It’s past midnight. She’s miles from him.
Home.
The word she wants is
home.
She doesn’t believe she will have the strength to submit herself to the doctors tomorrow without him. In a moment of clarity, she asks herself, is she really in love with Martin, with
Martin,
or is her broken heart circumstantial? Would she feel such emotion for him if she were not going into the hospital tomorrow, if he hadn’t arranged her first trip to the doctor with such compassion, if he were not the last man to know her body intimately before it would be grievously altered? And then the answer comes to her:
all
broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making. She might as well admit it — yes, she’s in love with Martin, and she’s discovered it at the worst possible time,
after
he’s broken her heart. In a sudden reversal of all that conviction she had when peeling away from the curb that Martin’s office was the worst place to be, and contacting Martin the worst thing she could do, she goes in search of a pay phone. She has her cell phone, but if she calls on the cell she won’t have the option of hanging up at the last minute without Caller ID informing him who was calling.
She calls from the pay phone of a closed gas station. It isn’t unreasonable to expect to catch him at his desk. In fact, despite the late hour, it doesn’t even cross her mind that he could be anywhere else. The familiar ring, the familiar voice mail — speak now or forever hold on to your self-respect. She hangs up. Wise choice. She calls back. “Martin, I’m at this number, it’s —” She gives him the number. “Can you call me here when you get back to your desk, please? It’s urgent.” She peers about as she waits. There is a dark orange light cast above the gas pumps that is almost supernatural in its hazy Halloween glow, illuminating, though that’s not the right word —
animating
the pumps and the oil stains and the pockmarks and the overflowing garbage pails into something ugly and vaguely menacing, and when a man pushing a shopping cart rattles his way across the pavement in the dark, the noise unnerves her, and she looks around. Great, now she’s frightened of being attacked, too, of rapists and murderers and of all men lurking this late at night. Talk about a landslide of shit. At this eerie-ass gas station at the witching hour, folks, she has officially been buried in it. All she needs now is the start of rain, the motor failing to turn over, a car with tinted windows to stop at an uncomfortable distance, and a plague of locusts. Wouldn’t that make the night complete? A football field’s distance away the highway looms. She hears the faint whir of whizzing cars. Has it been two minutes, or four hours, since she called? She tries again. “Martin,” she says. “I need to talk, please call me back.” “Martin,” she says, on her third try. “Are you at
home?
”
He
is
at home, sleeping. “What time is it?” he says, after the sixth ring. Oh,
no
— how long has he been at home?
Why
is he home?
How could he be home?
Now in the time before her reply, the entire evening requires rethinking. She envisioned him in familiar surroundings — refilling his coffee and pulling out a file and popping aspirin and readjusting his trousers after sitting down. She took comfort knowing where he was, even if she wasn’t with him. Finding him at home, however, waking him up, she realizes she knows nothing of where he might have been or what he was doing, and that’s very, very unsettling. She thinks the worst — a drink with someone new, fresh conversation, the beginning of what he
does
want. She’s lost him. “What are you doing home?” she asks. “What am I doing?” he says. “I’m sleeping.” “When did you leave work?” she asks. “I don’t know,” he says. “Seven?”
Seven?
She doesn’t say it aloud but inside it’s a scream as loud as that in the dressing room. Seven? She’s been picturing him for five hours in a place she thought she knew and now she knows nothing. What she badly needs is a step-by-step explanation of everything he’s done tonight. But she can’t ask for that. Better come to the business at hand before she says something pathetic. Too late: “What have you been doing at home since seven?” she asks. “I mean, isn’t it unlike you, to go home at seven?” “I was tired,” he explains. “I wanted to come home.” “So you went home at seven?” “Yes, Lynn,” he says. “I came home at seven. I ordered food, I watched TV — what’s going on?” So nothing out of the ordinary, she thinks. Nothing social. No
dates.
He’s honest with her, she knows that by now — at last, tell the man why you’re calling.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she says. “I need you to go with me. I don’t know what I was thinking. I won’t be able to do it without you.”
There’s silence on his end. “But I thought . . .” he begins. “Okay,” he resumes, a second later. “I’ll go with you.”
“You don’t have to worry,” she says. “I understand the conditions. I fully accept the conditions.”
