Heaven Is Small (11 page)

“You like it?”

He shrugged. “I was born there.”

Gordon flicked the ash amateurishly. He baited Daves. “How much do these set you back a week?”

“You don’t smoke, huh?”

Gordon shook his head, kept staring at the sky way up above them. Seen through a window, the sky could just as well be made of paper, but this, Gordon had to admit, smelled like snow, like earth.

Daves rattled off the price of his smokes, and Gordon raised his eyebrows. He held out the cigarette briefly and peered at it as if it could talk, tell him something different. “That’s all?”

Daves didn’t miss a beat. “Yep, but I don’t smoke much, you know. Not like those guys who rip through a pack a day or something. I can’t even tell you how long I been on this same one. I mean, you gotta be careful. It’ll kill you.”

“Sure . . . sure . . .”

“Poison of the working class, the things we can afford.”

Gordon wondered if Daves’ father had been a foreman and he couldn’t shake the blue-collar notion — or if he was simply young enough still to be enthralled by the idea of being down-at-heel. “I was never much of a smoker,” Gordon said, lurching into the past tense without thinking about how Daves would interpret it. “Not this stuff anyway. It is focusing, though.” Gordon held the butt in his lips and inhaled as best he could, which was more like letting the smoke float across his mouth. “Ever smoke outside the other doors? That would be nicer, with people going in and out.” But it wasn’t the view that Gordon cared about; after the pizza fiasco, he wondered whether anyone came or went through the grand double doors besides new interviewees.

The courtyard was dark and getting darker. The cigarette ends didn’t glow when they sucked, but Daves didn’t notice.

“Yeah, well, like everything good, there’s rules against it.” Smirking, Daves held up so-scared hands. “Looks bad. Company image. God forbid the individual should exist.” He grinned when he said this. He looked good, Gordon reflected, for a guy who’d been dead five years or more, judging by the price and the look of his smokes.

They shared a laugh and butted out.

“Double cheese,” Daves marvelled on the way back in, shaking his head wistfully.

10

Chandler goods’s e-mails were always paired with subject lines that would have set Gordon’s pulse racing, if he’d had one. Unfortunately the messages seldom lived up to the promise.

“Your male opinion” meant she wanted to know if he had noticed Carma’s skirt, and whether she should get one. “Thinking of you” meant she had straightened out his productivity report with Manos. “Speaking of romance” meant she could not concentrate at all on the business of romance publishing because Titus Bentley was distracting her. She believed Titus had power issues that were “affecting the Floor Twelve vibe.” The subject line “A proposal” meant she needed a coffee break — could she steal Gordon for ten minutes of accompaniment?

Gordon was in no position to refuse. He was a lowly proofreader, at the very bottom of Chandler’s department. She could have adopted a comrade from Copy Editing, Substantive, anywhere really. His best guess as to how he had happened to fill the position of Chandler’s confidant was his convenient location on her floor, combined with the fact that he seldom spoke. He refrained from writing back that, now that he noticed it, Carma had been wearing the same skirt for three months, likely three years; that Titus
definitely
affected the Floor Twelve vibe, and that the anxiety he emitted was a symptom of his necrosis. Gordon also refrained from letting on that coffee had become his greatest joy and sorrow.

“Gord, what’s up? It’s
Friday
,” Chandler commented on his sour expression, breezing into the kitchen as if she had no intention of being there. She walked in fast yet hesitant, the way she always did.
In a hurry
, her body said, but also,
Just passing through
. This struck Gordon as incredibly cute, since Chandler was only about five feet four in her heels. She had almost made her way out of the kitchen when she stopped at the doorway and doubled back, won over by the mocha scent. As usual she didn’t have her cup with her. She scrounged around the back of cupboards, which were too high for her to see. As she was going through her cup-at-the-back-of-the-cupboard routine, he found himself once again swept into an unexpected appointment with her rear end. Titus Bentley, as well as a number of men from Design, sat at the table in the middle of the room, silently sipping from their own fully possessed coffee mugs, each head tipped to a forty-five-degree angle, parallel to Ms. Goods’s goods. Bentley’s lewd mouth seemed to tear his entire face.

