by David Bledin
It’s shocking: Clyde is actually pretty good. While the lead singer croons in an earnest nasal falsetto and the guitarist fiddles around with his instrument as if he’s not entirely sure what it is, Clyde’s precise blaring of the trumpet manages to transcend this acoustic tomfoolery. Granted, it’s kind of strange mixed in with a Joy Division track, but Clyde has a keen sense of when to enter the fray and when to escape it. There’s no pause as the band churns through forty more minutes of embarrassingly bad music. A few of the hipsters in the crowd cover their ears in agony and slink noisily out of the bar. When it’s finally over, Clyde packs away his trumpet and heads over to where we’re standing.
“Crazy to see you guys here.”
On the surface he’s all chummy, shaking hands before he settles into that aloof smile. Nonetheless, I get the impression he’s finding the sudden reappearance of numerous former colleagues a bit weird.
“I didn’t know you could play the trumpet,” I offer up, stating the perfectly obvious.
He looks back in the direction of the band packing up the rest of their equipment.
“Yeah, I started playing in music class; I think it was the sixth grade. Not Asian enough for the violin, not dumb enough for the triangle, so they handed me a trumpet. Pure middle ground.”
“You’re pretty good at it, though,” Postal Boy says, beaming mirthfully, still basking in the feat of orchestrating our reunion.
“Thanks. Couple of buddies started jamming together and thought they could use some horn. God, that sounds dirty,” he snickers. “Anyway, we haven’t played together all that long now; obviously we still need more practice.”
An awkward pause, before the Defeated One asks, “So, what’s it like with you now? I mean, aside from the band. Are you working or anything?”
Clyde shakes his head. “Nah, I’m taking a breather.”
Postal Boy, drunk off his ass, pipes up.
“But Clyde, how are you surviving out there? Where’s the income coming from?”
Clyde glances around nervously, just long enough for all of us to remember the painting from the auction, the money he still technically owes us.
“I, uh, you know how it works. You do odd jobs here and there. I painted an old lady’s kitchen for sixty bucks last weekend.”
With impeccable timing, the guitarist in Clyde’s band swings by.
“Lou,” he introduces himself.
A shaking of hands before he turns to Clyde.
“Dude, we’re gonna have a smoke in the alley. The girl behind the bar has an eighth and she’s willing to share. Bring your friends along if they’re up for it.”
Lou flashes us a crooked smile and heads toward the rear exit.
“You guys want to join in?” Clyde asks.
“Yeah, I’m game,” Postal Boy chirps.
“What about the two of you?”
The Defeated One shakes his head and says, “The girlfriend is expecting me back home. We’re still in crisis mode. Sorry, bud.”
“And yourself?”
“Work,” I say with a shrug. “You know how it is.”
Eyes downcast, Clyde mutters, “Yeah, I know how it is.”
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Why haven’t you written yet? Is it because you’re embarrassed about it? Ashamed, probably, and
Delete.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Are you still seeing him? He left early yesterday evening. Yeah, I bet that’s it. Dropping by your place after work, fucking you on the same couch I once slept on
Delete.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
You don’t honestly believe you’re trading up, do you? Sure, he’s good-looking and everything, but he’s such a fucking player. Just don’t come crawling back in a few weeks when he
Delete.
And finally it dawns on me why I’m having such a terrible time phrasing these e-mails: It’s because I don’t really believe a word of them, that she made a mistake, that she’s better off with me than with the Prodigal Son. Let’s be brutally upfront about things: He’s better-looking than I am, and since he’s been promoted, he’s making more cash than I do, and playing squash with the Fish puts him in the league of untouchables, meaning he won’t have to cancel any of their dinner dates because a Managing Director decides to swing by with a load of comps at the last minute.
The worst thing about all of this is realizing that my youthful belief in comeuppance no longer holds up. The Prodigal Son is never going to feel the scalding shame of rejection or, worse, return home to a deathly still apartment night after night, the darkness punctuated by blinking green and red lights, the eyes of compassionless appliances mocking his loneliness, his inability to get anybody to join him for a beer when he’s in desperate need of human contact. There will be none of that sitting in front of the computer jerking off to Internet porn, wondering if those pixelized breasts are all there is, if it’s ever going to get any better. A decade from now and you know he’ll have that nauseatingly perfect life: a super-hot wife, four football-playing sons, a retractable swimming pool, and a chauffeur to park the Bentley.
The Defeated One hurls an eraser across the room. It narrowly misses my head and instead knocks over one of the computer speakers.
“You game for some teriyaki action?”
“Nah, I brought a sandwich from home.”
“What type of sandwich?”
“Peanut butter and jelly.”
The Defeated One snorts.
“Peanut butter and jelly? Are you in kindergarten now, Mumbles?”
“They’re pretty good,” I say. “Nostalgic value, right?”
“Well,” he says, slipping on his jacket, “I don’t know when you decided to get all PB and J on me, but I’ll tell you, I don’t like it one bit.”
“Whatever, man.”
