Page 11 of I Need You to Read This
She’d meant to shop for some new work clothes but she doesn’t want to go back to Century 21. She wants to go somewhere beautiful, to buy clothes befitting this office, things that will make her look and feel like she belongs here. But in order to do that she will need to wait for her first paycheck. So for now she’s cobbled together something from the pathetic assortment of clothes in her closet. Alex is wearing the same white shirt from her interview (its torn sleeve carefully mended), tucked into a slightly flared pin-striped skirt. She smooths her hand once more over her hair as a tonaldingannounces her arrival at the forty-ninth floor.
The elevator doors open to Jonathan Amin, again sitting primly at his desk. TheHerald’s gold owl insignia gleams coldly on the wall above him. His head is bowed as his finger silently and fervently scrolls through something on his phone. As she draws closer to the desk, Alex sees amusement flickering on his lips. If he registers her approach, he makes no sign of it. After a moment has passed without any acknowledgment of her presence, she clears her throat. His smile dissolves when he looks up to her standing there.
“Oh, look, it’s Alex Marks,” he says as though he wasn’t expecting her to dare show her face again. “Ready to solve the country’s problems, are we?”
“Yes. I’m actually a little nervous,” she says, thinking it’s possible that if she shows some emotion and opens up to Jonathan, they’ll forge some sort of connection.
It’s a tactic that clearly doesn’t work. He smiles sourly. “I’m sure you are.”
She feels herself start to wilt but remembers one of Francis’s columns from way back. It was one she memorized.There are certain people who appreciate your vulnerability and certain people who will try to use it against you. But they can’t if you don’t let them.
She takes a deep breath. “Is Howard in?” she asks, eager to see a friendlier face and to confirm once again that she has actually been given the job and this isn’t all some strange hallucination.
“Let me see.” Jonathan makes a show of looking at Howard’s scheduleon his computer and gives her an insincerely apologetic look. “It looks like he’ll be taking meetings most of the day. He wanted me to bring you back to your office. He’ll check on you later once you’ve gotten settled.” He heaves himself up off his desk chair as though it requires a great amount of effort.
“That would be great.” Alex smiles nervously. Jonathan stands up with a sigh and pockets his cell phone. Without another word to her, he spins on his heel as Alex scrambles to catch up with him. They cross the newsroom diagonally, winding through a grid of cubicles and turning heads to emerge near Howard Demetri’s glass office. The door is shut tight, and the blinds closed today. Through the crack at the edge of the blinds Alex catches a quick glimpse of her new boss. He is standing rigidly, pressing a phone to his ear. Through the glass she can hear the muffled sound of his voice. It doesn’t sound happy. But before she can try to decipher what he is saying, they’ve moved on.
She expects Jonathan to deposit her at one of the smaller glass-walled offices along the edge of the newsroom, but he keeps walking, leading her to the far end of the room. It looks as though Jonathan is bringing her straight into the wall, but as she reaches it she sees the slim doorway tucked between two tall filing cabinets, a sort of optical illusion where the wall between them is actually part of a hallway set farther back, invisible until you’re standing right in front of it. Curious, she follows Jonathan as he ducks between the cabinets, turning off into the narrow hallway beyond. As soon as they step into it the atmosphere changes completely, the modern glass and concrete replaced with dark polished wood, cracked in places. And heavy closed doors that look as though they haven’t been opened in a very long time. The overhead lights are encased in large glass shades in the shape of inverted teardrops, buzzing above as they carry on.
“This must be the old part of the building?” she asks Jonathan’s slim back even though the answer is obvious. This hallway makes her feel like they have stepped into a time capsule from a century ago.
“It is,” he answers curtly without glancing at her. The area feels unused, closed off. Her nose wrinkles at the smell of dust and mildew asthey pass several shut doors. She tries to imagine Francis Keen walking the same hall, her sleeves rolled up, ready to get to work. The thrill of it creeps up through her spine. And now here she is in the very same place, heading to her first day on the very same job.
Her stomach twists as they come to the very end of the hall and Jonathan stops in front of a large wooden door. For a moment Alex worries he is going to shove her into a storage closet, but then he inhales sharply and pulls it open. At once, cool natural light spills out into the hallway. She peers past him, her breath catching as she takes in a spacious corner office with massive paned glass windows that look out over Midtown. A solid wood desk, its finish wearing, sits to one side of the room, bare except for a computer monitor and an old-fashioned green-glass banker’s lamp. She recognizes the office immediately as the place Francis’s photo was taken. Jonathan moves aside and impatiently waves her through the doorway.
“Thank you, Jonathan,” Alex says.
