The floor manager was a short, compact woman who wore her red hair in a tight circular bun. She led Ava from Floor 2 down a flight of service stairs and through a set of double doors on which two hardhats and two orange vests hung from Supportive Door Hooks. She handed Ava a hardhat and recited a list of preliminary safety procedures. Ava pushed aside her pending text to Mat in order to listen.
“Keep your hardhat on at all times. Look where you’re stepping. Pretend you’re at a fancy museum. Do not cross over any bright yellow tape.”
The warehouse was loud but orderly. High ceilings and enormous grids of windows allowed natural light to flood the space. The pine-scented air reminded Ava of the Steinway factory. She was yanked back to that day: Mat’s reddened cheeks, the light falling in wedges that lit up every particle of sawdust.
We had something really great, but she ended things . . .
She shook herself from the memory and followed the floor manager. Steel roller belts carried products from one station to another, where they were inspected and flat-packed into cardboard boxes. Ava scanned the room, picking out the Very Nice Box whenever she could find it. Her heart leapt to see her design in its raw components, evenly stacked with no wasted space for packaging. They were perfect.
“We’re implementing automation to help meet the demand from STÄDA’s new showrooms,” the floor manager shouted over the noise. “As you probably know, we’re slated to expand to two thousand new showrooms worldwide within the year.”
Ava peered down at the whirring machinery, whose various parts moved in a choreographed fury, affixing hardware to panels of wood, sending sheets of MDF through a curtain of white paint.
“We need preassembled floor models in addition to our flat-pack inventory, hence our new automated assembly system, which is now in its last phase of testing.” Ava looked out onto the automated assembly. She wanted to savor this feeling of awe and curiosity, which her SHRNK had told her was healthy for the brain. This would be the perfect thing to text Mat about. It wouldn’t be seen as needy; she would simply be sharing her enthusiasm with him.
“Because our operations have expanded exponentially, our safety practices have followed suit,” the warehouse manager continued proudly. Ava listened, following closely behind as the manager began describing the various measures STÄDA had taken to keep its workers safe in the presence of daunting machinery, and the parts of the warehouse that were off-limits for anyone who didn’t have specialized training. “So if you wanna work back here, and I can see in your face that you’re thinking about it,” the woman said, “go train for seven years. Then we’ll talk.”
* * *
Back at her desk, Ava stared at her phone. She had deleted her text history with Mat, and the prospect of writing the perfect message was like stepping onto a field of untouched snow.
Hi there, she typed. She erased it—it was the same irritated greeting she used to reprimand technical writers for slipping marketing language into instruction manuals. She glanced around the room, feeling that whatever she wrote was being projected onto the jumbo screens or onto everyone’s S-Chat channel, or directly onto Mat’s smart watch, as though he could see each draft, each deleted phrase, word, letter, and punctuation mark.
Good morning.
No.
Hello. How’s Gambier?
No! What was she, a Customer Bliss bot? She erased it.
Hey, I—
“Are you ready for your review?” Helen Gross’s voice came from behind her, and she quickly put her phone away. She checked her Precise Wristwatch. She was five minutes late for their meeting. She hated the thought of being quizzed about her work, especially by the cold fish that was Helen Gross.
Well, Ava had nothing to worry about. The success of the Very Nice Box should be proof alone of her excellence. She made her way to Helen’s office, which had been Mat’s before, and briefly allowed herself a fantasy that she would walk inside and find him there, surrounded by his Good Guys books.
“Yes, sorry,” Ava said, glancing around Helen’s office. The sight of it depressed her. Helen had replaced the lighting fixtures with gloomy chandeliers that dripped with beads of fake crystal. Where Mat had once shelved his Good Guys manuals and yellow items from the Swag Lounge, Helen had hung paintings of a white, morose cat. The office felt damp and smelled like yogurt. Ava pictured Mat’s reaction: I’m gonna have to pause my Positivity Mandate to go ahead and say what we’re all thinking, which is that Helen Gross is the human embodiment of cottage cheese.
