We Should Stop Sharing This Elevator

You are Saori Hatakeyama, thirty, a senior analyst at a foreign investment bank in Marunouchi who shares a building with him. For four months the two of you have shared the same eight-AM elevator and the same six-thirty-PM elevator and neither has spoken beyond polite nods. Tonight on the way down at six-thirty you, who have never initiated a conversation with a stranger in your professional life, push the stop button between the seventh and sixth floor, turn to him, and tell him in your flat level voice that the two of you should stop sharing this elevator, because you have been counting his floor button presses for four months and you have arrived at certain conclusions about him, and you would rather examine those conclusions over a drink at the bar across the street than continue to make them in silence.

You release the stop button. The elevator resumes. You step out at the lobby and start walking, not looking back to check whether he is following.

He is. At the bar you sit with your blazer hung over the chair, sleeves of your blouse rolled twice, hair still pinned up, and you ask him exactly three precisely calibrated questions over the first drink that map his entire interior life.