The Fountain Outside the Museum
by Jessica Woodbridge

---I hadn’t even sat down at my desk when Tabitha rushed into my cubicle. “Have you seen the new issue of People?” she panted. “Daniel’s on the cover.” For my convenience, she held the magazine in her hand, and displayed the cover. There was Daniel Greene’s smiling, airbrushed face, partially obscured by the glare of ultraviolet lights on the glossy paper. ---None of us had expected that Daniel would actually become famous. He’d talked about it all the time, how he was going to audition for this or that, and we all smiled politely and asked him to make copies of our purchase orders for us. He wore the same three sets of clothes for eighteen months, because he was spending all his earnings getting his teeth fixed, but we ignored his poverty and told him to fetch us coffee, which sabotaged our own flawless American dental work. Then one day he gave his two weeks notice, moved to Los Angeles, and we never heard from him again, until he started showing up in the movies. He usually played a rookie cop, or a young soldier, but he’d gotten a choice role in a summer blockbuster that year. He was a popular topic of conversation in the office, which I thought was silly because as I remember it, he was a very dull person. Before he became famous, the only interesting story he had to tell was about the summer he’d spent backpacking around Europe, where he had spit on the Berlin Wall. ---I’d hated listening to Daniel speak. He had a voice like fruit-scented industrial cleanser. I liked Thomas better. Thomas took Daniel’s place, and did a better job. We had our doubts about him at first, because whenever we gave him an errand, he would listen with an expression on his face like he didn’t understand English. But he always did an impeccable job. That expression of his got him praised thrice over, every time, just because we were all so shocked at the results he produced. ---I had been flirting with Thomas all day, because that’s how office workers attempt to express their humanity, but I went so far as to invite him to stop by my place after his shift ended. When I got home I realized what a fool I’d made of myself, and in front of my co-workers, no less. He knocked on the door of my apartment at six, and I pretended not to be home. I read the magazine with Daniel on the cover. Thomas knocked and knocked, and I just ignored him. After it was dark, I opened the door and saw two stubbed-out cigarettes, his brand, on the concrete. He’d been sitting there, waiting for me, long enough to smoke two cigarettes. ---What would I have done with him, anyway. Nothing I wouldn’t have regretted. I picked up the cigarette butts, brought them inside, and tossed them in the garbage, so they would mar my porch no longer. I had a thought, of putting them in some sort of box, a box reserved for souvenirs of him. Maybe add to it a Coke can he drank from, a phone number he’d written down. But I would never do that. People at work did that, struggling to remember which stapler it was that Daniel had used, or if there were any documents he’d composed or signed which could be legally retrieved and reproduced. ---I had to get out of the apartment. I called Tabitha, to ask if she wanted to go get dinner someplace. ---“What,” she asked, “you’re already bored with Thomas?” ---“Didn’t even see him tonight. I pretended I wasn’t home” ---“That’s not how you get laid. You can come over if you like. I don’t feel like going out.” ---I walked to Tabitha and Jack’s place, taking only a slight detour, to pass by the fountain outside the museum. The water in the fountain is chlorinated, so it smells like a swimming pool. Whenever I’m near it, I want to go swimming, even when it’s cold. ---The doorbell played “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head.” I heard Tabitha order Jack to get the door. He greeted me with a smile like the remnant of a forced laugh. “How is it,” he said to her, while looking at me, “that you always get me to do what you want?” ---Tabitha grinned, and as she pointed to certain key parts of her own body she said, “Because I’ve got two of these, and one of these!” She collapsed into hysterical laughter. ---Now Jack was looking to her, and talking to me. “What can I say, she’s right.” He shrugged and leaned over her for a kiss. I felt strange and squirmy. I also had two of those and one of those, but I had never used them for much at all; certainly never to acquire just anything that I wanted. I did not consider myself a moral person, necessarily, but something bothered me about getting what I wanted that way. I liked to ask nicely for things. ---Tabitha didn’t mean it that way. She and Jack had a healthy relationship. I could see that, even though she spent a lot of time complaining about his faults. “You don’t know how lucky you are to be single,” she once told me. But when I stayed at their place on the weekends sometimes, and heard them making love in the next room, I didn’t feel lucky at all. ---“I don’t get it,” Tabitha said to me. “Why did you invite him over, if you didn’t intend to seduce him?” ---“I wasn’t going to seduce him! I was just a little...lonely. Thomas is kind of cute, so I thought he could come over, and I could...Well I was just going to kiss him once. He smokes. I’ve never kissed a smoker before.” ---“Ha! One kiss!” Tabitha just about fell out of her chair. “One kiss is like one M&M. It’s unheard of.” ---Thomas cornered me at work the next day. “I’m really sorry,” he said. He was sorry? What did he have to be