“I’ve got to think about this,” I told him.
I got up and turned away to face the rest of the room. There wasn’t much scope for sightseeing. Just those high, dusty windows, those pus-colored walls, and that tired-looking little bookcase at the other end. I headed for the bookcase. I could have saved myself the trip. There were a bunch of books on evolution, a bunch on history and prehistory, and a bunch on primitive peoples. There was a book on chimpanzee culture that looked interesting—but nothing on gorillas. There were a couple of archaeological atlases. There was a book with the longest title I’d ever seen, something like Man’s Rise to Civilization As Shown by the Aboriginal Peoples of the New World from Prehistoric Times to the Coming of the Industrial State. There were three translations of the Bible, which seemed excessive, for an ape. There was nothing I could curl up with in front of the fireplace, even if I had a fireplace. I poked around for as long as I could then went back and sat down.
“You wanted me to tell you a story. I don’t have a story to tell, but I’ve got a daydream.”
“A daydream?” Ishmael said, half a question.
I nodded, and he said a daydream would do very well.
“Okay. This is what I was daydreaming about this morning. I was thinking, wouldn’t it be great if I got down to Room 105 of the Fairfield Building, and I went in and there was this woman at the reception desk, and she looked at me and—”
“Wait,” Ishmael said. “Excuse me for interrupting.”
“Yes?”
“You’re … plunging.”
“Plunging?”
“Hurtling. Charging ahead, rushing.”
“You mean I’m going too fast?”
“Yes, much too fast. We’re not working under a deadline here, Julie. If you intend to share this story with me, then please let it unfold leisurely—as leisurely as it unfolded in your head this morning.”
“Okay,” I said. “I see what you mean. You want me to start over?”
“Yes, please. But no plunging this time. Take a moment to gather your thoughts. Relax, and let it come back to you. Don’t summarize it for me. Tell it as it happened.”
Take a moment? Relax? Let it come back to me? He didn’t seem to realize what he was asking for. I was sitting down, sure, but I couldn’t sit back and be comfortable, be cause if I did that, my feet would dangle over the edge and I’d feel like a six-year-old. I had to have my feet on the floor, because I had to be ready to get out of there in half a second—and if you think you wouldn’t feel that way, I suggest you sit down toe-to-toe with a full-grown gorilla and try it. The only way for me to relax and let the daydream come back was to curl up in a corner of the chair and close my eyes—and I just wasn’t quite ready to do that in the presence of a thousand-pound ape.
I gave Ishmael a sort of snooty, impatient scowl intended to convey all that. He took it in, mulled it over for a bit, and then did something that almost made me laugh out loud.
He used
two fingers to do a little swish over his heart and then solemnly held them up for my inspection, just like a Boy Scout: Cross my heart and hope to die.
What the hell, I did laugh out loud.
The Daydream
In my daydream I didn’t dress carefully for my visit to the Fairfield Building—any more than I did when I went there in real life. That would have been uncool. It would have been equally uncool to dress in my grubbiest, so I just split the difference. There are plenty of girls prettier than me, uglier than me, taller than me, shorter than me, fatter than me, thinner than me—and maybe it makes sense for them to knock themselves out over what they wear, but not me.
The Fairfield Building of my daydream was spruced up a bit and no longer the near slum of real life. And, in my daydream, Room 105 wasn’t on the ground floor beside a loading dock, it was an elevator ride up from the lobby (and someone had taken a good stiff brush to the elevator as well, uncovering some handsome brass metalwork).
The door to Room 105 said … nothing. I worked on that some. I wanted it to bear some intriguing legend like GLOBAL POSSIBILITIES OR COSMIC VENTURES, but no, it remained stubbornly blank. I went in. A young woman looked up from a desk in the front. Not a receptionist. She wasn’t wearing secretary clothes but rather something more casual and chic. And she wasn’t sitting at the desk, she was bending over it, packing a box.
She glanced up curiously, as if strangers seldom came through that door, and asked if she could help me.
“I’m here about the ad,” I told her.
“The ad,” she said, straightening up to give me a more serious inspection. “I didn’t realize the ad was still running.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so I just stood there.
“Wait a second,” she said, and disappeared down a hall. She returned a minute later in the company of a man the same age as her, twenty or twenty-five. He was dressed the same way, not in a suit but casually—more a hiker than a businessman. They stared at me blankly till I began to feel like a piece of furniture that had been delivered on approval.
At last the man said, “You came because of the ad?”