I inhabit a drywall miracle of rodent-like proportions above St. Mark’s Pizza in the East Village. The stairwell smells like urine and the Korean peddlers have slowly taken over my front stoop, so I have to bat scarves and crystal necklaces in order to enter my sad little plot of urban grandeur. I work for the Antichrist. Her name is Cynthia, and she is all about the black Chanel flat, expensive moisturizers, personal humidifiers, and a classic cut. Her bangs present an unwitting contrast of youthful fringe offset by aging skin. She looks like Bette Davis as Modigliani might have painted her.

She calls me from the train a lot. “Kate, I am on the train.” Cynthia said she had “dumbed down” her operations for me. I wasn’t catching on fast enough. In my interview for the job she said, “I am looking for someone who anticipates my needs. I want you to know I need a massage before I do!” She leaves dull pencils in her outbox so I will sharpen them. I used to wonder if I should anticipate the pencils too, to somehow reach for them before they became smooth gliding stubs of lead, but it’s hard to predict the sharpness cycle of a pencil.

Cynthia alludes to her life a lot. She doesn’t think I can grasp all the finery and her descriptions always come with careful footnotes. It’s my fault. I have a hard time telling people about my life. I don’t say things like, My father drank Campari and sodas after a round of golf at the Tollygunge Club in Kolkata. I don’t mention his chestnut racehorse Pocket Money, the steak sandwiches under the rubber trees, or polo at the Kolkata Pony Club. These are silent facts.

I also leave out the part where my father’s small plane goes down over Mumbai and I have to fly home alone above his casket with a card pinned to me that says, “Unaccompanied youngster.” My aunt and uncle from Oklahoma met me at JFK. My Aunt Vel looked like she had just walked off the set of Leave it to Beaver one day and never looked back. Uncle Ted smelled like Doublemint gum and Jovan cologne. Aunt Vel brought me a blueberry muffin my first morning in their house and sat on the floor by my bed, and said, “I always wanted a girl.”

She drowned that summer in a boating accident and Uncle Ted got married six months later to Marcy, his secretary. I became rebellious and “unsuffertable,” as Marcy opined, so as soon as I came of age, I cut all ties and moved away. I have a past, but it’s not one that fits too well into any scenario. There’s the Campari part, but then there’s the Oklahoma City part with Uncle Ted, the green siding split level, and the driveway with a netless basketball hoop above it. The interesting years get shuffled to the sidelines and suddenly I’m a lonely orphan from Oklahoma who was scrappy enough to come to the big city and work for the Antichrist. But that’s not who I am.

The Tollygunge Club, in Kolkata, is a large white mansion with green awnings surrounded by rose bushes and thick mango, jamun, eucalyptus, and kikar groves. The lush green golf course offers lots of water hazards. My father’s favorite one required a shot to sail over a huge tank filled with water lilies. It is called the Hydrophobia Hole. The Eden Gardens, where my father watched cricket, were created by Lord Auckland’s sisters, Emily and Fanny Eden, to fashion a facsimile of paradise in India. There is a serpentine lake running through the middle of it.

Our flat was on Ho Chi Mihn Street. My address was written inside the GI Joe lunch box my father bought me at the PX. My childhood was littered with off brands, wrong sex lunch boxes, and dolls that were too fancy to play with. Now I work with a bunch of peroxide blond malcontents who say things like, “I’m not going to be as smiley-smiley as I was before.”

My days are spent doing things I am not very good at and forgetting details. You know how you know you’re smart enough, but you screw up a couple of times and then you are pegged as dumb? I forget itinerary details and don’t request the king-size bed at Cynthia’s hotels and pull the South Dakota file when she says North Carolina. It’s not that I’m dumb. I can’t explain it.

Cynthia’s itinerary details are as follows: “Kate, I need an aisle seat in the upper four rows—bulkhead preferable—non-smoking, vegetarian meal, if they don’t have vegetarian then kosher. The hotel in Trenton knows me. I need a king-size bed! Please write that down and get it straight with AmEx. If Mike from the Tiny Jewel Box calls, buzz me.”

