The Sweetest Man in the World

We were in Walford’s office, in what was once a Foot Locker. We were looking out at the call center in the indoor plaza, the Donor Retention section specifically, Lydia Raleigh’s cubicle to be exact. Lydia was dialing a number with the eraser end of her pencil, her boisterous fog-like hair solidified at the back by a mango-colored jumbo clip. I felt a stirring.

“What am I going to do with you, Ms. Raleigh?” Walford said as he paced at his treadmill desk, hands at his waist, his suit jacket bunched in the back. Framed photos of Walford’s wife and kids sat on the clear shelves where sneakers once perched.

“Look at Ms. Raleigh’s last summary report, under Next Steps.”

The report mentioned a Richard M—, a donor who had failed to make a contribution in the past fiscal year. Documenting our efforts to reactivate reluctant donors like Richard was one of Lydia’s tasks. I skipped to the bottom, where Lydia had written Christina to keep cultivating Dick.

“And?” I said.

“Give me a break,” Walford said.

I worked with Lydia and Christina in Donor Retention, and I knew that Christina to keep cultivating Dick was not a double entendre, nor an unsubtle reminder to Walford on Lydia’s part that she had caught him in his car months back with his pants unzipped and Christina’s lips, as Lydia put it, “superglued around Walford’s ding-a-dong.”

“Let’s take a walk,” Walford said, using his back to push open the Foot Locker’s glass door.

We walked up the escalator to the mall’s vacant second floor where it was easy to see the ring of scuffed flooring encircling the Donor Retention cubicles. “Christina to keep cultivating Dick,” Walford said, clinking his wedding band against the metal lip of the glass railing. “Stay,” he said to me. “I’m going to take a leak.”

The call center below filled most of the Sears end of the plaza and added a pleasant reverberating murmur to the cathedral-like space. Over this baseline white noise came a distant cheer from the high school, over in the former Macy’s on the other side of the enormous Christmas tree. It was early June, but it was always the holidays here, the season of the mall’s demise. I would miss working here. The new PCB-free high school on the edge of town was almost finished. Once the kids were out for summer, the entire mall would be razed and all of us would move to another dirt-cheap lease location.

I wandered ahead until I was above the play area with the bears—a life-sized mother bear and two cubs done in chrome with red holiday ribbons sagging around their necks. I’d climbed on the bears when I was a kid and still felt affection for them. I wondered if they’d be auctioned off before the mall was torn down. I could picture buying them and one day putting them in a yard of my own.

Walford was taking a while—probably his IBS. I thought back to the car incident. I had been walking out to lunch when I saw Lydia race toward Walford’s car and open his door. Christina sprinted from the passenger’s side to her own car and drove off. Lydia turned and marched toward me saying, “I was just trying to help! I thought he was choking on his lunch!” 

It was only the second time I’d seen Lydia flustered, the first being the same morning as the car incident, when the city police poured from the former Sears in battle gear, a phalanx behind Kevlar shields practicing their school shooter response readiness with flashbangs and tear gas. It would have been nice if they’d told us about the training exercise, or had at least checked whether this end of the mall was abandoned. New Business made fun of Retention for hiding under our desks. They teased Morris, the French guy, for taking off like a shot when he mistook the police for INS. I nearly bought Walford’s explanation that the car incident later that day was a carpe diem reaction to the stress of experiencing the botched police exercise.

“The real question is, what am I going to do about you?” Walford said, coming up behind me. “Whose team are you on, Jayjay?” He kept walking.

“I never took you for a GILF guy,” Walford said when I caught up to him.

“Lydia’s not a grandmother,” I said. “She never even had kids.”

“She’s got schemes, though. Plenty of little schemes.”

We continued fast-walking along the mall’s interior perimeter in silence. There was nothing nefarious about Lydia. She was kind and supportive. She said I had a calm and inviting voice tailor-made for Donor Retention, and that my name was like the name of a hero in a romance novel. We were all like that in Retention, even Morris, even Christina—when her cubicle was still near ours. We were a team full of praise and encouragement for one another.

