“Lunch.”
“Are you crazy? If you’re selling something, we don’t want it.”
Forlesen said, “Don’t you know who I am?”
She looked at him more closely. He said, “I’m your husband, Emanuel.”
She seemed uncertain, then smiled, kissed him, and said, “Yes you are, aren’t you. You look different. Tired.”
“I am tired,” he said, and realized that it was true.
“Is it lunchtime already? I don’t have a watch, you know. I haven’t been able to keep track. I thought it was only the middle of the morning.”
“It seemed long enough to me,” Forlesen said. He wondered where the children were, thinking that he would have liked to see them.
“What do you want for lunch?”
“Whatever you have.”
In the bedroom she got out bread and sliced meat, and plugged in the coffeepot. “How was work?”
“All right. Fine.”
“Did you get promoted? Or get a raise?”
He shook his head.
“After lunch,” she said. “You’ll get promoted after lunch.”
He laughed, thinking that she was joking.
“A woman knows.”
“Where are the kids?”
“At school. They eat their lunch at school. There’s a beautiful cafeteria—everything is stainless steel—and they have a dietician who thinks about the best possible lunch for each child and makes them eat it.”
“Did you see it?” he asked.
“No, I read about it. In here.” She tapped Food Preparation in the Home.
“Oh.”
“They’ll be home at one hundred and thirty—that’s what the book says. Here’s your sandwich.” She poured him a cup of coffee. “What time is it now?”
He looked at the watch she had given him. “A hundred and twenty-nine thirty.”
“Eat. You ought to be going back soon.”
He said, “I was hoping we might have time for more than this.”
“Tonight, maybe. You don’t want to be late.”
“All right.” The coffee was good, but tasted slightly oily; the sandwich meat, salty and dry and flavorless. He unstrapped the watch from his wrist and handed it to her. “You keep this,” he said. “I’ve felt badly about wearing it all morning—it really belongs to you.”
“You need it more than I do,” she said.
“No I don’t; they have clocks all over, there. All I have to do is look at them.”
“You’ll be late getting back to work.”
“I’m going to drive as fast as I can anyway—I can’t go any faster than that no matter what a watch says. Besides, there’s a speaker that tells me things, and I’m sure it will tell me if I’m late.”
Reluctantly she accepted the watch. He chewed the last of his sandwich. “You’ll have to tell me when to go now,” he said, thinking that this would somehow cheer her.
“It’s time to go already,” she said.
“Wait a minute—I want to finish my coffee.”
“How was work?”
“Fine,” he said.
“You have a lot to do there?”
“Oh, God, yes.” He remembered the crowded desk that had been waiting for him when he had returned from the creativity meeting, the supervision of workers for whom he had been given responsibility without authority, the ours spent with Fields drawing up the plan which, just before he left, had been vetoed by Mr. Freeling. “I don’t think there’s any purpose in most of it,” he said, “but there’s plenty to do.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that,” his wife said. “You’ll lose your job.”
“I don’t, when I’m there.”
“I’ve got nothing to do,” she said. It was as though the words themselves had forced their way from between her lips.
He said, “That can’t be true.”
“I made the beds, and I dusted and swept, and it was all finished a couple of ours after you had gone. There’s nothing.”
“You could read,” he said.
“I can’t—I’m too nervous.”
“Well, you could have prepared a better lunch than this.”
“That’s nothing,” she said. “Just nothing.” She was suddenly angry, and it struck him, as he looked at her, that she was a stranger, that he knew Fields and Miss Fawn and even Mr. Freeling better than he knew her.
“The morning’s over,” he said. “I’m sorry I can’t give it back to you, but I can’t; what I did—that was nothing too.”
“Please,” she said, “won’t you go? Having you here makes me so nervous.”
He said, “Try and find something to do.”
“All right.”
He wiped his mouth on the paper she had given him and took a step toward the parlor; to his surprise she walked with him, not detaining him, but seeming to savor his company now that she had deprived herself of it. “Do you remember when we woke up?” she said. “You didn’t know at first that you were supposed to dress yourself.”
“I’m still not sure of it.”
“Oh, you know what I mean.”
“Yes,” he said, and he knew that he did, but that she did not.
The signs said: NO TURN, and Forlesen wondered if he was really compelled to obey them, if the man in the blue car would come after him if he did not go back to Model Pattern Products. He suspected that the man would, but that nothing he could do would be worse than M.P.P. itself. In front of the dog-food factory a shapeless brown object fluttered in the road, animated by the turbulence of each car that passed and seeming to attack it, throwing itself with desperate, toothless courage at the singing, invulnerable tires. He had almost run over it before he realized what it was—Abraham Beale’s hat.
The parking lot was more rutted than he had remembered; he drove slowly and carefully. The outbuilding had been torn down, and another car, startlingly shiny (Forlesen did not believe his own had ever been that well polished, not even when he had first looked out the window at it), had his old place; he was forced to take another, farther from the plant. Several other people, he noticed, seemed to have gone home for lunch as he had—some he knew, having shared meeting rooms with them. He had never punched out on the beige clock, and did not punch in.
There was a boy seated at his desk, piling new schoolbooks on it from a cardboard box on the floor. Forlesen said hello, and the boy said that his name was George Howe, and that he worked in Mr. Forlesen’s section.
Forlesen nodded, feeling that he understood. “Miss Fawn showed you to your desk?”
The boy shook his head in bewilderment. “A lady named Mrs. Frost—she said she was Mr. Freeling’s secretary; she had glasses.”
“And a sharp nose.”
George Howe nodded.
Forlesen nodded in reply, and made his way to Fields’s old office. As he had expected, Fields was gone, and most of the items from his own desk had made their way to Fields’s—he wondered if Fields’s desk sometimes talked too, but before he could ask it Miss Fawn came in.
She wore two new rings and touched her hair often with her left hand to show them. Forlesen tried to imagine her pregnant or giving suck and found that he could not, but knew that this was a weakness in himself and not in her. “Ready for orientation?” Miss Fawn asked.
Forlesen ignored the question and asked what had happened to Fields.
“He passed on,” Miss Fawn said.
“You mean he died? He seemed too young for it; not much older than I am myself—certainly not as old as Mr. Freeling.”
“He was stout,” Miss Fawn said with a touch of righteous disdain. “He didn’t get much exercise and he smoked a great deal.”
“He worked very hard,” Forlesen said. “I don’t think he could have had much energy left for exercise.”
“I suppose not,” Miss Fawn conceded. She was leaning against the door, her left hand toying with the gold pencil she wore on a chain, and seemed to be signaling by her attitude that they were old friends, entitled to relax occasionally from the formality of business. “There was a thing—at one time—between Mr. Fields and myself. I don’t suppose you ever knew it.”