Cynthia’s boss is a dubious blond party man who drives a red Chrysler Le Baron with vanity plates that read, “Y Knot.” He has a sailboat. His name is Michael Plentnar and he prides himself on prolonged eye contact and instant name recognition. “Hi Kate!” He is a born greeter. He likes the ladies, the booze, clubs, and things that are too young for him. He has a loft in TriBeCa. The butt is tight, and his ex-wife is still in touch. Cynthia and Michael are thick as thieves. Michael’s smile unfolds like the Grinch’s, in V-shaped increments of collusion.

Cynthia’s favorite minion is a girl named Marlee. “Ooooh, Marlee,” she intones, and then there is the faintest glimmer of a spark in her eyes, and, for that tiny moment, her smile is wedded to her eyes. Marlee sits in the cubicle across from mine and conducts lengthy conversations with herself involving profanity, admonishments, and direct references to herself, as in, “Marlee, you idiot!” or “Yes, you did send that fax, good dog!”

Marlee represents a variety of contradictions that all reflect an inability to commit. She is unmarried but has been involved with the same man for 13 years. She is not a vegetarian, but she eats tofu, soy bratwursts, barley, kasha, and lots of butternut squash. Our one-sided lunchroom conversations have revealed that Marlee blossomed in the 1980s as a young girl from Indiana here to study in the big city. She arrived sullen and undeveloped, got drunk at her first college mixer, and discovered an affinity for the fringe music scene.

There were Converse high tops, pencil-legged pants, studious glasses, a spiky cut, bad purplish highlights, a stab at anarchy, and a wholesale adherence to the New Wave music scene that bought her an insider edge. As a punk girl groupie, she stayed in the same room with the musicians long enough to become a fixture. Combustion was bound to occur when the organism remained in proximity to a primary substance for an extended period. She didn’t so much get a boyfriend as grow one in a conducive atmosphere.

I thought, initially, that Marlee would be a comrade in arms—a fellow obtuse underling who would never get sucked into the hollow world of urgent sticky notes, memos, trainings, and postured meetings. I hoped her mismatched secondhand outfits—the yellowed fake pearls, the charm bracelets with missing amulets—all meant that she would be a kindred spirit, a cohort in this professional underworld. But no, she proved to be just another office archetype: the hall monitor. Marlee frisks the corridors in a cloud of gnome-like innocuousness, quietly measuring, scrutinizing, and analyzing the work habits of others to form a patchwork of sin that exalts her.

“I made a cream of barley last night, but I didn’t have milk, so I substituted powdered milk, which changes the consistency. I added these special tofu bratwursts and I have to say they lend a really good flavor to the broth. They are a little more chewy and less dense than regular bratwurst, but I think they’re good. Do you want a bite?”
“Oh, it sounds really good, but I am stuffed, thanks.”
“I need to lower my cholesterol, so I focus on whole grains and nice German breads. Tofu is surprisingly high in fat, so I buy the low-fat variety.”

The fluorescent lights in the lunchroom flicker against the dingy white walls. This doesn’t seem any different from a cigarette break in a factory. I feel like the hearing-impaired mother in Norma Rae—deaf on my lunch break, eroded by routine and cellophane-wrapped sandwiches. I hypothesize that the plastic wrapping is causing my frontal lobe to disintegrate, or maybe the aspartame in the yogurt is rotting my cerebellum.

“Is that yogurt fat free?”
“Two percent.”
“Oh, you might as well eat a bucket of fried chicken. Tons of fat. I only eat the fat free plain yogurt but, my God, the other day I took a bite of full fat yogurt, plain of course, and it was to die for. Do you want a piece of celery? It’s very nice. Organic. It was only 30 cents more than the regular, so I went ahead and bought it. I was listening to This American Life the other night and…”

It goes on like this. Public radio, organic celery, the list of substituted ingredients in recipes.

“Last night Danny made a banana cream pie, and we were all out of pudding, so he substituted lemon Jell-O and it actually turned out all right. But I got really neurotic. We had guests over and he filled the graham cracker crust with the yellow filler and it only came halfway up. I don’t know what was wrong with me, but suddenly I was about to cry because he had screwed up the banana pie, but he was so sweet. He just smiled and said, ‘We have ice cream.’ And I realized it was going to be OK. I don’t know what was wrong with me!”

