Who are the people who thrive on this? How do they do it? I think you knew from the first day at the lift well and only us chumps could have failed to notice it. And the biggest chump of all fell in love with you, slowly and awkwardly, to the gentle breeze of the desk calendar fanning the days. I do not hold you responsible for this insofar as responsibility is equated with intent. You were not flirting with me, or rather, that was not your intent. I know this now. There is little else I know to be as true as this except, of course, that which I was going to tell you tonight before you took off. Now here is something right up your alley. A magician is onstage. Bright-colored silk kerchiefs appear and disappear through his sleeves. Rabbits become acquainted with the insides of hats. Everyone seems to be enjoying it, your brother-in-law most of all. I am not. In infancy I was dropped by a nurse and ever since I have not been mystified by magic tricks. I smile in case someone is looking at me. But no one does. They are all enraptured, unaware of the greatest trick of the evening: the one in which the lady vanishes.
You courted me, slowly but undeniably, and I never questioned your interest. Since we were not yet lovers it was even easier to believe that you saw something in me that I had seen in you. This was enough. I did not need to see you after hours—does this seem naïve?—and the longer it went on, the healthier it appeared to me. It seemed honorable to be so fond of you without ever being with you at night, without ever touching you. I impressed myself greatly. You rarely mentioned your husband, and when you did, it was not with bitterness but a sad resignation. Even when you kissed me in the basement car park—and it was you who kissed me—I did not allow myself to make too much of it.
Then you called me at home one Sunday evening and asked me to come over. I’d wanted to have an early night. I had an appointment with the specialist the next morning. Your husband had left you. He packed up his estimate of half the contents of the house and went. I had, of course, never been to your home before. You wanted to go out to the movies or somewhere—anywhere. “Let’s not talk about it now,” you said. “Maybe one day I’ll need to tell you everything, but right now I need not to.” But you told me a great deal and we nearly missed the film, one of those vehicles that enables Anthony Hopkins to regret everything.
“Is there time for one more Joni Mitchell song?” you asked rhetorically.
There wasn’t. Has there ever been time for one more Joni Mitchell song? But who am I to talk. When my wife and I first separated, I found myself often waking up in a shitty 1970 Whitlam-something Mazda hatchback—she took the sedan—barely moving on the South Eastern arterial, only to be reminded via the cassette player that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. All that remained of my marriage was a compilation country-and-western tape that had gestated for about eight years between the driver’s and front passenger’s seats, only to rise phoenixlike from the ashtray.
I was surprised to find myself in your home, flattered you had called. I think I had met him once, just briefly, at an office Christmas party, the one they invited spouses and partners to. I thought I had observed him thoroughly, given the limited opportunity, but I would not have guessed at his hunger for bric-a-brac. The place seemed more than half empty. We drank Swedish vodka and you filled me in, told me of an affair you’d had more than a year earlier, before you joined the company, and how it had hurt him, how he couldn’t trust you after that. But I felt sure, even then, that his mistrust was older than that. When you went to get changed I sat, glass in hand, waiting for him to come back nonchalantly through the front door, as though he had forgotten something. What would I say to him?
Don’t we love her unfaithfulness, just once or twice anyway? Then her forgetfulness cleans her hands of all those deeds that we have tallied so faithfully. It enables her to keep going. I know her well enough and you know her even better. I can understand how it is that you come to take these things, all these little things. I know her well enough. You had better not come back.
He did not come back and I don’t know that I even thought these things. Not at that time. These are just some thoughts, short of advice, on the occasion of your niece’s speech night.
You had taken an interest in me well before this, before I could be of any obvious use to you. Before I had befriended you, I was completely computer illiterate, whereas now I can impersonate the employee who warrants all the expensive hardware the firm seems incapable of resisting. And isn’t impersonation the key? Whoever the hell we are—and we never know—there is now the creeping suggestion that it no longer matters. If we can imitate the current faddish gestalt of success then money will surely follow. And even computers still matter less than money, although now it is only in computers that we prize memory. For us memory has become a burden. For you in particular it has been this way for quite some time, since before you sat here, in this auditorium among those young women with ribbons in their hair, suddenly out of season, so depreciated. Memory has been a burden for you since you first bristled at the stern admonition by your father that you must be happy in some other way. The money had gone.
Your sister was winded by this, left flat and lifeless. All the possibilities of civilization from gastronomy, travel, appreciation of certain previously ordained pieces of sculpture, haute couture and even sexual fulfillment that she felt would have been within her reach had your father done something differently, something about which she has never really bothered to find out—all these possibilities had vanished. There is a warmth in blame which blanketed her until you, the younger sister, took her under your wing. You had survived by reinventing yourself.
