Girls In White Dresses (13 page)

Mary had sworn that it wouldn’t happen to her, but she hadn’t known it would be so hard. She always wanted to leave the office and she always wanted to stay. She wanted all of the partners to like her, to praise her. She lived for one of them to say, “Nice job” or “Thanks for the help.” It didn’t come often, but when it did, it felt like getting an A. Or at least a B. And there was nothing that Mary loved more than getting good grades. Maybe that made her pitiful, but she couldn’t help it. And so she stayed, and she sat in her chair for fifteen hours at a time, eating Chinese food, popping dumplings into her mouth, slurping up sesame noodles, and hoping for someone to notice her work. And then she would go home and look at herself in the full-length mirror, studying the bulge that was threatening to explode, wondering how long it would be before she erupted into a truly giant person.

Each time she bought a pack of cigarettes, she said, “Last pack,” as she unwrapped the plastic at the top. She was basically done smoking, she told herself. It was really just a formality until she was an official nonsmoker. And so when Isabella came over to her apartment, sniffed the air, and said, “Were you smoking in here?” Mary said, “No, I quit.”

She knew she’d gone too far. Once she started lying about it, there was no going back. “I don’t care if you smoke,” Isabella said. She gave Mary a strange look. “I was just asking.” But still, Mary denied it. She hid her cigarettes in her bedside table, tucked in the back of the drawer, wrapped in an old bandanna. Each time after she smoked, she wrapped up the pack of cigarettes with the lighter, folding them in the cloth, and carefully placing them back where nobody could find them.

Brian Sullivan was made a junior partner at thirty-three. He was the one all of the first years wanted to be, the one they all talked about. He was handsome in a prep school way and looked like every cute boy that Mary had a crush on in high school. He was the first person to ask Mary to write a memo, and she was flattered. “Really,” she asked. “A memo?” She sounded like a parrot.

He laughed and leaned on her desk. “Look,” he said. “I know it feels impossible now, but it’ll get better. I promise.” He put his hand on her shoulder, and Mary almost turned her head and leaned down to kiss it. It was the first time in a week anyone had touched her, not counting the toothless woman who’d pulled on her leg as she was going down to the subway. Her face got hot, as though she had actually leaned over and placed her lips there. Brian removed his hand before she could think much more, and she was left in her office with her embarrassing thoughts.

Mary had always been scared of her imagination. When she was younger, she used to think, “What if I stood up in the middle of class and told Mrs. Sugar to go to hell?” Then her cheeks would flush at the thought and her heart would start pounding, as if she was really going to stand up and scream. “I’m not going to do it,” she would tell herself. She would try to calm down, but then she would think of it again, how she could have just screamed, how no one would have stopped her, and she would get nervous again. It was the potential of what could happen, the possibility that she could do something so reckless. That’s what scared her.

Brian Sullivan brought all of that back. Every time he came into her office and stood next to her desk, Mary imagined what would happen if she put her hands on his belt buckle and started to take off his pants. Her blood pounded in her ears, and she tried to reassure herself that she wasn’t going to do any such thing. But then she’d pass him in the hall, and she’d think, “What would happen if I just went up to him and said, ‘Let’s have sex right now’?” She tried to tell herself that she was in charge of her actions, that her brain couldn’t take over. And then she thought, “This is what happens to people right before they go insane.”

Brian found Mary on the roof one night, sitting on one of the stone benches, her head leaning back as she smoked her Marlboro Light very slowly, letting the smoke trickle out of her mouth and escape into the air. “Hey,” he said. “So, you’re a smoker.”

Mary snapped her head up quickly, causing her to cough and choke for a few seconds before she could speak. “No,” she finally said. “I’m not a smoker. I’m quitting.”

“Oh,” he said. “Okay.” He pulled out an unopened pack of cigarettes and hit them against the heel of his hand, then unwrapped the plastic and crumpled it into a ball, never looking away from her. “I’ve been quitting for years.” He raised his eyebrows and took a cigarette out of his pack, held it in his teeth, and smiled.

Mary gave a weak laugh and held her cigarette low. “I really thought I would’ve quit by now,” she said. “But it’s been a harder adjustment than I planned on.”

“Because I make you nervous?” Brian asked.

“What? No!” Mary said. She sounded too forceful. She’d meant to sound calm, but it came out in a little yell.

