River City One by John J. Waters

Author:John J. Waters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Permuted
Published: 2023-08-23T17:08:08+00:00

I limped into the office later that morning and tossed my keys into a drawer. My knees and back ached from the miles I carried the rucksack through the neighborhood, but my head felt clear. Although the boxes of deposition transcripts were beginning to collect dust, I still could not bring myself to work on the summaries. At least not this morning. I knocked on Ned’s door, finding him seated in his chair and looking out the window, fidgeting with a plant on the windowsill. That work was not on his mind was one reason I sought Ned’s company. He shared a wall but nothing else with Slaven.

“I met a woman last night.”

“Good for you,” he said. “I hear they’re everywhere nowadays. Women, I mean. As a matter of fact, I encountered one myself. We matched months ago and went out once.”

Slaven was talking loudly into his speakerphone from the office next door, his voice crackling and pulsing through the air around my head.

“Have you noticed there doesn’t seem to be any decorum left?”

Ned yanked apart the lapels of his jacket, flattening his chin against his neck to get a better look at something on the front of his clean white shirt.

“Right along here is where it was,” he said, a hand hovering over the side of his chest. “I’m talking about a young lady who fails to acknowledge me in the grocery. That a young woman refuses to look at my eyes but offers me two whole eyefuls of—how do I say it, delicately—side boob.”

A tray of folders was arranged in a metal organizer on his spotless desk. There was no way of knowing what the folders held or even to whom they belonged. I had never seen Ned work. According to the biography he authored for the firm website, Ned “focused his practice on delivering comprehensive corporate counsel to complex international clients.” To my knowledge, it was not something the firm had ever done.

His was the only office attorneys cared to drop by for a leisure visit, burning precious minutes of billable time to leach off Ned’s style, his sophistication, picking Ned’s pocket for something to say about the menu of a new restaurant or an order to make at the trendy cocktail lounge. He was older, a brush of gray on both sideburns and around his ears, with a well-guarded private life no one had ever seen but assumed was just as cosmopolitan as his manners. Ned was a tastemaker. Ned was a person who made choices, and in the choice between sexless work and doing nothing, Ned preferred to do absolutely nothing.

“I saw her near the entrance to the store and she was with a gentleman, if that’s what you call a man who wears a stocking cap inside of a building. I pass from the fruits toward the vegetables and the young lady and I make brief eye contact, so there’s recognition, and she simply looks away. Who knows what interested her? It was as if my eyes had been magnetized to repel.

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