Sandy’s office had a window. As a matter of fact, it had two windows because it was a corner office. It was larger than the other offices in our department because he was the department head. His office had a sofa and a bookcase with glass doors. But, instead of books, the bookcase was filled with baseball memorabilia.
I strode into Sandy’s office and said, “I want to talk to you.”
This was unusual. An underling didn’t walk into his superior’s office and announce in an officious tone what he wanted to do. That wasn’t an underling’s role. An underling was supposed to take small steps and ask in a small voice if the superior had a moment to spare.
Sandy was seated behind his desk studying long lists of numbers. His desk was large and dark and highly polished. There were several stacks of loose-leaf notebooks and an In and an Out box on his desk. Nothing ever moved on his desk. Everything was always in the same position, day after day. Occasionally, there was a cup of coffee on the desk, but that was the only variable.
He glanced up at me and raised his eyebrows. “Sure,” he said in his gravelly voice. “Come on in and sit down.” His voice was deep but the tone was more tentative than usual.
I lowered myself into one of the two sturdy wooden chairs in front of his desk. Through the window behind his head you could see a billboard extolling the virtues of a website with the dot-com address boldly displayed, but the advertisement didn’t say what the site did. You were supposed to know what the site did or the ad clearly wasn’t meant for you.
“I wanted to say farewell to you,” I said.
He nodded. “I figured that’s what this was all about.”
He got up and walked around the desk to where I was sitting. He was wearing his usual short-sleeved poly-cotton-blend shirt with more poly than cotton. His tie was red with small pink paisley curlicues on it, but the tie was worn and pilling and the little balls of fluff confused and distorted the well-ordered design of the fabric.
He paused in front of me, crossed his arms and leaned back on his desk. “So, tell me,” he said, “which company are you going to?”
“It’s not exactly a company,” I said.
“It’s not?” He seemed confused. “What is it? A non-profit?”
“Well, a non-profit is a company too, isn’t it?”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah, I guess it is.” He stopped to digest this. “So, if you’re not going to a company and you’re not going to a non-profit, where are you going?”
“Where I’m going is more a state of mind than an actual physical location.”
“So if you’re not going to a company or a non-profit, where are you going?” he repeated. “To a university?”
I shook my head. To Sandy’s way of thinking, you just didn’t leave a company voluntarily without having somewhere to go. It was completely inconceivable to him. You didn’t leave a secure job for an abyss. You moved from corporation to corporation, with an increase in responsibility and compensation each time you moved. Otherwise you didn’t move. You didn’t move unless you were pushed.
“No, not a university,” I said. “It’s not even an actual job.”
“That a fact?” he said.
I could see I was losing him.
“That’s right,” I said. “I’m leaving the corporate world.”
“But what will you do?” His tone was growing more and more desperate. “You mean you won’t work for a company?”
I nodded. “Yup, I won’t work for a company.”
A light came into his eyes. “I see. You’re going to start up your own business. You’re going to be an entrepreneur.” He spoke the last word painfully slowly, syllable by syllable. His pronunciation of the word was not quite correct but it was approximate enough for a man who had just enunciated the longest word of his life.
“No, not really,” I said. “I wouldn’t be any good at starting a new business. It would require too much time and effort. I don’t have enough of either one of them.”
Each time he spoke his voice rose an octave. What had started as a low bass rumble was now approaching the range of a castrato. His eyes darted wildly around the room, frantically searching for some reassuring point of the compass to tell him he wasn’t losing his mind. How could someone leave a company without having a job waiting? His frame of reference was being upended and it frightened him.
“I don’t understand,” he managed finally in a strangled voice. It was a very un-corporate sounding utterance. Very unlike him. In spite of myself, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. I didn’t want to, but I had the same kind of feeling you get when you see a small furry animal caught in one of those leg traps with the jagged teeth.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ll be all right.” But, of course, I had misunderstood him and he had misunderstood me. He didn’t care about me at all or what was going to happen to me. He just wanted the world to continue in its pre-ordained orbit without pesky troublemakers firing off booster rockets at irregular intervals and causing nerve-wracking mid-course corrections. And I didn’t really want to disturb the universe. I just wanted to start over without upsetting too many people.
It wouldn’t do to give him too much information. I’d told him about as much as I could without endangering myself. The digital clock on his desk clicked over to five PM. The symbolic whistle blew, ending the work day. If we were hourly workers, we would have been on overtime. It was the proper moment to bring our corporate farewell ceremony to a decorous end.
I stood and gave Sandy an abrazo. He drew back. You could see that embarrassed him. American men didn’t hug one another in public. It wasn’t manly. Embraces were left to Latin men and other benighted creatures. I took a step back and gave him my hand.
We shook hands like real men should. He looked me square in the eye and gave me the standard corporate farewell. “I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors,” he said.
I wished him the same.
And so I bid farewell to the corporate life.
CHAPTER XIII
The day I left was overcast. The sky was a dull leaden gray that threatened rain. The air was warm and wet and suffocating. So I took a raincoat because I knew I was going to need it in my new life.
