A fourth of a year.
Pretty soon it would be a half a year. Then a whole year. Then two.
I dropped the envelope without opening it, feeling unaccountably depressed. I sat there for a moment, staring at the ugly blank office wall in front of me, then reached for the box. I picked it up, pulled off the top, looked inside.
Business cards.
Hundreds of cards, making up a single solid block of white, filled the inside of the small box. On the face of the front card, I saw my name and my title printed next to the Automated Interface logo and the corporation’s address and P.O. box number.
My first business cards.
I should have felt happy. I should have felt excited. I should have felt something positive. But that huge stack of wallet-sized cards filled me instead with an emotion akin to dread. The cards bespoke commitment, a belief on the part of the corporation that I would be there for a long time to come. The cards seemed at that moment as binding as a contract, as adhesive as glue, an investment in obligation. I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw the cards away. I wanted to send them back.
But I did nothing of the sort.
I took a few others out of the box and put them in my wallet and placed the rest in the upper right drawer of my desk.
The drawer closed with a metallic clank that sounded disproportionately loud and had about it a tone of finality.
I found myself focusing on the permanently jammed keyhole in the center of the drawer. So this was it. This was my life. Here I would spend the next forty years or so, then I would retire and then I would die. It was an overly pessimistic view of the situation, maybe a little melodramatic. But it was essentially true. I knew what I was like. I knew my personality and patterns. Theoretically, I could move on to another job. I could even go back to school eventually, get another degree. There were many options available to me. But I knew that none of those things would happen. I would simply adjust to my situation and live with it, the way I always had. I was not an initiator, a doer, a get-up-and-goer. I was a stayer and a stick-it-outer.
And then my life would be over.
I thought back to the dreams I’d had in grammar school and junior high, my plans of being an astronaut and then a rock star and then a movie director. I wondered if it was this way for everyone, and I decided that it probably was. No little kid wanted to be a bureaucrat or a technocrat or a middle management supervisor — or an Assistant Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation.
These were the jobs we settled for when our dreams died.
And that’s all they had been — dreams. I was not going to be an astronaut; I was not going to be a rock star; I was not going to be a movie director. This was where I was, this was who I was, and the reality of the situation depressed the hell out of me.
Derek came in just before eight, ignored me as usual, and immediately started making phone calls. At nine, Banks called and said he wanted to have a meeting with me and Stewart, and I went upstairs to his office where the two of them berated me for half an hour and told me how unsatisfactory my GeoComm documentation had been until now.
I spent the rest of the morning and the afternoon rewriting the GeoComm function descriptions I’d already written.
Exactly five years ago this month, I realized, I had started attending UC Brea. What a difference those five years had made. Then I’d been just out of high school, my whole future ahead of me. Now I was rapidly speeding toward thirty, locked into this horrible job, my life a dead end.
Typing my revisions into WordPerfect on the PC, I accidentally pressed a wrong key and deleted ten pages of work. I looked up at the clock. Four-thirty. A half hour to go. There was no way I’d be able to retype all of that in a half hour.
This was the bottom, I thought. This was hell. There was no way things could get worse than this.
But, as usual, I was wrong.
The apartment was dark when I got home, and it still smelled of breakfast. Faint traces of toast and egg and orange juice lingered in the still air. I reached next to the door and flipped on the light switch.
The living room was empty. Not just empty as in no people, but empty as in no furniture. The couch was gone, as was the coffee table. The TV was still there, but the VCR was gone. Both the ficus and the Boston fern were gone, and the walls were bare, all of the framed art prints missing.
I felt as thought I’d stepped into another dimension, into the twilight zone. An overreaction, maybe, but the look of the apartment was so shocking, so unexpected, that my mind could not focus on particulars, could only take in the totality of the situation, and that totality was so overwhelming that I could not put anything into perspective.
But I knew instantly what had happened.
Jane was gone.
I pulled off my tie as I hurried into the kitchen. Here again, things were missing: the toaster, the cookie jars.
There was a note on the kitchen table.
A note?
I stared down at the folded piece of paper with my name on it, stunned. This was not like Jane at all. This was totally out of character. This was just not the sort of thing she’d do. If she was unhappy, if she had a problem, she’d talk to me about it and then we’d fight it out. She wouldn’t just pack her stuff and sneak away and leave me a note. She wouldn’t just give up. She wouldn’t walk away from me, from us, from what we had together.
The first thing I probably should’ve thought was that somebody had taken her, that she’d been kidnapped by the same person who had ransacked our apartment.
But somehow I knew that wasn’t the case.
She’d left me.
I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. Maybe I had seen it coming but hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. I thought back, remembered her telling me that communication was the most important thing in a relationship, that even if two people loved each other, there was no relationship if they couldn’t communicate. I recalled her trying to talk to me for the past few months, trying to get me to talk to her and tell her what was bothering me, what was wrong.
I remembered the night at Elise.
We hadn’t really talked much since that evening. We’d fought about not talking a few times, she accusing me of emotional secrecy, of not opening up and sharing my feelings with her, my lying and claiming that there were no feelings to share, that everything was fine. But even our fights had been tepid, lukewarm affairs, not the passionate battles of the past.
I looked again at the folded square of white notebook paper with my name on it.
Maybe she would have told me of her plans to leave at one time. But we definitely had not been talking much lately, and in that context the note made perfect sense.
I reached down, picked up the paper, unfolded it.
Dear Bob,
These are the hardest words I’ve ever had to write.
I didn’t want to do it this way, and I know it’s wrong, but I don’t think I could face you right now. I don’t think I could go through with it.
I know what you’re thinking. I know what you’re feeling. I know you’re angry right now, and you have every right to be. But it’s just not working out between us. I’ve turned this over and over again in my mind, wondering if we should try to work it out or if we should just spend some time apart, in a trial separation, and I finally decided that the best thing to do would be to make a clean break. It’ll be hard at first (at least it will be for me), but I think in the long run it will be for the best.
I love you. You know that. But sometimes love isn’t enough. For a relationship to work, there has to be trust and a willingness to share. We don’t have that. Maybe we never had that. I don’t know. But I thought we did at one time.