The Sultry Eye
The girl on the train.
Maybe she was the first thing I noticed that day. It was a nice day. I did notice the weather, but only incidentally. Perhaps it had rained the previous day, and perhaps that morning, leaving my apartment, I had silently been grateful that I didn’t need an umbrella.
I can’t remember now if it had rained the previous day.
However, I do remember the air outside having the somewhat astringent quality that I associate with a clear day after a storm.
The girl was young, about my age, and reasonably pretty, though I might remark here that she was not my type. She was sitting across from me, reading a magazine. Or was it a book? Yes, it was a book – I remember because I tried to catch a glimpse of the cover to see what it was that so engrossed her. I am generally interested in what other people are reading. Her lank hair hung over her face, and the book lay open almost flat on her lap. I couldn’t see the title.
Her hair was brown. If you asked me to be more specific, I might say it was chestnut brown.
I suppose she must have felt my eyes on her – as I have already mentioned, I was simply trying to see what book she was reading – because she quite suddenly shut her book and looked up.
That was when I saw it.
One of her eyes was full and bright, perhaps flashing with fury at me for disturbing her reading. But her other eye – her left one – belied that rage. It was peculiarly languid, the upper lid drooping slightly from the heaviness of the lashes. I was transfixed by this solitary, sultry eye.
I noticed then how full her lips were, and how perfectly shaped.
She looked at me boldly as though she were sizing me up, and there was also something in that tantalizing eye of hers that conveyed a challenge, or a dare.
I was certainly disconcerted, but I must admit that I was also intrigued.
Then again, she may merely have closed her book in anticipation of her stop, because a few moments later she stood up and left the train.
I never did discover what she had been reading.
Some minutes passed, and the train arrived at my station. I got off, leaving nothing behind.
Emerging into the upper air, I perfunctorily checked my watch and was startled to realize that I was somehow ten minutes behind schedule, and would arrive to work later than I was accustomed to, despite the fact that I had woken up at the usual time and left the house at the usual time and taken the same train as always.
You surely already know that I am a very punctual person, that, in fact, I pride myself on my punctuality, and I must admit that I was quite flustered to realize that I would arrive late to work.
To my chagrin, when I finally arrived at my desk, I found a post-it from my supervisor affixed to my computer screen requesting my presence in her office. “As soon as you get in,” it read, “come and see me.” She signed it, as she customarily does, with only her first initial.
My supervisor is a slender, meticulous woman in late middle age. Some would call her well-preserved. She is tall, with prominent cheekbones. She uses simple jewelry: a gold wedding band, a gold chain with a small gold cross, perhaps another ring or a thin bracelet. She typically wears pants suits, exquisitely tailored, and in dark jewel tones. Deep purple, sapphire, and garnet seem to be her favorite colors.
Her hair is auburn, though likely she is at an age where she must resort to artificial means to maintain the natural shade of her youth.
More than once I have caught myself staring at the constellations of freckles that splash across her collarbone.
I knocked on the door to her office.
“Good morning,” she said. “I see you’re a little late this morning. Traffic?”
“I take the train.”
“Yes, of course.” I sat down. She glanced at a manila folder on her desk and then squared her shoulders, making her voice hard. “I’ve been reviewing your work product from the past six months, and I’ve found some inconsistencies and deficiencies. Now, I don’t want you to think I’m picking on you; I‘ve reviewed everyone’s work in our division. I’m not sure if you are aware, but this is just part of the company’s standard biannual procedure. To ensure that we maintain high standards of quality across the organization.
“I found two incomplete projects, and one project that was completed months past deadline and significantly over budget. Most troubling, there seem to be some inconsistencies in the accounting, as well as some unrecorded costs. I need not tell you this is unacceptable.
“At first, I thought there must have been some mistake, but I went over the numbers myself. Nearly two hundred thousand dollars unaccounted for.
“Frankly, I’m very surprised. The quality of your work has always been exemplary: accurate, orderly, conscientious. Sometimes – sometimes even creative! And you have always – or, at least, you always used to be on time.
“I’m hoping that you can put my worries to rest, that you have an explanation for these – inconsistencies.”
I was about to speak in my own defense when I saw it.
Her right eye was the familiar eye of my supervisor: authoritative, impassive, severe. But her other eye – lightly taunting, heavy-lidded, the pupil sinking into its dark iris with a whorl of shadowy movement. The eye whispered something to me -- something irrelevant and utterly inappropriate, about the laziest kind of love – something that ended in a question.
I stammered. I felt my face growing red and prickly, and I looked quickly down.
“Look at me,” she said. “Gregory.”
Swallowing hard, I forced myself to meet her gaze.
She sighed. The sultry eye fluttered, lovely on the buttery plane of her face, mocking me. “Gregory. I’m not sure what’s been going on with you, or what problems you may have been having. But I want to remind you that the company is very reasonable when it comes to the personal issues of its associates. It is our policy to understand when our employees may need time to seek professional help or support. However, we have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to embezzlement.”
