This story isn't done either.
Ned shifted uncomfortably in the small-backed paisley chair he’d been sitting on for half an hour. With a numb, itchy ass, he wondered where the sweaty, musky smell originated and how it managed to completely capsulate the room. It clung like a Velcro parasite, to every foot of wall, every inch of floor space, and every molecule of air, floating lazily and motionless in the room’s empty space. The smell was almost old man deodorant, and almost locker room. It was suffocating.
The squat, chubby troll across the wide mahogany desk, Mr. Brown or Mr. Barn or Mr. Burke, had been pouring over the manuscript and unnervingly clicking and unclicking the silver tip of his ball point pen. Now and again his longest six strands of hair, which he comically combed over in a pointless effort to conceal his liver spotted dome, would fall in front of his face. Each time a sweaty hand would dart to slick them back into place. His mouth moved, forming silent words, and his beady eyes darted back and forth, end of line, beginning of line, on the second to last page.
Ned wished for a breath of fresh air, even tinged with car exhaust. An everyday urban oxygen mask. He reached up and pulled on his collar with a tired index finger.
Mr. Brown or Barn or Burke was an excruciatingly slow reader. Not the best of qualities, Ned thought, for a bi-monthly publication editor to have.
Ten humid minutes past. Six hundred parched-mouth seconds of seat shifting and throat clearing. Ned’s eyebrows were heavy with sweat.
“Well,” Mr. Brown Barn Burke began.
“You’re certainly a talented writer.” He shuffled the papers into order and
tapped them into alignment on his
Here
comes the but, Ned thought. Maybe
he’s a sharp one and he’ll give me the however.
“But…” He cleared his throat. “Our publication is geared towards a more, uh, contemporary audience…And I think your piece, here…Well, it just wouldn’t fit into our schema.” He cleared his throat again.
Schema?
Ned thought. Whatever the hell a schema
is, I’m certain your publication doesn’t have one. In fact, I didn’t even want
the piece in your crappy magazine, it’s too good for you. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t
it? The context and vocabulary would simply be way over the mindless heads of
your contemporary audience; the clueless, helpless bathroom romantics who need
to spend three dollars and fifty cents for dating tips and the fifteen year old
girls wanting the secret to ridding themselves of their ferocious acne. Your crummy little rag is
a farce and a joke. And furthermore—
“Mr. Nurdle?”
Startled, Ned looked up from a particular flower on the thick Persian rug than he had been intently regarding. He wondered if he had, in fact, been thinking aloud.
“Are you alright, Mr. Nurdle?”
“Oh, uh.. Yes, yes.” Ned clumsily got to his feet and scooped up the stack of papers on Mr. Brown Barn Burke’s desk. “Thank you very much for your, um, time and attention.” He ambled awkwardly toward the door.
The fat bald man behind his pious mahogany desk was gaping at him.
“I, um… I really appreciate your seeing me.” Clutching the manuscript to his chest he opened the door with his free hand, never turning his back on the porous office, and he backed out of the door way, keeping Mr. Brown Barn Burke’s stare. Quietly, he closed the door on himself.
Leaning against the colorless corridor wall, Ned managed a broken, difficult inhale. Four rejections in as many days, he thought. I ought to get a goddamn medal. He realized his eyes were welling up as he repeatedly snorted a runny nose into submission.
“Damn, damn it. Damn it to hell.”
Ned was thinking of Mr. Yamota, the stout Japanese gentleman who had told him to get lost the day before. He thought of the feeling he had gotten when Mr. Yamota had said, “Sorry, it's no good fo’ us,” in choppy, broken English. It was as if his lungs had been deflated and filled again with syrup. As if his stomach was being pulled to his crotch by the weight of his bladder.
Mr. Yamota had, without a facial tick of remorse, pushed his secretary call button, and said, “Next!” before Ned had a chance to respond.
“Well thank you for-“ Ned began.
“Yes, I’m sorry, It's no good fo’ us.” The office door opened, and another hopeful in a green cardigan stepped in. He regarded Ned with spiteful competition.
“I was just trying to thank-“
“Rook, buddy, get rost!”
Mr. Brown Barn Burke’s door swung opened suddenly, and he stood, baldly, looking at Ned.
“Was there something else, Mr. Nurdle?” He titled his head to look at Ned with his glassed, beady eyes.
Ned nervously shuffled the papers in his hands and edged a little further down the hall. “No. I’m sorry. I... I was just on my way out. Sorry.”
