“It’s what I’m here for,” he said. “Hey, let’s have lunch today?”
They had lunch. Lauren was going to ask Karen to join them, which would have made it feel slightly less unprofessional, but she was out with the flu, so it was just the two of them, at the diner across the street, the one so authentically New York that tourists rarely ventured into it, the one not long for the world, the one that would someday soon be transformed into a drugstore, or a quiet, efficient lobby holding blinking, beautiful automated teller machines and nothing more.
Rob had landed the temporary gig because his old boss was friends with Kristen, recommended him as a capable set of hands to help out in her absence; he wasn’t an aimless, career temp, but being adrift is a condition of being a certain kind of bookish dude in the contemporary economy. He had moved to New York to do his MFA at Columbia, finished that with minimal debt, worked at a magazine aimed at the collectors of yachts and race cars, left that to work at a literary imprint of one of the big publishers, lost that job in a round of belt tightening, and gone to work as a research assistant to an academic writing a popular biography of a pioneering art dealer, but that book’s research was finished and now here he was, on the assembly line at their office. As this story came spilling out of him, she saw more clearly what this thing was. It was as she had imagined. We only tell these stories about ourselves to those to whom we need to give some context, some understanding. These are details we offer to those we feel might find something meaningful in them. He wanted to be known by her, to be understood by her, and to kiss her, to sleep with her, to—whatever the verb is. He wanted her, and she had known he would. She is good at that, at being wanted.
That Friday, he’d asked her for a drink, and a drink meant something different than lunch during the workday. They left the office together, went to a bar in a Midtown hotel, where she ordered a Manhattan and held the glass as seductively as she knew how. He kissed her when they were leaving, stepped toward her as they waited for a taxi on the curb, pressed into her, held her by the chin and brought his face to hers, and their mouths met, and his tongue grazed hers, and then he took her by the hand, held the taxi door open for her like a gentleman, and saw her again Monday morning at the office, where they pretended that nothing was amiss. They maintained this game, and only Karen knew otherwise, because Lauren had confessed to her one day over lunch at the very same diner.
“I knew it.” Karen took a pink envelope of artificial sweetener out of the little ceramic dish and threw it at her accusingly. “You tramp.”
“Shut up.” Lauren grinned. It was part of the game: She wanted to be teased.
He had stopped working with them at the end of December, and so they’d abandoned the complex dance of pretending not to know each other as well as they did. One Saturday before Christmas, he’d come home with her, to order Chinese and watch a movie, but as soon as they entered the house, they’d fallen onto her bed as if it were a familiar place for them both. She wanted this out of the way before dinner; sex is never any good when you’re full of food. She took a shower after, came into the living room to find Rob opening the door to receive a plastic bag containing a paper bag full of oily Chinese from the middle-aged man who did the delivery for Hunan Delight. They sat on the floor, not watching the movie, talking about the quality of the dumplings. When the greasy plastic containers had had their lids snapped back on and were stowed in the fridge, Rob left; having sex was one thing, but it was still too soon for him to sleep in her bed.