Then We Came to the End

  “Humbly you submit,” said Larry, picking them off the coffee bar.

  It was obviously just plain wrong that the man was still in the building a full day after being laid off. But to have concepts, too? Some nerve system crucial to an understanding of the agreement one enters into when engaging in the capitalist system had obviously gone haywire in him, along with the rest of his ailing networks.

  “The problem I’m having,” he said, glancing back as if spooked, “is I can’t get credit for them because, well, you know, officially . . .”

  “You’re insane?” said Marcia.

  “No, Marcia,” he said, “not because I’m insane. Because officially I don’t work here anymore.”

  “Oh, right,” said Marcia, taking a sip of her latte. “Forgot that detail. But I wouldn’t worry, Chris. I’ve seen your resume. They’re going to scoop you right up.”

  “Why are you being mean to me, Marcia?”

  “Because you called me Karen!”

  “Chris,” said Benny, “listen. The project’s changed.”

  Yop’s attention was suddenly focused on the opening elevator doors.

  “Chris? Are you listening to me?”

  “Sorry,” said Yop, snapping back. “Benny, is Lynn really in today? Or was Dan Wisdom just fucking with me?”

  “Chris, listen. It’s no longer an ad for the fund-raiser. It’s this other thing now.”

  “What other thing?”

  “The project’s changed,” he repeated.

  “But I’ve been working on fund-raiser ads,” said Yop. “I was hoping you guys could take these in to Lynn and, you know, let it slip I came up with them.”

  “I don’t think you want credit for these,” said Larry, setting the ads back down on the coffee bar.

  “Now you’re telling me the project’s changed? — Go screw, Larry. — Benny, I spent a lot of time on these. I worked hard, man. I’m trying to get my job back here.”

  He paused to order a decaf from the barista.

  “Chris,” said Benny. “Shouldn’t you go home? Shouldn’t you stop worrying about these ads and go home and talk to your wife?”

  Yop looked away, distant and pensive. He removed a napkin from the dispenser on the coffee bar and wiped sweat from his brow. Then he set his head down on the bar, losing it inside his arms. He stayed that way for a while. When he looked up again, nudged by the barista holding his coffee out to him, his eyes were bloodshot and veiny. “Thanks,” he said, taking the cup. He handed off his dollar. “Will somebody do me a favor, please,” he asked. “Will somebody please e-mail me with details on how the job has changed? Will someone do that for me, please?”

  Before departing, he turned back to Marcia. “I’m sorry I called you Karen this morning,” he said. “I know you’re Marcia. My brain is fried, I just got confused.”

  He hurried off down the hall, staying close to the walls.

  “‘Tomorrow morning there’ll be laundry,’” said Hank. “‘But he’ll be somewhere else to hear the call.’”

  Karen Woo came toward us from the opposite direction.

  “Everybody come with me,” she said.

  She reversed in her tracks and headed back to her office.

  When we got down there she was sitting behind her desk holding the phone to her ear. She said to the person on the other end that she wished to speak with a nurse in the oncology department. As she waited to be transferred, no one spoke. We couldn’t believe it — she was making the call. Her cool composure was astounding, preternatural, and somewhat sinister. When the nurse came on, she remained confident and in character. We held her in awe.

  But as we waited, it was almost as if something swept the room and a collective epiphany dawned upon all of us at once and we knew for certain how wrong we had been about everything. No one would just miss a crucial operation. A crucial operation must have never been scheduled. Why had we not bowed to the eminently more reasonable likelihood that there was no cancer? That it was just a rumor, as Larry had suggested. Or if Lynn did have cancer and an operation had been scheduled, there were a thousand very simple explanations for why she might have missed it. Some scheduling conflict with the doctor, some clarification was needed in the diagnosis, more tests had to be taken, blood drawn, the doctor was sick, the hospital had lost power. All today’s intrigue was just cheap talk to better dramatize our lives. Why had we not seen it before Karen got on the phone with the nurse? Oh, to be seduced by that meddling, insensitive woman! To play along in her deception just to have our craven tabloid hysterias confirmed or denied. It was despicable. We were despicable. We should have stood up immediately, denounced her actions with one voice, and demanded that she —

  She hung up the phone. “Her operation was scheduled for nine,” she said. “The doctor was prepped and waiting. They called her at home, they called her at work. The nurse sounded irritated. She wanted to know when I wanted to reschedule.”

