“Well,” he said. “I thought, I thought … why not stop and say hello.”
He was playing this by ear, improvising. So far, so good.
“You’re sweet,” she said. “A rare breed. Like a black-eyed tree frog.”
“A what?”
“A black-eyed tree frog.”
“They’re rare?”
“Very.”
“Oh,” he said. “Okay.” He wasn’t sure where to go with this, or if there was anywhere to go, so he just stood there, silently.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Bronfman. Edsel Bronfman. Or just Bronfman. People call me … Bronfman.”
She smiled. Her eyes sparkled through a moist glaze. “Bronfman,” she said, as if her tongue were giving it a test drive. “Bronfman. Why do you think that is?”
“Why what is?”
“Why Bronfman,” she said. “Why people call you Bronfman instead of Edsel. Or Ed. Or Eddie. Fast Eddie Bronfman. Something like that.”
“I don’t know the science behind it,” he said. “Some last names just lend themselves to that sort of thing, I guess.”
“Like Cher,” she said. “Or Bono.”
“I’ve never thought about it like that.” He thought about it like that now. Cher, Bono … Bronfman. It didn’t really work. Their names were manufactured, badges of celebrity, and Bronfman was definitely not a celebrity. He was whatever the opposite of a celebrity was.
“I’m Sheila. Sheila McNabb. Same as my nameplate.” She pointed at the engraved black plastic nameplate on the front of the top of her desk. Not that he needed to look, because he knew her name, but he read it anyway. Sheila McNabb. “I’ve only been here six weeks and I get a nameplate. Is that amazing or what?” She laughed, shook her head, and sighed. “So. Is there anything I can do for you, Bronfman? I’m here to serve.”
On her desk was a debris pile of minutely torn typing paper, pieces of paper that had been made as small as they could possibly be, then torn again, and again. Beside it were a tortoise-shell hair clip and a retractable pencil, and a stenographer’s pad that, though upside down to Bronfman, appeared to be a list of cities: Istanbul, Krakow, Salzburg, Beirut.
“My dream list of places I’d like to go,” she said, noting his interest. “Someday.”
“I’m sorry!” he said. “It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have—”
She waved his panic away. “Where do you want to go? One day. If you could go anywhere.”
“Me?” The beach, he thought. The ocean. Destin, Florida, is my destination. It felt as distant and foreign as Salzburg to him, as dangerous as Beirut. He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t really thought about it.”
“Think about it.”
“Paris,” he said, without really thinking, and not because he had ever desperately wanted to go there but because Paris was the city he felt one should want to go to if one hadn’t been. “Have you been?”
“I lived there as a child,” she said. “From the ages of seven to twelve. I was actually fluent by the time we came home, but of course I’ve forgotten most of it now. C’est la vie!”
“That sounded very French to me,” he said.
Just then a shorter-than-average man holding an overstuffed leather briefcase rumbled through the lobby.
“Welcome to the Cranston Building!” Sheila called to him. The man nodded, his fleshy neck rolling over his collar, and kept walking. He pressed the UP button on the elevator, hard, twice, smashed it as if he were getting it back for something.
Her exchange with the man took only seconds, but when she returned her gaze to Bronfman he could tell that it was unclear to her why she was talking to him at all. He felt as if he should introduce himself to her all over again. She stared beyond him, into space, the way people stare into the night sky waiting for a shooting star.
“That man,” she said. “He looked a little bit like a mole, didn’t he?”
“What?”
“That man who just came in,” she said. “He looked like a mole.”
Bronfman glanced toward the elevator, into which the man had disappeared. He really couldn’t remember what he looked like. “A mole,” was all Bronfman could come up with in reply. “Hmm.”
“I’ll tell you a little secret,” she said in a low, possibly almost flirty tone, so softly that Bronfman had no choice but to move closer to her desk and lean over, like a top-heavy tree. “When someone comes through the lobby, I wonder what kind of animal he or she might be. Everyone is some kind of animal.”
“Really?”
