I picked up my fork, began eating.
“Bob?” she said.
I looked at my plate.
“Bob?” Questioningly, tentatively.
I did not answer, kept eating.
After a moment, she too picked up a fork and started eating.
Smoothly, silently, a waiter took my plate, replaced it with another.
NINE
August became September.
I arrived at work one morning to find a manila interoffice envelope and a small rectangular cardboard box sitting on my desk. I was early; Derek had not yet come in, and I had the office to myself. I sat down and picked up the envelope, staring at the rows of crossed-off names on its front. The envelope’s itinerary for the past month was printed plainly on its cover, in different ink, with different signatures, and it made me realize just how much I hated my job. As I scanned down the list of names and departments now hidden behind ineffectual lines and halfhearted scribbles, I found that there was not a single individual I felt warmly toward.
I also realized how long I’d been here.
Three months.
A fourth of a year.
Pretty soon it would be a half a year. Then a whole year. Then two.
I dropped the envelope without opening it, feeling unaccountably depressed. I sat there for a moment, staring at the ugly blank office wall in front of me, then reached for the box. I picked it up, pulled off the top, looked inside.
Business cards.
Hundreds of cards, making up a single solid block of white, filled the inside of the small box. On the face of the front card, I saw my name and my title printed next to the Automated Interface logo and the corporation’s address and P.O. box number.
My first business cards.
I should have felt happy. I should have felt excited. I should have felt something positive. But that huge stack of wallet-sized cards filled me instead with an emotion akin to dread. The cards bespoke commitment, a belief on the part of the corporation that I would be there for a long time to come. The cards seemed at that moment as binding as a contract, as adhesive as glue, an investment in obligation. I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw the cards away. I wanted to send them back.
But I did nothing of the sort.
I took a few others out of the box and put them in my wallet and placed the rest in the upper right drawer of my desk.
The drawer closed with a metallic clank that sounded disproportionately loud and had about it a tone of finality.
I found myself focusing on the permanently jammed keyhole in the center of the drawer. So this was it. This was my life. Here I would spend the next forty years or so, then I would retire and then I would die. It was an overly pessimistic view of the situation, maybe a little melodramatic. But it was essentially true. I knew what I was like. I knew my personality and patterns. Theoretically, I could move on to another job. I could even go back to school eventually, get another degree. There were many options available to me. But I knew that none of those things would happen. I would simply adjust to my situation and live with it, the way I always had. I was not an initiator, a doer, a get-up-and-goer. I was a stayer and a stick-it-outer.
And then my life would be over.
I thought back to the dreams I’d had in grammar school and junior high, my plans of being an astronaut and then a rock star and then a movie director. I wondered if it was this way for everyone, and I decided that it probably was. No little kid wanted to be a bureaucrat or a technocrat or a middle management supervisor—
or an Assistant Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation.
These were the jobs we settled for when our dreams died.
And that’s all they had been—dreams. I was not going to be an astronaut; I was not going to be a rock star; I was not going to be a movie director. This was where I was, this was who I was, and the reality of the situation depressed the hell out of me.
Derek came in just before eight, ignored me as usual, and immediately started making phone calls. At nine, Banks called and said he wanted to have a meeting with me and Stewart, and I went upstairs to his office where the two of them berated me for half an hour and told me how unsatisfactory my GeoComm documentation had been until now.
I spent the rest of the morning and the afternoon rewriting the GeoComm function descriptions I’d already written.
Exactly five years ago this month, I realized, I had started attending UC Brea. What a difference those five years had made. Then I’d been just out of high school, my whole future ahead of me. Now I was rapidly speeding toward thirty, locked into this horrible job, my life a dead end.
Typing my revisions into WordPerfect on the PC, I accidentally pressed a wrong key and deleted ten pages of work. I looked up at the clock. Four-thirty. A half hour to go. There was no way I’d be able to retype all of that in a half hour.
This was the bottom, I thought. This was hell. There was no way things could get worse than this.
But, as usual, I was wrong.
The apartment was dark when I got home, and it still smelled of breakfast. Faint traces of toast and egg and orange juice lingered in the still air. I reached next to the door and flipped on the light switch.
The living room was empty. Not just empty as in no people, but empty as in no furniture. The couch was gone, as was the coffee table. The TV was still there, but the VCR was gone. Both the ficus and the Boston fern were gone, and the walls were bare, all of the framed art prints missing.
I felt as thought I’d stepped into another dimension, into the twilight zone. An overreaction, maybe, but the look of the apartment was so shocking, so unexpected, that my mind could not focus on particulars, could only take in the totality of the situation, and that totality was so overwhelming that I could not put anything into perspective.
But I knew instantly what had happened.
Jane was gone.
I pulled off my tie as I hurried into the kitchen. Here again, things were missing: the toaster, the cookie jars.
There was a note on the kitchen table.
A note?
