Sputterpub's Blog

Erica watches his mouth as it makes words. She’s still sleepy, and she feels like sinking toward it. “Actually, I don’t eat breakfast. I hope to leave the candy untouched until after lunch.” She considers. “But thanks for the invitation. Maybe we can make it lunch sometime?”

Hank smiles into her eyes. He wonders why he’s asking. He is attracted to Erica but she seems hyper like his mother and type A like his ex. He has been single for awhile now and he thinks he needs a softer woman than the one in front of him.

Erica feels a moment of awkwardness. She looks away from him as he asks, “How about one day next week?”

An elevator door opens and a crowd ahead of them pours into it. They’ll get on the next one. Hank wants to draw her closer to him, but continues, “I don’t have my calendar. Let’s stop at my office and negotiate.”

“Fine. I think I know mine well enough. I certainly know what I’m doing next.”

“Candy?”

“Not hardly. It’s the time of year when we have to evaluate our two clerical employees. I and my two so-called partners attempted that yesterday. One review did not go well. That’s one out of two, so I’m not feeling like any sort of effective manager. I just learned that the employee was ‘sent home’ today, due to emotional stress/illness. As usual, I’m having to handle this alone. The women I call partners only act that way around bonuses.” Erica stops speaking. She doesn’t want to complain. She’s surprised at how willing she apparently is, to speak critically to an almost-stranger about people to whom she should owe, well, discretion if not much else.

Their elevator arrives. They and half a dozen others ride up one floor. Hank guides Erica to the right down the hall and into an exterior office. “You remind me how glad I am to work without employees. On the other hand, I could use a colleague now, when I’m under pressure to produce. Welcome to my place.” He extends his arms out to either side and glances at her.

His office is one large room with a view over Sansome Street. His desk faces the door, but he has a credenza between his chair and the windows; the papers scattered on it show he works in that direction. A large appointment calendar is open on the credenza.

He looks at the calendar. She aims her eyes out the window. He speaks softly as he turns the pages. “Can we make it next Wednesday?”

She takes a step closer to him. “I think that works for me. I can let you know if it doesn’t.”

“Here.” He reaches into a pocket for his card case. “Call me if we need to renegotiate.” Their fingertips touch with the passing of the card. They’re both aware of the touch.

She looks up into his face for a moment. Sometimes, when she leans out over an open window high up, she feels the impulse not to jump but to allow herself to fall. It’s a resistible but surprisingly strong idea. Right now, she feels a similar strong but resistible urge to fall toward his face and kiss his mouth.

“Okay,” she exhales. “I should get back to work. If nothing else, the chocolate calls.”

Hank smiles at her. “Good luck. I’ll see you next week.” She’s at the door, nodding back at him when he adds, “Oh, Erica. What type of chocolate do you like best?”

“Toffee-ettes,” she answers without a pause.

Hank sits for a minute after the door closes. He checks his phone messages: Margo insists on a callback about Tom’s latest misdemeanor and Betsy, who ought to see by now that their little relationship isn’t going anywhere, is still nagging about a weekend opera date. “Oh hell,” Hank mutters. “Chocolate calls,” and he resumes his interrupted quest for a mocha.

One floor below, Hank has just finished drying his hands. He drops a damp paper towel into the opening below the dispenser as he turns toward the door.

In all 5th and 6th floor bathrooms, sirens are whooping. The sound comes from a small red box high on the wall of each room. The same box starts to flash bright lights left and right. Before the voice comes over the PA system, Hank has left the 5th floor men’s and Erica has figured that she better get out of the 6th floor ladies.’ She’s about to enter her office when out of the door file Fran, Linda, and then Beth. Beth makes sure the door is locked behind her, announces that she’s the office fire warden, and directs the others to take the stairs to the 4th floor. Erica hears her ask Fran, “So you sent Evelyn home?”

Erica feels disoriented. She wants her coffee, but it’s locked in the place she’s leaving. She doesn’t understand what happened to Evelyn; is she ill or once again too stressed?

It’s slow going down the stairs. There’s an obese gentlemen with a cane below them, and the gap ahead of him grows as the tenants behind him clump together. Fran tries to lower her normally loud speaking voice. “What about him? What do we do about someone like him if there really is a fire?”

No one answers. As they emerge into the 4th floor hallway, Erica asks Fran about Evelyn, but only hears “…really upset about the talk yesterday” before they’re involved in the chaotic sign-in process, and the even more disorganized wait for an elevator. The stairs in the building are locked from the inside except on the ground. The locking is for fire safety but it means that if one enters the stairwell anywhere, one can only use it to get to the lobby. This situation creates obnoxiousness for tenants above 4, since floors 2, 3 and 4 are used by a large law firm whose employees are forever taking the elevator from one of those floors to another. Now it also means that all of floors 5 and 6 have to wait for elevators to stop on 4 and ferry them one or two stories. No elevator car can take more than 10 people; the aftermath of the fire drill is taking much more time than the drill itself.

