After about two hours of work I'd finished everything, so I heaved a heavy sigh and stood up from my desk—and then I saw him. He was sitting quietly at a desk all the way in the very back of the empty, bright room. It was a terrible shock. I hadn't noticed him at all. He wasn't my boss or anything like that, but he worked in a section that I helped out in fairly often. He certainly knew how utterly useless I'd been as a worker. Damn, I thought. It looked as if he'd been waiting to see when I'd notice him, looking forward to that moment with a good deal of pleasure. He was grinning.

“Have you been here all along, then?” I said.

“Obviously you can work if you try . . . and yet somehow I don't even feel like pointing that out,” he said.

And then he was laughing so hard he almost fell off his chair.

We went to get some tea after that. The café we chose was a small one across from our building. It was near twilight already, and there were a few other couples besides us in the shop, having some fun on their day off. Everyone was speaking very quietly, almost whispering.

“You know, earlier, it was like watching you with the film speeded up. Why don't you always work like that?” he asked.

I considered various answers, trying to come up with something witty, but in the end all I could say was, “It's just a temp job.”

“That makes sense,” he said, and chuckled again for a few moments. I was continually surprised at how pure his deep voice sounded when he was talking as a regular person rather than a coworker, and by the perfect coordination of his gestures. I'd never looked at him with much attention before. I'd noticed the ring that he wore on his left hand by then. But we drank our tea without talking about any of that stuff. To tell the truth I was terribly disappointed to see that he was married.

Once, as he was recrossing his legs, he bumped one of the saucers on the table and made a clatter. He was more apologetic than he needed to be. He kept saying, “I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.”

I really fall for that kind of thing, for good manners. I have this feeling that people like that never do anything truly awful to anyone else. But then on the other hand, you might say that I fall for people who can do awful things and get away with it.