Brian laughed. “It’s okay,” he said. “I mean, when I first started, even the secretaries made me nervous. Everyone knew more than I did.”

“Oh,” Mary said. She realized that he had meant something very different, and she made herself laugh again. “Yeah, well. I guess it goes away eventually, right?”

“That it does,” Brian said. He blew circles in the air.

Brian and Mary started smoking together at night. She always hoped she’d see him and she always felt sick when she did. She should not be doing this, she told herself. He was a partner. He was her boss. But she looked forward to their conversations all day. When two days in a row passed without them running into each other on the roof, she felt desperate. When he returned on the third day, she almost jumped off the bench.

Every piece of information she got about him felt like a gift. She gathered all that she knew and went over it in her head. He had two brothers, he was the youngest, he liked gherkins and sour Altoids but hated any kind of soda. He was a Yankees fan, called his grandfather “Oompa,” and looked best in light pink shirts.

They talked about college, and she found out that he’d played lacrosse. “Well,” she said, “that’s no surprise.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked her.

“Just that, you know, you kind of look like a lacrosse player,” Mary said.

“Really?” Brian asked. “How do you mean?”

“I mean, you just look like you went to prep school and played lacrosse. I don’t know.” Mary took a drag of her cigarette and tried to sound not stupid. “All the boarding school boys at my college, they all played lacrosse and just had a look.”

“Well, I did go to prep school,” Brian said. “But I didn’t go to boarding school. My roommate did, though, and he was weird.” Brian stopped talking and Mary wasn’t sure if he was done. Then he flicked his cigarette and continued. “I’d never send my kids to boarding school,” he finally said. “It fucks them up.”

Everything she learned in these five-minute conversations just made Mary like Brian more. And once when she was assigned to his case in a big meeting, he winked at her, and she thought that maybe she didn’t have control of her brain anymore. With each day, there was a greater chance that she was actually going to act on one of her totally absurd thoughts. There was no going back.

Mary told her friends that there was a cute lawyer at the firm, but that’s as far as she let herself go. They were out for drinks one night and she just wanted to say his name, so she said, “There’s this guy at my firm, Brian, who’s pretty cute. He’s a partner, though.” Then, because she regretted saying his name, she said, “I’m not interested in him or anything. Maybe he’s not even that cute. I can’t tell anymore.”

Lauren nodded and said, “It’s probably the cutest-boy-in-the-class syndrome.”

“The what?” Mary asked.

“Cutest-boy-in-the-class syndrome,” Lauren repeated. “You know, when you spend all your time in a class and it’s boring and you get a crush on a guy, who looks super cute in the class but then when you go out in the real world, he’s not. It’s just that you were only comparing him to that small group, so there was a curve.”

“Huh,” Isabella said. “I never thought about it like that.”

“I mean, that’s just the name, but it applies to all sorts of things. Like why camp boyfriends always turned out to be nerds. Or how a work crush can happen on a guy that’s really not all that great.” She shrugged and tried to look modest, as though she were the one to discover this phenomenon. “It’s good to remind yourself of it, though,” she said. “So you don’t end up sleeping with a bartender who’s a total life loser, or something like that.”

“Or something like that,” Isabella said. Mary nodded, as though they had figured it out, but she knew Brian didn’t fall into that category. She didn’t know where he fell, but it wasn’t there.

They kissed one night in her office, late, after everyone else had gone home. The two of them had ordered Thai food, and Mary had eaten very little, afraid that her skirts were going to stop fitting soon, and sure that when Brian looked at her, all he saw was a big ass.

He came into her office and stood behind her so that she couldn’t breathe. When she got up to go get a piece of paper from the other side of the room, she turned and was facing him, their mouths close. And then they were kissing, and she tasted the curry he’d eaten that day. It made her dizzy, but it all seemed a little unreal, like walking outside in pajamas.

When she got home, it was hard to remember if it had happened or not. She barely slept, and when her alarm went off she was happy to get up. She laughed in the shower as she got ready; giddy and tired, she lathered her hair and laughed.

She didn’t see Brian all day. He wasn’t on the roof that night, and she knew something was wrong. Two more days passed and the only time she saw him was from down the hall as he went into a meeting. She was such an idiot. He was her boss. This was not something she would ever do, and she decided that she would clear it up as soon as she got the chance.

A few nights later, she was in her office and he walked by. Before she knew it, she was calling out his name. He looked surprised, but just raised his eyebrows and stepped inside. “Yes?” he said.

