The Gallows Pole

"Have you ever been stuck in an elevator before?" the slender, attractive for all normal purposes brunette asks as she takes off her stainless steel with 18-karat gold plating Michele bracelet watch. "There is no reason for this now."

"Why?" The man asks. He takes off his Michael Kors three-quarter peacoat to reveal his three-piece Armani suit. He looks at his watch once, and then again to make sure. "No, I've never been stuck in an elevator before."

"Because, no matter how many times you look at the watch, it's not going to change the fact that you're stuck in an elevator." She fixes her polka dotted dress that seems fit for a 50s housewife and says, "We're on the elevator's time now."

"I guess," the man says as looks at his watch again. His facial expression did not suit his unblemished face as he takes off the watch and places it into his pants pocket. "You know I gave my wife a watch just like that one."
"I should have guessed," she says pointing to her naked ring finger.

The man notices a tan line around the ring finger. He wants to ask the stranger if she has ever been married before, but he is more worried about the elevator.

The elevator begins to move for a second, but only a few feet. The tall man in the pretentious blue suit grunts in disdain, rises from his seated position in the corner and feverishly presses the emergency button several times, each applied pressure displaying his discontent. "Why do they even put this button in the elevator if it's not going to work."

"For the same reason they have life jackets on airplanes," the woman says with a smile as she pulls out a three musketeers candy bar.
"And why's that?" the man says as he paces around, causing the heat to build up from between the soles of his feet and the face of the carpeted elevator floor.
"The illusion of safety," the woman says as she takes a bite of the candy bar whose flaky outer shell sprinkles onto her immaculate smock. "Do you want some?" The woman extends the candy bar to the inconsolable man.

"The illusion of safety," the man says contemptuously as his itchy disposition swallows the prescribed air. He moors along one side of the elevator and says, "I can't take it."
"Why," the woman asks smiling, "it's only a hundred calories."
"No, not the candy bar...the...the whole being stuck in an elevator."

"Trust me, I was a little worried too, but the candy bar made me feel a lot better," the woman says as she takes another bite.

"How can you eat at a time like this?"
"A time like what?"
"Like this, like being stuck in an elevator time."
"Cause I'm hungry?"
"Well I'm claustrophobic. And you are bothering me."
"I'm not bothering you," the woman says with a mouth full of nougat. "The situation is bothering you. Now sit, because you're ruining this experience for me."

"Pff. Experience. Do you have any service in here?" the man asks as he checks his Blackberry phone once and then again to make sure.
"Nope. Don't have a phone."
"You don't have a what? What are you some pseudo-bohemian tree hugger?"
"I think you're getting your stereotypes all mixed up," she says as she crumples the wrapper and places it into her Chloe Paddington handbag.

"Hey, I got my wife a bag just like that," the man says, finally stopping his one foot pace.
"You sure do like talking about your wife," the woman says as she looks into her purse. "Do you miss her or something?"

"Ah, what do you know," the man says, slapping the air in front of him. His perfervid walk persists.
"I don't know anything, now sit down because you're being rude."
"God, of all the people to be stuck in an elevator with." He shakes his tired, clasped hands into the air and then decides to finally sit down.

The two individuals sit together in an intimately sized elevator, each person at their respective back corners. The sidewalls are made of what seems to be eucalyptus granite, which is often seen on bar tops. The floor is forgiving, but not enough for someone to sit on it comfortably for more than thirty minutes. The apartment complex has twenty-one floors, but the numbers on the elevator buttons betake themselves to twenty-two; this is because of superstition, of course—it is quite hard in New York to find an elevator button with the number thirteen inscribed above it.

"How long has it been?" the man asks, holding his bent legs and tapping his anxious feet.
"I dunno, I put my watch away."
"What floor do you think we're on?"
"Dunno, maybe thirteen?"

"Just my luck," the man says, switching his seated position so he is sitting Indian style. There is a soft silence that consists of the sound of apprehension in each exhalation, a rummaging of cacophonously placed articles in a purse, and a rustling of wool cloth. "So what floor were you going to?"
"The fourteenth."
"Just our luck."
"Yeah, I figured you were going to the same floor."
"Why?"
"Because it was the one button highlighted when I walked into the elevator." The woman finds what she was looking for in the bag and pulls out a red pen and a miniature note pad. "Let's play a game."