  The Thing to Do and the Place to Be

  THE NIGHT BEFORE THE OPERATION she has no association dinners to go to, no awards ceremonies, no networking functions. A plan comes to her impromptu in the back of the cab as she steps in and instructs the driver to take the Inner Drive. She envisions her sofa, her two cats, something good ordered in, and a bottle of wine she’s been saving. They ask you not to eat anything twelve hours before, but honestly, that’s unreasonable, isn’t it — your last chance at a normal meal for how long?

  She brought no work home with her, not tonight, because work would not be an appropriate way to spend the evening. Yet whenever she’s without it, even for the duration of a cab ride, she starts to feel anxious. Luckily it’s a short ride. She pays the cabbie and steps out in front of some serious real estate. She lives in the top-floor condo overlooking the winding coastal edge of Lake Michigan.

  The doorman stands at his post in the lobby; they exchange greetings and she heads up the elevator. Inside the condominium, she slips off one heel while hanging her keys on the hook. She slips off the other one, and with two heels in one hand, walks down the hall to where her pajamas await. Getting into pajamas — now that’s appropriate. Here is a good place to be, she tells herself, right here in this apartment, and getting into her pink hospital scrubs and jersey zip-up — that’s the right thing to be doing.

  At the kitchen table she pours herself a glass of wine. She reflects on the day, it can’t be helped. Chris Yop broke down when she delivered the news. If Martin were here, she’d say to him, A grown man crying! Would you do that? Of course you wouldn’t! Let me tell you something, I think I’ve grown immune to the emotion involved. His crying? It didn’t faze me one bit. You want to know when I feel something? It’s the person who says to me, Lynn, you’ve been terrific to work for, and I understand you’re just doing what you have to do — that’s who I feel sorry for. Those people kill me. A grown man crying? Uh, no. And listen to this! An hour later, he shows up for a meeting. I come in, he’s sitting in my office. I just fired him, he’s sitting in my office. I said to him, Chris, you have to leave. God knows I can’t have them sticking around!

  Wait — did she just say that last part out loud? A hazard of living alone. One of the cats is looking at her from the floor. Or is it just a look of hunger? She reminds herself — Martin’s not actually here, Lynn. “But you are, aren’t you, Friday,” she says, bending to scruff up the cat’s black coat. The cat bow-backs and asks for more. “Yes, you are,” she says, “and so am I, and so who needs him?” She straightens up and takes another sip of wine. Look at all of the chairs! A total of four chairs at the kitchen table! Why do I need four chairs? It’s important that she not second-guess anything, now that she’s home. She’s home, she’s in for good. Stop thinking, stop thinking, stop thinking.

  She wonders where Martin is. Is he at work? What time is it? Six-forty-five, of course he’s at work. Stop thinking. He’ll be at work for hours. Stop it. Lynn Mason, on the other hand, knocked off early today. Two very important new business pitches,
absolutely crucial to the agency’s future, and strategies for both still need to be worked out with the account people, but Lynn left the office at a reasonable hour, to come home to her cats, to spend the evening before her operation in a relaxing manner, unwinding with a little television, going to bed early and getting a good night’s sleep. What could be better, more desirable than that? Don’t think about Martin. And if she’s tempted, remember — it’s Martin at work. Just a man at his desk, grumpy, nasty with the day’s odors, engaged in some dull legal matter. Consider how undesirable his company would be right now. How could she want that, with all she’s got going on right here — the Chinese food on its way, and so many chairs to choose from.

  The doorman calls up from the lobby. Her delivery has arrived. Thank god, send him up. If he’s cute, she’s going to seduce him. No joke. It’s done, it’s decided. Think she has time to play games tonight? No, if he’s in the least way cute, she’s going down on him in the hallway. Well, not in the hallway. Why don’t you come inside? Will you shut the door for me, please? Delivery boys must dream of this. Maybe choose different pajamas? The pink scrubs and zip-up — not very mistress-of-the-night. She needs a robe, nothing underneath. Because it all sounds like a joke until you understand that someone has to be the last one to hold her breast in his mouth — tonight’s it — and she’d really rather it not be Martin.

  But he comes and goes. Young Asian, has his charms, but she loses the nerve. She takes the food over to the couch. The initial comfort of a seat on the sofa — yes, this is the right place to be, right here, and turning on the TV the right thing to be doing. She eats her dinner and drinks her wine while watching an episode of The Simpsons, and a half hour later her conviction is still nearly intact.

