The Position

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Or else what?” Dashiell asked. There wasn’t a thing his older brother could say in response that could remotely be considered honest.

  “Or else nothing,” Michael admitted, and the children ate.

  * * *

  Now, on the day he was to leave New York City to visit his father in Florida, Michael Mellow sat behind his teak desk at Dimension D-Net and impassively looked into the grid of numbers and letters that filled his computer screen. The current project was a hunger initiative in Kenya; the last one had targeted the poorest population in Appalachia. The founders of DDN—Seth and Zachary Dibbler, “the twins,” as they were commonly referred to, for they had been born minutes apart and tangled up in umbilici—had accidentally become great believers in doing good works. A confluence of events had led them to discover a few years earlier that the supply chain software they’d developed for Lady Gillette razors could actually be modified to help expedite shipments of food to starving populations. Because there was so much hunger in so many different zones of the world, the software was forever being reimagined, and Michael’s work as VP of biz dev was never-ending, like hunger itself.

  This was a corporate job that only felt soulless; actually, friends had often pointed out to Michael that it wasn’t soulless at all. Sometimes it was hard for him to see the difference, for here, as in every other office building in New York City and Chicago and Los Angeles and industrial parks throughout the land, a waterfall pounded in the lobby and off to the side was an atrium where foliage, bribed and confused into thinking this was a rain forest, grew extravagantly. When he arrived at the Strode Building each morning and pushed through the revolving door, he was first met by the bold whack of water on jagged rock, and then by the sonorous, boomed hello of the armed guard Mohammed, and then he stepped into an elevator that rushed him upward far too fast, as though what he was going to do in those offices was an emergency. As Michael walked from the elevator into the corridors of DDN, he still felt stupidly impressed, as though he’d never seen the place before. DDN had “gone all out.” They had “spared no expense.” The rounded walls were covered in Japanese paper that had a rough, nubbed texture to it, as though made from oat. The lights were punched into the ceiling, and each office had its own individual Laarnen sound system so that employees could listen to music that might inspire them. Music enhanced ideas, the twins maintained in pamphlets about their company, and no one argued with this point, for the employees at DDN were largely productive and content, their salaries soaring, their need to do good continually satisfied.

  Michael walked silently down the soft carpeted hallway, greeted by two male coworkers, one with chumminess, the other with a kind of modulated paranoia. The three women he met on his way said variations on “Morning, Michael,” the first two greetings spoken with evident warmth and the third, by Deb from sales, with unaccountable irritation. What had he done to her? What had he possibly done? There was relief to be had by the time he arrived at his office. The space was immaculate; swirls of nap were still apparent in the ochre carpet from where it had been vacuumed in the middle of the night by a cleaning staff he would never meet. He slid a Mahler CD into the vertical sandwich of glass that made up the sound system, and for a brief moment he remembered how long ago when the marriage was about to fall apart, his father used to listen to Mahler all night long. He wondered if his father still listened to Mahler. He’d find out tonight, perhaps, when he landed in Florida and was taken into his father’s home.

  Michael suddenly became aware of a lurking figure in his doorway. It was Rufus Webb, product manager, twenty-six years old and agitated, his eyes bagged from no sleep, his private life an empty container. Rufus lived for his work, and he emailed Michael whenever they weren’t together, whenever they had a brief break from office life, and the two men would engage in a volley of words. Michael had found, lately, since his sexual problems with Thea had begun, that he didn’t mind the obsessiveness of his coworker, and the way Rufus was slowly dragging Michael into it as well. “Into my Webb,” said Rufus, as he’d surely said to many people before.

  “You’re really going away?” Rufus asked now with undisguised anxiety.

  “Yes.”

  “When exactly?”

  “End of today. You know that. I’m taking a week. Lot of vacation saved up.”

  “Oh. Right.” Rufus shifted from foot to foot in the doorway. “I hope I can keep on top of things without you,” he said glumly.

  “Of course you can.”