Lydia was from West Virginia and still sounded like it. She was widowed a few years back after twenty-nine years of marriage. She loved to bicycle. She had a ten-year-old car that she kept in her garage for shopping runs, only six-thousand miles on the odometer. She devoured romance novels and poetry, especially the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which she copied out in calligraphy and pinned to her cubicle walls. She was thirty-some years older than me—but what did Walford mean by me being a GILF guy? Did he know what was going on?

When Lydia invited me to her place for dinner that first time, I was thinking of a free meal. The living room held bookshelves packed with romance novels. There was also a sewing table and a cat’s climbing tower. She told me that Millie Mittens died of feline leukemia a week after her husband passed away. Presumably from something else.

Lydia showed me her late husband’s miniature steam-powered engine on the mantelpiece, which she insisted I’d enjoy firing up. I took it down and placed it on the dining room table.

“There hasn’t been a man in my house since my husband passed on,” she said from the kitchen. “Except for the plumber, of course. Please know how much I appreciate your propriety. You’re always such a gentleman.”

Lydia kept mentioning this propriety of mine over dinner, and insisted on cleaning up afterwards without my help. While she was in the kitchen, I managed to get the miniature steam engine running. Lydia brought out two bowls and a pint of premium ice cream and stood beside me, carving out a scoop. I got the little steam whistle to let out a shrill cry.

“Oh, don’t,” she said.

The wail was a reminder of her loss. Her hands began trembling, then her arms. Her head joined in and began shaking back and forth.

“Oh, hell,” she said, and plopped herself sideways onto my lap, the ice cream scooper hitting the floor.

She kissed my face all over, the great curling wisps of her foggy hair enveloping us both. There was a newness to resting my hands on someone I worked with but had never touched. She smelled quite pleasant up close. Her lips slowed and found mine. I appreciated Lydia’s bravery in putting herself out there. This was the same week as the incident with the police and with Walford at the car, and passions were still running high.

Now, months later, Walford and I were passing the mall’s empty food court.

“Okay. Here’s what I want you to do,” Walford said. “Get Ms. Raleigh to engage in something inappropriate with you that the security cameras can catch.”

I thought of the time Lydia and I had made out in the empty self-help section of the Barnes & Noble upstairs and—until I couldn’t stop sneezing—in the back room of the former Body Shop.

“You’re trying to fire Lydia?” I said.

“No, no. She’s our best caller. But this will neutralize her. No more of this cultivating Dick bullshit. I’ll stay quiet about what the cameras catch, she’ll stay quiet about Christina. I can’t have loose ends out there. Debbie has me planning our re-commitment ceremony. Over a hundred guests are coming, even the pastor who married us. Don’t give me that look. Love and passion are two different beasts.”

“Lydia isn’t going to report the car thing,” I said. “It’s been months.”

“Can’t take that chance. She probably has a draft email ready to go. See Something, Say Something. It’s right there on the computers’ wallpaper,” he said, which was true.

I was nearly having to jog to keep pace with Walford.

“Now, worse-case scenario, if she says something anyway, the company won’t let me go. Not with my numbers. But they’d probably fire Christina, which would be a shame, and which would lead, I’ve been informed by Christina, to Mrs. Walford and the kids learning about certain things. So help me out. You owe me one, cub scout. I’m being pressed on all sides. Get Mrs. Raleigh on a security camera with her knickers down.”

“Knickers?”

“Or knockers out. Pick your poison.”

“I’ll get fired.”

“Nah. Don’t face the camera . . . and wear a hat.”

“Like, a sombrero?”

“You’re not taking this seriously. Wait,” he said, stopping. “Is Jayjay playing hardball? Fine. I can also authorize a $300-a-month raise.”

Friday after work I met Lydia at the new Barnes & Noble. We browsed, then split a slice of coffee cake in the café. I thought about Walford’s ridiculous fear of Lydia and his attempt to enlist me in his protection scheme. And about how Walford thought I was playing hardball, detecting a sense of cunning in me that wasn’t there, in much the same way Lydia believed I was a man of propriety. If Walford’s paranoia was becoming a bit much, so was Lydia’s contented familiarity. 

Once, on a walk with her, I heard her compliment a cat in the same way she complimented me. Still, I wanted to believe that the things she said about me were true. I also wanted to believe that if I distanced myself she would close up, wilt, re-widow, as it were. I wasn’t as good a person as she believed me to be.

