“It’s Friday night. Please tell
me you have reservations at a West Village hot spot.” Jules searched the
ceiling for the name of just such a place. “The Little Owl, or somewhere. You
should be off somewhere fabulous.”
I made the vague tsk noises I’d
perfected since my move from Waitsfield, Vermont, to New York City two years
ago. A noise that both dismissed the fact that I was working late—again, and, hopefully—relayed
my enthusiasm for all this brilliant, vital work to be done. Where could be
more fabulous than right here? Puh-lees.
Besides, the only fabulous place
I wanted to go was home to my one room apartment on the Lower East side. From
the moment I left home at seven fifteen each morning until well after five
o’clock every evening, I longed to be back there. That three hundred square
foot space held my whole world, my atlases, books, and maps that were
strategically scattered all around, and, most importantly, my prized
possession, my obsession really, the hand-drawn, original map of New York that
I had been working on every day since I first moved to the city. It was my big
dream.
But dreams didn’t pay the rent,
and if I wanted to have a hope that anyone would, one day, pay attention to any
creation of mine, I first needed to make a name for myself as a cartographer. So,
even though my map called to me all day, I forced myself to work long hours at
Mappers Inc., often coming in on weekends. It was a weird self-punishment
thing. Like when you had to go to the bathroom but would see how many things
you could accomplish before you had to run for it or you wouldn’t make it.
Gross, I know, but that’s what this self-punishment I did to myself was: gross.
Intimately gross.
“Fi?” Jules never called me by my full name.
Modern life was so fast paced it necessitated abbreviating everyone’s name to
the least number of syllables possible to save time. Mappers Inc. was populated
with truncated folks, women called Al, Rob, Mar, and of course Fi. The men
responded to Bo, Red, and Al even though their names were Robert, Alfred, and
Alfonso. The women? Alison, Roberta, and Marilynn. We were never to call him
Mr. Amie. He was obsessed with the whole co-team equality gig. We’re all the
same, he’d insist, equals. Except he was the equal who could fire me. He
owned Mappers Inc. Owned.
“I never eat out,” I said. A total lie. I ate
nearly every meal while standing under the canopy of a food truck. Feeling
guilty for the lie, I flashed Jules the thumbs up sign. Just like a
thirteen-year old.
He looked at my thumb for a
second. “Whatcha working on?”
More guilt. I had just been
working on adding a trap street to our digital map of the area—inventing a
street, or geographical area which doesn’t actually exist as a way of
protecting our copy right of the map—which, in cartographer terms, was akin to
putting my signature on the work. My signature, not Mappers Inc.’s signature. I
tried to look importantly busy and not so much like Mappers Inc.’s most junior
cartographer. His question was unnecessary given the fact that he knew precisely
the work of everyone in the office at any given time. This omnipresent
knowledge was thanks to the fact that his workspace housed a wall of
screens—twenty of them—from which he worked while simultaneously keeping an eye
on everything happening on our floor. So he knew I’d been bug-eyed for weeks over
a stretch of northern wilderness that ran along the Canadian border from
Michigan to Maine.
He came in and stood behind my
chair. Real close. “You’re tense.”
Ummm, yeah, I was. And not just
because I’d spent the last ten and a half hours fighting with satellite
hookups, cloudy skies, and blurred vision, while staring at screen after screen
of hundreds of miles of lakes, forests, logging roads, a resort thrown in here
and there, and not much else. Nope. I was tense because Jules Amie was standing
so stinking close to me I could smell the soft scent of jasmine tea he must
have just finished drinking. I always got muddled up when he was in close
proximity. Not because of his hunkiness, though he was nothing to sneeze at. Back
home, he’d have been the prized pig without competition. He was a little on the
short side, but compensated with that urban casual-yet-chic look created by the
fact that everything he wore had been ironed by an underpaid Mexican immigrant
earlier that morning. His dark hair was always slicked back like he’d just come
from someplace glamorously breezy. His eyes were dark, and a tad too close
together, but they pierced you with their empathic sincerity, pinned you to the
wall with what appeared to be his very real joy at having encountered you.
He put his hands on my shoulders.
I pressed a combination of keys and the five screens on my workspace surface—no
desks here—went dark. Truth was that what I was working on could wait until Monday.
Or the Monday after that. Or whenever.
It was a light touch, quick
enough to not fall into the sexual harassment category but, apparently, it was
enough to tell him a great deal. “God, Fi, you’re wound tight.”
I didn’t like being touched.
Scratch that. I liked it fine, I just wasn’t used to it. New York City wasn’t
the place to live if you wanted lots of meaningful human contact. At least it
wasn’t for me. Seriously, when was the last time a man touched me? Really
touched, not the freakazoid groping on the subway at rush hour, or the ass
pinching from that homeless guy in the alley beside my apartment who looked
like a refugee from Armageddon, but somehow always smelled like baked bread. It
had been a forever since I’d been touched. Two forevers since someone had held
me.
Get a grip, Fiona. The boss
touches your shoulder for half a second and you’re immediately thinking he’s
looking to star in a porno with you. Stop! Must. Stop. Thinking. Weird.
Thoughts. I reached under the desk—workspace surface—for my purse, but when I
leaned down Jules bent down too, and when I sat up I cracked the back of my
head against his chin.
“Oh God, Jules, I’m sorry.” Kill
me. Kill me now.
