It’s no big deal, you’re just going over there to ask her a question. She’s the team lead and she should know why the hell the code won’t compile when it’s supposed to be delivered to the clients by the end of the day.

Her cube is in the back, she’s the last one on the aisle, the cube with the three dying African Violets on the cabinet above.

Last one on the aisle so once you get there, there’s no way you can pretend that you’re heading elsewhere.

She’s hunched over the telephone with her back to you. Her blonde hair is short enough so her neck shows, with the top vertebrae poking out, with the short fuzz of hair on her pale skin. You step to each side of her to see if the phone is to her ear. It isn’t. But it’s even worse. One thing to interrupt a telephone conversation. But interrupting someone hunched over the phone and hiding their face in their hands as you watch their shoulders rise and fall with each breath.

If this were a cozy couch, if you were at her house (Does she live alone?), if you were at her place, or your place, and she was upset, you’d really try like hell to help, you might put your arm around her and say it’s okay, but what on earth do you do to help her, here, between these half-height flimsy gray walls.

Tip-toe out of this scene, that’s the easiest thing. But before any real time passes, her hands land on the desk, a smack, and her head turns to see who intruded on her life. The turn is slow, not a real-life turn of the head but a slow motion film of real life.

The swollen cheeks. The wet eyes. The red rash at her neck, going down to her gray blouse.

“Sorry,” you say. “I just wanted to.”

Maybe it’s the project. Is her boss giving her shit about delivering this drop late again?

You grab a chair from the empty cube across from her, roll it next to her.

No way this is about work. You don’t know her personally, it’s only been a month that you’ve been here, but you know what suffering about work looks like. It looks like pushing on your temples to get rid of the headache. It’s skipping lunch and ordering dinner at the office. It’s sending e-mails with an 11pm timestamp. It’s walking down the hallway so fast that you don’t even glance at someone saying hello. It’s a stiff neck. It’s losing track of the days of the week and showing up at the office on the weekend. Suffering about work is bitter and angry, it isn’t hunched over and crying.

“Are you okay?” you say. You get closer but not too close, your chairs aren’t even touching.

The heel of her one shoe is twisting into the top of her other shoe.

It’s about her boyfriend. You just know it. She’s pretty tough at the office. She can tell a bullying project manager to fuck off better than anyone you’ve ever seen. She knows what’s right and she says it so clearly that it seems like a trick. And for that clarity, you’re thinking that it works just the opposite with her boyfriend. No reason to figure on this irony, no reason for her to deserve it, but you’re figuring it just the same.

“What is it?” you ask.

Her hands are on the desk. You drop your hand on the edge of the desk, you creep your hand closer with your fingers so you’re just a few inches away.

Her fingers are the same size as yours. They don’t have any rings on them. But her fingers are so fair, they have few wrinkles, the nails are bitten to the pink.

You want to touch.

You’ve never asked about the African Violets on the cabinet. Whose are they? Why aren’t they being watered? Wilted purple flowers on one, wilted red flowers on another, the third is too dried up to make anything out.

You want to hug her, sneak her out of this office, but you’re trapped deep in this building, floor 3, aisle 7, just beside pole C13.

Eye contact is what you usually expect when you talk to her. And you’re the one that is supposed to look down. But not now, with her head way down, chin on the neck, her focus going between her shaking hands and her shoes.

Her face squeezes up and makes wrinkles in the wrong places, above the chin, across the cheeks. The crying makes her whole body bounce in her seat, makes it look like the office chair is adjusting up and down all by itself. She holds onto the desk like the chair’s going to eject her at any moment.

“What did that bastard do?” you ask.

Finally. She looks up at you. Her eyes used to be blue. Yes. For sure blue when you caught a glimpse in that meeting yesterday, when you kept sneaking looks at her without her knowing, they were blue. You even told your friends, when you had that fourth shot of whiskey last night, about the blueness, bluenosity you called it last night with that smell of whiskey and French fries on your lips. But here, behind her tears, above the puffy cheeks, below the three African Violets, they’re gray.

