Chapter 16
The next day, I checked my email from my cubicle at the admin building when I finished up my shift.
Nothing from Montrose.
It was the second week of January and my long hours at the admin building were over, the new front end system working well, with only a couple of glitches.
Everybody at work today was celebrating and backslapping and the consultants were getting ready to move on to their next assignment.
I would return to just a couple of hours late in the afternoon a few days a week.
The guy who had asked me out for New Year’s Eve stopped by my cubicle and said goodbye and I wished him luck at his next stop.
I decided to have a long dinner alone at the caf and get my studying done there before heading to Montrose’s office.
Having only had one day of classes so far, there wasn’t much to do, but I got the reading done, not wanting to fall behind.
I had worked like a dog to get in here, there was no way I was going to get bounced for poor grades.
Still, it was work, and though I did enjoy it, it didn’t come as effortlessly to me as it did to Jane, who seemed never to crack a book and still got great grades for the first semester.
(Though I’d had to ask her several times before she put forth that information.)
I checked my text and email on the walk over to Snyder from the caf, not wanting to walk in only to have Montrose say, “Didn’t you get the message? Your ass is out of here.”
Not that he’d say it like that. He was a writer, after all.
No message from him. To my relief (and maybe a bit of disappointment) his office window was dark, my strategy of stalling paying off. I knocked on his office door, just in case, before letting myself in.
I was loud as I unlocked the door, even coughing, in case Montrose was there but had decided to take a nap on the couch or something, thus turning out the lights.
Not that I thought that would be the case, but I didn’t want to take the chance of surprising or waking him and giving him even more reason to be pissed off at me.
He wasn’t there. I hung up my coat, knit hat and mittens, and slid off my boots, putting them in the corner to dry out while I worked.
As I rounded his desk, the first thing I noticed was a space where his laptop had been. After yesterday, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Instead, there were a handful of flash drives and a note.
Unpacking my laptop and phone and other stuff from my bag, I read the note from Montrose.
Syd,
Sorry about the misunderstanding yesterday. Perhaps the best way to go about the work is for you to transfer all your transcriptions and outlines to a flash drive and just leave it on the desk. I’ll take it from there.
My last class is done at three daily, so I plan to take classwork home, and read it from my apartment each night, leaving the office open for you to work.
Billy
Well, at least we weren’t back to “Ms. O’Brien.” But there wasn’t one shred of anything personal in that note. I know, because I read it fourteen times analyzing it for something—anything—that would make me think we were back on track on a personal level.
Much as I wanted to find something, it was all business. And designed in such a way that he wouldn’t have to see me.
And, obviously, I wouldn’t have access to his chapter one docs anymore.
All forty gajillion of them.
I pulled the next pile from the credenza.
Skylark would be a fast pile to transcribe.
I even considered not doing the process I went through with the One Mile Trot pile of cutting and pasting into different outline ideas.
But no, even if that wasn’t part of the job, per se, it was an element that I enjoyed and was sure would help Montrose whenever he got around to writing fresh.
I snorted into the silent room as I wondered to myself if the man even knew how to type the words “Chapter Two.”
My anger rose as I entered the notes from the various pieces of paper, napkins, and backs of envelopes, into a cohesive document on my laptop.
Yes, we hadn’t discussed boundaries for me as it applied to his past work.
Or lack of it, as the case seemed to be.
But, if I had just been his assistant, if we hadn’t spent all those hours FaceTiming and talking and texting and discussing everything under the sun, would he still have flown off the handle at the thought that I knew he was basically a crippled writer for the past five years, unable, or unwilling, to go beyond three paragraphs?
If we hadn’t pressed our bodies into each other, clinging together with a shared wanting. If we hadn’t kissed for hours on the couch, would I, as nothing more than a glorified typist, have been permitted to see those all-mighty beginnings of some two hundred different novels?
But then I thought about the lovely clinging. And the kissing. And I knew I wouldn’t trade having had that for anything.
Even if I would never have it again.
My anger dissipated into sadness for what wouldn’t be, but I kept typing, even though my eyes got a little glassy and at one point I couldn’t even read my screen through the unshed tears.
Part of me even understood what made him lose it yesterday. (Not that he really lost it—I knew real losing it.)
The insecurity he felt as a writer, something I supposed every writer or artist went through at times, was something I very much understood.
His numerous chapter ones were the equivalent of my standing at the mall, staring at racks of shoes or clothing on a semi-regular basis because I’d noticed a new trend with the Bribury girls.
I knew insecurity. And I knew the feeling of shame at having your insecurities found out, like when those Bribury bitches called me a poser to Jane.
I shoved the Skylark pile a little further away from my keyboard, but still within reading distance. The tears were falling now. Not hard, and not often.
But there was no way I was going to leave my tearstains on Billy Montrose’s papers.