He rubbed his chin and grinned at
me as if I’d handed him a bouquet of flowers. He wasn’t coming on to me. I’d
learned this through trial and error. For my first few months at Mappers Inc.,
Jules doted on me. I became convinced that all he thought about all day was
ever improving ways to seduce me. He’d chat to me while standing in the doorway
of my office—workspace—leaning against the jamb like a Calvin Kline underwear
model. When I arrived at work windswept, my curly hair flying around my head
like a brillo-pad, he’d tell me I looked gorgeous. Once on a cold January day, I
stupidly wore the bulky cable-knit sweater my mom had made me for Christmas,
and he said I looked earthy. It took several months, but I came to realize he hadn’t
been flirting, or singling me out. He was just one of those Harvard extroverts
who oozed the kind of hyper-friendliness that made introverts like me cringe. He
treated everyone with the same laser-beam affection. After a while, I started
to like him, but I’d never learned how to relax around him.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. The
back of my head pulsed with pain where it had connected with his chin. And his
hand was still on my shoulder. I stood up and performed my subway jerk-and-step
move: a quick tip of the shoulder to dislodge the hand, while simultaneously
sidestepping out of reach. Since I moved from Vermont to New York, I’d invented
a hundred ways to physically distance myself from people.
I grabbed my coat, purse, and
hand-knitted mittens—hey, it was October—and headed for the elevators.
“Goodnight,” I waved at him. Actually waved. When would I stop being an
incurable doffus? When?
“Fi?” he said in that fake casual
way that made my heart pound hard. Something was coming I could feel it. For a
hysterical second a line from a song in A
Chorus Line blasted in my head, “Oh God, I need this job. Please God I need
this job.”
Jules said, “Have you started
mapping Vermont?”
Perfectly legitimate question.
Mappers Inc. developed animation software, which ran in conjunction with
digital map images of geographical locations around the world. So, you’d be able
to Google Earth a place, say Paris, zoom in to street level, and the animation
software would move objects in the image to create the immersive sensation that
you were really standing at the intersection of Boulevard du Montparnasse and
Rue de Rennes while traffic flew by, and birds sang from their perches on the
roof of the Place Pablo-Picasso. Or, you could click down into Eastern Europe
and watch old men with caved in faces lead ox carts through the muddy streets
of rural Lithuania and nearly smell the manure left behind. But the software
was full of glitches. I knew this because Jules’s workspace was down the hall
from mine and I could hear him swearing at his wall of screens. He was like God,
staring at the earth, cursing all the glitches. Even the unexciting bits of map
that I was working on, rural Vermont, would eventually get the animation
treatment. Except Mr. Twenty-Computer-Screens knew exactly which patch of
northern Vermont I was working on. So, why would he ask? Had I been working too
slowly? Too fast? Perhaps it was only because he was originally from Vermont,
like me, and he took special interest in his home state.
Respond, Fiona, I told myself.
Say something. But I’d already hesitated and that tiny gap before answering was
all the answer he seemed to need.
“Go home,” he said as he strolled
toward me. “And don’t come back—”
“Please don’t fire me.” I was
begging. Immediately begging. I had a horror of being fired and forced to pack
up my closet of an apartment into my junker car and head back to Waitsfield,
Vermont, where Mom and Dad would embrace me, their eyes moist with the unspoken
phrase, ‘We told you so.’ It was all so
inevitable. I lived in horror of it. Failure was my stalker.
“Don’t come back,” Jules went on,
“for a week at least.”
“Huh?” Brilliant, Fiona. Keep up
that kind of savvy and there would be a Nobel Prize in your future for sure.
“You need a vacation.” His eyes
flickered down to my black skirt, black tights, and sensible walking shoes, all
of which had traces of golden hair on them. His eyes lingered on my legs, clad
in the tights so expensive I had literally heard my mother scream in my head
when I bought them. The shoes? I’d slipped off my Louis Vuitton knock-offs in
favor of my broken-in twenty-five dollar walking shoes about an hour ago. They
made my feet look like matching loaves of bread, but they were So.
Comfortable.
“I have a dog,” I blurted. I
meant to explain the stray hairs, but it came out as if I were suffering from
Tourette Syndrome.
Jules, smooth as always, didn’t
miss a beat. “Love dogs.”
“Mooch,” I stuttered.
“How’s that?”
I twitched with
self-consciousness. “I call him Mooch.” He was a golden lab I’d had since I was
a teen. I couldn’t bear to leave him behind in Vermont. Turned out, he’d made
the adjustment to New York better than I had.
“Take a week.” Jules pointed with
mock severity. “Don’t show your face around here until the 21st—at the
earliest.” He turned and walked away. “And Fi?” He called without looking back.
“Enjoy.”
I stood in the lobby in that
awkward moment between making a fast getaway and waiting for the impossibly
slow elevator. Around me, the office gleamed. White. Chrome. Spotless. Modern. Ultra-modern,
the kind you’d see in magazines. I wiggled my toes inside their ugly shoes. I
meant for the black clothes to make me look NYC sophisticated, the opposite of
the nerdy girl from the sticks who loved maps and dogs and little else.
Must. Try. Harder.
A week off work. In October. Why
hadn’t he made me take a week off in July? A week to rethink my wardrobe. A
week to rethink Fiona Stuart. Reinvent her—again. Smart, capable, professional
Fiona.
When I finally arrived home, I
changed into my favorite pair of stretch pants, and grey Mappers Inc.
sweatshirt, leashed Mooch, grabbed my map, and went for a long walk.
I could work on polished New York
Fiona tomorrow.
