Free The Middle Stories by Sheila Heti Page A

quietly, “What am I doing in this city? Even looking at the clouds I feel I have lost my imagination.”
     
     
    ON THE WOMAN’S first day at work the poet helped her with her boxes, but as he was helping he was looking away.
    “Do you know this is my seventieth sick day since I started here?” he asked.
    “But you’re here,” she said.
    “Yes, I know.” And he went to the bathroom and peed blood.
    When he returned she was sitting upright, typing at her computer like a good girl. There was a calculated grace about her and it was this that caused him, eyes drooping and weary, to lean over the partition and say to her face, “Come with me after work. I will show you a good place to drink around here.”
    “I’ll come, sure,” she said, looking up, and there was no guile expressed, just a big round smile and those hateful eyes that only women understood.
    When the workday ended he took her by the arm and led her to The Poodle, which was seedy and disreputable and no place for a woman in a cubicle to be. He looked around. She was wearing a bra on tight beneath her clothing.
    “Sit down here at this booth,” he said, pushing in her body with both his hands, “and I will get you a soda water.”
    “I take gin in my soda water,” she said hopefully, and the poet walked away with a shudder. These modern women. They had no sense of their own indecency.
    When he returned with the drinks he slipped into the booth and began to twitch in boredom as he listened to her story.
    “I have a husband and three children,” she began.
    “But you look eighteen,” he said mournfully, and swished his drink. A husband and three children. “You should not be dressed like that then,” he concluded.
    She furrowed her brow and sucked up her drink with pristine fury. “Thank you for this,” she said, smacking down the glass and dropping the straw from her lips as she walked.
    When he returned that night he found his roommate working on his novel. Looking up from the computer his roommate beckoned him over.
    “I think there is a bug behind the glass,” said the novelist, pointing to a place on the screen, then tracing it, following it.
    “I don’t see it,” the poet replied, eyes crossed in intoxication.
    “Go to bed,” the novelist said, and the poet did.
     
     
    WHEN THE POET woke he remembered the woman, the one with the husband and the three lovely kids. Probably right now she was frantically diapering them, or shoving sandwiches into their boxes, not thinking anything, just scurrying around with a phone in her chin, talking to her sister in Ottawa.
    “It has been so in politics, it has been so in religion, and it has been so in every other department of human thought,” he thought, and got up and undressed and went to the shower and rubbed himself hard, then went to his room where he dressed in brown and walked in the rain to work.
    When he arrived the woman in the cubicle was already there. Her spine was haughty and tense and she was turned away. But as he sat and arranged his folders he knew that she was thinking of him. “She can’t do any better than me,” he determined. Yes, he would destroy her. This woman with the husband and the three lovely kids; she was looking for an affair, a real sweaty romance, he could smell it on her skin.
    Indeed, by the coffeemaker at 11 AM she said, “I would like to go home with you tonight. I would like to see where you live.”
    “It is not a sight for a lady,” he said, dangling this info in front of her. “It’s a small place. A man’s place. I’m a poet, you see, and I live there alone with my roommate of seven years who is cruel. Women fall in love with him but he cannot love them back. He is a novelist. He’s very messy.”
    “I want to come home with you,” the woman said, pressing her eyes into him and spilling all the coffee.
     
     
    THAT NIGHT THEY sat around the table: the poet, the novelist, and the woman from the cubicle. The woman from the cubicle,