Three days later he got a phone call, the woman saying she'd found half a dozen ribbons for the typewriter, if he'd care to have them. And when he went to pick them up, he'd invited her to J's Bar and treated her to a couple of rounds of cocktails in return for the ribbons. He really didn't get that far talking to her.
The third time they met was four days after that, at an indoor pool in town. The Rat drove her home and slept with her. The Rat really didn't understand why things ended up like that. He couldn't even remember who came on to whom. Maybe it was all in the way the air was flowing.
After a few days had passed, the relationship with her began to swell within him, making its presence known like a soft wedge driven into his daily life. Ever so slightly, something was starting to get to the Rat. Every time the image of her slender arms clinging round his body came to mind, he'd feel some long-forgotten tenderness spread through him.
He got a clear impression that she, in her own little world, was striving to build up a perfection of sorts. And the Rat knew that it was more than your ordinary effort. She always wore the most tasteful of dresses, which never attracted undue attention, and pretty underwear – nothing frilly, but smart. She put on eau de cologne with the scent of morning vineyards, carefully selected her words when she spoke, abstained from asking superfluous questions, smiled with that "practiced look" she learned from constant scrutiny in the mirror. And each of
these things, in their own little way, made the Rat sad. After seeing her several times, the Rat had guessed her to be twenty-seven. And he was right on the nose.
Her breasts were small, her slender body free of excess flesh and beautifully tanned – though she'd deny having wanted to get a tan, really. High cheekbones and thin lips bespoke a good upbringing and an inner core of strength, yet behind all the shades of expression animating her face, what showed was an utterly defenseless naivete.
She'd graduated from the architecture department of an art school and was working in a planning office, that much she'd told him. Birthplace? Nowhere hereabouts. Came here after graduating. Once a week she'd swim at the pool, and on Sunday nights she took a train to her viola lessons.
Once a week, on Saturday nights, the two of them would get together. Then all day Sunday, the Rat would loll about while she played Mozart.
7
Down with a cold for three days, a backlog of work awaited me on my return to the office. My mouth was all raspy and dry; I felt as if someone had gone over my whole body with sandpaper. Pamphlets and papers and booklets and magazines had piled up around my desk like anthills. My partner came in, mumbled some inquiry after my health, then went back to his own room. The office girl brought in a cup of hot coffee and two rolls as usual, set them on the desk, and vanished. I found I'd forgotten to buy cigarettes, so I bummed a pack of Seven Stars off my partner, pinched the filter off one and lit the other end. The sky was overcast just to the point where you couldn't tell where the air ended and the clouds began. Everything smelled as though someone had been trying to burn damp leaves. Or else it only seemed that way because of my fever.
I took a deep breath, and broke up the anthill closest at hand. Every item was stamped RUSH across the top and marked underneath with a deadline in red felt-tip pen. Luckily, that was the only RUSH anthill. And even luckier, there was still a couple of days left to go on them. The rest had deadlines from one to two weeks later, no problem if I farmed out half of it for rough translation. So one by one I started in on the booklets and brochures, restacking them in the order I finished them. A process that left an anthill of far less stable configuration than before. It looked like a newspaper graph by sex and age of constituent support for the cabinet. And it wasn't just the shape that was strange, I might add; its contents were as thrilling as a crosssection of random topics.
1. Charles Rankin, Scientific Puzzle Box: Animals.
From p. 68, "Why Cats Wash Their Faces" to p. 89,
"How Bears Catch Fish."
Finish by Oct. 12.
2. American Nursing Association, ed., Talking with the Terminally Ill.
All 16 pp.
Finish by Oct. 19.
3. Frank de Seto, Jr., Tracing Authors' Illnesses.
Chapter 3, "Authors and Hay Fever." All 23 pp.
Finish by Oct. 23.
4. Rend Claire, Le Chapeau de Paille d'Italie,
English trans. scenario.
All 39 pp.
Finish by Oct. 26.
The real shame was that the clients' names were never written anywhere. I could scarcely imagine who, for any reason, would want to get these things translated (and as RUSH jobs, no less). Perhaps some bear had stopped in its tracks before a stream in expectation of my translation. Or maybe a nurse was waiting wordlessly in her vigil over a terminally ill patient.
Photos of a cat washing its face with its paw lay before me on the desk as I drank my coffee and chewed one of the rolls to a pulp. It tasted like papier-mâché. My head had begun to clear a bit, but my extremities still tingled with fever. I took my camping knife out of the desk drawer, spent forever carefully sharpening six F pencils, then slowly got down to business.
I put on some old Stan Getz, and was at it until noon. The band was top notch – Stan Getz, Al Haig, Jimmy Rainey, Teddy Kotick, and Tiny Kahn. I whistled along with the tape through the whole Getz solo on "Jumping with Symphony Sid" and felt worlds better.
During lunch break I headed out to a crowded little eating spot five minutes down the hill from the office for some fried fish, then stood outside a hamburger stand while I drank two orange juices. Next I stopped by a pet shop, and played with some Abyssinians for maybe ten minutes, sticking my finger through a gap in the glass. Your regular lunch break.
Back at the office, I lazily glanced over the morning paper until the clock struck one. Then I sharpened my six pencils again for the afternoon, pinched the filters off the rest of the Seven Stars, and laid the cigarettes out on the desk. At which point, the office girl brought in a cup of hot green tea.
"How d'you feel?"
"Not bad."
"And work?"
"Getting there."
The sky was still relentlessly overcast. If anything, the gray had grown a shade deeper than in the morning. When I stuck my head out the window I got the distinct impression it was about to rain. Autumn birds were in flight across the sky, and everything hung heavy with that dull metropolitan drone (a combination of the rumble of the subway, the sizzle of hamburgers, the roar of traffic on the elevated expressways, car doors slammed shut or flung open, countless assorted noises like that).
I closed the window, put on a cassette of Charlie Parker playing "Just Friends," and resumed translating from the section "When Do Migratory Birds Sleep?"