“Okay, but . . . what’s changed? Because on Sunday you said —”
“I’m scared,” she says simply. He doesn’t reply. “It’s just that I’m scared.”
“Okay,” he says. “What time do you need me to pick you up?”
HEADING BACK ON LAKE SHORE DRIVE,
she is calm as a dove in a cage. No music, just the wind coming in from the sunroof and the Saab’s faithful trill. To her right is the quiet lake. She remembers the time the car went kapooey. As she drove along someone might have been strapped to the underbelly banging on it with a monkey wrench. It jerked and tottered, and the strange movement and the clanking filled her with anxiety, as if she were the extension of consciousness of the machine she loved. She took it in and when she got it back three days later, all had been returned — the familiar purr of the motor, the smooth palpable glide of the tires on the street. She feels like that now: steady, quiet, functioning, recovered. No longer gadding, flitting like a pinball. Those hours are behind her, and only now can she see it: at twelve-forty-eight
AM
enveloped by the sturdy Saab and moving north at a reasonable speed she knows exactly where it is, the right place that has eluded her all evening, and what she should have been doing all along. The night’s drama had muddled her, obscuring her rightful destination, and within fifteen minutes she arrives. She enters the building and greets the man who watches over it at night. He knows her by name. “Surprised to see you here this late!” he says, and with these words she knows instantly that her biggest mistake was ever leaving to begin with. It was climbing into that cab and heading home. She takes the elevator to sixty and walks down to her office. Has anyone but her yet recognized the critical importance to the agency’s future of these two new business pitches? And the strategies haven’t even been worked out yet! They have two weeks until presentation. It’s insane to think she even has a moment to spare. She sits down at her desk. Here is a good place to be, right here, thinking, What must be done? What must I do first? Amazing how energized she feels, given these last few months of everyday fatigue. No different than waking up after a long night’s rest, and she is ready to start the morning. She reaches out to her mouse, disrupting the screensaver. The clock says it’s just after one. Just a very early morning, that’s all. She works until six.
She’s exhausted. She rises off her chair and goes to the window. Just now the sun is coming up, the city dot-matrixing into life again, one dark spot at a time turning into light, brightening the buildings and the streets and distant highways. The stippling reminds her of the giant Seurat painting in the Art Institute, the one Martin liked. Not that Chicago, with its hard charm and gray surfaces — practically still with inactivity at this hour — is anything like Seurat’s colorful sprawling picnic. But watching the sky open at her window, it is magnificent, especially after all the work she’s put in, and a minor epiphany hits. We’ve got it all wrong. Normal business hours should be from nine p.m. to five
A.M.
so that we’re greeted by the sun when work is through. All that was despairing and hopeless the night before has evaporated, and all that talk about the transformative power of the light of day has come true for her. She is strong again, on firm ground again. She has done things as best as she could imagine doing them, and if her imagination is an impoverished one, if it lacks in some fundamental way and the result has been a default to working harder, working longer, her life defaulted to the American dream — hasn’t it been a pursuit of happiness all the same?
Her
pursuit of happiness. And no one, not Martin, not anyone, can take that away from her. It can be taken away only by death. And because of these new business opportunities, death, she’s afraid, will have to wait.
She picks up the phone. She just wants to let him know that last night she went a little crazy — who knows why. But with the light of day, her senses have returned, and she doesn’t need him to take her to the hospital after all.
“What are you talking about?” he says. “I was just about to leave to pick you up.”
“No,” she says. “That’s not necessary.”
“Lynn,” he says, “I’m picking you up.”
“Martin, I’m already at work. I’m a block away from the hospital. I don’t need to be picked up.”
“Lynn, why are you doing this?”
She promises to call when she’s out of surgery. He protests again, but she insists. She hangs up and staggers over to the white leather sofa. It’s cluttered with free samples of former client products — cans of motor oil, boxes of lightbulbs — and accordion file folders full of documents. Moving all this to the floor she lies down and, just before falling asleep, resolves that when she wakes up, the first thing she will do tomorrow — today — is clean this shameful office, and make a new start of things.