  “I’ll email you about the changes.”

  “No. Don’t. Please please don’t,” Michael said. “I need a little time to myself, Rufus. Family business. You understand.”

  Rufus Webb’s eyes glassed out briefly; no, he did not understand, he could not understand, he had no family, it was an incomprehensible concept to him; he had been born in a solar pod on Zoron. “Don’t forget, the twins are coming in two weeks,” Rufus hissed quietly, ominously, before turning and making his exit.

  The twins. Michael’s mouth went dry. No one liked to say the twins’ actual names aloud; it was like the way observant Jews were supposed to write G-d instead of God, Michael thought, for the full name was so powerful and daunting it should not even be written. The twins lived in Maui, in a wood-and-glass house they shared near a dormant volcano, and while they sat in that house attached to computers and headphones and Blackberries, overseeing the workings of their company in New York, it was as though they were sitting here in the offices, so present were they in all daily business. They were short, balding men in their early thirties, slightly malformed, and with a connoisseur’s interest in marijuana.

  Nothing in the twins’ demeanor would suggest that they should be feared and lionized, yet their employees did anyway. Even Michael did. It was not just because they were so rich, but because they were rich men who devoted their lives to causes. And for this they were to be both feared and lionized, for it was a stance to which anyone who had been hired by DDN inevitably aspired: rich. Rich and good. You were reminded of the Beatles. You were reminded of ideals you thought you’d lost during the crazy, grabby dream of the 1980s and into the 1990s.

  Michael had been part of that, too, making a lot of money in a start-up that had soon failed, living briefly with a fast-talking woman from L.A. named Alison Berman, who was obsessed with the stock market and started day-trading instead of going to her job as a financial officer at a bank. Sometimes Michael would come home and she wouldn’t even look up from the screen to say hello. Her eyes never seemed to blink when she was in front of the computer. She sat there long into the evening, eating lo mein from a take-out container, noodles hanging doggishly for a moment from her mouth if something had caught her attention on the screen before she had a chance to chew. That relationship had ended, thank God; that whole time had ended, and he’d been alone for a while, and jobless.

  After Michael had begun working for DDN in 1998, his mother had sent him an article from Contemporary Psychology magazine saying that people who worked for good causes suffered far less depression than those who didn’t. “FYI,” she’d written on a stickie that she’d attached to the cover. But apparently he was not one of those people. The Endeva was working, but only marginally, and he was an ejaculatory nonstarter, and he did not know how to make any of it better.

  Impulsively now, Michael picked up the telephone and tapped in his own number. Thea answered right away, her voice fogged, and he realized he had woken her up. It was 9:23 A.M. “Hey you,” he said. “Good morning.”

  “Hey.” She yawned and covered the mouthpiece.

  “Too late, I heard you,” he said. “What a life you lead. Total luxury.”

  “I wish,” said Thea. “But I have to get up now anyway.”

  They each reminded the other of the chronology of their day: her rehearsal for the Dora play, his in-office Bento-box lunch with the CTO, her improv class, then, finally, his 6 P.M. flight.

  “Well, then, have a good trip, Michael,” s
he said.

  “Thanks. I think it’s good that I’m going there. Maybe I can get my father to change his mind. Make my mother happy.”

  “Yeah. Listen, I wanted to tell you. Don’t feel bad, okay?” Thea suddenly said. “I mean last night and all. In bed. Because I don’t feel bad,” she reminded him, as if he’d possibly forgotten.

  Halfway to the airport later that afternoon, sitting in the backseat of a town car with the aggressive waterfalls and the indoor foliage of the city receding behind him, and with JFK and then a condominium in Florida waiting somewhere ahead, Michael Mellow realized that he’d forgotten to pack his Endeva.

