Pug Hill - Alison Pace [19]
But I digress. It’s kind of hard these days not to. So, anyway, Elliot arrived here, wooed, and I tried not to get all infatuated with him, knowing it was unprofessional at best to be infatuated with a coworker, but I did anyway. And then, perhaps not so coincidentally, once things recently started going to the bad place with Evan, I just fell that much harder. And it hasn’t worked out well for me.
Sergei walks by me, carrying a tacking iron. He looks at me quizzically and I wonder if he knows I am secretly (or not so) in lust with Elliot. I smile at Sergei, feeling slightly embarrassed, and as I turn back to the now endless seeming sea of red on my Rothko, I feel a little bit like a slacker for thinking so much about Elliot when there is so much work that needs to be done. I’m so tired right now of looking at the Rothko, but undoubtedly it is a better bet than looking over anymore at Elliot. I grab my magnifying visor and pull it down over my eyes. I think maybe that might help. I think, pretty much, something’s got to.
Lately, I’ve been beginning to realize that in addition to being the endless object of my fascination, Elliot Death also happens to be the personification of why people tell you not to fall head over heels in lust with your coworkers. Granted, people generally might more often say, “Don’t date your coworkers,” but if they knew falling head over heels in lust with your coworkers without even dating them was a risk, they’d warn you against that, too.
Trust me on this one. Look around you, any cute coworkers? If so, there is only one thing to do: shun them. Because if it doesn’t work out, because let’s say he doesn’t seem to take any notice of you at all and he has a girlfriend, and you have a boyfriend, having to see him every day, day in and day out, by virtue of the fact that you are in the same place as him day in and day out (seeing as you are coworkers and all) will make the whole “it’s not gonna happen” thing an entirely harder ball-game. It will all be so much harder than it would be if the person whom you lusted after went every day to, say, Bhutan, as opposed to a desk not ten feet away from you. I know this now.
Perhaps I knew this before, perhaps it was clear to me the second I met Elliot—the second I looked up and said to myself, “No way, a cute, hot, straight paintings restorer?” But I, when it comes to matters of the heart, am nothing if not a slow learner.
I force myself to focus in a bit closer on the Rothko, and think to myself, as I think about so many things these days, Why is it so hard? I’ve spent basically my whole career as a paintings restorer dealing mostly with the nineteenth century and earlier. I’ve spruced up more Hudson River School landscapes than you could shake a stick at. But actually, don’t really shake a stick, because shaking sticks, they can break loose and fly right onto the surface of a painting that I worked really hard and long and meticulously to get right. I’ve gotten to the point at last where I feel pretty confident in my ability to diagnose and fix all the problems of the seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century; but the modern stuff, the contemporary stuff—which at this late date is still so frighteningly new to me—is a whole different story. With paintings restoration, the problems of today are a lot trickier to fix than the ones of the distant past; you’d think that the reverse might be true, but trust me it’s not.
When I need to look away from my easel again, I don’t look across the room at Elliot, but instead I look down at