by Joe Meno
“I’m Odile by the way,” she says, extending a small white hand.
“Jack,” he says, and gives it a careful shake.
“Wow. You have really sweaty hands,” she says.
“I know. It’s why I’m not a big handshaker. I could never be a successful businessman. Or politician. Or surgeon.”
“No, probably not.” Odile nods a little and then stares at him again. “So I’m starting my own movement and I was wondering if you’d like to join it,” she says.
“What’s your movement about?”
“It isn’t about anything.”
“No?”
“Basically, we just sniff liquid paper and try and think of interesting things.”
“That sounds okay.”
“Do you want to join it?”
“All right.”
“The only rule we have is that you have to say yes to everything.”
“Really,” he says.
“Really.”
“Okay. Sounds good to me.”
“Okay. Here,” she says, handing him the small black-andwhite bottle of liquid paper. “Take a whiff. Then you’ll be one of us.”
He holds the open bottle of liquid paper beneath his nose, its chemical pungency making his nasal passageways itch.
“Who else is in your movement?”
“No one else right now. It’s just the two of us,” she says.
He nods and takes another sniff and then hands it back to her. It feels like his brain is full of pink and blue circles, each of these circles overlapping. A phone rings and Odile pokes her head back behind the cubicle. As the liquid paper’s fumes quell his brain activity, Jack finds himself staring at her again and what he thinks is this: Wow.
Question: Where do Jack’s eyes go when he looks at Odile?
Answer: The freckles on her nose. Her small breasts. Her long neck.
Question: Where is Odile looking?
Answer: At her own fingernails. She is chewing on them while talking on the telephone.
Question: Does she sit still in her chair or does she swivel?
Answer: She swivels. Back and forth, and the motion of it reminds Jack of a clock ticking off the remaining moments of his life or a heart pumping full of bright red blood.
Question: Are her bangs cut by herself?
Answer: It appears so.
Question: What does he imagine her breasts feel like?
Answer: Small oranges. From Jupiter or Neptune.
Question: Is Jack still in love with his estranged wife?
Answer: Yes, he is. Of course he is. But Berlin is so far. And here.
Here is this girl.
BUT IT JUST SO HAPPENS THAT TEN MINUTES LATER.
Jack goes to get a can of soda from the break room and there is Odile, kneeling on the gray carpet before the snack machine. Her entire arm is stuck up inside the small rectangular opening of the candy machine.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I’m trying to break into this machine,” she says. “This one always steals your quarters. I’m pretty sure it does it on purpose. Do you mind watching to make sure no one comes in?” and Jack nods, turning to keep lookout over the empty hall. After a moment or two of contorting her face, Odile pulls her hand out, holding several packages of bubblegum. “Here,” she says. “For being my accomplice.”
“I really don’t like gum,” he says. “Anyway, I have a bad tooth.”
“What’s wrong with your tooth?”
“I got in a bike accident. Someone hit me and I ended up hurting my tooth.”
“Is it infected?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can I look at it?”
“What?” Jack asks, more than a little surprised at the question.
“Can I look at it?”
“Really?”
“Sure, why not?”
And Odile nods and Jack shrugs and leans his head back, opening his mouth.
“Wow, you got a lot of silver in there.”
“I know. My stepdad is a dentist. One of my stepdads anyway. The second one.”
“You have two stepdads?”
“Three, actually. It’s a long story.”
“Wow. So you don’t want any gum?”
“No thanks.”
And here she leans against the plastic window of the vending machine and says, “I was pretty serious about what I said. I really am thinking about starting my own art movement. I know it sounds kinda goofy. But I’m really thinking of doing it.”
“What are you going to call it?”
“I don’t know. The Antiabstractionists. The Anti-Rationalists. The Anti-Intelligents. The Anti-Reasonists. Something like that. Basically, I’m against everything popular. Anything that makes art into a commodity. Or people into commodities. Or anything that’s supposed to be a commodity.”
“Wow,” he says. “That sounds serious.”
“Yeah, but it isn’t. It’s just something to think about when I’m working here.”
“It’s a pretty boring job.”
“It is,” she says.
“I’ve been tracing my hand over and over again.”
“I know. I’ve seen you do it.”
“You have?”
She nods. “So are you in or not?” she asks, and then without thinking, he says, “Sure. Why not?”
“Cool.”
“So what do we do now?”
And she says, “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far yet,” and then the night manager, Gomez, appears from his office with his typically sweaty forehead, holding a half-eaten bologna sandwich in his left hand, and he gives the two of them a dirty look, and so together they hurry back to work.
AND THE NIGHT AFTER THAT.
On Tuesday night, around five p.m., the two of them—Odile and Jack—are in the break room just before their shift starts. And they are staring at each other suspiciously, Odile peering from behind a diet soda pop can, eating a peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off. And Jack begins to talk first, asking, “So, are you working tonight?”
“Duh,” she says, smiling, with a mouth full of bread.
“I guess so,” he says.