Chandler’s hands crept blindly across an empty shelf above her head. Her teeth stapled her bottom lip. One knee leaned against the cupboards for leverage, the other foot off the floor. The loose ruffles of her short sleeves fell back to her shoulders, and the muscles bunched beneath them. All of her streamed upward with exertion, including her breasts. Even her eyebrows arched, a bank of effort appearing across her forehead. She glanced in Gordon’s direction, then her gaze flew back to the shelf above her.

Gordon walked over to the gathering of gawkers. He kicked the table’s leg. Coffee cups splashed black liquid over the edges. The men jolted, unfroze. Gordon stepped over and produced a cup for Chandler — the one he had brought in with him. After a quick rinse, he handed it over. She blushed, the flush extending across her face and into the cleft of her blouse. “Thank you,” she said, her shoulders falling as if they understood better than her brain the scene that had just played out behind her.

“I don’t know why I do that,” Chandler said, pointing to the shelf, herself, the shelf, her eyes doing an embarrassed dance between the two. “But that’s me.” She peered at the straps around her ankles that fastened to curved black heels. “And these aren’t getting any taller.” She filled Gordon’s mug, double-double, and they walked back to her office. “I’m developing a very serious relationship with that shelf,” she yammered. “That third shelf and I.” She crossed two fingers over each other.

“Oh, I’m sure you say that about all the shelves,” Gordon quipped, and without expressly being asked, he found himself once again inside Chandler’s shimmering office. She went through helter-skelter motions of cleaning up without actually seeming to rearrange any of the piles. Gordon inwardly acknowledged the effort as a sign of her self-consciousness. She liked him. He had saved her. She was drinking from his mug. It was as easy as something written on paper.

When his hands were empty, Gordon knew, he had his own nervous habit of digging through his pockets for lint, or that imaginary coin. With his mug cradled firmly in her palm, he had nothing to hide behind. So he reached out decisively and plucked a handful of unsharpened pencils from a stout holder of whorled pink glass. He set about the task of sharpening them with a metal wedge. Small pulpy flowers bloomed into one palm as he turned the yellow wood round and round.

“Making yourself useful? Careful, I could get used to having an assistant.”

“A male assistant in particular?”

“Oh, I’m really not particular,” she said, missing — or ignoring — his invitation entirely.

What good was the afterlife if you were less of a Casanova in it than in real life? Gordon asked himself. Did one really have to be oneself, even here?

Chandler tossed her hair and set the steaming mug down on the desk, both her hands wrapped around it as if for warmth, though one thing Gordon had noticed long ago was the building’s temperature; even as fall had turned to winter, Heaven seemed to have a flawless thermostat. It was unlike any place Gordon had ever been: work, school, libraries, restaurants, waiting rooms.

“Is it colder here than in France?” he asked.

“Well, France is north of here, of course. But dampness, crispness — there are different kinds of cold, I’d say. France is no England, for instance. But, you know,” she continued, as if the thought were occurring to her only as she spoke, “I haven’t had to change my wardrobe. When I left I just assumed I’d buy anything I needed when I got here, but . . . who has time, and I haven’t really found it necessary. I can’t complain, for a move across an ocean.” She sank into the coffee steam, getting down level with the cup, her chin nearly on her elbow upon the desk. “You know what I do miss?”

He watched as she eyed the cup with melancholy. “Café au lait?”

“The sunlight. Paris sunlight is just different.”

Gordon crumbled three pencils’ worth of trimmings into the wastebasket. As they fell, he felt his thumb and ring finger rub together, and just for a second he felt the familiar absence of Chloe’s ring, which was still inside a velvet golf-ball-sized box beneath the briefs with the waistband half torn away in the top drawer of the dresser in the upstairs bedroom on Russet Avenue. At least, it
had
been there, he reminded himself. “How can sunshine be different?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t say that if you’d ever been to Indiana. The light there is like water leaking out of a cracked glass.”

“What does Indiana have to do with Paris?”

Chandler took a long gulp from Gordon’s coffee mug, as if swallowing her own fear. “It’s where I’m from.”

The question in Gordon’s mind was: how had Chandler got to Heaven? The question he put forth was: how had she got to Paris?

