Genevieve reappeared in the doorway after having handed off her revisions to Joe.
“What’d I miss?” she asked.
SOME OF US WENT out for lunch to a new place every day and made lunch an event. Others, like Old Brizz, stayed in and had the same thing, day after day. Sometimes it was to save money. Other times it was to avoid the company of people who, from nine to noon and from one to six, we had to give ourselves over to unconditionally. For an hour in between, time reverted back to us, and sometimes we took advantage of that hour by closing our doors and eating alone.
Carl Garbedian shut his door every day and ate a Styrofoam clamshell of penne alla vodka from the Italian joint a block away and never went out to lunch with us unless it was a free team event. The free team event was a thing of the past, and so it had been months since we’d last seen Carl sliding into a booth, opening a menu, and considering his options.
Six months before being sacked, Tom Mota knocked on Carl’s door. This was only a few days or so after Benny told us the story of Carl undressing in his car. Tom apologized to Carl for interrupting his lunch and asked if he had a minute. Carl invited him in and Tom took a seat. “So I heard from Benny some things about how you were feeling lately,” Tom began, “that when I heard them, I found I could relate, so I bought you something.” Tom handed Carl a book across the desk. “Don’t be mad at Benny, you know how he likes to talk. And that,” he added, indicating the book, “that’s nothing. That’s just something everybody should have on their shelves. Do you know this guy at all?” he asked.
Gazing down upon the book — the complete essays and poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson — Carl shook his head.
“Nobody does anymore,” said Tom. “But everybody should. And I know that sounds like a bunch of pretentious bullshit, but it’s bullshit I believe in.”
Carl inspected the book and then looked up at Tom as if he needed an explanation of how to use the thing.
“And I know it’s maybe a little funny, me buying you a book,” Tom continued. “We don’t buy each other books around here. But I was listening to Benny and he said you weren’t feeling yourself lately, and when I asked him why and he tried to explain, I thought that what might help you was a little guidance from this guy here.”
“Thanks, Tom,” said Carl.
Tom shook his head dismissively. “Please don’t thank me, it’s a six-dollar book. Odds are you won’t even read it. It’ll sit on your bookshelf and every once in a while you’ll come across it and think, now why’d that fuck ever buy me this book for? I know what it’s like to get a random book,” he said, “trust me, but listen — let me read you a few things so you see better where I’m coming from maybe. Can I do that?”
“If you’d like,” said Carl. He handed the book back to him.
Tom paused. “Unless maybe you’d rather me just leave you to your lunch,” he said.
Carl removed the napkin from his lap and wiped his hands. “It’s fine if you want to read some of it, Tom,” he said.
So Tom opened the book. “It might help, I don’t know,” he said. He thumbed nervously through the pages for the passage he wanted. It was probably a fraught moment for both men, a self-conscious and brittle silence as Tom prepared to read. When he finally located the passage he wanted, he began quoting but immediately cut himself off again. “And listen,” he qualified himself, thrusting forward in his chair with abrupt eagerness, “I know it’s maybe a little funny, here’s me talking to you about how you can improve your life with this book and look at me, I’m a total fuckup. This last year has been. . let’s just say I see the error of my ways. But what it is with me, it’s funny. I see the error of my ways, but I can’t seem to get my head out of my ass, basically, is the basic fact of my life since my wife left me. So, please, forgive the hypocrisy of the unconverted sitting here preaching to you, but I do find that when I read Emerson, at the very least it calms me down.”
“Tom,” said Carl, “I appreciate the gesture.”
Tom waved him off. “‘Let a man then know his worth,’” he read, “‘and keep things under his feet.’” Tom reading out loud to Carl — the self-consciousness in that room must have been palpable. “‘Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up or down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself. .’ I’m just going to skip down a little ways here,” said Tom. “Okay, this is the part. ‘That popular fable of the sot,’” he continued, “‘who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.’” Tom ended his quotation there and shut the book.
“Well,” he said. “Anyway. I think he has a lot of good things to say. ‘Finds himself a true prince.’ That’s hard to keep in mind here, you know? But he tries to remind us, Carl, you and me both — everybody, really — that underneath it all, if we exercise our reason, we’re princes. I know I lose sight of that myself half the time when all I want to do is open fire on these bastards. You see, the problem with reading this guy,” he continued, “is the same problem you have reading Walt Whitman. You read him at all? Those two fucks wouldn’t have lasted two minutes in this place. Somehow they were exempt from office life. It was a different time, back then. And they were geniuses. But when I read them I start to wonder why I have to be here. It almost makes it harder to come in, be honest with you.” Tom handed the book back across the desk. He added with a huffy, defeated chuckle, “That’s a ringing endorsement, huh? Anyway, I’ll let you get back to your lunch.”
When Tom had nearly reached the door, Carl called out to him. “Can I tell you something in confidence, Tom?” he asked. Carl gestured for Tom to return to the chair.
Tom sat, and Carl looked at him for a long time before speaking. Earlier in the week, he confided, he had slipped quietly into Janine Gorjanc’s office after everyone else had gone home for the night and taken a bottle of antidepressants from her desk drawer. Since that time, he told Tom, he had been taking a pill a day.
“Is that wise?” Tom asked.
“Probably not,” said Carl. “But the last thing I want is for her to know that I’m depressed.”
“You don’t want Janine to know that you’re depressed?”
“No, not Janine. My wife. Marilynn. I don’t want Marilynn to know I’m depressed.”
“Oh,” said Tom. “Why’s that?”
“Because she thinks I’m depressed.”
“Oh,” said Tom. “You aren’t depressed?”
“No, I am depressed. It’s just that I don’t want her knowing that I’m depressed. She knows I’m depressed. I just don’t want her knowing that she’s right that I’m depressed. She’s right too much of the time as it is, you see.”
“So this is a matter of pride,” said Tom.
Carl shrugged. “I guess so. If that’s how you care to phrase it.”
Tom shifted in his chair. “Well, you know, Carl, I understand that, man. I can understand that perfectly well, being married for a number of years to a woman who was always goddamn right about everything herself. But man, if you’re taking a drug that hasn’t been prescribed for you specifically —”