Part Two
The Workday
“The idea was this—that at a certain age a black hole emerged in the middle of your life, and everything got sucked into it, and you knew, forever afterward, that it was there, this dense negative space, and yet you went on, you struggled, you made your money, you had some babies, you got wasted, and you pretended that it wasn’t there and never looked directly at it if you could manage the trick.”
-Charles D’Ambrosio, The Point
i.
Sometimes, when I consider I’ll have to die someday what makes me saddest is the thought of all the books I’ll never get to read. It’s irrational, yet it’s what springs to mind. I’m not religious, and the most logical explanation for what happens after we die is that we stop existing. But if an afterlife exists, I hope it’s filled with books. Maybe I won’t care. Maybe when I’m sitting in heaven—assuming I make it—I’ll no longer have earthly predilections, and books will be the furthest thing from my mind. But I’m going to let the fantasy ride, as one should with fantasies. Since time won’t exist—for I can’t see how it would in paradise—I’ll get to read them all. I guess there’s no clearer indication I enjoy living in different worlds, through different characters’ lives, which is not to say I dislike my own. If there’s an afterlife, I hope my friends and family are there. It’s just that, while I’m able to bear the fact there are books I’ll never read, I’m buried beneath the crushing weight of grief whenever I think that there will be a point at which I’ll never see my mother or father again, when I’ll never gaze upon my wife, when I’ll have to part ways with my daughter. So I linger, lamenting the fact I may not get to Don Quixote, because it’s easier to think of this. And whenever I think that I might not get to Don Quixote, I think of my job, the office, the time I devote to activities I don’t care about. Whenever I think I might not get to Don Quixote, I think, with deep-seated resentment, of the waste of a workday.
I stand at the corner of 6th and Walnut, waiting for the light, gazing up. Earlier this year, our company moved from one ugly building to another. The inside here is nicer than the last place, fewer roaches. I haven’t seen mice at my desk yet. But the outside’s an eyesore. I researched it online and discovered the building won an architecture award in 1977. I can only assume they must have been hard-up for nominees that year. The building is sectioned off into two distinct halves. The half closest to 5th stands some twenty-five stories and looks about as close to Stalinist architecture as anything I’ve seen in Philadelphia while the portion closest to 6th is eighteen stories with granite columns and might be pleasing on its own, but the overall dichotomy doesn’t cohere. Then again, maybe it’s just that I work here, and the sight reminds me I might never read Don Quixote.
You’re being ridiculous. If you want to read Don Quixote, read Don Quixote.
But that’s not the point. The point is: there will always be something I’m missing out on, something I’m not getting to.
Oh, boo-fucking-hoo, that’s life, trade-offs.
But I hate this fucking place.
I spin through the revolving doors, cross the marble floor, and board an elevator. Unlike our previous building, the elevators here talk, an automated voice, and there’s nothing as motivating as an automated voice reading off your floor and saying “Good morning” at eight a.m. A week ago, I got stuck between the seventh and eighth floors. The car had tried to move, and the brakes locked. Each time it happened, the car jolted and the voice said, “Please do not be alarmed. We are experiencing technical difficulties.” Why be alarmed when you’re dangling in a metal box eight stories above the ground? I pushed the call box, an attendant answered, they fixed it. I was only stuck for fifteen minutes. I consider taking the stairs today, but the stairs sap too much energy, so I board and hope for the best. What are the odds it will happen again?
Once the elevator reaches my floor, I use my keycard to open the door. The office is quiet this time of day. Only a few others arrive before me, one of whom is Ken, another supervisor. I pass his desk, shuffle, sing a few bars of “Good Morning” from Singin’ in the Rain, though I don’t know where I get the verve. Ken flips off his headphones.
“Good morning,” he says.
“Hey, Ken. How are the motherfuckers and sons of bitches today?”
These are the categories into which Ken places the authors we work with day-in/day-out: motherfuckers and sons of bitches. Only a small percentage cause problems, but the problem cases have greater resonance, so I call them motherfuckers and sons of bitches, too. It helps to curse—not at them but about them. It’s how we let off steam. I string together creative combinations of expletives in a low growl whenever something sets me off. It keeps me going, keeps me sane. It helps stem the rising tide of anger that grows within me throughout the day. Of course, we aren’t supposed to curse. We only talk like I’m talking with Ken when no one else is around. When things get bad and I can’t, I replace cursing with sighs—loud resigned sighs—and Rose, another supervisor who sits in front of me, laughs and says, “Sigh master strikes again.” Our department has six supervisors total, and we sit in our own little corner, share our own little jokes. This is one of the things I like about working here, the camaraderie, the sense of us against them. If any resentments exist, I’m not aware of them, which is partly because I stopped going to happy hours around the time I met Justine. It’s also because the two women in management positions above us aren’t going anywhere, so there aren’t any positions to be promoted into, no reason to bicker.
