Swallowtail is a novel that traces the narrator's gradual acceptance of submission.
Previously: our narrator has met a mysterious goth girl at an art gallery. The girl seduces him and they engage in an anonymous coupling in the gallery's washroom.
***
The lunchroom is uncharacteristically empty. The writers and graphic artists are either snug in their cubicles or enjoying a late lunch. I take a moment, while the coffee machine burbles and farts, to survey my little domain. It used to be a lot smaller, this office in which we spin advertisements. Some modest success and a lot of good luck enabled us to expand into an adjacent vacant office. But back then, we had this lunchroom, two offices, and the "pit", a large open space that we imagined would soon be filled by young keeners with their fingers on the pulse of the fickle consumer.
But now I'm remembering the beginnings. When Sharon and I took over the lease from a defunct software company, we found among the discarded junk an array of laminated motivational posters. I've always hated them and have been suspicious of the blank-eyed corporate zealots who lived by their vacuous mantras and saccharine platitudes. It was telling to me that of all the stuff the previous tenants had taken, they'd left these posters behind. Evidently, they'd failed to motivate sufficiently.
I was about to take the posters to the dumpster when Sharon, by business partner, confiscated them.
"You're not going to hang them up, are you?" I asked, horrified.
"Not in this form."
A few days later, the posters decorated the walls of our little lunchroom. In place of the pithy sayings were blank, dry-erase panels and markers hanging from strings. And so started a trend of cynicism that I felt more comfortable with.
This afternoon's array of messages includes:
* Ambition is the shining light that is soon extinguished by indifferent management.
* Perseverance is the stupidity to try on the face of certain failure.
* Collaboration means sharing the glory with the backstabbing morons you work with.
* The difference between try and triumph is... Aw, fuck it.
Sharon was wise to limit the posters to the lunchroom. That said, the one time a prospective client insisted on a tour that included the lunchroom, she was so amused by the brutal sarcasm of the staff that we won the contract.
Business works in mysterious ways, sometimes.
I've gotten more than a few chuckles over the years. I've also gotten some warnings; the white boards sometimes point to some underlying grievance that I can address. Messages such as the ones I see today suggest to me a staff that is secure and confident, a staff that I can trust to speak plainly if I ask them to. It's the silence that I have to watch out for.
I walk back to my office. A few weeks ago, I suggested to Sharon that we invest in some real artwork, now that we were successful and all. Sharon's partner, a latter-day beatnik by the name of Rose, had just had her first show and I suggested that we hang some of her less erotically fraught material around the place. To my surprise, it turned out that most of the work had sold, and those pieces that hadn't were, by Sharon's estimate, too freakishly genitalia-centered for a genteel office such as ours. Having seen those particular pieces, I had to agree.
"So she sold most of them?" I asked.
"One person even bought two," said Sharon.
"Go figure."
The art world works in mysterious ways, sometimes.
I have just closed the door to my office when the receptionist calls, telling me that I have a visitor. I'm not expecting anyone.
"She gives her name as Dex," says the receptionist.
It takes a moment for the statement to sink in. Dex? Here?
After twice calling the number that Dex had scrawled on my chest in lipstick several weeks before, I'd heard nothing in return. I classified her as some kind of dark, nymphomaniac crank who had given me a good story to tell. She was a story with which to regale my poker-playing pals when inebriation bred indifference to the wagering, replaced by forgettable conversation and boasting. After my tryst with Dex in the bathroom of the art gallery, I had congratulated myself for being the kind of guy for whom sexual favors occasionally fell from the heavens like blessings from a strange and inscrutable god. Anonymous and unnegotiated sex didn't happen often, but if and when it did, it seemed entirely appropriate that it should happen to me. I prided myself on a healthy succession of bedmates who bestowed upon me carnal relations with no strings attached, so when Dex failed to respond to my half-hearted attempts at contacting her, I was okay with it. No strings. An interesting story. Perfect.
She wasn't my type anyway.
Now here she is in my office looking like she has just stomped off the steampunk express.
"What are you doing here?"
I close the office door behind us.
"You called," says Dex.
I look at her. I might shake my head. I'm irritated that she has come to my workplace unannounced. It suggests disrespect for the niceties of commerce and an overestimation of what our little moment meant to me. Our one moment together, I think, doesn't give her the right to barge into my life whenever the whim takes her. "I left my number. You could have called back." There's just the right edge to my voice.
Dex shrugs, indifferent to my tone. "I don't like phones."
I'm growing increasingly impatient. I stalk around to the business end of my desk, sit down, and perch my hands over the keyboard of my laptop. I have around twenty minutes before a meeting in which we're to discuss a sales presentation that we're about to deliver to what might just be our biggest client ever. I have some ideas and I've set aside this time to review them. I'm not in the mood for an unexpected visitor.
Again Dex is heavily made up and looks not unlike a raccoon, but one with dark red pillow lips. She's wearing a tight black blouse that reveals her curves to advantage. A black skirt with an uneven hem extends to mid-thigh. Black boots with dangerous looking stilettos are laced up to just below the knee and add a good four inches to her height. She looks more formidable than her stature. Taking it all in, I momentarily forget my annoyance. "Look, Dex, I'm really busy..."
"And I'm not?"
I'm not sure.
She picks up her bag. "Should have trusted my first impressions."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
She moves to the door.
I should let her go. The meeting and my time is more important than some pierced stray with a fear of telephones. Instead, I move around my desk and head her off at the door.
