12 Bliss Street (2 page)

“No, Fred is on the paying side.”

“He wants certain features and when we deliver he decides he wants something else,” Nicola told him. “He’s like a man who keeps arguing with his architect: take down this wall. It doesn’t matter how often we explain that then the whole structure will collapse.”

“Why are you fighting me?” Guy asked.

Because I’m right, Nicola thought.

“Just, be nice when you tell him something won’t work,” he said, and he brought out his inhaler. “Smile, flirt with him a little if you have to.”

I can’t believe this, Nicola thought.

“Otherwise,” Guy said, “I’ll have to sit in, and you know how I hate to sit in. I remember all the times I’m forced to sit in when I’m cutting the bonuses.”

Was that a threat? I practically run this whole business, Nicola thought, and she looked across the table at Audrey, who raised a pierced eyebrow back. Nicola fought the temptation to say what she felt, a familiar feeling. She was from a hardworking family, a family of professionals, all of them smart and patient and willing to try difficult tasks. Her father ran his own cement business; her mother was a speech therapist who specialized in children with head traumas. Nicola grew up in a large stone house in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and although they had plenty of money she and her brothers went to neighborhood schools—or, as her mother put it, they supported the public school system. Nicola was the middle child, the neat one, the only girl. At seven she was reading to blind children on Saturday afternoons while across the hall her mother fund-raised for upgraded equipment for them. She was raised to be productive, useful, helpful, organized—in short, valued for her abilities.

And now she was being asked to, what, smile?

“So, before we move on,” Guy continued, holding his inhaler out like a pipe, “let’s go over Nicola’s tasks. One, test browser solutions before you go all geeky on me. And two, smile. Simple, right? I’m sure you have a lovely smile.”

Nicola looked at Audrey again then looked back at Guy.

“Don’t you have a lovely smile?” Guy asked her.

She smiled.

“Lovely,” Guy said. “Let’s move on.”

He turned to Rick again and Nicola felt her face stiffen with embarrassment. What an unbelievable asshole. And he was so wrong about the browser solution. He was just so consistently wrong. She would have to do what she usually did: fix the problem and show Guy the result and then listen to Guy tell her that since it was fixed, okay, but really she could have saved a lot of time by doing something or other else. Mostly she tried not to think too much about it, but the day was fairly crappy already at only ten twenty-five
A.M
. and she felt annoyed and sick of the whole game. Nicola looked around the stainless-steel table at everyone waiting for their share of abuse, while Guy sneezed again violently (his bowed head praying over his coffee cup) and she thought if I were his son I’d hold my breath too.

Two

The morning did
not get any better. When she got back to her desk Nicola found e-mail messages from three customers: one had a crashed disk and asked if she could send thirty-five pieces of artwork all over again; one hadn’t paid for their last job and wanted Nicola to “rethink the billing”; and one who called her incompetent.

Nicola stared at the word on the screen. He actually wrote the word incompetent. How could he say that when last month she customized a java program that solved a problem no one at his company had been able to solve?

She looked up at the whiteboards above her desk, where part of the code she had written for him was still visible. Nicola shared a room with five other people: Audrey, the Web master; Christian, Andrew, and Louise, the other designers; and Carlos, an artist. Their desks, wooden tables with two or sometimes three computers on each, were divided from each other by industrial metal shelving. Aside from the computer equipment everything in the room was fairly low end—Christian’s desk, for instance, was held together by a bungee cord. Still, it was a beautiful space: high ceilings, a skylight, and along one entire wall a stained oak bookshelf that Audrey made when the company was first getting started, five years ago. Guy had his own office, Alia and her assistant, Laney, sat in the large front room looking out over the street, and the rest of them shared two rooms in the back. Everyone had their own plastic toys and water pistols and user manuals and extra cables or modems, everyone had the same trouble finding the perfect pencil or an empty storyboard page, but they all shared whatever they had. There was a lovely green velvet recliner in the corner where you could sit, flip through a magazine, take a break. Next to it stood a fan that ran without a knocking sound unless it was really, really hot.

