“Used to be,” Ernie said. “Used to be. But ever since he got promoted he forgot all about that. Now he’s so scared I’m gonna pull him down that he won’t even sit for a minute. Used to be he’d come down here and we’d talk like you ’n’ me doin’. But now he just stands at the door and grin and nod.”
“I don’t get it. How can you like the job and the company if you don’t like the people you work for?” I once asked Ernie.
“It’s a talent,” he replied.
“Why ’ont you tuck in your shirt?” Big Linda Washington said to me on the afternoon that I’d unknowingly met Lana Donelli. The sneer on the young woman’s face spoke of a hatred that I couldn’t understand. “You look like some kinda fool hangin’ all out all over the place.”
Big Linda was taller than I, broader too — and I’m pretty big. Her hair was straightened and frosted with gold at the tips. She wore one-piece dresses of primary colors as a rule. Her skin was mahogany. Her face, unless it was contorted, appraising me, was pretty.
We were in the service elevator going up to the fifth floor. I tucked the white shirt tails into my black jeans.
“At least you could make it even, so the buttons go straight down,” she remarked.
I would have had to open up my pants to do it right, and I didn’t want to get Linda any more upset than she already was.
“Hm!” she grunted and then sucked a tooth.
The elevator came open then, and she rolled her cart out. We had parallel routes, but I went in the opposite direction, deciding to take mail from the bottom of the stack rather than listen to her criticisms of me.
The first person I ran into was Mona. She was wearing a deep red one-piece dress held up by spaghetti straps. Her breasts were free under the thin fabric, and her legs were bare. Mona (Lana too, of course) was short, with thick black hair and green eyes. Her skin had a hint of olive in it but not so deep as Sicilian skin.
“I can see why you were wearing that sweater at your desk,” I said.
“What?” she replied, in an unfriendly tone.
“That white sweater you were wearing,” I said.
“What’s wrong with you? I don’t even own a white sweater.”
She turned abruptly and clicked away on her red high heels. I wondered what had happened. Somehow I kept thinking that it was because of my twisted-up shirt. Maybe that’s what made people treat me badly, maybe it was my appearance.
I continued my route, pulling jackets from the bottom and placing them in the right in-boxes. Everyone had a different in-box system. Some had their in- and out-boxes stacked, while others had them side by side. Rose McMormant had no box at all, just white and black labels set at opposite ends of her desk. White for in and black for out.
“If the boxes ain’t side by side, just drop it anywhere and pick up whatever you want to,” Ernie told me on my first day. “That’s what I do. Mr. Averill put down the rules thirteen years ago, just before they kicked him upstairs.”
Ernie was the interoffice mail-room director. He didn’t make deliveries anymore, so it was easy for him to make pronouncements.
When I’d finished the route I went through the exit door at the far end of the hall to get a drink of water from the refrigerated fountain. I planned to wait in the exit chamber long enough for Big Linda to have gone back down. While I waited, a fly buzzed by my head. It caught my attention because there weren’t many flies that made it into the air-conditioned buildings around the Wall Street area, even in summer.
The fly landed on my hand, then on the cold aluminum bowl of the water fountain. He didn’t have enough time to drink before zooming up to the ceiling. From there he went to a white spot on the door, to the baby fingernail of my left hand, and then to a crumb in the corner. He landed and settled again and again but took no more than a second to enjoy each perch.
“You sure jumpy, Mr. Fly,” I said, as I might have when I was a child. “But you could be a Miss Fly, huh?”
The idea that the neurotic fly could have been a female brought Mona to mind. I hustled my cart toward the elevator, passing Big Linda on the way. She was standing in the hall with another young black woman, talking. The funny thing about them was that they were both holding their hands as if they were smoking, but of course they weren’t, as smoking was forbidden in any office building in New York.
“I got to wait for a special delivery from, um, investigations,” Big Linda explained.
“I got to go see a friend on three,” I replied.
“Oh.” Linda seemed relieved.
I realized that she was afraid I’d tell Ernie that she was idling with her friends. Somehow that stung more than her sneers and insults.
She was still wearing the beaded sweater, but instead of the eraser she had a tiny Wite-Out brush in her hand, held half an inch from a sheet of paper on her violet blotter.
“I bet that blotter used to be blue, huh?”
“What?” She frowned at me.
“That blotter, it looks violet, purple, but that’s because it was once blue but the sun shined on it, from the window.”
Lana turned her upper torso to see the window that I meant. I could see the soft contours of her small breasts against the white fabric.
“Oh,” she said, turning back to me. “I guess.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I notice things like that. My mother says that it’s why I never finish anything. She says that I get distracted all the time and don’t keep my eye on the job.”
“Do you have more mail for me?” Lana Donelli asked.
“No, uh-uh, I was just thinking.”
Lana looked at the drying Wite-Out brush and jammed it back into the small bottle that was in her other hand.
“I was thinking about when I saw you this morning,” I continued. “About when I saw you and asked about the air-conditioning and your sweater and you looked at me like I was crazy.”
“Yes,” she said, “why did you ask that?”
“Because I thought you were Mona Donelli,” I said triumphantly.
“Oh,” she sounded disappointed. “Most people figure out that I’m not Mona because my nameplate says ‘Lana Donelli.’”
“Oh,” I said, completely crushed. I could notice a blotter turning violet but I couldn’t read.
The look on my face brought a smile out of the mortgage receptionist.
“Don’t look so sad,” she said. “I mean, even when they see the name, a lotta people still call me Mona.”
“They do?”
“Yeah. They see the name and think that Mona’s a nickname or something. Isn’t that dumb?”
“I saw your sister on the fifth floor in a red dress, and then I saw a fly who couldn’t sit still, and then I knew that you had to be somebody else,” I said.
“You’re funny,” Lana said, crinkling up her nose as if she were trying to identify a scent. “What’s your name?”
“Rufus Coombs.”
“Hi, Rufus,” she said, holding out a hand.
“Hey,” I said.
My apartment is on 158th Street in Washington Heights. It’s pretty much a Spanish-speaking neighborhood. I don’t know many people, but the rent is all I can afford. My apartment — living room with a kitchen cove, small bedroom, and toilet with a shower — is on the eighth floor and looks out over the Hudson. The $458 a month includes heat and gas, but I pay my own electric. I took it because of the view. There was a three-hundred-dollar unit on the second floor, but it had windows that looked out onto a brick wall.
I don’t own much. I have a single mattress on the floor, an old oak chair that I found on the street, and kitchen shelving that I bought from a liquidator for bookshelves, propped up in the corner. I have a rice pot, a frying pan, and a kettle, and enough cutlery and plates for two, twice as much as I need most days.