Ava closed the door behind her.
“So,” Helen said, sliding into her oversized, off-brand desk chair. Was it possible for a voice to be clammy? She half stood, then awkwardly sat back down and untwisted the cap of a water bottle. “How are you?” she said.
How was she? “I feel very satisfied by the execution of the Very Nice Box,” Ava said, wanting to get the Self-Review over with as soon as possible. “I was happy to see that it’s now featured in the looping videos on Floor 12, along with the figures, which show the Very Nice Box outpacing all our seating furniture, combined, in sales. Plus the subway campaign and consumer reviews. Sofia told me it’s going to appear as a prop on four separate TV shows next year. Overall, I’m happy.” She stared at an oil painting of the white cat moodily gripping a knot of yarn.
Helen was taking notes in an off-brand spiral notebook. Ava tried not to look at what she was writing, but even when she did glance, Helen’s handwriting was impossible to read. Her fingers were stubby, and they ended in rounded, bulbous fingernails.
“Your work is good,” Helen said.
“Thank you.”
“And I believe it’s being wasted on bins.”
“Boxes, not bins,” Ava said. The correction was so automatic that she actually missed the content of Helen’s statement.
“Okay,” Helen said blankly. “I don’t know what the difference is, and I can’t imagine it’s meaningful.”
“Bins would include garbage cans, hampers—” Ava started, annoyed.
But Helen cut her off with her sharp, flat voice. “The point is, your talent has been wasted.”
Ava wanted to open a window. She had begun to sweat.
“What’s needed,” Helen continued, “is development in a new area that is experiencing an economic boom.”
“What area?”
“Feline furniture,” Helen said. Ava detected a twinkle in her eye.
“What?” Ava said.
“People want more furniture for their felines.”
“But STÄDA doesn’t make cat furniture,” Ava said. “Cat furniture is notoriously ugly, usually made of carpet and other materials that we don’t use at STÄDA because they’re distasteful.” She thought of what Karl would think of this. He would have said something poetic that both removed the tension and dismissed the idea of cat furniture entirely. And he loved cats.
“Cat furniture is not distasteful to cats,” Helen said, using air quotes around the word distasteful, then adjusting a small porcelain cat on her desk.
“But . . . people are buying STÄDA products, not cats.”
“People are buying STÄDA products for their cats.” Helen was vigorously twisting her necklace. Ava saw that a rash was spreading along her collarbone. “And I don’t see anyone making such a big fuss about our canine-related products, such as the Curious Leash. All companies need to expand in order to grow. In our case, we are expanding in the direction of feline furniture.”
Helen opened a large plastic three-ring binder that appeared to contain a sort of vision board of cat furniture. There were photos of carpeted towers, netted beds with suction cups on the ends, big blocky scratching posts, and a narrow, bright beam that one could install across the entire length of an apartment.
“You may borrow this binder to get your gears going,” Helen said.
“But I don’t want—I like boxes,” Ava said.
“That’s nice,” Helen said. “And I like going to Renaissance fairs. Sometim
es we have to do things we don’t like.” She used air quotes around the word like. “I’d like to see some preliminary ideas for feline furniture at the end of the week. Thank you.”
Ava stood.
“You forgot the binder,” Helen said.
“That’s okay,” Ava said. “The images are seared into my memory.”
* * *
The commute was at its worst that day. Signal problems kept the train underground between stations for so long that Ava began to feel like a vice was closing around her. The AC was overwhelming. The train conductor’s voice cut sharply into the car every couple minutes, startling her each time with a loud blast of static. Pressed between someone’s armpit and a woman who smelled like patchouli, she opened a new text to Mat. You won’t believe what your replacement is making me do.
She erased it.
I went on a really cool tour of the shipping warehouse today.
She erased it.
How’s Emily liking Gambier?
