Authors: Emily Schultz
Hi, I’m Amber, I’m Angel, I’m Anne-Marie, Becky, Bella, Bliss, Carma, Carolyn, Catherine, Daniella, Desreen, Donna-Sue, Edie, Emily, Erika, Fiona, Fleur, Francine, Gabrielle, Georgia, Georgianne, Helen, Hazel, Hilary, Ingrid, Iris, Ivy, Jessica, Judith, Julia, Katrina, Kennedy, Kylie, Lena, Lizette, Lucy, Marguerite, Marietta, Manjeet, Nancy, Naomi, Nathalie, Olive, Oona, Oxana, Patricia, Pauline, Petra, Rachel, Ray-Anne, Ruby, Sarah, Sally, Stella, Tanya, Tina, Toni, Ulrikka, Unta, Ursula, Vanessa, Veronica, Virginia, Xandra, Xaviera, Ximena, Yasmine, Yolanda, Yvonne, Zhang, Zora, Zsa Zsa.
For the first day or two, women swung in and out of Gordon’s cubicle checking up on him, saying, “Don’t worry, Gord, you’ll get the hang of it soon. Soon you’ll be keeping time with the rest of us, reading almost a thousand lines an hour . . .” But by Thursday he could feel himself left alone on the peninsula of the department. His cubicle was the last, a fuzzy pink edge before Design’s stations cropped up beyond the border of the bathrooms — which, he noticed, seldom attracted passersby but had cubicle walls scratched full of dozens of names. It was as if, when the employees did visit, they were unable to resist an adolescent desire to leave their marks.
The Design Department was a land of men, mostly Asian. Gordon would glimpse them ducking in and out behind their masculine partitions — a set of blue cliffs. Gordon’s work area was a virtual cabin of isolation, the floating green screen his life dinghy. Heroes and heroines traipsed across its face, then thrust their way to orgasm, tying the knot in less time than it had taken Gordon to secure the position at Heaven.
Gordon had been told there were more men on Floors Eighteen through Twenty-Three, Acquisitions and Substantive, but in his department on Floor Twelve there were only four men in a department of one hundred and thirty women — four men, and Gordon the only actual proofreader. There was Titus Bentley, Reception. There was Jon Manos, Proofreading supervisor and the department’s flaming bon vivant — Gordon supposed Jon must be the only un-hetero person, place, or thing in the entire conservative company. There was Gordon himself, proofreading grunt and all-around-keeps-to-himself type. And “Daves,” as he called himself, a lumberjack sort of guy whose first name and last name were apparently similar, some derivative of David — David Davies, or David Davidson — Gordon couldn’t remember. Daves worked in the one production office that bridged the gap between Proofreading and Design. Of the three — Bentley, Manos, and Daves — only Daves was friendly.
Jon Manos, whom Gordon had expected to give him kinder regard as a member of the slim minority of partway available men, stolidly reserved his better humour for the girls. Manos seemed to regard them as his own chorus line, kicking with commas instead of their legs, cloaked in red ink instead of red sequins. He was weedy for forty and had the same face Gordon could imagine him having had at fifteen. He wore pink or yellow polo shirts interchangeably with grey or brown vests, and a newsboy cap in the morning on his way in, peering out beneath it with crisp blue eyes that saw everything. He adored music and movies and spent more time discussing them in the corridor with whoever was passing by than he spent checking up on his staff’s work. Occasionally Gordon got the impression that he was talking about pop culture items he himself hadn’t seen or heard, but had only read about. In spite of what he and Gordon did not have in common, Gordon believed Manos would have been easy to get along with, interesting even, if he hadn’t dismissed Gordon as a dud within the first second or two of his company orientation. He had been welcoming during Gordon’s interview — all smiles up in Lillian Payne’s office — but his manner down on Floor Twelve was another story. Here it was clear he viewed Gordon as little more than a grunt.
Manos rushed through the procedures, handed Gordon an assortment of forms, and left more every day or two with handwritten point-form instructions on how Gordon had misfiled them and needed to redo them. There were time sheets, style sheets, telephone codes, and reading codes. The
time sheets
were not to be handed in to Manos directly but to be left at the end of every shift in a particular folder in an empty office at the end of the hall. The
style sheets
were to travel with the manuscripts, no matter what. On them Gordon was to mark the spellings, the trademarks used throughout the stories, and the heroes’ and heroines’ names. The
telephone codes
were for his own use, so he could change his voice-mail message on a daily basis. He was reminded twice in the first week alone that he needed to do this if he expected to be paid for that day’s hours. The voice-mail messages seemed to serve as a time clock or attendance system, and Gordon wondered who was checking them. The
reading codes
were to help him input corrections to the digital versions of the manuscripts, the documents that would be sent through to Design and Production when he was done with them, where they would be turned into layouts resembling books. These were essentially hot-key commands, although they seemed to Gordon to be anything but fast.