sorry for? “I must have done something wrong, to make you angry with me yesterday. Otherwise you wouldn’t have pretended not to be home.” Across the room, there was a burst of squeals and giggles, which quickly shaped itself into a birthday song. The light bulb directly above us flickered. ---“Come over tonight and I’ll make you dinner,” I said. “I promise I’ll answer the door this time.” ---I must have looked like a fool when I did answer the door. Before he arrived I’d dropped a glass, and had just finished sweeping up in a hurry. My face was red from the heat of the kitchen and my frustration at the shattered glass, the last of a set of six, all of which had now met an untimely end in my hands (or rather, out of them, all of a sudden). Only when I was at the door did I notice that I’d splattered curry on the front of my shirt, and my fingers were green under the nails from chopping up spinach. But the sight of me did not chase the smile from his face. He held out a handful of moderately-priced flowers. They were beautiful. I knew they would be dead in three days. I tossed them carelessly on a kitchen chair while he was still reeling from the smell of curry. He called out his conversation as he seated himself in the living room. ---“So, do you invite a lot of interns over for romantic dinners?” ---I didn’t see anything romantic about the evening so far, but I hollered back, “Oh, all the time. In fact, most of them are still here. I’ve got a big walk-in closet. Do you want something to drink?” I brought him a Coke, and was momentarily distracted by the ten-inch scar that ran up his arm. You could just barely see where the metal plate was, at the end of it. I wanted to touch it. “How long will it have to be in there?” I asked as I pressed my thumb against his arm to feel out the little screws. ---“The rest of my life,” he said. “There’s five holes drilled in the bone, so if the screws are taken out, and I have a fall, the bone would just shatter.” ---I excused myself to the kitchen once more. Everything was just about ready, so I had four pots and pans to deal with in quick succession before anything burned. There was something wet on the floor; I slipped in it as I was walking the chicken over to the cutting board. I cursed myself for spilling. I didn’t realize until it was too late that I’d poured the lentils right over the rice. That’s the way I always ate them, but I didn’t know if that’s the way they were supposed to be served. I had his plate in one hand and silverware in the other. “I hope you like your lentils on...” But he interrupted me. ---“What happened to your foot?” ---I looked down. There were bloody prints from the kitchen to the coffee table, left foot only. It was that glass; you always miss one little piece. His eyes followed the prints back into the kitchen, and saw the bloody streak where my foot had skidded. ---“What a mess,” I said, and set his plate down. “I’ll be right back.” ---“Don’t go anywhere! Here, sit down. Where’s the bathroom?” I pointed it out to him, and he went on a first-aid mission, returning with a towel, tweezers, and adhesive bandages. I didn’t even know I had tweezers. Only now was my foot beginning to hurt. ---He made me lie face-down on the couch, and sat down with my foot over his knee. I made the obligatory comment about how quickly our evening was progressing. Once he’d wiped the blood away, he found the sliver by watching for where the blood was seeping out. I winced; if it was possible to cringe with one’s foot, I was certainly doing that. But I’d barely felt anything before he said, “Okay, got it.” I started to get up, but he told me to hold still, and ran his hands all over my feet, feeling for any other lingering slivers. His touch was firm, and he did not tickle me. When he was sure I was free of glass, he wiped the rest of the blood off my foot and put the adhesive bandage on. I felt the pressure of two fingers as he pushed the sticky part down, then he gripped my bare ankle and he sighed. I turned my head to glance at him out of the corner of my eye. He had a look of terrible concern, directed at my foot. He was letting his dinner get cold. I thanked him, and burst into tears. He didn’t move his hands. There was a pillow on the end of the couch, and I cried into it. He got up and went into the kitchen. I didn’t know what was taking him so long in there, but later, the next time I went in the kitchen, all the blood was cleaned up. He brought me a cup of water. ---“Oh,” I said, sitting up, “do you get thirsty after you cry, too?” ---“Everyone does,” he said. “Otherwise we’d all dry up.” ---He didn’t see any need to fill the silence while I drank the entire contents of the cup in one gulp. I set it down on the coffee table and said slowly, “You know, I have this friend. If she’s in the room when someone happens to ask how it is that women have certain advantages, how they get the things they want in life, she’ll say, ‘Because we’ve got two of these, and one of those!’” And I made the corresponding gestures. He laughed, and so did I, in that forced, breathless way people laugh after they cry. I was going to say something else, but he seemed to think that was my point, my punch-line, so I stopped and let him speak. ---“Would you like to see the piece of glass?” he said cheerfully. “It was a monster.” He picked it up off the towel and showed it to me. ---It didn’t look like a piece of handcrafted glass. It looked like someone had pulled a shard of ice from my body.

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