“Well, that’s alright, there no ru-“ Mr. Brown Barn Burke gawked at Ned, squinting in the hallway’s fluorescence. “Mr. Nurdle, are you crying?”
“No.” Ned’s voice cracked sharply deep within the syllable.
Turning quickly away from Mr. Brown Barn Burke, Ned hurried down the corridor toward the elevator and heard a door close behind him. He stopped briefly in the waiting area to wipe his nose with the sleeve of his blazer, and to swipe the latest copy of Time magazine from a drab mahogany coffee table, wondering if Mr. Brown Barn Burke picked out all the furniture for the office.
“Fun?” An anxious knob grew in the back of Ned’s throat. Sheila looked very unhappy. “Of all the single words there are out there, and you pick ‘fun’ to describe our relationship?” Her frown stretched to the tips of her jaw, and she eyed him with one raised eyebrow. She certainly looked quite removed from happy.
“Well, honey, I just meant.. Um..”
Sheila abruptly got up from the couch to look down on his shivering form.
“What? Do you think I’m a roller coaster? A goddamn circus? What do you mean by fun, Ned? Maybe you think I’m fun like the way a hooker’s fun. Is that it?” She had raised her voice passed a comfortable apartment level, and Ned felt embarrassed that the neighbors might be listening, or worse, minding. He could see them through the cracked plaster of the ceiling, the peeling paint of the stucco. They had their ears to cups to their walls, and they were whispering about poor Ned, who was getting ripped on again.
“No, no, honey, listen, let me explain-“
“Please,” she said sharply. “Explain.”
Ned shifted on the couch and it groaned with weary springs. He traced his finger briefly on the cracks in the brown leather, desperate for a word or two that would make Sheila settle down.
“Well,” Ned managed. He stopped and started twice, and Sheila gave a groan of impatince. “I figure there’s two reasons… People do anything.”
Sheila’s eyebrow raised even higher and her head bobbed to one side. Her massive hoop earrings, Ned briefly thought, looked large enough to perch a parrot or two on. They dangled and bounced happily each time her neck snapped into a different angle.
“Because they have to, or because it’s fun, and..”
She sighed heavily and sardonically and crossed her arms under her breasts.
“And so, you’re a total reason for me to be doing anything, because..because..”
Ned had a taste on the rear of his tongue that he imagined might possibly be the taste of zinc or copper. Or even tenacious American iron. Confrontation gave Ned a sour stomach and he was working on a great, ripe lemon in his gut.
“Well, you know how little I get out and do things for fun..”
“Ha,” Shelia coughed sarcastically.
He looked around the room for inspiration. A card table set up to eat his HungryDude chicken fried steak. A Tv that hadn’t worked in two and a half years. His bookshelf of early ‘Maxi-Man’ comic books
“You’re drowning.”
“Well…Well..“
“Well, well, well, well!” She mocked with an ugly mocking face.
Ned furrowed his brow and didn’t need to try very hard to look honestly hurt. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, searching for a sonnet or a haiku or
“I’ll tell you what,” Sheila scolded, snatching her purse up from beside Ned on the couch. “You can call me when you stop thinking I’m a fucking video game.”
Sheila stomped through the door and slammed it behind her.
“But I hate video games,” Ned replied meekly, to an empty room.
Ned met Mr. Nurdle's niece one day at a supermarket. She was buying cantaloupe, and he was perusing the selection of Greek olives. There was a woman behind the deli counter, waiting for Ned to decide on one Mediterranean delicacy or another. Ned felt her eyes boring down on him, and thought quietly that with the overwhelming Bavarian presence of the FoodShack deli wench, her name should be Girtha.
Selecting feta stuffed peppers in lieu of olives, Ned heard a woman's voice behind him meekly say, "Ach, those give me heartburn."
Ned turned to see a young woman with a cantaloupe in one hand and a bottle of mayonnaise in the other. Her curly hair flopped messily around her smooth features. Ned, immediately defensive, sized up the situation.
This
is a woman. She's looking at me. Most women who look at me this long are
waiting for me to apologize for knocking over their lawn furniture with my car.
Nice shoes. Canatloupe and mayonnaise? What's that about? Serious
fruit faux pas. Still looking. Say something.
"Me too." Ned was feeling the hair on his arms shiver and raise in a flush of goosebumps. "But I eat them anyway."
"Me too."
For a brief moment, it was just the four of them, staring at each other. While retellings of this story have either the mayonnaise or the cantaloupe breaking the silence, it was actually Girtha who spoke.
