Inappropriate Behavior: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

the man crawling across the parking lot. I advanced the themes of abjection, endurance, possibly even protest. She said if she painted it, she wouldn’t show the man at all.
    â€œBut, Marcie,” I said. “That’s the whole thing about the painting.”
    â€œNope,” she said. “The whole thing about the painting is you.”
    â€œMe?”
    â€œYes,” she said. “You. Standing there watching him.”
    She started that very night.
    The rest of the week passed without incident. Every day at a little before five, I would peer out the window, looking for the man to crawl across the parking lot, but he never did. I thought I caught a glimpse of him one day, walking normally, and I triedto follow him with my eyes all the way to his car, to see if it was the same man. But there were lots of men in blue suits and lots of dark green Ford Tauruses, so I wasn’t sure.
    That Friday night when I got home from the office, Marcie was very glad to see me. She met me at the door and kissed me deeply, her arms around my neck and her tongue dabbing madly in my mouth. Before I could even get a word out, she was taking off her clothes, and then she took off mine, and we made love there on the living room floor. After, both of us still unclothed, she took my hand and led me to the spare bedroom that served as her studio. There on the easel was the sketch of the painting we had talked about. I was standing at the window in coat and tie, with a look on my face that was a mix of revulsion and pity and confusion and, I thought, just the barest hint of shame. I thought of mentioning to Marcie that revulsion and confusion were right on the money, and that pity was good—I should have felt pity somehow, I thought, and it made me feel a little bad that I hadn’t—but I had not been ashamed. Instead we got dressed and went out for drinks and a steak dinner, which is what we always did on Fridays after Marcie had a good week of work. When we got home, we made love again, this time on the floor in the studio, with me on top, a reversal of our earlier interlude. I rubbed my knees raw from bracing against the canvas drop cloths on the floor of the studio. I was a little drunk, but more than a little preoccupied as well. Every time I looked up from Marcie as I moved above her, I saw the sketch of me standing there in the window. It was really good; even I wasn’t sure what I was looking at anymore.
    When I got to the IC Monday morning, there was something that seemed a bit out of drawing, off-kilter, something imperceptible that nonetheless made me want to fix it, like in school when the teacher would leave that one little scratch of chalk on the blackboard after she erased it; if you’re like me, your whole day was ruined. That little chalk mark would distract us to the edge of madness. The IC was like that on Monday morning,except I couldn’t find the chalk mark to erase. I looked for it, all the way in from the parking lot, up the concrete steps and through the huge glass doors, through the marble-floored lobby past the PR office where I used to work, up the elevator to seven, all the way to my desk by the back corner near the window, I looked for it, but was unable to locate the problem.
    Everything seemed to be in order to the untrained eye: The people I saw every day were moving about in their everyday fashion; there was a stack of contracts on my desk awaiting my careful vetting; there was nothing different about the decor. Everything was as I had left it Friday, except that it wasn’t. It was as if something as implacable and yet imperceptible as a bump in the orbit of the Earth had nudged everything slightly aslant, and it was going to stay that way.
    I tried to work through it, but all day my timing was just a bit off. Where before I had carefully observed my coworkers’ movements, and scheduled mine, to avoid even the most light-hearted banter, I was now running into them