“Pretty much. Characteristics, personality traits. The kind of clothes they wear. Their eyes sometimes. Their facial hair. Or lack of it. If they’re big or little or—well, you know, various things. Once I had a badger, a zebra, and a marmoset come through here. All on the same day.”
“What’s a marmoset?”
“It’s a little monkey kind of thing with a furry collar. It always has this expression on its face like you just surprised it.”
“A marmoset,” he said. “That’s interesting.”
“And in the Cranston Building,” she said. “Of all places, right?”
He laughed, she laughed. He caught his reflection in the panes of glass that functioned as walls here, and which turned the lobby into an enclosure for anyone passing on the sidewalk outside to see, as if on display at a zoo. He saw how thin he was, how long was his neck, his hair so lifeless and practical. His tie was too short, and his shirt billowed out of his pants to give him that marsupial look.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said.
“You do?”
“I’m totally psychic. You’re thinking what kind of animal are you.”
“I guess I was.”
“I knew it!”
She considered him, starting with his head, his face, his eyes—his eyes, which she settled on for quite some time, longer than any woman had spent there in a long time, probably forever—and moved slowly downward, past his neck, the rib cage–torso, his stick legs and pencil feet. She let the vision marinate.
“Okay. You look like uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh—a giraffe!”
He considered this. “A giraffe?” It came as a disappointment to him, for some reason. A giraffe? He wasn’t sure that was what he wanted to be. Then again, he didn’t know what kind of animal he would like to be. But he said, “I guess that’s not so bad.”
Her mouth dropped. “Not so bad? What do you mean? That’s great! Let’s look it up.”
She swiveled around to face her computer and typed something quickly. She clicked the mouse a couple of times and then took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said, reading now. “The giraffe—Giraffa camelopardalis—an African even-toed ungulate mammal, the tallest of all land-living animal species, and the largest ruminant.”
She stared at the screen, momentarily hypnotized, and then she turned to him. “Wow,” she said. “You’re the largest ruminant.”
“And an ungulate,” he said. “Which sounds like something you’d call somebody you didn’t like. Like, ‘You’re such an ungulate.’”
“Or, ‘Don’t be such an ungulate!’”
“Or … or…” But he couldn’t think of another ungulate-related joke.
“You’re tall,” she said. “The tallest of the tall.”
“I’m not that tall,” he said. “Average, I think. For a person.”
“And tiny for a giraffe. Still. That’s what Wikipedia says.”
They laughed a little more, until all their laughter was exhausted and they had no more. Sheila squinted at him, rebooting herself. “Did you—need anything? Here I am going on about ruminants and marmosets and you probably need me for something. This is my job. I have a job.” She said it as if she were trying to convince herself that she did, indeed, have a job.
I don’t know, he thought. I’m lost in the forest of this conversation. I don’t know how I got here or where to go.
“Welcome to the Cr
anston Building!” she said.
He thought she was on some loop, and that they would relive the entire conversation they just had, and would again and again the longer he stayed. But someone had entered the building, a tall bearded man in a nice blue suit. Bronfman, who knew little about nice suits, thought it was Italian. For Bronfman, all nice suits were Italian, all nice cars German, and all good wine French.
“Good day,” the man said as he passed.
“Good day!” Sheila said. “Top of the day to you, sir!” She could really put a spin on a greeting.
She waited for the man to get on the elevator before she looked back to Bronfman. “Well?” she said.
“Well what?”
“What kind of animal?”
The phone rang. She held up a finger. “The Cranston Building. How may I direct your call?” She paused, listening, then pushed a button on her console and hung up.
“Well?”
He swallowed, and thought. The answer to this question seemed more important than it actually was, or more important than it should have been. His heart raced, and he felt a clammy sweat ooze across his palms.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Hazard a guess. Trust your instincts. Go for it.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. A groundhog?”