Danny is the anemic boyfriend with ravaged cuticles and a frustrated death wish. She has found him crumpled on the floor twice, once in the garage and once in the kitchen. The oven was electric. I am not sure what he was intending to do, or if he just fainted from the heat. He drives a 1976 Oldsmobile, and the interior ceiling material hangs down, causing their hair to stand up with static. Marlee has an acute case of Boyfriend Pride. Not proud of the boyfriend, proud to have one. “Kate, have you finished the outline I asked you to put together,” Cynthia asks, clearly agitated. Cynthia walks over to my computer and I suck in a gasp of air. Solitaire, in all its green, employee-time-theft splendor, sits maximized on the screen. I feel like I just wet my pants. It’s that kind of embarrassment. Cynthia fiddles with the computer revealing my sins. She is irritated and huffy.
“Kate, we’re going to be reviewing the ‘ask’ on this deal in about 45 minutes. I have saved this onto your C drive. Please see to it that it is completed and on my desk in 15 minutes. Any questions, ask Marlee.”
“Cynthia! I’ll be happy to help her out,” Marlee offers.

People in offices don’t make pacts with the devil; they become the devil. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven sort of thing. When Satan was cast out of heaven, he was not alone; he had to have a staff. Marlee is Satan’s first minion. Marlee is always here, an inexplicable presence neither snow, nor sleet, nor hail can deter. Marlee’s subway is never delayed, her route is never filled with traffic, the elevator is never slow. Marlee is a foot soldier of adamantine resolve. She sits at her desk with a pre-osteoporotic hump forming on her back, her mouth pulled into a pursed knot, staring into the void of the computer monitor. She is wearing an alarming green cardigan today. If hell is a library, Marlee is its librarian, filled with obdurate pride, loneliness, and voyeurism.

“Have you seen Carolyn this morning,” she asks. Her curiosity has given her an almost post-coital glow. She senses that something is amiss, someone is late, the rules have been bent, she is alive.
“She might be getting a cup of coffee,” I offer in solidarity to the delinquent Carolyn.
“She has an eating disorder you know.”
“No, I didn’t know that.” I bite into an apple.
“Bulimia. I hear her throwing up in the bathroom. How is your apple? Is it nice?”

I finish the outline Cynthia gave me and listen to Marlee as she talks to herself. I think the self-talking is meant to convey an extra sense of industriousness. Little vacant projects seem to light up Marlee’s world. She likes shredding boxes of paper. I just want to say to her, “Let’s join forces, Marlee. Let’s admit that this fatuous work life is crap and then we can be liberated.” Her unadorned skin looks pale and miserable next to the lime green cardigan. She holds a pencil in one hand and stares rapt at two charts on her desk.

“Now let’s see…” she ponders aloud, “Is this just…” She puts the pencil down.

Marlee’s phone rings and she answers it in perfect, exasperated, office worker cadences, “Marlee Edel!” Slowly the efficiency of her nattering and the sharp consonant sounds subside into an eviscerated little whisper, then a slight whimper. Then her voice goes up several octaves in an odd mewling sound. This doesn’t sound good. “What do you mean he was found?”

Marlee puts the phone down and looks even more destitute. She looks toward me and says, “It’s Danny.” And her face contorts. It is weird to see someone’s face transmogrify from a placid little plain of common features into an agonized countenance of despair. My first thought is: not a tragedy. I’m not up for a tragedy today.

She stands and her frail little hand touches the wood veneer on her desk. The lime green cardigan, a garage sale find, looks like a version of cheerfulness from a bygone era. She puts her head down and raises a hand to her forehead. Cynthia rounds the bend and immediately senses something is terribly wrong. She looks from me to Marlee, her mouth slightly open. She grabs Marlee’s wrist with bony fervor. I stand up and furrow my brows. I am a little bit inured to heartbreak. Cynthia looks back at me, her features heightened with confusion.

