The Fires of Orc

Everything in the world is about sex except sex.

Sex is about power.

Oscar Wilde

Iwoke with the soft light of late autumn and the muffled sound of distant trucks grinding into the labors of a new day. The grey-yellow tint of morning muted lines and blurred shapes. It was always my favorite time, the new stir of dawn, a head start on the still slumbering masses, a promising hour when everything remained to be done and nothing yet stood in the way of accomplishment.

Lydia slept. I lay silently beside her, so tiny in sleep, a minor convexity in the sheets, a low, rounded dune of woven cotton that suggested but did not reveal the narrow form beneath. Her hair on the pillow was all that betrayed her presence, that and the sweet morning scent of a woman that mingled with the morning’s chill.

There is something so essentially right about a woman asleep in the early morning, something so good, so pure about her slumber, some peace in the space around her that makes a man crave the night for the sake of the morning after, when the perfumed air of a woman’s sleep fills his space, beating down the sourness of man. I’m not alone in my sentiment. All people in all places at all times have known the goodness of a woman in bed asleep. Our greatest art and imagery features the sleeping woman, the emblem of what is most tranquil, most affirming in the soul of men. To give a woman the succor of a sound night’s sleep, sheltered against the beasts of night by a man’s broad chest and the warmth of a shared bed is fittingly our highest aspiration.

I slipped gently from the bed and to the kitchen where I brewed a pot of coffee and checked the morning news online. With its three-hour head start, the East Coast often beat me to the punch, breaking news of intrigue and sundry doings before I had my wits about me. That morning, however, there was nothing worth reacting to. A school shooting, as I recall, and a movie star’s death, the run-of-the-mill coverage that could always fill a slow news day.

I heard Lydia rise, faintly, heard her soft steps to the bathroom, heard the door close and the water run. It was delightful. I waited impatiently for her to emerge. I pretended to read my tablet, an insipid ruse.

When she came from the bedroom I gushed, “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” she answered. I couldn’t read her tone. She seemed comfortable enough. We could have been an old married couple. I suppose I was hoping for some display, either of giddiness or unease, anything at all. Lydia was all business.

“I made coffee,” I told her. “Are you hungry? I have food.”

“No thank you,” she said. “I’m not a breakfast person. But I would like a cup of coffee.”

“Sit down,” I said. “Make yourself comfortable. You take it black, right?”

“Yes, please.”

I poured her a mug.

She asked, “Do you mind if I check my email?”

“Not at all,” I said. “Do you want to plug in your tablet?”

“No need for that,” she said. “My phone is fine.”

We sat in silence for several minutes, me pretending to read the news, she scrolling through messages, typing the occasional short reply. She drank her coffee rapidly, emptying a mug by the time she had caught up with early emails.

I blurted out, “I had a great time last night.” It was all that came to mind. I wished instantly I had something smoother to say.

“Me too,” she said. “It was nice.”

Nice? A Thanksgiving dinner is nice. A chamber of commerce mixer is nice.

“I should get going,” she said. “I need to be in the office in an hour.”

“Sure,” I said. “Give me five minutes and I’ll take you.”

“Oh no, no need for that,” she said. “I’ll get a cab.”

I took my time getting to work. All the while through the morning’s ritual I wondered what the night before had meant. I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant to me, but I had an uneasy feeling that it meant more to me than it did to her. Did she regret it? Did I do something wrong? How would things be, I wondered, now that the thing I’d been working for had come to pass? Was that all there would be, just that quick night and nothing more? A man’s mind is a childish, confusing land when a woman rules over it.

When I got to the office Lydia was already there, clean, dressed, hard at work. Damn, I thought, she’s nothing if not a worker.

Business first, always business first, that was the credo of our time. One could do whatever one wished on one’s own, very limited time. But when the bell rang business was business and it came before everything else. Quite ironically, it was men who established the credo but women far surpassed us in living up to it. A man’s business day included the obligatory chats to catch up on the prior night’s sporting events, hourly stirs in the gossip pool, twice-hourly instant messages to pass on a juvenile joke or pun. And then, of course, there was the endless ogling and running mental commentary about the women in the office. We said business first but we didn’t mean it. We put business ahead of family, maybe, but not ahead of our own diversion and amusement.