  Oh shit, oh shit, he thought, and he frantically called Thea from the car but of course she didn’t answer, for she was off at the theatre. He tried to figure out the best way to remedy this. Who could he call? The pharmacy, that was who; he could have them contact his father’s pharmacy in Florida, and the new prescription would be waiting for him when he got there. He wouldn’t even have to miss a day of the drug. But he didn’t want to involve his father in this; he didn’t want Paul Mellow to know he was taking Endeva, and to say to Michael with truckloads of empathy, “So tell me what’s wrong.”

  Michael thought about how hard he’d tried in bed last night with Thea; even thinking about it now was excruciating. The drug kept him fairly happy but totally unfinished—and how could you really be happy when you were unfinished? One canceled out the other. Even now, his brain was being remodeled by the pale green, diamond-shaped tablet he’d downed that morning with his tall latte. And even now, if the most exciting woman in the world were to slide into the car beside him, unzip his fly, and put her head in his lap, he would be unable to finish the thing. The job. DDN was his day job, and this was his night job.

  So no. No. Maybe forgetting to pack the Endeva was a sign, telling him to stop scrambling his brain with those endlessly spinning isomers. He would go off the drug cold turkey. He knew that was supposed to be a bad idea and that there were side effects—dizziness and the shakes and the sweats—but somehow he didn’t care. He was full of pioneer energy now. He’d go to Florida, and he’d get his father to agree to what his mother wanted, and soon Michael would be different, and he would return to New York and to his bed and to the fragrant, waiting body of Thea Herlihy, and he would finish what he’d begun.

  Chapter Three

  CLAUDIA MELLOW was driving a white rental car out of the city—white because almost all rental cars were white, as if to be more recognizable for what they really were: slightly illegitimate and off in some basic way. Which was pretty much how she felt, heading along the Long Island Expressway at one in the afternoon on this bright winter day, the car back-loaded with rented cameras and cables and dollies. Traffic was light, for the L.I.E. was a commuter road, and the commuters were settled into their city offices by now, their children installed in the large, colorfully adorned classrooms of their suburban schools.

  She turned the heater on high and the air came in harshly, smelling of cooked plastic, but soon the warmth relaxed her, softened her rigid stance behind the wheel. Driving did not come naturally to Claudia Mellow; she had a license, but almost never had cause to drive. It all returned to her surprisingly easily, the sluggish passivity mixed with vigilance. She was going back to Wontauket to shoot a movie, though she knew she had no real business doing so. Her equipment was lying across the red upholstery of the Nissan Maxima and filling the carpeted trunk; its presence in the car gave her a kind of authority, the way equipment always did. If you wrapped yourself in the trailing vines of wires and cables, then you seemed somehow connected to the world at large.

  Claudia was a film student, one of many in the city. Film students were everywhere now, not just here but in smaller cities, too, all of which now boasted their own film “academies.” These schools sprang up wherever classrooms were available and equipment was rentable and a handful of a certain kind of film-school graduate—who now did industrials or commercials or made independent films or had sold a screenplay—were available to teach a class in the afternoon or evening. The students were a mixed, sloppy lot, their ages ranging from right out of college to the mid-fifties. Classes were available for a weekend, four weeks, eight weeks, a semester, or an entire year; the programs were so expensive that they tended to attract a certain kind of soft trust-fund type, someone with no clearly delineated goals for his or her own life.

  At age thirty-four, Claudia watched movies as often as she could, sometimes in clusters, roaming from theater to theater in a multiplex and ducking out one set of double doors and into another. It was simply a continuation of the interest that had started during the four-thirty movie as a child. It never really mattered to her if she’d missed the beginning of a film because she knew she could always catch up. Narratives were not that diverse or complicated, except in superficial ways; movies essentially gave you the same sensation, dipping you into a liquid coating of darkness and forcing you to watch the screen, for there was nothing else around you to compete for your attention.

  When video stores began to open everywhere around America, Claudia took out multiple memberships in her neighborhood. She was forgetful and would invariably incur late fees, but it didn’t matter to her. The fees were a small slap on the hand for being the kind of person who needed a continual dose of movies in order to make life flow by.

