And Sometimes I Wonder About You

9

I watched Hiram Stent walk down the hallway toward the elevators. He didn’t look back. I almost called to him. After all, I had money from Camille Esterhouse and Marella Herzog (if indeed that was her real name). I could afford to do a good deed for some poor schlub down on his luck. But the truth was that Hiram couldn’t be helped. Whatever I did, it would just turn out bad.

“How are you this morning, Mr. McGill?” Mardi asked my back as Stent turned the corner.

I closed the door and turned to my pale assistant, slight and white. Her gray-blue eyes carried all the sadness of the last days of autumn and her voice was so soft that it could have been a memory.

“Fine,” I said. “And you?”

“I’m okay.”

“How’s your sister?”

“Just entered middle school. She loves the ocean and wants to be an oceanographer.”

I sat down in one of the blue-and-chrome visitor’s chairs that used to be in my office.

“You’re hardly ever in this early anymore,” she said.

“I used to be this early?”

“Mmmm-hm. When I first worked here.”

She was right. My schedule had slowly shifted since Mardi began to shoulder some of the responsibility. She had been Twill’s classmate. Barely in her twenties and she made more difference in my life than almost anyone ever had.

“Now that I’m here you can tell me about it,” I said.

“About what?” she said, searching her desk for something to do with her hands.

“Twill.”

She picked up a bright yellow disposable mechanical pencil and set it in a ceramic mug used to hold such things. This process took just long enough for the door buzzer to sound.

I was sure that it was Hiram Stent come back to beg me. I would have probably given him a day or two — after all, failure is a big part of being human.

“It’s Ms. Ullman,” Mardi said, looking down at the monitor I had installed in her desk drawer.

I could feel my Adam’s apple writhe in my throat.

I got to my feet and, stumbling a little, took the two and a half steps to the entrance.

When I pulled the door open Aura said, “Oh!” — shocked that it was me.

Tall for a woman, she had a few inches on me. Aura was the color of pure gold that hadn’t been polished for some years. She was nearing the midway mark in her forties with a generous figure that would never go out of style. Her hair was naturally wavy and darkly blond. Her surprised eyes were not brown but that’s as far as I would go trying to define the color. Her mother, I knew, was Danish and her father black Togolese.

Aura was the plant supervisor of the Tesla Building. She was very efficient at her job. The only task she ever failed at was getting me evicted. She tried, and might have succeeded, but then we kind of fell in love.

“Didn’t expect me?” I said to my sometime lover.

“Um,” she said. “I wanted to ask Mardi something.”

“She’s right here,” I said, moving backward and to the side, allowing her room to come in.

Mardi was already on her feet.

“Good morning, Ms. Ullman,” she said. “How can I help you?”

“Um,” she said again.

“I’ll go back to my office and let you ladies talk.”

“No,” Aura said with more emphasis than was necessary.

“Why don’t I go downstairs and get you guys some coffee and bagels?” Mardi offered.

“Thank you,” Aura said to my assistant.

The next thing I knew, Aura and I were sitting in my old visitor’s chairs more or less facing each other.

We had a lot to talk about and nothing to say.

When we met, my wife had left me for a banker named Zool. He turned out to be an embezzler who ran off, somewhere down in South America, leaving Katrina and my blood son, Dimitri, high and dry. And so Katrina returned just when my relationship with Aura was beginning to take form.

We, Aura and I, broke up for a while and had started to get back together a few times. The latest breakup had to do with Katrina again. Aura felt guilty making love to a man whose wife was suicidal.

“How’s Katrina doing?” Aura asked.

“Kinda faded, I guess.”

“Does she need new medication?”

“She needs something,” I said, “but don’t we all?”

Aura decided to ponder that question.

It struck me that sadness had as many striations as a rainbow — only in grays. Hiram Stent was sad because of a miscalculation. He believed that his education, his station in life, would allow him to make choices about how he might live. He lost his job, his wife, and his children; he’d lost his vanity and hope all because somebody named Wills wanted to do financial planning while living on a ranch.

Aura and I, on the other hand, loved each other fiercely but when together we turned morose and downcast.

Mardi had been molested as a child, repeatedly and over many years, and so her sadness descended when there was nothing for her to concentrate on.

“My daughter got into Mount Holyoke,” Aura was saying.

“Good for her,” I said.

“Are you working?” she asked then.

“I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean?”

“I finished one job,” I said. “That was a domestic beef. Those kinds seem to resuscitate now and then. I helped a woman who was being stalked but that only treated the symptom. And then there’s Twill.”

Aura smiled. Most people’s moods lighten when they hear my son’s name. He’s just that kind of guy.

“What about him?” Aura asked.

“He’s been absent and then seen wearing clothes not his style. He hasn’t called in to me and that usually means that he’s into something either illegal or dangerous, or both. Since he’s working with me now it’s more than likely that he’s taken on a job I wouldn’t approve of.”

“He’s got a lot of facets,” Aura agreed.

The jeweler’s term brought Marella to mind. I realized that her skin was very close to the same hue as Aura’s. I wondered if that was the reason I’d taken such risk. Maybe I thought that if I put my life on the line I could receive a night of familiar love.

“What are you thinking, Leonid?”

“That we should have dinner one night next week.”

“I’m free for lunch next Monday,” she said.

Lunch — a single word that says, I don’t want to be alone with you in the evening when you might, and I might, get confused and break the unspoken rules that were chiseled for us on the tombstone your wife almost made.

I didn’t answer and then the door came open. Mardi entered with a small gray cardboard box holding our coffees and bagels.

“That was fast,” I said.

“The coffee cart is usually on floor sixty-five this time of morning,” she said.

Aura stood up and told us both, “I have a meeting down in my office in a few minutes. I’m going to have to take my coffee and run.”

I stayed in my chair.

Aura gathered her coffee and bread.

“So we’ll have to make a plan for Monday,” she said.

“We’ll see,” I replied.

She looked a little lost for a moment and then left.

When the door closed I took out my smartphone and started entering a text.

“She seems a little upset,” Mardi commented.

I erased what I had been typing and said, “Both of us I guess.”

I started typing again.

“She’s a nice lady,” Mardi continued, trying to draw me in.

Instead of answering I sent the text to Aura’s phone. It read: I LOVE YOU.