“It’s her…” I attempt.
“They found Danny. Cynthia, they found Danny in our apartment. They think he hung himself.”
“Kate, go tell Michael this instant that something has happened.”
I walk toward Michael’s office and his cologne assaults me before I enter his immense lair overlooking Park Avenue.
“Michael?”
He’s wearing half glasses and peering into his laptop. He looks at me with impatience. The professional greeter is clearly not programmed for friendliness right now.
“Do you need something?”
“Michael, it seems that Marlee’s boyfriend…”
“Marlee?”
Lead minion! The librarian! Man! You must know who she is. “Marlee Edel, she works for Cynthia. She sits…”
“Oh, Mar-lee. What happened?”
“I think her boyfriend…um…hanged himself and Cynthia wanted me to come get you.”

Michael is apparently aroused by situations that require action. He shoots out into the hallway and I follow, a little slowly, like Prissy coming to help deliver Melanie’s baby. There is now a cluster gathered around Marlee’s desk. Cynthia is ministering to Marlee like a perfect aging sorority girl. Cynthia looks at Michael and their eyes lock. Michael says, in a low snarl, “Cyn, you need to get her out of here.” Cynthia takes stock of the situation, fixes me with a keen stare, her lips thin with purpose, and says, “Come with me.”

We guide Marlee down the hall to the elevators and descend into the underworld of the parking garage. Cynthia has a black Jeep Cherokee. Satan’s chariot! Lots of little security bells and beepers go off and Cynthia inserts one of a chorus of keys into the ignition. I sink into the leather of the backseat.

I was having a riding lesson at the Tollygunge Club when I found out about my father’s plane going down. “Up down up down up down up down.” I was riding a pinto pony named Cinderella and my nanny approached the ring with a bizarre look on her face. Her eyes were slack with fear, her mouth frozen in an uncharacteristic grimace. She walked toward the pony, raised her hand to the bridle, the pony got spooked, and I screamed. Cinderella threw me off into a fence and I lay there crumpled on the dry dirt. My arm was broken. The instructor and all the pony leaders were saying, “Baby, baby, baby are you all right?” My nanny scooped me up and put me in a Sikh’s big black taxi. The seats were roomy and soft, and I lay my injured arm underneath my nanny’s ample body. It felt cushioned there, but she moved it out of concern for the fragile limb. Then it hurt. She said, “Baby, oh baby…” and burst into tears. I hadn’t just broken an arm; I’d lost a father.

My own glamorous father was with me in the morning. We shared breakfast on our veranda overlooking the lush, manicured gardens and he laughed when the crows hovered too close to my toast. He was gone by lunch. Harry the sweeper cried silently. His tears fell on the floor, mixing with all the little inefficient dust piles he had gathered with the sparse straws of his short broom.

As a little girl, it seemed to me that all of India was bowed in a collective namaste to my tall, elegant, silver-haired father with the pencil thin moustache and the sparkling blue eyes. My father of the dry wit and the even drier martini. Namaste is a Sanskrit word meaning, I bow to the divine in you. It’s a lost epoch.

Marlee clutches the supple armrests of the Cherokee and looks like a wan doll. Cynthia zooms through the garage like a rodeo rider expertly maneuvering around barrels. We emerge into the Manhattan glare of noise, buildings, and taxis. We glide across the Brooklyn Bridge and Cynthia masters the streets. We pull up to Marlee’s brick building and the police cars are out front with silent sirens and flashing lights. We bypass the stairs and go up in the elevator. Marlee looks resigned. Her nose turns red, but the tears won’t come. She puts her hand to her mouth and Cynthia ushers her into the apartment and quickly placates the police by explaining who Marlee is and why she belongs here.

There is a note clenched in Danny’s gnawed hand. I see a box of couscous on the counter. Marlee looks up at me, bewildered, and I mouth, “I am sorry.” I want to tell her that sometimes a really sad thing can be liberating. I can’t mouth that. I want to explain that all her past depression was based on a sort of learned intellectual angst. It wasn’t real. But now she has a legitimate reason to be sad. It didn’t happen to someone in a biography. Her pain isn’t vicarious anymore.

