“Yes. Every time I try to get close to you, you push me away.”
“I push
“When’s the last time we made love?” She stared at me. “When’s the last time you even tried to make love with me?”
I glanced around the restaurant, embarrassed. “Don’t make a scene,” I said.
“Make a scene? I’ll make a scene if I want to. I don’t know these people, and I’ll never see them again. What do I care what they think of me?”
“I care,” I said.
“They don’t.”
She was right. Our voices were raised now, we were definitely arguing, but no one was looking at us or paying us even the slightest bit of attention. I assumed it was because they were too polite to do so. But a small voice in the back of mind said that it was because they didn’t notice me, because I created a kind of force field of invisibility that surrounded us.
“Let’s just finish eating,” I said. “We can talk about this at home.”
“We can talk about it now.”
“I don’t want to.”
She looked at me, and it was like she was a cartoon character or something. I could see in the exaggerated expression on her face the birth of an idea, the dawning of realization. “You don’t care about this relationship at all, do you? You don’t care about me. You don’t care about us. You’re not even willing to fight for what we have. All you care about is you.”
“You don’t care about me,” I countered.
“Yes, I do. I always have. But you don’t care about me.” She sat there, staring at me across the table, and the way she looked at me made me feel not only uncomfortable but profoundly sad. She was looking at me as though I were a stranger, as though she had just discovered that I had been cloned and replaced by a soulless look-alike impostor. I could see the sense of loss on her face, could tell how deeply hurt and suddenly alone she felt, and I wanted to reach across the table and take her hands in mine and tell her that I was the same person I’d always been, that I loved her and was truly sorry if I’d said or done anything to hurt her. But something kept me from it. Something held me back. I was dying inside, desperate to right the things that had gone so wrong between us, but something made me look away from her and down at my plate.
I picked up my fork, began eating.
“Bob?” she said.
I looked at my plate.
“Bob?” Questioningly, tentatively.
I did not answer, kept eating.
After a moment, she too picked up a fork and started eating.
Smoothly, silently, a waiter took my plate, replaced it with another.
Nine
August became September.
I arrived at work one morning to find a manila interoffice envelope and a small rectangular cardboard box sitting on my desk. I was early; Derek had not yet come in, and I had the office to myself. I sat down and picked up the envelope, staring at the rows of crossed-off names on its front. The envelope’s itinerary for the past month was printed plainly on its cover, in different ink, with different signatures, and it made me realize just how much I hated my job. As I scanned down the list of names and departments now hidden behind ineffectual lines and halfhearted scribbles, I found that there was not a single individual I felt warmly toward.
I also realized how long I’d been here.
Three months.
A fourth of a year.
Pretty soon it would be a half a year. Then a whole year. Then two.
I dropped the envelope without opening it, feeling unaccountably depressed. I sat there for a moment, staring at the ugly blank office wall in front of me, then reached for the box. I picked it up, pulled off the top, looked inside.
Business cards.
Hundreds of cards, making up a single solid block of white, filled the inside of the small box. On the face of the front card, I saw my name and my title printed next to the Automated Interface logo and the corporation’s address and P.O. box number.
My first business cards.
I should have felt happy. I should have felt excited. I should have felt something positive. But that huge stack of wallet-sized cards filled me instead with an emotion akin to dread. The cards bespoke commitment, a belief on the part of the corporation that I would be there for a long time to come. The cards seemed at that moment as binding as a contract, as adhesive as glue, an investment in obligation. I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw the cards away. I wanted to send them back.
But I did nothing of the sort.
I took a few others out of the box and put them in my wallet and placed the rest in the upper right drawer of my desk.
The drawer closed with a metallic clank that sounded disproportionately loud and had about it a tone of finality.
I found myself focusing on the permanently jammed keyhole in the center of the drawer. So this was it. This was my life. Here I would spend the next forty years or so, then I would retire and then I would die. It was an overly pessimistic view of the situation, maybe a little melodramatic. But it was essentially true. I knew what I was like. I knew my personality and patterns. Theoretically, I could move on to another job. I could even go back to school eventually, get another degree. There were many options available to me. But I knew that none of those things would happen. I would simply adjust to my situation and live with it, the way I always had. I was not an initiator, a doer, a get-up-and-goer. I was a stayer and a stick-it-outer.
And then my life would be over.
I thought back to the dreams I’d had in grammar school and junior high, my plans of being an astronaut and then a rock star and then a movie director. I wondered if it was this way for everyone, and I decided that it probably was. No little kid
These were the jobs we settled for when our dreams died.
And that’s all they had been — dreams. I was not going to be an astronaut; I was not going to be a rock star; I was not going to be a movie director. This was where I was, this was who I was, and the reality of the situation depressed the hell out of me.
Derek came in just before eight, ignored me as usual, and immediately started making phone calls. At nine, Banks called and said he wanted to have a meeting with me and Stewart, and I went upstairs to his office where the two of them berated me for half an hour and told me how unsatisfactory my GeoComm documentation had been until now.
I spent the rest of the morning and the afternoon rewriting the GeoComm function descriptions I’d already written.
Exactly five years ago this month, I realized, I had started attending UC Brea. What a difference those five years had made. Then I’d been just out of high school, my whole future ahead of me. Now I was rapidly speeding toward thirty, locked into this horrible job, my life a dead end.
Typing my revisions into WordPerfect on the PC, I accidentally pressed a wrong key and deleted ten pages of work. I looked up at the clock. Four-thirty. A half hour to go. There was no way I’d be able to retype all of that in a half hour.
This was the bottom, I thought. This was hell. There was no way things could get worse than this.
