She deleted her Facebook account.
She decided she would not look at her phone again for another hour.
She got a lot of work done in that hour, and also got a lot of thinking done about how much work she was doing and how good it was that she wasn’t dating Gavin anymore so she could focus on her work. Before she was dating Gavin, she used to spend a good portion of her day thinking about excuses to go visit Gavin in his office, but now she was not thinking that, so she could really be productive.
Before she was dating Gavin, she would idle in the doorway to Gavin’s office after hand-delivering him some research memo, and transform somehow from the boring Lucinda she had always been into some other Lucinda who was deliciously witty and charming, making all sorts of conversation around such scintillating topics as: That research memo was really fun to put together, and: How was Gavin enjoying Colorado Springs? and: Since she grew up there, did he need any advice about fun things to do in the Springs? and (when he called her bluff and said, “Yeah, what’s the best thing to do in the Springs?”): Oh, shit, uhhhh, drive somewhere else?
And when she kissed Gavin late one night in the copy room, while the whole team was line editing some bullshit after hours so they could get it filed by midnight, and when he kissed her back, with everybody in the whole world just on the other side of a paper-thin door eating paper-thin pizza over brick-thick documents, Lucinda had felt sexy and bold and beautiful and endlessly fascinating.
And when she went home with him and then showed up to the office the next day wearing the same clothes and everybody who walked by her fishbowl office on the way to Conference Room H could see it, she had felt sexy and bold and beautiful and endlessly fascinating.
And over the next five months and eight days, when she and Gavin would drown each other in tsunamis of text messages—inside jokes and tiny observations, but also occasional admissions of “God, I couldn’t pay attention during Andrea’s sexual harassment presentation because the whole time I was thinking about how badly I want you to rip my clothes off and fuck me in your office”—just knowing that these messages were being transmitted in the middle of Important Meetings, whizzing past the heads of their unwitting coworkers, all of these coworkers just living their boring, average coworker lives—it all made her feel sexy and bold and beautiful and endlessly fascinating.
But now she understood that she was wrong to have felt that way, because Lucinda was not sexy and bold and beautiful and endlessly fascinating. She was regular, and average, and boring, and fine.
And she knew that now, although to be honest, secretly part of her kind of thought it all along.
* * *
—
Everywhere she went there were little reminders of how completely Lucinda she was, how unworthy of any experience approaching extraordinary. She tried to open a small carton of orange juice and she couldn’t get the stupid thing of it to rip in the right direction and honestly why do they even still have these dumb little orange juice cartons here, like hasn’t this firm ever heard of bottles? And then she ended up spilling orange juice all over her shirt and she thought: I deserve this.
At the end of the day, Debbie asked if she was staying late and needed dinner, and Lucinda said, “No.”
She walked past Gavin’s office, which reminded her of Gavin.
She got in the elevator, in which she had kissed Gavin at least a hundred times, and she thought about how cruel the elevator was for reminding her of that. Fucking elevator, how dare it?
In the garage, she passed Gavin’s BMW, parked in Gavin’s parking spot.
On the drive home, she passed a store with a display in front that said WE SELL BOXES, which reminded her of the time she got mad at Gavin because he was always sucking up to Harold Weissman, laughing at all his jokes.
“And by the way,” Lucinda had said, “you never laugh at my jokes.”
And Gavin had said, “That’s because your idea of a joke is going into a store with a big sign out front that says WE SELL BOXES and asking the guy behind the counter, ‘Excuse me, do you sell boxes?’ ”
“Yeah. It’s hilarious when I do that.”
“It was kind of funny the first time you did that.”
“No. It gets funnier every time, and it’s bizarre to me that you don’t understand that.”
* * *
—
Lucinda made herself a chickpea polenta for dinner and forced herself to picture Gavin at his dumbest and unsexiest, like the time they were walking to Gavin’s car after lunch one day and he said, “Hey, look at this cute plant store,” and Lucinda thought: Did he just call this flower shop a “plant store”?
Lucinda imagined telling that story in a speech one day, and everybody laughing. Why was she giving a speech? Where was she? It didn’t matter.
“You know,” Lucinda continued in her imaginary speech, “Gavin’s the kind of guy who thinks hating brunch is a personality.”
More laughter from the crowd. It was everyone from the office, along with all of Gavin’s friends and Lucinda’s friends.
“Gavin’s the kind of guy who would love to go camping—he’d looooove to go camping, just not on any of the weekends you invite him to go camping with you, but seriously, he loves the idea of camping, he is definitely down to go camping with you, any day now, as long as he can bring his Tempur-Pedic mattress and white-noise machine.”
The imaginary crowd erupted with laughter as Gavin forced a grin and a nod to show that he was in on the joke, but Lucinda knew that behind the smile he was steaming, the way he always silently stewed when she teased him in front of his friends.
