Some Kinds of Love: Stories

Forgery

122J Forgery My twelfth-floor office window in the United Fruit Company Building looks across St. Charles Avenue on the Hotel InterContinental. Here in my office, I would like to think, is the real life, the workaday world of designing catalog pages for Head Shoppe Gift Company, Ltd., owned by the sturdy DeGraff Family Foundation. Over there, behind those hotel windows, is a beachhead of American unreality, a staging ground for the false carnival of the French Quarter. Now every night in New Orleans, no matter how distant on the calendar from Fat Tuesday, a faux Mardi Gras swirls, a pageant of beads and boobies. When I work late, I endure quite a show. You see, in the hotel there are guests from such metropolises as Pittsburgh and New York City, even Tokyo. Few bother with shades when preparing themselves for the year-round street party they have traveled so far to witness. I am just saving a photoshopped recast of six lava lamps shaped like penises when an Asian woman sheds her kimono and exhibits herself to St. Charles, her orange skin blazing. Her hair she releases in a coal-blue cascade. Though feminine, her shoulders and collar bone create the base of a triangle with its apex at her navel. She makes an ideal model, a da Vinci sketch of perfect anatomical form. What mistaken sense of privacy, what delusional tourist tale forgery K123 of guilt-free frolic would allow someone so lovely to bare herself to just anybody? Only New Orleans. Carla, my boss, enters and jolts me from this reverie. Her hose whisper between her wool skirt and plump thighs, a sound like fine-grit sandpaper. I sense her looking over my shoulder at the Macintosh’s screen. When she has taken in the lava lamps, the velvet background, the way the colors will separate and pop, she draws a deep breath that betrays a struggle for restraint. “Mr. Rudyard, that is an especially pleasing display of product you have mounted there,” she says. Last year’s Carla would have come in smoking and growled something ribald, such as, “I need to find me a dick that lights up like that.” Her comments always seemed doubly naughty coming from a petite blonde dressed in a navy business suit and designer shoes. But those were the days before the litigation. While it is hard to imagine claiming sexual harassment or hostile workplace against a firm that peddles rainbow-colored dildos and condoms tipped with effigies of dead Presidents’ faces, the offices of Head Shoppe Gift Company, Ltd. are stifled now. Last year a temporary secretary sued us and won a settlement that was never disclosed to employees, not even to Carla, so vast it must have been. Now poor Carla has become the executive exemplar of an office-wide politeness and correctness policy. She has quit smoking and gained forty pounds. “Press check on this spread, Miss Carla?” I swivel to her. A joke: our catalog printer is in Taiwan. She is seated on my desk, a gnarled antique abandoned by the Fruit Company executives. Her black skirt is too short—she has not yet realized how heavy she is becoming. With her thin rayon blouse on round shoulders she is a plum ripening. “Mr. Rudyard, I delight in your dedication, here so late after a full day.” She opens one of the chocolates I keep for her on my desk. All her sentences now sound as if they have been screened by some legal team from Baton Rouge. When her blue eyes catch the Asian nude across St. Charles, 124J forgery her face softens as though she sits before a great work of art. “You know, I used to feel this concern was cutting edge, provocative.” She opens another chocolate. “Now . . .” When she looks down, there are her stout legs bulging in wine-colored hose. Her eyes widen as if she is just sensing the damage. “Miss Carla,” I say. “This will pass. Soon we’ll all feel like a hundred bucks.” Her fingers tear at a third wrapper. She whispers. “A year ago, if you said something reassuring, you would have touched my knee without fear of meaning anything but kindness, Mr. Rudyard.” The far-off, nostalgic look has left her face. Despite the softness of her whisper, her rounded jaw and narrowed eyes...