“I did!” He smiled broadly. “I loved that guy. How do you know about him?”
“My brother!”
“Oh, right.”
They were both quiet for a second. She felt an incredible surge of identification with and affection for him. “So — tropical, huh?”
He nodded soberly. “Tropical.”
Tropical was not really her bailiwick. “You’ve read about the dengue outbreaks in Cuba?” she ventured.
“Yeah, and Castro trying to blame the U.S.” He laughed.
But she couldn’t really focus on a talk about tropical. She was still wired up from the meeting that morning, and even from the brief volley with Faye. “Health is a shark pit,” she said.
His eyes widened, confused. “Health?”
“Health. Health. The DOH.”
“Oh!”
“Lauren St. Hilaire hates my guts. Did you see the way she was looking at me in that meeting?”
Hector grinned slightly. “Well, you kind of hijacked her presentation.”
Her mouth fell open. She was shocked and a touch offended, then suddenly amused. “You really think so?” she asked.
“Well, it’s — it’s—” He was flustered now. “You had a good idea, but she was getting to the same idea, I think.”
“I hate how slow people are with their ideas,” she nearly barked at him. He popped back in his seat. “Spit it out! Spit it out! Let’s save time. The more time we save, the more we can do.”
He laughed uncomfortably. “I know, but—”
But. She suddenly felt affectionate, playful toward him again. “You have a girlfriend?” she asked.
“A what?”
“A girlfriend. A girl. Friend.”
“Uh. Not right now.”
“You like girls?”
He was squirming, and she liked it! How far could she take him? She had no interest in her food. If anything, she wanted a drink. Also, she had to go back to the office and make sense of that flowchart she’d been diagramming during the meeting and bring it in to Renny. Should she call Renny right now, from the payphone, tell him to set some time aside for her this afternoon? Oh, wait, shit, but Emmy! Serendipity at three o’clock! How much work could she get done between now and three?
“I—” Still squirming. “I’m too busy for that right now,” he said. “I wanna publish.”
“You wanna publish?” she cried. “You’re too young to publish.”
“I’m ambitious!”
“I can see that! Okay, fine, you wanna publish, I’ll help you publish. Don’t worry about it, Bronx Science guy.”
Now he finally smiled. “Thank you,” he said. She let the fish off the hook. Their food came. He ate with gusto, but she barely picked at hers. She felt like she was losing hold of her thoughts; they were running ahead of her now just a bit too fast, and she didn’t like the feeling it gave her. A few times, she felt an urge to cry, but she pushed it back.
Hector looked up at her. “You’re not eating.”
“I’m not hungry at all,” she said. “I’m thinking about my daughter, Emmy. I don’t do enough for her.”
They left the restaurant. On Canal Street, they passed a vendor selling Hello Kitty dolls. “I’m buying one for Emmy,” she said. But she ended up buying five of them, each in a different color, and hauling them away in a black plastic garbage bag, the only bag the vendor had. She slung the bag over her shoulder like Santa Claus.
“You want me to carry those?” Hector asked.
“No, I’m fine,” she said, barreling through the sidewalk crowd. Back at the office, she dumped the bag, picked up the flowchart from the meeting, stalked into Renny’s office. He was sitting there going over something with Lauren.
She pulled up a seat. “Can you just give me five minutes?”
Renny and Lauren looked at her, stunned. And a little scared. “Ava, we’re in the middle of a meeting,” Renny said.
“I want five minutes of your time.” She stabbed her pad with her pen. “I have a way we can get three times as much out of that meeting in probably half the time. It’s just a process issue.”
“Okay, Ava,” Renny said — why so gently? That was annoying. “But not now.”
Lauren glanced at Renny. “Ava,” she ventured.
“Ava what? Are you angry at me because I stole your thunder in the meeting? Because if you are, I’m sorry. The idea just came to me and I came out with it.”
“No, Ava,” Lauren said, her voice firm and loud now. “I’m worried that you’re cycling.”
She sat straight up in her seat. She made a high, indignant sound. She laughed sharply. “You’re worried that I’m cycling? That I’m cycling? No, Lauren, you’re pissed off about the meeting, so you’re going to say instead you’re worried that I’m cycling, when you well know that I was diagnosed unipolar, not bipolar.”
“Ava,” Renny said, “I think that, in retrospect, you’ve been ramping up for the past two weeks, and now you’re cresting.”
With a Herculean effort, she sat back in her seat, said not a word. Then, slowly, with excruciating enunciation: “Even if I am, this”—again, she tapped the pen on her pad—“is a better way to do things.”
Renny and Lauren looked at each other helplessly — how infuriating! “Fine,” Renny said. “We’ll go over it. But not now.”
“Aw, c’mon, Renny, all I wanted was five minutes!” God, she just sounded like a girl from Queens! She stood up, pad in hand, and walked out. She heard Renny mutter to Lauren: “I have to call Sam.”
That stopped her cold. She could not see Sam go through the torment he had gone through a year ago. She stepped back into Renny’s office. “Don’t you dare call Sam, Ren,” she all but shouted. “That is not showing concern for us.”
She stalked back toward her office, well aware that Mrs. Conti and the rest of the support staff had heard her and were tracking her, peering over their fucking glasses as they typed. She stopped at Hector’s closet. “I’m going to my office and closing the door and getting some shit done before I go meet my daughter,” she announced.
He looked up. She noticed he was looking through the Kaposi’s briefs Blum had brought in earlier. “Okay,” he said. “Are you okay?”
She put a hand on her hip. “Do you know what I hate, Hector? I hate when people see good, energetic impatience — when they see a touch of activism in the middle of a fucking ossified bureaucracy — and they want to pathologize it because it scares them. Because it means they might have to get off their own fucking asses and actually get something done. And it sounds like — already! even though you know what I’m about — you see me that way, too. You’re scared of me.”
He shook his head. “No, I’m not,” he said. But she could see the briefs trembling in his hand.
She stared at him good and hard. Her affectionate and aggressive feelings toward him were all mixing in her head confusingly. She wanted to cry. Instead, she thought, He is literally sitting here in a closet. That was hilarious to her. “I hope you know you’re literally in the closet,” she said. Then she was horrified. Had she just said that?
He turned pale. His mouth opened. “I’m not in the closet,” he said, but it came out a croak, barely audible.
She held her stare. Voices in her head were telling her to continue to taunt him, but something else broke through. A tender voice told her to spare the boy. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Hector,” she said.
She got back to her office and closed the door. Her fat folder awaited her. She had exactly eighty minutes until she had to leave to meet Emmy. Certainly she could better use that time if she outlined precisely how to use it, how much time to spend on each thing. She flipped her yellow pad to a fresh page, drew a box at the top. “Chinatown Project,” she wrote. “Crunch follow-up data. Call Ben Eng. Spreadsheet format!” And so on like that. Thirty minutes later, she’d completed her outline and was ready to execute it with her remaining fifty minutes. Someone knocked on the door. It was Blum.