I’m a floater at the biggest bank in the city.
    My last boss was an older guy named Herbert Feldstein in Corporate Audit.  I was there for six months until he retired.  He treated me like a daughter.  I always wanted to have a girl, he’d say.  And I’d play the good daughter I never was in real life. You should eat healthy foods! he’d say.  And I’d leave a couple of oranges and bananas on my desk for him to see.  A young girl like you needs exercise, you shouldn’t just sit at a desk all day.  Go get some fresh air!  And I’d smile and put on my jacket and go outside for a couple of cigarettes.  You do a wonderful job here, I appreciate all of your hard work.  When he retired, he gave me a bonus out of his own fat pocket, a secret between the two of us.  $2000 in fifty-dollar bills.
    And then I had to move again.  My new boss appreciated me, too.  I didn’t have to do much, but what I did have to do, I did well and did fast.  He appreciated me and he was hot for me.  Both for sure.  His name was Louis.  He may have even had some feelings for me towards the end.  Louis was big and clumsy, like an elephant, knocking things over and not noticing, so this was nothing for me to write letters to my grandmother about.  But he did, and who wouldn’t, given a choice of me and the rest of that environment, the other assistants being, honestly, complete heifers?  I was there for him every day – never came late and never left early – that’s all it seemed to take to win with him.
    My cubicle – around the corner and off to the side of the action.  He was on the trading floor.  He never really came over to my desk when he needed something, just called my extension:
    “Breaker breaker, calling out for Superstar.  Superstar, do you copy?  I have a mailing that I need you to get out ASAP.  Over and out.”
    And I would go when he asked but I would also walk out onto the trading floor about six or seven times a day, passing the bunches of Mylar birthday balloons floating over the secretary cubicles, the on-floor coffee shop with free all-day Starbucks for the traders, the view of Midtown from the fifty-third floor.  I walked out there for energy – the effect was like strong coffee on an empty stomach – it freaked you out but it kept your eyes open.  It was nothing but men, angry at each other, yelling at each other, giving the high five, laughing, eating Doritos and sushi at their desks.  Nothing but noise – a room full of toddlers who can’t be quiet and no one asking them to anyway and they are getting rich being completely themselves.
    I brought it on myself, and by saying that, I don’t mean to say that I minded his attention.  He was a good-looking guy – tall, good clothes, smelled nice, though he had old acne scars in his cheeks.  Like most of the traders he knew how to flirt – he knew how to make you tingle just that little bit and wonder about him forcing his kiss on you at 5:30pm when everyone else was gone.
    It all started because I had nothing to do.  I was bored of watching the clock, checking my email, figuring out people to call to make my day go by faster.  One morning I was in the bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror when I decided to open my shirt another button.  I took one look at the effect and wondered why I’d never done it before.  This one little manipulation made me a whole new person.  It was as easy as that.  I left the bathroom aware of myself and what I had going for me.  From one or two angles I looked like I could have been in Playboy.  I walked over to bring him the photocopies of the Wall Street Journal article, swaying gently over his desk.  Louis didn’t look up at me (?!), even though I was right there, two boobs, still tanned from Christmas in Cancun, sitting in a blue brassiere practically calling his name.  I started to do this everyday – pausing and leaning my breasts forward, right at the level of his small grey eyes, and even though he would never look up, he always smiled to himself.
    Louis showed me that he appreciated it.  He started by leaving presents on my desk in the mornings, for no reason, about twice a week.  First, an expensive strawberry tartlet (I’d never spend 7 bucks for something you eat in four bites, but it was pretty damned good), one truffle in its own little box, a financial murder mystery bestseller to keep me occupied during the lulls.  I would walk over to his desk, shoulders back and shirt a little open, and say “Thank you, that was very sweet.”  And he would say, “What do you mean, I have no idea what you’re talking about, Zileski.”  Then, he would smile at me and look at my chest.  I would stand with my hand on my hip for a moment before I walked away, pretending that the gift was an unsolvable mystery.  The whole thing was like some kind of silent transaction, his attention for mine, something left on my desk in exchange for the secret of my well-tended breasts shown off expressly for him and whatever else my doing that meant.  It was both fair and fun.