“Of course, just doing my job,” he says in case she makes the mistake of thinking that he is showing her some special kindness. As she slips past him into the office, she notices his face is pale and peaked like he might be feeling sick.
“It’s beautiful,” she says. Turning around the spacious office, Alex is shocked to find that the two walls not dominated by windows are still hung with Francis’s art. There is an old oil painting of the ocean with a tiny ship tilting on the waves; a yellowed art deco print of a woman smoking a cigarette from a long holder, her hip jutting confidently to the side; a large poster from a Francis Bacon exhibit at the MoMA, in which a man in a suit reclines against a drippy dark background, his face disturbed by streaks of paint.
She moves in closer to the wall, to better see some of the smaller personal photographs in black and white. One is of Francis leaning on the doorframe in front of the old entrance. She looks tiny and young, in an A-line dress and knee-high boots, dwarfed by the large art deco relief of the man with the book that now hangs in the lobby. Next to the photo is a framed newspaper clipping of the first column she everwrote as Dear Constance, dated June 12, 1987. Alex remembers looking it up in an archive years ago. It is advice to a woman who is miserable in her career. She knows the reply without having to read it.You are not miserable because of your job but rather because you have made it the whole focus of your life.
Alex moves over to the window. To the left, the scalloped peak of the Chrysler Building cuts up into the skyline. To the right, the mirrored windows of the Excelsior Bank Building glimmer in the bright sunlight.
The high vantage point also gives the office a sort of secluded feeling, like being locked away in some forgotten turret of a castle. The traffic far below makes her dizzy and she steps away.
“And she really worked back here all alone?” She glances back at Jonathan, who hasn’t moved from his spot by the door. He gives her an impatient nod, glancing behind him into the hallway before he answers.
“When they did the huge renovations about ten years ago, they had plans to move Francis’s office into the modern part of the newsroom, near Howard’s. But she insisted they keep her office back here, in the old part of the building. She always preferred it.”
Alex runs her palm along the top of an old radiator under the window, collecting a handful of dust.
“Do you know why?” she asks, curious to know more about the inner mind of her hero.
“Francis said the only way she could really feel each person’s struggles was to be alone with them,” Jonathan says. “But if you would rather, I can see if we could get you a cubicle or something in the newsroom.” He says the wordcubiclederisively. Alex doesn’t want to make the distinction between her and Francis so soon. She wants to like it back here, too, to live up to Francis’s legacy.
Alex scrambles to clarify. “No, no. I was just asking. It’s a beautiful office, I didn’t mean to imply—” She spins back to the door, surprised to find that Jonathan is already backing out of the room. She notes the slight sheen that’s sprung to his forehead.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it.” He claps his hands together. Then remembers something and reaches into his pocket for a small slip of paper.“Here is the log-in to Francis’s, um, the Dear Constance database so you can get started reading the letters right away. There should be quite a few of them after so long. You have your work cut out for you.” With that, he shuts the door behind him with a click. She stands still, listening to his footsteps recede down the hallway. The subtext of his last line is unmistakable:I don’t think you can handle it.
NINE
Alex carefully sits down at the desk. The springs of the wooden office chair squeak loudly and she cringes, feeling like an intruder.This is whereshesat,Alex thinks, imagining Francis Keen in one of her trademark men’s shirts, the sleeves pulled up to the elbows, typing her answers to all of life’s important questions. Maybe when she gets paid, she’ll look for an oversized white shirt of her own from one of the tiny boutiques she’s always admiring along Madison Avenue.
She opens the top desk drawer. It has been emptied out of everything but a letter opener, brass with a handle inlaid with shell. She holds it in her hand like a priceless artifact, placing it carefully to one side. The bottom of the drawer still bears a constellation of old pencil marks on one side and a splotch of blue ink from a leaky pen soaked into the wood at the bottom. She runs her hand across the grooves where Francis’s pens and pencils once lay, feeling herself well up. She’s about to close the drawer when she notices something trapped on the edge, a piece of folded paper tucked into the seam of the wood. As she pries it loose, she finds that it’s a matchbook. She holds it in her palm, marveling at the little relic left over from Francis’s life.The Nest, it says in art deco–inspired font. The phone number is listed below in delicate gold embossing. Alex opens it and runs her fingers over the tight rows of matches, all unused. She places the matchbook back inthe drawer. She’ll keep it there as a little good-luck charm, a memento to remember her by.
She turns her focus to the computer monitor, which is brand-new. A thin film of plastic still clings to the front of it. Alex peels it back, feeling weirdly ashamed. Why couldn’t they have left the old one? She rests her fingers lightly on the keyboard. Deep breath in. She takes the instructions that Jonathan has printed for her and logs into theHerald’s mail system.