I told Lydia about Walford’s fear of her as we sat in her hot tub after Barnes & Noble. She laughed and draped a steaming washcloth over her eyes. We were au naturel, as Lydia put it, a thing she’d never done with her late husband, whose last name you’d think was Godblesshim.

Lydia adjusted the hot tub down to a gentle purr. “Have I told you about how I used to go on bike rides to spy into other people’s yards?”

I’d heard many—too many—bicycling stories from Lydia, but not this one. “I can’t picture you as a snoop,” I said.

“I was an impish young teen. I was hoping to see sunbathers or lovers kissing in the grass, but there was nothing at all. Until this one house. I was pedaling standing up so I could see over their hedge, and what I saw was a woman holding a shovel and standing beside a dark mound of dirt. A man’s bloodless arm was hanging out of a big hole.”

“Oh my,” I said.

“Exactly, Jason. We react so similarly to everything. I was so startled that I rode straight through their hedge, cutting up my face and bending my bicycle’s handlebars. Still have a scar to this day.”

She pointed at her nose, but I knew better than to get close to her this early in the evening. I enjoyed her hot tub and wanted to linger.

“The woman helped me up and led me toward their back porch. I felt like I was in a Hitchcock film. But then I saw that the arm in the hole was moving and was connected to a man who was crouched and working on a pipe fitting, sewage maybe. The smell was awful.” Lydia laughed. “Here I’d imagined the woman was trying to bury a body. The man crawled out and wiped his hands on his trousers. He took one look at my poor bike, then held the front wheel in place with his knees and straightened the handlebars in one motion. I remember that his fly was undone and that my front reflector sort of tucked inside there for a moment. His wife dabbed me with iodine and bandaged me up, then gave me a Dr. Pepper. When I got home, I used my mother’s witch hazel to scrub my handlebars and my reflector and the spokes of the front wheel.”

“All’s well that ends well.”

Lydia dragged the washcloth from her eyes. “Wait now, sweetie. I haven’t come to the terrible part. The following year, guess who got it in the back of the head with a shovel.”

“Your handlebar straightener.”

She nodded. “I’ve wondered if my telling the woman what I thought I’d seen her do put the idea of murder into her head.”

“You’re not going to do me in with a shovel, are you?”

“Much worse,” she said, turning up the jets.

I felt her toes inchworm up my shins. “What am I going to do with you?” I said.

“Oh Jason,” she said, launching herself toward me through the hopping spray. “Don’t you know by now? You can do absolutely anything you’d like.”

It wasn’t so much that she was imitating the dialogue in her romance novels, but more like her books matched how she perceived the world. She had the rosiest, most generous attitude I’d ever encountered in a person. There in the hot tub, I thought of Walford’s offer of $300 more a month and how it could put me in my own squalid apartment instead of renting a room in one; I couldn’t spend all my time at Lydia’s place. Sure, she’d be mortified to be caught on tape, but Walford wouldn’t let it get out with his marriage at stake. One kiss was all it would take to break the company rule about fraternization.

I visited the security guys on Monday morning and checked out the bank of monitors. I noted how most of the cameras were trained on employees, including on my cubicle. There was only one camera outside the employee areas, on a highly trafficked side exit.

“No good,” I told Walford when I saw him next.

“$350. $400 tops.”

An additional $400 a month not only meant my own apartment, but also the prospect of whittling down my credit card debt. I decided to try some hardball. “She wouldn’t do anything in any of the places the cameras are pointed. I wouldn’t either.”

I waited, but Walford didn’t make a higher offer. I’d learned two things from the security guards: that demolition on the mall would begin in sixty days and that Walford had been spotted with Christina in the next town over.  They’d shown me the video.

“I saw a video of you and Christina at—”

“Goddamn it,” Walford said, halting in front of an empty Spencer’s. “Was that Ms. Raleigh at the park, behind that tree?”

The video the security guy showed me was taken in a Red Robin, not a park, but I said nothing. I enjoyed getting Walford worked up—another of my less-than-stellar traits. Maybe if Walford became desperate enough I could bump my raise up to penthouse level. But he still wasn’t upping his offer. I had never been the blackmailing type before, possibly  because I’d never had anything to blackmail someone with. I barely did now.

“She’s a stalker,” Walford said, as we resumed walking. “I was picking up a prescription yesterday and she was already at the pharmacy, pretending to look at vitamin supplements.”