“Mr. Small,” Manos said, leaning over Gordon’s cubicle wall as Gordon scrolled ahead furiously to make it look as if he were reading faster than he was. “Watch your codes. Got a wee complaint about them.” Manos held his finger and thumb an inch apart when he said “wee,” but didn’t elaborate on which codes, so Gordon simply nodded and scrolled on.
“You pack a PowerBar today, Jon?” one of the ladies called out to Manos, cruising by with a pink Adidas bag over one shoulder.
“Don’t I every day?” Manos departed, having left a fresh pile of time sheets and memos on top of Gordon’s inbox.
Already Gordon knew that Manos liked gym guys. During lunch hour he went cruising down on the sixth floor, where the weight room and treadmills were, and apparently had been with Heaven long enough that this was acceptable behaviour for a supervisor, and also acceptable cubicle conversation. Like everyone else, Gordon had overhead the stories Manos told to Gordon’s colleagues Erika Workman and Jill Fast.
In contrast, Daves was the Grenwald of Heaven. He didn’t gel his close-cropped hair and he didn’t wear Adidas the way the mall’s Champs manager did, but he had begun to drop by Gordon’s cubicle to talk scores of games Gordon hadn’t watched, or to silently punch Gordon’s shoulder. Daves wore hiking shoes and plaid button-downs that his shoulders were threatening to break out of, perhaps an indication of what he did on his lunch, though whether he was one of the sixth-floor men that Manos cruised Gordon had no idea. “No worries,” was Daves’s favourite saying, and within a week of Gordon being at Heaven, Daves had already dropped it on him about sixty times. Daves was in his mid-twenties, about ten years younger than Gordon, and spent a lot of time walking around their department, passing out finished pages of the books they’d proofed as if he were passing around a bottle of something good. “Here, have a go at this,” he’d command, slipping mocked-up covers salaciously into inboxes. Once already, Gordon had seen Daves actually whistle at Fiona Christiansen, who was a slim young married, and she had only smiled and wagged her finger at him like a 1950s schoolmarm. Gordon had been surprised to find out from One-Cubicle-Over Jill that Daves was the last of eight children and lived with his seventy-four-year-old mother, whom he cared for. Grating though Daves’ swaggering 100-percent can-do attitude could be, Gordon felt a little warmer toward him afterwards.
Then there were the women. Their names formed a list that Gordon attempted to access and replay as if it were the alphabet song. Every time a new one approached him, he ran through half the catalogue looking for the right descriptor. As soon as Gordon got to know them, the same way that Cinderella’s carriage had turned back to a pumpkin, the women turned into little more than co-workers, into cousins of a sort. They wore skirts that touched their knees. They ate their lunches out of bags. They took the underground tunnel to go shopping on their lunch hour at the shoe outlet around the corner and came back tittering, lugging bulky black bags with mundane merchandise inside. They lowered their voices when they spoke of things menstrual, things maternal, or things to do with marriage. After the first couple of days Gordon made no attempt to listen. Quite simply, he and the rest of the department had made a mutual decision: Gordon was to be shut out of all things save those pertaining to spelling, punctuation, geographical queries, and quotations. It made no difference to him.
Gordon had already deduced that in the eight-hour day of romance, one could exist only in an asexual state. The ardour of the reading material left a taste in his mouth like old coffee. He hated to admit that he got strangely jacked up as Jessica Price — and she certainly had hers, a $10,000 gemstone bangle procured as easily as a packet of jujubes — jumped on Justin Prince, judiciously jiggled his johnson, felt its persuasive pulse, then let it all gap into hearts and gardenias, pleading with him to peer deep inside her to the little girl she had always been, and the woman she was still to be. The turn from excitation to exasperation was a blunt and sudden one. Gordon found himself scrolling ahead with juvenile eye-rolls. The arrow keys were his only friends. With crossed arms and tilted chins his subjects argued the arguments of dullards, then gave in, plunging and writhing and endlessly coming to release as Gordon’s chair wheels ground into fireproof carpet. He didn’t get hard so much as restless, an ongoing agitation settling over his lap like a winding sheet. All around him the office buzzed with faint, undefined tension. The proofreaders were as turned on as the fluorescent tubing overhead, but also as cold.
