Precisely at twelve (one and one-half hours after his first break and two and one half hours before his next), Matt pulled the door of his cubicle shut and carried his brown paper bag to the nearest lounge. He bought a can of Diet Coke from the machine and sat down at the same table where he sat every day. He could have had his choice; the big room was at its emptiest at noon, for packing a lunch and eating it here was a certain sign of nobodiness.
Matt didn’t notice the dew nobodies at other tables; he was intently revising his devastating putdowns of Ada Silberwetter, none of which had come to his mind during their actual conversation. As fierce growls worked their way around his imagination, he unbagged his sandwich, This was the last of the leftover turkey. Pity. It might get a little monotonous, these weeks right after Thanksgiving, but it relieved him of the trouble of making a decision about the menu.
He set his apple to the right of the Diet Coke, just above the scratch pad. By now his imagination had him rescuing a penitent Ada Silberwetter from a blizzard, fleeing to a snowbound cabin where they would be holed up for days. Matt frowned over the phrase “holed up”. He wrote it down. Then he scratched it out.
He shifted his mind to the mostly empty scratch pad. Luch was for coming up with Inspired Plots and Scenes for “Ascent of the Ruby Slippers” or for some award-winning short story that would make that novel saleable. Matt yearned to write elegant horror stories about ancient spirits of the green who menaced picnickers or sensuous women who, after a night on the town, threw off their clothes and jumped back into the sewer system. Somehow, though, everything he wrote sounded like something he had written.
“Too cold to go out, isn’t it? What’ve they got for lunch in vendoland?”
Matt glanced up into the blazing eyes of Linda Szarkowski’s parrot pen. The eyes rattled at him as Linda moved past to the row of vending machines, cocked her hips to one side, and considered the selection.
Matt’s eyes went back to the scratch pad. He scratched a little more ink over the words “Holed up”. When Linda came back to sit at his table, he put his pen across the phrase just in case.
“So, ah….” Linda dropped her package of cheese and crackers on the tabletop. “Going to that, er, party, then?”
Matt grimaced. Smiling, Linda dug at the plastic wrapper. “Need a ride?”
Matt thought it over: it would save him cab fare. But Linda lived down south. No sense putting her miles out of her way by taking her up on what was probably just a polite conversation opener.
“No,” he said. “I’m all set. Thanks anyway.”
Lina shrugged, twice, quickly, while stabbing at the plastic with long pink nails. “The Silberwetters will be there, I suppose.”
Matt shrugged back at her, but she didn’t see it. Her clawing was bringing her no closer to the cheese and crackers. Matt considered offering to help. But that might embarrass her.
She glanced up at him and ran a finger through the hair at the side of her head. “Um, you’re still a writer, aren’t you?”
Matt had even less of an answer than for her previous remark. “Well, um, er.” He fumbled with his pen but suddenly remembered it was camouflage. “You heard what m…what Mrs. Lowe said, didn’t you?”
“Once a writer, always a writer?” Linda nodded. “I wish I had a job I liked that much.” One thumbnail tore away a corner of the plastic, exposing crackers to open air. She removed one cracker, shook her head, and went on, “I wonder how Mrs. Silberwetter knows her.”
Matt shrugged some more. Linda set an elbow on the table. “I never heard Mrs. Silberwetter was interested in literature,” she said.
“No,” Matt replied, with another shrug.
Linda cleared her throat and leaned forward to try harder. “You think maybe she’s going to do her memoirs? With a ghostwriter, I mean. I wouldn’t think Mrs. Lowe would do that, but maybe she heard you were a writer and that’s what she wanted from you.”
“I wouldn’t know what she wants,” muttered Matt. “She didn’t say.”
Linda’s eyes narrowed. She tapped her cracker on the table. “Well, I, oh, I suppose it’s all nothing. Who could have told her you were a writer anyhow? I mean…I know, but we’ve been around a long time. We’re the last ones left from that crowd: Nelson, Dick….”
“There’s Himself,” Matt felt obliged to point out.
“Oh, he was here before us.” Linda scratched at the plastic covering the cheese compartment of the package. “The older generation, really. He moved up to that office a month after I got there….oh God, how many years ago?” She shrank away from the thought.
Matt had heard legends of a time before Walter Prince, but he hadn’t been around Down as long as Linda. “His, er, predecessor….” He cleared his throat; it always made him uncomfortable to use four-syllable words in mixed company. “He died, didn’t he?”
Linda nodded, concentrating on the cheese. “Yeah. There’s no promotion in that department except by death.” She tossed the packet on the tabletop and gazed morosely at Matt’s lunch.
Matt plopped a hand over his Diet Coke. “No cyanide capsules, please.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go after you.” Linda grinned. “Himself, maybe. I wouldn’t mind being in Nairn’s shoes either.” She glanced over her shoulder and leaned forward to whisper, “I hear he’s got Walt Prince on his arm.”
Matt shrugged. Linda lowered both head and voice, eyes shifting left and right. “When I just started here, the inspectors pick him up. Everyone said he’d spill the beans and drag a lot of them into it. But he never did. I expect that’s why they found him a cubicle at Down.”
Matt shrugged again. “Could be.”
Linda wrinkled her nose in distaste. Whether this was for him, Carleton Nairn, Walter Prince, or the cheeseless cracker she’d bitten into, Matt couldn’t tell.
She swallowed and reached for the packet. “Think this has any harmful additives?”
“Probably.”
The packet bounced on her palm. “If they were going to put all this stuff in anyway,” she declared, “You’d think they’d go on putting stuff in until they got it right.”
The possibility that Linda was too broke, rather than too cold, to go out for lunch crossed Matt’s mind. Was there a good way to offer her half of an undistinguished sandwich without sounding condescending? Leftover turkey: that was the key. He could say “Here, want to help me get rid of my leftover turkey?”
“I give up,” she said, just as he opened his mouth. “I’ll try my luck at Arby’s, wind or no wind. See you.”
She nodded goodbye and the parrot head on her pen did the same. He watched her cross the lounge, mind racing for a way to call her back and offer her half a sandwich. On her way out, she shoved the cheese and cracker packet past the metal lid of the trashcan. She moved on, as Matt stared at the can, pressing his hands down hard on the tabletop to force himself not to jump up. That was a dollar’s worth of uneaten food gone to waste. But, as Walter Prince’s assistant he could hardly be seen fishing cheese and crackers out of the garbage. He grabbed his pen and scrawled “crackers and cheese” on the pad. Then he decided there was no reason to record it.
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