2.
Laura was back at home. Glancing up at her apartment on East 69th and Third Avenue, she sighed. Another work day over. She was an accountant at J.P. Morgan Chase. Her office was at the corner of 2nd and 58th Street, in Midtown. Easily walkable. Another 27-year-old Manhattan cliché. She was born and raised in San Francisco, in Pacific Heights, and moved to New York to attend NYU. She’d graduated with a degree in accounting two years ago.
She entered her apartment, slamming the door and triple-locking it behind her. Christ. Leaning her back against the shut door she closed her eyes. She was exhausted. The first thing she did was kick off her heels—J-Crew D’Orsay pumps. Reaching in her cabinet she snatched a clean wine glass. From her fridge she grabbed her bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. She poured a nice, full glass.
Stepping into her living room, she eyed her gigantic Matisse painting on her wall, the only piece of art she owned: Large Reclining Nude. The blue tiled background in the painting always stuck out to her. The misshapen, large-armed woman. The green bars above. The yellow ball, mixed with the red long rectangular shelf. It was oil and canvass. Her mother had bought it for her years ago. Mom, despite being a doctor, was a fervent art collector. She could talk your ear off about Matisse and Picasso and Cezanne and Gauguin. She especially loved 19th century French art.
Laura sat on her gray leather couch. It crunched. She kicked her feet onto the thick maple coffee table. She leaned back against the couch. Sighing again, she drank deeply from her glass. The chilled white wine swam slowly down her throat, into her stomach, that acidic, cloying taste, warming her insides. Thank God for wine.
God, she thought. Greg Torino. Greg was her boss at Chase. He wasn’t a bad guy. It was just that he so badly wanted to fuck her. (Then again: Who didn’t? She laughed at her own vanity.) He was 42—fifteen years older than her. And married. He had two kids. Men were absurd creatures, really. Good ole Biology: They wanted to “spread the seed.” They didn’t care if they were married and had kids. They wanted to screw. Laura sipped more wine. She began to feel slightly more calm, relaxed.
Getting involved with your boss was a bad idea. She’d been taken advantage of. At the first job she ever had. In San Francisco. When she was just barely twenty. The summer before she moved to New York City. She’d been a server at Joe’s Crab Shack along on Pier 33. Tourists came from all over the globe. She hated the job. People acted like assholes. Men undressed her with their eyes every day. The kids were out of control. Tips were shoddy. Rich people. She was annoyed by them even though she, herself, was “one of them.”
One night, after closing, when the restaurant was locked up and a few of them were mopping the floor and counting the register, Juan, one of the cooks, approached her and said, “Hey. Boss wants to see you. Told me to tell you.”
“About what?” she said.
Juan shrugged.
She leaned her mop against a nearby table and walked, slowly, across the restaurant, passing all the empty tables. She felt nervous. Her boss was a large, intimidating man. Mr. Rollins was easily 6’4. In his early fifties. He had a full head of graying hair, always gelled back like a greaser. On his right forearm he had a small tattoo. She’d realized weeks into the job that it was a military tattoo: An eagle clutching an olive branch with the letters U.S.M.C. around the eagle. He rarely smiled. He was married but had no kids. He and Laura had barely exchanged more than half a dozen words the two months she’d been there, besides her brief interview. His hands, she had often noted, were the size of baseball mitts, veined and wormy.
She stood in front of his office door. The door was big and wide and red and had a giant brass knob. The impulse to turn around and take off raced through her. She glanced back down the hallway. Empty. Barely, she could hear the sound of Juan and another boy speaking Spanish a ways off. And the very slight click of a keyboard behind the door.
Laura knocked, timidly. The typing ceased.
“Who is it?” a deep, booming voice said.