In the press of people, Erica is separated from her employees. She gazes around a sea of somewhat familiar faces, and smiles when she spots Hank. At 6½ feet, he’s hard to miss. Erica likes large men and notices them. Hank seems strong, silent. Even though she’s been fooled twice before into mistaking silence for strength, she might have it in her to be foolish again.

Hank has just decided to continue down for his mocha when he sees Erica. He pauses.

Their acquaintance consists of miscellaneous lobby and elevator chats. Small incidents that are mutually gratifying. Each recognizes a spark of humor and personality in the other. They’re favorite strangers.

He smiles at her with his big face. They manage a couple of steps toward one other. When they’re close enough he says, “Fancy finding you here.”

“I had no idea ‘fire alarm test’ meant ‘fire drill!’ If I had, I would have brought my coffee. Hell, I would have brought the pound of See’s candy too. Here I am, caught without breakfast.”

“Maybe we should take an elevator down instead of up. Breakfast?”

Hank has been in his office since 7:30. Now that he lives on Telegraph Hill, he can walk to work in 20 minutes. Now that Tom’s away in college, he has morning responsibilities to no one but himself. Now that Margo has remarried, he rarely has to waste a morning getting hassled about his past inadequacies or current failings. When he wakes early thinking about a project, like today, he’s free to leave his bed, exercise, walk to work. He’s put in almost two and a half hours this morning, and he’s ready for a mocha.

At the same moment, Erica is carrying another pound of candy to the office. She can’t get her co-workers to dance, laugh, or exercise at all, and any one who’s getting sex isn’t getting it in the office, so chocolate is the only remedy they have for stress.

The box in the white bag contains a selected assortment. She picked dark and light bordeaux for Linda, California brittle for Beth, peanut butter squares for Fran, cashew brittle for Evelyn, and toffee-ettes for herself. Most of the candies nest in brown pleated paper, but the toffee-ettes crowd together in white cups; they stand out like twins in bassinets above a floor of rich brown.

Erica carries the package flat on her upright palm as if it’s a small tray. She jaywalks across Sutter and Sansome, looking right for cars and left toward the display on her building. Above the entrance to the ground-floor bank is a message in programmed bulbs. It offers some interest-bearing short-term account to the public, about which Erica never attends. She’s watching for the time and temperature, which always follow “CERTIFICATES/COMPOUND MONTHLY/MEMBER FDIC.” It tells her that in another six minutes it will be 10 am. It considers the temperature to be 68°. Across the street and a block north, the marquee above the Bank of the Orient agrees about the time, but reports 62°. As usual, Erica figures the outside temperature is halfway between the two digital opinions.

Four floors up, Hank stands and stretches. He looks at his Braun coffeemaker and confirms his desire for a specialty drink. He leaves his jacket hanging behind the door as he heads out. He stops first in the men’s room.

With the candy on her left hand and her double cappuccino in her right, Erica opens the building door by pushing a hip against the square handicapped-access button. It makes the far right door move outward toward her. She proceeds to the elevator area, and there reads the marker-on-mapboard sign that someone has placed on an easel. “General Fire Alarm Test Today,” says the first line, with “10 am, Floors 5 and 6” under it. Just then, Linda joins her with the day’s mail, and a familiar female face from their 6th floor steps up to wait with them
.
“Maybe we should just stay here till it’s over,” says the blonde woman whose name neither Linda nor Erica know. She’s referring to the fact that it’s now 9:55. Erica used to avoid these building drills, until lectured one day by a frustrated fireman – she’d blushed then to learn that if there were a fire and she didn’t know how to check in, she’d put first responders in danger while they searched for her in the office she had secretly abandoned. So when an elevator arrives she steps aboard, and the other women accompany her.

Erica’s normal morning procedure includes a stop in the ladies’ room before entering the office. She’s accustomed to positioning her very dry cappuccino at the end of the pull-down shelf in the stall; she has to be careful, for her coffee barely weighs enough to hold the shelf down. But she doesn’t usually have candy with her when she arrives. And she doesn’t usually have Linda. She enters the office instead, puts down her case, her coffee, the candy, her coat, and then visits the bathroom. She’s in an indelicate position when the fire alarm trips.

Paula wasn’t having any of it. While she sometimes argued that it is up to the victim to define whether abuse has occurred, she took exception then. She asserted that Maggie was too young to judge the experience when it happened, and too warped by the experience to relate its effects accurately now. Paula likes to think she has an open mind. There was no way she was bending it to okay the Don-on-Maggie business.

