“What are you doing?” she asked him.
He turned to her. “Making a call,” he replied.
“Why are you calling me, Carl?” Marilynn asked with a firm, cautious bemusement.
Mornings had turned tetchy of late between the two Garbedians, sometimes downright traitorous. “Hold on one second,” Carl said to Marilynn, putting a finger up in the air. “I’m just leaving a voice mail. Hi, Marilynn, it’s me, Carl. I’m calling at about” — he lifted his arm and looked at his watch, a formal gesture — “it’s about half-past eight,” he said. “And I know you’re real busy, Sweetie, but if you could do me a favor and call, I’d love to just. . catch up. Chat. You have my number, but in case you don’t, let me give it to you now, it’s —”
Marilynn put her phone back to her ear and said, “Susan, I’m going to have to call you back.”
“Okay, bye-bye, Sweetie,” said Carl.
They both hit end on their cell phones at the same time. At some point, the new-message light on Marilynn’s phone began to blink.
JOE POPE STUCK his head over Jim Jackers’ cubicle just as Benny was coming to the good part in his story. Some of our cube walls were made of particleboard wrapped in a cheap orange or beige fiber and were so flimsy they wobbled from nothing more than the in-house draft. Other cube walls, like Jim’s, had been purchased just before the downturn and could withstand hurricane winds. Benny’s story came to an abrupt halt. Some of us departed Jim’s cube immediately, while the rest of us peered up at Joe nervously. Joe asked Jim if the mock-ups he was working on would be ready for the five o’clock pickup.
Joe had a tendency to interrupt. Sometimes it was a good thing. We could lose ourselves in one of Benny’s stories and the time would fly and then someone more important than Joe might come around and see us and that would be worse. We liked him at first, very early on. Then one day Karen Woo says, “I don’t like Joe Pope,” and she gives us her reasons. She goes on and on about it, for close to a half hour, a very spirited rant, until finally we had to excuse ourselves so we could get back to work. After that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind how Karen Woo felt about Joe Pope, and more than a few people agreed that she had a legitimate gripe — that if in fact the situation was as Karen reported it, Joe was not a likable person at all. It’s tough to say now what that gripe actually was. Let’s see, here. . trying to remember. . nope, not coming. Half the time we couldn’t remember three hours ago. Our memory in that place was not unlike that of goldfish. Goldfish who took a trip every night in a small clear bag of water and then returned in the morning to their bowl. What we recalled was that Karen didn’t let up on the story, day after day for an entire week, and when that week was over, we all had a better idea of Joe than we had gotten in his first three or four months.
Jim Jackers looked up from his computer. “Yeah, Joe, they’ll be ready,” he replied. “I’m putting the final touches on them now.”
Jim’s remark was Joe’s cue to depart, but instead he lingered over the cube wall. This was between the time of his first promotion and his second. “Thanks, Jim,” he said. He looked at us. We held our ground. We didn’t want to be bullied back to our desks by Joe Pope when Benny was in the middle of a good story. “How is everybody?” asked Joe. We looked around. We shrugged. Pretty good, we told him. “Good,” he said. He finally left and we raised our brows at one another.
“That was a disgusting display of power,” said Karen Woo.
We told Jim he had to leave if he was the one attracting Joe Pope’s attention. If he was the reason Joe was on the move in our direction, Jim had to go.
“But this is my cubicle,” said Jim.
“Maybe he was just trying to be friendly,” Genevieve Latko-Devine suggested. Genevieve had blond hair, cobalt eyes, and a tall, gelid grace. Even the women admitted her superior beauty. For Christmas one year, she was given as a gag gift a set of twisted redneck teeth, which she was instructed to wear year-round in an effort to even us all out. But when she put them on, we discovered — the men among us, that is — a desire for rotted teeth we never knew we had. We told Benny to go on with his story.
He picked up where he’d left off. Carl and his wife sat in silence a long time after hanging up their respective cell phones. Finally Marilynn, with tender, firm insistence, turned to him and said, “You need help, Carl.”
Shaking his head resolutely, Carl replied, “I don’t need help.”
“You need medical attention,” said his wife, “and you won’t admit it, and you’re hurting our marriage because of it.”
“I’m not depressed,” said Carl.
“You are a textbook case of depression,” Marilynn persisted, “and you need medication so badly —”
“How would you know?” he asked, cutting her short. He had turned at last to stare at her with an outraged and lonely expression. “You aren’t a psychiatrist, Marilynn, are you? You can’t know every angle of medicine — can you, can you possibly?”
“Cancer patients, Carl,” she said, exasperation rising in her tone, “are not the happiest people, believe it or not. I recommend antidepressants for many, many of my patients. I know a depressed person when I see one, I know the symptoms, I know the damage it can do to families, to. .”
He let Marilynn fade out. Just then, crossing the street on her way to work, was Janine Gorjanc.
Janine looked to Carl perfectly motherlike. Unpretty but not ugly. Hippy but not fat. Puffy about the face but with a youthful cuteness buried somewhere in there that might have caused someone to be crazy about taking her to the high school prom. A child, thought Carl, is not the only result of childbirth. A mother, too, is born. You see them every day — nondescript women with a bulge just above the groin, slightly double-chinned. Perpetually forty. Someone’s mother, you think. There is a child somewhere who has made this woman into a mother, and for the sake of the child she has altered her appearance to better play the part. Insulated from her as he was by the car, he could look without the urge to turn and flee, and it was the first time he had seen her in months, maybe years. “Carl?” Marilynn was saying. “Carl??”
“Marilynn,” he said. “Do you see that woman? That woman there, in the wrinkled blouse. She looks like a mother, doesn’t she?” Marilynn followed his gaze. “That’s Janine Gorjanc,” he said. “That’s the woman, I’ve told you about her,” he said. “Her daughter was killed. You remember? She was abducted. I told you about her. I went to the funeral?”
“I remember,” she said.
“She stinks,” he said.
“She stinks?”
“She emits some kind of smell, I don’t know what it is. It’s not every day. But some days, I think she just lets herself go. She doesn’t shower or something.” He watched her enter the building. Marilynn was looking at her husband, not at Janine. She was listening, trying to understand. “Marilynn,” he said, “I hate the woman for how she smells.”
“Have you ever tried talking to her about it?” she asked.
“But I hate myself even more,” he continued, unbuttoning his oxford, “for hating her. Can you even imagine what she’s been through?”
“Carl,” Marilynn said, “what are you doing?”
“The abduction,” he continued obliviously, “then the waiting, the terrible waiting.”
“What are you doing?” she cried.
“Then finding the body. Imagine finding the body, Marilynn.”
He was naked to his waist by then. He had removed the oxford and flung his undershirt over his head. “I don’t want to go into work today,” he announced, turning to his wife. He was breathing up and down with his paunch exposed, a hair-brushed hillock of pale, glowing belly. When Benny recounted all this to us, he said Carl had told him later he hoped Lynn Mason would walk by right then and see that unattractive feature and walk him Spanish for the sake of aesthetics. “Put your clothes on!” cried Marilynn.