Lucinda relished his pain, but before she could turn the screw even more, he raised his eyebrows and offered a little smirk, like, What can I say? You got me, Luce, and in an instant Lucinda forgave him for everything. She realizes she was wearing a wedding dress. Why? Oh no! She was giving this speech at her wedding, to Gavin! What a terrible thing to be happening! Why would her imagination do this to her?! She immediately stopped imagining.
* * *
—
Lucinda crawled into bed and thought about when would be a good time to quit her job. She knew she couldn’t quit now because then Gavin would assume she was quitting because of the breakup, and she didn’t want to give him that power.
She thought about humiliating Gavin on her way out the door, printing out all the dirty emails they’d exchanged from their work accounts and plastering the glass walls of her fishbowl office with them for everyone to see.
“What the hell is this?” Gavin would say, as his peers and mentors congregated around Lucinda’s office and immersed themselves in their entire epistolary romance.
Lucinda would look at the pages on the wall and pretend to be confused. “Oh, I just wanted some privacy in my office so I covered the windows; I wasn’t even paying attention to what I was printing out. Well, anyway, I quit.”
“This isn’t funny, Lucinda,” Gavin would shout, and Lucinda would have to agree that it wasn’t funny, not really. But maybe Lucinda wasn’t capable of being funny anymore. Maybe Gavin was right—she was never really funny to begin with.
Lucinda imagined Gavin storming into her office to tear down the emails, and it struck her that this would be the most time Gavin had ever spent in her office. It occurred to Lucinda that throughout their affair, but also just throughout them working together, all of their major conversations had taken place in his office. Gavin was fond of poking his head through Lucinda’s doorway to ask for a memo, or nodding at her through the glass wall on the way to Conference Room H, but all the important milestones in their sexual and/or professional relationship had taken place on his turf.
But again, her breakup with Gavin was not the reason she wanted to quit, which is why she couldn’t quit right now, and she couldn’t quit in any way that seemed to imply that the decision
was even slightly inspired by Gavin.
The truth was she’d been thinking about leaving Weissman, Zeitzman & Kinsey ever since the firm made Karen Glassman a junior partner. The truth was Lucinda never even wanted to work there in the first place; she just kind of fell into the position, the same way she seemed to always just kind of fall into everything. A person as unexceptional as Lucinda doesn’t live a life as much as a life just floods in around her, filling up whatever empty space a life should be occupying. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be a lawyer really—she’d just gone to Boalt because nothing else was happening for her, and she figured if she went back to school she could put off making any more decisions for at least another couple years.
Gavin always thought this was hilarious—that someone would go to law school and take the bar just for the hell of it—and when Lucinda tried to clarify, “I didn’t say it was just for the hell of it,” Gavin said, “No, no, I get it.”
And then they made Karen Glassman a junior partner.
* * *
—
Lucinda thought about Karen Glassman’s promotion on her drive to work. She thought about Karen Glassman’s promotion a lot. She actually liked Karen Glassman, personally, and she was happy for her success. There was no real reason to think about her promotion so much, other than it was easier for Lucinda to think about that than to think about the end result of Karen’s promotion: Gavin and Lucinda getting in a big fight about it.
She’d asked Gavin if the partners had ever considered making her a junior partner, and Gavin said, “You know I can’t answer that.”
“Boo,” Lucinda said. “What’s even the point of having a secret relationship if we’re not going to be spies for each other?”
Gavin bristled at the accusation, even though technically there had been no accusation—Gavin just always heard accusations in everything, which would’ve been a good thing for him to discuss with his therapist, if he didn’t also consider it an accusation of some sort every time Lucinda suggested he see a therapist.
“The only reason we’re in a secret relationship,” he muttered, “is because you didn’t want to go to HR.”
“Yeah, but that’s just because I wanted to work on your cases still. If we went to HR, I’d have to work for Harold or Joel, and then I’d probably kill myself, and that would be a whole other legal headache.”
* * *
—
Lucinda now spent the morning trying not to think about that conversation. It was a very productive morning—she got a lot of not thinking done.
For lunch she had a kale Caesar salad.
After lunch, she shifted to not thinking about the next Karen Glassman conversation, the one that oozed out three days later because she couldn’t leave well enough alone. She kept scratching at the Karen Glassman itch, sniffing around the periphery of the Karen Glassman situation, edging right up to the woods of Karen Glassman and making a camp at the entrance to those woods, and starting a fire at the camp, and baking some beans, until finally Gavin (who would love to go camping sometime) exploded, “Luce, drop it, you were never going to get Karen’s promotion.”
“Why not?”
“Come on, you can’t compare yourself to Karen. She’s actually looking at this as a career—she believes in the work we’re doing.”
“I believe in the work!”
“Luce, you know what I mean. Karen gets dinner at the office and works late every night.”
“I sometimes work late!”
