Who was an alcoholic, whether early onset, functional, or fall-down drunk — that was always a topic of conversation. Who was fucking who, that was another. It was no secret that Amber Ludwig was fucking Larry Novotny. Amber would like us to stop talking about that now. But was it not true? If not true, not another word on the subject. Well? Amber? Unresponsive. Okay — what, then? If not the subject of fucking Larry, and if you’ve just asked that we stop talking about Joe Pope, what should we talk about? After all, the democratic principle underpins this madness. The floor is yours. Argue, once again, that you don’t feel safe here anymore, that Tom Mota always gave you the creeps, and that what we call antics and low comedy you call homicidal insanity. Amber?
“Last night I tried to sleep,” she said, “but I couldn’t stop worrying.”
We tried telling her for the fiftieth time that he was not coming back. She gazed around as if she were Marcia, as if she had Marcia’s power to reduce us with a single withering glance to small and ridiculous beings. But when Amber did it, the gaze turned inward and revealed something about her, that she felt misunderstood and therefore hurt.
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “Are you guys talking about Tom Mota again? How can you be talking about Tom Mota at a time like this?”
Who was she talking about?
“Who else?” she said. “Who could I possibly be talking about right now?”
By then it was certainly time for us to get up, return to our desks, and try to catch Karen in the pursuit of the best fund-raiser concept, but for some reason nobody moved. “Can you believe she might be in surgery right now?” Amber asked us. “I mean this very minute. Does anybody know what time it was scheduled for?”
“I don’t think anybody knows that,” said Genevieve.
“Last night,” continued Amber, “I don’t know why, but I was wondering if she had a boyfriend.”
“Oh, I actually know something about this,” Genevieve announced.
Amber was startled. “What, what do you know?”
“That she was dating a lawyer.”
“How do you know that? She told you?”
“Oh, no. I saw them at a restaurant with my husband. He knew the guy. They were opposing counsel on a case.”
“You saw them at a restaurant?” said Amber. “What did he look like?”
“Kind of heavyset, if I remember. But not fat. Sexy, I thought. I thought they made a good-looking couple.”
“So what happened? Are they still together?”
“Oh, I don’t know that,” said Genevieve. “I only saw them once at a restaurant.”
There was silence. It seemed pretty clear we were all wondering what Lynn Mason did at night when she went home. Did she watch TV, or did she think TV was a waste of time? What hobbies did she have? Or had she sacrificed hobby-having to professional ambition? Did she exercise? Was her diet particularly bad? Did she have a history of cancer in the family? Who was her family? Who were her friends? What had happened between her and the lawyer? And how did she feel, being in her forties, never having married?
“I wanted to call her last night and offer to drive her to the hospital,” said Amber. “Can you imagine that? She’d have been like, ‘Amber, please don’t call me at home at eleven o’clock at night.’ Click.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Genevieve. “She might have been touched. Remember her birthday?” We had made an infomercial for her on her birthday, editing together testimonials from everyone about how great she was. “She was very touched,” said Genevieve. “I don’t think we give her enough credit for being human.”
“It’s hard,” said Benny. “She’s scary.”
“I can’t picture her on a date,” said Larry.
There was more silence, until Genevieve asked, “Do you really think she needed a ride to the hospital?”
WE BROKE APART, climbing down to fifty-nine and up to sixty-three and to the floors in between. If something was on the radio we kept it low. The weather outside, telling from our windows, was overcast but not cold. Spring had finally arrived. We settled down to the fund-raiser ads. We opened a new Quark document, or took out our pencils. Every once in a while a nicely sharpened pencil would crack on the page upon impact and we’d have to go in search of the one electric pencil sharpener. That was annoying. Back in our chairs we drummed the eraser between our teeth. If a stray paper clip happened to be lying around we were likely to bend it out of shape. Some of us knew how to turn a misshapen paper clip into a projectile that could hit the ceiling. If our attention was drawn to the ceiling, we usually recounted our tiles. When we returned to our computer screens, we erased whatever false starts we found there, suddenly embarrassed by them. We had the feeling that our bad ideas were probably worse than the bad ideas of others. Those of us who worked on sketch pads were engaged by that point in the great unsung pastime of American corporate life, the wadded paper toss. This, more than anything, was what “billable hour” implied. It was always annoying when an eyelid started to twitch. We did some drag-and-drop. What was missing was an interesting color palette, so we leaned back in our chairs and gave it some thought. What Pantone would be perfect for a fund-raising event? No one ever admitted to it publicly, but there were days of extreme sexual frustration. The phone would ring. It was nothing. We checked our e-mail. We clicked back into Quark and established new snap-to guides. Sometimes our computers froze and we would have to call down to IT. Or we needed something from the supply room. Lately inventory in the supply room seemed half of what it used to be, and the woefully bereft shelves recalled to mind TV programs that documented seasons of drought and low crop production in the history of a foregone people. But usually we needed nothing from the supply room. We took out our bags of snacks from our desk drawers, or we chewed our fingernails. Suddenly a blinding flash of the obvious would strike, and a flurry of keyboard noise filtered out into the hall. We thought, “This is not a half-bad idea.” That was all we needed, one little insight. Soon the roughest look, the crudest message, started to shape itself into coherence. Inevitably when we reached that point, we stopped to use the restroom.
What was the likelihood, if we were being honest, that this one fund-raiser, one of a thousand, no matter how many donations it might receive, would really get us any closer to a cure for breast cancer? Who knows, maybe it would. None of us understood how advances in medical science worked. Maybe they needed only one more dollar and our solicitations would put them over the top.
We also saw our work that day as doing a personal favor for Lynn, even if we couldn’t help feeling that, by choosing not to tell us that she had cancer, she had cheated us of one of our most dearly held illusions — namely, that we were not present strictly for the money, but could also be concerned about the well-being of those around us.
MAYBE THIS WAS why she didn’t tell us:
Not long after layoffs began, things started going missing from our workstations. Marcia Dwyer’s handcuffs, Jim Jackers’ Mardi Gras beads. At first we thought we must have misplaced these things. We had loaned them out, or maybe they’d fallen behind a bookshelf. Don Blattner ran framed movie stills around his walls, with a particular emphasis on scenes from The Lost Boys and From Here to Eternity. Larry Novotny had a collection of World Series pennants dating back to 1984. Who could say why we felt the need to display such things in our offices? For some it helped to say, Hello, this is me. Others just liked having their useless shit around in the place where they spent most of their time. When that useless shit began to disappear, we got angry.