The Other Hand

my article,” I said.
    “Yes, let’s,” said Lawrence. “Because otherwise this is going somewhere else, isn’t it?”
    I felt adrenaline aching in my chest. This thing that was happening, then, it had apparently slipped quite subtly over some line. It had become something acknowledged, albeit in a relatively controlled form that both of us could still step back from. Here it was, if we wanted it, hanging from a taut umbilicus between us: an affair between adults, minute yet fully formed, with all its forbidden trysts and muffled paroxysms and shattering betrayals already present, like the buds of fingers and toes.
    I remember looking down at the carpet tiles in Lawrence’s office. I can still see them now, with hyperreal clarity, every minute gray acrylic fiber of them, gleaming in the fluorescent light, coarse and glossy and tightly curled, lascivious, obscene, the gray pubic fuzz of an aging administrative body. I stared at them as if I had never seen carpet tiles before. I didn’t want to meet Lawrence’s eyes.
    “Please,” I said. “Stop it.”
    Lawrence blinked and inclined his head, innocently. “Stop what?” he said.
    And, just like that, for the moment, it was gone.
    I breathed again. Above us, one of the fluorescent tubes was buzzing loudly.
    “Why did the home secretary have to resign?” I said.
    Lawrence raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you don’t know. I thought you were a journalist.”
    “Not a serious one. Nixie does current affairs the way The Economist does shoes. On a need-to-know basis.”
    “The home secretary had to resign because he fast-tracked a visa for his lover’s nanny.”
    “You believe that?”
    “I don’t really care one way or the other. But he never seemed that stupid to me. Oh, listen to them.”
    From outside Lawrence’s door there was laughing and shouting. I heard the sound of paper being scrunched into a ball. Feet scuffed on the carpet. A paper ball clanged into a metal waste-paper basket.
    “They’re playing corridor football,” said Lawrence. “They’re actually celebrating.”
    “You think they set him up?”
    He sighed. “I’ll never know what they did to him, Sarah. I didn’t go to the right schools for that. My job is just to write a good-bye letter to the man. What would you put?”
    “It’s hard if you didn’t really know him. I suppose you’ll just have to stick to generalities.”
    Lawrence groaned.
    “But I’m terrible at this,” he said. “I’m the sort of person who needs to know what I’m talking about. I can’t just write some spiel.”
    I looked around his office.
    “I’m in the same position,” I said. “And like it or not, you seem to have become my interview.”
    “So?”
    “So, you’re not making it easy for me.”
    “In what way?”
    “Well, you haven’t exactly personalized this place, have you? No golf trophies, no family photos, nothing that gives me the slightest clue who you are.”
    Lawrence looked up at me. “Then I suppose you’ll just have to stick to generalities,” he said.
    I smiled. “Nice,” I said.
    “Thank you.”
    I felt the ache of adrenaline again.
    “You really don’t fit in here, do you?”
    “Listen, I very much doubt I’ll still be working here tomorrow if I can’t think of something suitably noncommittal to write to the old boss in the next twenty minutes.”
    “So write something.”
    “But seriously, I can’t think of anything.”
    I sighed. “Shame. You seemed too nice to be such a loser.”
    Lawrence grinned. “Well,” he said. “You seemed quite beautiful enough to be so mistaken.”
    I realized I was smiling back at him. “A little blond of me, you think?”
    “Hmm. I think your roots are showing.”
    “Well I don’t think you’re a loser, if you must know. I think you’re just unhappy.”
    “Oh, do you? With your gimlet eye for emotional cues?”
    “Yes, I do.”
    Lawrence blinked and looked down at his keyboard. I realized he was blushing.
    “Oh, sorry, ” I said. “God, I shouldn’t have said that. I got carried away, I don’t even know you, I’m so sorry. You look really hurt.”
    “Maybe I’m just doing vulnerable.”
    Lawrence drew in his elbows—drew in all of himself in fact, so that he appeared to withdraw into his body on the royal-blue upholstery of his swivel chair. He paused, and tapped out a line on his computer. The keyboard was a cheap one, the kind where the keys have a high travel and they squeak on the downstroke. He