  On her third glass of wine, she repeats it to herself: Here is a good place to be, right here, and this thing the right thing to be . . . wonder what Martin’s doing? He’s working. Lynn, you know this. He’ll be there for hours. Think about something else. Wonder . . . wonder what movies are playing. She likes to see a movie when she has the time. Always better to see them with someone, though. Alone, there is that awkward ten minutes between the time you arrive and the time they dim the lights for the previews when against all reason you believe everyone in the theater is staring at you because you are a woman alone at the movies. It’s probably a good thing she’s here on the sofa, rather than waiting self-consciously for a movie to begin. This is the right place to be. Unless the alternative was a movie theater with Martin.

  Television isn’t working out. She turns it off, gets up, makes the cold transition from carpet to tile — but what is there in the kitchen for someone looking to indulge? No food for twelve hours my ass. This could be it. Let’s see — some freezer-burned ice cream. What’s in the cupboard? A third of a bag of mini marshmallows. For the life of her she can’t remember buying those. She’s not interested in any of it — though when she turns her attention to cleaning the bedroom closet, she does take the ice cream with her. It’s a spoon-bender. What compels her to do that, to clean? She stabs at the tub after every new pile of mess she drags from the closet out into the tidy room. It will be nice, she thinks, to have a nice clean closet during my recovery.

  Fifteen minutes later she does not want to be cleaning the closet. On this night of all nights, cleaning the closet? Does she have such a deficient imagination, that’s all she can come up with? Imagine if one night in a lifetime were looked upon as a scientist might look upon it, or some other life form studying our species, and from that one night, the worth of the entire life were derived. Well, she’d rather hers not be evaluated by the TV she’s watched or the closet she hasn’t cleaned. Besides, that goddamn ice cream requires a pickax. Abandoning everything, she returns to the kitchen and finishes the bottle of wine.

  MARTIN IS FORTY-FIVE and has never been married. His parents divorced when he was young and he never forgave the institution for any of its false comforts. He goes on and on about it, until finally she tells him, “Okay, I got it the first eight hundred times, you’re not the marrying type.” Still, he needed someone to go to Maui with. His firm kept a luxury box at Wrigley, there wasn’t a restaurant in the city he couldn’t afford — he wasn’t about to sit in them alone. He needed companionship, he needed sex. But perhaps that paints too one-sided a portrait of Martin. He could have dated only younger women, girls practically, paralegals and secretaries without a brain in their heads, attracted to his partnership, his money, the broad chest under his starched shirts. Instead he was with her, someone his own age, someone whose professional achievements he respected. And last August, he spent a week in Florida, an entire week in Cocoa Beach, taking her old dad around. Eating at five-thirty, speaking loud so he could hear — the whole routine. He never complained. That was something, wasn’t it — giving of his vacation time, meeting her family? And once in a while, he would show up with flowers, he would come up behind her and kiss her neck, and that would be enough to look past the birthday he forgot, or the dates he’d have to cancer because of work.

  Cancel. The word she wants is cancel.

  But what would commonly happen was that he would call at the last possible minute. “Deposition . . . judge moved up the court date . . . important conference.” Whatever it was would leave her alone, looking down the long double-barrel of Saturday and Sunday when it should have been three bottles of Merlot on Mackinaw Island and bedsheets warm with body heat. “Oh, fuck, Martin, not again.” “Hey, I’m sorry,” he’d offer. “But this is work, Lynn. This is what I do.” “Yeah, but you know what? Fuck you, because this was planned. We planned this thing, you and me — and what, I’m going to call Sherry now? I’m going to call Diane and say, Martin stood me up again, the asshole, want to rent a movie?” “Does it even count,” he’d ask, “does it even matter that I’m sorry?” The sorry part was how well she knew that Sherry, with twin ten-year-olds, was not in a position just to drop things and listen to another Martin story, and the other sorry part was how loathsome it sounded, renting a movie with sad, fat Diane. Sometimes she almost wished Martin were married and that she were fucking another woman’s husband so it could all be simpler — easier to deal with a cliché than Martin’s overriding obsessions. He wasn’t just not the marrying type. He was pathologically noncommittal. “I can’t do this,” she’d say. And there was silence on the other end. “Can’t do what?” “This,” she’d say. And that was it, they were off again.

