Maybe I was reading too much into all this, I thought. Maybe I was overreacting.
I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I studied myself for quite a while, trying to be objective, trying to see myself as others might see me. I was not good-looking, but neither was I ugly. My hair, light brown, was neither long nor short, my nose not big and not small.
I was average-looking. I was of average build, average height. I wore average clothes.
I was average.
It was a weird realization. I cannot say that I was surprised, but I had not really thought about it before and I felt strange being able to categorize myself so easily and so completely. I wished it weren’t so, wished there were something about me that was unique and exceptional and wonderful, but I knew there wasn’t. I was completely and totally ordinary.
Perhaps it explained the situation at work.
I pushed the thought out of my mind and hurried out of the bathroom, back to the living room where Jane was.
I was acutely conscious, the next few days, of everything I did, everything I said, and I was both horrified and discouraged to discover that, yes, I really was thoroughly and consistently unexceptional. My conversations with Jane were banal, my work was never less or more than adequate. No wonder Craig had not remembered me. I seemed to be so average in every way that I was entirely forgettable.
Was I also average in bed?
It was a question that, in one version or another, had been haunting me for some time, even before I’d seen Craig, lurking in the back of my mind when I was with Jane, unfocused but there, a vague threat. Now it had been, if not voiced, at least given shape, and I knew it would not go away. I tried to push it out of my mind, tried not to think of it when we were together, when were eating or talking or taking a shower or lying in bed, but it gnawed at me, growing in my brain from a whisper to a shout until I felt compelled to bring it up.
On Saturday evening, as always, we made love, doing it during the half-hour local news before Saturday Night Live. I did not usually analyze our love-making while it was happening, did not examine what we were doing or why we were doing it, but I found myself watching from a distance this time, as though I were a camera, and I realized how limited were my moves, how scripted my responses, how boring and goddamn predictable everything was. I had a difficult time maintaining an erection, and I had to force myself to concentrate in order to finish.
Afterward, I rolled off her, spent, breathing heavily, and stared up at the ceiling, thinking about my performance. I would have liked to believe that it was great, that I was a true stud, but I knew that was not the case. I was average.
My penis was probably the average size.
I probably gave her the average number of orgasms.
I looked over at Jane. Even now, perhaps especially now, hot and sweaty in the aftermath of sex, hair clumped in damp tangles, she looked beautiful. I had always known that she could do a lot better than me, that she was pretty enough, intelligent enough, interesting enough to attract someone superior to myself, but it was suddenly brought home to me in a way that was almost painful.
I touched her shoulder, gently, tentatively. “How was it?” I asked.
She looked at me. “What?”
“Did you… come?”
“Of course.” She frowned. “What’s wrong with you? You’ve been acting weird all night.”
I wanted to explain to her how I felt, but I couldn’t.
I shook my head, said nothing.
“Bob?” she said.
I guess what I really wanted was to be reassured, to hear her say that I was not average, that I was special, that I was great, but in my mind I could hear her trying to assuage my fears by saying, “I love you even though you’re average.” Which was not what I wanted to hear.
Her mother’s words echoed in my head: “…a nothing… a nobody…”
That was how I felt.
What would happen, I wondered, if she met someone with more skillful hands, a faster tongue, a bigger penis?
I didn’t even want to think about that.
“I… love you,” I said.
She looked surprised, and her expression softened. “I love you, too.” She kissed me on the mouth, on the nose, on the forehead, and we snuggled together and pulled the blanket higher and watched TV until we fell asleep.
Seven
Acknowledgment of my mediocrity only seemed to hasten my fade into the woodwork. Even Hope no longer spoke to me unless I addressed her first, and more than once it seemed that she’d forgotten I worked at Automated Interface. It was as if I were becoming a shade within the corporation, a ghost in the machine.
The weather changed, became warmer, became summer. I felt melancholy, sad. Sunny days always made me feel that way. The sharp contrast between the blue beauty of a summer sky and the drab grayness of my life made the difference between my dreams and my reality seem that much more pronounced.
I was working full-time on GeoComm now, writing a real instruction manual, not playing around with the piddly-ass projects to which I’d previously been assigned. I was given access to computer screens by the programmers; I was given demonstrations of the system; I was allowed to play around with the system on one of the terminals in the test facility. I suppose the work could have been considered challenging — could have, had I had any interest in it at all. But I did not. Assistant Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation was a job I had taken not out of choice but out of necessity, and its specifics held no allure for me.
The one person who did not ignore me was Stewart. He seemed more hostile than ever. I was a constant source of irritation to him. The fact that Banks, or someone above Banks, had decided to let me work on a legitimate project made him furious, and at least once each day he would come into the office, nod to Derek, then move in front of my desk and stand there, looking down at whatever I was working on. He would not say anything, would not ask me what I was doing, would simply stand there, staring. It annoyed me and he knew it annoyed me, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of letting my feelings show. I would ignore him, concentrate on the work in front of me, and wait him out. Eventually, he would leave.
I’d watch him go, and I’d want to just punch him.
I’d never been a violent person. Even my revenge fantasies had usually involved humiliation, not physical harm. But something about Stewart made me want to just beat the living shit out of him.
Not that I could.
He was in a hell of a lot better shape than I was, and I had no doubt that he could’ve easily kicked my ass.
I finished documenting the functions from the first GeoComm submenu. I gave the instructions to Stewart, who supposedly gave them to Banks. I heard nothing back from either of them and began work on the system’s second submenu.
It was Thursday, the day of Jane’s night class, and though we didn’t usually have sex on Thursdays because she got home late and tired, I convinced her to do it this time. Afterward, I rolled off her. We’d done it in the missionary position, I realized. We always did it in the missionary position.
We were silent for a moment, lying next to each other. Jane reached for the remote and turned on the TV. A cop show was on.
“Did you come?” I asked her finally.
“Yes.”
“More than once?”
She propped herself up on one elbow. “Not this again. Am I going to have to reassure you each time we make love?”
“Sorry I asked.”
“What do you want from me? I came, you know I came, and you still have to ask me about it.”
“I thought maybe you were faking it.”