Authors: Emily Schultz
The security guard cleared his throat.
Gordon smiled.
“Nice suit.”
Gordon peered down at it, carefully considering each olive button. They were new. Each felt heavy as a roll of coins on his chest, though Gordon could not remember draining his bank account to pay for the ensemble. “Thanks.”
The elevator doors slid open. Lillian Payne stepped out.
The shock of her red hair against the pink wallpaper lit a nervousness inside Gordon. Her face bore the pearl transparency of an embryonic sac. Her slate eyes were cut above razor cheekbones. She wore men’s-style dress pants, black, and a red mandarin-collared jacket, one small silver clasp over her throat. “Mr. Small,” she said, without a question mark in her voice. She had come to take him up. Her lips twitched into a dubious smile.
Gordon had not prepared for the awkward intimacy of the elevator ride. He could tell that Lillian Payne was one of those people who always acted quickly, and with aplomb, and expected the same of everyone else. Though attractive, she managed to exude
cruel
from every tight pore. The idea of being in a room alone with her — indeed, the small room of the elevator — frightened Gordon immensely. They shook hands, exchanging a static shock, at which Gordon cringingly mumbled, “Ow!” Even more cringingly, he found himself adding a sneeze of anxious laughter. Then, with no other options, they stepped inside the lift together. She was a good two to three inches taller than Gordon, at least six feet in height. Her short hair pitched at odd angles around her face: something styled by running one’s hands through it, palms puttied with product. Gordon noticed that those hands were long, unwrinkled, as she reached to depress the Close button. The security guard stared after them blankly. As the doors shut out his ennui eyes, Gordon nodded goodbye.
Lillian swiped a yellow light with her plastic card. The control panel swatch turned to green and up they went, their backs to the mirror, elbows resting tentatively on a handrail. They stared straight ahead at a corrugated diamond pattern etched in the steel doors. Around the top, hidden tubing peed pristine light across the ceiling. Gordon wished he couldn’t smell her (lemon and leather) and hoped she couldn’t smell him (dampness and Altoids). She had a stringy, muscular body that looked as if the day she had been poured from the genetic vat she’d hung onto a bar while the rest of her body dripped down, icicle-like, and hardened: hips and legs as narrow as a splinter.
“Nervous?” She turned to face Gordon. Her eyes glinted with bemused appraisal.
“No,” he lied. Gordon had never read an actual romance novel, and he was certain that this was a question he would not be able to tap dance around.
Though he had hoped to wow “Call Me Lillian” within the first thirty seconds of this journey, it was she whose eyes travelled up and down his sleeves and pant legs as easily as if scanning the weekend classifieds. When she reached Gordon’s face, her eyes seemed to change colour. Her chin tilted. Nonchalant “Call Me Gord” broke the gaze and stared at Ms. Payne’s shoes. They were oddly ordinary: flat, with black buckles, the top of her foot exposed, an egg-coloured nylon oval.
Swipe cards entered and exited, dangling on cords around necks and wrists. “Hello Sonja” got on at Floor Sixteen and rode to Floor Forty-Two with them. She had hair so thin and brown it looked like someone had grilled it onto her head. Her face had “Computer Wallpaper: Niece and Nephew Department Store Portrait Series” written all over it. Gordon could already see her dustless desk, a parade of Cracker Jack toys artfully arranged, and one of those totem collections so enjoyed by true individuals — frogs or fish, elephants or owls, anything that could be gathered obsessively in fuzzy denominations or painted onto wooden clocks and other craft items. She was twenty-eight at most and, Gordon felt, far too young for such tragedies. She bubbled with updates about foreign rights — “Just got the newest batch in from Japan. You should see how the covers look!”
Lillian answered this exclamation in a monotone: “
Konichiwa
, Heaven Osaka.”
When Hello Sonja had departed, Lillian looked Gordon up and down again, exciting sweat cells in his forehead region, underarm regions, neck region, crotch region, and all other regions. The ride was rivalling his transit time.
“Policy states that the interview cannot begin until you’re signed in with reception in HR. But it’s a long way up,” Lillian said. “Tell me about yourself — something legal, within bounds.”
Gordon glanced at her.
She smiled genuinely, exposing crystalline teeth. “Don’t make me pry.”