I didn’t begin this job with designs on upward mobility. All I’d wanted was a job that paid the bills and gave me time to write on the side. Before this, I waited tables. I worked part-time as a proofreader in medical publishing. I’d taken an apartment in West Philly with two roommates for three-hundred dollars a month and paid for health insurance through COBRA, more to put my mother’s mind at ease than from any sense I’d fall ill. I was eking by. I made between fifty to a hundred dollars more than monthly expenses. I’d been sitting through one interview after another, not getting hired, which I recognize in hindsight wasn’t the result of insufficient skill, but because I couldn’t sell myself. I lacked the confidence to convince employers I could do whatever they needed. I’d even interviewed here, for an assistant position, and not been hired the first time around. But I tried again, met the head of my department, a man I still report to, and he’d sneered, “I didn’t hire you last time. What makes you think I’ll take you now?”
By that point, I was so exhausted looking for a job that I’d lost all sense of decorum. If I had to wait tables the rest of my life, so be it. I figured I wouldn’t get this anyway, so I answered honestly, with arrogance. “You made a mistake. I’m giving you a chance to fix it.”
I was good at what they hired me to do. My basic responsibility was shepherding research papers from manuscript to finished article. I ran proofs by authors, input their changes. I learned to balance speed and quality, and when competitors started poaching our employees, my boss promoted me to make sure I didn’t join the migration. I didn’t have to expend much concentration either. The job was full of rote tasks, and during lunch, I wrote. In the meantime, another position opened above me, and I applied, not because I was ambitious, but because it came with more money. I was saving for a house. I dreamed of a wife, a family, children. My eyes were opening to the compromises necessary for comfort. I saw my parents’ struggle as legitimate—my father trudging off to work each morning, supporting us paycheck-to-paycheck. I was vying for a position in management because I wanted more than that. Over the years, my mother stressed about money. She sat with the Sunday paper clipping coupons, collecting stacks of circulars. I watched her balance the checkbook, rows of numbers in black ink, Catholic-school script, her eminently legible hand. I saw the way stress would radiate off her whenever she picked it up, the way she cursed, muttered beneath her breath. I noticed the hunch in her posture, her deep concentration, making sure we had enough to eat, wore decent clothes. Whenever we lost a pair of gloves, an umbrella, she got angry. She gave lectures about responsibility that we didn’t heed, and we lost more gloves and umbrellas, but she never stopped buying them because she’d rather have us wear and lose them than shiver with cold or get soaked.
For as long as I can remember, my dad has earned it, and she’s managed it. These are stresses of a different kind. My dad rarely displays his. His personality conceals strain. He sees what has to be done and does it. If he needs to pick up overtime, he does, and he doesn’t complain. Throughout my youth, he came home, hopped in the car, took us to music lessons, baseball practice, swim meets. He keeps moving, which helps ward off stress. My mother keeps busy in different ways, and the chores she completes, the checkbook she maintains, the beds she makes never allow her to take her mind off money problems. She is, like me, someone who worries, someone who thinks things through and weighs potential outcomes and obsesses over the bad—losing your house because you lost your job and can’t pay the mortgage, not having enough to eat, falling behind because you had an accident and have medical bills or because your car or hot water heater broke and you have to buy a new one. Neither went to college, so my mom urged me to get an education, fearing I’d struggle like they did. And I pushed myself, internalized the pressure. I went to a state school, got a scholarship, avoided having to take out loans and lived at home to save on room and board. I followed her advice, remained debt-free. And I found a job that used my degree. I’d followed her plan. I’d ended up secure, though I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I didn’t play it safe. If I’d taken risks. If I’d moved to New York after college with my high school friends.
