“You sure jumpy, Mr. Fly,” I said, as I might have when I was a child. “But you could be a Miss Fly, huh?”
The idea that the neurotic fly could have been a female brought Mona to mind. I hustled my cart toward the elevator, passing Big Linda on the way. She was standing in the hall with another young black woman, talking. The funny thing about them was that they were both holding their hands as if they were smoking, but of course they weren’t, as smoking was forbidden in any office building in New York.
“I got to wait for a special delivery from, um, investigations,” Big Linda explained.
“I got to go see a friend on three,” I replied.
“Oh.” Linda seemed relieved.
I realized that she was afraid I’d tell Ernie that she was idling with her friends. Somehow that stung more than her sneers and insults.
She was still wearing the beaded sweater, but instead of the eraser she had a tiny Wite-Out brush in her hand, held half an inch from a sheet of paper on her violet blotter.
“I bet that blotter used to be blue, huh?”
“What?” She frowned at me.
“That blotter, it looks violet, purple, but that’s because it was once blue but the sun shined on it, from the window.”
Lana turned her upper torso to see the window that I meant. I could see the soft contours of her small breasts against the white fabric.
“Oh,” she said, turning back to me. “I guess.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I notice things like that. My mother says that it’s why I never finish anything. She says that I get distracted all the time and don’t keep my eye on the job.”
“Do you have more mail for me?” Lana Donelli asked.
“No, uh-uh, I was just thinking.”
Lana looked at the drying Wite-Out brush and jammed it back into the small bottle that was in her other hand.
“I was thinking about when I saw you this morning,” I continued. “About when I saw you and asked about the air-conditioning and your sweater and you looked at me like I was crazy.”
“Yes,” she said, “why did you ask that?”
“Because I thought you were Mona Donelli,” I said triumphantly.
“Oh,” she sounded disappointed. “Most people figure out that I’m not Mona because my nameplate says ‘Lana Donelli.’”
“Oh,” I said, completely crushed. I could notice a blotter turning violet but I couldn’t read.
The look on my face brought a smile out of the mortgage receptionist.
“Don’t look so sad,” she said. “I mean, even when they see the name, a lotta people still call me Mona.”
“They do?”
“Yeah. They see the name and think that Mona’s a nickname or something. Isn’t that dumb?”
“I saw your sister on the fifth floor in a red dress, and then I saw a fly who couldn’t sit still, and then I knew that you had to be somebody else,” I said.
“You’re funny,” Lana said, crinkling up her nose as if she were trying to identify a scent. “What’s your name?”
“Rufus Coombs.”
“Hi, Rufus,” she said, holding out a hand.
“Hey,” I said.
My apartment is on 158th Street in Washington Heights. It’s pretty much a Spanish-speaking neighborhood. I don’t know many people, but the rent is all I can afford. My apartment—living room with a kitchen cove, small bedroom, and toilet with a shower—is on the eighth floor and looks out over the Hudson. The $458 a month includes heat and gas, but I pay my own electric. I took it because of the view. There was a three-hundred-dollar unit on the second floor, but it had windows that looked out onto a brick wall.
I don’t own much. I have a single mattress on the floor, an old oak chair that I found on the street, and kitchen shelving that I bought from a liquidator for bookshelves, propped up in the corner. I have a rice pot, a frying pan, and a kettle, and enough cutlery and plates for two, twice as much as I need most days.
I have Rachel, an ex-girlfriend living in the East Village, who will call me back at work if I don’t call her too often. I have two other friends, Eric Chen and Willy Jones. They both live in Brooklyn and still go to school.
That evening I climbed the seven flights up to my apartment because the elevator had stopped working in December. I sat in my chair and looked at the river. It was peaceful, and I relaxed. A fly was buzzing up against the glass, trying to push his way through to the world outside.
I got up to kill him. That’s what I always did when there was a fly in the house, I killed it. But up close I hesitated and watched the frantic insect. His coloring was unusual, a metallic green. The dull red eyes seemed too large for the body, like he was an intelligent mutant fly from some far-flung future on late-night television.
He buzzed up and down against the pane, trying to get away from me. When I returned to my chair, he settled. The red sun was hovering above the cliffs of New Jersey. The green fly watched. I thought of the fly I’d seen at work. That one was black and fairly small, by fly standards. Then I thought about Mona and then Lana. The smallest nudge of an erection stirred. I thought of calling Rachel but didn’t have the heart to walk the three blocks to a phone booth. So I watched the sunset gleaming around the fly, who was now just a black spot on the window.
I guess I fell asleep.
At three a.m. I woke up and made macaroni and cheese from a mix. The fly came into the cooking cove where I stood eating my meal. He lit on the big spoon I used to stir the macaroni and joined me for my late-night supper.
Ernie told me that Landsend mortgaging got most of their mail from the real-mail mail room, that they didn’t get most of the interoffice junk mail.
“Why not?” I asked.
“There’s just a few people up there. Most of their employees are off-site.”
“Well, could you put them on the junk list?”
“She a white girl?”
“So?”
“Nuthin’. But I want you tell me what it’s like if you get some.”
I didn’t answer him.
For the next week I took invitations to office parties, sales-force newsletters, and “Insurance Tips,” penned by Mr. Averill, up to Lana Donelli’s desk. We made small talk for thirty seconds or so, and then she’d pick up the phone to make a call. I always looked back as I rounded the corner to make sure she really had a call to make; she always did.
At the end of the week I bought her a paperweight with the image of a smiling Buddha’s face in it. When I got to her desk, she wasn’t there. I waited around for a while, but she didn’t return, so I wrote her a note, saying “From Rufus to Lana,” and put the heavy glass weight on it.