Engaged in escaping the knots of her past, she’d been blind to the new noose now tightening.
Fernando was kind, he was handsome and witty, and there when she’d needed him most,
But Wendy now worried she’d quite inadvertently smitten her love-bitten host.
And yes, Wendy liked him, and true, she had privately pictured the boyfriend he’d make,
But still she knew letting this fling now spin into a thing was a deadly mistake.
For starters, she’d just left a man at the altar; if anything, she needed space.
But how do you keep a straight face when you say, “I need space,” while you crash at his place?
You put on his sweater, you sleep in his arms—well, that carries, perhaps, implication,
Abetted by joint expectation, the anticipation from years of flirtation.
And then add two weeks’ worth of kissing, and drinking, and sharing the scars of their youth—
She’d climbed in his heart without thinking, the way that a kid idly tongues a loose tooth.
The truth was that even though she and Fernando could be a good thing for a minute,
The month she had planned to get married was maybe not quite the right month to begin it.
On top of all that, though, assuming the two could have worked through the terrible timing,
It still felt presumptuous to write her a poem. Like, why did he think she liked rhyming?
If truly Fernando had felt a connection, then couldn’t Fernando intuit
That if his intention was wooing this woman, this wasn’t a good way to do it?
The poem was clever, but cloyingly so, overflowing with whimsy and vim.
So, was it for her, as the verses asserted, or was it, in fact, more for him?
Fernando’s affection felt clingy but distant—familiar, yet still somehow foreign.
(Besides, if she’d wanted unyielding devotion, she could have just never left Warren.)
“I’m sorry,” Fernando suggested but didn’t quite say, in regards to the letter.
And even though Wendy insisted he shouldn’t feel bad, he felt worse—he knew better.
The poem was maybe a little indulgent, a maudlin emotional jack-off.
He’d meant to be playful and fun—Dr. Seuss!—only now things felt more David Rakoff.
And so they both sat for a moment in stillness, the silence beginning to pool;
Each one of them struck by the notion their actions had not just been selfish, but cruel.
Fernando thought maybe he still had a chance to say something profound and specific.
Instead he said, “Hey, so, the thing of it all is, you know, I just think you’re terrific?”
“This isn’t…” said Wendy, and then she trailed off, and Fernando said, “Yeah, no, I get it.
I guess I just thought it was better to say than to not and then later regret it.”
And Wendy said, “Yeah…” and Fernando remembered the first time he’d mentioned to friends
The current arrangement and one of them said, “Well, I can’t wait to see how this ends!”
His sister had told him, “Be careful, you know what they say: Roaming hearts gonna roam.”
So now he was less than astonished when Wendy said, “Honestly? I should go home.”
Fernando said nothing, for what could be said? It was over and done with, and soon
His half-a-month lover would just disappear in the folds of the cold afternoon.
He threw all his sheets in the laundry and stared straight ahead, less perturbed than perplexed.
As Wendy awaited her subway, she found Warren’s number and crafted a text.
A poem’s a thing that is hard to pin down, though the words pile up in your head.
A person’s a thing that is tricky to read, but it’s trickier yet to feel read.
The Average
THE AVERAGE
of All Possible Things
Lucinda, the average of all possible things, woke up very averagely in her extremely unexceptional apartment. She put on some very normal clothes, glanced at her mirror, which was just the regular amount of reflective, as far as mirrors go, and as she looked at her quite average self, she thought: Yeah, okay.
She got in her car (which was fine) and drove to her job (which was fine). Everything was beige, and stucco, and fine. It was a very normal day, like pretty much any other, the only notable thing at all about it being that at one point she didn’t look at her phone for a whole eight minutes.
She ate lunch by herself at her desk. Kale Caesar salad and a club soda.
The thermostat was set to seventy-one degrees.
That night, she returned to her extremely unexceptional apartment. For dinner, she reheated some pasta she’d made for herself the night before—it wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad either. She ate a normal-sized serving, then watched two and a half hours of home renovation shows while replying to work emails, then went to bed.
She had trouble falling asleep at first, so she counted down from three hundred by sevens, then eights, then nines. At 3:32 a.m., she checked to see if she’d gotten any text messages—but of course she had not because it was 3:32 a.m. It was very normal to not receive text messages at 3:32 a.m. It was normal, and fine, and what Lucinda deserved.
* * *
—
Lucinda woke up in the morning with a crick in her neck, which was what Lucinda deserved.
Traffic to work was normal. There was a gruesome accident on the freeway, which was statistically appropriate. The radio played eight songs that were very popular and Lucinda liked all of them but didn’t love any of them, and she briefly wondered if she was incapable of loving anything ever again, which is a very normal thing for a person to briefly wonder.
When she got to work, she did not have any new text messages.
She had thirty-one new emails, but they were all either work-related or junk offers from mailing lists she had been too lazy to unsubscribe from. She briefly wondered if hundreds of years after she was gone and forgotten, her last remaining legacy would be a never-checked email account that still received dozens of messages a day from automatic email bots who had no idea she was long dead and therefore not interested in an exciting buy-one-get-one-twenty-percent-off offer from Sephora.