  Then a night would come along — hey, not unlike this one — when enough time had passed that the specifics of their last conversation grew vague, when Lynn discovered that in the intervening days her anger at Martin had shifted toward understanding, which had spilled over, that night, into regret for how she had reacted when he canceled their plans. It had always been an understanding we share, the thought went, how important work is, and when we get together it’s what we talk about — this frustration of mine, that fascinating case of his, how we’re succeeding and failing and working hard. She would reflect back and think how selfish she had been, and slightly childish, too — and she would call. Or a few days would pass and he would call. “You were right, I fucked up, we had it planned,” he’d say. “Can we do it this weekend?” How good it was to have her hands on his chest again, how good to trip over his shoes again on the way to the bathroom.

  But not this night — no calling him this night. Not after their last conversation. No way to shift any of that emotional content. That back-and-forth is frozen like a mastodon in ice, and the rider on top, with his spear and animal urges, he is their year together, suspended forever with his mouth gaping wide, his whoop and howl finally silenced.

  WHOA — SUDDENLY it’s like something in a science fiction movie: how’d she get here? Just a second ago, she was sitting on the sofa with the cats, eating Chinese. There was television, and the last of the ice cream. Next she knows, she’s dressed and sitting in a public place, seeing and being seen. A delicately lit wood-paneled wine bar new in the neig
hborhood. She feels on display for being the only one actually sitting at the bar. The crowd’s in back. What was that she kept repeating to herself? Here is the right place to be, alone at this bar, and this thing I’m doing, having my, what, fourth? my fourth or fifth glass of wine for the night, what a wise and prudent thing to be doing. Not any more convincing here than it was back home. She can’t even work up a conversation with the bartender, who seems fixated on the contents of his wallet. Jeez, don’t let me distract you. No need for a little conversation, what they used to call the human touch. By all means, keep looking through your ATM receipts. She’ll just content herself with mulling it over again: the fact that there is some place — she’s absolutely certain of it — one place that is the right place to be tonight, and one thing that is the right thing to be doing. Is it really sitting in Martin’s office, under very familiar fluorescent lights, amid all those oppressive document boxes, watching Martin read Westlaw downloads, just so she can be in the presence of Martin? No, goddamn it, no — that is bullshit. There is something else, something that is Lynn Mason’s, that belongs to her and to her alone and is not contingent upon the existence of Martin Grant. But what? Only thing she can say for sure, it’s probably not here. Amazing how quickly a glass of wine goes when you’re the only one at the bar. Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be saying good night now, you won’t be seeing me tomorrow. “Another one?” asks the bartender. “Just the tab,” she says.

  One day she said to him — they were on again — “Hey, come here, will you, and feel this for me?” She was in the shower. It was a workday, one of the rare occasions Martin slept over during the week. He came to the shower door. “Hey, I’m going now,” he said. “Have to get home to shower.” He was standing behind the opaque glass. “Did you not just hear me?” she asked him. “What?” he said. “I asked you to feel something.” He didn’t move. “What is it? I’ll get wet.” And instantly, she had a thought. More like a suspicion. It was when he said, “I’ll get wet” — what sort of thing was that to say? Roll up your fucking sleeve then, you jerk! It led her to believe he had heard her, heard her all too well. It can’t be helped, when a woman is in the shower and says, come here and feel this, that a tone creeps in. Not fear, not just yet. Concern, and she’s looking to unburden some of it. She’s looking for somebody to say, that feels to me like it’s nothing. But Martin, Martin was quick. Martin would immediately grasp the implications of a request like come here and feel this, and he would pick up on the tone, too — and knowing what that tone implied, all it might lead to and all it might require of him, he came to the shower door with his own agenda. Have to go home, have to shower. Was it true, or was it just her suspicious mind? “What is it, Lynn?” he said. “What is it you want me to feel?” “Never mind,” she said. “No, what is it?” he said, with an impatience intended now to make her believe that he was eager for it, really wanting the opportunity. “It’s nothing, forget it, get out of here,” she said. He opened the shower door, startling her. She slammed it shut. “Get out of here! Go home and shower.” He already had his keys in his hand. They jangled as he spun them around on his finger. “Okay,” he said — and that was the extent of his protest. She hated the disappointment she felt when, with the water off, she heard the front door slam.