Bastard. That code was beautiful, so simple and useful. Nicola made herself compose a polite reply back, answering his charges one by one, but as the morning wore on she became hungry and less and less patient. Her head felt like a heavy, porous rock steeped in toxic thoughts and even coffee didn’t help, though she tried it many times.

Where can I go? she kept thinking. It was a bad time for renters and she did not have enough money to buy. As she stood up from her chair she kicked an empty box into the wall with more passion than she had intended.

“
What
is up?” Audrey asked. “Is it diet day or something?”

Nicola sat back down and looked at her monitor. She really didn’t feel like going into the whole eviction thing with everyone right there.

“Oh, I thought I saw Scooter on the muni.”

“He’s back from L.A.?” Audrey asked. She had gone to college with Nicola and Scooter, and had even lived with them for a while before she married a pierced, red-headed surfer named Declan.

“Just someone who looks like him.”

“Doesn’t he still owe you money?”

“And I’m sure that’s why he’s here,” Nicola said. Why
was
he here? Or whoever it was. Another customer called her, got snippy over the phone, and this time Nicola was actually rude.

“Nicola,” Audrey warned when Nicola hung up.

“I know, but you know I get like this when I’m hungry.”

“So get some food,” Audrey said.

Nicola looked at her watch. There was a man who often ate lunch at a nearby café and they had begun to say hello to each other; he had dark skin and almond-shaped eyes and he usually ordered chorizo pizzeta, a specialty there. She didn’t know his name but she thought of him as Chorizo. In her purse was a small vial of angel water—orange flowers mixed with myrtle and rose—which she planned to sprinkle on her neck and behind her ears and maybe a little bit under her teddy before lunch. He didn’t usually get there until one, but she was so hungry.

“Do a cookie run while you’re out,” Carlos said.

“Chocolate ones,” Louise said.

“No, the ones with sprinkles.”

“Those are carcinogenic,” Nicola told him.

“How can sprinkles be carcinogenic? They’re made for like three-year-olds.”

“Survival of the fittest,” said Christian, a vegetarian who maintained a very active Web site on meat production in America.

“You’re maxed on sugar anyway,” Audrey told Carlos. “Look, you’ve lost control of your line.”

“It’s supposed to look that way.”

Nicola walked over to his desk to look at his drawings.

“Christ, Carlos!” she said. “Are these Fred’s? These are supposed to be in the computer by Monday! You’re going to have to call Fred and ask him if we can reschedule the meeting because I am not talking to him one more time today, and then you better dose up on caffeine or something, because if we don’t show him something soon he’s going to walk, and I wouldn’t blame him. Put your dart gun down, I’m not kidding. You need to organize yourself; this table is a mess.”

“Whoa,” Carlos said. “Mommy’s back.”

“Oh, all right, but you know how I am; you’re cutting it too close for me.”

“Go get some food,” Audrey said. “Carlos will work on it over lunch, right, Carlos?”

“It will be fine, Nicola,” Carlos told her. “I have something in mind that’s absolutely bulletproof.”

“Bulletproof?”

“Don’t get hung up on the negative vibes,” he said.

Nicola stared at him. “I’m going to lunch,” she decided. She picked up her purse and tried to normalize by telling herself they were a good team and they always came through, but meanwhile she could feel Carlos watching her with that little grin on his face which at times like this she hated.

“But you’ve absolutely got to work on this while I’m gone,” she couldn’t help adding.

Carlos said he would and then watched her, still smiling, as she closed the office door behind her. A few seconds later when the elevator dinged he looked over at Audrey.

“She needs a lot more than food,” he announced.

*   *   *

Outside it was
windy and cold and the man Nicola thought of as Chorizo was already sitting at the West Portal Café reading an article about pigeons poisoned near City Hall. It was a bit soon for lunch, but his mid-morning massage had ended earlier than usual and he decided to sit and look over the afternoon paper, which had just come out.

The front page featured a grainy black-and-white photograph of a policeman touching a dead bird with his foot, and as he looked at it he found himself thinking about his wife, who was currently imprisoned in Cyprus. His common-law wife. But is it still common law if you haven’t seen each other for over five years, he wondered?