"I'm not in the mood for games," he says as he looks again at his Blackberry phone.
"So you're in the mood to sulk. Woe is me," she says as she hands him the pen and pad. "Now you know how to play hang man, right?"

The man takes the pen and pad. "Oh, hang man, how fitting."
"Well, this is going to be a variation of that game."
The man draws a gallows.

"Pick a word that reveals your most sacred secret, then I'll try and guess all the letters," the woman says smiling. "Once I guess the word, you then have to tell me why you chose that word." She crosses her hands, stares passionately into his pupils and whispers, "Now remember, it has to be a secret that you cherish, something that you have never told anyone else. That's the fun part. Cause, we'll never see each other again."

"What if I see you walking around the apartment complex?"
"You won't," the woman says in the most earnest of tones.

The man, now somewhat perplexed, draws five dashes underneath the gallows, pauses for a moment and stares at the woman, then drafts three more dashes, eight in all.

"Good," the woman says as she shimmies over to the man until their legs are touching.
The man thinks about how soft her legs are. They do not have any rogue hairs, or missed spots. He remembers how meticulously his wife shaved her legs. He remembers how they used to lie on their bed at night and watch romantic comedies—the Julia Roberts kind—and how he never really liked watching the movies but, for some reason, he just enjoyed the warmth of her body tugging unremittingly at his design as she rested her legs across his and her hands around his broad, tense shoulders. And as she watched the screen intensely, he watched her, rubbing her silvery legs the entire time. And without consciously knowing, the man rests his left hand upon the unfamiliar girl's naked thigh. When he comes back from his reverie, he removes his hand and, in an attempt to quell the uneasiness, he says abruptly, "Guess a letter."

"E," the woman says, "I always guess E first."
"Well it's a good letter to guess," the man says as he scribbles an E above the sixth dash.
The woman bites her lip and says, "A."
"No fair, you can't guess two vowels in a row."
"Who says?" the woman asks. "This isn't Wheel of Fortune. I don't have to buy a vowel."
"I don't think that's any fun," the man says worriedly because he knows there are three vowels in his word—four if you count the Y.
"Fine. T," the woman shouts now.

The man scrawls a T above the fifth dash. He begins to sweat a little as the woman places her restless hand upon his knee. He loosens his tie, wipes his brow clean and clears his throat. The man thinks about how his wife used to watch Wheel of Fortune while she fixed dinner. She was quite good at it too. He hated the show. At that moment, the man realizes how much he and his wife are unalike. She even likes walking in the rain.
No one likes walking in the rain, he says to himself.
"Wow. I'm pretty good at this."
"You've only gotten two."
"Well, then...R," she says as if she already knows the word.

"Dammit," the man mutters as he scribbles an R above the seventh dash. He remembers a documentary he saw on TV about letter frequency in the English language and how A, E, R, and T are all in the top ten. So is L.
"L," the woman says in a labored tone, extending the L for a few seconds.

The man reluctantly writes an L above the fourth dash. The sequence now reads, _ _ _ lter_.
She must have seen the same documentary, the man says to himself.

"Can I use that A now?"
"I guess," the man says as he presses the red pen hard against the paper. He scrawls an A above the first dash mark.

The woman grabs the man's jaw and twists it so that he is now looking into her fixed eyes.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm finding the word in your eyes," the woman says, inspecting the brown of his eyes with apparent contempt. "You have sad eyes."

The man removes her hand as he thinks about his wife and how she always said that same thing. He stares at the girl again with a deep curiosity.
She even looks like my wife.

The man throws this thought away, insisting that it is only a symptom of his quivering guilt.
"I'd like to guess the word now."
"Okay, but if you guess it wrong, you lose," the man says, despite the fact that he cannot help but regret ever agreeing to play the game in the first place.

She drops her head ever-so-slowly until it sleeps upon his heavy chest. His heart beats at a drummer's pace as if in an attempt to escape the guilt that also resides in the axis of his being. And she can feel this. "Adultery."