“No, you don’t! You used to work late, but that was just so you could flirt with me.”
“You never told me I was supposed to!”
“I’m not going to tell my girlfriend she has to work late. Besides, you don’t even really want to be a lawyer.”
“I totally do, kind of!”
“Come on. This place is a joke to you. You’re always writing up jokey research memos, about like the Barenaked Ladies or whatever.”
“Okay, first of all, the band is just called Barenaked Ladies, there’s no ‘the.’ ”
It’s true that Lucinda had once spent hours of her own time putting together a research memo on the Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies, specifically investigating whether then lead singer Steven Page was purposefully singing in a fake American accent for their 1998 hit single “One Week.”
She’d noticed that the song loudly announces itself with the lyric “IT’S BEEN,” but the word “been” is pronounced bin, which is the American pronunciation, as opposed to the more Canadian way of saying it, bean. Even more notably, the oft-repeated lyric “sorry” is also pronounced the American way, sawry, instead of a round Canadian soary.
After scouring the internet for video and audio interviews with Steven Page, she discovered that he did in fact pronounce “been” the Canadian way in casual conversation, which meant he (intentionally or not) was putting on a fake American accent when he recorded the song.
Lucinda couldn’t find any literature or analysis on this subject, so she was forced to conjure her own theories, which included:
Steven Page was actively suppressing his Canadian accent because someone told him his music would be more successful worldwide if he sounded more American,
he was subconsciously suppressing his accent because he’d already internalized this idea, or
the song itself is sung from the point of view of a character who lives in the United States and is in fact a subtle satire of American culture.
So, yes, Lucinda had written a memo about Barenaked Ladies and distributed it to several other lawyers in the office, but that didn’t mean she didn’t also, when she wasn’t doing that, take the job seriously.
“Plus,” Gavin continued, “you’re always talking shit about Joel and how handsy he is.”
“That’s not ‘talking shit’—”
“You know what I mean.”
“You think Karen Glassman never complains about Joel?”
“I’m just saying you and Karen want different things.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Luce, be honest. If we got married tomorrow and I said you never had to work again, would you still want to be writing research memos for Weissman, Zeitzman & Kinsey?”
All the air must have gotten tremendously embarrassed and left the room, because Lucinda suddenly couldn’t find any.
“What the fuck is that? A proposal?”
“No, I’m just saying.”
“Saying what, that I’m not partner material because I’m wife material?”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
“Do I know that?”
“Come on. You’re tired. Let’s go to bed.”
* * *
—
Two days, eleven hours, and four minutes after that conversation, Lucinda was working on a memo on the legality of secretly serving soup with chicken stock to vegetarian homeless people, when Gavin texted her, asking if she would swing by his office.
“Could you close the door, please?”
She did.
“I owe you an apology,” he said.
“No…”
“I think maybe I had the wrong impression of what you wanted out of this job. I think our relationship might have clouded my judgment.”
Lucinda thought this was awfully mature of him, all things considered, so she said, “Thank you.”
“And I also think if you’re really serious about this, as a career, then maybe this isn’t the right thing for both of us.”
“Maybe what isn’t the right thing?”
“Lucinda. Please don’t play dumb.”
“I’m not playing dumb,” said Lucinda. “I’m being dumb. Are you breaking up with me? Or firing me?”
And Gavin laughed and said, “Oh God, no!”
Lucinda relaxed a little and said, “Oh, okay.”
“You’re not fired, no. This is just a breakup.”
Lucinda quickly unrelaxed the little she had just relaxed and shouted, “What?!”
“Please don’t make a scene,” said Gavin. “I’m doing this because I care about you.”
“You’re breaking up with me, at work? Who does that?”
But Lucinda knew who does that. The kind of person who doesn’t want the woman he’s breaking up with to make a scene does that.
“This doesn’t have to be ugly. The truth is neither of us ever really understood what the other one was looking for.”
Lucinda nodded, and went back to her office, and thought about how incredible it was that in one conversation Gavin could break up with her, and also not give her a promotion, and also say, “I owe you an apology,” all without actually apologizing.
* * *
—
But now, Lucinda was getting very good at not thinking about any of that. In fact, that night, she had trouble sleeping, because she was so consumed by not thinking.
* * *
—
Lucinda woke up and it was Friday, and she couldn’t believe how long it had taken to get her to Friday. Every day had felt incredibly long and yet also incredibly empty. The week had been an endless string of moments, each one packed, stuffed, overflowing with emptiness.
At the end of the day, Debbie spilled into Lucinda’s doorway.
“Can I get you dinner?” she asked.
“Not tonight, thanks. I’m heading out soon.”
Debbie glanced up and down the hallway and then leaned farther into Lucinda’s office. “Hey, can I talk to you? About the Cinnamon Sugar Blast Oat Cubes?”
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory Page 17