SmartPig Office, 3:48pm, 6/4/2002
When Maurice broke into my office and found me asleep on the couch, he pointed a narrow finger dramatically in my direction and actually said, “Aha!” ( like a policeman revealing the guilty party on an old TV show ). I struggled my way up into the world, and wondered some combination of ‘now what?’, ‘get out!’, and ‘lunch? … maybe donuts’. He must have tiptoed up, putting his weight on the sides of the old wooden stairs in the old wooden building ( or I would have heard the creaking which normally alerts me to people approaching ). Since he owns the whole building and I’m never behind on my rent, it occurred to me that he had no need to sneak around, so he must have wanted something in particular.
“Maurice, come in.” I offere d, although he was already in. Social conventions are hard enough for me to learn and follow when people follow them, but I had no idea how to treat someone who entered my locked office without my permission; so I ignored it.
My greeting seemed to take the wind out of his accusatory sails; he lowered his pointing finger, and jingled his keys with an apologetic tilt of his head and arching of eyebrows.
My landlord Maurice communicates largely through gestures, and in the nearly seven months that I’ve been renting this office space, it has become abundantly clear that he finds my manner of human-to-human interactions equa lly off-putting and confusing. He dragged one of the chairs around my work-table ( really a kitchen table, but there’s no kitchen, so … ) and moved it close to the couch, then settled himself slowly down onto the seat as I shook myself free of the last of my nap.
“What do you want?” I ask ed, in a manner much too direct for Maurice, who prefers to circle the subject for discussion sometimes for an hour or more before getting down to business.
Maurice looked at me blankly, patted the chest pocket of his worn-thin flannel shirt, pulled out a mostly crushed pack of Lucky Strikes (the short filterless ones, I noticed ), and looked around ( as he always does ) for an ashtray. I hate the smell of cigarettes, and have to air out SmartPig for hours after each visit from Maurice. He knows this, but it’s ( probably ) better than him lifting his leg to claim dominance/territory like the dogs at the shelter.
I fish ed an empty Coke can out of the recycling bin, and passed it to him. He looked at the can with a mixture of deep sadness and disappointment ( at me … the can … both … I’ll never know ), shook it, and tapped the half-inch of ash already accumulated into the can ( which gave off a sour little hiss as the hot ash fell into the few stray milliliters of Coke at its bottom ).
I don’t want to repeat my question, but Maurice seemed either not to have heard it the first time, or was waiting for reasons known only to him to respond. He nodded and smoked and tapped and sighed, then whistled through his teeth and asked, “So it was cold last night, yes?”
It’s been coming for months, but I saw it in a flash of conversational ( and gestural ) images now; the next ninety seconds of this conversation could leave me actually ( as opposed to only virtually ) homeless. When I settled into my new life in the Adirondacks, and found how much I loved camping and sleeping outdoors, I let the lease on my apartment in town lapse, keeping the office-space for my few belongings and to have a place to get out of the rain. Maurice must have figured out that I no longer have an apartment ( people in small towns apparently know almost everything, about almost everyone, almost all of the time ), and became concerned that I was using the SmartPig office as a residence ( which is in violation of my lease ). I had a moment of mixed fear/anger/panic/frustration as I contemplated losing this space, but Maurice didn’t see it; I don’t emote like other people do, and unless I’m trying, I
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