On days when I was unaccountably sad and lonely or had no money, she would notice and set right about trying to cheer me up or insist on lending me the two or three dollars I needed until payday, even when she had to borrow it from one of the other girls.)
"Why?" she wanted to know, when I asked her to meet me on the staircase instead of in the storeroom.
"Can you keep a secret?"
"Sure," she responded brightly. "What do you want to do to me?"
"No, it's about Tom. Would you believe that Tom Johnson and —»
"Of course," she said.
"With —»
"Sure."
"Rightnow?"
"The more often the better, I always say."
"In thestoreroom?"
"Sometimes they do it in an apartment on Second Avenue. She has a divorced friend who lives there."
"How doyouknow?" I demanded.
"She tells me."
I was flabbergasted. Virginia's cheeks were red with delight and her eyes were twinkling with merriment at my expression of amazement.
"How do they do it?" I wanted to know.
"Well, she has this thing of hers, and he has this thing of his, and he takes his —»
"I mean down there! Where do they lie down?"
"On the desk," she told me. "Haven't you ever tried it?"
"I'm going to as soon as they're through."
"Not with me, you aren't. I need a big hotel room. I like to move around a lot."
"You didn't move around so much in that canoe at college," I reminded her.
"I was a dope then," she laughed. "I didn't know I was supposed to. Doyouwant to know a secret?" She motioned me closer. "Come around to here so I can whisper and put my knees against you."
Holding a blank slip of paper, I moved around to her side of the desk and began fussing with folders in a tray there, as though hunting for a particular one. As soon as I drew near her, she swung her knees around against my leg and began rubbing me with them methodically, watching me steadily with a knowing, kind of mocking smile.
"What's the secret?" I asked.
"Take your hand out of your pocket."
"Fuck you."
"Okay."
"On the desk?"
"Pretend you're working."
"I am. What's the secret?"
Mrs. Yerger was outside the entrance of the file room (Mrs. Yerger was always outside the file room), observing me balefully.
I took my hand out of my pocket, picked up a property damage accident folder, and held it over my hard-on. Virginia saw, of course, and laughed out loud, showing the tiniest tip of shiny tongue between bright red lips and wet white teeth. Her cheeks were touched with red too — they wore them rouged then — and she had dimples. I felt the strongest undertow of affection for her, but it was so inadequate; she was twenty-one, and I was seventeen, and I found myself wishing I were as old as Tom and had a better idea of what to do with her.
"Len Lewis and I," she told me, "meet for drinks and dinner every Thursday night after work. He wants to tell his wife he wants a divorce, but I won't let him. He says that nobody in his whole life ever kissed him the way I do."
I was surprised again, but excited to find this out. I was always fascinated by her sex adventures with other men. (She had a fondness for sheer, silky blouses, and I often had an urge to put my hands on her shoulders when she wore one and delicately caress her. When she wore a sweater, I wanted to put my hands inside and squeeze.)
"Do you sleep with him?" (I was always greedy for details.)
"He's afraid. He's been married all his life and never did anything with anyone else. I feel sorry for him. I don't know what I'll say when I finally get him to ask me to. I like him. But I'm not sure I want to."
I liked Len Lewis too. And I had no doubt that nobody had ever kissed him the way Virginia did, for I had seen him at the office Christmas party with his wife, who was a short, shapeless, soundless woman, as old and meek as he was, and much more wrinkled and gray. For that matter, nobody inmywhole life had ever kissedmethe way she did or touched and fondled me the way she could and did over and over again in the storeroom downstairs or on the staircase between floors. I wanted more and more of her; I never got all I wanted. She did not like me to do things to her; she liked to do things to me. We met on the staircase between floors several times each working day, where we would kiss and pet and clutch frantically for the few seconds before she always imagined she heard someone coming and bolted away; or we would meet downstairs in the storeroom for three, four, or five minutes, where she would also pale suddenly and whirl away from me in violent alarm.
I was never angry with her when she ran from me, never felt resentful or cheated; I always felt lucky that I'd had any of her at all. (And I was always sorry to see her so scared. I always wished there were some way I could help.) She told me once (more than once, because I kept bringing it up in order to hear about it again) that in her freshman year at college (she attended Duke University for two years and never went back after her father killed himself one summer) she had been laid in a floating canoe by the backfield star of the varsity football team. I didn't believe her. (I don't think I honestly believed then thatanybodyreally got laid, that a boy like me took my thing and put it inside her thing and then went on to do the rest, even though I had seen the drawings and photographs and listened to the dirty jokes and stories.) She kept asking me to get a room. I didn't know how. I asked Tom how to go about renting a hotel room, and he told me, but even after he told me, I still didn't feel I knew how. I had an idea the desk clerk would start beating me up right there in the lobby if I ever tried to register for a hotel room for Virginia and me. And I didn't have the money for something like that. I was only a file clerk. (I didn't even know how to take her to dinner!)
I never really made it with her (I never laid her), and I'm sorry. After Tom and I left the company together, I never went back, and I never saw or spoke to her again. I tried. I'm sorry. I miss her. I love her. I want her back. I remember her clearly now when I try to remember everything important that ever happened to me. I think of her often as I sit at my desk in my office and have no work for the company I want to do. And I think of her often in the evenings, too, when I sit at home with my wife and my children and the maid and the nurse and have nothing better I want to do there, either, biting my nails addictively like a starving hunchback as I slump in a chair in my living room or study and wish for something novel to occur that will keep me awake until bedtime. I liked the fact that she was short and slightly plump (and wherever my hands fell, there was something full to hold and feel).