But you can be a writer anywhere. All you need is a notebook. If you’re astute and attentive, if you don’t let your mind rot. Find time within your day, jot a few ideas. Construct slowly if need be, sentence-by-sentence. But that was the hard part, not letting your mind rot. New York might have been exciting. The publishing world is there. Contacts. Agents. Editors. Maybe if I’d moved, I would have succeeded, published a book by now. I wouldn’t be fretting about making middle management. People talk about the energy in New York, the way it inspires. But I’ve visited enough to suspect they’re talking about the past. A time when New York was crime-ridden and affordable. A time when outcasts from around the country came to congregate and exchange ideas and make exciting music and paintings and plays. A time before AIDS wiped out the gay community. The time of CBGB and Warhol and his Factory. As much as I’d been tempted by all this, that version of the city doesn’t exist anymore. As soon as rents became too high for dreamers to afford a room to work in, the dream was dead. It was more likely, if I’d moved to New York, I’d become another entitled hipster living in Brooklyn, talking a good game but producing nothing. I’d met legions of them whenever I’d gone to visit Lex and Jim. But I also wonder if I might be telling myself this to stave off regret. If I’d gone, would I feel more alive? Would I be happier?
My parents had given me advice: have something to fall back on. I’m sure the parents of artistic kids everywhere do this. What I didn’t realize was that your fallback becomes your fall forward, falling into mediocrity. By accepting promotions, I feared I was becoming nothing, a nonentity, rushing headlong into normalcy, anonymity. Would I be subsumed?
I had, in my position as an entry-level employee, engaged in petty rebellions aimed at making myself believe I wasn’t buying in. I found ways to cut corners. I had time in the workday for my own pursuits. Some afternoons, I’d go to the movies, and no one noticed I’d been gone and no one complained because I got my work done. I’d go out at lunch and eat a burger and have a few beers and come back and finish the day. I didn’t think I’d be able to get away with this now, now that I’d been promoted. And I worried I couldn’t lead. As a colleague, I’d had my coworkers’ respect. I was known as one of the stronger editors. The staff I now oversaw was composed of people who’d formerly been colleagues, and I’d socialized with them, gone to happy hours, had pleasant conversations. But would they recognize my authority now that I managed them? Would they come to me with problems? Be honest if they encountered trouble? Or would they see me, now that I’d taken this role, as their opposition? Could I take the role and use it to advocate on their behalf, or would I become a company man, someone who pushed the agenda of power in increasingly ignoble attempts to cover my own ass?
In the handful of jobs I’ve had, the managers I respected most were those who’d worked their way up, who understood what the people they managed did because they’d done it themselves. Despite my reservations, I couldn’t refuse promotion, both from a monetary standpoint and out of pride. If I didn’t take it, I was admitting I couldn’t do it, and this filled me with shame. Then too, if I let a promotion slip by, I’d look at whoever got it and wonder if I couldn’t have done it better. And if I didn’t become a writer, what would I have to show for my life? Would I work the same entry-level position the next forty-five years?
Again, it came back to a question I’ve never stopped asking: what is success? Was promotion success? Was writing a decent story success? Raising good kids? Was I destined to be perpetually dissatisfied, always chasing some ill-defined measure of achievement? I couldn’t answer that. But I needed a change. So, I took it. Six years later, I’m still at it. I’ve had to shuck the idea I couldn’t do both: write and be good at my job. I’ve kept writing during lunch breaks. I think up stories during my commute. I carry around a notebook and jot down ideas, phrases, lines that I’ll come back to later. I write between other tasks and find a different type of satisfaction in caring for the people I manage, trying to nurture their talents.
It might be true that no one dreams of working in academic publishing, but most people, when they get the job, still want to be good at it, and I’m no different. Still, whenever someone leaves, I can’t suppress some jealousy, since the job I’d intended as a placeholder, as something to pay the bills while I pursued writing, has become a trap. With a mortgage and child to support and four weeks’ vacation time, I can’t walk away, say I’m tired of this and live paycheck-to-paycheck off whatever else I find. I have to make a certain amount to keep up with bills. There are days I need off because daycare is closed or Sadie gets sick, and vacation time comes in handy. There are so many reasons not to leave, but the real reason is that I’ve grown comfortable. I know the job so well I can do it without exertion, and though I’m dissatisfied, though the things I like about the job aren’t enough to keep me engaged, I have trouble believing anything other than writing will make me happy.
I sit and open my email and try to shut down any vestige of higher brain function. Every question someone asks, I’ve answered a thousand times. Most responses require little thought. Open, scan, hit reply, type, repeat. My fingers operate on autopilot. I have a compulsive personality that needs to read and respond to correspondence first thing. Unanswered emails put me on edge. I log into our database and notice someone has changed the company logo to a pumpkin. Halloween is two weeks away, and it signals the start of my favorite stretch of the year.