I stared down at the folded piece of paper with my name on it, stunned. This was not like Jane at all. This was totally out of character. This was just not the sort of thing she’d do. If she was unhappy, if she had a problem, she’d talk to me about it and then we’d fight it out. She wouldn’t just pack her stuff and sneak away and leave me a note. She wouldn’t just give up. She wouldn’t walk away from me, from us, from what we had together.
The first thing I probably should’ve thought was that somebody had taken her, that she’d been kidnapped by the same person who had ransacked our apartment.
But somehow I knew that wasn’t the case.
She’d left me.
I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. Maybe I had seen it coming but hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. I thought back, remembered her telling me that communication was the most important thing in a relationship, that even if two people loved each other, there was no relationship if they couldn’t communicate. I recalled her trying to talk to me for the past few months, trying to get me to talk to her and tell her what was bothering me, what was wrong.
I remembered the night at Elise.
We hadn’t really talked much since that evening. We’d fought about not talking a few times, she accusing me of emotional secrecy, of not opening up and sharing my feelings with her, my lying and claiming that there were no feelings to share, that everything was fine. But even our fights had been tepid, lukewarm affairs, not the passionate battles of the past.
I looked again at the folded square of white notebook paper with my name on it.
Maybe she would have told me of her plans to leave at one time. But we definitely had not been talking much lately, and in that context the note made perfect sense.
I reached down, picked up the paper, unfolded it.
Dear Bob,
These are the hardest words I’ve ever had to write.
I didn’t want to do it this way, and I know it’s wrong, but I don’t think I could face you right now. I don’t think I could go through with it.
I know what you’re thinking. I know what you’re feeling. I know you’re angry right now, and you have every right to be. But it’s just not working out between us. I’ve turned this over and over again in my mind, wondering if we should try to work it out or if we should just spend some time apart, in a trial separation, and I finally decided that the best thing to do would be to make a clean break. It’ll be hard at first (at least it will be for me), but I think in the long run it will be for the best.
I love you. You know that. But sometimes love isn’t enough. For a relationship to work, there has to be trust and a willingness to share. We don’t have that. Maybe we never had that. I don’t know. But I thought we did at one time.
I don’t want to place blame here. It’s not your fault this happened. It’s not my fault. It’s both our faults. But I know us. I know me, I know you, and I know that even though we’ll say we’ll work on our relationship, nothing will change. I think it’s better to say good-bye now before things get too ugly.
I’ll never forget you, Bob. You’ll always be a part of me. You were the first person I ever loved, the only person I’ve ever loved. I’ll remember you always.
I’ll love you always.
Good-bye.
Beneath that was her signature. She’d signed her full name, both first and last, and it was that bit of formality that hurt more than anything else. It’s a clich� to say that I felt an emptiness inside me, but I did. There was an ache that was almost physical, an undefined hurt that had no set center but seemed to alternate between my head and heart.
“Jane Reynolds.”
I glanced again at the paper in my hand. Now that I looked at it, now that I reread it, it wasn’t just the signature that struck me as being too formal. The entire letter seemed stiff and stilted. The words and sentiments hit home, but they still seemed familiar and far too pat. I’d read them before in a hundred novels, heard them said in a hundred movies.
If she loved me so much, why were there no tears? I wondered. Why weren’t any of the letters smeared; why wasn’t the ink running?
I looked around the kitchen, back into the living room. Someone had to have helped her move the furniture, the couch, the table. Who? Some guy? Someone she’d met? Someone she was fucking?
I sat down hard on one of the chairs. No. I knew that wasn’t the case. She was not seeing someone else. She would not have been able to hide something like that from me. She would not even have tried. That she would’ve told me about. That she would’ve talked to me about.
Her dad had probably helped her move.
I walked out of the kitchen, through the living room to the bedroom. In here the loss was less, but more personal, and all the more painful for that. No furniture had been removed. The bed was still in place, as was the dresser, but the bedspread and the lace doily covering the top of the dresser were gone. In the closet there were only my clothes. The framed photographs on the nightstands had been taken.
I sat down on the bed. My insides felt like the apartment—physically, structurally unchanged, but gutted, hollowed out, soulless, the heart removed. I sat there as the room darkened, late afternoon turning to dusk, dusk to evening.
I made my own dinner, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and afterward watched the news, Entertainment Tonight, and all the other shows I usually watched. I was paying attention to the TV, yet not paying attention; waiting for a phone call from Jane, yet not waiting. It was as though I was possessed of multiple personalities—all with conflicting thoughts and desires—and was aware of all of them at once, but the overall effect was one of numbed lethargy, and I sat on the couch and did not move until the late news came on at eleven.
It was strange walking into the dark, empty bedroom, strange not hearing Jane in the bathroom, brushing her teeth or taking a shower, and with the television turned off I realized how quiet the apartment was. From down the street somewhere, muffled and indistinct, I could hear the sounds of a frat party. Outside, life continued on as usual.