She ate lunch by herself. Kale Caesar salad and a club soda.
“You really love these kale Caesars,” said Debbie, the receptionist, dropping off Lucinda’s kale Caesar.
“Yeah, well, I like to be reminded that if you get stabbed in the heart enough times, eventually they’ll name a salad after you.”
This was an average joke, but Debbie laughed at it like it was above average, which was a very nice thing for her to do. Everyone was Very Nice to Lucinda these days, which only made things worse, honestly, because it meant that they knew. Of course they couldn’t know know, because nobody knew, not really. That was part of it, both part of the good and part of the bad—the fact that nobody knew. But still, somehow people knew something, and that’s why they were being Very Nice. Somehow there had been Conversations in the kitchen about How We Should All Be Nice to Lucinda because she’s Going Through a Lot, even though Lucinda wasn’t even going through all that much really, she was just going through the normal amount of stuff that everyone goes through. It was normal and boring and fine, and it sucked, but it was fine.
* * *
—
At 2:18 exactly, Gavin swung by her office to ask if she’d finished putting together that memo compiling all the occurrences of tech support calls during the forty-five days outlined in the class-action suit as the “Period of the Exploding Bluetooth Headphones.” Lucinda said not yet but she could get it to him by the end of the hour, and she didn’t s
ay it was taking her longer because the new large-breasted legal assistant Gavin hired had a charming predilection for confusing area codes with zip codes—which, all things considered, was very decent of Lucinda not to say.
Gavin smiled at her, which was Very Nice, and Lucinda thought it was awfully cruel of Gavin to be so Very Nice, and Gavin said, “Thanks a lot, Lucinda.”
“Of course,” said Lucinda, and Gavin smiled again and walked away.
Lucinda opened up the document she’d been working on and thought about how when Gavin said “Thanks a lot,” he didn’t say “Thanks a lot, Luce.” He said “Lucinda,” which was her name, and it sounded weird when he said it, but it shouldn’t have sounded weird, because Lucinda was her name after all, and it would have been much weirder if he had said “Luce,” because Luce was a name for boyfriends to call her, and Gavin was not, at that moment, her boyfriend.
Lucinda pulled out her phone and drafted a text message to Gavin: “Working on that memo now. Sorry it’s taking so long, but you know koalas sleep for twenty hours a day.”
She looked at the message and decided not to send it, thank God, and instead she sent a text message that said, “Sorry if that was weird.”
After she sent it, she saw the three dots indicating Gavin was drafting a response, but whatever he was drafting he didn’t send, and the three dots went away. Lucinda put her phone in her desk drawer and worked on the memo. At 2:42, she finished the memo but didn’t want to send it without first checking to see if Gavin had responded to her text message. He hadn’t. She waited until three o’clock exactly, then sent him the memo attached to an email that just said, “here you go.”
Eighteen minutes later he responded with an email that said, “thanks.”
She didn’t look at her phone the whole time she was driving home, but when she got home Gavin still had not responded to her text message that said, “Sorry if that was weird.” She thought about texting him again, “Sorry if that text message about things being weird was weird,” but she didn’t, thank God.
Instead she went to see a movie by herself, which is a normal thing for a single woman to do. She had trouble focusing on the movie, though, because she kept thinking about how good it was that she couldn’t look at her phone during the movie, and how by the time the movie was over she would probably have a few new text messages to look at, from Gavin or anybody else who wanted to text her, but then when she turned her phone back on after the movie, she had gotten no new text messages.
That night she left her phone near her bed, but she put it on Do Not Disturb mode, so that she wouldn’t get woken up if she got any new text messages, but then at midnight, she thought, This is stupid, so she turned her phone off, but then at 2:14 a.m., she thought, This is stupid, so she turned her phone back on, and sure enough she had gotten a text message from Gavin at 12:41 that said, “It wasn’t weird.”
And Lucinda thought: Okay. So it wasn’t weird.
* * *
—
The next day, Lucinda was in her office, performing her job adequately, when she got a text message from a number she didn’t recognize that said, “i have something for you.”
When Lucinda got text messages from numbers she didn’t recognize, she liked to prolong the conversation for as long as possible without asking who it was, to see if she could figure it out. This is a very normal thing unexceptional people do, because their lives aren’t exciting enough in other ways so they have to create little mysteries for themselves, and since Lucinda was so unexceptional, it was quite appropriate that she did this.
“What do you have for me?” Lucinda texted back.
“it is a surprise,” said the number she didn’t recognize.
“Can I have a hint?”
Then Lucinda saw the three dots that meant the person was drafting a response. The three dots stayed there for exactly one minute and thirty-four seconds, and then came the response: “no.”
Lucinda put her phone in the top drawer of her desk and got to work.
* * *
—
At twelve past eleven, Gavin swung by Lucinda’s office on his way to Conference Room H. He nodded as he passed the doorway and said, “Lucinda.”
