Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “And the winner is…” Colleen Lundstedt’s voice chimed like a nursery school teacher’s. In spite of myself, and my desire for total nonchalance, I felt my heart catch and my face smile as I heard her say my name—my name!—in the echo chamber of my head. “Brittany Chang. Brittany,” Colleen Lundstedt announced, “you have not only had some of the highest revenue for 2015, but also, the highest ratings on our website’s ‘customer satisfaction’ survey and the most followers on Twitter and Instagram!”

  And suddenly, perky Brittany was jumping up and down, clapping and posing for photos with Colleen Lundstedt, and waving the spatula victoriously above her head. Amelia and I stood there with the good-natured smiles plastered across our faces that we salespeople are such masters at—then we, too, congratulated Brittany, shook hands with Colleen Lundstedt—it was an honor just to be nominated—blah, blah—before getting the hell off the stage. “Hey, at least we got a free vacation, right?” Amelia sighed, biting her lower lip. “Though, dammit, I’m missing my dogs.”

  “Yeah, well…” I said vaguely, and my voice trailed off. And I realized, on some level, I’d been expecting this very outcome all along. It seemed inevitable, somehow. Nowadays, the world valued velocity and spectacle over anything genuine. Or maybe I was just getting old.

  Afterward, there was a cocktail reception we were all obligated to go to as well. It was held in one of Vegas’s swanky new restaurants, on a mezzanine overlooking the main dining room. The gimmick of the place was a giant glass “wine pyramid” that rose up through the center of the dining room like a three-story volcano. Waitresses in acrobatic harnesses rappelled up and down inside it, plucking bottles of merlot and sauvignon blanc from racks fifty feet overhead. It was meant to be elegant, I suppose (the menu said the design “recalled the French tradition of the Louvre”), but Vegas can’t help itself, can it? It was far more Ringling Brothers than Le Cirque, so literally over the top.

  Me, I ordered a cranberry and club soda—one, then another, then another—God, I would’ve loved something stronger. At AA, a fellow alkie once said, “I feel like I’ve got this voice inside me crying all the time, I need. I want. Fill me.” This was my reality exactly: I need. I want. Fill me. At the reception, I wandered around sucking on my gummy bears nonstop, accepting jokey condolences from my colleagues, posing gamely with them for group selfies, smiling until my face hurt. I had a vague sense that hors d’oeuvres were being passed—platters of mushroom tartlets, baby lamb chops, some sort of deconstructed spring roll—but my stomach was in knots from the ceremony—and anyway, all of it was just loaded with calories. And so I didn’t eat, and the party began to blur around the edges and, suddenly, the atrium below me was rotating. I excused myself to the ladies’ room, performed some human origami trying to wrestle myself out of my Spanx, gave myself a good talking-to in the bathroom mirror, then doused my face several times with cold water. By the time I emerged, I was surprised to find the last of my cohorts already downstairs by the coat-check, struggling to punch their arms through the straps of their complimentary Privileged Kitchen 2015 tote bags. The servers were clearing away the dishes, disassembling the bar.

  I felt a stab of abandonment. A postparty melancholy started to seep in. Twelve years of hard work, and zilch in the end.

  I stood alone on the mezzanine, unsure of what to actually do with myself now (call Joey? text the kids?)—certainly, I should be doing something—what was my life, after all, without responsibility and productivity and guilt? Turning my phone back on, I saw I’d missed several alerts. My screen read:

  Ashley Kozcynski tweeted:

  @BernieSanders should ban GMO’s. They’re killing the bees! Sanders 4 Prez. #FeeltheBern #noGMOs;

  Charleston massacre pain scene lingers. Check your White Privilege, people!!!;

  Russian airstrikes rumored to start targeting Homs!! ☹

  Ashley, our daughter, was studying abroad in London for the year. She was majoring in—God help us all—something called “Social Theory and Practice”—living in a group house full of homemade hummus and recycled toilet paper. When she’d first told us about the exchange program in Britain, I’d pictured her sipping tea in some grand Victorian drawing room, being waited on by a butler—okay, I’d been binge-watching Downton Abbey—yet whenever I Skyped, she appeared in a grungy kitchen with an electric kettle plugged into a green wall and a Union Jack tacked over the sink like a stage prop—her own declaration of independence, I supposed, though geographically backward.