But the women of my time, they perfected the act of putting business first. With them it really did come ahead of anything else, except maybe family. For young, single, childless women, that meant business came before everything. Lydia took that truth to the extreme. She would have held her breath if breathing got in the way of the job.

So it was down to business for me when I got upstairs.

“Good morning,” I said, walking past her at the round table.

“Good morning,” she answered, pleasantly enough. Nothing seemed amiss, which was both a comfort and a frustration.

“We just got an email from the Campaign Director,” she said. “I replied but you’ll want to read it.”

“Will do,” I replied. All business.

She went on, “If you haven’t reviewed the text for the St. Louis materials you’ll want to do that. We need to get everything proofed and back to the printer by noon today.”

I couldn’t focus on the simplest task and every word she said was an irritation. I wondered, Did I not just spend the night with this woman?

“I’ll make sure and review it before noon,” I said, with a blandness to match hers.

She worked in silence while I stewed, scrolling through pointless forwarded and copied emails, deleting almost all of them, typing terse responses to a few, hitting keys with childish anger, pouting all the while.

After ten minutes I couldn’t sustain the façade.

Folding my arms in indignation, I asked, “Have I done something wrong?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

“How can you be so nonchalant?” I demanded. “Were you not there last night? What’s with the whole normalcy routine?”

She dropped her voice to a near whisper, “I really do think this is something we should discuss later, don’t you?”

“No I do not,” I barked. “I think it’s something I want to discuss right this minute.”

“Are you ordering me, in the scope of my job, to discuss our personal relationship?”

A woman’s rebuke stings to the bone but her indifference crushes the heart.

“I’m not ordering you to do anything,” I protested. “I just thought… well I guess I was hoping for something a bit more congenial than ‘Good morning, now get to work.’”

“First of all,” she said, “there is work to be done and it won’t wait for us to figure things out or spend time talking about our feelings. How we feel will still be how we feel when we’re caught up.”

“Please!” I snapped. “We’re not going to get caught up. We just keep pushing back the pile. We won’t be caught up when the votes are cast and totals are on the board. You know that.”

“Yes, well, second of all, I would appreciate it if you would speak to me in a more appropriate tone, especially in the workplace.”

“Why?” I asked. “Is that some guideline from the human resources manual? You ask for proper workplace conduct and I either concede or you sue?”

“How dare you,” she growled, thin-lipped, her jaw clinched tight as a vise. “Have I ever insisted on proper workplace etiquette?”

“Well no…” I muttered.

“I’m not through yet. You just sit there and listen.”

I sat and listened.

“How do you think this is going to play out between you and me in the larger scheme of the whole campaign?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I hoped that between you and me it might play out naturally, the way things play out between people who like each other, and as for the campaign, I don’t actually give a shit. Who cares about the rest of this office? Who cares about the interns? Who cares about the tight-ass bureaucrats and sycophants? Who cares about any of it? I certainly don’t.”

She shook her head. “No, you say you don’t because right now you’re worked up and you only want to care about one thing at a time. Right now you care about getting your way. But what you care about in this campaign is winning. Sure, you also care about winning this test between you and me, but that will pass and you’ll get back to the campaign.”

“How do you know that?” I protested.

“Oh come on. I know it and so do you. And as for all the others, the staff, the interns, the executives, how do you think this is going to go for me with all of them?”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“I mean, damn you, that no matter what happens from this point forward, I am now and will forever be the woman who fucked her boss and we both know how that goes for women.”

“Lydia,” I insisted, “nobody even knows anything…”

“Yet,” she interrupted. “They don’t know yet, but they already suspect. You think I don’t hear the murmuring and see the leers and upturned noses? We have been working too closely, too long, in too much isolation from the rest of the group for them not to think something’s up.”

“Yes, maybe, but until last night they were wrong,” I insisted.

“That doesn’t matter. They’re right now and no matter what you say, no matter how much you protest, soon enough everyone will know. The fact that we’re having this discussion right now in the workplace, that’s enough to confirm suspicion.”

“Oh come on,” I said. “No one can hear us.”

“They don’t have to,” she said. “People can read people. You know that. You’re a better people reader than most. You know full well there’s no way people won’t see through us. I bet Veronica already does.”