  She had some money that her parents had put into an account many years ago, and now she was finally spending it on film-school tuition. Her parents had given all the children this money when they were still married; they had sat everyone down in the den, a foreshadowing of the divorce conversation that would one day follow. “We want you to know,” their father had begun, “that we are putting some money in trust for each of you.”

  Claudia didn’t know what he was talking about, what “in trust” meant, but Holly had nodded and coolly asked, “When can I get it?” Years later, Holly would rant to her sister and brothers that it was “sex money, I mean, fucking blood money,” but she’d accepted it anyway; all of them had. So the money from the book, which had pulled and stretched and altered the family, was now going into the pockets of the New York branch of the Metro Film Academy, in which Claudia had enrolled for one semester. Thirteen weeks for a 16mm-film class, and it was costing her thousands of dollars, not even including the rental of the Arriflex camera.

  She’d worked in jobs of marginal interest for the past few years, having been a typist at a law firm at night, and a dog walker, and, most recently, an assistant to the publicist Marnie Lembad at the PR firm Kline Lembad, until Marnie had shouted and called her “a stupid, fat cunt” in front of everyone after Claudia had forgotten to give her a telephone message from an important agent.

  “No I’m not,” Claudia had said bravely and unwisely. “You’re the cunt.” There were vague muffled gasps from the hallway, where people were huddled, indiscreetly listening.

  “Just leave,” Marnie Lembad said, waving her long white hand. “Just get out.” And so Claudia did. As she passed the staff of Kline Lembad—everyone too frightened and awed to offer more than a fleeting look of telepathic sympathy—she had felt horrified at herself, and she had gone straight home and put on the DVD of The Godfather, then gotten into bed and watched it through to the end, and followed it up with The Godfather Part II, crying intermittently over the loss of her job and how unmoored she was in the universe, as well as over the terrible thing that had been said to her. For she wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t a cunt. But it was the fairly reasonable accusation of fatness that disturbed her.

  At five foot one, Claudia Mellow wasn’t exactly heavy, but appeared too solid. She imagined that her body looked like a garbage bag full of leaves. Small, loosely filled, her legs very short, as though she were one of those little dogs that the Queen of England favored. Her breasts, too, were quite big for such a small, squat body. They overhung too far, like buck teeth. Buck tits, she had always thought about herself, and sometimes she wondered if in fa
ct she had some sort of genetic condition that no one had ever noticed, something really obscure, perhaps called Poorly Assembled X.

  Claudia’s body broke every aesthetic rule. Short, thick, big-breasted, strange, that was what she was. The redemption existed in her face, for she was in possession of beautiful blue eyes, fair, unblemished skin, and dark waves of brown hair. If that head had been on another body, everything would have been different. But men, and boys before them, understood that a woman was a composite thing, a package of brains, face, and body, and as a result, most of them stayed away. The men she’d gone out with had often had something wrong with them. Clifford Zelman, several years older than she was, had been a Thalidomide baby, with one arm tapering off to a slender stump. But he’d been mean to her, too, asking Claudia in bed whether or not she’d ever thought about having her breasts reduced. Another man named Andy Meyers had recently been released from low-level psychiatric care, though he seemed perfectly normal, if a little melancholy. Depression ran in his family like a river, he said. He and his father and sister had all received electro-convulsive therapy before they were twenty-one. In college, Claudia had slept with several different men, two of whom had turned out to be gay, and who, she thought in retrospect, had been attempting to employ her in their quest to verify their sexuality. Yes, it had been verified.

  Instead of being a lover, Claudia Mellow was a friend, and a good one, too. Many people counted on her and confided in her in ways that made them say, afterward, “I don’t know why I told you that. I’ve never told it to anyone before.” She had her own secrets, of course, though her sense of shame was so profound that it almost always kept her from revealing too much. It was her soft-edged, indistinct quality that Claudia was certain separated her from everyone around her. And this, she was convinced, could be tracked right back to her childhood, to the moment when her father mounted her mother in the pages of a book.