The Other Side of the Desk

Dana Reyes had a method for the Delmarco files, and the method was to stop being angry before she picked up the phone.

She did it at her desk, on the Monday afternoon, with the laptop open in front of her and the message from the records office still glowing on the screen: We seem to have received this in error. Please advise. She sat very still with her hands flat on either side of the keyboard. She counted to ten, as her mother had taught her, and then to ten again, and she did not let herself think about how it had happened, because she knew exactly how it had happened. A young man had typed record where he should have typed records, and had pressed Send with the pleased, confident click of a person who believes that he has never made a mistake in his life.

She picked up the phone and called IT.

It took eleven minutes. The man on the other end, a bored technician named Gary, said that a recall was generally not possible once the message had been opened, and she said that it had not been opened, and he said that it would be a favor, and she said that she would remember it at Christmas. She stood by the window with the receiver against her ear and watched the traffic on the avenue, and listened to the hum of the keyboard at the other end, and thought about nothing at all.

"It's pulled," said Gary at last.

"Thank you."

"You owe me a coffee."

"Large, no sugar," said Dana, and hung up.

She had been at Whitlock & Crane for nine years. She had seen eleven interns come and go, and she could have written a short book on the genus: the hungry ones, the lazy ones, the ones who wanted to be partners by thirty. She had a gift, she knew, for sorting them within the first week, and she had sorted Asher Cole on the first Friday. He was none of those. He was a type that she knew in a different way, from a different place, and it had taken her a month to understand why she kept finding herself at the end of the corridor with a cup of coffee in her hand, looking at the back of his head.

…

He had been a talker.

That was how it began. Her brother had been a talker. His name had been Mateo, and he was two years younger than she, and from the age of about eleven he had talked without stopping, in a bright, fast, insistent stream, about trains, about comets, about the history of the Peloponnesian War, about anything at all that could be fitted between a question and the silence that followed it. He had talked at breakfast. He had talked in the car. He had talked to the dog, and to the neighbor, and to the people on the television, and her father had once said, quite kindly, in the middle of one of the long dinner monologues, "Mateo, we are not a lecture hall," and the boy had gone red to the roots of his hair and stopped.

He had not been able to stop for long. That was the thing. When he stopped, he went gray. It was as if the talk were a kind of weather, holding something up, and when it ceased, the whole sky came down.

She had been twenty-two when he died. She had been at a party. She had come home at two, a little drunk, humming, and the house had been dark, and the light was on under his door. She had thought, he's still up, with a warm indulgent thought of the stream of talk that would greet her in the morning.

She had been the one who opened the door.

She did not think of it often now. Nine years. She had learned how to carry it as one carries a heavy bag, shifting the weight from hand to hand. But it had done something to her, and she knew what, and she did not pretend that she did not. It had made her patient with people who talked too much. It had made her listen, below the words, for what they were being held up against.

She had listened to Asher Cole for a month.

…

At half past five, when the floor had thinned, she went down to the supply room for a box of staples, and found him alone at the copier.

He did not hear her come. He stood with his back to the door, in his gray suit, which was a size too large across the shoulders, feeding a pile of papers into the machine one sheet at a time and watching each one go through with the air of a man who was keeping a vigil. His shoes were clean. His hair stood up at the crown. A small paper bag lay on the counter beside the copier, with a receipt stapled to the top of it, and she saw him reach out and smooth the receipt flat with two fingers, as one smooths the forehead of a child.

She knew what that was.

She had known for a week. Corinne from the pool had seen it, by accident, when he left his drawer open: a small manila envelope, in the top tray, among the paper clips, with a letter written on the front in neat block capitals. D. Inside, in order, with the dates penciled in the corners, were nineteen coffee receipts. Corinne had told her at lunch, in a hushed voice, as one reports a ghost. It's weird, right? He's keeping a tab on you. Like you'll send him a bill.

Dana had said, "It isn't weird."

She had said it quickly, and put her fork down. Corinne had looked at her, and Dana had added in a lighter tone, "He's just a kid," and gone back to her salad. But the words had stuck in her throat like a bone. She knew what it was to keep a record of kindnesses. It was what one did when one could not believe that anyone would give a thing for nothing. It was a man standing at the edge of a party with his hands in his pockets, counting the cups that other people drank, so that he would know whom he owed. It was her brother, at fifteen, keeping a list in his head of every person who had been nice to him that month, so that he would not forget to be nice back.

"Hey," she said.

He started. A page went through crooked, and the copier gave a long mechanical shriek.

"Oh. Dana. Hello." He pulled the page from the tray, flustered, and straightened. "I was just finishing the Pelham exhibits. For Hargrove."

"I know."

"I wanted to say that I had already noticed the address on the Delmarco thing. Before you said. It was an easy catch."

"Okay."

"I think the error is really in the system. The domains are too close."