“If she was already there, how could she be following you?” I said. “Besides, she didn’t take the video.”

“Could you see my face?”

I didn’t know what to say. We were talking about two different videos. The one in Red Robin, where Walford dripped BBQ sauce on his shirt and then spilled the glass of water he was dabbing his napkin into, and then this phantom video shot in a park, where he and Christina were doing whatever it was they’d done.

“You can’t see a thing in the video,” I said. “There’s nothing to worry about. Trust me.”

“Keep walking, Jayjay. We’re done.”

I kept walking. Walford went back the way we’d come. I watched him pick up speed and break into a jog, the corners of his suit jacket flying up a little, the bottom of his shoes rising high enough that I could see the dark wear in the smooth, caramel-colored soles. 

Walford was in a real hurry. IBS, I thought, but he didn’t stop at the bathrooms. When I saw him pass his office in the Foot Locker, I felt, maybe for the first time in my life, a sense of foreboding. I ran.

Walford was shouting at Lydia when I reached Donor Retention. Papers flew from her cubicle as he riffled through her desk. Her monitor wobbled. The Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems push-pinned to her cubicle walls shook like feathers. People came over from their cubicles, some looking over the partitions and saying, “Whoa,” and “Hey now, Mr. Walford,” but doing nothing about his behavior. Walford looked like he was going to lunge for Lydia, but all he got his hands on was her hair clip. I had him in a choke hold.

I felt bad about the choke hold. I didn’t want to be seen as the guy whose first reaction to a situation is violence. I’m Jason in Donor Retention. I’m kind and soft-spoken and patient. I coax the best out of people. I was muttering these things as Walford’s prickly throat scraped my tender inner arm. Lydia was picking up the loose papers and saying nonsensical things like “If Mr. Walford rode a bicycle to work none of this would be happening,” and “Poor man. Marriage can be so everlastingly lonely.” The security guards took Walford away. No one said anything about my choke hold. Instead, I got a couple pats on the back. No one really liked Walford.

The next day, I came in expecting to be fired. Instead, I was told that Walford wouldn’t be coming back. Lydia didn’t return to work, either; she was given the rest of the week off.

“I’m fine, really,” she said, when I visited her that evening. “I don’t know why they insist I take time off. Did Mr. Walford really think I was going to say something about him and Christina? What two people do to each other is their business. You sleep in the mess you make. I was just trying to save his life that day at his car. You should have seen his face. I thought he was gagging on a piece of carrot or apple. If only he really had been choking on something.”

“Christina probably was.”

“Oh, Jason,” she said.

It was the first time I’d disappointed Lydia, and I could feel her reaction inside me, a deep sudden sadness where that sense of foreboding had lodged itself before. Then she laughed a little.

“Poor Christina. Oh my.”

Since she had the rest of the week off, Lydia proposed a little road trip. I called in sick the next day. I thought of the additional $400 a month I wasn’t going to be getting as we drove to the coast, and I realized Walford had probably made up the raise. We got a motel room a short drive from the beaches we planned to see in the morning, then we went out to dinner. When we came back to the room, a couple was having an argument next door. At some point it went real quiet next door, and then we heard them having sex, loudly. I couldn’t take it and went out, crossing the street to a gas station to pick up snacks for the next day.

While I stood in the long line, an impeccably well-maintained Cadillac pulled up to a pump. An older guy climbed out, tall and trim, wearing a flat cap. A pair of aviator sunglasses hung in the crook of his yellow shirt. An attractive young woman slid from the passenger side and entered the mart. She picked out a bottle of champagne and stood in line behind me where I was holding two beach chairs and some snacks. I watched the old guy cleaning the front windshield of his Cadillac, then the back, then spotting the woman and waving to her with a smile. There was grace in every move.

“Hope I’m like your grandfather when I get old,” I said to the woman, making conversation. “That guy’s got style.”

She looked at me and laughed. “He’s not my grandfather.” I was next in line, but she cut in front of me, then bumped her ass into me so hard that I stepped on the shoes of a big guy behind me. She glided to the open counter, paid, and was gone. The guy behind me hummed three times like he’d just tucked into a supremely satisfying meal.