I lean back and look out the window. The sky is a perfect azure. A helicopter buzzes past on its way to Jefferson Hospital. It skims the tops of buildings and disappears. I glance down into Washington Square. Early morning commuters crisscross the diagonal walkways. The trees have changed color. They’re golden and red, a rich dark red that fills my chest with warmth and makes me to breathe deeply whenever I see it. Had the streets been decorated for Halloween? I’d walked to the train station and hadn’t noticed. Some of my neighbors decorate. One of the neighbors at the end of the block slings a web of white-gray mesh across his porch and puts out a life-sized figure of Spider-man, but I’m almost sure it wasn’t there. Could I have missed it? It doesn’t matter. I’ll look for it on my way home. I like all the gaudy decorations: the tombstones lining the lawns; the ghosts stuck to windows; gigantic spiders concealed in the branches of trees. I watch horror movies in the weeks leading up to the holiday, Universal classics like Dracula or Frankenstein, the ‘70s remakes by Hammer, modern slasher fare like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. I don’t even stick to the first in any given franchise but go on binges where I’ll watch all the sequels, too.
When I was small, I watched The Blob and King Kong with my uncle Joe in the living room of my grandmother’s house. Weekend afternoons, they’d show old movies on TV. I liked being scared—anticipation, tension, release. When I was ten, I caught a commercial advertising A Nightmare on Elm Street as the late-night movie on FOX. The spot lasted thirty seconds, but having caught sight of Freddy Krueger’s charred visage, I was enraptured. I had to see it. Nothing would stand in my way, not even a parental edict that I couldn’t watch, that it wasn’t appropriate for someone my age. My parents had forbidden it. But that night, I waited, pretending to sleep, and after they’d gone to bed, I snuck downstairs and sat close to the TV, the station on, sound down. My hand was resting on the knob, and I shut it off every time I heard a floorboard creak upstairs. It was thrilling to be awake, watching this movie without permission, to sneak behind their backs and do something they’d forbidden and succeed. Then, he appeared. First as shadow, long arms stretched across a back alley. His glove with its four finger-knives scraping against the metal of trashcans to produce a nerve-chilling screech. And then, he was there, in the flesh. The deep furrows on his burned face, the raspy voice, taunting his victim, those yellow eyes. He was evil incarnate, vengeance in human form. And I couldn’t have been more frightened if he’d appeared in the room with me. Everything in me screamed to look away as he chased that girl down the alley. But I couldn’t. There was something both repellent and attractive in my fear.
My fascination with the macabre had started that summer at the library. I got picked on by other kids, so I lost myself in reading. The library was quiet, low-lit with muted brown hues that came from a combination of dark carpeting and halogen bulbs. They had metal racks full of books. I loved books. From an early age, there were scores in my room—Dr. Seuss, Golden Books. My mother read to me and sparked the interest, and once I discovered this building filled with books you could borrow, I gravitated toward it. Most days I browsed the children’s section—Judy Blume, Hardy Boys. Sometimes I snuck back and looked at the sex education books, but this was more to sate my curiosity than for any clandestine arousal. If I wanted arousal, I’d stop at the magazine section and open copies of Glamour where my friends and I had discovered advertisements featuring lingerie-clad women. One afternoon, out of boredom, I wandered into the adult fiction section, perusing the thicker hardbacks, and stopped at the first author whose name I recognized. I pulled his biggest book, the plastic sheathing they used to coat the dust jackets crinkling in my hands.
On the back cover was a photo: a large gawky man with dark hair holding a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He didn’t make much of an impression on me. But once I turned the book over, I was mesmerized the way I’d be by Elm Street. The cover showed a sewer grate with a paper boat floating toward it. Reaching through the grate was a scaly green hand with talons for fingertips. Beneath the author’s name, a single word was printed in red lettering, It. The sheer size was a challenge, bragging rights. If I finished I’d be able to say I’d read a thousand-page book, but the real reason I checked it out was this image. I had to discover what It was.
I took down two more—Cujo, Dead Zone—and walked to the circulation desk, as though by taking three instead of one, I could fool the librarian that these works weren’t woefully beyond my years. I worried they’d stop me, but the librarian checked them out without hesitation. The mistake I made was that when I got home, I placed the books on the stereo speaker inside my front door where my mother could see them.
“What are those?” she asked.
They were obviously books. But I answered anyway. “Books.” To which she responded, “Not for you, they’re not.” She made me return them, and I waited for the librarian to reshelf them. Once she did, I absconded with Cujo to a chair in the back corner. Day after day, I sat and read it there. Cujo was modest in length compared to It. And while I understood the plot—rabid dog terrorizes woman and son in broke-down car—the subtext was above my head—marital difficulties, infidelities, problems encountered raising children. I skimmed those parts, racing toward the bits where the dog attacked. I identified with Tad Beaumont, the ten-year-old. He has a monster in his closet. I worried there was one in mine, too.