"Sure." She leaned against the shelf. She looked at the paper bag and the little stapled receipt, and she looked at him, at the thin, earnest, defensive face, and she found that she was not angry at all. She was only tired. She was tired in her bones, in the way that one is tired at the end of a long run. "Asher, can I tell you something? And you don't have to say anything."

"Of course."

"You don't have to prove it."

He blinked. "Prove what?"

"Any of it." She gestured vaguely at the room, the copier, the floor above them. "That you're good. That you've earned it. That you saw the error first. We know that you're good. You don't need to say so in every meeting."

His face closed.

It closed slowly, from the forehead down, like a shutter coming down on a shop, and she watched it with a sinking feeling that she had said the wrong thing in exactly the wrong way. He drew himself up, a little, and said in a clear, level voice, "I think you've misunderstood the nature of my contribution," and picked up the paper bag, and went out of the room.

She stood there. After a moment she laughed, once, helplessly, and put her hand over her mouth.

…

She took the long way home.

She lived in the east end, on the third floor of a narrow house with a brown couch and a window box in which nothing had grown for two summers. She rode the bus, and then walked the last six blocks, and the evening came down gold and cold over the rooftops. A boy on a bicycle went past her, and called something to a friend. A woman on a stoop was shelling peas into a bowl. She had a habit, on these walks, of keeping her hands in her pockets and her eyes on the pavement, and thinking about nothing in particular, and on this evening, somewhere between the laundromat and the bakery, she stopped.

She was standing in front of a coffee shop.

It was a small one, the kind with a chalkboard on the sidewalk, and inside, through the glass, a girl in a green apron was steaming milk. Dana looked at her reflection in the window. She was thirty-two, small, sensible, in a green coat, with her glasses pushed up into her hair. She did not look like a person who would do what she was about to do.

She went in.

"A large black," she said, "no sugar. To go."

She did not even like it. She had not touched caffeine in months. Her doctor had told her in the spring that her heart was fine but that it would be a good idea to cut down, and she had, and had missed it in the sharp unreasonable way one misses a bad friend. She carried the cup out into the evening and stood on the pavement holding it in both hands, feeling the heat go through the cardboard into her palms.

It's a stupid thing, she thought. It's one cup of coffee.

She walked home with it. At her door she paused, and looked at the cup, and went up the three flights to the apartment and poured it down the sink.

She did not know why she had bought it.

She knew perfectly well.

…

Her mother called at eight.

She was in the kitchen, eating pasta out of the pot, with the phone clamped between her shoulder and her ear. "How's work?" said her mother, in the cheerful, clipped, anxious voice that she kept for these evening calls. "Are they treating you well? Are you eating?"

"I'm eating, Ma."

"You don't sound like you're eating."

"I have my mouth full."

"Ah." A pause, in which she could hear a television, and a chair creaking. "Did you hear from Aunt Lucía? She says that Mateo's friend Tobias got married. Do you remember Tobias? The tall one who played the trumpet?"

"I remember."

"He sent a card. To the house. For the, you know. For us. She said it was very kind."

Dana put the fork down.

"That's nice," she said.

"I thought it was nice." Her mother's voice faltered, and recovered. "I was thinking I might go to the cemetery on Sunday, if you wanted to come. We don't have to say anything. I can bring the flask."

"Okay, Ma."

"Okay?"

"Yes. I'll come."

When the call was over, she stood in the kitchen for some time. A pipe knocked in the wall. Out in the street someone laughed, and a car door slammed, and she looked at her own face in the dark window above the sink, a small pale outline, and said, quite quietly, to nobody, "There's a boy at work."

She said it again, with less of a break. "There's a boy at work. He keeps receipts."

She put the pot in the sink.

…

On Tuesday morning she was in the office at seven-thirty, before anyone. She had a cup of tea, and her laptop, and a stack of yellow sticky notes from the drawer, and she sat with the pen in her hand for some time.

She wrote it three times.

Want to get lunch sometime? That was too much. He would think it was a trap. Good job on Pelham. That was a lie, and he would know. Hey. That was nothing, and nothing was the one thing that he could not stand.

She wrote Hello. She looked at it. It was short, and plain, and entirely without a hook, and it could be read as a joke or an insult or a small gift. She added —D, and peeled it from the pad, and walked down the long empty aisle between the desks to his, by the window, and stuck it to the bottom of his monitor.

She stood back and looked at it.

It was a very small yellow square. It looked, she thought, rather foolish.

She was halfway to the door when she heard the elevator, and the voices, and his step in the corridor, quick and a little too loud, and she turned and walked fast in the other direction, down the side aisle, around the end of the cubicles, to the copy room, where she shut the door and stood in the dark among the reams of paper with her heart going.

She stayed there for twenty minutes.

When she came out, the note was gone. There was a little scrap of yellow in the wastebasket by his desk, folded once, then once more, with the edge torn off, and she saw it as she went by, and she kept walking.

That's all right, she thought. It's a start.

She did not believe it. She said it anyway, like a person closing a window against the cold, and went to her desk to answer the first of the day's emails.