The Businessman

The Businessman pressed the thick sheets of smooth and pale blue stationery on which he had been engraving his graduated handwriting into his leather briefcase. He could see his face reflecting pallidly back at him and considered the idea of a haircut, crisp and chaotic, the scissors cutting halos around his head. He allowed the individual planes of the Venetian blinds to descend from their divine repose. He felt godlike as his thumb fondled the light switch and he watched on as the room swam in deliberate darkness in front of his eyes, completely expected, producing the perfect, desired, effect. He closed the door with care, smiling slightly as the lock clicked shut, leaving his large mahogany desk, his luxurious blotter, the sepia tinted gold of his letter opener to hum with the motion of atoms, delicately, unseen.

His steps crushed the pile of the amber-hued carpet satisfactorily as he perambulated toward the ornate grille of the elevator, which opened seemingly of its own accord as he approached, the doorman more a creature of the dark than the light. The grille shut, a rich man’s toy accordion, and the Businessman was pulled a little less willingly towards the bottom of his building—well-proportioned as it was, it seemed only appropriate that he was positioned at the top.

He strolled across the gently illuminated lobby—everything marble and sumptuous sofas and lighting like lime, greenish nimbuses thrown against the walls, floating islands between the Black Seas of his shadow, the only part of him which drifted, disconnected, from the rest of the earth, his anchors of limbs, blood and bone. His carefully constructed feet, the web of slender tendons each supported by strips of muscle and vein. Feet had always fascinated him, the fluted way they slipped from heel to instep to pragmatically ordered toes—their practicality paired with pleasant panache.

The Businessman steered his feet in the coffins of their shoes over the resplendent threshold of the restaurant that glimmered on the first floor of the building—they moved forward in well-measured increments until the net of nerves in his extremities caught up with the realization of his retinas. She stood behind the polished podium, dark hair shining around her oval face, her eyes like tumbled jewels still shining with movement as they roved thoughtfully, lazily over the room. She caught sight of him, stranded in his movement across the floor, and smiled—surely this must mean something—her lips revealing stripes of white that seemed to burn against his eyes: a camera flash, a fork of lightning.

Was she saying something? Was her unseen but already beautiful tongue touching letters meant to reach him? He shook water out of his ears.

“How many, sir?” She murmured, her breath somehow reaching him across the room like the draft from a wing fluttered. He gasped a solitary response, his loneliness as sharp as if the letter opener left gleaming on his desk was slicing through the top of his head. Was he just getting a headache? Or had he never noticed before that he had no one? The grey graves of his mother, his father, his sisters, grandmother, grandfather, ancestors galore making perfect, even pairs for him to adorn with flowers that weren’t as perfect anymore—nothing was perfect but

Her hand as she poured a slip of red wine into his blown glass like the bubble of his eyes as he felt his pupils enlarge by her nearness, an incredible red brown pale magnet, shining and shocking the domes of his eyes. Had he asked for this? No matter. He wanted it, he wanted anything she had to give, even this poor reflection of shine that he was already cataloging against the blood of her lips, the glass, too, somehow substandard now that he’d been exposed to the translucence of her skin. He could see her veins. They tracked like moving roads down her arms, concentrated in a snarl in her chest, flooded downwards to the flowers of her knees, the contraction of her ankles, the unimaginable fans of her feet.

“Will you be having anything else tonight, sir? I would be happy to bring you a menu,” she whispered and the sheer delicacy of her voice already put the untasted wine to shame. He couldn’t manage his esophagus, the ribbed inside of his throat. He merely closed his eyes. (Say something. Tell her what you want. Tell her you want the world, in her hands. Tell her the world is her hands. No, no, no tell her. Tell her the world is under her feet. Tell her you are under her feet.) And so he muttered something he’d never heard before and had still never heard because his vowels became consonants and the inside-out envelope of his voice reached the wrong addressee. But she understood, didn’t she? Of course she understood. She didn’t smile because he wasn’t trying to be funny. She just lowered the fermatas of her eyebrows, her eyes singing arias as she turned like the earth, she was the earth, she was gravity, she was water and the hot sun over the desert she was everything he’d ever thought before compounded into one being with her feet aching. All he wanted to do was call her back as he rose through the same air that had clung to her and take her back against his arm, drape her knees over the fold in his elbow, sweep her through the restaurant and into the wild world which he would shield her from, his suit impeccable and impenetrable, pinstripes of chain. (This is all you want? Then you must have it. If the snow starts to fall, it is your birthday and if the smoke from his cigarettes curls into the air you have blown out the candles and your wish is your power, your wish is her feet between your hands).

As she takes another step and her ankles hold her barely because she’s been turning all day long, she’s been gravity all day long, how weary the world must be!, the smoke from the Banker’s cigar is caught in the draft, the empty space, created by her absence. Snow materializes outside. He’s given himself reasons and he doesn’t accept excuses so he stands and he calls her back as he rises through the same air that had clung to her and he takes her back against his arm, drapes her knees over the fold in his elbow, sweeps her through the restaurant and into the wild world.

Somehow she is unsurprised, and only asks “Why?” so he touches her spiked feet and mentions that they are sore. She tells him she dances all night long and he can understand as he soars down the street like an angel with a broken child in his arms. He turns corners like they are the flaps of letters, he cuts them open and doesn’t stop. The snow melts moments before it touches her skin though it settles in his hair. She is warm but not soft in his arms, her body made for precise results, she dances ten hours a day for the ballet but she is nothing, she says, she is nothing. (She is madness and glory. You are nothing). And her feet are already worn when she is born from the dark backstages of randomized theaters into the shock of the sunlit, snowy world, hurrying like a peacock among pigeons to the dance of table for two, table for two, table for two?

(Speak to her: let me rip off your shoes). Let me take off your shoes his hands mutter as soon as they let the snow disappear into the world sealed by the inch of wooden door and he barely knows her name is Magdalene, he only knows that his fingers aren’t trembling because this must be perfect as she reclines in plum velvet and he lifts her skirt in thirds of inches to reveal just the spires of her ankles. He traces them. He considers the reflection of his fingers in the black shine. He slips off shields. This must be rebirth.

Or maybe he has just dug up a grave. The span of skin is scabbed. The toes twist under like they are insects afraid of light. Scars tattoo the places where her nails should be, torn down, worn down, white eyes blind. (You wish you were blind.) These feet should be white like porcelain. They are red like a baby crying. They bulge in the wrong places. They are patterned like the bottoms of fountains swimming with algae on the surface, sun shining through unevenly, dying stretches beet, stretches almost blue.

“I’m a ballerina!” she snaps, her voice suddenly loud because the snow has stopped and her feet have already been stepped on by dirty shoes, unpleasant, rusty imprints. The Businessman closes his eyes. (You consider everything you could say. You couldn’t love her. But maybe you could say something). He opens his eyes. He closes his eyes again because her toes are near his nose. They might bleed. He might cry.

“Here are your shoes.”