Under my bed was a demon waiting to assail me, if ever I was so foolish to let an arm or leg dangle off the side. If I needed to leave my bed at night and go to the bathroom, I had to be quick about it, spring from bed at a distance where the claw—a claw not unlike the one I’d see on the cover of it—couldn’t reach out and grab my ankle, subsume me in a portal it had created there. To protect myself, I took a book of bible stories, bound in imitation red leather, which I believe had been my mother’s, from the bookcase across the room, and placed it under my pillow. There were also a pile of stuffed animals at the foot of my bed, that, in the stage between puberty and adolescence I fancied could come to life, and I made a pact with them to offer me safe passage through the night, but still, I had to make sure to keep the entirety my body beneath the sheets and comforter because they contained talismanic properties that would prevent the claw from piercing through and reaching me. I had a wild imagination, and eventually, I read It as well, and this only furthered my conviction of the monster in the closet. It was also where my love of literature began. I moved onto Poe and Ray Bradbury, Clive Barker and HP Lovecraft. By high school, I was reading Crime and Punishment and Native Son, both of which contained elements of horror. I was attracted to work with elements of the illicit. And if someone said I shouldn’t read a book, if someone said a book was in bad taste, tawdry, I had to engage it.
Then, too, with Halloween, I like to dress up, become someone else for a night. At work, they encouraged it, held contests for best group, individual costumes. There were food and cakes and candies in the kitchen. One year, I’d dressed as Indiana Jones. Leather jacket, khakis, button-down shirt. I’d gone to the costume store to buy a hat and whip and walked around the office humming the Raiders of the Lost Ark theme. That was eight years ago. I haven’t dressed up in a while. Before marriage and parenthood, I went out. I dressed for parties. When I’d lived in West Philly, there was always a Halloween party somewhere.
These days I sit on the sofa, watching Night of the Living Dead, answering the door for trick-or-treaters, which doesn’t make for a bad night, but it isn’t exciting. The littlest kids roll through first. I’ve seen princesses and cowboys, football players, astronauts, ninjas. The ones around Sadie’s age have no idea what’s going on, but they lap up the attention. Then, we get bigger kids, middle school, early high. Later on, we get kids from the college up the street, and though I don’t begrudge them candy, I can’t help wondering why they’d opt to trick-or-treat when there are parties they could go to. Even if they weren’t invited to any, there are usually enough to have their own fun back at the dorms. Get an older student to buy them booze. Engage in some good-natured Halloween-themed fooling around. But who am I to judge? I didn’t do that in college. I’d commuted, and commuting, I didn’t have a circle of friends, didn’t get invited to parties, didn’t even have the few others to form a little enclave with an older student buying booze. It was only afterward when I’d moved to the city that I found these things. Before I met Justine, I’d attend one or two Halloween parties every year. I’d gotten together with my last girlfriend Judy at one, and despite how it ended, that night was a good memory, one the intervening years hadn’t tarnished. I didn’t think of it often, but I was glad I’d had the experience of freedom and recklessness, and every once in a while, I recalled it with some wistfulness, not because I longed to return to it, but because it had passed and wasn’t coming back.
I’d dressed as a devil. I’d worn a dark green suit, painted my face white, bought a pair of red plastic horns that lit up in the dark. I’d shaved my beard to a pointed goatee and opened my black button-down shirt to reveal a synthetic gold chain draped across my chest hair. “You look good, Jones,” my friend Robin said. She was sporting penciled-on whiskers, a headband with kitten ears. She wore a black dress. We were going to a party on Chester Avenue. Robin was a coworker who’d started a few months before, and though we’d slept together a couple of times, we weren’t dating.
“No Horny Devil jokes,” I said.
