Читать книгу The Question Authority - Rachel Cline - Страница 16

Lunch is a confusing time of day for me. The apartment is a fifteen-minute walk, so clearly I should go home. No one here expects me to work through lunch, and even if I did, it wouldn’t count—I wouldn’t get paid for the time—but if I come back more than two minutes late, they dock my check and, after three lates, there’s some kind of probation or warning, so mostly I stay close. But all I can really get to eat in the immediate neighborhood is a burger, pizza, or “street meat.” Obviously, I should bring a sandwich and I have resolved to do this numerous times, but making myself lunch at eight in the morning is apparently beyond my capabilities as a human being. I’m sure that’s related to the fact that my mother never mastered that skill, either, and used to send me to grade school with atrocities like a jar of olives or a can of sardines—this was before the invention of the Lunchable. Maybe that’s part of why I wound up at the Academy. They served a hot lunch every day and every girl was expected to sit down and eat it.

Anyway, it’s twelve thirty, I’m so hungry I could plotz, and I’m sitting immobile at my desk when my cell phone starts ringing in my bag, in the desk drawer. I don’t even keep it on my desk, because since moving back to Brooklyn and starting this job I have been as bad at keeping up my friendships as I have at making myself lunch. It’s an unfamiliar 718 number, but I’ve gone to the trouble of getting the thing out so I answer it.

“Is this Eleanor?” says a male voice. No one has ever called me Eleanor. I can’t even imagine who would know that it’s my real name.

“Yes,” I say, with some discomfort.

“I think I have your cat,” he says. “I got your number from Sammy.”

It takes me a second but I realize he means Sami, the man who owns Pets Emporium on Montague Street, and who knows everyone and everything in Brooklyn Heights. And because Sami lets me pay for cat food with checks that he often has to hold onto until payday, he has read my phone number off of one of them, along with the name printed above it, to this guy. I told Sami to keep an eye out for Tin Man when he first failed to come home.

“Where are you?” I ask my caller.

“Poplar Street,” he says. If Tin Man is in the neighborhood, he should have come home by now. He knows the way. So I am unbalanced by this news.

“Is he okay?”

“He’s fine. A little skinny, but fine.”

“Where did you find him?”

“The old playground on Columbia Heights.”

“Squibb Park? But it’s closed. The entrance is all boarded up.”

“Not to cats, obviously.”

“And you were there looking for cats?” The old playground has not had playground equipment in it for some time, maybe since I was a kid when it had sprinklers and we would roller skate down the long ramp that led into the park, gathering speed until we thought we might careen right off the thing and into the river. Impossible, of course, but that’s my memory. Also, there were tough kids there—maybe from Farragut, the projects? But of course the adjoining neighborhood is no longer a wasteland, it’s DUMBO—full of wealthy white people living in converted industrial spaces.

“I heard there was a cat down there so I went over the other night with some tuna.”

He’s one of those cat-rescue people. I’m always surprised that there are men in that cohort. “Are you home now?” I ask. “Can I come get him?”

This is a terrible idea because I can’t come back to the office with my cat, and anyway he’s heavy and I have no carrier, but now that I have taken in the possibility that he is alive, and nearby, I want him back desperately. In the past year, that cat has become my best friend, my boon companion. At times, I've slept holding his fucking paw.

“I have to leave at four thirty,” he says. “Sixty Poplar. Apartment three.”

“I’ll be there,” I say. “Probably not until four, but I’ll be there.”

I hang up and realize I didn’t even get the guy’s name. He knows Sami, and he’s a cat rescuer so he’s probably not a murderer/rapist, but it hits me that I’ve just agreed to go alone to the apartment of a man I’ve never met at a time of day when, if I disappeared, no one would miss me until tomorrow morning at work. ( José the doorman doesn’t keep track of my comings and goings, although he does continue to ask after the cat—my mother must have been a good tipper.)

I go down to the newsstand in the lobby and buy a Styro-foam bowl of Special K, a banana, and a mini milk, which I scarf down at my desk. I’ll still be ninety minutes short if I leave at three thirty, but if I can get this offer done before then, maybe Jocelyn will let me take it as sick leave or something. I trash the remains of my lunch and go back to the spreadsheet, but after staring at it for another minute or two, I decide to follow Jocelyn’s original instructions: just offer.

