The Kissing Game (13 page)

“Get out!” Henry says. “What makes you think
that?” A bit of sandwich remains in his cheek like a chipmunk.

“If you took all those Xanax, you’d have been
out on your feet.” Cory scowls.

“I was. That’s the thing. I was out of it, but
Robert wasn’t. He even drove me home. And you know what that means, right?”

“No.” Henry smirks.

“It means that Robert kissed
her
and he
wasn’t even drunk,” Cory states while pointing at me, the look of fascination
on his face. For a moment, Henry and Cory look contemplatively at me before shoveling
in their food again.

 “Hmmph.” Henry shakes his head.

“I know,” I say.

The office door whips open and Todd joins us.
He’s looking smart in his slim-fitting button-up shirt, grey slacks,
multicolored scarf around his neck, and shades over his handsome eyes. He takes
off his shades. “What’d I miss?” he asks, looking eager to catch up.

“Robert kissed Caroline that night and he
wasn’t drugged. She took the Xanax on accident,” Cory states. “Now she feels
guilty because he’s getting fired. You’re going to have to keep up. I can’t
summarize for you every hour upon the hour.”

“And he kissed her back, without being drugged,”
Henry states for emphasis, looking as if a miracle has just happened.

“No!” Todd says, his mouth open wide.

I groan and flop my arms on the desk, my face
into my arms.

“Hmm,” Todd says, taking off his scarf and
putting it on his lap. “You know, I always and my suspicions. Robert is like
that mean boy on the playground who throws stones at the girl he likes. I had a
sneaking suspicion he had a little chubby for you.”

“Why weren’t you less of a bonehead that you
could’ve told me sooner?” I whine. But then I notice that Todd looks as if he
says that just to be nice, as if he knows the kind of compliment you’re
supposed to pay to your friends when you’re surprised.

Todd opens up his pilaf and pulls out a plastic
spoon. “I dunno. I thought you hated him.” He shovels a spoonful in his mouth.

“Oh god, what am I gonna do, you guys?” I moan.

“First, here, eat a granola bar.” Cory hands me
one. He’s an endless supply of granola bars and tie-dye shirts. “And we have to
pow-wow. What’dya think my little lackies?” Cory looks around at Henry and
Todd, who shrug and blink and chew.

I open the granola bar and take a bite. It’s
like eating cardboard with chocolate chips. I deserve a disgusting lunch, so I
don’t complain.

“Well, Caroline can’t confess to mailing the
tapes because that incriminates you,” Henry says to Cory. “And she can’t
confess to trying to get the tapes back from my boss’s house because that
incriminates me.” He points at himself. “But she could tell the Chairman that
she’s a slut, basically, that she threw herself at Robert.”

Todd smiles. “Oh yes, I like this idea.
Caroline would become the firm-wide hussy. We haven’t had a good hussy in the
firm since … oh god, what was her name?” Todd says with his hand over his mouth
while he chews. In the little office, we’re a bubble of munching sounds.

“Felicia,” Henry says between bites.

“Right,” Todd replies. “I wonder what ever
happened to her.”

“I don’t think Caroline could pull off office
slut like Felicia could. Caroline’s too...” Cory says.

“You’re right. She’s definitely too…” Henry
seconds, his lips pressed together as though he’s trying to come up with the
word.

“Too what?” I ask.

Henry frowns. “No matter what, she still won’t
get Robert his job back. She’ll only succeed in making a fool of herself,”
Henry says and sips his soda. “Robert is out of the firm. There’s no way around
it, I’m afraid. All that’s left is the meeting with the partners tonight, and
that’s just a formality. The partners just needed the excuse, and now they have
one. And the best part is that Robert can’t take any business with him. So all
his clients stay with the firm.”

 “This is, by far, the worst thing I’ve ever
done. I can’t live with myself if I get him fired.” I sound like moaning wind.

“Why do you like him so much now?” Cory asks
me, chewing his sandwich. He dabs his mouth with a napkin.

Three pairs of eyes are on me suddenly. “I
don’t know. Think about it though,” I say. “Robert kissed me. He kissed me and
he wasn’t drugged.” I fail to mention that he kissed me a second time.

“I think your chances at friendship or anything
else with Robert is fairly impossible now, don’t you?” Henry asks me. “He’ll
hate you, if he has any idea, which I’m sure he does. I mean he knows who
you’re friends with.” Henry points at Todd and Cory. “He knows you planned this.
That guy learned war by warring himself. He’s no fool.”

“Yeah, Robert knows,” I say, holding the lip
granola bar. “I could tell by the way he acted in the meeting. He put it all
together pretty fast.”

