“Nice to meet you finally,” he says. “Of course, I’ve seen you around.”
“It’s a small office.” She nods. They’ve been nodding hello for weeks, but she’s avoided being alone with him in the kitchen or the elevator or at the printer, embarrassed by the depth and specificity of her initial fantasy about him, a fantasy so vivid in its mundane detail she can almost picture the holes in his socks. Thus far, they’ve only been together among crowds, and an introduction seemed beside the point. Maybe she doesn’t want to fuck him, after all; maybe she only wants to pretend. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.
“Antonia said you might have some time to help me on this project?”
He sits back in his swiveling chair, a posture of insouciance. “Sure, no problem,” he says.
“Great. It’s simple, you know they’re doing this site redesign, and we were thinking it’s a good time to update all the bios of all the authors.” She’s lapsing into the first person plural for reasons that are unclear.
“Cool.” He seems amenable. He’d do anything she asked. He’s that sort of guy.
“So just, like, update with new projects and new books or whatever they’ve been up to,” she says. It sounds idiotic, this explanation, but she can’t stop herself. “I can give you the actual update info, or e-mail addresses or whatever so you can kind of figure that out from them.”
“Not a problem.”
“Well, there are thirty-eight bios, so we can just split it in half. I’ll do the first nineteen? That sound good?” Maybe she should be doing what Antonia does, saying things more nicely so it sounds more like a suggestion than a command.
“That sounds good,” he says.
She feels odd standing when he is sitting down. “Good.”
“Good.”
“I’ll e-mail you the details.”
He picks up a pen, writes his address on the back of one of Kristen’s business cards. “This is me,” he says.
She takes the card from his hand. “Awesome,” she says, overly enthusiastically.
Everything makes Lauren think of something else. That morning, the weather, which was so perfect she’d gotten off at Thirty-Fourth Street, two stops early, eager to enjoy it before spending another day confined to the computer, made her think of California, that one trip to San Francisco, the shock of the clarity of the air, which she noticed the second she stepped out of the airport’s sliding glass doors. You couldn’t not notice. A work trip, that one, a rarity she wishes were not. She took her place in the steady flow of commuters in the knot of tunnels issuing from Penn Station, which she knew well enough to navigate without thinking, or while thinking about other matters, like the delicious liberty of San Francisco, working while away from the office she’d arrive at in a little less than half an hour, and the fact that, despite what she thinks has been her best effort, the working day still takes place there and there alone. She had imagined better: shared confidences with her bosses, invitations into important meetings in the glass-walled conference room, the chime of the computer reminding her about another lunch or conference call, being asked her opinion, being thanked in the acknowledgments by grateful authors. She used the exit on Thirty-Seventh Street, as she always did, and thoughts of California had given way to thoughts of Thanksgiving, of cranberry sauce, of awkward silence. How did this happen, she wondered, trying to retrace her thoughts, how did her mind leap from one thing to the other, and did this happen to everyone? Maybe it was the autumnal note in the air.