“We all know what’s going on here. You don’t have to be weird about it.”
“What’s going on here?” he asks, smiling.
“I am not going to even dignify that with a response,” she says, smiling again.
“Wait. What do you think’s going on here?” he asks again.
But she doesn’t say a word, only keeps eating her sandwich, smiling.
He is encouraged by her nonanswer for some reason. Maybe she’s interested in me. Perhaps, well, no, but, maybe. And so Jack says: “Are you going to order something to eat tonight? On your break?”
“Yes.”
“Well, let me know. I’ll order something too.”
“Fine,” she says, still glancing over the top of her soda pop can. “But I’m paying for my own. We’re not going steady or anything.”
“Okay,” he replies, a little disappointed at what she has said, but not disappointed enough to stop being interested. Because, immediately, he catches himself staring at her again. He catches himself trying to memorize the shape of her eyes and wide face. He watches her get up and leave the break room and then he asks the cloud of air where she has just been sitting why it’s so freaking lovely.
And then he punches in on the time-card machine and walks over to his cubicle and Odile is already answering the phone, and he looks downs and sees she’s taken her off shoes. Which is sort of weird. And when she finishes her call, she leans back in her chair and looks at him, not saying anything at first. She runs her fingers through her hair, arranging her bangs, and then announces: “We are not going to have sex. I want to tell you that right now. I don’t have sex with people I don’t know. It makes it too weird too soon.”
“I wasn’t even thinking that,” he says. “Why would you even say that?” he asks, blushing, feeling the heat of his face r
eaching his neck.
“I know that look you have. I think I know what you are thinking.”
“We’re adults,” he says quickly. “I’m only here to work. I won’t bother you or anything.”
“Fine,” she says. “Great.”
“Great,” he repeats.
“We’re too good of work friends anyways.”
“We are?”
“I mean, we’re probably too much alike,” she says.
“Yeah, it would be too weird. If things didn’t work out.”
“These things never work out,” she says.
“Exactly,” he says.
“Exactly.”
“Right,” he adds. “Exactly.”
“And who needs all the weirdness?”
Both of their noses twitch as they peer at each other. She tugs on the corner of her gray cardigan sweater and looks as disappointed as he does and then disappears back behind the gray cubicle wall.
BUT THEN.
But then at one a.m., in the elevator, on the way down to the lobby, Jack zipping up his coat, Odile fitting her white hat over her head and then buttoning up her green parka, she turns to Jack and asks, “Do you want to get some coffee somewhere?” and Jack says yes faster than he ever has said any single word before. And they find their two bicycles parked opposite each other, and both of them unlock their bikes, and they ride side by side through the bleary downtown snow.
AND AT 1:17 A.M. THAT SAME NIGHT.
They get two cups of coffee at a small diner on Chicago Avenue and begin to plan their violent art movement together. It will be called the Art Terrorists. Or the Art Brutes. Or maybe just the Anti-Rationalists. And they discuss these names, straightfaced, as Odile pours two creams and three sugars into her coffee. And then she looks up at Jack pensively and says: “You know, those are some really weird-looking glasses.” She points to her own face and makes a ghastly expression, as if she has been forced to wear them. “What did you do to them?”
Jack touches the fingers of his left hand to the frames of the black glasses and shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ve broken them a few times, I guess. I was wearing them when I had my last bike accident.”
“Oh. Well, I think they’re pretty awesome. In a fucked-up sort of way.”
Jack nods, unsure what that compliment actually means. His glasses have never felt so awkward on his face. He pushes them up against the bridge of his nose. And then he does not know what to say after that. He looks down into his coffee, and then checks his watch, and then looks down at his coffee again.
“So,” he says.
“So.”
“So,” he repeats.
“I’m kinda seeing someone. I think I ought to let you know.”
“Okay,” he says, feeling his face crash and twinge in an expression of disappointment he knows he is unable to hide.
“We’re not really talking at the moment. But still.”
“Okay.”
“In case you had any ideas.”
“I don’t have any ideas,” he says, the falseness of the words hanging in the air with their dismal tone.
“What about you? Are you seeing anyone?” she asks.
And he thinks and looks down at his empty left hand, his empty ring finger, and says, “No.”
“Oh.”
“Yep.”
“So, do you want to go to my place and hang out? We can watch a movie. I have almost all of Truffaut’s work on video. Have you ever seen The 400 Blows?”
“You want to go to your place?” he says, the shock of the question nearly knocking the slumpy glasses from his face.
“Sure. Why not?”
“Okay.”
And so they do, Jack riding his blue ten-speed behind Odile, watching the way the ends of her dark hair flit out from under her winter cap like wings. And they are riding past the small hillocks of snow and ice and everywhere there is music, the softening key of pink and silver lights.
AT HER APARTMENT.