I open my email and pull up the offer letter template. My normal procedure is to start with an obscenely low number and see what happens—the used-car-buying approach to justice. I take pleasure in typing the phrase “termination without severance or other ensuing benefits”—I guess I really am a bureaucrat. But before I can save and send the thing, an email message arrives and the transparent box that previews its contents informs me that it’s from Elizabeth Cohen, the guy’s attorney, apparently responding to the “here I am” email I sent earlier. I’m about to read it when I realize someone is hovering at the entrance to my cube. Two people, actually: Jocelyn and one of the attorneys, a large woman in a tight, flowered dress. For some reason, I feel as though I have been caught in a guilty act. Both women say, “Hi,” simultaneously when I look up at them.

Jocelyn says, “This is Alessandro, she works in appeals. She’s my go-to for kiddie sex stuff.”

Alessandro, to my amazement, hoots with laughter while grabbing my boss’s arm—as though Jocelyn’s a normal human being!

“You are too much!” she says, and then to me, “Hi, I’m Gina.”

We shake hands.

“Anyway,” says Jocelyn, “I realize I threw you in the dark end of the pool, deep end, whatever, shut up Alessandro, and this one can probably help you out. End of speech.” She turns and leaves after a strange, ceremonial nod. Gina steps inside my cube and leans her butt on the desktop.

“Isn’t she a kick?” she says of Jocelyn.

“It hadn’t occurred to me to view her as anything other than an authority figure,” I say, which is true, but sounds so stiff and schoolmarmish that I want immediately to start over. I like Gina, I realize. She’s funny. This place needs funny so badly it should be our motto: “New York City Education Department: Please tell us a joke!”

“So tell me what you’ve got,” says Gina. I fill her in. She asks good questions. When I finish, I expect her to issue a solution of some sort but she just nods and waits.

“What should I do?” I say, finally.

“Sounds like you have a strategy,” she says. “Lowball, right? You don’t have time to really dig in and find your backup singers.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if I were taking this to hearing on Monday—which I couldn’t even if I wanted to—but if I was, what I’d need are witnesses. The other side’s going to have the guy’s mother and his sister and the homeless dude he gives dollars to all there to convince the hearing officer that he’s just a good guy who bends the rules a little. The only way to play that off is to have a parade of girls saying he’s a perv, even if he never touched them. So I would basically get all his class rosters and start calling.”

“You can do that?”

“Right, I don’t think you have access to that stuff. And even if you did, it takes forever to pull the records. And then, nine times out of ten, the family doesn’t want the girl to testify: they think they’re protecting her. Like even just talking about sex is dirty—and as though that pathetic little hearing room was open court. I don’t think anybody realizes till they get there that it’s more like a mechanic’s waiting room than bum-pum. Right?”

I nod. It takes me a second to understand that the two-note sound bum-pum means the TV franchise Law and Order but when I do, I can’t help but smile. I find this woman so interesting—I’ve passed her in the halls dozens of times, and based entirely on the flowered dresses and her choice of profession, I’d assumed she was from a different planet than mine. Of course, I assume that about everyone—it’s something I need to work on.

“I don’t know why people don’t see that getting your daughter on record against a real creep is keeping her safe, not to mention teaching her to stand up for herself. Nobody wants to consider how this stuff tends to come back and haunt you later on, and how crap the statute of limitations is in New York.”

I remember this coming up on that Facebook thread about Rasmussen that appeared last year, but I never really took in the details. “How crap is it?”

“If you don’t start proceedings by the time you’re twenty-three, tough luck.”

I think about myself at twenty-three—I was still under multiple delusions about the transformative power of growing up. I don’t think I started really noticing how much the stuff with Rasmussen had affected me until I was in my forties.

“I had a teacher like this guy,” I say to Gina.

“He raped you?” she asks.

“Some of my friends. I almost went on a camping trip where it probably would have been me, too, but I changed my mind at the last minute.”

“Smart kid,” says Gina, but she looks at her watch and I realize she needs to go, and I need to get back on this thing.

“Thanks so much,” I say. And she says, “Any time.”

I have forgotten all about the email I was about to read, but when I wake up my monitor, there it is:

Dear Ms. Buchbinder,

Thank you for your correspondence in the matter of Harold Singer. As you know, the hearing is set for Monday so time is of the essence. The latest we can accept an offer for consideration would be tomorrow at noon.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Cohen

P.S. I knew a Nora Buchbinder a long time ago, in Brooklyn Heights. Is that you?