IN THE LOBBY, one of his neighbors, a man of thirty-five or so, someone he knows only as Robert, is screaming at the girl behind the desk. (This girl is not a full-time professional concierge. She’s a student. In fact, she’s the prettiest of the girls who live down the hall from Matthew.) Robert’s dressed almost entirely in black, including a black fur coat and black-and-white patent-leather saddle shoes. His date is standing behind him, with his arms folded, trying to appear uninterested, but his eyes betray him — they’re afire with the thrill of watching Robert make a scene. He too is dressed in black. He has a rhinestone pin on the lapel of his coat.
“This is absolutely inexcusable!” Robert is shouting. “Fifteen minutes! Fifteen minutes we waited for the goddamned elevator. In-ex-cus-a-ble! Inexcusable.”
Matthew tries not to chuckle. It sounds like a spelling bee. He can’t keep himself from spelling, mentally, i-n-e-x-c-u-s-a-b-l-e.
“I don’t ever want this to happen again, do you hear me!” Robert stamps his foot.
The girl is on the verge of tears. Matthew loves the way her hair falls over her shoulders, fine and straight, light brown, with a little red in it. For the first time he notices that she has freckles.
Freckles, he says to himself. My God. And he asks himself, How old is this girl? Twenty-two? Eighteen? Twelve? He has no idea. He can’t tell. It occurs to him, just then, that he’s well on his way to becoming an old fart, or a middle-aged fart, anyway.
The girl has a textbook of some kind open on the desk in front of her. She pushes some hair back behind her ear in that lovely, heartbreaking way girls do and runs her finger under her eye, wiping an incipient tear. For an instant Matthew considers snatching the vase of flowers from the lobby table and smashing it over Robert’s head. Then he remembers himself as not the sort of person who would do something like that.
“You understand that I have nothing to do with this,” the girl says. She’s trying to be calm, but her lip trembles a little, and there’s a catch in her voice.
“All I know is this,” says Robert. He heard that little catch in her voice, and he’s pressing his advantage. He jabs his finger at her. “I never want this to happen again. Do you understand me?”
She frowns and nods, barely.
“Do you understand me?”
“Yes, I understand you, but — ”
“Good! That’s all I have to say about it.” He turns on his heel, and his friend opens the door for him. They walk out and start off down the street, talking animatedly, flinging their arms.
The girl puts her elbows on the desk and lets her chin drop into her hands.
“He has no right to talk to you like that,” Matthew says. He wonders if this is a good time to ask her if she’d like to drop in for dinner sometime.
She looks up and smiles at him, weakly. “I called the elevator company,” she says. She blinks, and she brushes her hands across her eyes.
Matthew thinks again about staying home, just hanging out in the lobby, perhaps, chatting with her, helping her study, sending out for whatever girls her age eat. He pulls his stomach in and stands up a little straighter, is immediately struck by the fact that he thinks it’s necessary to pull his stomach in and stand up a little straighter, and loses his nerve. He gives her a crooked little grin that he hopes she’ll consider conspiratorial. “What more can you do?” he says.
She shrugs. For a moment he thinks she’s going to ask him something. Maybe she’s going to ask him why he didn’t speak up in her defense, or maybe she’s about to say, “I noticed you were considering hitting Robert with that vase. Why didn’t you?” Whatever she thought of asking she thinks better of it, he guesses, because she just shrugs. She probably knows that he knows that she has three roommates, two more than the building allows, and she doesn’t want any trouble from him. It has occurred to her that he must be about her father’s age, and he probably has the same touchiness about rules as her father. She smiles at him, the very smile she smiles at her father when she wants his support but doesn’t really want to talk to him.
The elevator alarm bell begins ringing again. “Hello?” calls the tentative voice. Matthew shakes his head and leaves, wondering what she’ll do after he’s gone. Will she call a friend and chat? Will she call the elevator company again? Will she stick her earphones in her ears so she won’t hear the little voice calling from the elevator? Will she slip into the mailroom and efface the unhappy incident with cocaine? Maybe she’ll say to herself, “He’s kinda cute, that Mr. Barber. I’ll bet he’s pretty interesting when you get to know him.”
In Topical Guide 412, Mark Dorset considers Foreshadowing; and Aging: Effect on Male Ego and Fantasy Life from this episode.
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🎧 412: In the lobby, ..