Back at our motel, Lydia yelped as I opened the door, and she dropped a glass she’d been holding against the wall. It hit the carpet and landed upright. She blushed. I opened the bag of Hershey’s Kisses I’d bought and tossed one at the glass before she could reach for it. It hit the rim, giving off a quick, pleasant chime. She picked up the Kiss and unwrapped it.

Our neighbors were still at it next door, the headboard galloping. There was a lot of loud buzzing, and the woman was saying what sounded like “Oh Jibbyjibby, oh Jibbyjibby.” Her partner’s replies were pure caveman.We made a game out of seeing who could land the most foil-wrapped chocolates into the glass. She was the reds. I was the regular silvers. Lydia snorted at a particularly loud “Oh Jibbyjibby.” I emptied the glass and held it against the wall and motioned for Lydia. She pressed her ear to the end and laughed at whatever it was she could hear. She was that young woman again, peeking over hedges, spying on her neighbors’ hidden lives. Our foreheads touched and I was back in the fog of her hair, like that first time, and when I moved to kiss her, I was stopped by the sight of her tears.

I rose before dawn, my body still on a workweek schedule. Lydia was asleep and still undressed from our strangely emotional coupling the night before. She’d confessed to me afterwards that she’d had four brief affairs over the course of her marriage. They’d taken place in motels like this one, but our affair was the first honest one she’d ever had, and the longest by far. She told me how good that felt, deep down where it mattered, where you respected yourself and others. She’d never told anyone about those four affairs, and although it was years ago, she just hated that those men were out there somewhere and could think of her whenever they wanted to, and in a way she didn’t wish to be thought about by anyone, except me, if I chose to. I had never considered intimacy to have an afterlife that was out of your control. I had nothing deep like that to share, so I told her instead about how I was hoping to buy the chrome mother bear and bear cubs from the mall before demolition began.

“How wonderful!” she said. “Maybe you can get them donated to a playground.”

I didn’t mention that I wanted them for myself, in that future backyard of mine.

I dressed quietly in the near dark and grabbed her car keys. At some point last evening, Lydia had shaped the Kisses on the table into the outline of a heart. I stole downstairs with my duffle, climbed into Lydia’s car, then drove, squinting at the sun as it rose off the sea, not sure where I should go or what to do, or who I was becoming. 

I thought about the young woman in the mini-mart and wished we could compare notes. Was she happy? She seemed happy. Had she figured out her future? I thought about the dapper old guy and about all the mismatched people I knew, including the fighting/fucking couple in the motel, Walford and his wife, Lydia and her late husband, Lydia and her flings, even the couple she’d seen in a backyard a year before a murder. I thought about how I was now in a mismatched relationship, and I wondered whether this might actually mean that I was truly kind. Not empathetically kind, not kind with a trace of pity, but kind in the best sense of the word. I was someone who saw others as pure beings with whom I could meld my soul, no matter our differences. Poetry kind. If this wasn’t true, then was I a loser, a sad saint, a mortar filling the cracks in others? A GILF lover? I hadn’t thought of what we were doing as an affair. Who were we cheating? Ourselves? And the more I thought about that, the more I didn’t like the word affair at all, especially its inherent quality of expiration.

When I pulled back into the motel’s parking lot a couple of hours later, Lydia came downstairs with her little suitcase and the beach chairs. I expected my disappearance to have made her cry, or worse—disappointed her. She didn’t seem to have noticed. She was wearing her swimsuit under her blouse. She’d braided her hair and I could see sunscreen gilding the helix of one ear. I popped the trunk and placed the chairs and her suitcase inside, then pulled out the bouquet I’d picked up that morning and handed it to her.

“Honestly, Jason. If you aren’t the sweetest man in the world.” She ran her finger down the length of my nose, then pressed the end of it. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re real.” She buried her face in the bouquet, the short pale scar at the bridge of her nose lost in the blossoms.

She climbed into the passenger side and let me shut her door. I went around to the other side and started the car. I was there, I suppose, because she’d planted the idea in my head that I was better than I thought I was. I figured I could do worse than try and live up to the way she saw me, and to do so for as long as this thing we had might last—before my thinking about her would become a violation of this purer moment now, just two people driving to a beach on a workday, and whatever it was that we were going to do afterwards in the mess that we made.