Temporary Perfections Read Online Free

work.
    Then I attempted to throw together a dinner out of what I had in my fridge, but instead I basically drained almost an entire bottle of 29-proof Primitivo wine. I slept only fitfully and the whole weekend was a slow, dull, exhausting trudge. On Saturday I went to the movies, but I picked the wrong film, and I exited into a relentless drizzle. It rained all day and was still raining on Sunday, which I spent at home, reading, but I picked the wrong books, too. The highlight of the day was watching a couple of
Happy Days
reruns on a satellite channel.
    When I got up on Monday morning and looked out my window, I saw some rays of sun poking through the remaining clouds. I was happy the weekend was over.
    I spent the whole morning at the courthouse, dealing with insignificant hearings and running around to various clerks’ offices.
    In the afternoon I went over to the office. My newoffice. I’d been working there for more than four months, but every time I pushed open the heavy burglar-proof door the architect had insisted on installing, I felt the same sense of bewilderment. And each time I asked myself the same thing: Where the hell am I? And then: Why on earth did I leave my old, small, comfortable office to move into this alien, antiseptic place, reeking of plastic, leather, and wood?
    In reality, there had been a number of excellent reasons for the move. First of all, Maria Teresa had finally earned her law degree and asked to continue on at the firm, moving up from secretary to apprentice lawyer. I hired a gentleman in his sixties, named Pasquale Macina, to take over Maria Teresa’s secretarial duties. He had worked for many years for an elderly colleague of mine who had recently passed away.
    Around the same time, a law professor friend of mine asked me to hire his daughter. She had finished school and passed the bar, but she wanted to become a criminal lawyer. She’d practiced civil law in her father’s office, and it wasn’t to her taste.
    Consuelo had been adopted from Peru. She has a dark, chubby face, with cheeks that at first sight give her a faintly comical appearance—she looks a little like a hamster. If you meet her gaze at certain times, however, you realize that
funny
is not the right word at all, to describe her. When Consuelo’s dark eyes stop smiling, they transmit a very straightforward message: The only way to get me to stop fighting is to kill me.
    I hired her, which meant that in just a few months, the law firm grew from a staff of two to a crowd of four, shoehorned into a work space that had been small to begin with, but which then was completely untenable.
    So I looked for a new office. I found a large apartment inthe old part of town, very nice indeed, but it would have to be completely renovated, from top to bottom. I liked doing renovations more or less as much as I liked going to the proctologist. I found an architect who considered himself an artist and didn’t want to bother listening to the trivial opinions of his client or waste time quibbling over such silly questions as the cost of materials or furniture, or his own fee.
    The work took three long months. I should have been satisfied, but I just couldn’t get used to the new space. I couldn’t see myself as the kind of professional who had this kind of office. Before I had an office like mine, if I walked into an office like mine, I always assumed the owner was a clueless asshole. Now I was the clueless asshole, and I was having a hard time getting used to it.
    I shut the heavy armored door, said good afternoon to Pasquale, said good afternoon to Maria Teresa, said good afternoon to Consuelo, and went to hide in my office. I turned on my computer, and in a few seconds the screen displayed my calendar with the appointments for that afternoon, three of them. The first was with a surveying engineer who worked for the city zoning office and had the unfortunate habit of demanding tips in order to move projects off his desk.