The way that Chandler explained it, life for her had begun in the outlying farm areas around Indianapolis. “The Crossroads of America” was her town’s grand motto, though to apply it to the rural area where the Goods family resided was munificent. Chandler described herself as one of those eager, over-anxious children, the kind who were constantly spinning in circles or turning the tiniest problems over and over in their minds in order to avoid running about and playing with the sockets. By sixteen, in a whirl of summer romance, she’d gone and got her heart broken worse than one might think imaginable, considering she’d never actually kissed the boy himself — or any boy, for that matter. Though she’d always had difficulty with attendance at school, her solution to heartbreak was to inhale the smell of ink from every page of every textbook within the very first month of junior year. She soon skipped ahead, progressing straight to senior. If it was a jailbreak to get out of Indianapolis, Chandler had decided to go the whole nine yards, treating the state and all its outlying crossroads like San Quentin. Though she applied to top schools across the country for scholarships and bursaries, her true goal was to get off the continent. A convenient, unknown uncle in Scotland emerged at that point in the story, and a letter.

Gordon paused in his listening to imagine the rudimentary nature of the letter, the penmanship of one Chandler Goods, age sixteen, in blue felt-tip on airmail paper thinner than the Goods’ household TP, the flag — like one of surrender — on the three-quarter-inch stamp waving yet immobile as Chandler’s then-lineless hands clutched the envelope tightly. He imagined her blowing on it for luck and dropping it finally into the dark of the box on the block where she had lived her whole life, a series of unknown sacks and baggage compartments awaiting it.

The uncle responded, also in letter form, approximately thirty days later, enclosing the most beautiful photograph Chandler had ever seen: the countryside of his “modest, but by all means serviceable estate.”

Gordon had an uncanny feeling that he had heard this story before, but he said nothing.

Though her parents had protested her choice, Chandler had believed their protective instincts were motivated by their desire to keep her harnessed to a life of mediocrity. And so she ascended, hovering over the Atlantic, heart buoyed by girlish dreams — all of which would be dashed in the days to come.

An uncle with no aptitude for pleasantries retrieved her from the airport and drove her farther and farther from civilization, to his indeed “modest but serviceable” estate, the only benefit of which was the view of the neighbours’ far more lovely, sprawling, and completely unpopulated properties. With a shock Chandler recognized these from the photograph she had kept tacked above her desk in Indiana. She found herself cloistered in a small stone cottage. It had no telephone and few modern conveniences, and the exterior resembled a crumbling, forgotten prison. The romantic in Chandler vowed to make the best of her situation, and she spent her first few hours writing postcards announcing her arrival, and even an original poem on the first page of a shiny hard-backed journal she had bought for the purpose of recording her new life.

The entries that followed were streaked with tears, and Gordon sat aghast as Chandler recounted in detail her uncle’s demonic behaviour, which began that very night with an unhealthy monitoring of her personal habits and led in the days to come to intercepting her outgoing and incoming mail (from her university applications to her pleas to her parents for plane fare), building to a nightly imposition of his basest desires upon her unsuspecting, often sleeping, corpus. He had horrid whiskers, and fouler breath. Though he had lost one hand years before, he took particular delight in attempting to stimulate her with his sinister clamps, stroking her feminine flesh with his unfeeling steel, and — on those days when he feared she might flee from his advances — wielded his medieval hook like a weapon, holding it to her throat as she struggled against him.

Gordon attempted to interrupt Chandler at this uncomfortable point to warn her that he was sure he had read just such a thing in a Heaven title the previous week, but she patted his hand on the third word out of his mouth — as if he were attempting to console her — and rushed on.

She had fought her uncle always, though he continued to tell her how much sweeter their love would be if she would only give in to what he knew was her heart’s true desire. He took to referring to her as his “American mail-order,” and ordered her about the isolated garden by the name Bride. When she found the marriage licence among his papers, her forged signature and the deadline of their pending appointment led her to grasp the direness of her situation. She would need to do more than merely survive his abuse; she would need to escape now or perish in what would become a lifetime of sexual submission and servitude, a regulated schedule of eternal misery.