She convinced him to call Benny. “Send her up here!” Benny hollered at Roland into the phone. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I can’t do that, Benny,” Roland said helplessly as Marcia stared at him across the lobby post. “It’s against the new rules.”
“Well, then tell her to hold on,” Benny replied, standing up. “I’ll come down to her.”
He fixed up his corkscrew curls in the cloudy brass of the elevator. When he reached the lobby floor he sucked in his gut and stepped out with several others. It was lunchtime. People were coming and going through the revolving doors.
“Come on, man!” he said as he approached Roland. “Does she look like a threat to you?”
“It’s the new rules, Benny!”
“Don’t give him a hard time,” said Marcia. “He’s just doing his job.”
“What are you doing back here?” Benny asked.
She had returned, she said, in order to take apart Chris Yop’s chair, that used to be Ernie Kessler’s, so she could toss it piece by piece into the lake.
“Of course you have,” said Benny. “Let’s go outside and talk.”
Which is how it came to pass that we saw them conversing outside the building on our way to lunch. We spent that hour speculating on what Marcia was doing back at the office and what the two of them were discussing. Perhaps she liked him. Perhaps Roland, at his post in the lobby, was wondering the same thing, because despite the hard time Benny gave him about keeping Marcia in the lobby according to the new rules, we knew the two men were friends, and that Benny had talked to him just as he talked to the rest of us about his paralyzing and unrequited crush. “So what are you going to do about it, Benny?” he’d ask. “I’m going to tell her,” Benny announced at last, after Tom’s spree. “I promised myself I would and I will.” Maybe, thought Roland, that confession was happening right now, right outside the building. He returned his attention to his small amount of daily paperwork. When he looked up again ten minutes later to see how things were progressing, Benny and Marcia were gone.
ROLAND HAD APPEARED TO LOOK right at them as they walked past, but they were sheltered within a group of incoming lawyers from the firm below us and eventually he looked away again. They passed by freely, and after stepping off the elevator on sixty, walked together in the direction of Jim’s cubicle.
Marcia wanted Benny’s reassurance that Jim wasn’t there. Benny explained that he had sent Jim out to pick up sandwiches at the Potbelly, where the line was always atrocious.
“I’m telling you,” he said. “He won’t be back for hours.”
“If you tell anybody about this,” said Marcia, with a familiar, scolding, clawing tone. How he loved that tone!
“I wouldn’t be threatening me right now if I were you,” he said to her. “One call down to Roland and I could have you arrested.”
They made it down to Jim’s cube and Marcia set the envelope upright between two rows of keys on his keyboard before noticing the souvenir she had purchased during a visit with her family to the Statue of Liberty. “Hey, what’s this doing here?” she asked. Then she noticed that Jim also had her Fighting Illini shot glass, several magazines, and her Scorpio keychain, which listed the attributes of her personality. After his initial pillaging, he’d gone back for more. “What the fuck?” she said.
“Well,” replied Benny, sheepishly. “You did leave them behind.”
Jim wasn’t the only one with Marcia’s things. If she had stayed and scoured more workstations, she would have found them divvied up among us and scattered across the office. The only items we left behind were her unused tampons and marketing textbooks. Within two hours of her departure, her boxes had been picked clean. Don Blattner took her radio. Karen Woo swept down on her bookends. Someone of remarkable stealth stole in and took Chris Yop’s chair, which used to be Ernie’s, which Marcia had replaced with Tom Mota’s, which Chris Yop had tossed in the lake. Now someone else had the burden of possessing the wrong serial numbers but the pleasures of an ergonomic masterpiece.
“I don’t even feel like giving it to him now,” she said, reaching for the envelope.
“Don’t do that,” said Benny.
She left the envelope where it was.
Those of us who didn’t go to lunch that day saw them talking by the elevators. That was most of us, because of the pressing demands of the new business. We wondered the same thing those of us who’d gone to lunch wondered. After Marcia slipped past Roland on her way out — coming off a full elevator, ingeniously disguised as one of us — we all went down to Benny’s office and asked him what they had been talking about. He refused to say. “Never mind,” he said, dismissing us outright. We had to think that could only forebode bad news. Someone as loquacious as Benny Shassburger reduced to “Never mind”? No doubt that meant he had been rejected. We asked him a second time and a third. We came back fifteen minutes later and asked the same question in a different way. We sent him e-mails. “Never mind,” he wrote back. Not wanting to rub it in, we let it drop.
When he returned to his cube, after dropping Benny’s sandwich off, Jim puzzled over the white envelope on his keyboard. On the cover of the card, a cheap generic Hallmark item made of recycled paper, a hound dog’s fat snout and heavy ears rested on a pair of crisscrossed paws, while his blubbery furry body floated in a background of blue. Above his cocked and woeful head, a cumulus-shaped thought bubble announced, “I feel so blue. .” And on the inside, “For the way I treated you.” There was no note, no revisiting specific slights. Only her name to inform him who had left it. Marcia. It was scrawled reluctantly. He pinned the card to his cube wall.
TOM WAS BEING HELD TEMPORARILY in a central holding cell near the city courthouse. At his initial hearing, his bail was set at twenty thousand dollars, which some of us thought was a little much, and others considered much too little. In the end it didn’t matter because no one would post it for him, and he didn’t want to part with any of the little money he had saved from the sale of his Naperville house. Or so he told Joe Pope, who went to visit him. Tom labored under idiosyncratic and stubborn notions, but even he must have known that the court costs, lawyers’ fees, and criminal fines that he’d have to pay for pulling his little stunt were going to tap him dry forever. We had no doubt that his inclination to stick around the jail cell was influenced by the fact that he had been processed on a Friday, and that by posting bail, he’d have nothing but another aimless weekend to muddle his way through, getting drunk and harassing the groundskeepers of his apartment complex, and composing e-mails to people who never wrote him back. So he decided to stick around and have a few hot meals on the state until his arraignment, when he would be charged with five counts of aggravated assault and battery, destruction of private property, and trespassing.
When we heard Joe Pope went to visit him, we were beside ourselves with disbelief. We were surprised, confused, angry, curious, tickled, and dumbfounded. It took everything in us not to dismiss the rumor as an absurd invention. But no, it was true, Joe himself admitted it before commencing a meeting in the Michigan Room. We were there to discuss details of the caffeinated bottled water, and everyone was fearful of a long night. Comparing conflicting accounts and trying to win the new business at the same time was taking it out of us. It would only prolong things to talk about anything but the work, but we couldn’t help ourselves, and someone asked Joe as he walked in if it was really true. Had he become Tom Mota’s prison wife?
Joe smiled. He set down his leather day planner and pulled out a seat at the head of the conference room table.