I took off my clothes, but instead of dropping them on the floor and then crawling into bed like I usually did, I decided to put them in the hamper, as Jane had always nagged me to do. I carried my pants and shirt into the bathroom, opened the plastic top of the dirty clothes basket, and was about to drop them in when I looked down.
There at the bottom of the hamper, rolled up next to one of my socks, was a pair of Jane’s panties.
The white cotton ones.
I dropped my clothes on the floor. I swallowed hard. Suddenly, staring down at Jane’s rolled-up underwear, I felt like crying. I took a deep breath. I remembered the first time I’d ever seen her. She’d been wearing white panties and a pair of jeans with a rip in the crotch to school. I had been sitting across from her in the library and I had been able to see that white peeking through the hole in the blue, and nothing had ever turned me on so much in my life.
My eyes were wet as I bent over, reached into the hamper for the panties. I picked them up gingerly, handling them as though they were breakable, and carefully unrolled them. They felt damp to my touch, and when I lifted them to my face, the cotton smelled faintly of her.
“Jane,” I whispered, and it felt good to say her name.
I whispered it again. “Jane,” I said. “Jane…”
TEN
Jane had been gone for three weeks.
I settled into my chair and looked at the calendar I’d tacked up on the wall to my left. There were fifteen red X’s drawn through the month’s workdays.
As I did each morning, I crossed out another date, today’s date. My eye was drawn back to that first X—September 3. I had not heard from Jane since she’d left. She had not called to see how I was; she had not sent me a letter to tell me that she was all right. I’d expected to hear from her, if not for sentimental reasons, then for practical reasons. I figured there were logistical things she’d need to discuss—belongings she’d forgotten and wanted me to send, mail she wanted forwarded—but she had cut off all contact cold.
I worried about her, and more than once, I thought about going to the Little Kiddie Day Care Center, or even calling her parents, just to make sure she was okay, but I never did. I guess I was afraid to.
Although I could tell from the drastic decrease in mail that she had put in a change-of-address request at the post office, she still occasionally received bills or letters or junk mail, and I saved it all for her.
Just in case.
After work, I stopped by Von’s for milk and bread, but I felt so depressed that I ended up buying half a gallon of chocolate ice cream and a bag of Doritos as well. All of the checkout stands were crowded, so I picked the one with the shortest line. The cashier was young and pretty, a slim brunette, and she was bantering happily and easily with the man ahead of me as she ran his items over the scanner. I watched the two of them with envy. I wished I had the ability to start up a conversation with a perfect stranger, to discuss the weather or current events or whatever it was that people talked about, but even in my imagination I was unable to do it. I just could not seem to think of what to say.
Jane had been the one to start the first conversation between us. If the responsibility had been left up to me, we probably never would have gotten together.
When I reached the cashier, she smiled at me. “Hello,” she said. “How are you today?”
“Fine,” I told her.
I watched in silence as she rang up my items on the cash register. “Six forty-three,” she said.
Silently, I handed her the money.
I’d never thought about it before, but as I put the ice cream in the freezer, the Doritos and bread in the cupboard, I realized that there’d always been something within me that distanced people. Even my relationships with my grandparents were overly formal; we never hugged or kissed, though they were naturally affectionate. Ditto w
ith my parents. Throughout my life, our “friends of the family,” my parents’ friends, had always been nice to me, cordial to me, but I never got the impression that any of them liked me.
They didn’t dislike me.
They just didn’t notice me.
I was a nobody, a nothing.
Had it always been this way? I wondered. It was possible. I had always had friends in elementary school, junior high school, high school, but never very many of them, and as I thought back now, I realized that nearly all of them had been, like myself, totally nondescript.
On an impulse, I went into the bedroom, opened the closet door, and found the pile of sealed boxes under my hanging clothes—the record of my past. Dragging the boxes to the center of the room, I ripped off the masking tape and opened their tops one by one, digging through the contents of each until I found my high school yearbooks.
I took the books out, began looking through them. I hadn’t seen the yearbooks since high school, and it was strange to see again those places, those faces, those fashions and hairstyles from half a decade back. It made me feel old and a little sad.
But it also made me feel more than a little uneasy.
As I’d suspected, there were no photographs of me or my friends in any of the sports, clubs, or dance pictures. There were not even any of us in the random shots of the campus that were sprinkled throughout the books. We were nowhere to be seen. It was as though my friends and I had not even existed, as though we had not eaten lunch at the school or walked across campus from class to class.
I looked up the names of John Parker and Brent Burke, my two best friends, in the section of the senior yearbook dedicated to individual photographs of each class member. They were there, but they looked different than I recalled, the cast of their features slightly off. I stared at the pages, flipping back and forth from Brent to John and back again. I had remembered them as looking more interesting than they apparently had, more intelligent, more alive, but it seemed my memory had altered the facts. For there they were, staring blandly into the camera five years ago and out of the pages at me now, their faces devoid of even the slightest hint of character.
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