The Accountant at the Bank

She is working in a bank and she is 19 and already a mankiller.

At the pre-Christmas party, a balding accountant draws her name to give his holiday present. His face is crimson and he barely looks at her when the office manager reads off her name. He shrinks from view. Now he has to come up with a present for the babe everyone adores in his workplace. He retreats, stooped, a man backing into his guillotine.

Ananda doesn’t notice. She drinks a vodka and tonic and goes home with a headache and cannot remember the name she has drawn for her own gift-giving. Her boyfriend is waiting up for her. He is agitated, nostrils full of her pheromones, and as he has sex with her she tries to remember who she must buy a present, and this causes her to think of the balding accountant who must give her a present. As her boyfriend climaxes she barely notices because she remembers the accountant's flustered face and dreary embarrassment. She must remember to say hello to him the next morning when she goes into work.

To her surprise, the accountant works nearby. He must have seen her every day from his cubicle, she thinks, but she knows nothing about him. He is bald, wears glasses, plump, and coughs a lot. She goes to his cubicle and introduces herself. Hi, I’m Ananda, and we’ve never really met. He stammers his name and gets red in the face but smiles and seems to her to be relieved about something when she walks away.

The next day, the balding accountant asks her discreetly if he can give her whatever he would like to give her for Christmas. She doesn’t understand. He says he’d like to give her something special, but doesn’t want her to get the wrong impression. Ananda laughs. Give me whatever you want, she says. It’s Christmas, don’t worry. He smiles and seems relieved again.

She says hello every day as she passes him in his cubicle, and he says hello as well. The day before the Christmas break, she finds a wrapped box on her desk, with a card from the accountant. He is not in the office. She opens the box and finds expensive silk. Underwear and garter, stockings. She’s shocked at the expense, but digs the quality. She wants to thank him, but he doesn’t come to work for a few days and then it’s Christmas. A few days after New Year’s, there he is in his cubicle, red-faced when she thanks him profusely for the gift. Nothing, nothing, he mumbles.

The boyfriend likes the silk. He asks her to dress in it so he can undress her. They are meeting for happy hour the first Friday night in the new year, and the boyfriend begs her to wear the accountant’s silks. She walks in that Friday morning and sees the accountant staring at her legs in silk stockings. She grins and winks and gives him a thumbs up and laughs out loud when the accountant’s face turns red. Six times she walks past his cubicle and lingers, smiling, until the accountant smiles back and gives her the thumbs up. Thank you, she says. Glad you like it, he says. He is very happy.

To her surprise the accountant is also at the bar at happy hour that evening. Most of her office is there, and her boyfriend politely keeps his hands off her body while the office higher-ups are around. She excuses herself and approaches the accountant. She says thank you again, and he is smiling. He’s drunk vodka and so has she, a shot too much. She hikes up the hem of her skirt until the accountant can see the wide dark tops of the stockings on her thigh. Terrific, he says, terrific. Your boyfriend is lucky. Ananda wants to know why, teasingly. Because he gets to see you in all that silk, says the accountant. She tells the accountant to follow her and they go to the back of the bar into the handicapped toilet, where she lifts her skirt and takes off her shirt to show the balding accountant his Christmas gift, wrapped around her youth and blooms. To both their surprise, he begins to touch the silks, and one touch becomes a clutch and then a taste, and she is thrilled by his hunger. For a few minutes he handles her like expensive luggage, and she spins into him like a ride at the county fair, bumping. But then he stammers again, and she slips on her skirt and shirt and walks back to the bar and her anxious boyfriend.

A few days later, she is in silk again, teasing the accountant in his cubicle, but he is not in a cage and at five o'clock they are fucking in his van in the company parking lot, and she laughs while she watches her co-workers walk to their cars to go home, stooped, as though to their own guillotines. And this end-of-the-workday sex in the van happens a dozen times before Ananda gently and politely reminds the accountant she has a boyfriend she is quite fond of. He goes back to stammering and the silks stay put away, but she makes sure to say hello every day until one day the balding accountant is not there. He has been transferred or left for another branch or bank. Ananda doesn’t know, and doesn’t really care. But there should have been a small goodbye, except she remembers that, yes, she doesn’t really care.

A few months later Ananda comes into work and finds her colleague Angie distraught. The accountant is dead, a suicide. Ananda hardly hears the details. She is trembling, and goes home at lunchtime and lies in bed the whole afternoon wondering when she is going to throw up. Her boyfriend makes the mistake of fondling her when he comes home that evening, and she snarls at his touch. He leaves to watch football, and she cleans the apartment.

This is one of many true stories about Ananda Shields. People wonder why I flit still around her flame, and this story is part of my reasons. Perhaps the story is more about my weakness than it is about her power, but I don’t care; her stories fill me with anxious jealousies, and I will feel this way until some magnet of humanity is extinguished from the roots of my personality, and I am neutered or killed, whichever comes first.

Her adventures are small flames and each one hurts, but the scar Ananda has left on my instincts and intellect are a burn that warm me still. She is my bruise. And everyone knows that a cure for bruises is to keep touching them with concern and a little provocation, as if releasing a little pain with each poke brings a faster heal. But I wish the bruise stays, because I love its hurt.