  In our family, her earnestness and sense of justice were legend. Always, she had been the rescuer of stray cats, injured birds, the keeper of lost caterpillars. Once, when she was four, she’d asked tremulously as I was giving her a bath, “Mommy, what happens to all the soap bubbles when they go down the drain?” When I told her they popped and dissolved into the sea, she’d cried inconsolably. “All the bubbles die? And the sea gets full of dirty water? But then who washes the sea?” Her empathy, to me, was stunning—and admirable—and poignant—but, also, good God, exhausting. At one point, Joey had a standing offer of $20 to the first family member who could make Ashley laugh hysterically (an extra ten for milk-out-the-nose!).

  Now, occasionally over Skype, she’d mention going to the British Library or the Tate Modern. But mostly, she seemed consumed with tweeting her moral outrage over the world’s injustices to her 39,672 Twitter followers. I squinted down at my phone: What the hell were Homs?

  So often, I felt like I didn’t have an actual brain anymore; now that I was into my forties, my mind seemed to have been reduced to a sushi train at a cheap Japanese restaurant: nothing but tiny plates circling around on a conveyor belt, offering little substance, only reminders about PK demos, doggie tranquilizers, weight gains—Good God, I’m putting myself into a coma just thinking about it—but there on the balcony, all my internal chatter came to a halt. Dumbly, I stared at the airborne waitresses in their glass pyramid. It was like watching exotic fish undulating in a giant aquarium.

  “That takes guts.” A man in a rumpled suit jacket emerged from the men’s room. He stood planted in the path between the reception alcove and the kitchen, rattling the ice cubes in his glass, eyeing the girls.

  He was heavyset, baby-faced, perspiring. A forelock of grubby blond hair fell into his eyes like a comma. The smudgy lozenges of his eyeglasses gave him a slightly robotic look. He seemed to be one of those men in their thirties who, due to indulgence, work, and junk food, were not aging well. A wedding band winked dully on his left hand.

  As a waiter passed between us holding aloft a tray full of ravaged hors d’oeuvres, the man held up his hand like a stop sign. “Hey. Hang on a sec.” He motioned to the platter. “Got anything good?”

  Surveying the leftovers, he plucked an untouched mushroom tartlet from the debris and popped it into his mouth. “Mmm. Not bad.” Pulling out a napkin that appeared to be clean, he nimbly piled on it two remaining triangles of spanakopita, a congealing baby lamb chop, and the last pancetta-wrapped fig.

  I felt a prickle of irritation. Freeloading hors d’oeuvres was something my husband would do. Whenever we found ourselves at a restaurant buffet, Joey piled up his plate multiple times with crab salad, pasta, miniature pizzas. “Go back for seconds,” he’d instruct the kids. “I want everyone eating our money’s worth.” Anytime we stayed at a motel on our way to Mackinac Island, Joey wrapped up danishes and mini-muffins from the breakfast bar in paper napkins and smuggled them out under his shirt along with single-serve boxes of Kellogg’s cereals. “What the hell are you doing?” I always said. “You hate Fruit Loops. You tell your patients this crap rots their teeth.”

  “And let it all go to waste?” he’d say. “We paid for it!”

  Scavenging food was something I believed only starving actors, musicians, or homeless people should do. It was the very behavior I’d once hoped I’d left behind for good.

  “Are you an entertainer?” I said to the man on the balcony.

  If he de
tected any acidity in my voice, he ignored it. “Sure. Absolutely,” he said cheerily. “I’m a magician.” Dangling the bacon-wrapped fig by its stem, he tilted his head back and opened his mouth exaggeratedly. “See? I make food disappear.”