In your early university days you became the floral-skirted queen of alfalfa and buckwheat, an acoustic-guitar-strumming braided bohemian. You tried to teach your sister the guitar, probably without much greater success than your foray into that black hole that is my affinity with computers. There were many cross-legged circle-sitting music sessions in which your new friends tried to view things alternately from a Marxist or feminist perspective without any of them ever really mastering bar chords. It must have been at one of these midnight-to-dawn sessions that someone introduced you to the songs of Joni Mitchell, presumably with malice aforethought, songs for which there is always time for one more, the one we just have time to hear when your husband has recently left you.
Then it happened, far more suddenly than the first, another metamorphosis. It happened so suddenly it might have created headlines in the student newspaper: Sisters released from a year and a half on a D minor chord. Your sister quickly recovered her Vogue Living sensibilities, the ones that led her to marry this astronaut here on my right. And you? I don’t know where you are.
Only you know. You are not merely unknown to me but unknowable. It embarrasses me now to recall the way I permitted myself to admire you for your fluent command of a pseudotechnical managerial jargon for which I have contempt. So easily done in the first thaw, we became intoxicated with the you-and-me-against-the-world of it all, forgetting that it never stays that way. It became ultimately a tag-team match wherein sometimes you sided with the world. I watched you color your office and the whole of the floor with your presence, shrugging off without noticing all that had for years tripped me up or slapped me in the face. I wanted to believe in a likeness between us despite everything I saw, and this is how there came about the corruption of reason which, in this instance, permitted me to admire you for your capacity to impress Lloyd Walker, whom you persisted in calling Mr. Walker until I ribbed you for it without mercy.
Lloyd Walker is my vintage. We started at more or less the same time. A ruddy bespectacled man who speaks in forced high-pitched gusts of wind as if he had several pieces of fruit permanently lodged in his neck and speaking was only a method that had been recommended for dislodging them. With his exaggerated side-to-side gait and the inexplicable dowdiness of another time and place, Walker quickly became the object of often very funny but unfailingly cruel jokes. While his wife stayed robustly home, knitting casser
oles from women’s magazines and pruning the children, he was taking offense inoffensively year after year and punctually, steadfastly, not rocking any boats. There is a temptation to locate such a physically unfortunate-looking character somewhere around one’s sympathy, pity and even affection, believing him, after everything that you have seen or imagined him to have felt, to be incapable of cruelty himself and perhaps even to be endowed with some vestige of a kind of In Which We Serve, Noël Cowardly honor.
Did any of this occur to you in that breakfast meeting as you put your now famous suggestions to this lymphatic papier-mâché head of the department and the assembly of double-breasted morons below him? What did you think they were thinking as they looked at you over black coffee, cardboard croissant and the Financial Review, these gentlemen of commerce, each with his own car space and synapses that are still waiting to be formally introduced to one another? Walker’s secretary was already reading the minutes of the last meeting and I still hadn’t found my seat, having sauntered to your side of the table to lean casually, conspiratorially, and whisper, “Hey, you know why they call this the bored room.”
Feeling, unusually for these surroundings, not alone, I stumbled to my chair and fell into it. It was early morning, after all. No one noticed. The meeting had come to that hushed, fearful state described as order.
Walker thanks us for our attendance as though perhaps some of us had considered sleeping in. Even I know the importance of this weekly orb-of-day charade. The minutes are read. Some circular from Head Office is distributed and discussed. This usually involves most of them, or at least the intellectually weakest of them, clambering over each other to most fulsomely praise with no-name-brand sincerity whatever inanity has come down from on high this week. Only Atherton is creative enough to restrain himself every now and then. Perhaps he is still asleep. There is often a sullenness to his affect at these meetings which has made me think we could have been friends.
Targets, projections, monthly, weekly, for the company and for the section, are read. Well done but we can do better. We can always do better. All talk of what Walker euphemistically calls the horizontal merger is, he says, premature. We must not believe what the press is writing about it, and if we are approached by any of them, we are neither to confirm nor deny. Refer all inquiries to Head Office. But what could we possibly tell the press? They know everything before we do. The little we are told is in the weekly epistle Head Office sends us, and every other department, to make us all feel we matter.
I was eating cantaloupe and honeydew melon. It slipped from my fork on to my lap. I shook involuntarily and it hit the floor. Had anyone noticed? I was gazing out of the window when you began to speak. I came back from the tiles and the flag on top of some distant building, in through the window, and past my reflection to see you lip-synch to your own voice. “Go ahead,” Walker encouraged you. The words came out with polite certainty, a mix of reverence and the imperative. It was an idea and a statement of the bloody obvious dressed up as a question. Create a new market, by which you didn’t mean exporting to countries where previously we were unknown and all of the population had until recently sat in loincloths up to their necks in their own shit but where now five percent live better than we ever did by co-opting the other ninety-five percent into slavery. This was a common idea. Everyone was doing it. We were already doing it. You meant something else, something local. Create a market somewhere between wholesale and retail. Since much of what we did was based on turnover, why not offer some form of discount to certain traders who either bought unusually large quantities or else bought far in advance? The principle was applicable to most of our lines. Walker liked it. You sang it like a song.