I had told my wife a few days earlier that I was going to a convention of label writers in Cleveland, of all places. She would never suspect anything unusual of someone going to Cleveland.
“But you never travel,” she had said, with just a hint of a whine.
“That’s very true. I’ve never traveled on business. But that’s no reason not to start now.”
I explained to her that the label writers of America had been feeling isolated and neglected and so had decided to join together in a confederation in order to seek strength and solidarity in numbers. I explained to her that label writing was a lonely vocation without proper recognition and that the practitioners of this calling wanted to professionalize the occupation by developing licensing standards and giving tests and awarding professional designations in order to gain respect.
She seemed to accept this. She nodded. “Well, alright then. I’ll pack a suitcase for you. You never know what to pack. You always forget something.” She looked at me with a sideways glance the way she used to when we were first married. It was a look that conveyed interest and concern. It was a look I hadn’t seen in a long time.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a pang of conscience then, which just proves that I have emotions, after all. But my resolve was stronger than ever. I’d spent too much psychic capital on this enterprise to turn back now.
A final question awaited me. I had debated for a long time whether to leave a farewell note. It was a difficult choice to make and I’d changed my mind several times. Now the time had come for the final decision.
I would leave a note. But it would be short. No lengthy explanations or excuses. No philosophical discourses about the need for self-realization. And certainly no self-pity.
I wrote it on a
Post-It note and stuck it in the middle of a stack of papers on my desk in the den. She wouldn’t go looking through my things until several days had passed and she began to realize I wasn’t coming back. She was that kind of a girl. She always let me have my illusion of privacy.
I wrote it out in a shaky hand. Dammit, but I wished my hand were steadier.
I’m gone. Please don’t try to find me.
Churchill had said if you are going to declare war on someone, it doesn’t hurt to be polite and observe the niceties of convention. That’s why the word please was there.
I dare you to write a better farewell note than that.
*
The alarm clock went off at six that morning, as it had so many thousand mornings before. But the alarm was unnecessary that morning, because I hadn’t been able to sleep at all the night before. I’d been wide awake since three. My heart had pounded through the night as I pondered the different scenarios I might encounter. Maybe, if things went well, there would be no more three o’clock night dreads, night sweats and night fears when your eyes snap open in the darkness and you lie in your bed covered with sweat and it’s the fifteenth of the month and you wonder how you will pay the mortgage.
I’d been counting down the days as the time of departure approached. Each night, as I rode the commuter train home, another day had been struck down. Another day between me and my goal had been eliminated forever. And each day I seemed to feel my burden getting lighter. All the preparations had been completed. There was nothing left to be done.
I rolled out of bed, put on my slippers and padded into the bathroom. My wife was still sleeping and would be sleeping when I left, as she was every morning. I looked at myself in the mirror. It was the last time I would see myself like this. My old self. My familiar self. My hairy self. Tomorrow I would emerge as a butterfly, reborn.
My bag had been packed and was placed in front of the door to the garage. I didn’t pack a suit, but I would wear one for the final voyage. Never again would I see the inside of a Brooks Brothers store or wear a navy blue, three button, three-piece suit. The thought that I would never wear a suit again was a stirring one. It was emblematic of my release from a tailored suit-based existence into a free-form casual one.
I’d told my wife I’d be taking a train to Cleveland. She knew I didn’t like flying, so it made perfect sense to her. I didn’t want the trouble of buying an airline ticket and getting up early and going out to La Guardia airport to further the charade. What I wanted was to take my regular commuter train and see my usual Republican fellow travelers for the last time. Their faces were as familiar as a Greek chorus that chanted the same verses every workday. The never-ending refrains of sports and politics and gardening. The song cycle of suburbia.
It put me in mind of Schopenhauer and how he used to have his meals at an inn frequented by English military personnel. At the start of each meal he would place a gold coin on the table in front of him. At the end of the meal he would drop the coin back into his pocket. A waiter asked him why he did this. He said he’d made a wager with himself. He would drop the coin into the poor box the first time the English officers talked of anything besides horses, dogs or women.
After I’d showered and dressed, I went back into the dark bedroom and looked down at the sleeping form of my wife for the last time. She lay there under a sheet pulled up to her waist. She was sleeping on her side, her shoulder snug against the pillow. The contours of her back were so familiar to me. The fall of her hair on the pillow. Her rhythmic breathing. This would be the last day I would see sights that were familiar to me. From tomorrow on, everything would be new.
I closed the door of the bedroom quietly behind me. Across the hall, my son’s bedroom door was open and I could see his teddy bear sitting where it always did on his bed. My wife had maintained the room as a shrine, as if my son had died and nothing could be moved because it would disturb his resting spirit. His childhood toys and books were placed as graven objects to be worshipped in a sacrament of the departed prodigal.
The metallic morning light slanted across the hallway as I went down the stairs. The third step creaked as it always did.
There would be no breakfast this morning. The mere thought of eating something would surely turn my stomach into a raving cauldron of nausea. My stomach was upset already. The best I could do was gulp down a cup of black coffee. I didn’t turn on the kitchen lights. As I drank the coffee, I sat at the kitchen table and ran my fingertips over the smooth Formica surface and stared out at the back yard. The house was uncharacteristically quiet this morning, before it began its daily routine of domestic functions.