“Hey, if the shoe fits…”
“Or the horns in my case…”
Robin was beautiful but wasn’t interested in dating me, so I was hoping to meet someone at the party. We’d had a few drinks at my place while waiting for my friend Jim to arrive. He was in town from New York and wanted to come. The party was hosted by my former roommates. They’d taken over the top floor of a house around the corner, and when we got there, the lights were dim, the music loud and pulsing. Both their downstairs and loft were packed. I went to get drinks and said hello to friends on my way to the kitchen. When I returned, I pointed to an open space in the loft, and Robin and Jim followed me up. My former roommates were playing one of the hip-hop mixes I’d made for a party when we lived together. I liked parties. They removed my inhibitions. The writhing mass of bodies. Arms and legs flailing in unison, rhythm. I grabbed Robin’s hand and pulled her onto the dancefloor. Jim followed, but his presence was an afterthought. We’d been friends a long time. He wouldn’t hold it against me. He’d been eyeing Robin, too. With anyone else, I would have been jealous, but not with Jim. Jim was a brother, and he wasn’t good with women. So, I felt sorry for him, but I wasn’t going to facilitate it. Robin and I had planned to come to this party before he called, so she was with me, and I got the first dance, but she was in control. This was how our relationship worked. As long as we were both single, she could sleep with me whenever she chose. I would have liked to do it more often, but I wasn’t pushing my luck. She could be erratic. She’d tell me she wanted to keep things platonic, but then come to my door at one a.m. high on coke and hop in bed and let me have free reign over her body and then want to go back to friendship.
I wanted to see her more often, but here I was, playing it cool, hoping we might do it again. The only reason I was keeping an eye out for other girls was because she wasn’t a sure thing. It might have been better if I’d said straight out that I was fine with her coming and going as she pleased. This might have led to it happening more, but I was scared that saying this would stop it altogether. So I invited her to parties and figured one thing might lead to another.
Around the fourth song I spotted a girl in the crowd. She seemed to be gliding. She came over, grabbed me. She was wearing a white dress with an apron, slim-framed glasses, roller skates. I let her lead me off, I twirled her around. We drew close. Her aggressiveness turned me on. She grabbed my hands and brought them to her chest, and I moved them down to her waist, the lower halves of our bodies grinding, her legs against mine beneath her skirt. She was pretty, piercing gray eyes, brown hair. She drew her hair back over an ear and smiled. I pressed my forehead to hers. She tilted her head and our lips met. We were both drunk. I could taste it on her. I pushed her against the loft’s railing and kissed her again, deeper this time. The music went on, and the crowd danced around us. She hadn’t said a word. I’d seen her on the trolley. She was friends with my friends, but I couldn’t remember her name. I ran my hands down her back, grabbed her hips, and she ground them against me with greater force. I grabbed her ass overtop her skirt and kissed her again. She whispered: “Do you want to go down to the porch?” I nodded. It was private outside, and I wanted to see where privacy led. On the way out, I passed Robin and Jim. “We’re going to the porch,” I said, and Jim smiled. Robin gave me a fist bump.
The porch was empty, the night air chilly. I took off my jacket and draped it around her. The house was old-fashioned, Victorian-looking, though it wasn’t Victorian. The wood porch wrapped around the front of a red-brick façade. We took a seat on the edge and kissed more tenderly now. The night had dissolved. We became lost in each other, complete strangers but intimate. The party continued upstairs, and people passed by as they left. We hardly noticed until Jim came down and asked for my keys. The girl and I had been out there an hour, kissing, moving our hands over each other’s bodies.
“You want to come back to my place?” the waitress, whose name I’d learned was Judy, asked. We walked to her apartment in the translucent haze of lovers hooking up the first time, mistaking lust for love, and when we got there, we lay on her couch, entwined, placing our hands underneath each other’s clothes, beginning to learn each other’s bodies. She rolled on top of me, I slid my hand into her panties. She let it go on for a moment but then stopped me. “Not tonight,” she said. And I slid my hand back out. We continued to kiss until the sun streamed through her curtains.
“Can I see you again?” I said.
“I have to drive to Virginia today and visit some friends, but I should be back around eight.”
“Tonight? That sounds good.”
She took my phone and punched her number in.
“Call me,” she said, as I walked to the door.
I called her at eight, and she came over to watch a movie. By eight-forty-five we were in bed. The need to feel myself enveloped within her was pressing, animalistic. I pulled her jeans and panties off together, went down on her. After a minute, she grabbed both sides of my head, titled it up. “Fuck me,” she whispered. The two of us moved at such a frenetic pace that we came within minutes. Then we started again. We talked between making love, and she revealed she’d wanted to meet me ever since she saw me on the trolley. She knew I’d be at the party and had planned on making a move.
By morning, my pelvis hurt. She liked being on top. She’d slide down the full length of me and grind back and forth. She’d come so hard she’d lose herself and collapse. I liked watching her whenever she had an orgasm. The way her chest broke out in gooseflesh, flushed. The way she shook and shuddered, convulsed. The relationship carried on with this intensity for three months, with a drama only borderline alcoholics can achieve. We were always drunk. We said we loved each other after two weeks. We’d go to parties and get drunk and come home and have sex and drink more.
