I. "The sign," pointing.
"Out of business?" he asks.
... then something happens and her memory kicks itself out from underneath itself and all the stars of past nights become muddied floaters in the corner of her eye. Voyeur of inner stuff, eager sloths hanging from sills, with the magic of whatshisname's awful nudity and the lack of intrigue in her own whatever. She sits or someone sits, and the hippity-hoppety of her neighbor's daughter and the self-shuttered de-robed superintendent manage the shades, the shutters, the inches of revealed animal designs identifying death and awaiting the dated heated cordless imagination to order-in some delivered help to weigh the Intrepid's once-busy carcass.
When there is order, wands stir cups full of copper buttons, and the tailor divides the spoils with his scissors, her painting, by Jove, pecuniary foolishness, climbs wysteria vines and the big guy denounces his chores because someone else "can do 'em better."
I love buttons. I buy clothing for its buttons. I just buy buttons. When someone gifts me something with buttons, always with bland, plastic buttons, I remove them and replace them nicer ones, gilded, enameled, decorated ones. And then I store the rejected buttons in Mason jars that I place in a closet in my bedroom—the only closet I have in my one-bedroom apartment I share with my boyfriend.
As much as I know about myself, this is the only weird trait I own. Otherwise, I'm normal. I have no sexual hang-up (although I don't like Will unbuttoning my blouses before we make love (in fact, I don't like anyone unbuttoning or unfastening anything of mine)); I have a group of very close friends, and even a best friend. I have a father, a physician (my mother died of breast cancer when I was a teenager), who lives in a new condo in New Jersey with his girlfriend, a nurse in his practice, and a brother who has an apartment with his wife only two blocks from mine. At 28 years old, I have a good job (not the profession one would assume of me my BFA in painting) and I volunteer at a soup kitchen on some Sunday mornings.
I'm normal.
Or I think I'm just normal enough to pass as normal.
My little apartment is kept neat. I don't have a cat or a goldfish. I'm organized. I dress well.
Aside from my brother, I don't think anyone is particularly aware of my obsession, not even Will.
II. "Out?"
"Out."
Agnes behaved like an Agnes. In other words, Agnes was like an old nurse—the kind one who liked her job and never complained.
Agnes was the only female doorman she knew. As a college graduate with a degree in art, she couldn't find a job that paid her well enough; so, she applied to the Service Union as a "doorman" and after just one interview and a week's training course she was offered a job at a downtown building—a complex not unlike the one she grew up in.
Like any job she had ever had (waitress, lifeguard, house painter), Agnes went about her business with a nonchalance not found in many New Yorkers.
Agnes worked under the stars that matched her lack of desperation; under the stars—albeit a few of them—that punched through the warmly lit night; and then under the last star and the whisper of a weekday morning... under a few good stars and never managed to complain to anyone.
Will, Agnes' live-in boyfriend, didn't like the fact that his girlfriend was a doorman.
Agnes liked her job but liked her uniform more. She wore a loose-fitting, polyblend, navy suit with a gold rope embroidering both the sides of her pants and blazer with the shiniest, not standard issue but ideally suited for her outfit, buttons most of her tenants had never seen—electroplated gold, shank buttons each with a different naval insignia; and underneath the blazer, she wore a white oxford shirt with vintage mother-of-pearl buttons that she found in an empty jar of baby food in a Vermont barn sale; platinum cufflinks (her prized possession (with her grandfather's initials engraved upon their reflective, smooth surfaces); and a dark blue tie held in place with a gold tie pin with a moonstone head.
Agnes was liked by her tenants. Hers was a newer, kinder, calmer, sunnier face—and her body, her lithe, fit body, could still be admired under all that fabric by the dozen or so middle-aged husbands who perked up as soon as they saw her when they returned from work.
Sure, she was resigned, but her smile, her thin, cautious smile, made days seem more purposeful... and Will was smart enough to know this and know that others would know this.
So, when Agnes returned home on Wednesday evening, Will was purposefully pouring another glass of white wine. Agnes, whose easygoing personality—part whimsical, part ancient—made it impossible for someone to want to confront her, seemed prepared.
"I want you to quit," he said. He almost couldn't believe he said it.
Agnes was unbuttoning her blouse. All of her bras were too big for her chest—but they didn't make comfortable bras for her size and she felt required to wear one at work.
"Quit what?" she asked.