I didn’t want to remember anything. Not the one-acre lot which I had just mowed so diligently for the last time, and whose bushes and trees I knew so well. Not the house itself and its furnishings, so desperately trying to keep up and yet fading and falling further behind. All this would become a dream, a distant memory of a life once lived.
In the dim light, you could see the kitchen was clean. The dishwasher had been emptied the night before and everything had been put back in its place. This would be the kitchen of my memory. Neat, clean and aging. A suburban kitchen from the Seventies.
I finished the coffee and rinsed out the cup and put it, upside down, in the top rack of the dishwasher. The wooden chair squeaked as I pushed it back into its place at the kitchen table. Everything was in order.
There was one final journey I had to make. A circumnavigation of the lower floor of the house. The setting of so many quiet evenings spent at home, of dinner parties and late night bridge games, of endless suburban conversations on sofas about children and their schools. But it had to be a quick tour because the regularly-scheduled train would be leaving shortly.
I walked through the unlit rooms like someone who hadn’t woken up yet. It felt as if I was Babe Ruth trotting around the bases, his cap held high, saying farewell to Yankee Stadium after his final home run. Thus I said goodbye to the old world and set out for the new.
The Jeep seemed to sense I was leaving and not coming back. First of all, it wouldn’t start. Then it kept dying as I drove to the train station. Did it want to prevent me from carrying out my plan? Does the phrase pathetic fallacy apply only to forces of nature or does it apply to inanimate objects also? My desperation kept on increasing as I checked my watch and saw that there was a good chance of missing the train. This would not do at all. My program depended on correct timing and the proper flow of events.
I pulled the Jeep into a slot a few spaces away from its usual parking space, because I was late and those few minutes had allowed the last-minute stragglers to appropriate my spot. Ordinarily, I would have been upset, but today my priorities had been reordered. I jumped down from the car, surveyed my trusty chariot and gave it a farewell pat. It would have a better life with its new owner.
It was a good thing the train was late. When that happened, the waiting commuters on the platform would grunt and moan and shuffle their feet and display other signs of stress and I would invariably join them. But today, it was my good fortune to hear the announcement over the loudspeaker that an earlier train had broken down on the way from New Haven and my train would be twenty minutes late.
I joined my former fellow commuters on the platform and stood in the same place I always stood, year after year. The sky had lightened a little, but was still mostly cloudy. A few of the men who wore suits wore beige raincoats like mine. Most of the men didn’t wear suits any more. They wore slacks and sport shirts. Some of the men had even sunk so low as to wear jeans to work. As each year had passed, fewer and fewer of the men wore suits. I was one of the last die-hards who still insisted in wearing a suit to work, as a form of battle armor or a badge of rank. In the very old days, when my father went to work, even laborers wore suits and ties and fedoras to work. Cheap, threadbare suits, granted. Then, of course, there were also those old black and white photos and movies showing all the men at Ebbets Field and Yankee Stadium in suits and t
ies. In those times, even college men wore suits and ties to school, and a good percentage of them were communists.
“Where are you heading?” Bill asked, pointing at my suitcase.
“I’m taking a trip to Cleveland.”
“Not my idea of a fun vacation,” Bob said.
“It’s not a vacation,” I said. “It’s more of a journey.”
“It sure is,” John said. “Any trip to Cleveland is not a voluntary one.”
They all laughed. Hearty Republican laughs. Confident laughs of men who knew the rules and knew how to break them.
We exchanged more badinage. The morning commuter run was a time of light conversation, nothing heavy or serious. That type of conversation was reserved for the trip home, after the combat of the day, if you could keep your eyes open. Most of the evening riders, obvious victims of sleep-deprivation, nodded off soon after the train started its swaying motion.
The train did arrive as promised after the twenty–minute delay. We boarded quickly and took our usual seats. We sat in a four-seat group, facing each other and doing the same thing we did every day. Bill would read The New York Times. Bob would read The Wall Street Journal. John would read the Journal. And I would read the Times. Occasionally we would comment on an interesting article or tell an offensive joke we’d heard the day before.
Nothing personal was ever discussed. That was a given, just like the fact that black or blue raincoats were not worn.
We arrived at Grand Central fifteen minutes late. We were already standing in the aisle as the train pulled into the station, briefcases in hand, waiting to file off the train without any further delay. A final joke, a wink, a poke in the ribs and a “See you tonight” completed the ritual. We entered the main waiting room and went our separate ways as we had so many times before but this time, unbeknownst to them, would be the last time they would ever see me.
I wondered what their reactions would be when word of my departure circulated among the commuters. Would they consider my actions brave or cowardly? Would they be shocked? Would they, in their private hiding places, secretly envy me? It would probably be the first time they had encountered a situation like this. I didn’t know of anybody who had done such a thing. It was not to be encouraged by society. In fact, it was a downright subversive action. Imagine, if you will, wholesale numbers of husbands deserting their families. What would happen to the social fabric of society? This was not to be encouraged at all, in my view.
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