1.
I am, in fact, a tall, slim, long-legged, well-proportioned woman. As I stepped up to his window, the supervisor would not have been thinking of me as a sweet woman, one of a kind, but as a head-turning stunner, an infinitely self-mirroring representation of that species. Or this was how I saw myself through his eyes anyway (as these very words bear out).
I studied law and had been working for twenty years at the top of my trade. I walk tall, and I dress expensively and with confidence. I had known perfectly well where I had parked my car. The supervisor’s brusque appearance beside me had discombobulated me. I’m not a simpleton, but events in recent years have upturned me badly and I’m easily thrown off kilter; some might say, and I’m inclined to count me among their number, that I’m a nervous wreck.
My husband died three years ago. I was inexplicably wronged by his three children from two of his former marriages, maneuvered into giving up my partnership at the firm I had been with for close to two decades, and have been racking up debt on my house and my private pension scheme, enough to put a lid on any ambitions and prospects beyond paying it off during the remaining twoscore or so of my life. The two children from my own marriage are completely in the dark and, their half-sisters having taken off with most of what I owned, stand to inherit naught. In the midst of all this a therapist I had been seeing for years, a woman I had confided in, whom I had been open, level, laughing and bantering with during those years, unexpectedly suggested bipolar disorder, reducing me, at an age when this isn’t particularly heartening and certainly not helpful in any circumstance, to a congenital brain-defect nutcase (the diagnosis, just to set the record straight, turned out to be borderline personality disorder … “character structure”, they added when I showed signs betraying disconcertment). I had no choice of course but to break with her at that most unwelcome juncture. I threw out the wake-up light clock radio, bought at her recommendation, as the rather poorly emulated sunrise and the repetitive, short-cycle pattern of the sound of seabirds skimming over the surf would be a daily reminder of her treachery and incompetence.
I haven’t had sex since he passed away, which he did lying in our bed, almost in the wink of an eye, but, as it turned out, with just enough lead time to have allowed him to stuff three unopened bottles of schnapps under my mattress.
2.
I tried to get into the garage, but due to some mechanical malfunction, I wasn’t able to swipe my AMEX at the ticket machine. I pushed the ticket request button to make it dispense a stub, but none came out. I pressed the intercom button, but as I sat waiting for someone to answer my call, the boom barrier rose and, the queue behind me beginning to signal murderous intent, I drove in.
As I walked out, I was pondering how, having neither checked in with a credit card nor been given a ticket, I was going to have a problem driving out. I didn’t look forward to negotiating the raising of the exit barrier through the intercom system, not with cars and their irritable drivers or passengers (wives in passenger seats are notorious for inciting hatred, especially against car-driving members of their own sex) piling up behind me. I decided to pass by the supervisor’s booth before going on my errands.
A man who had been sitting in the back came up to the window. The window was made of thick glass, probably bullet-proof. A parking garage typically attracts concentrations of motorists, thereby exposing its personnel to an above-average number of potential assassins. The supervisor’s position at the back of his booth and the ballistic-glass front presented what I thought was a sensible precautionary office layout. I positioned myself at a pass-through panel, which the supervisor could slide open if he judged the world outside safe enough; otherwise, he could leave it shut and use the built-in intercom. It was shortly past noon. I wasn’t pointing a gun or brandishing a knife; I looked like an innocent and even amiable person, which sums up why I think he opened it for me.
I succinctly explained the situation.
He said: “Ah, I think I saw you struggling. You’re that white Peugeot?”
I said in a friendly voice, feeling warm to him: “My car is a Peugeot. It is in pearl white and it has a cream-colored soft top.”
“A nice car,” he said. “I was going to answer your call, but the buzzer stopped just as I got to the mike.”
“Well,” I said, “the barrier went up, so I drove in. I had to. There were people backing up behind me and getting impatient.” “That’s funny,” he said, “I mean that barrier opening on you.”
I said: “Perhaps you opened it for me?”
“Oh, I would have,” he said. “I would open any door in the world for you. But as it is, I didn’t. I wasn’t given the chance. So, what can I do for you?”
I said: “I want to be able to drive my car out when I get back. I couldn’t get in with my credit card and I haven’t been dispensed a ticket. There’s nothing I can present at the exit terminal.”
“Can I see your card?”
I said: “It’s AMEX. It wasn’t rejected. I couldn’t swipe it. There was some mechanical obstruction in the slot. I often check in at this garage using this card. I’ve never had this problem. Perhaps someone stuck gum in the slot for a lark.”
I realized that he might not have been paying due attention to my story when I told it in headlines the first time. It probably wasn’t the kind of problem that staff dealt with regularly, and I assumed he simply ran the checklist they had for situations they were used to, even if my having passed the barrier seemed to present a mystery that didn’t quite fit in with any checklist.
“When you get back, pass by this office again and we’ll make sure you can get out.”