"I don't want you to be a doorman."
"Then what should I be?"
"You should be what you are... an artist."
"I'm not an artist. I studied art in college."
"Then get a more suitable job."
"How about this?" and Agnes sounded more direct and more stern than she had ever sounded before. "How about this? I remain a doorman and you keep doing what you do. I mean, what is it you do?"
"I write."
"And what do you write? Stories? Enough. I'm keeping my job."
The next morning, before walking out the door, Agnes left $100 on the kitchen counter for Will.
She hoped he wouldn't be there when she returned home.
III. "What do you have?"
"Nothing."
"Oreos? Oranges, English muffins...?"
No, sorry. Out. Of. Business."
Agnes nominated one particular tenant, a 30-year-old who lived on the fifth floor with a rotating roster of brief, live-in girlfriends, "Fucker of the Year." Despite this, she was attracted to him. She couldn't help herself. He was always impeccably dressed, always paying attention to the details, to his buttons.
Clubbing inner health with the back of her mind, she asked: "What is this strand of human doing in this world?" Bent and humbled on the couch in front of the television, bent into deprecating enjoyment, a yesteryear of more than he has left to show. This journeyless flight makes men less man and health more lustful and wander more allowable—like the invalid torment of striking a wall with your fist and doing it again because it felt bad (various degrees of chalk and chalkboard, a RECKONING OF CLAMOR AND ABUSE OF FINGERNAILS AND NAILS).
He had a career in banking, no doubt, and his apartment was pointed to modify his inevitable successes... all of them fitted into a neatly sewn slot on his breast.
Agnes would sleep with him.
IV. "There's no other place to shop," he says.
Pent up in his old-fashioned ideas, Will, two years Agnes' senior, and 15 pounds overweight, sat sucking his beer bottle. Agnes sipped her wine and waited for a response.
He's a pillow, she thought.
"And what now? Do I just wait? Return home to my parents and wait?" he asked.
"I can't take this trip again," Agnes said. "I really need this to be over now."
"Why, because you became the man?" He emphasized man as if it were anathema.
"Not in this lifetime."
Will vibrated.
She always knows, he thought and he wanted to say something about her insane button affixation preoccupation, but he didn't want to hurt her feelings.
V. He folds his wallet.
"Thanks."
Today is the day before yesterday and my first day off in ten days. I know this because my iPhone is telling me so and after yesterday being yesterday and the day before that a repeat of two days ago, I'm already acclimating to these new shifts and embracing the fact that I'll have another day off tomorrow. Originally, I woke up at 5:30 to prepare for my day, this day being a Friday, and I still wake up because my alarm, a gong, burst from my vibrating phone at 5:30 a.m. I don't recall falling asleep yesterday, I mean, tomorrow. But just in case the last ten days were a dream, I'm planning on going to work; and if this really is the Friday of the past and tomorrow is Thursday, I won't go to work yesterday... there's no reason to. Anyhow, Thursday is payday, so I might as well go out for dinner tonight AND tomorrow night.
VI. "Sorry I couldn't help."
I'm wearing paint stained jeans today and a flannel t-shirt (with black, ebony (real ebony) buttons) —easy enough and without a concern for next week and my lack of a professional air—fuck it, I'm a tenured, full time door "woman," I'm 28 years old, and I've been pissing my life away on the couch of yesterday... I mean, later today, and Saturday too; although my second Saturday was a frenzy of What the fuck?
My boyfriend, now "ex," I think, is gone. I know he wanted to see me before I went off to work yesterday; but it was too early to wake him especially considering that night before he stayed up packing while I hid in the bedroom...
Agnes is too focused on her stuff, but she says to herself, "He's just a jerk of all trades, a maxed-out myth of speculative options."
She wasn't sure if she was referring to Will or the tenant on the fifth floor.
VII. The days of these weeks are marked with red exes.
Agnes replaced the buttons on her white oxford work shirt with ones from a Mason jar she kept in jar closet.
Who's the fool now?
Brian P. Katz has been a paint factory worker (where he painted the paint factory), beachcomber, waiter, shop boy (the longest two days of his life), preschool instructor, security guard, house painter, sculptor, carpenter, set builder, wanderer, bartender, actor, director, hobo, copy editor, literary journal editor, high school art teacher, high school English department chair, househusband, and, throughout many of these occupations, a college instructor (at ten different universities).
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