He read the first paragraph of the article again. No one had seen anything. The police claimed the act was deliberate, done at night, chicken feed dipped in poison then scattered on the curb. He thought how his wife would enjoy this sort of thing. Did she ever get newspapers, he wondered? There was so little he knew. Did she read? Exercise? Did they even have pigeons flying around where she was? The article, he noticed, did not say what kind of poison was used.

He put the paper down for a moment to examine one of his fingernails. He had not exactly been physically faithful, but then again neither of them had ever been physically faithful even when they lived together. What they had was different. More. Americans could never understand this. He thought of a television talk show host he had recently seen, who called people like him spiritually defunct. She understood nothing. The first principle of Shambhala is to be unafraid of who you are.

Turning his left hand toward the light, he noticed the thumbnail could use some shaping, and he rubbed it gently with his forefinger. It had been five years, almost six, since he had seen his wife, but he would not give up on her. He would not give up, but in the meantime he knew she would forgive him his needs. It didn’t mean he wouldn’t wait for her. He would wait. He would wait, save money for the legal expenses, for the bribes, for whatever it took to get her out. All the money he earned was for her. He would never tell her about the girls, there was no need, but if she knew she would understand. They were all dead anyway.

Chorizo picked up the newspaper, folded the page back, then began to read the article about the pigeons once again. And he thought: Well, and perhaps she has girls herself, there in the jail on Cyprus.

*   *   *

Nicola left the
building without her jacket and immediately regretted it but didn’t go back. A man reduced to selling flowers from the back of a Volvo station wagon was cleaning the sidewalk with an industrial hose, and a spray of water caught her arm as she passed. West Portal was dry and flat, once an arroyo, and it was said that its winds would drive you to sex or suicide. Someone was always spraying the sidewalk and the wind carried droplets up onto passersby, mostly women with strollers and men begging change wearing army jackets and unusual headgear.

What is the point, Nicola was thinking as she gave one man some change. Usually she enjoyed doing all the little tasks that spelled survival—mailing her tax returns or buying stamps or scheduling dental appointments—but on days like this she could imagine letting everything go until she was one of those people with unpaid bills in a shoebox under her bed and an eviction notice served—the last of which, of course, had already happened. And then what? The man begging change could imagine what; at some point he could see himself here on the street. Or at least, Nicola thought, he could not
not
see himself here on the street. Well, thank God, she wasn’t that far gone. Or was this the beginning of that kind of nightmare? It seemed unlikely, given her job and her taste for trendy shoes.

The café was only a block away and as Nicola pushed open the heavy glass door she was surprised to see Chorizo already sitting at a far table. The café was small and narrow with white plastic chairs and red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloths that wrinkled in hard little waves.

There was an open table near Chorizo and Nicola took it, smiling when he looked up, since they were at that point. He was older than she was, in his late forties probably. She liked that. Maybe he was even older.

He dressed well and was tall, or medium tall, with thick dark hair like the feathery waves of a raven—or did she mean vulture? A black-bird, that was it. Today he was wearing a button-down shirt in an unusual shade of blue, and dark pants. As she looked at the laminated menu Nicola stopped thinking about Guy and Scooter and her landlord, and she began to alternate instead between fantasies of a short passionate affair with Chorizo—food in the bed sheets, et cetera—and a milder, long-lasting relationship as she saw him through his later years, listening to his stories about dinners with Noam Chomsky or Butros Butros Ghali and helping him step into the tub.

Her waiter resembled a goat, with glasses so small they looked like eyelids. “I’ll have the chorizo pizzeta,” Nicola told him.

Chorizo looked up briefly at that. “They do those so well,” he said to her, then returned to his paper.

She turned to see what he was reading—another article about the dead pigeons, she saw—but although she had a comment ready he didn’t look up again. Nicola pulled out her
SF Weekly
and opened it, angling the paper so Chorizo could see she was reading the Personals if he happened to look. This she had planned in advance. All around her people were dressed casually but well, typical San Francisco. The café was cold, also typical, and Nicola found herself craving hot chocolate. It was said Montezuma drank fifty cups a day on the days he visited his harem, and she thought about the plumbing system in Mexico, then lifted her hand to her nose to smell the angel water on her fingertips and glanced at Chorizo.