She erased it, stepping onto the sidewalk that led to her apartment. Sunlight had spilled across the sky, spreading pink light in all directions. Birds argued happily in the trees. Dogs ran exuberant laps in the park. A line of people waited for ice cream outside the Stoned Fruit. She approached her apartment and opened her phone one last time.
I miss you, she wrote, and pressed Send. Her blood pumped in her ears. She immediately wanted to take it back.
But an ellipsis appeared.
I like that shirt, Mat wrote. Is it new?
??
Look up from your phone, Lamby.
33
He leaned against the hood of his sports car, his legs crossed at the ankles. The bottom of the car was splashed with mud. His hair was longer than it had been when he left, but otherwise he was exactly as Ava remembered—his eyes a clear blue, his cheeks bright. He held his arms out to the sides as though to say, Can you believe it?, his mouth fighting a smile. He looked like a child waiting to receive a gift.
Ava’s heartbeat drummed in her throat.
“Lamby,” he said.
“Why . . . how,” she began, walking toward him as though he were a mirage, but she couldn’t finish the question before he pulled her to him and kissed her, holding her face in his large hands. She took him in. His piney scent, his warm breath that was sweet and minty.
Of all the competing needs she had in that moment—to understand why he was standing in front of her apartment, to scold him for ruining the paltry momentum she’d built to get over him, to reckon with the embarrassment of her own surprise—the one that prevailed was her need to feel the entire weight of his body on top of hers.
They pushed up the stairs into her apartment. In one swift gesture Mat pulled Ava onto his lap, on the edge of her Principled Bed, and brought her close. It was as if he were trying to absorb her, a desire to which she would gladly have conceded. She pulled off her shirt, and then his. His chest was warm and more freckled than she had remembered. She held a fistful of his hair as he ran his mouth down her stomach. She touched him as if her hands could rebuild each part of him she’d lost.
Afterward they lay at the foot of the bed. Mat rested his head on Ava’s chest. She found it endearing that he liked to be held, and ran her fingers through his hair.
“I missed you,” he murmured.
“No you didn’t,” Ava said. She wanted him to say it again. She opened one eye to find him with his cheek propped on his fist, looking at her impishly, as if he were in the midst of scheming about something. “But I wrote you seven thousand letters!” he said, and Ava covered his mouth with her hand. He pried it away and continued to recite the line from the movie 7,000. “I wrote to you every day for twenty years!” Mat whined.
She laughed and kissed him again.
“You’re just trying to shut me up,” he mumbled into her lips.
“Maybe,” Ava said. “Are you saying you want me to stop?”
He shook his head.
“Good,” she said sternly, and pulled him back onto the bed.
* * *
In the morning Ava perched on a Reliable Stool at the end of the kitchen counter and watched Mat cook breakfast, worried he would disappear if she looked away. He was in his boxers, with a Courteous Dishrag slung over his shoulder, whisking eggs. She gazed happily at the scar along his ribs. He bopped his head to music that Ava recognized vaguely from its extended guitar solo. Brutus watched from his Dreamy Dog Bed. Mat occasionally called out to him, as if Brutus were going to take a solo, and his tail flicked at the attention.
Evidence of the huevos rancheros was everywhere. Eggshells and papery onion skins were strewn across the counter, along with most of Ava’s cooking utensils and a can of black beans, which Mat had opened three quarters of the way before prying it apart. He tossed a couple tortillas onto the burner over the open flame, flipping them with his bare hands when they started to smoke. If the beautiful uniformity of the shipping warehouse had an inverse, Ava thought, it was this.
“I went on the most incredible tour of STÄDA’s warehouse,” she said. “It was technically a safety training, but I got to see everything. I wish I’d sketched it. Did you ever do the tour?”
“Nah,” Mat said, sprinkling a tortilla with cheese. “They tried to get me to do that safety thing, but I left it to the nerds.”
“You missed out,” Ava said. She described the warehouse, the automated machinery, the sheets of wood running beneath a solid wall of paint, like wafers being coated in chocolate. “It was beautiful.”
