Strictly speaking, Simpson was not a complicated person. He woke up each day ten minutes before his alarm clock sounded. He showered quickly and efficiently and shaved whether he really needed to or not. He liked his coffee black, but not too strong and his white toast lightly buttered with a minuscule dusting of cinnamon and sugar. Simpson left his home every workday at precisely 7:01 a.m. and arrived at Meladon Ficus and Associates, his place of employment for the past 10 years, exactly 45 minutes later. (Sometimes there was an accident or delay on the interstate that caused him to be late by five or ten minutes; but he was so punctual otherwise that everyone assumed he possessed some preternatural sense of traffic patterns and was in his corner cubicle by ten minutes until eight – whether he actually was or not.)
While at work he was focused and professional. His job was not a complicated one and it was not one that provided him with much power, affluence, or notice from his superiors. Fifty or sixty years ago, he would have been called a paper pusher. Now there's very little paper and most of what he does is transfer files from one folder on the server to another folder on the same server so that someone else can look at it after he goes over it. His job is to make sure that the person who saved the document in the file Simpson pulled it from didn't make any mistakes. The person who looked at it after him made sure that Simpson didn't miss anything. Eventually the files made their way to the Executive Board, where they were glanced over as visuals for a presentation that someone else – who had no part in putting the documents together – was giving. And it was that person who would get the credit for the hard work of all the invisible people who touched up document along the way. Simpson didn't mind this; losing out on the credit also meant that he lost out on the blame, too. And this was primarily where he drew satisfaction from his job.
On Wednesdays – which happened to be this particular day – Simpson ate his lunch at half past 12 instead of at noon. No one cared. Not even the the office manager Delores Filtcher. Delores spent most of her days fawning over the young delivery boy who brought FEDEX packages to the 15thfloor office and talking to the small circle of women she drank with after work. Simpson knew the only reason she sexually harassed the FEDEX delivery man was because she didn't want it to get out that she and her was having an affair with one of the other telephone service specialists, a meek little mouse of a woman named Mildred.
Simpson also thought that maybe Delores was a little scared of him – though he couldn't really understand why.
He sat and ate his lunch – usually a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread (with the crusts cut off, the way his mom used to give them to him when he was bedridden and ill as a child), an apple, and a bottle of lemon flavored iced tea from the vending machine (Simpson didn't like the tarty flavor of real lemon, but he liked the saccharine taste of fake lemon flavoring. ) He said very little to anyone beyond vague pleasantries.
Wednesday was the day he allowed himself to watch Penelope. Penelope had the same job he had, but in another department. On Wednesdays she always wore her back in a pony tail. And while Penelope was a beautiful woman every other day of the week, long auburn hair, hazel eyes, and a well cared for physique. Simpson imaged by the sculpted curvature of her rear and the flatness of her stomach that she worked out at least two to three times a week. (Simpson himself did not.) And while that was an especially pleasant bonus, it wasn't those things about her that attracted his attention.
It was the tattoo.
A small rose tattoo, to be exact, just below her hair line on the back of her neck. It was small, ornate. Against her pale winter skin it looked like etching on fine porcelain. There was no indication that there were tattoos anywhere else on her body; Simpson had seen her in a variety of sleeveless, short, and long-sleeved professional outfits and there was nothing on her arms. She sometimes wore a skirt when the weather was warm and there was no ink marring her perfectly shaped legs. He supposed she could have tattoos other places; but he didn't like to think of her abdomen being marred with ink... or anywhere else, either.
No, it was just a small, single tattoo. He liked to sit and imagine the story of it as he ate his peanut butter and jelly sandwich with the crusts cut off. He liked to imagine it was some brief bout of college indiscretion; in his more imaginative moments, he imagined that it wasn't a tattoo at all, but a rare birthmark. Something that made her precious. Rare. Distinct. But maybe she was unaware of what it really meant, and maybe she had always wanted to know... that thing that only he could tell her because it was knowledge that he was born with, something he had known his entire, dull existence, without even knowing WHY he knew it. But it had been there. Waiting. Waiting for the moment when the two of them would occupy the same space at the same time. Waiting so that he could tell her his secret knowledge... and in the knowing, together they would both be free.
He timed eating his sandwich to coincide with her finishing her egg salad croissant and stood so that he would reach the door before she did. He did this every Wednesday, so it required almost no thought. When they met together at the door, each and every Wednesday, Simpson thought that might be the moment he could tell her the meaning of the rose tattoo and free them both. He imagined the moment over and over again: the expression on her face as he mouthed the words that she had been needing to hear her entire life – words that she was unaware of, except for the great emptiness of their absence. He imagined her smiling, maybe touching the rose lightly, and a slight tear rolling down her otherwise perfect face. “Thank you,” she would say. “I always hoped it would be you.”
As he approached her, reaching for the door in order to open it, he prepared. The words, he knew were on his lips. He had only to speak. Then he opened the door, and she looked up at him and smiled a glorious smile.
Then her cell phone rang.
“Oh!” she said, hurrying through the open door and answering her phone. “Thanks, Simmons,” she hissed quickly over her shoulder.
Simpson stood there for a moment, then walked through himself. He didn't follow her down the hall. Instead he went back to his office and went about the rest of his day, wondering whether Penelope was aware of the company policy regarding cell phone usage during work hours.