“Hmm,” Todd mumbles, chewing pilaf. We all sit
there silently chewing for a minute. Henry drinks the last of his soda and
tosses it into the trash.

“I don’t know,” Todd mumbles. “Quite the
predicament.”

 I groan.

“I’m afraid he’s right, pumpkin,” Cory says.
“You’re going to just have to sit back like the rest of us and watch the fun
unfold. Your job in this is done. Don’t worry, though. The partners thank you.”

“Why you’d want to save him is beyond us all.”
Henry twirls his finger.

“Beyond us all,” Cory seconds.

“Most definitely,” Todd adds. “Good riddance to
that evil man. Beautiful as sin but evil as the devil.”

We spend the rest of the lunch discussing
Henry’s new romantic interest, a newbie who works in the mailroom, wears a
goatee, has a big gut, and plays the electric guitar. Henry can’t stop gushing
about him. Todd and Cory give Henry advice on how to woo the young man,
assuming he’s gay, of course.

When we convene eating our lunch, we move
single file out of the office back toward our desks, parting at the elevator
banks. As we head in different directions, I realize that my friends can’t help
me, that I’m alone in the problem I’ve created. Alone in my own head. And I’m
going to have to solve my problem alone, too, if that’s even possible.

For the remainder of the day, I sit at the desk
outside Sara Denton’s office while she takes calls all afternoon, and when she comes
out of her office, she looks at me as if I’m an alien and hustles down to another
lawyer’s office, where she closes the door behind her. At 5:00 p.m. I collect
my backpack and head down to the coffee shop in the lobby, which gives me a
clear view of the elevator banks. I order raspberry soda and sip slowly while
keeping an eye on the lobby. I feel ruinous and ruined, and I’m so hungry
suddenly that I could eat a whole pizza by myself, but I just sit there
watching.

At 6:35, several partners file out of an
elevator together, walking in shrugging clusters towards the exit doors, some
towards the garage elevators. At 7:20, I spot Robert, looking tall and alone, carrying
a box under one arm, his briefcase under the other. The slight hunch of his
stride, even at a great distance, gives me an inexplicable aching. How could I
have done such a horrible thing to this man? He moves across the lobby toward
the elevators leading to the garage, where his car must be parked. He places
the box and briefcase on the floor to press the elevator button. As he stands
waiting for the doors to open, the large palm near the lobby fountain crouches
over him, shadowing his face. Though I strain, I can’t see his expression. But
as the elevator opens and he steps inside, I swear I see something akin to fear. 
I wonder if he sees me from far across the lobby, sitting in the coffee shop. But
before I can tell, the doors close.

And so I sit there, sipping raspberry bubbles,
wallowing.

“El infierno está empedrado de buenas
intenciones.”

Hell is paved with good intentions.

The next two
weeks roll by in cloud of my own misery. At my job, I’m assigned to two new
attorneys, Anne and Doug. Anne is a short, dark haired, dark-eyed voluptuous
woman who spends most of her time crying in her office (over what I don’t know,
but I suspect a man). She constantly blows her nose and wipes her eyes. “I have
allergies,” she says. Doug is a tall blond balding man who deems that giving me
work is a human rights violation, so I barely see him other than when he exits
his office to meet his new wife for lunch. She’s a nurse who greets him in the
lobby by nearly jumping into his arms. Newlyweds. Watching them is like
watching cats regurgitate.

Most days I spend forcing Doug to give me work
or editing Anne’s documents. She insists on making changes to sentences and
then revising them back to their original condition, as if she fears her edits
are wrong. Then she edits them again, and we go round and round like this
indefinitely, sometimes all day, until the document eventually returns to its
original condition and she returns to crying in her office.

On most days I visit Todd’s desk, but I have to
pass Robert’s empty office, which is totally devoid of life, a great barren desk
across from empty bookshelves, lacking any evidence that he ever worked here. Whenever
I walk by, I feel like a murderer.

After my second week of hell at work, I’m
striding past Robert’s empty office when I notice a box sitting on his desk.
Curious, I step inside to read the label: “555 California.” Wondering whether
one of the file clerks misplaced yet another set of files, I open the box.
Inside I find documents for a children’s home in the Philippines called
Children’s Refuge Project, along with a purchase agreement for a property and pictures
of a large house. Of course, the file clerks misplaced it; they were likely in
a hurry to get out of the office on this Friday afternoon. I thumb through more
files and notice a name with an email address
:
[email protected]
.
 I stand there in the unlit office, the sun
sparking off cars crossing the Bay Bridge outside the window, and I wonder
where I’ve read that email address before. It’s familiar. I just can’t remember.
Just when I’m about to take the file and find a better home for it, Cory and
Henry walk by. They catch sight of me, lunge inside Robert’s deserted office,
and close the door, looking as if bandits have stolen their underwear.

