Photo by Yogi Purnama on Unsplash
She’s sleeping with him. She said she would, the first time she met him. He carried her to the sidewalk, right outside the front doors with everyone staring, gone again in a flash. I saw her in the lobby after, shoulder to shoulder with the rest of everyone else in the building. Her hair was in tangles, her feet bare. We rode in the crowded elevator, the boss behind us spitting out ceaseless headlines. I noticed she’d lost an earring, but couldn’t get a word in to tell her as much.
When the clamour cleared and it was just the two of us across from each other at the desk, I watched her as I pretended to work. She chain-smoked, staring off into nothing.
“I wonder what he’s like in bed.”
I stopped typing and looked at her above my glasses before pushing them back up my nose with an index finger. I resumed my typing.
She laughed. “It’s our job to ask questions, virgin.” She lit a fresh cigarette off the butt of the one she was smoking. “It also just so happens to be our job to answer them.”
I didn’t say a word, just kept on typing.
She resented me the second she met me. She’d given her whole life to journalism. I was a good journalist, but I hadn’t done anything close to the work she’d done, I’d never even worked for a major paper before. Still, here I was sitting across the desk from her, her apparent equal. When I stuck out my hand and introduced myself she ignored it and lit a cigarette.
“Do you know how many second-rate reporters with cocks have sat in that chair?”
“Pardon?”
“Some of them are now my boss. Some of them are my boss’s boss.” She rolled paper into her typewriter, the cigarette dangling from her lips, squinting through the smoke. “I don’t date coworkers.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t fuck them either.”
She didn’t speak to me again for the rest of that first day. She hardly spoke to me the rest of that week.
***
I’ve been orphaned twice in my life. My biological parents were long dead before I got here, foreigners with alien customs and language, citizens of a cold doomed world. They were nothing to me. The parents I knew and loved — my adoptive parents — were my world entire. The farm, the solitude. I’d had a childhood of early risings and honesty. My parents were the only people who loved me in the universe; the only ones I loved in return.
Even after I started school, I had no true friends. Like me, most of the other students were farm kids and had a long ride to and from school, and work to be done before sunset once they got home. A neighbour and his daughter, who had a job at the bank in town, gave me a ride in the mornings. My father picked me up at the end of the day. The best memories I have of him are of these drives after school. He’d be out of his coveralls and his hair would be hand-dragged across his scalp — his version of cleaning up before coming to town. He’d always start off giving me a recitation of the day’s mundane events, which were identical everyday and changed only with the seasons. After some time, though, my father — a man who wasn’t in the habit of talking — filled up the silence with as much of his sense of right and wrong as he could, distinctions I soon came to understand as relative and forever shifting. It was the only lesson in morality he thought I’d ever need.
He had a Bible that once belonged to his illiterate mother that he kept for sentimental reasons and never read. When I was older and noticed the religious hole in our common culture with those around us I’d asked him why we never went to church like everyone else.
“We used to,” was all he said. But the way he said it made me never ask the question again.
It was only when I began high school that I was no longer satisfied with the life I was living. The farm wasn’t enough for me, my parents weren’t enough. I felt sick with isolation, with alienation. My mother told me the things I was feeling were normal. I told her there was nothing normal about me, there never was. She turned from me and stared out the kitchen window, into the distant horizon. Her grey hair was piled into a bun on her head, looking as if she belonged to a century gone. Without a word she left the room and came back with a folded blanket held out before her.
“You were wrapped in this when we found you.”
***
She said they’ve had dinner together at his place up north three times this week.
“He’d brought this awful champagne every time. It’s expensive, but I hate champagne. I drink it anyway. I’m his guest, can’t be rude. It’s fucking freezing up there.” Then she smiled. “But we managed to stay warm. She laughed. Just use your imagination, virgin.”
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
“Because it’s true. Obviously, true. You’re blushing.”
“I had a girlfriend in college.”
“Really?” She sat up and looked me in the face, her eyes meeting mine. I looked away. “What colour was her hair?”
I hesitated.
“You’re a liar.” She laughed and took a long drag on her cigarette.
“Red. It was red. I don’t lie.”
“You’re full of shit.” She dumped her ashtray in the waste basket beside her desk. I went back to my work.
“Funny thing is though,” she said after a few minutes of silence. “He won’t go on record. Doesn’t answer a single question. For someone so goddamn gorgeous, he doesn’t like to talk about himself very much.”
“Maybe he’s just private. Or humble.”
“Humility is for the weak.”
“I don’t think that’s a fair––”
“Wait, do you smell something burning?”
“I think your trashcan is on fire.”
***
My parents died within a year of each other. They didn’t have the luxury of dying simultaneously as my birth parents had. My mother had to wait to follow my father. For months after they were both gone I worked the farm as if I’d been born there, their ghosts following me around. I knew I had to leave, that I owed the world much more than I could ever give it alone in that field.
I hated the city when I arrived. The noise, the anxiety, the endless desperation, all those lost souls. I’d still hate the city if I hadn’t met her. I loved the city because I met her.
But she met him and couldn’t care less for me. Maybe she’d have never cared for me, even without him, but at least I would have stood a chance, her rules regarding coworkers notwithstanding. I’d have left the paper, if that’s what it took.
Instead I did exactly what I shouldn’t have. Spitefully, I got an interview with him. A long interview, answering every question everybody wanted to know. She’d never forgive me, or him. I knew that. I did it anyway, it wasn’t even that difficult.
For my efforts I was clapped on the back and told I’d done a fantastic job by all my peers and superiors. She didn’t say a word.
She stopped sleeping with him. She stopped speaking to me. She just sat across the desk, typing away, the cigarette dangling from her lips.
One morning, unable to stand it any longer, I told her I was sorry.
“Sorry? I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, you hayseed son of a bitch, but you’re not saying sorry to me. You’re a hack, you’ll always be a hack, and that interview changes nothing.”
She stood up and took her coat from the rack and put her cigarette out in the ashtray.
“And if you think you’re fooling anyone, you’re dumber than I thought.”
She started to walk across the office, buttoning her coat.
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
She pulled up the window, letting the cold winter winds blow into the office; papers flew off the desks. She sat up on the ledge and lit a cigarette.
“What do I mean? I mean I’m about to write the story of my career. I mean fuck you and your secrets.”
And with a quick wave of her hand and a laugh, she threw herself out the window, the cigarette still in her mouth.
Dane Gill’s work has appeared in the Cuffer Prize Anthology 2 and 3, the Newfoundland Herald, Paragon, Sterling Magazine, and CBC-NL. In 2016 he won a Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters award for short fiction; he won again in 2018. He lives in Gander, Newfoundland and Labrador with his family.