"Did you know the word before we even started?"
"Yeah, well I had a hunch. I mean, the whole wearing the ring, mentioning your wife, anxiously looking at your watch thing kind've helped me out."
"You're a bitch."
"Why?"
"Because you asked me to play this game so you could satisfy your curiosity...so you could expose me."
"Oh, stop being so paranoid. Everyone commits adultery. Forget AIDS, adultery is the world's new epidemic. That's hardly a secret worth anything."

The man cannot help but agree with her. He thinks about each one of his colleagues, about how each of them has their respective mistress, most of them being their assistants. His was not. His was a client. She was a pretty Jewish girl who had taken over her dying father's business. She was spunky and spontaneous, witty and emotional—everything his wife was not. He first met her at a conference in San Francisco where he gave her his company business card and she gave him her hotel room number. The night ended with him smoking a cigarette and drinking a nightcap in her hotel room bed, her with her left leg placed on top of his—the both of them asleep—and him thinking about his wife and all those times they watched Julia Roberts movies in their bed back on the fourteenth floor of their apartment and how he used to rub them because it made him love her more. And him thinking about how things would never be the same. "I still love her, you know," the man says as if he is pretending this stranger is his own wife. This is him confessing.
"I believe you."

"I don't know, it's just—" and the man pauses for a moment, his mind scrambling to find the right letters to put above the dash marks. "It's just, when you get married, you think 'Well this is the girl I'm going to spend the rest of my life with. She is everything I have dreamed of...and more.' And then right after the honeymoon, nothing is the same. They always says, 'Give it two years and things'll be different.' But no, that's just how long people lie to themselves before they realize that things are different. It's like, after the honeymoon, nothing is the same. Not a thing. Spontaneous means going out to the movies on a Thursday night...it means eating duck instead of chicken; it means going to bed at two instead of twelve. It's not like she's a bad person. No, no I'm the bad one. I—" and he stops himself before he can get too wrathful.

The woman, now somehow closer, says, "What's her name?"
"Her name?"
"I dunno, some brunette. I remember her being a brunette because my wife's a blonde. And I just wanted something that wasn't her."
"No, your wife."
"Oh, why does that matter?"
"Because we'll never see each other again."
"Michelle."
"That's a quite common name."
"I know, too common."

"So, my turn," the woman says, grabbing the pad and pen. She draws another gallows and draws six dashes under it.
"You know what the worse thing is?"
"You can guess two vowels in a row; I don't care."
"For some reason, I just want to kiss you right now."
"It's six letters."

The man moves in closer and closer until his lips touch hers. Their lips embrace for only seconds, but to him it feels as though it is a lifetime. And she kisses like his wife.
She pulls back, places her free left hand over her lips, and gulps past her fingers, "Six letters."
"E," the man coughs.

The woman places an E above the fifth dash mark. The man continues to guess letters using the frequency technique until the sequence reads, ¬_ _ r_ er and the hangman's body is suspended above the ligature, headless. He finds it peculiar but likes how she leaves the head for last. For some reason he likes everything about her—how she dresses and shaves her legs like his wife, and especially how everything else about her was nothing like his wife. He sifts through his rampant mind in a desperate attempt to guess the word because he could not afford another incorrect guess. But the only word he could think of was murder. And this bothers him, so he takes a chance and guesses another letter. "M." And sure enough, the sweet, spunky, warmhearted being places an M above the first dash mark. The curiosity burns its presence into his unbridled mind, rifling through his thoughts and branding each one of them with prodigious suspense. The man cannot help but mutter, "Murder."

And the woman places a U above the second dash and a D above the fourth one. The man's throat constricts, tightening its grip with each breath.

"When," the man says reluctantly, his mind in such a haze that he cannot see the knife that is hiding between the throes of her dress—the place where her legs do not touch. And as she places the culprit against his naked, shaven neck, he cannot help but descry what she said before about the illusion of safety. And before he can utter another word, the knife invades his forgiving neck without any scent of contrition. The woman rises from her seated position, takes off her brown wig, hits the emergency stop button on the elevator and warmly whispers, "Just now."

And the elevator starts abruptly and politely takes the woman to the fourteenth floor.