The Other Typist Read Free Page B

across the room. He complimented Odalie on her bravery and taste several times that day. As for the Sergeant, he did not officially comment except to mumble over his lunch, to no one in particular, that men were likely to get the wrong idea about a woman with short hair.
    But all of that came later. As I said, on the day of her interview Odalie’s hair was not yet bobbed. She arrived at the precinct that morning, her face demurely powdered, her hair slicked into a tidy chignon. I remember she wore white gloves and an expensive-looking ladies’ suit that matched the robin’s egg blue of her eyes, but it was really her voice that left the deepest impression on me, as it revealed the most about what I was later to understand was her true character. It was a husky voice with the kind of low rattling timbre that made you watch the childish curl of her lips very closely to ensure you’d caught the words that were issuing from her mouth accurately. Her voice was like this until something delighted her or made her laugh, and then it rose and fell musically, like someone practicing scales on a piano. It was a paradox of innocent surprise and devilish complicity that proved intoxicating to everyone who heard it, and I wonder sometimes—even now—whether that voice was something she had carefully crafted over the years or if she had simply been born with it.
    The interview was brief. I don’t imagine the Sergeant or the Lieutenant Detective needed to know much more about the woman to be hired as our new typist other than how fast she could type (they tested her with a stopwatch, and she laughed as though they had just come up with the most intelligent and delightful game), was she presentable, and did she have good manners. There generally just wasn’t much more to vetting a new typist. And Odalie, with that voice, had them both instantly charmed. When they asked her would she mind having to hear about the often extremely unsavory acts of the criminals who were brought into the precinct, she laughed her musical, jingling laugh and then dropped into that husky timbre to joke that she was not the sort of girl you might call
squeamish,
and that it was only her meals at Mouquin’s that she insisted on being particularly
savory
anyhow. I did not think the remark was really all that clever, but the Sergeant and the Lieutenant Detective both chuckled, already eager, I believe—even at that early stage—to be liked by her. I eavesdropped from across the room and heard them tell her she was hired, starting the next Monday. In that second, I swore Odalie’s eyes flicked across the room and rested on my face for the briefest of instants, and that a tiny smile twisted itself into the corners of her mouth. But this impression was fleeting, and later it was difficult to be sure she had looked in my direction at all.
    Damned nice girl,
the Lieutenant Detective had said after Odalie departed. His summary was simple, but it actually described something I hadn’t quite put my finger on at that point. The truth was I was probably younger—perhaps as much as five years Odalie’s junior—yet the word
girl
applied to her in a much more powerful way than it did to me. Part of Odalie’s allure was the way she carried with her a sort of grown-up girlishness. There was an excitement in the air around her, an excitement that might include you in some way, as though you were her secret collaborator. Her voice quivered with a sort of tomboy energy that suggested, despite her refined poise and sophistication, she was a robust individual—someone not above climbing a tree or beating you at a game of tennis. And in that observation was another thing I had begun to realize: The voluptuous glee in Odalie’s demeanor hinted at privilege, at a childhood that had been filled with automobiles and tennis courts, things that had been absent from my own childhood, and—I would humbly venture to guess—absent from the Sergeant’s and the Lieutenant