Don kept arguing. He called Paula “Fluffy” again, and when she objected he told her to lighten up. He said he called lots of women Fluffy, and he only used the term for ladies he liked. As far as Paula was concerned, that added insult to injury. But she didn’t want to argue by email; that’s too easy to misread. And she sure didn’t want to go into it on the phone – angry awkward silences were not her thing. She didn’t want contention in person either. She kept the plane tickets, and she told herself she had no intention of flying to Texas to fight. After it all ended, she wondered why she retained the tickets and the plan.

And end it did, just two weeks after the Maggie memoir. By then their biographies had progressed into early adulthood. Paula was narrating the events that led to her accidental career and Don was about to report on how he came to marry his Berkeley girlfriend and why she changed her name. Paula had been interested in his memories so far, but she was sitting on the edge of her ethernet seat when it came to these subjects.

She booted up her computer on February 14 with some happy expectations. She looked forward to the chapter he owed her, and she’ll admit that she expected some romantic gesture from Don. Of course it wouldn’t be flowers or candy (she disdained cut plants and was on one of her diets anyway), but the man knew how to write mediocre verse and was clearly an accomplished flirt. For the first time in years, Paula had Valentine hopes.

She got something, and it was surprising, but it wasn’t pleasant. The only good thing Paula could say about it afterwards was that was the day she learned what the phrase “hopes dashed” meant. She got to feel her hopes dash.

Don’s email didn’t come to her till late afternoon. By then she was on the verge of disappointment anyway; he was two hours ahead of her and she’d expected a romantic communication by noon her time.

He wished her a happy Valentine’s Day. He apologized for not writing earlier. He excused his tardiness by telling her he’d spent the day in jail.

Of course there was more to it. And it was only city jail and a very bailable offense. He reported that, on arising and acknowledging February 14, he decided to start his day by fetching pastries and coffee for Rain. His wife. What?

His email continued. In his hurry to the bakery he ran into roads closed for a marathon, and a cop trying to detour him in a very roundabout way. He grew obstreperous. It was obvious to the reader that his obstreperousness was owing to stress from not yet telling his girlfriend that his estrangement from his wife wasn’t (or as he but it in the brief email argument, during the few days between his arrest and the cessation of their correspondence, “well yeah we have separate bedrooms, separate wings of the house really, but it’s not like an armed camp, fer chrissakes…”).

What symmetry. It won’t survive an editing session, but it’s the truth. Don’s wife bailed him out and Paula bailed on their relationship. It was all too clear to her. She saved their email printouts for a possible future book.

But she won’t go there. Paula reviewed those emails recently and she is mortified. It’s easy now for her to see how impossible the heroine’s situation was. She had too much money and comfort to thrive in Don’s fantasy arena. He’d just about perfected his solitary-man Hemingway image, at least ethereally, and nothing Paula could say or write would penetrate that persona. Don was comfortable by then with his failures, his heartburn, his cycles of depressed self-disdain. He was so accustomed to feeling low that he wouldn’t reach for any fruit that wasn’t already in his larder. He was immune to better feelings.

Paula didn’t have much from which to choose. It finally came down to hanging in with the Don dialogue and leasing from that a little attention, or closing the book that never got writ.

So Paula assumed Don was eligible when she sent the first email. She had no marital aspirations herself (having not succeeded in the institution, more than once). She knew he was poor (she lost the money she invested through him, and she wasn’t alone, and he soon left that business for the separate but equally dismal field of residential real estate). Paula assumed it was okay to flirt with a free heart.

Both of them aspired to write. Neither expected to make a living at it, but that didn’t stop them from keeping journals, trying poetry, occasionally attempting a short story. This meant the emails were readable at least, and sometimes memorable. In fact, it only took half a week after Paula sent her first “I’m here – be gentle with me” and Don responded with defloration double entendres before they found themselves exchanging chapters of autobiography.

Each managed to write with an attractive voice. Don was funny, affectionate, and on the verge of macho. Paula expressed herself with humor and insight, and when she complained she tried not to come off as shrill. For she did complain a little, when he called her “Fluffy,” or assumed she was heavier or more Jewish than she was.

Don didn’t complain. Sometimes he engaged in screen silence for a day or two, which tended to prompt Paula to send short “are you all right?” messages, to which he then responded with masculine monosyllables. Those exchanges made her look anxious and talkative and him appear busy and taciturn. The screenplay was then favorable to Don. Paula resented it. They quibbled and then engaged in makeup emails.

But they continued. They wrote their stories to each other from birth through a few post-college years before interruptions occurred. They engaged in suggestive comments. They signed their electronic missives with increasingly long strings of X’s.

They learned that their early childhoods were spent two towns away from one another, in Suffolk County, in New York state. They found coincidence in the fact that their birthdays were exactly six months apart; both commented that their astrologer friends said the best mates split the calendar like that. They interrupted narrations about their first sexual experiences, not because the words got too hot, but because those memories reminded them of more they wanted to tell one another. Right about then, Paula sent Don an explicit short story she’d drafted (titled “Sex”), and Don confessed how passionately he wanted to nibble on the underside of Paula’s breasts: not enough to cause pain, exactly, but sufficient to mark her so she’d remember him all day. That email made her remember him much longer than a day.

