[ This one is pretty long -- that's just the way it wrote itself. I should probably warn readers that the story mentions body fluids including saliva and urine, not a focus of the narrative but they're part of it. ]
I felt a little offended and abandoned when they moved my team, my former team, to another building. This big office, Lohman 1153, quickly became a kind of storage room, cubicles were filled with boxes and books and things or they lay deserted, except for my cubicle in the corner near the window. I felt like a pariah at first, all alone in there on the eleventh floor. The security guy, Juan, would come in once a day and sign the check-in sheet near the door. He was supposed to go through the room and check everything but like everybody else in the company, he had a fuck-it attitude. He's doing his job. He doesn't need to walk all the way back to look at me, I'm a healthy, relatively young man, I'm okay or I'm dead, in which case his job is toast no matter what the cause.
Most of the company offices in the Lohman Building were on the third and fourth floor, and somehow my lonely cube turned into a kind of getaway spot for people from down below; they would drop by and sit and bullshit with me and nobody would know where they were. Most of them worked six to two, because the company did mostly international business, and I worked the old nine-to-five-thirty schedule so my mornings were often spent socializing, with quiet afternoons for work. Except I didn't have much work with my team in another building. The view from up here was nice, and life wasn't as bad as I'd feared, even if I did feel a little isolated.
One couple used to stop by, their story was kind of funny. Earl worked in the production office until two in the afternoon, like most of the company, and she was in design, coming in at eleven, so they didn't work together or have much time together but somehow they had figured out how to what HR calls "fraternize." They were a kind of homely, ordinary couple who had an unassuming little romance going on but nobody could know, so they would come to my cube together around lunchtime and she would sit on his lap and we would talk and they would make goo-goo eyes at each other. They would come separately into Lohman 1153 and leave using different doors, it was all very spy-versus-spy. Julie and Earl were good people, and I was the only one in the company who knew about them.
After about six months into their relationship their joking took, I noticed, a kind of dark turn. He would joke about her coldness in bed and she would jokingly complain that he had a one-track mind. She still sat on his lap and there were goo-goo eyes but you could tell something was wrong, and I was sorry to see them drifting apart. Julie did consistently give the impression that she was uninterested in sex, in fact I surmised that the whole thing kind of disgusted her. There was something inherently cute about her but she concealed that fact with dumpy clothes and an unengaging personality. She had curly red hair and probably part of her problem, paradoxically, was her body, with big high breasts and a narrow waist, widening out to a fine round bottom. There was no way she could dress modestly enough to conceal all that treasure, and people saw her as a sexual creature and she hated that and tried to avoid any situation or conversation that could be construed as flirtatious or sexual. At least that was my theory, I could have been wrong. Over time though her jokes became more caustic and more personally directed at Earl, and I was not surprised when they stopped coming to my cube together.
Earl came up by himself first, and plopped down and spilled the beans. "We broke up," he said. "I couldn't take it any longer. She's a great girl, I love her to death, but man she is like a corpse in bed."
"I'm sorry and sort of surprised," I said. "She looks like she might be, you know..." I didn't want to get too graphic with her broken-hearted ex but he knew what I meant. She looked potentially hot, under the dumpy exterior.
"That's what I used to think, too," Earl said. "But I tried everything. You see her, she dresses like an old lady. Well I don't want to go into it, I really do love her but she is the least passionate woman I ever saw."
I empathized and we chatted for a while longer and then later that same afternoon Julie dropped by. She had been crying.
She had the other half of the same story: "I love Earl but he wants me to do things that just feel wrong. He wants me to wear weird clothes and, I won't go into it, but he wants crazy stuff in bed, and that's just not me."
I showed her some empathy. I didn't have any tissues but she had brought her own. "What kind of weird clothes does he want you to wear?" I asked as we talked about it.
She gazed out the window. "For instance, he's always showing me these ads in the newspaper for women's underwear."
"If it's in the newspaper it can't be too bad."
"It's just not me," she said. "I am just not the sexy-underwear type."
"I see. Do you wear especially unattractive underwear? What is his complaint?"
"I wear the same thing as everyone else," she said.
"You might be wrong about that," I said, gently.
"Trust me, I wear regular underwear."
"You wear a bra?"
"Doc, yes, of course."
"And you're wearing one now?"
"Of course."
"What kind?" I asked her.
"Just a regular kind," she said.
"And you wear a regular kind even when you and Earl go out?"
"Yes of course," she said.
"And Earl, I take it, doesn't really like them."
"If he wanted a girlfriend in sexy underwear he should have found one. No, he doesn't like the way I dress, especially my underwear."
"What kind of bra do you wear?" I asked. "Now I'm curious. Can you show me an ad or a picture online or something of it?"
"I don't remember what kind it is, it's just a regular bra that women wear."
"And Earl complains about this?"
"He doesn't really complain but he makes hints and comments."
I was in my high-backed chair behind the desk and she was sitting in a cushioned guest chair beside my desk. I leaned toward her and said, "Julie, you just lost a man you love. Are you going to act like that's all right?"
She started crying again. "I don't know what to do."
"Tell you what, let me see this 'normal' bra you're wearing."
"Are you kidding me?"
"Julie, it's me, Doc. I am trying to understand what is going on with you two. You obviously have different expectations from each other, and you seem like good people, and I don't get it. Let me see what it is that you think is normal and he hates so much."
"That's ridiculous," she said.
"Sure," I said. I looked at my computer screen and moved the mouse a little bit, scrolling through a document while she sat there.
"Okay," she said. "I'll show you. It's no big deal."
"Good," I said. "Let me see what normal looks like."
"Nobody's going to come in, right?"
"Nope," I said. "It's after three o'clock, Juan's done his check, everybody's gone home, there won't be anybody in here for the rest of the day."
She stood up to look over the walls of my cubicle. Of course there was nobody around.
"This is stupid," she said, as she sat back down and began unbuttoning her blouse. She undid four buttons and pulled the front open a few inches. "See?" she said. "White cotton. Perfectly normal."
"I can't see that," I said. "Just take your blouse off and show me."
"That's insane," she said.
I looked at my computer screen some more.
"Shit," she said. "Okay. You'll see." She finished unbuttoning and then pulled her arms out of the sleeves, trying to make it look effortful and laborious. I looked at my computer screen while she did this, not wanting to make her more self-conscious. She sat there in my chair, waiting for me to look. "See?" she said. "Perfectly normal."
I glanced over at her. "Stand up."
She started to complain but instead she got up from the chair.
"Let me see the back," I said.
She turned around.
"I see," I said, and she sat down, leaving her blouse on my desk. "And you think this is normal?"
"Yes, it's perfectly normal."
"It looks like a piece of football padding," I said. "Or something a fireman would wear to fight a fire."
"So? It's not for looking at, it's to, uh, it's to hold me in place."
I looked her over. "Well first of all, you're right, your underwear is not for looking at, except when you are intimate with someone. And that, actually is important. It also affects the way you feel about yourself. But you brought up an important point."