“Will you still be here?” I asked. “Because if I don’t find you here, I will have to explain the situation to a colleague of yours who hasn’t seen what happened when I tried to get in and who will probably think I lost my ticket and am attempting to finagle my way out of paying the maximum toll you guys charge when you can’t produce a ticket.”
He didn’t show any annoyance at my mistrust. He probably thought I might be right, even if this scenario hadn’t occurred to him. This bothered me. It is to obtain reassurance that my fears of other people’s acts and thoughts and motives are unfounded, to elicit commitment to my fears, that I am explicit and often rather prolix about them.
“How long you think you’ll be taking? I sign off at 3.”
“An hour,” I said, “perhaps an hour and a half.”
“I’ll make sure my colleague doing the next shift has all the information if you haven’t returned by the time I leave.” But I wasn’t going to stake my fate on that. I got back about 45 minutes later, carrying a classic navy blue Burberry Prorsum trench coat with flower appliqués over my arm.
“You’re back early,” he said when I presented myself at the window again.
“Yes.” I smiled. “I thought better of some of the errands I had set out to run. I picked up this coat at the Burberry store a block up the street. It opened two years ago. I’ve had the sleeves let out. The coat is five years old, but it was very expensive and it’s still in pristine condition. I bought it in San Francisco. I’ve been wearing it for five years with sleeves that were a little too short. Can you believe that? They fixed them free of charge. I’m a returning customer. I think that’s why.”
This is my way of opening up to people: letting them in on little personal things, destroying the mystique of the personal, breaking through the walls between my strangeness and other people. I feel uncomfortable with those walls. It wasn’t delicate intelligence.
“I don’t know about that shop,” he said. “I don’t know anything about clothes. You are a very sweet woman. Let’s get you a ticket. Can I have your card?”
I gave it and as he studied and then swiped it, I was thinking about what a sweet man he was and how unencumbered he seemed. His face was round, smooth, and clean-shaven, with light-brown skin. He would be in his late thirties or early forties. “Can I take down your phone number?” he said. “It’s protocol. It’s not for me. I wouldn’t mind using it though.”
I mentioned the number. I entered the code on the cordless PIN pad he extended through the pass-through panel. He returned my card together with the stub for the exit terminal.
As I turned to walk to my car, he was suddenly standing beside me.
“You should be fine”, he said. “Where is your car?”
His kindness was overwhelming. Terribly afraid of forfeiting it, and then his benevolence, I wasn’t thinking straight. I completely botched my attempt to picture the turns I had made while driving in and looking for a space.
By a fluke, we found the car fairly quickly.
“Just back up a little and then turn right. It’ll save you the trouble of doing a whole round to get to the exit.”
But I didn’t. My brains are not laid out to understand the concept of reversing a car to shortcut the way out in the complex environment of a two-storey parking garage filled with cars in every color in the world. My brains, and my good sense, tell me to follow the way-out signs, which is what I did. I made a full circuit of both floors to reach the exit, following the signs.
3.
As I drove home I was thinking of the supervisor. I could have simply said to him, “You have been so awfully kind to me. I would love you to call me sometime.” But the whole situation had badly preoccupied me. I had got carried away by his kindness and by my fear that it wouldn’t last. I remembered his smooth face and how naturally in control he had been, and his unobtrusiveness even as he devoted so much personal attention to me. All I had returned was my dependency and meekness, disguised as aloofness. I had never looked him straight in the face. I couldn’t even picture his features. I had mirrored the distance between us when, on the screens he was monitoring, I was just someone in a white sports car—man, woman, occasional idiot—struggling to get through the parking garage’s entry barrier. I felt I was to blame for a terrible loss of effort and opportunity.
When I got home I called the toll-free service number of the garage. I mentioned the times of my arrival and departure and said how pleased I had been with the assistance of the supervisor on duty. I asked whether they would leave him a note asking him to call me, if he had time, so I could thank him in person. And I gave my cellphone number, thinking that the same protocol that required staff to enter such data in their systems might bar them from retrieving it for un-protocolled ends.
4.
The next day, the supervisor called me. I reiterated my gratitude in efficient terms and we agreed to meet in a bar near his garage.
He wasn’t particularly handsome, but he was as kind and composed as he had shown himself in his professional capacity.
He said: “Where’re you parked? I didn’t see you driving into the garage. But I may have missed you.”
“Oh, I am in the garage,” I said, “but with a different car.” “Your husband’s?”
“I’m not married. I was. He passed away.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It happened three years ago.”
“Well,” he continued, “you know what I do for a living. What about you? If I have to guess, I’d say a lawyer.”
“No,” I said, “I’m a housewife. My husband was an accountant. He did well. He left us well off. I have two children. One is in college. You’re very good at what you do.”
He didn’t shrug that off. He looked pleased, not complacent or proud, but pleased at knowing he had done what a supervisor is meant to do to make me say it: act efficiently and courteously, comply with local government regulations and company policy standards, and go the extra mile with a personalized touch. He was pleased to know he had performed well for me.
“I like you,” I said.
The supervisor said: “You’re a stunner.”
___
