The Other Hand

Baghdad—and Clarissa had a piece on a new kind of orgasm you could apparently only get with the boss. We talked about which of them we would run with. I was only half concentrating. I texted Andrew, to see how he was doing.
    The flatscreen at our end of the floor was showing BBC News 24 with the sound down. They were running a segment on the war. Smoke was rising above one of the countries involved. Don’t ask me which—I’d lost track by that stage. The war was four years old. It had started in the same month my son was born, and they’d grown up together. At first both of them were a huge shock and demanded constant attention but as each year went by, they became more autonomous and one could start to take one’s eye off them for extended periods. Sometimes a particular event would cause me momentarily to look at one or the other of them—my son, or the war—with my full attention, and at times like these I would always think, Gosh, haven’t you grown?
    I was interested in how this new kind of orgasm was meant to work. I looked up from texting.
    “How come you can only have it with your boss?”
    “It’s a forbidden-fruit thing, isn’t it? You get an extra frisson from breaking the office taboo. From hormones and neurotransmitters and so forth. You know. Science.”
    “Um. Have scientists actually proved this?”
    “Don’t get empirical with me, Sarah. We’re talking about a whole new realm of sexual pleasure. We’re calling it the B-spot. B, as in boss. See what we did there?”
    “Ingenious.”
    “Thank you darling. We do try.”
    I wept inwardly at the thought of women up and down the country being pleasured by middle managers in shiny-bottomed suits. On the flatscreen, News 24 had panned from the Middle East to Africa. Different landscape, same column of thick black smoke. A pair of jaundiced eyes looking out with the same impassivity Andrew had shown, just before I turned away to leave for work. The hairs on my arms went up again. I looked away, and took the three steps to the window that gave out onto Commercial Street. I put my forehead against the glass, which is something I do when I’m trying to think.
    “Are you all right, Sarah?”
    “I’m fine. Listen, be a doll and go and grab us a couple of coffees, would you?”
    Clarissa went off to our idiosyncratic coffee machine, the one that would have been an in-house salon de thé in Vogue ’s offices. Down on Commercial Street, a police patrol car pulled up and parked at the curb in front of our building. A uniformed officer got out on each side. They looked at each other over the patrol-car roof. One of them had blond, cropped hair and the other had a bald patch as round and neat as a monk’s. I watched him tilt his head to listen to the radio on his lapel. I smiled, thinking absently about a project Charlie was doing at his nursery. The Police: People Who Help Us, it was called. My son—it goes without saying—was magnificently unconvinced. At constant high alert in his bat cape and mask, Charlie believed a proud citizenry should be ready to help itself.
    Clarissa came back with two plasticky lattes. In one of them thecoffee machine had deposited a clear acrylic stirrer. In the other, it had elected not to do so. Clarissa hesitated over which to give me.
    “First big editorial decision of the day,” she said.
    “Easy. I’m the boss. Give me the one with the stirrer.”
    “What if I don’t?”
    “Then we may never get around to locating your B-spot, Clarissa. I’m warning you.”
    Clarissa blanched, and passed me the coffee with the stirrer.
    I said, “I like the Baghdad piece.”
    Clarissa sighed, and slumped her shoulders.
    “So do I, Sarah, of course I do. It’s a great article.”
    “Five years ago, that’s the one we’d have run with. No question.”
    “Five years ago our circulation was so low we had to take those risks.”
    “And that’s how we got big—by being different. That’s us. ”
    Clarissa shook her head. “Getting big’s different from staying big. You know as well as I do, we can’t be serving up morality tales while the other majors are selling sex.”
    “But why do you think our readers got dumber?”
    “It’s not that. I think our original readers aren’t reading magazines anymore, that’s all. They moved on to greater things, the same way you could if you’d just play the bloody game. Maybe you don’t realize just how big you are now, Sarah. Your next job could be editing a