She thought about it, quite seriously, and then she nodded. “Absolutely,” she said. “Yes. A groundhog.” She seemed more pleased with the answer than he was. They both let that moment happen, and then it was over. There was nowhere else to go with the conversation, nothing else to do. To try to extend it would have been awkward and weird.
“So,” she said.
“So, yes.” He sighed. “I guess I need to go pretend to work.” His stomach growled, reminding him that his original intention had been to go to lunch. But it seemed impossible now. He had committed to returning the way he came.
She forced a laugh, he did, too, then she looked at him, and then away. But she didn’t say anything in response. She didn’t say anything at all. Space and time seemed balanced on the tip of a needle. Sheila, Bronfman, the lobby, the Cranston Building, the city, the earth, the solar system, the universe.
Of course, this was when everything could have changed for Bronfman. Rather, this was the moment when he could have changed everything. Meaning his life. Meaning what remained of his life, the balance of days left to him. A single word from him to her, the smallest possible gesture—that’s all the moment called for him in order for him to reinvent his world. This is when he should have said something, like “Would you like to go out sometime? For coffee, lunch, dinner, even a drink? I’m up for anything. Maybe even a weekend trip to the beach a couple of months down the line.”
But, just like that, the moment ran its course and was gone, gone because who can do that? Who can change their entire life like that? It was asking too much of him. It would be asking too much of anybody, except maybe some kind of professional swashbuckler. He was not that kind of man, though, and, really, outside of books and movies, who was?
He turned, walked to the elevator, pressed the UP button, and watched the glowing numbers above him as the elevator slowly, slowly, slowly descended per his request. Then it stopped on the twelfth floor and the light hovered there, not moving for a moment before the elevator resumed its course. Then he turned to her, and was surprised to see that her gaze hadn’t left him.
“You’re different from any receptionist we’ve had here before,” he said.
“That’s because I’m not a receptionist,” she said. “I’m something else.”
Her tone suggested that she was an undercover investigator or maybe a witch, something romantic or potentially dangerous.
“Oh. What are you?”
“I’m … a freelance writer,” she said. “I guess you could say.”
“Ah. A freelance writer.” Though it appeared that she was neither spy nor sorceress, Bronfman was intrigued. As a child, he had often dreamed of becoming a freelance something-or-other one day; the word freelance excited him. “What do you write?”
She opened her mouth to tell him and it stayed open, but without a single word coming out of it. She looked down at her desk and back at him. Then, “Okay. Like, you know when you buy something and inside it or on the box there are directions on how to use it, put it together, how one part fits with the next?”
“Yes. Sure. Of course.”
“That’s what I do.”
“I’m still not sure what you mean.”
“I write directions. Instructions. How-to manuals.”
“Step one, step two, step three—that sort of thing?”
“That sort of thing exactly. But sometimes I go A, B, C—it depends.” She looked down, spotted her purse, opened it, and produced a generic prescription-pill bottle, plastic, the color of an old orange peel. She read from it: “‘Take two before bed with water.’ That’s me! I wrote that.”
“Wow.”
“It’s a tough racket, though—very competitive. That’s why I’m here now, doing this. Girl’s gotta pay the rent, right?”
“Yes,” Bronfman said. “She does.”
She smiled. When she smiled her cheeks rounded up into grape-size hillocks, and her eyebrows seemed to expand across her forehead, like an accordion. He watched her eyes open, close.
The elevator finally arrived, and the doors groaned open and he felt compelled to get on, even though he didn’t want to. He sort of backed into it, because she was still looking at him, mouth half open, and he was still looking at her.
“By the way, Bronfman?” she said, half statement, half question. “The giraffe? It’s one of my favorite animals. Actually, I would say it is my favorite, for sure.”
