“Que pasa, Josef”
“Hola”. I’ve been teaching myself Spanish for years, he knows a little bit from somewhere. I never found out where.
I look up front and our wonderful secretary isn’t there. An appointment maybe?
“Where’s Kate”, I ask.
“Her and Jeff are on vacation this week”.
“Together?” I am shocked. I knew Jeff liked her but I didn’t think she liked him that much, not as much as going on vacation together. That was something.
He looks at me and smiles.
Why would two people go on vacation at the same time if they were not going on vacation together? Two hot-blooded twenty somethings that just happened to spend all their free time together. Especially in the month of January. A cruise? Cruises were cheap in the winter time I heard.
“Where’d they go?”
“I’m not going to tell”
I need this information for some reason. It will bother me if I don’t get it. He knows this but does he know that I know this? I will have to make a joke of the matter.
“Is it warm where they went?”
“Yes.”
This makes me think it is either Florida or California that they went to. I try to think what goes on down south around this time of the year. Were the two of them sports fans? We just came back from the holidays a few weeks ago. I can’t think of anything, maybe I’ll go home and do some googling.
“Is it on this side of the country?”
“Yes.” He’s surprised I got so close so fast. I’ll unimpress him shortly, revealing
my dumb luck.
“Florida is it?”
“Yeah.” Now he thinks I know something. Here’s where it all ends. Here’s where the sharpness gets dull.
“Is it a business related thing?” A business related thing isn’t really a vacation at all. All it is is little rich boy taking the secretary somewhere that some vendor had probably paid for. One time my boss was gone for a few days. He went to the Turning Stone Casino with some employees of one of our vendors who paid for his trip. It was a presentation for the vendors to learn about the newest “green technology”. He stayed overnight in a hotel room, played golf, lived the good life. He regretted he hadn’t gotten a prostitute. That’s how the rich guys did it.
“No.” I didn’t want to hear this word come out of his mouth but I had to keep playing so as to not display my true self. Keep playing the game.
“Is it sports related?” I didn’t really get the impression they were strong sports fans. Strong enough to travel to Florida at least. Sometimes people just need an excuse to go somewhere, especially somewhere warm in January. Besides, I was mostly on the road making deliveries, these people were always together in the office. I didn’t really know them.
“No, you’re getting colder.” He rubs my curiosity in my face.
“They picked the right week to go. Did they know what the weather was going to be like this week?” I turn my interest into a joke. I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere with him anyway. I’m bored. What does it matter? I’m already in a relationship, I’m practically married. I should hope this young girl gets taken off the market.
“Go back to doing what you were doing in the basement and in a couple of minutes I’m going to send you out with some orders to take. Okay.” This twenty seven year old little punk tells me. I think he’s half a fag sometimes. Or he could be just a sensitive soul like myself, unafraid of his feminine side. I had no way to tell and it led to some strange communications sometimes, sometimes raising some questions about myself to others no doubt. I have given up on what other people think; but sometimes I know it’s important to maintain appearances, how important it is to clarify yourself when your opportunity came. You had to give people some stable thoughts to attach to your image every now and again. Steer them away from any impression that you were an unstable lunatic so they could relax and be comfortable around you. You build them a fantasy world and give them enough detail to make it seem real. You build them a bed and then tuck them in after you assure them the boogey man isn’t real. When you see they’re comfortable with you in the periphery of their little world, you can relax in the knowledge that your sham is good. Then you could go off the deep end again for a little bit for a little while.
“You got it,” I mouth enthusiastically. This time when I went down there I actually did something. I was preoccupied and had to do something to crowd it out of my head. I threw myself into this cleaning project that I had been milking for weeks, just making a show of it. This time I could actually make sense of the mess I had made down here, of all the debris that had come back from a construction job we had just finished. The foremen at different jobs would order things, have them delivered, and then months later when the job was over would return what they didn’t use. It would just go back out the next time someone ordered it for another job. We put it in the basement and tried to arrange it into some thing orderly so that my boss would have a somewhat easy time of finding it and sending it out again before ordering more. For months I lounged among the debris, doing a token amount of work here and there to put on a show of organizing it. I threw myself into forming the parts into a whole, summoning an orderliness that came surprisingly easily when some concentration was directed at the task. I didn’t even hear him call me until he comes downstairs into my dungeon.
“You ready?”
“To go to Florida? Hell Yeah!”
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