The Forgotten Hours(14)
“Good day, Miss Pretty,” he said. His hair was so lush it looked as if a comb wouldn’t make its way through the thicket. It shone under the overheads, giving off a faintly perfumed smell.
“Morning, Drasko,” Katie said, pressing the up button. “Good weekend?”
Drasko was one of a small roster of security-guards-cum-receptionists and the only one who had been there since she’d worked as an intern the summer between her junior and senior years. Back then her hair had been very short, and the Serb had always looked a little alarmed when he saw her, as though thinking, each and every time, Why would a woman choose to have hair like that? The next summer on her first day back—as a paid consultant this time—she’d been growing out her hair, and he’d broken into a grin of instant recognition and approval. That’s when he started calling her “Miss Pretty.” It seemed like something Katie should be upset about (she noticed he never greeted other employees that way), but she didn’t find it upsetting. She often wondered about that. Sometimes in those early months in the city, she’d been so lonely that Drasko’s cheerful, soft face had been the only thing that made her feel connected to humanity. It had been wintertime; she’d graduated from Vassar a semester early, taken a tiny sublet in Queens. Those months, dark and frigid, while she’d hauled groceries to her walk-up so she could eat alone at a card table, Drasko’s face would pop up in her mind periodically, the uncomplicated smile, the welcoming gesture, the predictability of it. Miss Pretty. It wasn’t always bad or uncomfortable to be noticed.
On the fifty-second floor there was a real reception desk, above which hung a sign with blocky gold lettering that read HCG. The entire floor was studded with cubicles personalized with a plant or a light or family pictures, some piled high with papers and others pristine. The office itself was not all that important to Katie—during the workday she really only craved light, which she got plenty of, since she sat on the outer edge of the room near a window overlooking West Forty-Eighth Street. She liked the quiet studiousness of the place: everyone’s head bent over spreadsheets, inches from a screen, absorbed by some presentation, banging out client reports with a focus unbroken by ringing phones or collegial chatter. She’d taken to the work quickly, even though she found spreadsheets boring and was, truthfully, only mildly interested in the problems the consultants were trying to solve. Since she was good with numbers, she was able to lose herself in the work; that was helpful. She tried to ignore the fact that it all didn’t seem to amount to much, that it was soul deadening. Every problem they wrestled with seemed to end up in the same place: yet another slide in some endless deck showing how many people to lay off.
The morning went by quickly; she was researching the production cycle of various breakfast cereals. It was pointless work, since she wasn’t currently assigned to a project. She was “on the beach,” in consulting lingo. The other junior consultants loved being on the beach because it meant weeks of early nights and lazy mornings, but Katie far preferred being busy. At lunch she stepped out to stretch her legs. When she got back, one of the vice presidents was sitting behind the front desk, tapping into a smartphone. “Hey, Mr. Montague,” she said. “Changed jobs, have you?”
Montague was in his late sixties. He was huge around the middle and had the disconcerting habit of sucking his teeth. “Filling in for Janis while she visits the ladies,” he said. “Sometimes it’s good to get a feel for what’s happening out here in the real world.” He frowned while not moving his eyes from her.
Katie stopped her forward movement. “Everything okay? Can I help with something?”
He held out a piece of paper. “You got some calls. I took messages for you,” he said.
Before she even took the paper from him, her skin started to tingle. “Oh, thanks,” she said. He had written in block letters: Dennis Kanton, the Guardian, and Juliana DeVorgay, from some unfamiliar online site. Montague’s watery eyes bored into her, and she felt she had to give him some sort of explanation. “Some old business I need to deal with. Nothing to worry about.”
“You’re not in some sort of trouble, are you, sweetheart?”
His endearment put her on edge. “No,” she said, “nothing to worry about.”
“You’re on the beach, right?” he asked.
“Yup,” she said, “but just for the past week or so.”
“Good. Why don’t you take it easy for a bit?” He hesitated, his lips curling inward toward his teeth. “You’re looking a bit peaked, if you don’t mind my saying.”
Involuntarily, her hand rose to her face, and she smoothed away some stray hairs. This morning she’d applied her makeup carefully, dressing in a new silk shirt and a dark-gray jacket and skirt, styling her hair in a low bun. It was a curse that people felt they could read her moods or her needs on her face, when she herself was trying so hard to appear decidedly neutral.
Smiling at him as naturally as she could, she said, “Maybe I’ll do just that,” and headed to her cubicle.
Charlie Gregory had spoken to reporters once, right after her husband’s sentencing. The headline the next day read, “West Mills Wife Stands by Convicted Rapist” (especially ironic, of course, as it was soon proven to be untrue). For a few semesters at college, Katie had devoured a variety of seminal journalism books in a class that advertised itself as offering a fresh look at the modern media landscape: she’d read Blur, Flat Earth News, The Death and Life of American Journalism, and so on, all those doom-and-gloom books that cast a cold shadow over what was supposed to be such a noble profession. But what had stuck with her most was a book she couldn’t remember the name of. It was slim and somewhat outdated, with a faded orange cover that curled at the edges, and it covered how data could be manipulated. As she’d flipped through the pages in the stacks at the library one day, it had seemed as though she were waking up to a world made up of rules she hadn’t even known existed. She had already learned that people could not be trusted, but she had put her trust in numbers. Reading that book made her understand that there were no exceptions to the rule: human beings were always compelled to bring their own agenda to any endeavor. Juries, for example, didn’t operate on mathematical principles: they didn’t simply add up complex numbers and provide an airtight solution, presto. They came to their job as human beings, flawed and easily swayed. You could never truly be objective or dispassionate; your biases would always drive the way you saw reality and expressed facts. Returning to her cubicle at work, sliding into her chair, she thought again of that little orange book.