They put Danny’s body on a gurney and cover him completely. Cynthia is holding Marlee’s hand, ready for a cue, a sign, an indication of what to do next. I look at the fire escape and long to swing down the ladders to the pavement below and be done with this. A small crowd is gathering around the police cars and the ambulance.

“We had an argument this morning,” Marlee says in a halting voice. “I told him I was going to make salmon and seaweed salad for dinner. I got some seaweed from an Asian grocery store, reconstituted it, and added rice vinegar and canned clams. When I looked into the oven, I could see remnants of his baking projects lining the bottom of the oven and I knew it would burn tonight when I broiled the salmon. I told him that he needed to…”
“Sshshshs, Marlee, that’s not why Danny…”
“No. There’s more. I said, ‘If you did more than just sit around baking and making papier-mâché boxes then maybe we’d be somewhere in this world.’ He was just starting to bake. I thought the baking was a good sign.”

Cynthia’s eyebrows are frozen in a facsimile of concern. She is squatting in front of Marlee, holding her hand, and I can sense the compassion draining out of her like sand. This is all a little too plain and bleak for her right now. She is ready to move on to the next crisis like a good manager.

“OK, listen Marlee, you probably want to be alone now, right?”
“I’m going to need to ask Ms. Edel a few questions, ma’am,” a remaining police officer says.
He unfolds the suicide note and looks embarrassed. He hands it to Marlee and she reads it aloud, her voice raspy with fatigue, “I’m a sensitive, sad little man (you already knew that) who appreciates you more than you will ever know. I believe people are inherently good. That’s why it terrifies me to feel this much pain in the face of all that goodness. In the end, I decided it was better to burn out than to fade away. I love you, Marlee. I’ll save a spot for you in paradise.” Marlee folds the note in half and hands it back to the policeman.

“You’ll be all right, dear!” Cynthia says confidently and then winks knowingly at the police officer.
“Take care,” I say lamely.

We leave Marlee alone with the police officer at the kitchen table, looking stunned with her cold cup of tea next to her. I don’t think she wants us to leave, but I follow Cynthia dutifully out the door and back down to her large, lush vehicle.

“Do you need a ride, or can you hop on the subway,” she asks. The corners of her mouth rise in a haughty, marionette-string smile. I hesitate. She says, “Subway it is then!” She climbs effortlessly behind her padded leather steering wheel and disappears in a cloud of indifference.

I am left in front of Marlee’s building, unclear about a lot of things. I look up at the fire escape and back in at the mosaic tiled foyer. My shoulders feel weighted down and I think of pale Marlee and her reddened nose talking in disbelief to the police officer. I reconstituted the seaweed and…

My father’s memorial service was at Uncle Ted’s house. There was lots of thick white wall-to-wall carpeting pulled snug over fat layers of foam padding. The rooms whooshed with conditioned air and seemed impermeable to invasion. After the heat, humidity, and disorder of Kolkata, with all the smells, insects, beggars, cows, and monkeys, a split level in Oklahoma City seemed like a lunar module.

My father’s plain pine box lay closed in the sunroom on black and white linoleum tiles. Aunt Vel took me up to his casket and pulled my hand away from my white lace dress with a single appliqued rose on it, complete with lace anklets, white tights, and patent leather Mary Janes. She placed my hand on the pine casket. I thought it would be scratchy, but it was smooth. A man laughed in the next room and my head turned with a start. My father’s laugh, not my father’s laugh. I looked up at Aunt Vel and there was one small tear pulling its way out of her eye. I wanted to ask her why she was crying. It’s hard to understand as a kid that the loss of your parent is going to affect others, too. I walked away, looking down at the pearlized buttons fastening the straps on my shoes.

“I think she’ll be glad you came back,” the police officer says as I ascend Marlee’s staircase. He jauntily flips his notebook shut and gives me a nice smile. I walk up the cold hard stairs and stand in Marlee’s door, which is still ajar. I’m not really sure what the protocol is with a suicide. I don’t know where they’ve taken him. The morgue I suspect. There is nothing else for Marlee to do. She has identified the body and now it’s just time to make preparations. It’s oddly so final.