“Small talk?”
“Yes, and absolutely unrelated to anything we have to discuss upstairs.”
“Off the record?”
“Mm-hmm. Travel. Geography. Hobbies. Sports. Cooking. Dogs or small children . . .” She turned in to him, personal-like but not, flicking her wrist.
Dogs? Small children? Gordon stood there pondering, the rail behind him searing the first crease into his jacket. Was this part of the psychological testing? The woman actually blinked at him, the serration of her red eyelashes a prompt. Because she seemed to command it, he answered her in absolute order. “Paris once. North America, most of it. The Pacific Rim someday soon.” The latter a lie, based on Hello Sonja’s suggestion of the world of Heaven beyond Heaven Central. “Russet Avenue, just west of Dufferin. Baseball, sure. Soccer, take it or leave it. Eating more than cooking. Who doesn’t like dogs and children?”
Lillian’s lips quirked into a wry brown corner where a pale mole was telling some private joke to two pink freckles. “I think you’ll fit in just fine here,” she said, as if they were not about to step into the HR foyer, but out of it.
The Human Resources office was the hue of nipple meeting flesh. Lillian escorted him past a reception area into her own office, which was vast, housing what appeared to be an archive of every title published, neatly arranged by spine colour.
“This year’s,” Lillian said when Gordon asked.
Lillian explained that a Ms. Chandler Goods, the head of the Editorial Department — or “Ed. Head” — was overseas at present, otherwise Gordon would have had a group interview. Instead it would be just herself and the supervisor from Proofreading. The latter arrived on cue, looking as if he had dressed for a part in a film about a publishing company. He wore a brown vest and his sleeves were rolled up, as if he considered himself a hard worker. Before the questions began, Lillian and Jon — as Proofreading was called — batted enthusiasms back and forth about the Editorial Department at large, as if they seldom spoke and were taking this opportunity to make up for lost time while impressing their new recruit.
“Yes, yes, I’ve heard that Chandler Goods is a young international dynamo!” the supervisor exclaimed — oddly, Gordon thought, as if he couldn’t wait to have someone above him. “When will we all meet her?”
“End of October. November, if there are problems with immigration.”
“Worth the wait, Ms. Payne. Worth the wait, I’m sure.”
Before Gordon could interrupt with small talk or questions of his own, Lillian whisked out two folders and handed one to Jon. She let Gordon know that if he were accepted, he would be registered with their temp agency, Job City — or had he already registered? — and technically would work under that umbrella for a brief period until he was approved for full-time. Then they ran through the questions quickly, as if an egg timer had been set.
How did you first hear of Heaven Books? What prompted you to apply for work in our Proofreading Department? What makes you think you would be an asset to our company? Why do you want to join Team Heaven? Is there anything else we should know?
Gordon stumbled over his motives for contacting Heaven, but the rest of the questions he answered with ease, almost as if he had been working up to them his whole life. There was a tense moment when the two Heaven representatives peered at him following the
Is there anything else . . .
query, and the question seemed to repeat itself in the space between them until Gordon shook his head fervently,
No.
When Lillian and Gordon concluded the interview with a handshake, he felt the dry shock as their skin lit up painfully again. “It was nice meeting you, Mr. Small — Gord.” Then the woman who held his future in a folder stuck one wrist quickly through the elevator doors and swiped Gordon into the lift’s elaborate code. “You’ll hear from me very soon.” She smiled as the doors clasped one another, holding Gordon tight within.
Alone, he fell the seventy floors on a fluid hydraulic system that could barely be felt until it touched the earth.
3
Their throbbing malehoods were ball-less, only shafts, stitched on at the groin. It was as if the authors — the floral-printed Peggys, Marthas, and Marys — had carried out love affairs with marital aids. Gordon tossed
Virgin for Hire
onto the empty bench beside him and picked up
No Business Like Show Me Business
.
He sat at the bus stop outside the Heaven building for what seemed like weeks. In a studious after-interview stupor he turned pages that were peopled with flesh but not-flesh. Acts akin to pornography glided over dewy thatches, tender nubs, and downy notches, hard heats and rock-rigid sexes. Just reading the words made Gordon think creepy thoughts and duck his head.