This lasted three months. I’m not sure how I held down my job. Most days I trundled into the office hungover. By the end of those months, she started to pull away. In hindsight, I should have expected it. We’d burned out. We didn’t have much in common. What we’d had was a brief maelstrom of sex we’d confused with love. It had consumed us, and once we’d exhausted the mystery of our bodies, there wasn’t much left. I didn’t like spending the night at her place. She had a cat that jumped on me in the dark and woke me, that clawed and scratched me. She had a heater next to her bed she couldn’t control. It seeped hot air, and I woke with my mouth dry, head pounding. I didn’t love her. I knew that deep down. But pride kept me from admitting it, from chalking up our relationship to three blissful months of consensual objectification. Instead, ending our relationship fell to her.
“Wait, you mean you’re breaking up with me because we’re not like the couple in Brokeback Mountain?” I said.
This was how she’d explained it. We’d seen the movie a week before. I’d taken her out for a date, one of the few times we left the bedroom.
“We don’t have that kind of passion,” she told me.
This was evasion. Even the strongest sexual relationships can’t survive without something else to propel them. She’d had the foresight to recognize this before me. But letting go was harder than expected. I got depressed. I laid on the sofa in my apartment watching mediocre romantic comedies and drinking. After a week, she wrote me an email. She wanted to tell me something.
What is it? I wrote back.
I want to tell you face-to-face.
Don’t waste my time. It’s someone else. I’m assuming that. Who is it?
I’m sorry. I never meant for this to happen. But I’m dating Owen.
I was sitting at work in my cube as I read this. Owen wasn’t a friend, but I’d seen him around at happy hours, talking to her. I was usually good at anticipating breakups, but I’d failed to do so here. I walked to the bathroom, sat in one of the stalls. I was tempted to kick the door in, smash the mirror, tear the soap dispensers off the walls. But why? Why did I want her? It wasn’t healthy. We were drinking too much. Yet, the niggling beast jealousy whispered in my ear: my place had been usurped. My pride was wounded, and whenever my pride was wounded I couldn’t think straight. I became maniacal, single-minded, all id. Whenever someone broke up with me, I’d get drunk and rage at the world, call my ex, recited poems I’d written her. This time around, I wanted to avoid that. I had to talk to someone, someone removed from the situation, someone who might calm me down, help me gain perspective.
I took the elevator down to where my friend Regina worked in IT on the eighth floor. She’d walked me through breakups before. She was up-to-speed on Judy. I stepped into her office, shut the door, slumped into a chair.
“What’s up, Jones?” she said.
She was typing. She stopped, looked up. When I told her, she smiled, as if to say, I wouldn’t call this unexpected.
“What did you think, Jones? Meeting a girl in a bar like that? Happily ever after? It doesn’t happen that way. I mean, I met her that one time. And I liked her. But I could tell something was off. You were bad for each other. You need to meet a girl doing something healthy, not at a bar.”
“It was a party,” I said.
She gave me a look.
“She wet the bed and tried to blame it on you.”
It was true. I hadn’t been drinking that night, but she had. I had to wake up early to go to my brother’s college graduation. She’d been at a club with friends but came over afterward. We’d fallen asleep, and when I woke at four, my pajama pants were damp. I rolled over and felt around under the covers. The bed was wet. I shook her awake, “Hey! Hey, Judy, wake up!”
She came to, disoriented.
“I think something happened,” I said.
We stood, and I pulled off the sheets.
“Oh my god,” she said. “Did you wet the bed?”
I had to think a moment. Maybe I had. Yet, my crotch was dry. If I’d wet myself, my crotch would be damp. Judy went to the bathroom while I stripped the bed, changed the sheets, put a towel over the spot. When she came back, she admitted, “It was me. It happens when I drink too much.”
I’d told Regina about it.
“What should I do? Tell her to lay off the booze? I mean, I drink too. We drink together, but wetting the bed is this whole other level.”
“Jones, if your girlfriend’s pissing the bed, she’s got issues. What did you think I’d say? Yes, lay off the booze. Unless you’re into the golden showers thing.”
To stop drinking would change the dynamic of our relationship, but I asked Judy, and she agreed: only on weekends. But Thursdays were kind of the weekend. So were Mondays, if you thought about it. So, it went on until it didn’t. Regina was right. This was for the best, but I didn’t like being alone. I didn’t like the thought that Owen was having the same sex I used to have with her. Were they having the same sex? Was it as good? Better?
“Let’s take the afternoon off,” Regina suggested. “You like the museum? I like the museum. You want to go to the museum?”