“Marlee?”
She looks up, startled, steeped in thought.
“Hey, Marlee, how are you doing?”
“I don’t know. I can’t believe he’s gone. I don’t know what happened. I mean, there were other times, but I never thought he would go through with it. I don’t know if it would have been better if we were married. I wanted to get married, but he didn’t want to take that final step. He’s been depressed, but I took the baking as a good sign. I took the baking projects as a really good sign that maybe he wanted to commit to things and create them and that would lead to sealing things with me and maybe, I don’t know, more creation.”
“A baby?” I whisper.
“Maybe. Maybe a baby. My mother told me not to have children because they would keep me from doing what I want in life. But I don’t think not having children has given me what I want either. What do you think?”
“I don’t know, there are a lot of people who have kids, and their dreams seem to come true.”
“Danny wanted to be cremated and he wanted me to leave his remains, you know unofficially, at the Metropolitan Museum. He worked there as a guard part time, and he took his job really seriously. If someone tried to touch a painting, he would approach them and get all heated up about it, and his face would get red. That’s how he was.”
“Marlee, I…”
“I want to tell you something else, Kate. I realized something today.”
“What’s that?”
“Cynthia Deam is a bitch. She begged me not to mention the company name if there were any reporters involved. And then she just left me sitting here. She couldn’t wait to get out of this apartment. I realized she was embarrassed to have an employee with a messy life. Maybe if I had spent more time with Danny and less time running out into the cold to be on time to impress Cynthia, he would still be here. He was sleeping this morning when I left him.”

I look over at their bed on the floor, with the ecru-colored futon cover showing under the light brown sheets. I imagine them warm and contained in their fuzzy, sad, vaguely unfulfilled world. I wonder if Danny watched her leave, knowing he would hang himself this afternoon while she sat in her cubicle in a pleated dark gray dirndl skirt and a lime green cardigan. A tiny bird couple. Danny had a thin crop of dryer lint fuzz for hair and a cream-of-mushroom-soup complexion. He’d stopped playing mandolin years ago, gave up on the music scene, and resigned himself to a life on the fringe, well below the burning scan of social radar.

“I thought if I followed her dutifully, if I did all the right things, if I was perfect with my attendance and lunch breaks, it would get me somewhere. I thought I was doing everything right.” She bows her head, and the tears finally fall, unbidden, like little salt pools of release.

A week later, I take the subway with Marlee to the Metropolitan Museum. There are purple, red, and orange exhibit flags advertising an array of shows: Hockney Paints the Stage, Titian and Van Dyke: The Body of Christ, and Rodin’s Gates of Hell. I take Marlee’s hand and lead her toward the Egyptian rooms. I usher her into the Temple of Dendur exhibit. There is an immense glass wall facing Central Park. The air is carefully calibrated and slightly humid.

Marlee’s hands are shaking terribly so she gives me the manilla envelope. I open it, look around furtively, and pour Danny’s dainty gray remains into the large potted palm nearest the temple. They spread like fine volcanic ash over the black soil. The temple’s columns rise toward the sky like tall bundles of papyrus with lily flowers bound up in them. There are images of the sun disk above the gate flanked by the outspread wings of Horus, the sky god.

Marlee and I walk across the polished stone floor and look out at the leafless trees of the park. I am glad to know sad Danny is interred in his improvised sarcophagus. I put my hand on Marlee’s shoulder, she nods her head and says, “I’ll see you Monday.”
“You’re going back to work with Cynthia?”
“She promised me my own office.”

Marlee takes off her carpal tunnel brace and shakes my hand. I leave her at the entrance of the museum and stride diagonally down the long, shallow steps. I walk down 5th Avenue, toward 80th Street, and on to Union Square. The teeming farmer’s market lightens the sulfuric city air with scents of basil and lilies. The farther I walk from the lofty, surreal confines of the museum, the grittier and more concentrated Manhattan becomes.

When I reach St. Mark’s Place, I turn the corner and squint into the reassuring sun. A tall Indian man with a turban in a light blue button-down shirt walks toward me, tilts his torso, leans into my face, and says, “Someone is thinking about you.”