by Claire Adams
I told myself to be cool, to not sound too interested. “How did he get into the business?”
A few of the interns groaned. Isabella was one of those people you’re not supposed to encourage. “Well,” she started, “I heard that before he went to college and everything, he was working for this mafia crime family up in Yonkers.”
“A mafia crime family,” Tim sighed. “Here we go.”
Isabella glared at Tim a moment, but then turned her attention back to me. “From what I hear, he was some bigshot enforcer or something, but there was some big falling out and he got kicked out of the family. They would have killed him if he hadn’t started shelling out cash once he started the business.”
“Yeah, one problem with your theory, though,” Desiree from 15 said.
“Yeah, and what’s that?” Isabella asked, clutching her fork like she was getting ready to stab the next person to question her wisdom.
“If he worked for the family before he went to college, why would they let him live long enough to finish his education?” It was a fair question.
“Look, I don’t know, but he’s still paying them,” Isabella said. “How do you think the company got so big so fast?”
“I read somewhere he started college when he was still seventeen,” Margaret from the executive level said. “He would have had to be fifteen or sixteen when you’re saying he was an enforcer.”
“A lot of people use kids to do their dirty work because they don’t get tried as adults,” Isabella said. “Drug dealers do that sort of thing all the time.”
“Oh, so now he’s a drug dealer!” Natalie from the executive floor cackled.
I wasn’t buying it, either. Despite my realization my life would never compare, or even be remotely interesting to someone like Dean, I still wanted to know more about him. Just because I didn’t want to be the one to let him know just how unexceptional I was didn’t mean I didn’t want to know every fascinating detail about him. I’d read the magazines and the Wikipedia page.
Once he was in business, his life was publicly scrutinized, but even being such a public figure, he’d managed to keep large portions of his life entirely private. I’d hoped maybe I’d pick something up here or there by listening to Luke ramble or from someone who’s been working here awhile. Of course, I’d just run full force into the problem of listening to other people: they hardly ever know what they’re talking about.
“He didn’t go to college,” I said.
Isabella shot me a look like I’d just run over her dog. Her eyes were so narrow, I could hardly believe she could see me. “He did so go to college,” she countered.
I’d been trying really hard not to get on anyone’s nerves. One of the quickest ways I’ve ever found to get someone mad is telling them they’re flat out wrong about something. Most of the time, people do what politicians do when they’re caught in a lie and just keep repeating the same provably false story over and over until anyone who’s listening eventually starts to believe it.
More worrisome than that, though, was that situations like that have a tendency to create enemies. Not that any of that stopped me from continuing to run my mouth.
“No, he really didn’t. There’s an article on the company website from just after Farnsworth & Temple was founded and started getting noticed. The article actually starts with something like, ‘How did a man who never went to college make such a splash in the business world?’” I said. “I’d never heard the mafia bit, but I know he didn’t go to college, and you sitting there continuing to tell me that he did makes me not believe anything else you have to say. It’s really not your strongest move, so maybe it’s best if we just drop it.”
Did I overreact? Tim certainly seemed to think so, because he tapped me on the shoulder as he got up from the table and tugged at my arm, saying, “Why don’t we go get a coffee or something. I’ll show you how to use the machine.”
I was starting to get tired of walking on eggshells with these people. They were going to hate me eventually, and in that moment, with Tim seriously suggesting there was such a creature as an intern who didn’t know how to use a coffee machine, I didn’t care so much if “eventually” stopped waiting and just got it over with.
At the same time, Isabella was still clutching her fork like she was planning on jabbing it in someone’s eye, so I didn’t say any of this while I was getting up and following Tim toward the coffee dispenser at the other end of the cafeteria.
“Are you okay?” Tim asked.
“That’s an odd question, don’t you think? Someone was wrong about something, I pointed it out, and now you’re asking me if I’m okay as if I’d just hit my head and started mumbling nonsense,” I responded. I could have been quieter about it, but glancing back toward the table to make sure Isabella wasn’t spitting in my food, it looked like things had returned to normal.
“There’s something you should probably know,” he said.
“What?”
“Some of the other interns…” Oh, here it comes, “they’ve kind of started saying things. I know you probably don’t care about that, but this place can be really cliquey. I know that’s like ‘who cares’ and everything, but those people can make your life hell. I’m not saying you’re wrong or nothin’. I just don’t want to see you have a hard time, you know?”
I took a deep breath. If it weren’t for the fact Tim was openly gay and married to his high school sweetheart, Daniel, I’d think he was hitting on me. The truth was that he was right. I’d never been a fan of confrontation, and I certainly didn’t want to be around it at work. The way Isabella was just so blatantly and unrepentantly wrong about Dean, though, that was just so galling. I was losing it.
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“It was pretty cool, though: watching you call her out like that. I just don’t want to see you get mixed up in an office feud or something. One of those starts and it’s kind of like watching monkeys throw feces at each other: it’s spectacular entertainment, but you really don’t want to be in the middle of it. Someone like Isabella is so full of crap you wouldn’t have a chance as it is. She’d win on sheer volume.”