I remember how clear and smooth and bright her skin was; her dimples deepened when she laughed. She laughed and smiled a lot. I miss that gaiety. Now Iwouldknow what to do with her. I want another chance. Then I remember who I am; I remember she would still be four years older than I am now, short, overweight, and dumpy, probably, and perhaps something of a talkative bore, which is not the girl I'm yearning for at all. (That person isn't here anymore.) Then I remember she's dead.
(She killed herself, too, just like her father. I tried telephoning her at the office after I got back from overseas. I tried telephoning her again after I'd been married a few years. I was already missing her way back then. She wasn't there. There was somebody new in charge of Property Damage also. I spoke to a crippled man in Personal Injury named Ben Zack.
"Virginia Markowitz?" he said. "Oh, no. She killed herself a year and a half ago. She's not employed here anymore. Didn't you know?")
It was after the war, I think, that the struggle really began.
So that was where the tin lizzie had already carried us to by then, this industrial revolution, to the third largest automobile casualty insurance company in the whole world, with a coarse, tough-talking, married bleached blonde in Personal Injury (PI) and a flirting black-haired girl with thick glasses and very weak eyes in Property Damage (PD), and all of us frying in lechery but poor old Mr. Len Lewis, who was beguiled and fortified by juvenile notions of romance that had no possibility of ever coming true. (By now, he certainly must be dead. He had nothing left coming to him but those kisses from Virginia.) It was a pretty tangled (and funny) (and doleful) situation there in that automobile casualty insurance company, and I didn't begin to learn about most of it until just before Mrs. Yerger came barging into the scene like a hunk of destiny, disguised as new boss of the file room, and scared me out a few weeks later. There were so many startling secrets then that everybody seemed to know but me. Today, I don't think there's a single thing I might find out about anybody in this whole world that would cause me anything more than mild surprise or momentary disappointment. Sudden death, though, still shakes me up, particularly when it strikes somebody who has always been in robust health. (Like my brother.)
Once I did find out about Tom and Marie Jencks, turned more persistent in my advances to Virginia; it got me nowhere. (I don't think I even knew then what it was I wanted to force her to do.) The funny thing about each of these women (girls?) (women) (girls) was that neither one wanted either of us ever to take the initiative. I had much more freedom with Virginia than Tom enjoyed with Marie Jencks (and got fewer results). I could go to her desk beneath the big clock whenever I chose and talk as dirty as I wanted to, or ask her to meet me on the staircase or in the storeroom; most times she would; sometimes, with her naughty smile, she would be the one to suggest we meet. But she would never let me force her down onto the desk, although she continued to tempt me far enough to try — before she broke away from me and fled. (Why was that? What was there that made her so frightened with me and not frightened at all with the many older boys and men for whom, she claimed, she did put out and always had?) I think it all would have worked out well with Virginia and me if we ever had gotten together in an apartment or hotel room and had plenty of time, worked out beautifully. (So what?) She would have taught me to go slow. If I did go slow, she might not have become frightened; and if she did not grow frightened, she would have let me do everything to her and showed me how.
But so what?
It would have passed, sooner or later, just as she has passed already, just as I am passing now. (Fuck her, she's dead.) Her case is closed. If she didn't kill herself, she'd be older than I am now and probably a pest; she would be stout and wrinkled and suffer from constipation, gallstones, menopause disturbances, and bunioned feet, and I more than likely would not wish to see her. Everything passes. (That's what makes it endurable.)
But the memory lives (but not for long. Ha, ha).
Her record may be dead, but it isn't buried; and I remember also how she used to urge me on after Marie Jencks once she saw me lusting for that baby too. I could not stop thinking about Marie that way after I found out about her and Tom and that desk in the storeroom. (I used to eat my lunch at that desk two or three times a week and read the sports sections of the New YorkDaily NewsandMirror .) I wanted her too. I didn't know how to get her.
"Bang her," Virginia would exhort me. "Go get her."
"How?"
"Goose her."
"You're nuts."
"Grab her by the nipple."
"You're crazy."
All I could decide to do was keep my eye on Tom and see what he did to get her; and all he did was nothing. He practiced his handwriting. (He knew enough to wait and never approach her.) He sat unperturbed for days at a time, working on his handwriting with me, and waited tactfully and patiently for her to summon him into her office by buzzer or telephone or by ordering one of the other file clerks (it might be me) to send Tom in.
"Are you busy now?" she would ask.
He would answer: "No."
"Get the key," she would command.
And down to the storeroom they would go (where records and folders of people in accidents were crumbling with age in the file cabinets).
Virginia and I kept track of their comings (ha, ha) and goings. She was truly a stupendous catch for a lucky young man to make (or be made by), although I liked Virginia more (and so, for that matter, did Tom). She seemed twice as large as Virginia, four or eight times as much in pure female bulk, that towering, sarcastic, frequently sympathetic bleached blonde of a twenty-eight-year-old married woman in Personal Injury, who looked solicitously after poor little old Len Lewis (who was suffering seriously from kidney trouble and dangerous related ailments and in all likelihood didn't really want to divorce his poor, old, little wife, to whom he had been married all his life and of whom he was probably still very fond) and did what she could to make his job easier. She was married to a cost accountant with a weak heart (weakened, probably, by her) and she bluntly took control of Tom whenever she wanted to and put him to work banging her down in the storeroom or in her divorced friend's apartment after business hours, in much the same autocratic manner she might use to call him into her office and order him to do some filing.