“What?” I ask, the file in my hand.

Henry’s blue plaid sweater vest bunches around
his waist. “The Chairman has security footage of the night you broke into his
place. The footage is grainy and dark, but definitely...
you
.”  His sweater
vest is hyperventilating.

“Oh no.”  I half expect police officers to
barge in behind them and arrest me on the spot.  

“I’ve seen the tape, too, sweetie. It’s you,
for sure.” Cory looks at me as if I’m about to die.

 “What am I gonna do?” Prison time. It’s
inevitable at this point.

 “Thing is,” Henry begins. “I overheard my boss
on the phone talking to the security company. He seemed really worried about
someone being in his house, as if he might get in trouble himself. I couldn’t
figure out why he would be so worried. Did you see anything while you were inside
his house?”

“Like what?” I ask.

Henry shakes his head, as if searching for
ideas. “Insider trading documents? Anything that looked shady lying around his
house?”

“No.”

 Cory shrugs and his pink and yellow tie-dye
shirt shrugs too. He adds, “I checked the Chairman’s internet usage. Only thing
I could find was the occasional visit to a porn website. It was always brief.
Always late at night, but that’s pretty standard stuff around here,” Cory says.
We stand there in the empty office, three partners in crime, except I’m the
only one going to jail.

“I’m going to jail.” I feel a prickly chill.

“You sure, you saw nothing shady?” Henry asks
me again.

I plunk down into Robert’s old chair and put my
face in my hands, rubbing until my cheeks feel hot and red. Meanwhile Henry and
Cory stand there over me, like husbands waiting for me to deliver some
nonexistent baby. “I don’t know anything. I didn’t see anything … But, now that
I think about it, while I was in his house, I first grabbed the wrong envelope
out of the mailbox. A bunch of photos of young women fell out. It was weird.”

“Like what?” Cory asks happily.

“Like professional photos, like the kind actors
or models get, only these were clearly young women… you know… showing off their
bodies, wearing weird outfits, ball in the mouth, stuff like that. And I
remember there was an email address pasted to one of the photos.”

“An email address?” Henry perks.

“Yeah, like a contact. Now what kind of porn
pictures send an email contact?” I ask excitedly.

“The kind soliciting prostitutes?” Cory suggests
blissfully. “Do you remember the address?”

“I don’t know.” Then, as if by instinct, I yank
out the document from the file and hold it out like a gift to Cory and Henry. “This.
The address was like this, only different… favfun, I think.” I point to
document. “But this is a Children’s Refuge Project in the Philippines. What
would this document have to do with prostitution?”

Henry grabs the document and stares at the page
for several seconds, his eyes scanning as though he’s reading a foreign
language. “That’s my boss’s charity. He’s purchased the house for victims of
human trafficking in the Philippines. It’s mostly for young women, children,
who live there. It’s supposed to help get children out of prostitution, give
them an education, and help them find jobs. The place is a charity project meant
to stop human trafficking. My boss has spent millions on it.”

Cory and I eye the document over Henry’s
shoulders. I can feel the revelation quaking over us as if we should shield our
eyes from the possibility.

“You don’t think…?” I ask Henry.

Henry stares at the document.

“He’s into child prostitution?” Cory looks a
little too happy at the prospect of finding dirt against the Chairman.

“Are you sure this was the same email address
as the one on the photographs you saw in the Chairman’s house?” Henry wants to
know.

“No, it was similar. This one is favlove, but
that one was favmore.”

“Let me keep this,” Cory suggests, taking the
file box into his arms like a baby. Henry puts the folder back into the box.
“I’ll look into it and see what I can find out about those email addresses.
Meanwhile, you two act like the pretty little tramps you are and head back to
your desks.” 

 “We’ve got a little time,” Henry tells me. “The
security company just sent the footage to my boss’s office. I’ll hide it for as
long as I can, which won’t be long.”

I feel my face turn hot with fear. “Oh god,
this is karma,” I say, “for being a bad person and getting Robert fired. It’s
like justice in those old western films, when the bad guy ends up being shot
between the eyes at the end. I’m the bad guy.”

Cory and Henry eye me.

“You need to calm down,” Henry says.

“I’m telling you. It’s karma.”

“Let’s go to your computer for a minute,” Cory
suggests. We follow him out of my office and down the hall and take the stairs to
my new desk. When we arrive, Cory sets the box down and begins searching the favfun
email address on my computer, obviously too excited about this new information
to wait to search on his own computer. His fingers smoke across the keyboard
while Henry and I lean over his shoulders watching the screen. Cory lands on a
website, which leads him to another with an email address, and then another,
and finally he lands on a website displaying pictures of scantily clad girls
ducking their heads provocatively, their positions labored but ready for sex,
their clothes nearly nonexistent. They look like children.