You recall a piece of information you once heard, People with gray eyes are the most—, but you can’t remember the rest.

“Thank you,” she says. She’s thanking you. “I’ll be okay,” she says, not pretending that she’s okay now, just telling you that sometime in the future she’ll be okay.

A thought sweeps down into the back of your head. Maybe it can be your kindness today, tomorrow, next week, that can make for her okayness.

“Thank you for caring,” she says. Your hand still on the desk. She puts her hand on your hand. Her hand is moist. It trembles. It’s pink against your skin.

You put your other hand on top of her hand on top of your first. It risks silliness, but she smiles. The smile reshapes her face, her red cheeks, her baggy eyes, so that some lingering tears roll down her face, drop onto her chest at the open V part of her blouse. She inhales and you hear the wet clogginess in her nose.

“I’ll be okay,” she says. She pulls her hand out between your hands and you’re left with your two hands piled on themselves. She pats her hand on your cheek and lets her hand slide off. The fingers scratch against your stubble.

“Thank you,” she says. The eyes. They focus on something just below your eyes.

Then her hand, the one that just dropped off your cheek, it reaches for the phone. Her body turns away from you.

You sit in your chair, in your cubicle, two aisles away from her. Your hand plays with the lever below the seat and the seat drops a foot. You raise it and do it again.

Your father once collected African Violets. You’d sneak into that room in the basement and stand next to a hundred of them on a giant table just a few inches below the rows of fluorescent lights hanging by long rusty chains from the ceiling. Five or six books about plants underneath the table and nothing else in the room.

You rubbed your fingers against the furry leaves, pretended that you were standing in a rainforest, standing beside an army of wild plants. You talked to your favorite plant, the one on the far corner, the one with the flower not quite purple, not quite pink, you talked to it like it was your brother. “Don’t tell anyone,” you said, “but I like Nori Takei. She’s the prettiest.”

But then, one day, you ran down there and the lights were all off, the plants were dying in the dark. The lights were unplugged. You mashed the plug into the socket as hard as you could but it wouldn’t go. So you ran upstairs and cried to Daddy about the poor plants. “Daddy, daddy,” you said. “The plants are all dying. The plug won’t go in the wall.” His eyes went small for a second and you thought he was going to tell a sad story, maybe that all the plants caught the flu, maybe that he became allergic to furry leaves, but then his eyes opened up again and his face went red. The red started in the cheeks, and then it was on his forehead and ears. “What the hell were you doing in there?” he said. The bad concentrating forehead and the way he stomped his bare foot one step toward you. “You have no business,” he said. “Go to your room,” he said. Just like that. And you ran.

The next time you went down there, all the plants were gone.

You know you had things to do today, issues to handle today, but nothing comes out. People walk by, people curse, phones ring, and you’re looking at the fog of words and images on your twenty-one inch monitor.

Then it hits you.

You’ve figured on something to do for the rest of the day.

And so you type it.

Typing and deleting and typing and deleting, but finally typing and sending one of those e-mail-love-letters that you’re so good at. You bust up the phrases, you break apart the grammar, twist the clichés, spell it wronger than hell. You burn up the language so good that she’s gotta feel your touch somewhere deep in.

And for a moment, you forget about the rest. The project is way out of your head. You forget about it. You forget about the dentist appointment that you were supposed to leave work early for. You even forget about what’s eating her up. Because you just want to tell her how fucking there you are for her. You don’t say anything about love or dating or the way you want to let your lips linger on the back of her neck. You’re good.

You forget about how you just left your girlfriend without explaining to her a bit about why, mostly because you can’t figure on why except that you just want aloneness again. You forget about your counselor, how she says you don’t know about love. Pretty similar to the past three counselors.

And one more thing you forget. You forget about the fact that this woman, your team lead, as she grows to love you, after a year goes by, she will again be crying at her desk, another person sitting next to her, sneaking glances at the fuzz on the back of her neck as she picks up the phone, and this time, you’ll be the bastard boyfriend on the other end.

-end-

Copyright © 2007 Yuvi Zalkow