If he had thought that a job at Heaven would help him escape from the memory of his ex-wife, Chloe, Gordon couldn’t have been more mistaken. In every romance there was room for the broken-hearted to mend her real relationship by replacing it momentarily with that of the character. And although he was a man reading these stories for women, he was not immune. Into their easy casings Gordon sandwiched himself and Chloe. It was not the Chloe he had parted from seven and a half years before that he imagined — it was the Chloe he’d begun with. A younger-than-he, wee, twee, twenty-three-year-old Chloe.
How ludicrous was it that her face should spring to his mind every time heroes and heroines kissed? They had practically “met cute.” His first date with Chloe had been only a half-hour long. She’d phoned him two weeks after he passed her his number. It was suitably awkward: they discovered that she had a car and he did not, so she offered to drive. A day and time were arranged for “coffee and hanging out,” whatever that meant. An hour later than she was supposed to arrive to pick him up, she phoned.
“Did we say we’d hang out tonight . . . ?” The words had slipped out of her mouth sounding sly and apologetic simultaneously, as if all the consonants were slanted sideways. Before he could reply she had amended, “I’m supposed to work. I could still swing by before my shift. We could do something quick, like coffee. Or Popsicles.” In spite of his irritation at being half stood-up, the idea of eating Popsicles with a woman like Chloe had been extremely invigorating.
She picked him up in a rusted Firefly and whisked him off to a cappuccino place near the school for a date of only thirty-one minutes, including driving time. She apologized — she was meant to punch the clock at The Limited by 6 p.m. and not a minute later. “A three-hour shift,” she complained. “It’s not worth it.” She sped past the pubs and falafel joints and diners and dollar stores with the accuracy of a motocross racer, secured the two of them cappuccinos, and arrived promptly back in front of the rented place he shared twenty-nine minutes later, where she said, “Can I give you a hug?” in spite of the digital time on the dashboard.
Her neck met his mouth when she one-armed him from the driver’s seat. Even her one-armed hug was still a real hug, the kind that told him,
Hang on, you are loved, and even your squeezed breath is mine to love
.
Gordon scrolled ahead. He could feel the restlessness of Heaven around him as he read and remembered.
He could barely believe he had been bold enough to kiss her there, wetly, in the crook between her neck and her ear, and then apologize as he did it, to one side of her mouth, mumbling, “Sorry, you . . . smelled nice.” Had he really said something so caveman-like and stupid? Chloe had laughed and he’d had to jump clear of the car as she revved down the street at a hug-and-kiss-delayed few minutes past the hour. She was supposed to be fourteen blocks away and already parked and punched. It was doomed from the start, he had snorted later,
a half-hour date
, the ridiculousness of their entire three-year relationship.
Now, in Heaven, it was as if Chloe and Gordon drank coffee together in the morning while he read about characters’ first kisses. They kissed then too, dark-roast damp, lips like caramel cappuccino. Chloe sat behind Gordon as he ate lunch. She read over his shoulder about characters’ family problems and insecurities — often obvious and relating to lack of fatherly love. Then in the afternoon, afternoon delight. A first fight at three o’clock. It wasn’t easy to relive the downfall of his marriage in every week-long romance that came dancing across the screen. But it was inevitable. In every slight-waisted nymph Gordon saw Chloe in that button skirt eleven years before, her body less like an hourglass than a grenade. In every quivering pink nipple, areola of Chloe. In every wet, tight, wanting crux, eau de Chloe and Chloe alone.
It was a complete contradiction. Though Gordon had once slept beside this woman, touched this woman, smelled her, breathed her, exchanged matter with her, heard her occasional snoring or sneezing in the night, little remained but the crust of the emotion he associated with her. He knew that her first sexual experience had been with an older girl across the street, that she took her tea with milk and honey, that strawberries gave her hives, that she had weight issues and bought low-fat sour cream as if it could lessen her addiction, that she secretly loved disco, that she would wear black bras but not black underpants because she feared it would denote something distasteful about her. They were facts. Or they were now. Summaries of reality. The highs and lows. But the in-betweens were missing. He could remember the exact map her teeth made in her mouth, but if he tried to remember the salt of her skin, it evaporated beneath his memory’s tongue.