"Four sixty," Girtha resounded, heaving the little package onto the edge of the deli counter.
"Um, I'm Ned." He absently handed Girtha a five dollar bill.
"I'm
"Um."
Ned thought of quickly scanning the aisle for a camera or an audience, but
simply said, "Sure." Sheila popped briefly into his head. How furious
she would be if she happened to get a craving for feta stuffed peppers, and see
him blushing and chatting with Sandy the cantaloupe woman? Very furious, Ned thought. Ridiculously so. And
it's only harmless shopping company.
Forty five mintues later, three aisles over, Sandy and Ned mulled over the noodle selection.
“And what other fucking twenty-nine
year olds still have comic books, Ned?
You care more about your damn comics than fucking me!” Ned was taken aback. He
stumbled over a retort, a syllable or two that would have at least made him
look proud. “
Sheila started towards the bookshelf in the corner and continued. “Maxi-Man, for christsake! What kind of stupid comic name is that! It’s sad enough you’re still reading this horseshit, but fucking Maxi Man?” She had pulled a copy, sanitized with precision in a sealed plastic pouch, from the bookshelf. Ned saw instantly that it was issue number 72, the first appearance of Awesomedog. $73.50.
“Maxi… is short for maximum,” Ned said resentfully, calmly.
“Maxi is short for maxi pad, loser. And you wonder why no one except you read this shit when you were a kid!”
For the first time ever he found he really wanted her to stomp towards the door, lashing him with obscenities, maybe pulling down a picture frame or two. She’d spin and demonstrate an artful new way she’d learned to stick up one or both middle fingers. She’d slam the door, and he'd quietly rise from the couch to apply the chain lock.
Shelia suddenly went for the window. “I’ve taken this shit for too long, Ned! Too..Damn..Long!” Ned gasped painfully.
She had thrown the comic, backhand like a baseball player, out the window and it spun like a tablesaw frisbee.
Ned leapt to the window and saw Maxi-Man issue 72 whipping about in its descent. He thought about the neighbors and what they might think if they’d seen something thrown out his fifth floor apartment. Mrs. Lambones would be very disappointed with him.
Then Ned saw the vile little quick-legged neighborhood piranhas, pointing at the comic headed towards them from above. It slapped the ground and for a queer split second they all stood and regarded the comic book on the sidewalk. And as quickly as recognition took hold, one of them snatched it up with their sticky, greasy hands and took off down the street with the rest of the pack at his heels.
Ned ducked his head, and pushed himself away from the window. He turned to Sheila, who looked at him with remorseless lipstick, and remorseless eye shadow, and remorseless blush, and those goddamn remorseless hoop earrings.
"What?" Shelia demanded. She patronized his threatening gaze. "You'll thank me one day for saving you from being such a pussy."
Ned stepped toward her, drew his hand flatly to his side, and smacked her across a reddening cheek.
Sheila was stunned and steaming. Ned had enough time to quickly think about what one should do after having delivered the only smack, having depleted his nerve towards violence. With the single slap, was he to turn and stomp away like a jealous prom date? Sheila was the first person he had ever hit.
She suddenly exploded.
“You little fuck! You son of a bitch!” Ned saw Sheila’s fist flying straight into his eye, followed by a burst of light, and the sensation of falling backward. His back hit the wooden arms of the couch at an angle and he slumped to the floor, holding a hand over one eye. He cracked a faint moan and drooled on the floor. Sheila was still screaming.
“You don’t hit me, you little pussy! You don’t hit me!”
Ned was only aware (“Boring little shit ball!”) of a repeated, screaming hurt bursting from his (“I’ll kill you!”) ribs and belly. She was kicking him (“Motherfucker!”) with black pointy-toed pumps, and she kicked until she was tired.
Ned managed an open eye, and watched her pound her feet to the door, ripping a Renoir print off the wall. She opened the door, turned to flip him off and slammed it again behind her.
"Mr. Nurdle?
This is Ned Rugburn.
The crackling speaker above the outside doorbells was in desperate need of replacement. Ned only caught the 'come' and the 'in' from Mr. Nurdle's reply. The door sounded an irritating buzz, and Ned pushed on the door.
The inside of the building was kept much nicer than the outside. The marble flooring was washed regularly and the leaflets advertising Fanny's Community Bingo and a Cutlass for sale were hung in parallel plastic pouches across an immense bulletin board.
Up a small flight of steps, Ned was stopped by a sign on the elevator. It read, in sloppy, red magic marker, "Doesn't work. Take stairs."