Then the doors closed, and Bronfman, her favorite animal, rode the elevator up and up and up, wondering the whole trip how he, such a large, ungainly ungulate, meant to roam the grasslands and the woodlands, the sun-drenched savanna plains, had ended up in this tiny metal box, alone. It wasn’t until he arrived at the fifteenth floor that he manufactured the courage to push the button that would take him back to the lobby to reclaim his lost opportunity. The elevator button, formerly a bleak white, glowed a bright and hopeful orange after he pushed it, an orange like the sunshine in his apartment that morning. Going down, the elevator said to him. But he stepped off just as the doors were closing, and even when he remembered that he had forgotten to go to lunch he took his place in his cubicle and proceeded to fill orders, order after order, because, he told himself, there were so many of them to fill.
FOUR
Skip Sorsby chose this moment to peer over the top of his wall. Maybe he’d heard Bronfman scouring his desk drawer for a candy bar, a piece of gum, anything. That’s the sort of office his office was: a hive of drones in unapologetic propinquity, all working toward the same end, which was to keep being drones by successfully completing their tasks. This worked for Bronfman. He felt reassured by the clarity of it all.
Skip was about six feet three, with broad, sloping shoulders and a wild mop of thick brown hair, boyishly unmanageable, bright-blue eyes, and the smile of a door-to-door salesman or a double agent. He was loud, opinionated, and had no social filter at all. He towered over the sitting Bronfman like a god. “Yo, Bronfman,” he said. “How goes it, you goofball?”
“It’s going okay, Skip,” Bronfman said in a way that would have suggested to anyone that it wasn’t going well. Sorsby scrutinized him. Nodded. Made a small, almost sympathetic sound, and cleared his throat. This was Sorsby: on the one hand, he knew that something was wrong, and on the other hand he didn’t really care.
“I can’t find the IKEA invoice,” Sorsby said. IKEA purchased a container load of flatware through their distributor every six months or so. It was one of their sexiest accounts. “It’s disappeared, erased somehow, seriously vanished. If I had deleted it, it would be in the deleted folder and, lo and behold, it’s not. Maybe a virus got to it.”
“I’m sorry,” Bronfman sai
d, as if it was his fault.
Sorsby looked troubled, shaking his head and biting his lower lip. “You’re not a computer whiz, are you, Bronfman?”
“No,” Bronfman said, and traveled that line of thought. “I don’t think I’m an anything whiz, actually.”
Sorsby wasn’t listening. “I had another one of those nights last night, Bronfman, the kind I’ve been telling you about.”
Telling him too much about, Bronfman thought.
“Another ‘invasion of the body snatchers’?” Bronfman said. This is how Sorsby euphemized it. By that he meant that he was seeing many different women, one night after the other, even in the morning on the way to work for a “quickie.” So many that Sorsby couldn’t keep them straight. It was exhausting, Sorsby said almost every day, and it appeared to be: For the amount of work Sorsby got done, terminal exhaustion was probably his only excuse.
“It’s like I’ve been blessed or cursed, one or the other—sometimes I can’t tell.” Sorsby laughed, winked, lowered himself into the shell of his cubicle, talking to himself now but loud enough that anyone within a few yards could hear him. “You gotta learn to say no, Skip! You gotta get right with God. But not yet!”
“I don’t think it’s a curse,” Bronfman said, after giving it a little thought. “A challenge, perhaps, yes…”
But Sorsby didn’t care what Bronfman thought or didn’t think. “Gotta check my updates, see what she said about you-know-what. The beast with two backs. Grrrrrrrrr.” Sorsby sighed, and then Bronfman heard him swearing at the IKEA invoice. Then he heard him pick up his phone and mumble while he texted and sniggered, and it was clear to Bronfman that Skip was now communicating with one of the body snatchers.
“Skip?” Bronfman said through the cubicle wall.
“Hold on…” Text, text, text. Sigh. Sly laughter. Yawn. “What’s the what, Bronfman?”
“I’d like to ask you a question,” Bronfman said, lowering his voice to a whisper, which, were anyone listening, would only have encouraged them to listen all the more closely. Though Bronfman was merely going to ask a simple question, one man to another, he felt that in doing so he was venturing beyond his safe zone, maybe just by an inch or so. But, once you stepped into the open, there was no difference between an inch and a mile. “It’s about women.”