In truth, I’m hoping to catch some fresh air over lunch, some time to make sense of things, surrounded by the bronze cows in the courtyard. It’s a strange emotional vortex I’ve been swirling around in over the past few weeks: one minute I’m absolutely devastated by everything, the next I’m in a state of sluggish apathy. I give the Defeated One enough time to make his way into the land of food courts before I head to the elevators.
I push the button and the doors glide open. I’m grateful the elevator is empty. The speakers crank out a Muzak version of a Jewel song and the screen at front displays its useless definitions before the elevator comes to a smooth halt on floor 27. The doors slide open to reveal none other than the Woman With The Scarf rummaging around in her purse. She steps inside and the doors swoosh shut behind her before she looks up and notices me standing there.
“Oh, hell.”
She quickly pushes a button. Two floors down the elevator comes to another smooth halt. She moves to exit the elevator before stopping herself.
“No, this is ridiculous.”
The doors close again, and the elevator continues its descent. She stands facing away from me, as rigid as a statue, only her scarf ruffling slightly in the artificial breeze from the overhead ventilation unit. I rock back and forth on my heels, fixated on a point between her shoulder blades, and I don’t really know what to make of the situation. Certainly I’ve longed for an isolated encounter like this, a chance to deliver the perfectly crafted barbs that would make her burn up in shame before she pleaded with me to take her back. But of course, as is always the case, when the opportunity finally presents itself, I’m left with my tongue hanging limp in my mouth like a strip of undercooked veal.
We’ve dinged past floor 6 when her hand slams the Stop button; the elevator shudders to an abrupt halt between floors 4 and 5.
She turns around and hisses at me, “I am so very mad at you right now.”
She stands there with her fists clenched, a throbbing tic visible in th
e upper right of her forehead, so I’m half-expecting a Carrie-like meltdown: the elevator lights crunching out in a hail of glass, the distant groan of cables snapping, the elevator shaking a bit before careening down the darkened shaft.
“What, you don’t have anything to say for yourself?”
“What I have to say for . . . me?”
It comes out meek, pathetic. I sound like a fucking mouse.
“Yes, you!”
She crosses the elevator in three great strides and pushes me hard in the chest, sending me toppling backward until I collide with the wall.
“I am going to have my piece. Oh yes, I am going to have it.”
She reaches down and takes off a shoe, waving it right up in my face. The razor-sharp heel is dangerously close to my eyeball.
“I step inside to use the bathroom at your company barbecue. I’m gone for five fucking minutes. And then I come back outside, and wouldn’t you know it, but you’ve just gone off and disappeared on me.”
Pacing back and forth in the small compartment she takes on squeaky voices:
“Have you seen my boyfriend —?”
“No, I haven’t—”
“Oh jeez, I just don’t know where he’s gone off to—”
“Sorry, haven’t seen him—”
“But he wouldn’t just leave me here—”
“Lady, I don’t know what to tell you—”
She emits a strangled cry.
“And so I’m left there, all alone in the middle of suburbia, wondering what the hell happened to you.”
Throwing her hands up, she continues, “Then I’m thinking there has to be a reasonable explanation. Maybe somebody in your family got hit by a car, your grandma had a brain aneurism, whatever. But, no”—her voice shakes with fury—“two weeks go by and I haven’t heard one fucking peep from you! No phone call, not one goddamn e-mail letting me know what’s going on!”
She’s panting hard, still waving the heel in my face. But what is going on here? It’s her betrayal, her running off with—
My thoughts are interrupted by a beeping noise and a voice warbling through the elevator speaker.
“Excuse me, but is there some type of emergency?”
“No, everything is fine,” the Woman With The Scarf snaps.
“Why is the elevator stopped, then? Because otherwise there’s no—”
“I said that everything is fine,” she hisses.
“But ma’am,” the voice continues, “it’s the lunch break.” In a sudden burst of authority, the voice says, “You can’t just go on holding up the elevator like this!”
The Woman With The Scarf rubs at her temples, “Just give us one more minute. Please.”
A long pause before the speaker crackles to life again:
“All right. But any more than that and I’m checking with security.”
We’re left in an eerie silence. The Woman With The Scarf puts her shoe back on.
“I just don’t get it, that’s what’s really bothering me about this. None of it makes any sense. I didn’t think our fight warranted your just ditching me like that. But I guess I failed to realize what a temperamental son of a bitch you are—”
That’s it for me:
“Temperamental? Yeah, like seeing you head off with one of my colleagues isn’t enough justification for wanting nothing more to do with you? Don’t you turn the tables on me again!”
She gasps, her eyes widening. “Heading off with . . . what are you talking about?”
“Fuck off,” I sneer. “Don’t play stupid about this. Big blond guy—remember him? Maybe it’s just me, but I’d have thought it would be kind of difficult to forget the guy you fucked in the bathroom, huh?”
She stumbles backward, covering her mouth.
“You think I was . . .”
She removes her hand and purses her lips tightly.
“Let’s clarify this right away: I didn’t fuck him, if that’s what you’re calling it. Unless that involves both of us heading inside to relieve our bladders. Separately.”
I’m squinting at her, unable to process this new information.
She shakes her head in disbelief. “You’ve got to be joking with me. You really think I’d accompany you to one of your office functions and pick up another guy?”