  In spite of myself, I smiled. “Cute.” I raised my club-and-cranberry salutatorily in his direction, then turned back to watch the girls. They were as dizzying to watch as window washers, suspended above the dining room like human mobiles. Their mothers would have heart attacks, I thought, if they could see their babies like this. It was nighttime now, and the ambient music in the restaurant had been turned up; a techno version of “La Vie en Rose” throbbed across the dining room. The walls themselves seemed to pulsate.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw a birdlike flutter. The man eating hors d’oeuvres was beside me now, performing what could only be described as a pirouette, his face flushed. Bowing gallantly to the airborne waitresses, he whipped around—his large body moving with unexpected agility to the backbeat—his hands pressed poetically to his heart. He threw himself against the brushed aluminum railing of the balcony, trying to attract their attention. He did this once, twice, then a third time with operatic passion, clutching his fists to his solar plexus, as the women continued to levitate past him indifferently. He bowed again, torqued halfway around with his arm flung out, then collapsed on the tiles.

  It was only then that I realized he hadn’t been dancing for the girls at all.

  He had been choking on the fig.

  I screamed, but my voice was vacuumed up by the clamor of the restaurant, the amped-up music, the raucous parties at the bar downstairs.

  The man lay beached on the parquet. His glasses were mangled and hung off his ear at an odd angle, his skin was turning an alarming whitish-lavender, pallid and waxy as a guest soap. “Somebody!” I shouted. But the landing was deserted.

  Instinctively, I dropped to my knees, yanked open his mouth, and jammed my hand down his gullet. I fished around in the swamp of the man’s epiglottis but couldn’t dislodge anything. I pounded his chest. His torso was clammy, tufted with a frisée of hair that crunched beneath my palms like steel wool. Through his layer of baby fat, I could barely palpate his ribs, his heart. He smelled of astringent and, ominously, of mushroom tarts and bacon. “Help!” I shouted. The life was seeping out of him: I could feel it. Trying to remember my first aid from a class at the Y, I pinched his nose, clamped my mouth over his—our teeth knocked violently—and blew as hard as I could. When that didn’t work, I raised myself up on my haunches and slammed my entire body weight down onto the man’s belly. I’m not a big woman—five foot three at best, 138 pounds in my underwear, if I’m being honest—but I pounced on him with all my mass, straddling him as if he were a mechanical bull. It was savage—I landed hard right on my pubic bone—the pain was excruciating—but the force of my landing finally pounded all the remaining air out of the man’s lungs, and the half-eaten bacon-wrapped fig flew out of his mouth like a champagne cork.

  I collapsed against him with relief. “Oh my God,” I murmured into his pale, grayish ear. “You’re okay. It’s okay. Breathe.”

  But he remained prone, motionless.

  I straddled him again, my hands like bellows against his chest. Someone who sounded oddly like me was screaming, “Help! Help! Breathe, goddammit!” and then, finally, there were legs and feet scrambling around me, and the manager was wrangling me to a standing position, and another person—a burly Hispanic man in a chef’s apron—was now astride the man performing violent compressions, and I heard a waitress sob, and someone say: “I just thought they were having sex, otherwise…,” then two figures in EMS windbreakers pushed through with a stretcher and an apparatus, and red-blue lights were rotating feverishly over the far walls of the restaurant from the street like an insane disco ball, and someone was talking frantically into a walkie-talkie, and someone else was saying, “The rear elevator is best,” and someone else said: “Table nineteen needs more bread”—Oh my God! What? I felt my legs give out and a busboy, I think, helped me into a chair by the bathroom. Then a cluster of people moved past like a carnival float—sprouting equipment, rubber tubing—with a tablecloth draped over a supine form with a pouf of blond hair—and I was gripping a glass of melty ice water and staring straight ahead. After a moment, I heard myself whisper: “Is he dead? Did he die?” A hand landed on my shoulder. A voice said: “I don’t think so. They said they got a pulse. You okay? You need a drink? You did good, ma’am.”

  I started to shake. Another voice said: “Do you think she should maybe go to the hospital too?”

  “No,” I heard myself say. “No hospital.”

  “Ma’am,” said the voice gently, “you’re bleeding.”

  Only then did I notice that my palms and my knees were serrated with tiny cuts, sticky with blood. Apparently, when I’d first realized the man was choking, I’d dropped my club soda; I could now see shards of glass sparkling on the floor and in the weave of my skirt like frost.

  “I’m okay. I’m okay,” I said.