Jack helps Odile carry her bicycle up the snow-fjorded stairs, each of them taking a wheel. And then he runs down and gets his blue ten-speed. It is almost two a.m. now. And he can see a series of white footprints trailing past the moldy carpeting of the third-floor landing where Odile is searching her parka for her keys. “Just a sec,” she says, and leans up against the door. “We have to be quiet. My roommate works mornings,” and in they go, the apartment sparsely decorated, Jack taking in the garage-sale furnishings—the antique though very modernlooking lamps, the poster of Serge Gainsbourg—and then he parks his bicycle beside hers across from a brass-colored radiator. And the way Odile stands there, watching him take off his wet shoes, it is like they have done this together a million times before, her leaning there, smiling, her face ruddy, cheeks pink from the cold, arms folded across her chest, waiting, not impatient, but waiting, as if the two of them already know each other, and have already spent countless nights together. And he walks across the apartment in his damp gray socks and bumps into the couch and Odile laughs and whispers, “Shhhh,” and it’s like they’re kids, like this is only a game, just some practical joke.
BUT THEN SITTING ON THIS GIRL’S BED.
Instead of beginning to kiss each other savagely, instead of undressing themselves with that random sense of urgency, they sit beside each other quietly, Odile with her legs folded beneath her, Jack with his two feet on the messy floor, articles of clothing and books and vinyl record albums strewn about in a performance piece of absolute messiness, and what Odile does then is take out photo album after photo album, turning the plastic-coated pages, pointing at people Jack does not know.
“This is my dad,” she says. “Before he shaved his beard. Now he looks like a newscaster. He used to be a pretty famous artist. My mom’s an artist too. They do these amazing woodland scenes in oil. Hotels have their stuff all over the country.”
Jack nods, sees the rugged face, the conservative smile.
“This is my mom. This must be back in the ’70s. Or maybe the ’80s. I can’t tell. Look at those earrings.”
And here Jack can see the same neck, the narrow litheness, and he nods.
“Here’s my grandma. She’s probably my favorite person in the world.”
And her grandmother is sitting on top of an older man’s lap, the two of them wearing paper party hats. “That’s one of her boyfriends, Hank. She has three of them. Boyfriends, I mean. And two of them are named Hank.”
“She looks like she knows how to have fun.”
“She does. I spent all of my summers with her, growing up. I have five brothers, so in the summer my parents let me go live there with her. She lives just outside Minneapolis. That’s where I’m from. Minneapolis, I mean.”
“You’re from Minneapolis?”
“Yep.”
Jack looks at her and smiles, surprised for some reason. “You don’t look like it,” he says.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I really don’t know,” he quietly admits. He looks down at the photo album and asks, “Who’s that?” He points to a teenage boy with a long dark mullet.
“That’s my oldest brother. He’s in jail now.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. We don’t hear from him much.”
“Who’s that guy?” Jack asks, pointing to another young man with a mullet, this one with a long scar running down the side of his face.
“That’s Randy. He’s my brother too. He’s the second oldest. He was in a motorcycle accident when he was sixteen and hasn’t been the same since.”
“You have five brothers? And you’re the only girl?”
“Yep. Four older, and one younger. The older ones are all a mess. My younger brother, Ike, he’s still in high school. He’s having a hard time of it right now but I think he’s going to be okay. My parents, they kind of didn’t believe in rules. They’re creative-types, you know, hippies, so … my family is all a little nuts.”
“Do you miss Minneapolis?”
“Who me? No way. I mean I do. Not the people. But the place. When I was in high school, we used to get drunk and roam around the Skyway. That’s in St. Paul.”
“What’s that?”
“The Skyway. It’s like this thing. This thing that connects all the buildings downtown because it’s so cold. You can get around without going outside. The Replacements have a song about it.”
“I don’t think I ever heard it.”
“Oh. Well. That’s basically the only thing I miss. The Skyway. That and my parents. And my grandma.”
“Oh.”
“Yep.”
And she nods, looking down at the red polyvinyl photo album again.
“Hold on a second,” he says, and digs into the pockets of his gray parka. He finds the silver tape recorder in the left pocket, checks to be sure there’s a tape in it, and then points it at her.
Odile looks down at the silver recorder and frowns. “What’s that?”
“It’s for this project I’m working on. Do you mind me asking you a few questions? Imagine you’re a television star and I’m a television reporter.”
“What project?”
“Just this thing. All you have to do is be yourself and just answer the questions.”
“Okay,” she says, rolling her eyes a little.
“Okay, the girl from the office,” he announces directly into the recorder. “Okay. First name and age.”
“What?”
“Um, your name, and then your age.”
“Okay,” she says, leaning forward. “Odile, twenty-three.”
“Okay. Shoe size?”
“Seven and a half.”
“What famous person would you be and why?”
“I really don’t like famous people.”
“Try again.”
“Okay. Superman’s girlfriend.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Okay,” he says. “Do you have any distinguishing features?”
“I have an overbite. And my shoulders are kind of narrow.”
“Okay. What crime have you committed recently?”
She pauses and then says, “I slept with a married man.”
And Jack looks down at the tape recorder, making a surprised expression, eyebrows tilting up. “Really?”