The heroes came to climax with long moans. Multiple
H
’ed
ohhhhh
’s spanned the page, but there were never any secretions. Explosions abounded but mess did not. The heroine’s hair was always charmingly mussed. Her nipples were teased into taut peaks before her lover had even touched them. If there were condoms (and the trend seemed occasional at best), they were frantically pulled on before the male “impaled her to the hilt.” There was no removal, no threat of disease or unwanted pregnancy, no ungainly search for a trash can or a box of Kleenex. There was no need to bathe, save for the pre-third-date Calgon scene where the woman delighted in the suds and thought of her man.
And oh, what a man! A man who knew what he wanted: her. A man who was so damn smart. A man who would gaze at a woman’s mouth before he kissed it. A man made of money, and height, and heat, and BMW smoothness. A man with dark, exotic eyes who smelled of the woods. A man of solid presence, moulded contours, and sloe-eyed glances, with big hands but sleek thighs. A man written by women. One who plunged and panted, grunted and growled, pounced and pawed playfully. Like a lustrous oversized cat.
Lillian Payne had bestowed all this upon him post-interview. “Perks,” she’d called the stack of gleaming paperbacks. Did he want this job? Gordon asked himself. He stretched one arm over the grubby painted wood slats of the bench as he skimmed the cramped pages, characters jumping and trembling beneath his thumbs, still no bus in sight.
The female, as she was often called, fared no better than her partner. She was stubborn but frequently ditzy, in spite of her sophisticated career as a CEO, fashion designer, or magazine editor. If she had children (and the widow or divorcee did), she always put them ahead of her own needs. If she had a dark past (and even the most virginal had learned not to trust her instincts), she looked to her new suitor to solve it, simultaneously pushing his muscled chest away. If she had been taken captive (forced into marriage by some familial obligation or loophole in a will), she would fiestily fight her captor’s straightforward rapes, admonishments, and cruel torments — only to give in to the torment of her own desire.
As clumsy as she was beautiful (five feet nine, with swollen, beckoning lips and tendrils of blond hair spiralling down at the most inopportune times), she spilled coffee on her soon-to-be boyfriend’s shirt because of the delighted distraction of his stormy blue eyes. Alliteration, repetition, and an outdated earnestness were the cornerstones of the genre. Attraction was not only abundant but redundant: so honest, so deep, so fathomless. The male was devastatingly handsome and sinfully sexy when the female described him to herself in moments of submission. Eventually Gordon found himself dragged in by the predictability and cartoonish charm of the stories.
When she wasn’t admonishing herself for “loving that man,” the heroine abhorred him, competed with him, and was determined to prove herself smarter. In the end she gave in to her feminine instinct. She spent hundreds indulging herself
just this once
with extravagant underwear, and spent thousands on subterfuge. She hired friends or fellow models to attempt to turn his head or tease out his secret, since he could never
ever
possibly
really
care for
her
. (Gordon noted:
Italics take precedence over strong verbiage
.) She took cabs to New York galas, hid behind potted plants, engaged in lipstick slapstick. She was Nancy Drew with a perpetual nipple hard-on, headstrong, with a nine-year-old’s smarts and a nineteen-year-old’s desire. She was instantly naked, her hair constantly, gorgeously windblown. She was not looking for someone to complete her, but he had, seamlessly, done so as she dug her nails into his broad shoulders, in spite of herself. She could turn on her heel and switch tenses that quickly too. And, as she tilted her chin, nationalities. Her eyes were as turquoise as the American Southwest where she was born; her will was as cold as the Canadian North; her heart was as wild as the outback of Australia; her lips were as misty as London. She was looking for her cowboy, her Mountie, her game warden in the outback, her jet-setting businessman.
Of all the bad clichés, there was just one left out. The Gordon Small.
4
Good morning, Gordon.
You must be new. You must be Gordon. Hi, Gordon. Gordon? Oh, you’re Gordon! I guess you’re Gord. Gord!
Good for you. Oh good, you’re here.
Into the glorious gadgetry of Heaven, Gordon glided, past gadolinium-haired girls, golden waving ones, and giggling, gossiping groups. A cappella
Gordon, Gordon, Gordon
. Gorgeous. A gap-toothed gamine gang singing in a chorus of G major . . .