“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”
“If you can explain where the missing funds have gone to, and of course, if you can return them … the company will take that into consideration when contemplating disciplinary action. I think you know Renata Tiers in Human Resources Associate Relations?”
I nodded.
“She would be an excellent person to confide in to discuss your options. For now, I regret that I must ask you to leave. I encourage you to seek support, whether medical, psychological, spiritual, or otherwise.
“And rest assured, the company will remain in touch.” She closed my folder with finality.
Despite my understandably shaken nerves, I managed a weak smile for the guard when he asked, “Leaving so soon?”
It was not yet ten in the morning.
I had never been outside the office at this hour. Except for the few dissipated individuals creeping into work with sour breath and haggard faces, the sidewalks were nearly empty of people.
The zone around the company’s headquarters was not a place where anyone lived. It was only a place where people came, to work and then to leave.
Had anyone ever lived here? Before the glinting steel and glass high-rises, there had been warehouses and wharves. Before that, who knows – nothing, just unincorporated land. The old town center is upriver, where the last surviving remnants of families bearing the names of civic and cultural institutions cough and play solitaire in chilly, landmarked mansions. The streets are cobblestone, and the gutters are stagnant.
The actual, pounding heart of the place, its lean and fast-twitching muscle, has been dispersed to countless small settlements, one-family homesteads encumbered by all manner of small appliances, insulated with pettiness, swaddled in affordable luxury – where it has atrophied and run its course.
I thought: regardless of where we live or work, in this town, we spend our lives with our backs to the water.
It was not yet ten in the morning, and I needed some place to go. Traffic glided by efficiently. I walked against it, keeping parallel to the river.
I don’t know how long I walked. Time was lost on me. The sun had shifted to the other side of the sky when I came to a park that I had never noticed before.
Perhaps it is going too far to call it a park. It was a neat triangle of greenery bounded by three quiet streets, hardly a block long on any side. Poplars shaded three pairs of benches, which looked onto a central pavilion paved with red brick.
A statue rose in the middle. On a grey stone pedestal that closer examination revealed to be marble, a flinty-faced Indian in a feathered headdress stiffly shook hands with a white man wearing the fringed backwoods jacket of a cartoon pioneer. I say “flinty-faced” and “white,” even though the statues were cast bronze and dark with age. On the ground alongside the Indian sat a bronze squaw, tending what I assume was meant to be a bronze infant. Behind the white man stood two other bronze men with what appeared to be rifles slung across their backs. Although the two central figures were smooth as the surface of a bell and detailed down to buttons and beadwork, the secondary figures were rough featured and gestural, as if modeled hastily out of clay mud. The influence of Rodin? I wondered, idly.
There was a discolored area approximately the size of a paperback novel on one side of the stone base. I assume that a plaque explaining what the statue commemorated had once been affixed to that spot, as there was no other information to be found that shed any light on who these people were, or what it was claimed that they had done.
Oh, yes -- there was one other thing, a number, carved into the marble. I believe it was 1891. I assume this number refers to a year, though it is unclear whether it indicates the year the event depicted took place, or the year the statue was erected. I suspect it to be the latter.
Gradually, I became aware that I was not alone.
There was a man, sleeping or resting on one of the benches.
He was perhaps twenty years my senior, but on first glance he looked far older – at first I took him to be a man in his late sixties. He was breathing heavily, his hands on his belly, his legs splayed out in front of him so that I could see his soiled sock showing through the worn sole of his shoe. He wore a dark trench coat, stained with pale marks. His chin, stippled with grey hairs and slick with saliva, or grease, trembled slightly with the force of each breath.
He must have felt me looking at him, because with a sudden bronchial snort, he awoke.
There was something indistinct about his face, as though his features had been smeared with soft wax. There was a vulnerability there. I felt suddenly tender toward him, I took a step closer, I was about to ask him if he was all right when his features resolved into familiarity.
Unmistakably, I found myself staring at the flabby jowls and violent, staccato mouth of my father. Unmistakably, my mother’s soft nose and her liquid dark eyes appeared before me, as though she were peering up at me from within a mirror.
And, in the midst of this man’s ruined face, floated, perversely, like a blown kiss, that sultry, carnal eye – gloating, defeating me.
I think the man may have been about to say something, but I became afraid, without any real cause. I ran away. I don’t believe I looked back. I ran, without knowing really where or why I was running.
Soon, out of breath, I found myself by the riverbank.
The old railway tracks, abandoned years ago, disappeared into the tall grass, like a trick of perspective. The grass disappeared into the trees, and where the trees lined the river, the water was dark and still and gave back the image of the trees as perfect as a looking-glass.
I approached the river. I looked into the reflecting pool, and saw what I expected to see: my own face, there among the leaves.
**Some savvy readers may note that the first line of this story is “borrowed” from Barthelme’s Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel. I use that a lot.**