ON NOT GETTING IT — BENNY SPOTS CARL — HOSING THE ALLEYWAY — MARCIA’S HAIRCUT — AN INADVERTENT OFFENSE — THE NEW BUSINESS — A REQUEST FOR GENEVIEVE — THE CAFETERIA — GOING UNDER — THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JOE AND THE REST OF US — “THESE PEOPLE” — AN ELITIST — THE WATER TOWER — WHY IT WASN’T CYNICISM — THE GARDEN HOSES — JOE MAKES A DECISION
IN THE MORNING WE CAME
in and hung our spring coats on the back of the door and sat down at our desks and sifted through last night’s e-mail for something good. We sipped our first cups of coffee and cleared our voice mails and checked our bookmarked websites. It might have been a day like any other, and we should have been grateful, ecstatic even, to find no declaration of bankruptcy waiting for us in our in-boxes and no officewide memo announcing eviction from the building. We had every reason to believe that payroll management still acknowledged our existence, that Aetna had been paid and remained committed to our well-being, and that no one had been granted a seizure order to repossess our chairs.
Why, then, did discomfort pervade the hallways and offices? What made this morning different from others like it?
The unfinished pro bono ads that had eluded us the day before. We had been asked — was it possible? — to create an ad that made breast cancer patients laugh, a strange and vexing assignment. What was the point of it? No matter. Our job wasn’t to ask what the point was. If that
had
been our job, nothing articulated to prospective clients in our capabilities brochure and on our website would have escaped our rolled eyes. The point of another billboard outside O’Hare? Another mass mailer on your kitchen table? Good luck mustering an argument for more of that glut. If we had to call into question the point, we’d have fallen into an existential crisis that would have quickly led us to question the entire American enterprise. We had to keep telling ourselves to forget about the point and keep our noses down and focus on the fractured and isolated task at hand. What was funny about breast cancer?
We didn’t have an answer, and it was making us nervous. Jim Jackers, fearing the blank page and searching for direction among the hoi polloi, was not the only one who suffered anxiety about turning in crap work. One crap ad could make the difference between the person they kept on and the one they let go. No one could say that was the criterion, but no one could say it wasn’t.
But it wasn’t just our jobs at stake, was it? When we had trouble nailing an ad, our reputations were on the line. A good deal of our self-esteem was predicated on the belief that we were good marketers, that we understood what made the world tick — that in fact, we
told
the world how to tick. We got it, we got it better than others, we got it so well we could teach it to them. Using a wide variety of media, we could demonstrate for our fellow Americans their anxieties, desires, insufficiencies, and frustrations — and how to assuage them all. We informed you in six seconds that you needed something you didn’t know you lacked. We made you want anything that anyone willing to pay us wanted you to want. We were hired guns of the human soul. We pulled the strings on the people across the land and by god they got to their feet and they danced for us.
What, then, were we to make of an empty sketch pad or blank computer screen? How could we understand our failure as anything but an indictment of us as benighted, disconnected frauds? We were unhip, off-brand. We had no real clue how to tap basic human desire. We lacked a fundamental understanding of how to motivate the low sleepwalking hordes. We couldn’t even play upon that simple instrument, embedded within the country’s collective primal cortex, that generates fear — a crude and single-note song. Our souls were as screwy and in need of guidance as all the rest. What were we but sheep like them? We
were
them. We were all
we
— whereas for so long we had believed ourselves to be just a little bit above the others. One unfinished ad could throw us into these paroxysms of self-doubt and intimations of averageness, and for these reasons — not the promise of gossip or the need for caffeine — we found ourselves driven out of our individual offices that morning and into the company of others.
“I could
not
believe it,” said Benny Shassburger, leaving his office just as we had settled in. This was an old trick of Benny’s — to abandon us at the moment we needed him most, so that we knew never to take him for granted. He stopped briefly in the doorway and turned back. “Hold on a sec while I fill up my coffee and I’ll tell you the whole story.”
We talked among ourselves until he returned. “Okay,” he said, coming into the room with a full mug and a trailing odor of stale coffee grounds. He sat down and the delicately webbed seat sank for him a little more than it did for the rest of us. He squared himself to his desk and said, “So who did I see this morning parked right outside the building but — what?” He stopped midsentence. He had something — “Where?” It was on his other cheek — we hoped to god he’d find it fast. He wiped his whiskerless face and looked down. “Doughnut glaze,” he said.
