them drive you crazy, okay?”

  Young woman after young woman sitting at this same desk, listening to that same banshee silence, thinking about other lives—Josephine’s neck tensed.

  “They’re just walls, after all,” Trishiffany concluded.

  Josephine was still trying to remember if she’d let Joseph’s name drop when the door swung open again; Trishiffany had some final zinger.

  But it was The Person with Bad Breath, reflective eyeglasses masking any expression.

  “Hard at work,” The Person with Bad Breath said. A command, not a question. Josephine could smell the breath from where she sat behind the desk—the mint veiled nothing.

  EIGHT

  She didn’t know whether to dawdle or rush on her way back to the stranger’s apartment, and she ended up doing something in between, dashing ahead for a while and then hanging back. The three-headed dog was silent as she searched for the correct key. Before she’d inserted the key, the door opened.

  Joseph held a large red fruit in his right hand.

  “You!” she said, furious and overjoyed.

  He pulled her into the room and double-locked the door behind her. Then he handed her the fruit.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “A pomegranate.” He sounded tired. But also, maybe, elated. That note of elation or whatever it was—it made her uneasy.

  “Where the hell were you?” she said, wishing she were the kind of person who could recognize a pomegranate when she saw it.

  “Working,” he said. “It was urgent.”

  “You didn’t call.”

  “It was urgent,” he repeated. “An emergency.”

  “I thought your job was boring.”

  “There was a deadline.”

  “You should have called.”

  He cupped her neck with both hands and smiled at her, a frank smile, his eyes direct into hers. His irises were nearly black.

  “You should have called.”

  He nodded.

  An ice cream truck passed down below, its gleeful tune crackling through a malfunctioning speaker.

  “If you ever do that again,” she threatened.

  But he was already heading into the kitchenette to fry four eggs in lots of butter.

  He flipped the eggs with his typical ease, yet she noted certain things—the swift rhythm his fingers tapped on the spatula, the shakiness of the water glass in his hand.

  She didn’t want to speculate. It was hard not to speculate.

  “Did you—” she said.

  “Grab me the pepper?” he said.

  She passed him the salt, the pepper, the plates.

  They sat cross-legged on the floor in the candlelight, their knees touching. He told her about the new sublet he’d found for them—a garden apartment not far from here, on the same subway line, a tad farther from downtown but nicer than this place. And soon their credit would be restored and they could get their own place and start the different kind of life anew.

  “Hug me,” she said when they were done eating. She could hear that she sounded whiny, like a small child. But he owed it to her.

  Joseph set their plates aside. He hugged her. It was awkward to hug sitting up so they lay down on the blanket on the floor.

  There had been moments, last night, when she had imagined him never returning: life without Joseph. Recalling that abandoned, bereft version of herself, she pressed her hip bones against his hip bones. She felt him respond to the pressure of her and it made her proud.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” he said.

  She unsnapped her skirt and squirmed out of it.

  “I don’t know,” he said, sitting up.

  “Excuse me?” she said, also sitting up. She pointed at his cock, thick and solid inside his pants.

  He started to say something and then stopped. He looked at the ceiling and then at her. Tonight his hair was dark and sharp, like a demon’s.

  “Maybe we should,” he paused, “wait.”

  She was enraged. Suspicion swelled inside her.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said ferociously.

  “Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay,” he said. He lay back down, pulling her with him. He unbuttoned his shirt. He unzipped his pants. She watched him until he was naked except for his socks.

  “Socks too,” she insisted.

  He obeyed.

  Then he reached for her shirt, pulled it over her head. He helped with her tights, her underwear, navigating them over her feet. She got on top of him. It was a relief to be so close. She found herself relaxing, moving in the familiar way.

  “Did you hear something?” he said after a moment. His voice was curt, cutting through the candlelight.

  “Something?” she said. She was all dreamy now and she didn’t like the way he was softening inside her.

  “Someone? In
the hallway?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. That dog.” She was moving her hips around him in a circle. She didn’t want to worry about whatever it was that he was worrying about.

  She felt like he was trying to not come. There was resistance in his muscles. It made her angry and she pressed harder and moved faster. She put her mouth very close to his mouth and when he cried out the sound was inside her skull too. She scooted up to his mouth and knelt above him and then when he made her come she fell forward onto her hands, laughing.

  “041-74-3400!” she said.

  It was time to cut the pomegranate.

  “I’ll do it,” she insisted, even though she had no idea how to do it.

  She pulled down one of the stranger’s heirloom plates, balanced it on the narrow strip of countertop, jabbed at the pomegranate with a steak knife. Thick red blobs of liquid shot out of the fruit, spraying the wall and the cabinets. The plate flipped off the countertop and shattered on the linoleum floor.

  * * *

  Joseph and Josephine stood guiltily on the sidewalk beneath the streetlight in the slight rain, surrounded by overstuffed suitcases and canvas bags brimming with uneasy contents. A mostly drunk bottle of cheap white wine poked out amid stale laundry. Their umbrella was broken, its elbows splayed like a bad joke. It was desolate beneath the train tracks. No cab came along. Then a cab came along, but its driver sped up when he saw them. They waited a very long time. In the building behind them, the three-headed dog stirred, as dark and frenetic as ever, and a fake heirloom plate charaded among the other three.

  The cabdriver who finally picked them up told them all about the faraway farm he owned; he raised cows and grew bananas on another continent, and soon he would return to that place to live forever. Josephine felt ill with envy, but still she politely inquired about growing practices for tropical fruits.

  Instead of a garden, the garden apartment possessed a dim entryway that smelled like a cellar. There wasn’t even a flowerpot. There was, however, as Joseph pointed out, a butterfly quilt on the bed.