“I don’t seem . . .” continuing the facade, sifting through slips of wrinkled receipts and trying not to show his embarrassment at being caught penniless in a train of well-to-do commuters.
“You got it or don’t you?” the conductor said.
“If you just give me a minute . . .”
“Here,” someone said. “I’ll pay for him.”
It was her.
Holding up a ten-dollar bill and showing him a smile that completely threatened his equilibrium.
THREE
Of all the things they talked about — and they talked about all sorts of things — there was one thing they didn’t talk about.
Commuting to work? Yes.
I was thinking the other day, she said, that if the U.S. government was run like the Long Island Rail Road, we’d all be in trouble. And then I realized that maybe it is, and we are.
The weather? Of course.
Fall’s my favorite season, she said. But where did it go?
Baltimore, Charles answered.
Jobs? Absolutely.
I write commercials, Charles said. I'm a creative director.
I cheat clients, she said. I'm a broker. After which she added: Just kidding.
Restaurants dined in . . . colleges attended . . . favorite movies. All spoken of, discussed, mentioned.
Just not marriages.
Marriages, the plural, because she wore a wedding band on her left ring finger.
Maybe marriage wasn’t considered an appropriate topic when flirting. If flirting was what they were doing, of course. Charles wasn’t sure; he was kind of rusty at it and had never been particularly at ease with women to begin with.
But as soon as she’d pressed the ten-dollar bill into the conductor’s hand, Charles protesting all the while — Don’t be silly, you don’t have to do that — as soon as the conductor gave her one dollar in return, Charles still protesting — No, really, this is totally unnecessary — he’d gotten up and sat in the empty seat next to her. Why not — wasn’t it the polite thing to do when someone helped you out? Even someone who looked like her?
Her thighs shifted to accommodate him. Even with his eyes glued to her heartbreaking face, he’d managed to notice the movement of her legs, a memory that stayed with him as he spoke to her about the banal, trivial, and superfluous — a good name, he thought, for a law firm specializing in personal injury suits.
He asked her, for example, which brokerage house she worked for. Morgan Stanley, she answered. And how long she’d been there. Eight years. And where she’d worked before that.
McDonald's she said.
My high school job.
She was just a little younger than he was, she was reminding him. Just in case he hadn’t noticed.
He had. In fact, he was trying to think of just the right word for her eyes and thought it was probably luminous. Yeah, luminous was just about perfect.
“I’ll give you your money back as soon as we get to Penn Station,” he said, suddenly remembering he was in her debt.
“Tomorrow’s fine,” she said. “Ten percent interest, of course.”
“I’ve never met a woman loan shark before. Do you break legs, too?”
“Just balls,” she said.
Yes, he guessed they were flirting after all. And he didn’t seem half-bad at it, either. Maybe it was like riding a bicycle or having sex, in that you never actually forgot how. Although it was possible Deanna and head.
“Is this your usual train?” he asked her.
“Why?”
“So I know how to give you your money back.”
“Forget about it. It’s nine dollars. I think I’ll survive.”
“No. I’ve got to give it back to you — I’d feel ethically impugned if I didn’t.”
“Impugned?Well, I wouldn’t want you to feel impugned. By the way, is that an actual word?”
Charles blushed. “I think so. I saw it in a crossword puzzle once, so it must be.”
Which got them onto a discussion about what else? Crossword puzzles. She liked them — he didn’t.
She could make it through Monday’s with both eyes closed. He needed both eyes and a piece of brain he didn’t possess. The one that provided focus and fortitude. His brain liked to roam around a little too much to sit down and figure out a five-letter word for . . . say . . .sadness. All right, all right, so that was an easy one. Grief. That place where his brain insisted on spending so much of its time these days. Where it had set up house and resolutely refused to budge. Except, of course, when it was imagining that alternate world of his, where he could flirt with green-eyed women he’d just met not five minutes before.
They kept talking about other mostly inconsequential things. The conversation a little like the train itself, moving along at a nice, easy clip, if briefly stopping here and there to pick up some new topic of discussion before gathering steam once again. And then suddenly they were under the East River and almost there.
“Well, I’m lucky you were here today,” he said, entombed in darkness as the fluorescent train lights flickered off and all he could see was the vague shape of her body. It seemed like he’d just got on, like he’d just been asked for nine dollars he didn’t have, and she’d just untangled her thighs and paid for him.
“Tell you what,” he said. “Take the same train tomorrow and I’ll pay you back then.”
“You’ve got a date,” she said.
For the rest of the day, even after he’d shaken her hand good-bye and watched as she disappeared into the Penn Station crowd, after he’d waited ten minutes for a cab uptown and was greeted with his boss, Eliot, telling him to brace himself just two feet into the office, he’d think about her choice of words.
She could’ve said fine, sure, meet you tomorrow. She could’ve said good idea. Or bad idea. Or just mail it to me.
But she’d said: You've got a date.
Her name was Lucinda.
FOUR
Something was up.
Eliot informed him their credit card client was coming in to speak with them. Or, more likely, to scream at them.
Blown deadlines, poor tracking studies, unresponsive account executives — they could take their pick.
Even though the actual reason was the same reason it always was these days.
The economy.
Business simply wasn’t good; there was too much competition, too many clients with too many options. Groveling was in, integrity out.
This was going to be a visit to the principal’s office, a sit-down with Dad, an audience with the IRS. Where he’d have to stand and assume the position and say thank you, sir, too.
One look at Ellen Weischler’s sour expression when he walked into the conference room pretty much confirmed this.
She looked as if she’d just tasted curdled milk or sniffed something odious. He knew what, too. The last commercial they’d done for her company was a triumph of mediocrity. Badly cast, badly written, and badly received. It didn’t matter that they’d recommended another one to them. That they’d begged and pleaded and, yes, even groveled in an attempt to get them to choose a different board. It didn’t even matter that the first cut of the commercial had been almost good—clever, even hip—until the client, Ellen in particular, had meddled with it, changing copy, changing shots, each succeeding cut more bland than the previous one, until they’d ended up with the current dog wagging its tail five times a day on network buys across the country. It didn’t matter because it was their spot, and the buck — or to be perfectly accurate, the 17 percent commission on the $130 million account — stopped there.