“Those are just the kinds of pictures I saw in
the Chairman’s mailbox,” I say. “Only these girls look really young.”

 Under each picture, their ages appear: Maxine,
14 years old; Sylvie, 17 years old; Maggie, 16 years old.

“Child prostitution,” Cory whispers. “Shit.”

Just then two partners stride around my
partition heading somewhere. We remain motionless like opossums until they’re
out of earshot.

“Holy shitcakes,” Henry whispers. “My boss is a
pedophile.”

“Indeedio,” Cory interjects. “You might be able
to use this against him before we send him to jail.” Cory smiles. “Sick
bastard.”

“I mean, couldn’t the Chairman just be trying
to help these women? Why do we assume this means he’s a pedophile?” I ask.

“Why would he be so freaked out that someone
was in his house then? I knew something was up. I knew he was hiding
something,” Henry replies.

Cory soon slides the box under his arm. He
deems that keeping the files in his office is the best scenario. “Don’t say a
word of this to anyone. No one will look for them in my office,” Cory explains,
carrying the boxes as he strolls toward the elevators. Henry strides away looking
as though his world has turned aslant. Perhaps picturing his boss as a
pedophile is taking its toll. Now that I think about it, the idea isn’t so
surprising.

Other thoughts, however, propagate like tufted
stalks in my mind. I begin to wonder if I could actually
use
this
information as leverage to get Robert’s job back and perhaps protect myself
from unemployment or jail time. More importantly, if the Chairman is a
pedophile, we can get him locked up where he belongs. I feel as though I might
be able to right some wrongs. Right a lot of wrongs, actually. And really, for
the past two weeks, the desire to right wrongs has been my primary prayer. The
ideas shimmers like a grassy valley on a spring day.

That night after work, I decide to avoid doing my
laundry and to take care of something much more important instead.

After riding the bus over to the Marina
District, I step off, my mental compass telling me exactly where I’m headed. The
address became amalgamated in my head years ago. I memorized it during the
first few weeks on the job because I didn’t want to accidentally end up in this
neighborhood and be forced to interact with him on my off days. My plan was to
keep a wide berth around the Marina District at all times.

I glide past an organic grocery store busy with
Friday-night shoppers carrying bags or pushing carts. Then, I cross the street
and pass a liquor store, a hamburger place, the Marina Green where a few homeless
people sit around in the dark waiting for life to begin. Another block, I cross
a busy intersection and see the house across the street. It’s a modest-looking
Spanish-style house with a red-tiled roof. For several moments, I stand on the
corner, feeling indecision hammering at me. Should I go to his house and knock
on the door? What am I going to say? Have I planned this out? Do I ever plan
anything out?

Briefly, I scan the neighborhood, which
consists of charming Spanish-style houses standing shoulder to shoulder. I can
still smell the hamburger joint. Unable to move towards the house, I contemplate
food instead, and then turn around and head back toward the smell. Inside the
small white-walled diner, I order fries and a Coke. Behind my table, two women
sit talking and eating. I hear their plates clank but can’t see them. I tune
them out, as if they’re suddenly speaking silently. Instead I watch the
slow-moving people outside the window.

The place buzzes and cackles with the dinner-hour
crowd filling in. I take a few more bites of my French fries and sip down my
Coke. Then, I slide my bag over my shoulder and walk out of the restaurant. Jaywalking,
I cross the street, which is narrow and full of slow moving cars. Soon, I
arrive back at his block, where I see his house unchanged. This time, I stride
all the way to his door and knock three times and stand back. The creak of
footsteps. The door swings open.

Robert stands there wearing a grey t-shirt, jeans.
Bare feet. His hair looks as if he’s just run from madmen.

“Hi,” I say, the only word of which I’m capable
because I have the urge to jump on a horse and ride away into the night. “Can I
come in for a minute?”

His hand still holds the doorknob and for a
second he just looks at me. Then he makes a sweeping gesture, which causes queasy
swirls in my stomach. Even so, I stride inside his house, my flats clacking on
his stone floors. He closes the door. Only one black sofa sits against the wall
under the window. In front of it is a small glass coffee table. One long
blood-colored rug lies on the floor. It looks Persian, exotic. On the left, the
kitchen looks darkly lit and empty, full of sharp metallic corners. Off to the
right is, I assume, his bedroom, maybe an office. Nearby is a long black
rectangular dining table under a modern chandelier that looks like sharp knives
dangling.

“What do you want?” he asks, his blue eyes
looking bloodshot. His biceps under his short sleeves look as though they could
hurt someone. I smell the faint scent of alcohol.