Mat picked up a pair of Ava’s reading glasses from the countertop and put them on. Then he grabbed Brutus’s reflective vest and fit it over his head. “Does my safety gear turn you on?” he said.
“Okay,” Ava said, smiling. “So I’m a nerd.”
“A hot nerd,” Mat said, squinting at her from behind her glasses. He took them off and turned his attention back to the stovetop, where diced onions sizzled in a Benevolent Pan. Ordinarily Ava would have followed closely behind him, clearing the debris he left in his wake before it had time to sit, but this morning she felt happy simply to watch him. For a moment she allowed herself to imagine what it would be like to have Mat standing in her kitchen, serenading her dog, every Saturday morning.
She hadn’t asked about his arrival, and didn’t want to. She didn’t want to invite the likely truth into the room, which was that he was here for something administrative, like picking up his old mail, or formal, like attending the wedding of one of his Wharton friends. Both scenarios would mean he’d have to leave soon. Then she’d begin the process of moving on again, only this time it would be worse, because she’d hold out hope that he’d surprise her at each turn. She felt the question rising in her throat, but just before she could let it out, as though sensing her anxiety, Mat turned to face her.
“I quit my job,” he said plainly, handing her a Simple Dinner Plate of breakfast.
“You what?” Ava said. The steam from her eggs bloomed up in her face.
“I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve been miserable in Gambier. Without you, without the Guys.” Mat stood near the stove and jabbed at his breakfast. “There’s no Good Guys chapter in Gambier. Shocker. Anyway, I was rereading one of the manuals last week and was reminded that I really need to fire my unhappiness so that I can hire my desire to work for me instead.”
Ava blinked at him, vowing never to repeat this proclamation to Jaime. At the thought of Jaime, her stomach twisted. “Does that mean you’re staying?” she said, cutting into her tortilla with the edge of her Useful Fork. She wanted to sound hopeful but not needy.
“I need to start reaching for what I want, and here’s what I know for sure: I want to be with you. I want to make breakfast with you and walk Brutus with you and listen to TMM with you. I have some savings, and I’ll figure out the rest.”
Ava maneuvered through a crash of competing thoughts: How could a twenty-six-year-old man derail his career like this? Had he considered the possibility that s
he had moved on? Did he have a next move? But the answers to these questions were simple. Mat always landed on his feet, and she hadn’t moved on, despite her best efforts. Why complicate the truth, which was that she wanted to be with him too? For the first time in months she could have exactly that, and as the feeling settled, Mat set down his Simple Dinner Plate, lifted her off the Reliable Stool, and carried her back to bed.
The brightness of Ava’s desire for him was blinding. There was no amount of having him that could satisfy her, which left her feeling exhilarated. After a few urgent minutes they collapsed onto her Principled Bed and lay there, naked and entangled. She pulled his hand to her lips and kissed his palm.
“So I’ll take that as a yes?” Mat said, although Ava didn’t recall him presenting the idea of them getting back together as a question. “Although maybe you have another boyfriend, or a wife and kids, by now,” he said. He smiled, but she saw from his face that he wanted an answer.
“No,” Ava said. “Dating is truly bleak. I tried, but only managed to date a couple weird strangers.” She detected a glimmer of jealousy in Mat’s face. “I mean truly awful,” she said. “One guy took me to an absurd modern dance show and then kissed me as if I were made of glass. He actually went to Wharton. Amir Cade?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Mat said.
“He would have been in your cohort, I think.”
“What did you say his name was?”
“Amir Cade.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Mat had a look of epiphany. “Amir Cade?” he said. “Yes! He used to be Amir Cade-Stein. He married this girl in our year and they wanted to be equitable about the last name. But they divorced within, like, a year, so he must be back to just Cade. Honestly, though, that guy sucks.” He shuddered and pulled her close.
The Very Nice Box Page 20