This is (Not) a Story

This is a story. Stories give a series of events that tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end – in theory – and at the end, there is a climax, the pinnacle of excitement in the series of (usually interrelated) events, and there is a resolution, where all of the problems discussed in the story get tied up neatly so that in the end, you have a nicely wrapped package that someone somewhere will want to open, and when they do, out will come the story.

So this is a story:

A woman walks into a bar. She sits down. She looks casually around the room, because she is trying to find a man. This man is a weapons dealer, who deals in what one might call slightly unconventional weapons, especially for a weapons dealer to be dealing. So she sits, and she waits, looking around the room even though she doesn’t know what this man is supposed to look like. Eventually, he sidles up to her at the bar, and under the rouse of buying her a drink, he slips her a dust-buster. But this is no ordinary dust-buster. Leaning in to kiss the man on the cheek, presumably in thanks for buying her a drink, the woman slips the money that she is exchanging for the dust-buster into the man’s pocket.

The exchange being finished, the woman leaves the bar and goes home to her abusive husband. Creeping to the linen closet in the hall, the woman replaces the old dust-buster with the new one from the weapons dealer at the bar, and then conveniently bumps into the vase in the living room, knocking it over, and causing it to shatter into a million tiny pieces. Her husband comes running and screaming into the room, a sort of manic glee evident in his face, and we think he is going to hit her – he moves as though he will hit her – but he doesn’t. He goes to the linen closet and he takes out the dust-buster, the one from the weapons dealer in the bar, and just as he turns it on in order to clean up the mess, the dust-buster explodes. The abusive husband is dead, the wife disposes of the body, goes on with her life, and lives happily ever after.
So, if that is a story, then what follows is most certainly not a story.

It begins with a lawyer – but it is not important that this person was a lawyer. It is only important that this person walked to work everyday, and when he walked to his office, he took the same route without fail. As far as this lawyer knew, no one had noticed or cared that he took the same route everyday. He was incorrect. Someone had noticed.

That someone was a woman who worked in a similar office, which looked down on a street that happened to be a part of the lawyer’s route to work. Not only had this woman, who was a magazine editor of a not-too-great-but-not-bad-either sort of publication, noticed him, but in fact she made a point of watching him walk to work every single morning. She needed to look down from her window on the seventh floor to see this lawyer on his way to work because he passed by her window at the exact same time every morning – but not by the measure of any clock.

Every single day, that lawyer passed by this magazine editor’s window exactly four minutes after the newspaper vendor down the street opened (she presumed because the lawyer stopped there to get a paper every morning, and it took him four minutes to get from there to her window), and therefore exactly two minutes before her own boss arrived at the office. She needed to know when he would arrive because it gave her just enough time to hide the stack of papers that she kept on her desk whenever her boss wasn’t around. Since the newspaper vendor did not open at a specific time, she couldn’t use the clock to gauge how much time she had before the arrival of the editor-in-chief.

The editor had to hide the stack of papers because if the editor-in-chief were ever to see them, then he would know that she was having an affair with Ed in accounting, and due to the strict rules on intra-office dating, both the editor and Ed in accounting would surely lose their jobs. So she was very grateful to the lawyer on the street because he made it possible for her to read her secret love notes in the morning and keep her job, which made her happy and kept her in a good mood throughout the day, especially when he was a bit later than usual and therefore allowed her to read through more of the old notes.

And when the editor was in a good mood, so was the staff, especially the editor’s secretary. This secretary, unlike the lawyer and the editor, did not much like her job, but it was made far more enjoyable when the editor was happy, because when she was happy, she gave her secretary more time for lunch. Normally, this secretary would only get the mandatory thirty-minute lunch break that everyone else got, but on the days when the editor got to read through all of her old love notes, and therefore was in an especially good mood, she allowed her secretary to take a full hour.

On these days, when she was allowed an hour for lunch instead of just a half of one, the secretary left the office building and walked the five or so minutes that it took to get to the little deli down the street. At this deli, she always ordered the same thing, a pastrami sandwich on rye, but it was not the sandwich that brought her to the deli – it was the waiter. Now, typically delis don’t have waiters, but this particular waiter was the nephew of the owner, and being his nephew and a college student, the owner felt obligated to give the boy a job. Unfortunately, his nephew was useless in the kitchen, so he would have made him the cashier except that he already had an excellent cashier. And so, he made the boy his waiter, even though it was more or less unheard of for a deli to have such a thing.

In any event, this waiter, over time, grew to understand that the secretary did not come to the deli for his uncle’s delicious sandwiches. He knew that she came to the deli to see him, and he knew that if he flattered her profusely, and flirted with her as he brought the extra pickle that she always requested, she would leave a hefty tip when she went back to her office at the end of the hour.

On the days when the secretary came in for lunch and left a large tip, the waiter usually used that tip to treat himself to a drink at the end of the day. When he left his uncle’s deli, he walked the couple of blocks to his favorite bar, and took a seat in his favorite spot – right near the bartender. He liked this spot not because he liked the bartender per se, although she was very friendly, but because this particular bartender was an excellent listener, and she never seemed to mind when the waiter talked about the stresses and problems in his life.

Sometimes he felt guilty about venting to the poor girl, but he’d always felt that he could be himself with her, and she didn’t seem to mind the company. In fact, some nights she would even stay with him long after the bar had closed and, on the days when the waiter didn’t have to get to class for a while, well into the morning and the two of them would just talk.

The bartender only worked nights, so it wasn’t a problem if she didn’t get home until early morning. She knew that her roommate preferred this, because despite her late-night job, she had always been an early riser, and so she usually woke up just a few minutes before her roommate and beat him to the bathroom for a shower. But, when she stayed out all night talking to the waiter from the deli a couple blocks over, her roommate was able to get the first shower of the morning, which always made him happy because he could get down to the street earlier and open his newspaper stand before the two finely-dressed gentlemen showed up.

The newspaper vendor hated getting there to find them waiting for him. It made him feel late, and one of the reasons that he had his own business was so that he would never have to feel late. So as often as he could, mainly whenever the bartender stayed out late so that he could get the first shower in the morning, he beat them to his spot on the curb and set up his stand. One of the men – his briefcase made the newspaper vendor suspect that he was a lawyer – always just grabbed the day’s paper and went on his way. The other, some sort of fancy magazine editor, took a couple of minutes to survey all of the covers before making his choice. As he watched the two gentlemen disappear further down the street, on those mornings when he beat them to his spot, the newspaper vendor smiled, glad that he had helped them get on with their days a little bit earlier than usual.