I lower my phone and put my hand to my neck. “And what the hell exactly was that? What she was wearing? Around her neck?”
“It’s called a butterfly tie,” Lynette says. “It’s a women’s bow tie.”
I wait for more. When more is not forthcoming, I say, “A women’s bow tie.” The secret to getting people to tell you things is that you repeat their last few words. There’s nothing more stimulating to people than their own words.
As one of my lawyers, Lynette’s seen me use that technique hundreds of times but she still falls for it. “A women’s bow tie, very Kmart circa 1989. A little bit Korean schoolgirl, a little bit country-mouse-goes-to-Sunday-school. It’s not something anybody would ever wear.”
“Women are wearing bow ties now?” Kaufenmeier asks. “Can you all leave one thing to us?”
“No, she wasn’t wearing a bow tie like a man wears,” Lynette explains. “A butterfly tie is a largish bow with the ends trailing out. Imagine a slim-ish scarf tied in a bow around her neck, though I’d bet any amount of money it’s pre-tied and she clips it on. That would be so gray bird.”
I frown. The clip-on aspect definitely ruins my fantasy—you can’t slowly pull the end of a clip-on bow and untie it. You cannot pull it clear of the collar with slow, taunting deliberation.
If she were mine, I’d demand that it be an actual long bit of fabric tied around her collar that I could untie, like untying the bow on a gift, the gift in this scenario being her complete and utter undoing. I’d pull it out from under her collar, slowly. Pull it away. And then the buttons, one, two, three. A scrap of a bra, white, no frills.
The elevator comes to a stop on six. We get off and I head to my office, mind spinning on the country mouse down there.
Is it a clip or a tied bow? A tied bow would also be best because once undone, the tie would be there. Always useful for sexual hijinks. I’d hold it up in the air to show her. Would her gaze change then? Would she finally feel wary?
Though there’s something to be said for the pre-tied bow. Any woman that I could take seriously as a human being would clip on a pre-tied bow. Fashion is an incredible waste of time. A woman I’d take seriously would appreciate that. She’d be interested in efficiency and order and not wasting the time of tying the bow.
So now I have two too many sexual fantasies about some country mouse I’ll never see again.
Or will I?
Who is she? What business does she have here? My business has a lot of different segments. Was she going to HR?
I pick up the papers on my desk. These are things I need to sign. There are tabs by the contract changes.
I grab my pen, imagining tracing my tongue along that coy curve of her nose. I imagine her sprawled beneath me, hair a sandstone halo around her head, and she’s undone and panting, naked in my bed. Or naked except for the butterfly tie.
I swallow back the dryness in my mouth.
One of the admins comes in. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he says. He’s here for the contract.
“No, hold on.” I look at the changes and sign, hand it over. “Tell me, is HR conducting interviews today?”
“Interviews for what?” he asks.
“Interviews for hiring,” I say. “Find out.”
3
Noelle
The elevator I’m allowed in only goes up to the second floor. I get out and step up to the desk. A woman on the phone there holds up a finger, signaling that I’m to wait. She has red hair tightly coiled into a bun on top of her head with a little braid woven in and out. According to the little sign, her name is Anya.
“Can I help you?” Anya asks.
“I need to see Mr. Blackberg, please.”
“Do you have an appointment with Mr. Blackberg?”
“I have something that I have to show to him,” I say. “Regarding a property.”
“Appointment?” she asks again.
“No,” I say.
“You can’t see him without an appointment. You’ll want to call the main line.”
I clutch my bag, feeling the outline of the iPad with the movie cued up. “I feel that he’ll want to see what I have.”
“You have to talk to his staff. The number’s on our site.”
“It’s time-sensitive. It pertains to 341 West Forty-fifth Street, a property he recently purchased.”
“In what way is it time sensitive?” Anya asks.
I suck in a breath. “In a way pertaining to the property. He needs to see it.”
“You’re going to have to give me more than that,” she says.
“Something for his eyes only,” I say. “Extremely important.”
She regards me for a bit. She picks up a phone. “I’ve got a woman with something about 341 West Forty-fifth,” she says, sizing me up. Then, “She won’t say. Mr. Blackberg’s eyes only? I don’t know. She thinks it’s urgent but she won’t say.”
She sets down the phone. “This way.” She leads me down a hall past a row of cubicles. We pass another elevator. This one, too, has a black pad. Do the black pad elevators lead to the offices above? We arrive at a door bearing the name Janice West. The woman with the red bun knocks.
“Wait,” I say. “It’s Mr. Blackberg who I need to see. It has to be him.”
A female voice. “Yeah.”
Anya gestures me through the open door.
Janice West is a stately woman in her forties with a long neck, black hair, and bright red lips. “What is it that you have to show Mr. Blackberg?”
“It’s exclusively for Mr. Blackberg.”
“That’s not how this works,” Janice says. “I’ll take a look at whatever you have that’s so very urgent, and I’ll decide if it seems important enough to pass upstairs.”
“It’s for him alone to—”
“The answer’s no.” She waves a hand for Anya and me to skedaddle.
“Come on, then,” Anya says.
“No, wait,” I say. “It’s from the tenants. Things he needs to know about the building.”
“There’s nothing he needs to know about the building. He’s knocking that building down, and that tends to get rid of the issues with a building,” Janice says.
“No, we need him to know…look, we’re losing our homes. There’s just this small film I wanted to show him. It shows what the place means to us…”
“That would be a hard no,” Janice says. “The hardest of hard nos.”
“You’re leaving,” Anya says.
“But we’re losing our homes.”
Janice says, “There’s nothing anybody can do about that.”
I don’t know why this makes me mad, but it really does. “Mr. Blackberg could do something about it. He could change his mind—I heard there are other ways he could execute this project. If he could just see it. Look…it’s just us telling…” I open the small portfolio and turn on the screen and press play, tilting it so that they both can see it. I have it cued up to a part with Maisey. She’s the most persuasive. She starts talking about what 341 means to her.