Before I have time to dig myself into a deeper hole, we hear another beep and the speaker switches back on.
“All right, ma’am. Your minute is up.”
“Okay.” She nods to the speaker and says, “We’ll be on our way.”
She pushes the Lobby button and the elevator hums to life and resumes its course. She combs back a stray hair.
“Look, I know that fundamentally you’re a good person. And I can kind of see where you’re coming from with this. But on the other hand, well, this is all just a little too absurd. After the time we’ve spent together, after I’ve told you those things, you still think that I’d—”
“It’s not like that—”
“Shhh, let me finish. It’s this job of yours; I mean, it’s obvious that you’re not thinking clearly right now.”
“Hey, that’s not fair.”
She puts her hand up to silence me again. “Yet I wasn’t lying when I said it before, that I really do care about you.”
“I do too, I mean, I had it all wrong—”
“But I guess what I’m realizing is that I just can’t go on dating you while you’re like this.”
“While I’m like what?”
“While you’re still a banker.”
A pause.
“So you’re asking me to quit?”
“No,” she says, shaking her head sadly. “You shouldn’t see this as any sort of ultimatum. The last thing I’d want is for you to base your decisions on our relationship and then begin resenting me later.”
We reach the lobby and the doors ping open. Before she steps out, she gives me a tired smile.
“In a perfect world, right?”
“Please—”
But she’s already walking briskly across the lobby and disappears out the revolving doors.
Fourteen
And thus we get to the crux of the matter, the all-important question: to quit or not to quit; what’s it going to be? Do I really have the balls to abandon this two-year stint halfway through? It’s all I think about now, aside from the Woman With The Scarf and trivial stupid things, like whether I should wear black or gray socks to work, or what I’m going to pick up for lunch—teriyaki chicken or General Tso. I’m that flea-ridden monkey lifting his throbbing head up from the clunky typewriter, a half-finished manuscript of War and Peace accumulating in a messy pile beside him, staring across the rows upon rows of other typing monkeys (an infinity of them, it seems) to the only window permitted in this cavernous sweatshop, a tiny rectangle glowing eerily white against the musty darkness flooding the room. The monkey shakes the cobwebs from his head and strives to recall life beyond the window: the pungent earth smells, the wild orangutans with their splendid pink anuses, the pock-marked bananas, imperfect exteriors protecting mushy insides far more tasty than the chemical-laden torpedoes doled out at regular intervals throughout the day.
What life is this, he considers, typing away in a language he doesn’t even understand until the nibs of his fingers rub raw to the bone, all to satisfy a silly rhetorical question to begin with, whether he and his brethren can really replicate all of mankind’s novels (most so unreadable it’s hardly worth the effort) so that some hoary academic can publish a paper about it, can clear his throat and decree pompously, Why, yes, it can be done.
At times it seems so agonizingly simple, just a few leaps and bounds off the shoulders of twittering typists until he’s fumbling with the latch and pushing through the window. But what then? What if the world outside has changed since the halcyon days of his youth; what if things have become colder and less forgiving? He imagines landing in some scorched wasteland with nary a pock-marked banana in sight, a few days of foraging for edib
le twigs before a wild coyote comes hunting down a light afternoon snack. Better to stay inside, where it’s safe, where even though life isn’t perfect he’s still surviving, being fed, hearing the re-assuring buzz of millions of fingers pushing the same QWERTY configuration of keys. Best to leave these crazy notions of window-hopping to somebody else, a braver soul with nothing to lose.
The monkey droops his head in resignation and places his arthritic fingers back on the typewriter keys. A crack of the whip: It’s already half past three and his daily quota of fifty pages still needs to be filled.
But this time the escape fantasy is not going away. On the subway this morning, while watching a cherubic Asian girl in a pink parka giggle as she twirls around one of the poles, I think to myself, everything will be just fine. Postal Boy and Clyde are living proof of this; they’re surviving decently enough, right? No sleeping in boxes on the street, no gnawing on pieces of Bubble Wrap, pretending it’s a double portion of Lunch Special No. 3.
So, what is the problem, then? What’s holding you back?
But then, while in line at Taco Bell, I ask myself, Do you really want to be hawking dual-headed Swiffers for the rest of your life like Postal Boy? And what’s going to happen to Clyde ten years down the road? Fat chance of him getting into any decent business school with such pitiful work experience, only a few months on his résumé, and no references to speak of. So, what then? Playing trumpet in dingy bars until he’s far too old for that sort of thing, the next generation of hipsters holding him up as their ideal because they don’t get to see the other side of his life, him quivering in fear every time another bill passes through the mail slot?
I have the same nagging feeling I used to get watching Office Space. It’s a classic movie, sure, but look where that guy ended up before the credits: working construction. Shoveling dirt. Granted, it could be a pleasant experience for a week or two, basking in feelings of liberation from the corporate world, but what’s going to happen when he’s forty and he’s still dirt poor, and the foreman won’t stop bitching him out because he’s not shoveling fast enough on account of his aching back, and the pinched discs are untreatable because health insurance has become unaffordable?