There were doughnuts? Benny’s story would have to wait for those of us wanting doughnuts. Those of us who’d already eaten, or who were watching their weight, or Amber Ludwig, who had just split open a brown banana and was already halfway through it, filling Benny’s office with its singular ripe musk — we sat tight.
Benny proceeded to tell us that he’d seen Carl Garbedian parked in the drop-off zone just outside the building, Marilynn in the driver’s seat beside him. Was it possible? Our understanding was that Carl and Marilynn were separated. “Of course they’re separated,” he said impatiently. “But if you’ll just let me tell you my story . . .”
CARL SAT IN THE PASSENGER SEAT
of the car looking out upon the day. There was his building, up ahead, with the beggar he knew so well sitting cross-legged near the revolving doors, tired this hour of the morning, it seemed, as he hardly had the energy to shake his Dunkin Donuts cup at all those entering. As Carl glanced around, he recognized people from the office converging upon the building, but nobody he cared to talk to.
Directly to his right, something curious was going on. Two men in tan uniforms were hosing down the alleyway — a small dead-end loading dock between our building and the one next to it. Carl watched them at their work. White water shot from their hoses. They moved the spray around the asphalt. The pressure looked mighty, for the men gripped their slender black guns, the kind seen at a manual car wash, with both hands. They lifted the guns up and sprayed the Dumpster and the brick walls as well. They spot cleaned, they moved refuse around with the stream. For all intents and purposes, they were cleaning an alleyway. An alleyway! Cleaning it! Carl was mesmerized. It was the sort of thing, six months ago, that would have sent him right over the edge, seeing these men, these first-generation Americans without much choice in the matter, spend their morning in the dark recess of a loading dock power-spraying the asphalt and the Dumpster — good god, was work so meaningless? Was
life
so meaningless? It reminded him of when an ad got watered down by a client, and watered down, until everything interesting about the ad disappeared. Carl still had to write the copy for it. The art director still had to put the drop shadow where the drop shadow belonged and the logo in its proper place. That was the process known as
polishing the turd.
Those two poor saps hosing down the alleyway were just doing the same thing. All over America, in fact, people were up and out of their beds today in a continuing effort to polish turds. Sure, for the sake of survival, but more immediately, for the sake of some sadistic manager or shit-brained client whose small imagination and numbingly dumb ideas were bleaching the world of all relevancy and hope. And meanwhile, that mad-bearded fellow there with his crossed legs could hardly lift his grease-caked hands to make it a little easier for someone to flip him a quarter.
“Well, we have to find some way of getting her in,” Marilynn was saying into her cell.
Carl turned his attention back to the noble fools scouring the bricks. Another thing that would have sent him spiraling was how quickly he could come up with the advertising copy designed to sell power sprayers to those shit-brained managers. “Uniform liquid distribution guarantees remarkable scouring intensity for maximum coverage and time efficiency,” he thought to himself as he watched the men work, “while the high impact of our spray angles makes cleaning any surface a snap!” His quick command of that cloying and unctuous language, that false-speak, while his wife was next to him talking to Susan about mammography results or negative drug reactions, whatever — it would have been all too much to bear.
But not so much this morning, not so much somehow. Oh, he was still clear-eyed and sober about the day’s dim prospects. He knew he had affixed himself, by some accursed fate, to this massive, mind-boggling effort — to
work,
to the polishing of the turds. And yet, he was changed. For Marilynn was beside him talking on the phone, and he felt no need to call her and leave a voice mail. He was not inclined to undress in the car. Marilynn had picked up the cell phone, and this was a delicate morning — the first morning after the first night they had shared together in six weeks. She might have had the good sense to ignore its ring until he had gotten out of the car. But no, she answered it as she always did, despite its being a delicate morning — yet when Carl searched himself, he did not feel ignored or preempted, at least not cripplingly so. Why was that? Because Marilynn had a job to do. Was it not that simple? Just as those men had to power-wash an alleyway, just as he had to polish the turd of an ad, Marilynn had to pick up the phone at inconvenient times and discuss estrogen receptors with goddamn Susan. Realizing this, he did not sit in the passenger seat pouting and devising schemes to draw her attention toward him. That, as he measured things, was progress. That was the promise of those little pink pills in their proper dosage. That was some kind of miracle. And when Benny shambled up and banged on the car window, it wasn’t Carl’s first instinct to dismiss him irritably, but to half-smile and offer a little wave. Benny being Benny, he went over to watch the unexpected pair from the drop box.