Regina was six-two, smart, pretty. She’d experienced enough drama in her life to avoid courting it. She advised me to do the same. Her husband Dominik was Polish but had lived most of his life in Sweden. He was bright, laidback, handsome. He had a charming accent, but then, to Americans, almost all European accents are charming. I’d only met Dominik once. But he’d made a positive impression. It was at a happy hour, the same happy hour where I saw how fiercely loyal Regina was to her friends. It was a going away party for our coworker Brian. Regina and Brian were close. Midway into the evening, Brian’s ex-girlfriend showed up. I don’t know if he’d asked her beforehand or got drunk and called her. But a half-hour later, the ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend showed up. From the look on Brian’s face, it was obvious the guy hadn’t been invited. Brian went from making toasts and celebrating to crushed, silent. Regina walked up to the ex-girlfriend and tapped her on the shoulder, “Can I speak to you outside for a minute?” They were gone a while. I went to the window and saw the ex-girlfriend pressed against the wall with Regina standing before her, wagging a finger in her face. When they came back, the ex-girlfriend picked up her bag and said, “It was nice meeting everyone.” As she and her boyfriend walked out, I turned to Regina. “I don’t know what you said, but if shit like that ever goes down for me, I want you in my corner.”
Regina had become my closest friend in the office. I talked to her whenever I was having problems. She offered advice, and it was always good, even if I didn’t take it. Now we’d gone to the art museum, but I didn’t feel like looking at paintings, so we sat outside on the steps overlooking the Schuylkill River.
“Screw her, Jones!” Regina said. “It’s been what? Four days? And she’s already fucking someone else? You’re better than this, better than her. Look, man, you have to get away from that scene. When people start this type of shit, don’t engage. You need to step back. If she calls you, don’t answer. If she emails, don’t write back. If your friends are hanging out with her, fuck your friends. You don’t need this type of shit in your life. If she forces the issue, tell her, ‘Bitch, you trippin’, talk to me when you’re done.’ Because that’s what she wants: drama. These bitches feed off it.”
It was sound guidance. But first I had to go on a two-week bender that culminated in attacking Judy’s new boyfriend in the back of a bar. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He owed me nothing. He’d seen a pretty girl, who’d wandered up to him, as she’d done with me, and he’d gone with it, like I had. But I blindsided him anyway. I drank a liter of wine, chased with bourbon, and decided to go to the bar where she’d be. If she wanted drama, I’d give it to her. I saw her with Owen, but I didn’t hit him. Instead, I grabbed him and slammed him into the wall. I thought doing this would make me feel better. Even in the state I was in, I didn’t want to hurt him. Just scare him. So I dropped him and left.
When I woke the next morning, my head was pounding. It all came back to me. I’d attacked him from behind. I hadn’t given him a chance to defend himself. That was bad. But once the shame started to dissipate, it was replaced by another set of regrets, regrets for what might have happened. What if I’d miscalculated and dropped him the wrong way? What if he’d hit his head? What if I’d killed him? I’d gotten away clean. I wasn’t even banned from the bar. But I was overcome with thoughts of what if? Regina’s words returned to me. Step away, you’ll be better off. She had talked sense, and I hadn’t listened. It was time to start. I got up, showered, went to the office. I was done meeting women in bars. There were things I wanted to do, things that didn’t involve getting plastered, screwing around, making bad decisions.
I hardly think of Judy anymore. Every once in a while, I miss my reckless youth, but life is better now. So why am I thinking this? Because it’s October? Because of the icon on our database, that pumpkin? Or is it something more? Am I retreating into the past to avoid my present? Because it’s easier to think about the past than figure out a way forward? Am I longing for a time when escape was easy? Why can’t we resolve this simple disagreement? Is it really so simple? Or is it bigger than one potato, one moment of selfishness, one incident? Maybe this is the first sign of a rift. Maybe she’s thinking of leaving me. Maybe she’ll hold off and stay for Sadie and leave when our daughter’s grown. I’ll find myself an old man, on his own, with no one. Or maybe I want to leave? Do I? I don’t think so. When I see the future, I see it with her. I keep circling around ideas of success and failure, but I know, at least in one sense, that failure would be to lose my wife. If all goes according to plan, I’ll be with Justine until I die. It’s absurd that this is success in marriage, that success means union until death, but there it is: the best possible outcome. The greatest failure would be to split. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but I’ll do everything I can to avoid it. Yet, I still can’t bring myself to say sorry. There’s some kind of block, a dissonance. Why?