Two events then occurred in notable succession. Paula bought plane tickets, and Don shared a sexual anecdote from his hippie history.

They were American Airlines tickets – SFO to DFW to San Antonio, for late March, for a long weekend. It made sense to Paula: a scenic city close to Austin but not Austin, to get Don away from work and stress. It made sense to Don for other reasons (“I’ll have to take a bit of care arranging,” he mentioned cryptically, and Paula didn’t ask him for details).

She bought the tickets for $215, two months before the trip. She looked forward to looking forward. So his early February recollection upset her.

He wrote about an experience from 1966. Paula was 15 then, but Don was a fully formed individual of 24 years. He was living somewhat communally that summer, with one ex-roommate from college and two other guys. It was the typical situation for white guys of that era: junk food and litter, water pipes and beer, nubile women in bright colors. Don’s ex-roommate had a wild little sister named Maggie who visited their bachelor den every chance she got. She was 13 and adept at sneaking out of her parents’ house; it became something of a ritual to return her to the suburbs on Monday mornings.

Don sent an email to Paula, fondly describing the first time Maggie climbed into bed with him. He characterized their romps as pure fun, unmitigated play, lots of laughter along with easy orgasms.

Paula objected. She typed the words “child abuse” into her next email. Don reacted with weird indignation. He even brought Maggie into the conversation; he was still in touch with her brother, and he acquired an email from Maggie where she agreed that their “affair” had been harmless, actually good for her, a transition from childhood to adolescence that she’ll ever appreciate.

She isn’t a Luddite, but Paula didn’t start using email till 1998. She’d been a pen-and-ink type of writer (she used a fountain pen because she didn’t want to press hard, and she held the cap in her left hand when she wrote, in case there was any ink inside the cap that could smear the nib). But after she acquired her first word processing computer in 1980, she began typing so much that the 8th grade lessons flowered within her. For a clerk-typist who only managed 47 words a minute when she took her first job in 1975, Paula blossomed into a touch-typist who could work the machine faster than she could write.

When she finally got into email (Eudora program), she liked it. She sent greetings to the half dozen friends who were already into it, and everyone replied. Soon she was involved in a daily correspondence with her old acquaintance Don. He lived in Austin, she in Berkeley, and neither was much into the phone for personal interchange; email was an easy way to chat.

They’d met three years earlier. She doesn’t remember how he got her contact information, but Don was then selling oil&gas investments, and he’d been calling her with limited partnership opportunities, now and then. They both gave good phone (their mutual aversion to the medium was not based on lack of skill but on overuse during work hours), and they developed a conversational relationship that included news, amusement, a little flirting, and mutual respect.

There was humor between them from the first call, and chemistry soon after. Don is a tall handsome personable man. He has always liked women and flirted well, and he has succeeded with a variety of them. He was a little old for the summer-of-love (born in 1942, he can’t claim to be a boomer), but he was still associating with his old college buddies and living near campus till 28; he was active and into the era between free love and the advent of AIDs. In 1970 he made the cross-country pilgrimage to the left coast, traveling with four friends and hooking up with a dozen more in Berkeley. He peddled flowers and balloons, drove a cab, and fucked women (friends and fares), knocked one up and married her, sired a few more offspring on her and then had to move the wife and kids out of state, to make money and preserve the growing family. His wife was almost as bent as he – she tolerated and sometimes encouraged his sexual adventures, she managed to never earn money herself, and she changed her name to Rain, formally.

Paula was not like Don and, except for the fact that his taste was so broad, she wasn’t his type either. He found almost every woman lovely, but he was attracted to long blonde hair and long slim legs. Paula is about five and a half feet tall but tips the scales at 160 when she is “good.” She has dark hair that curls becomingly with the right products and humidity, but often frizzes out in the coastal air. Her legs are strong and too sturdy to be described as slim.

They met about a year after the first telephone calls, about a month after Paula finally agreed to invest in one of Don’s deals. He made a trip to the Bay Area, partly to see potential prospects like Paula but mostly to visit buddies from the good old days. Paula will never forget walking from her office to the reception area and getting a first look at him. He was taller than she expected, dark-haired, large-featured: very much her physical type. She felt a strong attraction. Their eyes met and it seemed he shared the feeling. She hadn’t then learned that any guy that good-looking and personable was easy with attraction.

They had lunch that day, before he flew back to Texas. That’s when she first heard his personal history. That’s when she learned that his marriage was pretty much over; he just didn’t have enough money to split up with Rain. He told Paula how each of them had a separate wing in the house where they raised their kids and still lived. He said they led separate lives.