    One day I walked over and said:
    “I need to talk to you.  I got another offer upstairs and it could be a good opportunity.  It’s for more money and all, so I need to consider it.”
    He didn’t look up.
    “How much more are they offering?”  It was early.  He was working on a Xerox of the Times crossword puzzle.
    “Four dollars more an hour,” I said.
    “Then I’ll get you eight.”  Like it was no big deal, like if I had asked for twenty more an hour I would have gotten it.  And with his hand, he shooed me back to my desk.  Kind of rudely.
    Two days later a real gift showed up.  A soft red leather bag, wrapped in tissue and a classy shopping bag, nudged under my desk so that my knees hit it before I knew it was there.  It was a Coach bag, which to me meant something.  I’d seen ads on the N and the R trains for these bags, a whole side of the subway train taken up for them.  Coach Coach Coach Coach – nice pictures of the bags held by famous rich people looking at you like you could afford expensive bags even though you had to take the subway to work and they didn’t.  I don’t know how much it cost – a few hundred I’m sure.  And after that, I knew I had to give him more than just a jiggle and a peek.  That day had a wonderful, confused, excited feeling about it.  Every time I had to walk out to the floor I started to laugh.  For a joke, I walked over to his desk with my shirt buttoned up all the way to the neck.
    “Thank you, Mr. Jacob.  Really, that’s the nicest gift anyone has ever given me.”
    “Zileski, may I ask what the hell you’re talking about?  You’re scaring me.  You’d better consult the company psychiatrist about these delusions.”  And then he smiled, so I unbuttoned my top button right there and walked away slowly.
    At 5:15, while I was packing up my things, including my new bag, Louis walked over.  He pulled up another chair and held my knees tightly together with his own.
    Louis didn’t say anything and we sat there like that for a minute.  He moved his hands to between my knees.  I was wearing wool pants and I saw his gold ring on his ring finger catching the overhead fluorescent lights, caught in that fork between my legs, a dull kind of light reflection that made the gold look fake.  He moved his hand closer.  Then a door slammed somewhere around the corner.  He got up, gently smacked my shoulder, and left for the day.
    The gifts kept coming, but from then on, they were just those expensive tartlets.  He left one on my desk every morning – strawberry, blueberry, raspberry, mango and pear.  Louis started looking up at me when I came around, right into my eyes.  If I thanked him for a gift he said you’re welcome and anytime.  It was less charming.  I almost didn’t want them anymore.  One morning, I took one look at an apricot and custard tart he left on my desk, with that yellowish glaze on top of it, and I wished it wasn’t there.  I wrapped it in paper towels and stuck it in the sanitary trashcan in the ladies room.
    And right after that, or later that night, he died.  I came into work and he wasn’t there.  No one knew why until lunchtime.
    I heard them talking.  They’d just heard the news.  Someone took me by the shoulder.  He had five or six whiskeys after work and stepped off the curb in front of a moving bus, a commuter bus that takes people back to their homes in New Jersey.  He died as quickly as a stapler staples papers together.  Gone.  They said he had two children, one of them still a baby, and a wife with some disease that makes her constantly need sleep.  They told me that I could leave at 11.
    I went home and realized I didn’t have a job.  At least not right then.  What happens to the secretary when the boss dies?  The Coach bag was still wrapped in its paper standing up on my bureau.  Louis could do anything he wanted, and I guess that he usually did.  With the lights off, I sat on my couch.  My cat jumped onto my lap.  I couldn’t think of anything but that tartlet, and how the way that I looked at it seemed to change everything.

CLAUDIA ZULUAGA, an MFA student at Sarah Lawrence, lives with her husband in Brooklyn, NY.  She has an upcoming short story publication in The Exchange and is currently writing a novel entitled Hot Little Hands.

The photograph illustrating this story, "False Ceiling," is by artist Christian Uhl (copyright Christian Uhl, 2000).