“Hi,” Mary said. “So, I just wanted to apologize for the other night. It wasn’t professional, and I regret it.”

“Okay,” Brian said.

“Okay,” Mary said. He looked like he was going to leave, but Mary wanted to say more. “I mean, if there were different circumstances, maybe. But you’re my boss, and we work together.”

“That’s the least of it,” Brian said.

“What?” Mary asked. “What do you mean?”

“Mary,” Brian said, “I’m engaged. You knew that.”

“I didn’t know that,” Mary said. “How could I have known that?”

Brian laughed. He sounded a little evil. “You knew,” he said.

“I didn’t know,” Mary said. Her voice sounded like she wasn’t sure if she believed herself or not.

“Of course you knew,” Brian said. He sounded impatient. “Remember the week after you started when everyone had cake in the big conference room? It was for my engagement. Carla arranged it.” Mary vaguely remembered standing with plastic plates, eating white frosted cake that wasn’t good but was better than sitting at her desk.

“No,” she said. She shook her head. “No, I don’t remember.”

Brian laughed meanly again, and Mary realized that he was maybe the kind of guy who contained the potential to be very cruel, the kind of guy who believed the lies he told. “Look,” he said. “Whatever you need to tell yourself. Just don’t repeat it around here.”

“I wouldn’t tell anyone. Don’t you tell anyone.” This came out sounding stupid, like a child deflecting an insult by repeating it.

Brian just nodded. “Okay,” he said. He turned and walked out of her office.

Mary sat at her desk for a while, not knowing what to do. She’d never done anything this bad in her life. She’d never cheated on anyone, never stolen a friend’s boyfriend, never kissed a guy who was taken. Engaged. The word was weighted.

Had she known? She didn’t think so, but maybe she was just trying to make herself feel better. She considered going to confession and then decided against it. She’d always hated confession, ever since the first time she went, when she told the priest that she was afraid of the albino janitor who cleaned the school.

“I’m afraid of Andy the janitor,” she’d said. “Because he’s an albino.”

“That’s not a sin, Mary,” Father Kelly had said. He’d sounded annoyed, like she didn’t understand what it was she was supposed to tell him. But Father Kelly was wrong. Mary knew that it was a sin to be afraid of Andy the albino. She didn’t want to look down when she saw him, didn’t want to go to the other side of the hall when they passed each other. He always smiled at her, like he understood, and that made the whole thing worse. She wanted to cry when he did that. She didn’t want to be afraid of him, but she couldn’t help it and it made her feel awful, like she was the worst person in the world. And no matter what Father Kelly said, it was a sin. She knew that much.

Mary turned back to her computer as if she was going to do more work, and then she decided against it. She had to get out of the office. She walked all the way home, even though it was so cold that she couldn’t feel her toes after the first block. She didn’t want to stop for anything, didn’t want to wait for the train to come. She just wanted to keep moving, and so she did. She walked forty blocks to her apartment, and by the time she got there, her nose was running and her eyes were watering, spilling down her face. She wasn’t crying, though she wished she were. It was just the cold.

She went up to her apartment and started running a bath, which she’d never done the whole time she’d lived there. She had trouble unbuttoning her blouse because her fingers were numb, but she managed, and got into the bath, which was so hot it burned her skin for the first few minutes. Mary stayed in the bath for over an hour. Whenever the water started to cool, Mary drained a little bit and added more hot water. When she was sure she could feel her fingers again, she got out and put on her most comfortable pajamas, thin flannel pants and a long-sleeve T-shirt that was worn and soft. She curled up on her couch underneath the blanket. She wanted a cigarette. But she wouldn’t let herself have one. Not tonight and not ever again. She sat there for a moment, and then she got up and started lighting all of the candles in her apartment. This would have made her mother very nervous. “You’ll fall asleep and burn the place down,” she would have said. But Mary was wide awake and not afraid of starting a fire. She turned off the lights and sat on the couch, watching all of the flames light up the room. She breathed in and out until she didn’t want a cigarette anymore. She sat there for a while, and then she leaned over to the candle closest to her and blew, softly at first, and then harder, so that the flame vanished. She got up and walked around to each candle, blowing them out, watching as the flames turned into long winding tails of smoke, and she watched them curl and twist, up in the air, until they were gone. And then she went to bed.