Lucinda nodded back, then went to the bathroom and cried for eighteen minutes.
* * *
—
At lunch, Debbie dropped off a kale Caesar salad and a club soda, and then lingered for a moment.
“Thanks, Debbie,” said Lucinda.
“Sure thing,” said Debbie.
She continued to linger.
“Can I help you with anything else?” asked Lucinda.
“Don’t you want to know what your surprise is?”
Lucinda tried to hide her disappointment in learning that the mysterious stranger she had been texting was just Debbie, the receptionist.
“Yeah,” she said. “What’s my surprise?”
Debbie pulled a cereal box out of her messenger bag. “I thought you might like this box of Cinnamon Sugar Blast Oat Cubes.”
Lucinda looked at the box of Cinnamon Sugar Blast Oat Cubes. “Why?”
“It comes with a free Minions wristwatch.”
“Oh,” said Lucinda. “Cute.”
Lucinda briefly wondered how old Debbie was. If she had to guess, Lucinda would say twenty-two, but she would also believe it if someone told her Debbie was a precocious fourteen or a smooth-skinned fifty-eight.
“The Minions are hilarious,” said Debbie.
And Lucinda said, “I should get back to work.”
“Okay,” said Debbie.
Debbie left the room, leaving the box of Cinnamon Sugar Blast Oat Cubes with the free Minions wristwatch on Lucinda’s desk. Lucinda nudged the box to the side with a pencil and opened Facebook on her phone. Before it could even load, she closed it again, then deleted the app. Then she opened Facebook on her computer and looked at her own profile. She still hadn’t changed her profile picture, which was dumb, but she felt that changing it would be Admitting Something—not that the relationship was over (because of course it was, whether Lucinda wanted to admit it or not) but that she Cared.
The picture was of her in Hawaii, smiling wide, an arm around her waist. Whose arm was it? There was no way to tell from the picture. There was no way to tell that Lucinda had gone to Hawaii with a boyfriend over Christmas. There was no way to tell that Lucinda had a boyfriend. There was no way to tell that Gavin hadn’t in fact gone back east to see his family over Christmas. There was no way to tell that for five months and eight days, two people shared something marvelous and intimate and true. There was no evidence of this ever occurring. Nobody knew. But still, in the picture, there was an arm around her waist—the arm of a man who would now never again love Lucinda and wake her up with sweet kisses and lie about going back east to see his family while spending a week with an arm around Lucinda’s waist in Hawaii. Not that Lucinda Cared.
It was very important to Lucinda that everyone on Facebook understood that she hadn’t bothered to change the picture yet because that’s how Little she Cared, and not because she was like obsessed or something. After all, this was no tragic love story, her and Gavin, hardly the kind of thing they write great operas about. It was the kind of thing they write just okay operas about, where the audience is mostly just the friends of the guy who wrote the opera, and afterward, they’re all just hanging out in the lobby trying to think of nice things to say, and then their friend comes out and they all go, “Hey! Look at you! You wrote an opera! Wow!”
* * *
—
What annoyed Lucinda most of all was that they still had to work together. Gavin still continued to exist in the world, which Lucinda thought was very rude.
If you were an undercover detective observing the comings and goings of Weissman, Zeitzman & Kinsey, you might suspect that Lucinda had
once been in love with Gavin, but you’d never guess it was for the way that he talked to her, and how she felt when she talked to him, because now they could barely talk to each other at all. Every conversation was punctuated by long awkward silences—but punctuated the Spanish way, so every sentence was followed by a long awkward silence and preceded by the same awkward silence upside down.
And when he spoke to her, he called her “Lucinda,” which sliced and gutted her every time, even though she knew that was stupid, because what else would he call her? “Luce”? No way. “Koala”? No. He used to call her a koala because of the way she wrapped herself around him in bed, like a koala on a branch. She had wrapped her whole life around him, like a koala on a branch. And now the branch was gone and Lucinda had to deal with the fact that her life was now wrapped around nothing—which of course was all perfectly normal. All the pain Lucinda now felt was normal. The emptiness was normal. The harsh incinerating boring awful raw barren obsessive numb five-hundred-volt nothingness now completely consuming her was so totally average.
* * *
—
Lucinda looked at her phone, just to check the time. She noticed she did not have any new text messages and put her phone in her desk drawer. She then realized she had not actually noticed the time, so she took her phone out again. She noticed that since she’d put the phone in her desk drawer a moment ago, she had not received any new text messages. She put her phone in her desk drawer again. Then she remembered that there was a clock on her computer. It was seven minutes after one. She noticed her Facebook profile was still open on her computer and she wondered how many people had just walked by her office on their way to Conference Room H and seen the picture of her in Hawaii with a mysterious man’s arm around her waist.
The problem with Lucinda’s office was that the walls were made of glass, and its central location meant you couldn’t not look directly into it on your way to the kitchen or the bathrooms or Conference Room H. She used to like being in the center of things like this—it made her feel important. But now it just made her feel like a fish in a bowl, constantly on display. Pretty colors for the people to look at.
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory Page 16