“Veronica!” I snapped. “What does that tart have to do with this?”

“Tart? What makes a woman a tart when she sleeps with the boss if she’s a receptionist but not if she’s the Communications Specialist? Honestly, you are so self-righteous that you can’t even admit I’m the one who stands to lose here.”

“This isn’t about winning and losing…” I said.

“Isn’t it? It’s interesting that you think everything is about winning and losing except when admitting it might make you feel bad. This is about many things and maybe it’s not about winning, but I know there’s one of us who stands to lose, the one who everyone else will call a tart.”

We looked at each other in stony silence. I stiffened my lip and tightened my brow. I tried to look firm but unshaken. I’m sure I failed.

Lydia was angry but that wasn’t her primary emotion – she was afraid and for good reason. She was right, of course. Assuming the talk got going around headquarters soon enough I’d be getting high-fives while she was getting rebukes from women and lurid glances from men. In time she’d be shuffled aside while I ascended another rung. That’s how it was and my protestations notwithstanding, she could see it all very clearly.

We worked the rest of that day and into the evening in near silence. By seven o’clok that night we were talking as usual, the sting of the morning’s confrontation having lessened a bit.

“I think I’m going to call it a night,” I announced.

“Very well then,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Are you sticking around for a while?” I asked.

She looked up from her tablet, “Yeah, I think I’ll be another hour or so.”

“Okay then,” I said.

“You know…” she started.

“Yes?” I said, turning to face her.

“Nothing. Really, it’s nothing. I just… I guess you know already how I’m feeling and, well, I guess I just need to thank you for keeping our business ours, and for understanding where I’m coming from. I just need us to be okay. Are we okay?”

I summoned my most comforting tone, “We’re okay. I promise.”

I struggled to maintain composure in the coming days. Affected nonchalance was my armor, aloof detachment my shield. To be beaten and still longing was a horror beyond hell’s tortures but to let my suffering be known was unthinkable. I bantered casually, laughed loudly and often. I treated Lydia’s presence day-to-day as if it didn’t matter. I was as congenial with her as I might be with any girl in any office anywhere, demeaning in my way with a dismissing lightness of bearing meant to insult her heart as much as it guarded mine.

It was not enough to have had a night with Lydia if she would not have more. Her contentment with that night as a singular instance was maddening. Her rationality about it all was unbearable. No matter how I managed to act at the best of times, in my heart I was juvenile and petty in direct proportion to her comportment and dignity.

A man spurned is something truly vile.

In all times and places men have maintained the myth that women are cloying, needy, possessive creatures who will cling to a man after a night’s intimacy, driving him madly away into the arms of others. What a clever thing for men to criticize women for a fault they find in themselves. I wonder even now how it is that a woman can be so unaffected by that which drives a man past hurt, even past rage to pure venomous spite. It’s a puzzlement as old as time.

Consider the serpent.

Did the serpent in the garden set out to corrupt from an inner impulse to do ill, or was he rather more blameless than the story would suggest? Did he do evil for evil’s sake, or was he rather driven by spite, by slithering vengeance to extract some toll from woman for the transgression of her being. Did he not long? Did he not feel as others feel and upon glimpsing God’s most vexatious creation, did he not crave? Was he not entitled to his desire? Was he wrong for wanting?

Imagine him, warmed in the garden sun, sleek, coiled, tight, trapped in his sinuous form, confronted with the image of woman. How could he not want? But to want and be unwanted is intolerable even to a snake. He did not make woman in order to desire her. God, the villain, he made her and he made her such that the serpent would be banished by his lowly status, writhing on his belly, unblinking eyes keen by day and night to glimpse the beauty who would never return his affection. Never was one more cursed than the serpent.

So he repaid evil with evil; he tempted. For what else could he do? He could not have her and he could not ignore her, so he tempted her. Perhaps he meant no harm initially but realizing that all he could do was tempt, he gave in to the greatest temptation of all – the temptation to tempt. He surrendered to the urge to tempt his tormentor and in so doing gave woman forever to God and man, resigning himself to his place in the grass and dust.

Would he do it again, given the chance? Of course. There is no temptation stronger than the temptation to tempt. In the end the low serpent’s sin was doing the only thing he could do. A fair God would never curse his own creation so.