I wondered then whether it was something off the top of your head. As genuinely pleased as I was to see Walker take to it, I had difficulty reconciling it with the person I knew to be you. In the first place, it was trite. Did you really think this was a new idea, to offer products at a discount in order to increase the volume of sales? You had never mentioned it to me before. Were you worried that I would talk you out of it? Or steal it? I am not capable of stealing anymore, if I ever was, and am even less capable of dressing up something like this as new and original. It would embarrass me. And what a waste of time that would be, to feel embarrassed. I do not want to waste any more time. Where are you?
Con-sider yourself one of us, sing the Year Nine girls or those of them who graduated from Mrs. Dowager’s Year Seven class and still harbor the suspicion that their future may lie on the stage. I feel the need to tell someone I don’t know how much more of this I can take but your sister is hugging herself, both arms crossed against her chest, one hand gripping her shoulder, the other tugging on an earring. Your elder niece, our elusive but undoubtedly charming raison d’être, has not yet, to my knowledge, graced the stage. Perhaps you are with her, and she with you? Your sister’s astronaut, sitting beside her, is tapping his knee in time to We don’t want to have no fuss. It’s clear—we’re—going to get along.
I was in my office late one evening and, strangely, you were not around. You had not gone home but you had gone for the day, I remember being aware of that. The sun was going down, refusing to stay back late for love or money, and the skyline was delineated by the usual sterile fluorescent light of the city. I was not working but tinkering or perhaps tampering with my computer. I love the look of a spreadsheet against the dusk sky. By changing the data we can change the picture. If we do it often enough and fast enough we can make our own cartoons. The data is of course meaningless, so the skyline is the limit. I was checking my e-mail, just for the hell of it, because you had recently taught me how. Even the term e-mail sits uncomfortably with me. It always sounds like a brand of white goods. Previously my secretary was the only link between me and all those thousands of computer-literate people who desperately needed to contact me but who did not feel sufficiently confident with the telephone.
For all of my newfound computer skills, formatting, scrolling and saving, I can never remember my password or whether it is mine or yours. You will remember we used yours while you were teaching me. My first instinct is to use yours and I did that time, too, so that it was not my e-mail I was receiving but yours. Discretion may be the better part of valor, but serendipity should not be lightly dismissed, either. I was not searching for anything. My discovery was more in the form of an honest mistake and I would gladly have turned back from it had that been possible. It was one of these things you come across by chance, and though you are, at that moment, unable to grasp it fully or in context, still you are unable to turn away, fascinated by what it means, by what it is going to do to you. Something is triggered in your nervous system, something akin to that triggered when, as a child, you walk in on your parents in bed. No amount of shame or self-rebuke or the cursing of chance can overcome the sweet pulsating ache of your discovery. Walker had been writing to you.
It was so unutterably disturbing to see memos to you from “Lloyd” or from his secretary suggesting a familiarity with you I found astounding.
Nice work this morning. Regards, Lloyd.
What the hell was going on? What had you done so well that particular morning? If he was referring to your splitting of the atom at the breakfast meeting, he was clearly flattering you in the way that inadequate men with power and with the most transparent of motives often do. Surely you were not flirting with Walker? Were you simply permitting him to flirt with you, a proposition not quite as repulsive to contemplate but one still necessitating further explanation? You had not said anything about it. I know you would have been at least as revolted by this as I am. Why wouldn’t you have said something? Were you planning to do something about it and, in the interim, thought you would spare me? Of course I wouldn’t have been jealous of a sensitively handled rebuff of his unwanted attentions. You could have told me.
But there was more. A memo containing your bright “creation of a new market between wholesale and retail” idea was there on the screen
, word for word as you had expressed it at the meeting. All right, what I would call sycophancy, you would call job security, or more likely, just “getting ahead.” But this was a memo from Walker to you. I couldn’t understand this. Was he passing on your idea to someone else and checking it with you, making sure that he had captured the concept in all of its complexity? Was he about to pass it off as his own? If so, why would he tell you? Why would he check it with you first? I kept reading it, hearing the words in different keys. By now it was night; most of the staff and even the cleaners were gone. There was nothing to focus on but the terminal and the high-rise clinic outside: cold, sharp immutable representations of all that we have collectively striven for.
Were you giving it to him? Were you feeding him ideas and if so, why? In order that he might grow? Why would you do this? I still had it in the back of my mind that perhaps he was stealing from you, although this would make no sense. If he was stealing from you and I had discovered it, I would have to tell you. Wouldn’t I? So why wouldn’t you tell me? I have nothing he would want to steal. But this is nothing anyway, just some bit of trite marketing you have dressed up. Why didn’t you discuss it with me? Was it because it was just some puffery you came out with that morning to alleviate your boredom, sitting as we were in the bored room, and you have the ability—let’s say capacity, a more neutral term—to sell it to an idiot like Walker. Then I read it again and noticed the date. He had written the memo to you a week earlier.