“Yeah, that’s probably as far as the metaphor needs to go, but thanks for the visual, Tim,” I said, cringing. “Now, can we go back to the table before I lose my appetite?”
Somewhere nearby, I could hear someone say, “Yeah right, like that’s even possible,” but I just tried to ignore it. Probably whoever had said it wasn’t even talking about me. Even if they were, what could I possibly hope to gain by acknowledging it? When you’re a bit bigger, like I am, you hear stuff like that all the time. I was well on my way to pretending like I hadn’t even heard it, much less thought anything of it when Tim pushed past me.
“What did you just say?” he hurled at a table full of guys from another company in the building.
This was my nightmare scenario. Usually, when it actually was a dream, it was the cafeteria in my high school and my friend Josh was making things ten times worse by “jumping in to protect me,” but this was pretty close.
“Look, we weren’t talking about your lady friend, there, ma’am,” one of the guys said while the others snickered. Okay, the guys were assholes, but I had been perfectly content not knowing that for sure.
Now, I knew Tim better than most of the other interns, but I had no idea how bad things were about to go. “Ma’am?” he asked. The question seemed to be rhetorical. “First off, it’s Tim. I’m gay, sweetheart, not your sister. Secondly, if I did identify that way, I sure as hell wouldn’t be a ‘ma’am.’ I’m seventeen years away from being a ma’am. But hey, what’s the difference, if you’re the real men here, let’s head outside.”
By now, the entire cafeteria was staring. I was still over by the coffee machine, not moving. The guys sitting at the table looked at each other with big eyes.
“Come on,” Tim said, “there are four of you big, strong men, and only one ‘ma’am’
to worry about, so what do you say we head out there and I show you just how fast you can bleed?”
I made a mental note in that moment to never to refer to Tim as “ma’am”—not that I had any designs on doing that as it was.
Tim put his hands on the table. “Now, you tell me how it feels to have someone make a scene at your expense. Doesn’t feel good, does it? You know what else I’ve heard doesn’t feel good? Being on my bad side. I’ve heard that can hurt quite a bit.
“But you guys weren’t saying anything about me or my friend, were you? You were just talking about something else, and the whole ma’am thing was you not saying the word ‘man’ clear enough, right? I know you’d love to apologize for creating the wrong idea in the first place, though, wouldn’t you?”
Tim was well over six feet tall, and when he wasn’t at the office, he was usually at the gym. If he were a celebrity, he’d be Matthew Willig—if Matthew Willig was in the cafeteria, leaning over a table of four grown men who were just trying to keep from wetting themselves because they intimated I was fat and called him “ma’am.” Most of the time, Tim was such a gentle, nice guy it was easy to forget about how intimidating his presence could be. I credited that fact with why none of the men at the table got up or said anything other than the words, “I’m sorry.”
“Now apologize to her,” Tim said.
Four guys I’d never met looked over at me and they apologized. I’d forgotten how embarrassed I was until the attention was back on me.
“You don’t eat lunch in the cafeteria,” Tim said like he was using the force. “You go out on your lunch breaks.”
Over by the coffee machine, I was having a problem of my own. When it looked like people might start taking swings at each other at any moment, I was frozen in place. The whole scene had been so unexpected, and it was so over the top for someone who only a minute before had been dragging me over to the coffee machine to tell me not to start crap with coworkers. Of course, the guys at the table weren’t from our company. Maybe that was the difference.
Whatever the case, I’d started feeling my body shaking. At first, it only shook a little bit, but before long, I had my hand pressed firmly over my mouth.
The men at the table nodded their heads, their expressions a sort of blank fear.
The worst thing to do when you’re trying not to laugh is to tell yourself repeatedly not to laugh. It’s always the first thing that comes to mind, but it basically guarantees you’re going to crack. I’d never really thought about it until that moment when, hand still over my mouth, I erupted in a fit of laughter. A moment later, the rest of the cafeteria was laughing right along with me.
The four guys sitting at the table, though, weren’t laughing. Neither was Tim. The men got up, slowly. Collecting their briefcases, they made a beeline for the exit. By the time Tim and I finally got back to our table, I’d completely forgotten about the thing with Isabella.
We sat down and everyone wanted to know what had set Tim off; apparently nobody heard the first part of the confrontation. Tim didn’t even glance at me or acknowledge what really started it. He just said, “They called me ‘ma’am,’ can you believe that? What’d we miss?”
Normal conversation returned quickly enough. I’d just come across something important, though I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it: distraction really was the answer all along. I’d tried distracting myself before then, but I was using the weak stuff like television and fantasies about my current situation being anything other than a cruel, short-lived joke.
What I needed was the industrial-strength kind of distraction. Nearly witnessing a fist fight at work between four jerks and a guy protecting my honor had been pretty cathartic. Now, I didn’t know if that meant I was supposed to go out looking for trouble just to keep my mind off of all the crap someone of my size obsesses over when dating someone way out of her league, but it was starting to seem like a reasonable idea.
The problem was I was so distracted that I was three bites into the tuna pasta salad I’d brought from home before I saw Natalie down the table shaking her head and mouthing the words, “Don’t eat that.”