  I stood up abruptly and wobbled into the bathroom. It was hard to dab away at the cuts through my pantyhose, which had begun to mat to my skin. Yet I was too shaky to remove my stockings. I thought of myself, straddling the man on the floor. How had it even occurred to me to do that? My heart was still punching frantically; I could still feel the man’s damp chest beneath my palms.

  After I cleaned myself up as best I could, I stepped back out into the restaurant. The mezzanine had been cleared of all debris, and a pair of waiters were now shaking a fresh tablecloth out over the buffet table. Beyond the balcony, the wine angels kept moving silently up and down in their glass encasement, laughter billowed up from the bar area, the hiss of filet mignon and duck breast from the grill came in piston-like gusts as the kitchen doors swung open and closed, open and closed, punctuating the music throbbing through the recessed speakers and the rattle of the cheese cart stuttering from table to table.

  I gingerly gathered up my belongings and made my way down the stairs. A large, unruly party had herded into the restaurant, and the maître d’ and a waitress were hunched over the computer, trying to sort out the seating.

  “Hey,” I shouted over the music to the hostess. “That guy—do you happen to know if he’s okay?”

  “What guy?”

  “The one the paramedics wheeled out. Upstairs, on the mezzanine.”

  “EMS was here?”

  “He choked or had a heart attack?”

  She regarded me narrowly, shrugged, then motioned to a group of diners behind me to step forward. Pushing my way through the glass doors, I plunged into the blaze of the Strip and took a deep breath. After the climate control inside, the night air of Las Vegas came as a shock, and the overload of lights and traffic and crowds on the street was even more chaotic. I navigated in a daze through the casino in the lobby of my hotel to the karaoke bar in the back. Sure enough, a group of my fellow sales reps had commandeered a couch and a low table in the corner. Someone had ordered a pitcher of frozen strawberry margaritas that was quickly separating into striations of red slush. A rep named Traci stood on the little blue-lit stage, holding a microphone plagued with feedback. “No, I mean, the other Adele song,” she was saying to someone behind a laptop.

  I sat down stiffly. Both my knees felt scraped up, and my legs were trembling spasmodically the way they did after too much yoga. I had a strange, metallic taste in my mouth. Had I really just clamped my lips over a stranger’s?

  My colleague Victor was perched on the arm of the couch, swiping the screen of his phone. Normally, we were karaoke buddies together; get us warmed up, and just watch what we did with the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.” Sometimes it was easy to forget that Victor was almost twenty years younger than me—though, sometimes, it wasn’t. He constantly referred to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Run DMC as “that ’90s music.”

  “Buona sera,” Victor said showily, standing to give me an air kis
s over each shoulder. “Girl. You were robbed, is all I can say.” He looked me up and down. “Clearly, that ceremony was rigged. Here. Liquid consolation.” He dumped the remainder of the frozen margarita pitcher into a sweaty glass mug, handed it to me, then fluttered his hand at Traci. “Bitch gets one more minute to choose her song, then I’m taking over.”

  I looked deep into the margarita—it smelled like a juice box—and set it down.

  “Victor,” I said quietly, tugging his elbow. “Victor, I just saved a man’s life.”

  “Shut up! What?”

  “At the restaurant,” I said incredulously. “He was choking on an hors d’oeuvre.”

  “Oh my God!” Victor slapped his hands over his mouth and laughed throatily. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh. But wouldn’t that be, just be, like, the worst way to go? ‘How did he die?’ ‘Oh, you know. He choked on an hors d’oeuvre. In Vegas.’”

  The margarita in front of me was lurid and melty, a noxious pink. “He was down on the floor, and—I had to straddle him—and I pounded,” I said.

  “Where was the staff?”

  I shrugged. “Nobody helped.” Suddenly, noiselessly, I started to weep. I kept seeing the man, writhing in all his terror and desperation, fighting to breathe, while tables full of diners tucked into steaks and heaps of truffled fries below. He had a wife back home, possibly children. What if it had taken me just a few seconds longer to react? Even so, at this very moment he could be lying rigid on a metal hospital gurney—snap!—gone—just like that—while somewhere his wife was receiving the most brutal phone call of her life.