no further misunderstandings on her part when it came to Michael Wainwright. The beep continued and she looked down, saw the light that indicated a paper jam and bent to pull out the trapped page. She couldn’t manage. ‘Can I help?’ he asked. Her brain jammed and she felt as trapped as the paper seemed to be. She pulled at it ineffectively. Disbelief, embarrassment and confusion fought for supremacy in her completely overwhelmed consciousness.
‘Here. Let me.’ He leaned down and touched a button at the side of the copier. It released the entire top of the paper feed. If he touched her, Claire thought her whole head would pop off too. ‘I’ve fought this baby more nights than I like to remember,’ he said and, pushing another switch, freed the document. He handed the page to her and smiled. ‘So, would you like to go to London with me?’ he said.
Now her mind beeped a warning more frantic than the copier had. All of the gossip she’d tried to ignore replayed in Claire’s head: The working trip Marie Two might be going on, the new business activity in the UK, Tina’s blow-by-blow about Michael Wainwright’s difficulties in lining up a woman for this latest escapade. She tried to see where the trap was, where humiliation was waiting. Perhaps he needed secretarial help. That must be it. She sighed with relief. Of course …
‘Can’t Tina help you?’ she asked.
‘Help me what?’ he asked in return.
‘With typing or …’
He laughed and Claire felt herself blush. He was laughing at her, and she had tried so hard to avoid that, to forget him, dismiss him, and yet …
‘Claire, I’d like you to spend a long weekend with me in London. Not for work. For fun. As my … guest.’
And then he put his left arm around her. She felt his hand warm – almost hot – through the clothes on her back and then he was pulling her toward him and he lifted her chin with his other hand and put his mouth on hers.
Claire was so surprised she didn’t have time to stiffen or think. It all had a dream-like quality, as if she was in some story she had read long ago – Snow White or Sleeping Beauty – one of those passive young women who waited for years for a kiss to awaken them. She could feel every tiny place of contact she had with him – each finger between her shoulder blades, his palm against her cheek, and his lips against her lips – as if her skin there had never been touched before. Her surprise fought with a surge of feeling both sensual and emotional.
When he moved away from her Claire was struck speechless. In a hundred fantasies she’d imagined – well, nothing as good as this. She literally held her breath and couldn’t – wouldn’t – say a word.
But after a brief pause, he wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. She remained silent because she couldn’t make a sound. He took a step back and she could see that for a moment doubt rearranged his face. ‘I’d certainly understand if you thought that was inappropriate of me …’ He seemed to stumble for a moment, ‘… or if you feel it’s politically incorrect. Or even harassment. Please don’t. I mean we don’t actually work together. Just in the same place.’
Claire still couldn’t speak. By chance, her silence had allowed her to see a moment of Michael Wainwright’s uncertainty, a rare bit of, well, insecurity, or something that looked like it. Somehow it made him more alive, more accessible. Her eyes actually clouded. She had to blink.
‘Okay. Sorry. It just occurred to me that we might enjoy it. But whatever.’
Claire held onto the photocopy machine and tried to remember how to make her tongue capable of speech and her eyes capable of focusing. She was looking at Mr Wonderful, but she was having trouble seeing him. Still, what she was most afraid of was that she wasn’t hearing him properly.
He had turned and was going to leave. Do something, she told herself. But where had this invitation come from? Why her? She remembered the conversation at lunch, the one she had tried not to listen to, and realized he had most likely run out of women available at short notice. ‘Wait,’ Claire heard herself say. He turned. ‘I’d really like to go,’ she told him.
‘Are you out of your friggin’ mind?’ Tina asked Claire the next morning, her voice shrill enough to be heard above the engine of the ferry and not only by Claire but by another dozen people sitting nearby.
Claire moved the yarn from the back of the needle to the front so that she could knit the next three stitches, then slipped them off her cable holder and onto the main needle. She knit those stitches to finish the back twist of the cable while calmly shaking her head at Tina. She would wear this lovely sweater in London.
‘For god’s sake, Claire. You don’t even know him.’ Tina crossed her arms in front of her chest. ‘And it’s not as if you don’t know what he’s like with women. If Katherine Rensselaer couldn’t handle him, how do you expect …’
Claire carefully put the knitting into her bag. Even Katherine Rensselaer couldn’t have a cashmere sweater this lovely, this fine. ‘I don’t expect anything,’ she admitted calmly.
‘Well he will! You think he’ll just take you across the Atlantic because he wants a roommate?’ Tina shook her head and it occurred to Claire that she was more angry than concerned. ‘You think this is the start of some love affair? Sometimes you’re like a kid.’
‘No, I’m not!’ Claire protested. ‘I’m planning to sleep with him. I want to. But I don’t expect anything else.’
Tina laughed but it was one of her sarcastic ones. ‘Yeah, right. I know you. Claire, I’m warning you. You think you’ll come back and start going around New York with Michael Wainwright and you can fagetaboutit.’
‘I don’t have to forget about it because I’m not even thinking of it,’ Claire told Tina. Then, to her relief, the ferry gently bumped against the pilings and the motor reversed. Soon they’d be off.
But there was no respite. ‘So what are you thinkin’ of?’ Tina asked, putting her hand on the damp rail of the ferry and tossing her hair back. ‘You thinkin’ about how to make yourself more miserable? You thinkin’ about how you can become the laughin’ stock of the office?’
And all at once Claire realized she didn’t like Tina’s attitude or tone. And that she didn’t have to listen to it. She stood up. ‘I’m thinking that I’ve never been further away from Staten Island than to Boston. That I’ve read about London since Mary Poppins and I’ve never been there. That no man ever invited me anywhere.’ She paused and reined in her temper. She looked Tina directly in the eye. ‘I’m also thinking that I don’t need any more advice.’
Tina’s face tightened. Then she shrugged. ‘Suit yourself,’ she said and they didn’t speak on the walk to the office.
‘Do you have a good suitcase?’ Marie Two asked. ‘You can’t travel with a backpack, you know.’ Claire hadn’t thought about it. The news of her trip had, via Tina, moved through the human circuits faster than e-mail on electronic ones. She’d already received everything from a high-five from Marie One to a congratulatory note from Michelle, passed surreptitiously to her folded up like a note passed in study hall. It seemed to Claire as if the working class had risen up and were proud; as if their team had scored some kind of touchdown. The irony was that while Claire knew she wasn’t patrician, she had never felt at one with the ‘girls’. Perhaps that was why she didn’t react to Joan’s fish-eye response. In fact the odd thing was that Claire realized that she didn’t care about what the others might think. A sea-change had taken place in her own emotional landscape since Michael Wainwright’s invitation. She simultaneously felt more a part of the business harem while more detached. Now, over the lunch table, where even Marie Three had joined them, her trip was the major topic of discussion yet Claire didn’t feel the slightest bit self-conscious.
‘And