“No,” his wife said, “I don’t feel comfortable bringing him into this.”
Just then Carl noticed a woman crossing the street. She looked familiar, even if he had a hard time placing who it was right away. Suddenly it dawned on him. Unbelievable! — she was completely transformed. Into a vision. A genuine beauty. No Genevieve Latko-Devine, but my god, thought Carl, who could have guessed such a thing were possible? It was Marcia Dwyer, and she had cut her hair. Gone was that flap that crested just above her forehead like a hard black wave, gone was that wall of glossy curls that hung between her shoulder blades like a cheap curtain of beads. In its place was now a delicate and textured cut, short in the back, curving under her chin in front and free to move in the wind. Its color was no longer tar black but a rich chestnut brown. She looked as fashionable as a model in a shampoo commercial. Carl was overcome by the change. “I cannot — will you — Marilynn,” he said, tapping his wife, “Marilynn, will you look at that?” He was pointing through the windshield. “Do you see what I see?”
Marilynn was preoccupied at the moment, but Carl’s excitement was alarming. “Susan?” she said. “Susan, can I ask you to hold, please?”
“Marilynn,” he continued, “do you see that girl there, that woman?” He was pointing through the windshield. “Look right there, the one that just stepped up on the sidewalk, you see her?”
“The one carrying the denim purse?”
“Yes,” he said. “But — ignore that for a minute, if you can. And look at her!
See
her!”
“What am I looking at?” she asked.
“That’s Marcia!” he cried. “Marcia Dwyer! Marcia cut her hair!”
“Oh,” said Marilynn.
The two of them watched Marcia enter the building. Marilynn peered over at her husband, waiting for him to say something more. But he was still watching the building, lost to his thoughts. Marilynn waited another beat before resuming her conversation with Susan, just in case there was something more Carl wanted to say.
With some maneuvering to obscure the fact that he had been spying, Benny came around again to the Garbedian car. Benny dropped to a squat, and Carl rolled down the window.
“Did you just see Marcia Dwyer?” asked Benny.
“She looks terrific!” cried Carl.
Benny looked toward the building as if to catch a final glimpse. “She does look terrific,” he agreed.
“If I had had to place odds,” said Carl, “I would have said Marcia Dwyer would have gone to her
grave
with that old haircut. I never would have thought, not in a million years, that she would wake up out of it and realize how crappy she’s looked all this time.”
Benny looked back at Carl, who was not really paying any attention to him while he spoke.
“Would you really call her crappy-looking?”
“Not in a million years!” cried Carl, ignoring the question. “But she
did!
She woke up, looked at herself, and said no, this is not working out.”
“She has a cute face, don’t you think?” said Benny.
“And who cares,” said Carl, “if it was some stylist who suggested it. She
went
with it. She said yes! She said let’s make a change. Benny, it’s inspiring! It inspires me to want to lose some of this weight — I mean, look at this thing,” he said, looking down at his belly as if it were something quite independent of himself. When he looked up, he found that Benny had stood and was walking away.
A second later, Carl got out of the car and tried catching up with him. “Hey, man, wait up!” he called out. He forgot entirely about Marilynn. The good-bye kiss that at one time had been so important to him — not in and of itself, of course, but as a gauge of Marilynn’s morning attentiveness to him, of her willingness to put him before the phone call — must not have mattered much now, because without even saying so much as a good-bye, he abandoned his wife to catch up with his coworker. Marilynn, surprised by this, thought who-knows-what about Carl’s sudden departure. She asked Susan to hold on again and honked the horn. Carl looked back, realized that he had forgotten about his wife — she had just slipped his mind! — and halfway between the two, asked Benny to please wait while he said good-bye to Marilynn real quick. Being curious about what Carl had to say, as much as he was about what might happen back at the Garbedian car, Benny put a foot on the first stair leading up to the building and turned back to watch. Carl leaned through the passenger-side window, a few words were exchanged, and then the separated couple kissed each other good-bye. When Carl emerged from the car and headed toward Benny, he did so almost at a gallop, as if skipping a step for the sake of urgency — and that, Benny said,
that
he had never seen before.