I set my fork down and looked over at Isabella. It took about half a minute, but when she saw me looking at her, her face went a deeper shade of red than usual. “Well,” she said, “that about does it for me. I gotta get back to work.”
Spit would be bad enough. I was just hoping she didn’t sneeze in my salad or something. It was probably the exact kind of thing Tim had tried to warn me about. He was absolutely right, and I knew it. No matter what, I had to make sure this didn’t go any farther. Otherwise, I’d end up retaliating, then she’d retaliate against my retaliation and the whole thing would end with one or both of us out of a job. Still, I had some ideas in case Isabella wasn’t as blissfully enlightened as I.
After Isabella was well out of earshot, though, I motioned to Natalie and she came over to sit across from me. “What’d she do?” I asked quietly.
“We wouldn’t have let her do anything too bad,” she said. “She just dumped a bit of syrup into your food, and then some salt—a whole lot of salt. Okay, so she took the top off of the salt shaker, and we all thought she was just going to do a little, but she dumped the whole thing in one corner of your container and then kind of spread it across the bottom with her fork. Oh, and then she put a bit of hot sauce along the opposite corner and then spread that around the bottom, too, so it’d mix with the salt and make it so the farther down you got, the more unbearable it would be to keep eating your salad.”
“Well, thanks for sticking up for me,” I said.
“Any time,” she answered and went back to her original seat. Apparently, Natalie wasn’t too good with sarcasm.
If I had my own office, I could have eaten in there. If eating in Luke’s office wouldn’t simply cause further covert actions against my food to go from a single isolated incident to a full-blown epidemic, I would have eaten in there. I wasn’t going to play the game of always wondering whether it was safe to eat or not; I simply decided not to eat at work anymore. That would be better for everyone, anyway.
I should have been paying attention to the conversation at the table, or thinking about the work I had to do when my lunch break was over. Instead, I was pulling my phone out of my pocket, and I was sending a text to a phone number I’d entered under the name, “Chuck.”
Dean was, in many ways, the source of my problems at work. I doubted it was planned to work out that way, but our relationship had become an addiction. One thing a lot of people don’t yet understand about addiction is that it’s hardly ever about the substance itself. Yeah, there are proud addicts who will boast the wonders of this drug or that all-you-can-eat buffet, but in every case I’ve ever even heard about, the addiction came because something else was missing, or to cover damage, or to do what I still thought was my best approach to that period of my life in general: distraction.
It had already turned into a horrible day and it was only lunchtime. I needed to know I could have my fix, or I’d just be stuck feeling what I was feeling. There’s nothing more humiliating than trying to pretend everything’s all right when it very clearly isn’t.
“No, of course that doesn’t bother me that Isabella put stuff in my food. It’s the only thing I have to eat, and I didn’t bring any money to get anything else, but no, I’m fine with it. Of course I don’t mind if people I don’t even know make public comments about just how damn fat they think I am.
“Really, I’m fine. Everything’s fine. I’m having a great day. No, I don’t realize that this affected unaffectedness is only making you pity me more, thus making everything worse because I’m trying to make everything better.”
It wasn’t so much what people said or did to me, though, as it was the rest of the people sitting at the table, Tim excluded, who’d really twisted the knife. Everyone just sat back and watched while Isabella dumped all kinds of crap into the salad I actually spent a decent amount of time making.
What was more humiliating than anything was that the few bites I did eat tasted spectacular. There wasn’t enough salt or hot sauce or syrup toward the top middle of the salad, from which I’d taken those three bites, for me to know it had been messed with. I’m sure if I’d eaten much more of it, I wouldn’t have needed Natalie to tell me to put the fork down.
So, not only was Isabella a beast for screwing with my food, and not only were the guys horrible for publicly mocking me the way they had, but I felt like I probably deserved it. When people have been picking on you most of your life, when you go out in public and people make beeping noises when you take half a step backward, it’s easy to think maybe the people treating you that way have a point.
Another thing about addicts is that they are spectacular at justifying just about everything, even their most self-destructive behavior. I felt terrible, so I wanted to feel better while conveniently forgetting why I felt so bad in the first place.
That’s what I was: I was an addict. Addicted to food, and then I became addicted to Dean, too, and the jolt of self-confidence I secretly craved from being with him, such as I was.
I was blissfully (and actively) ignoring the fact that depending on Dean to make me feel better would only end up making things harder in the end. I was an alcoholic the morning after a drinking binge, too far away from medical care to safely get rid of my withdrawals any better way than to simply keep drinking the poison that was causing the problem.
As soon as I sent the message, all of that came flooding into my brain. I knew what I was doing exactly the moment after I’d already sent the text: “Are you in town tonight?”
He lived in the city and he’d mentioned he didn’t really like to travel unless he had to. I knew he was in town. This was our code. Well, it was my code, really, because I was still too nervous to be any more direct. “Are you in town tonight?” was me making a booty call, and it’s not like he didn’t know that.
I put my phone in my purse after a minute and did my level best to play the role of easygoing coworker without a care in the world. It was painful, but when I got the response, “Yes. Meet me at the hotel at eight o’clock tonight. There’s something I’ve wanted to try with you.”