by Cai Emmons
She is tall, taller than most of her boys—a height that has been a useful tool in the work world compensating for whatever she lacks in the beauty department—but Adrian is taller, and from his perch he looks at her with an oblique, evaluative gaze. She wasn’t prepared to be smitten. He is only thirty to her forty—older than the others, but still young. She has instituted a strict policy of not dating her boys. Once she made that mistake. Grant was his name, and after a month of rousing playful sex she realized how irredeemably puppyish he was, and she had to withdraw, and it took a couple of months of fortitude on both their parts for the mistake to mend itself, though she can still recall the humiliation. It was good, however, for reminding her: Never again.
She smiles for a fraction of a second longer than might be appropriate, offers Adrian coffee then sees he already has it. As she flushes she goes into command mode. “Follow me.” For a moment it seems that her invitation might be to anywhere, to Paris, or Tibet, or to a bedroom sequestered at the back of the office.
“Steve isn’t here yet,” she explains. “We can never predict when he’ll be in.” She never shares with the new hires the precarious-sounding fact that Steve founded the magazine with the scads of money he made in hedge funds, and still keeps it afloat primarily on his own dime. “He’s our guiding brain and a very hard worker, but he follows his own schedule and leaves the daily operations to me.” Code for: He has his hand in so many projects Vitruvian is a low priority. He has a physician wife and two grown kids, one a multi-media artist, the other a molecular biologist. She’s met the wife and kids a few times over the years, and they know who she is, but each time she has felt how much she occupies only the margins of Steve’s life. You’re the one who . . . the wife said to her, and in that phrase it became clear she is only one of the many who manage Steve’s multiple projects, the business and philanthropic involvements she knows nothing about. If Vitruvian folded Steve would be sorry, but it wouldn’t break his heart.
Adrian walks beside her through the narrow corridors between the cubicles, their hips at almost the same level, the fabric of his navy suit jacket sending out a whir of encoded thoughts. Soon enough he’ll realize a suit is unnecessary—jeans, T-shirts, and hoodies are the norm here at Vitruvian, though not for her. She introduces him to the rest of the boys, along with their office nicknames. Zeke the Geek. Josh by Gosh. Dandy Randy. And Dan, reliable Dan, Dan the Man who has been here the longest, almost a full four years, so she treats him as her deputy.
Adrian greets them with a nod, a smile, a laconic “Hey.” She wonders what they’ll end up calling him—the name Adrian is a little retentive. The suit makes him seem older than the others. Dan’s bald head—which should make him look older, but doesn’t—seems particularly shiny today.
“What have you done to your scalp?” she asks.
Dan fondles his pate. “Who’s asking?” He winks.
“Aunt Sophie,” she says.
Adrian’s cool gaze shifts from her to Dan, back to her.
“You have to get used to us. We’re terminally silly.” She flushes, hotter this time, no doubt redder. But hell, if you can’t have fun at work, what a waste. A phone call comes in, rescuing her just as she’s about to feel like a serious fool.
“Dan, want to finish the tour and take him to his cubicle?”
She escapes to her office. Fuck, it’s Lila. She’s told Lila a million times not to call her during work hours. Tim’s in trouble. The neighbors, the Levys, say he stole things from their garage. Tim denies it.
“What things?” Talmadge presses.
“Well,” says Lila, “a motorcycle most importantly.”
Christ, why the neighbors? Stealing from some faceless corporation like Walmart she might almost understand, but the Levys?! Did he think they wouldn’t find out? Did he think they wouldn’t press charges? Mr. Levy has eyed Tim suspiciously for years, even when he was an impishly happy-go-lucky four-year-old. Everyone else was enchanted by Tim’s smile back then, but apparently Mr. Levy was onto something. The smile that at four seemed to promise a charmed life, at twenty-four seems a promise of just the opposite.
“Well, what am I supposed to do? I’m not coming up there again now. I’m much too busy at work,” she tells Lila. Adrian is standing outside her door, staring at her through the wedge of glass. She can’t let herself get worked up. She raises a finger to him and stares down at her desk. “Okay, okay, I’ll talk to him later. . . . No, not now, later.”
But Tim is already on the line. “The garage was open.”
“You think that makes it okay?”
“I’m just saying.”
“Well, it’s a stupid thing to say. You have to talk to them. Apologize. Give back whatever you took. Nip this thing in the bud before you find yourself in big trouble.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Of course you can. Swallow your pride and just do it.”
“Mr. Levy called me a cunt. I told him I wasn’t planning on keeping it. I was only borrowing. You know.”
“I don’t know. Look, do whatever you want. I have to get back to work.” She shuts off her phone and stares into her Escher screen saver. Tim is writing the handbook on self-sabotage. She descends some steps in her Escher universe and finds herself on a ledge above an unseen abyss. It’s not the end of this Tim mess. She lays her hands on the keyboard then looks up, remembering Adrian, but he’s already gone.
Dan’s knock surprises her. “We’re taking the new guy out to lunch. Want to join us?”
She always joins them if she’s free. She sits among her boys, basking in her small lagoon of power, joining in their banter, sometimes pretending to be one of them, other times acting as their den mother, chiding them about staying up too late or drinking too much, advising them about their girlfriends. She’s found ways to be part of their gang while still being able to pull rank.
“Who’s coming?”
“Everyone. Omnivore at 1:00.”
She salutes. Good on Dan for organizing this. She counts on him to keep the esprit strong, and she and he collaborate to keep Vitruvian’s rituals alive. They make people run the spanking gauntlet on birthdays, dress up for Halloween, choose Secret Santas at Christmas. They howl to the full moon in winter when it’s visible from one of the office windows. It’s corny stuff, sure, but when everyone participates it’s spirited and team-building. Playful. It embodies DaVinci’s spirit. She couldn’t possibly do it alone, without Dan.
Omnivore is a hip burger joint two blocks from the office, just off Mass Ave. The Vitruvian group is known there and does its part to keep the place in business and to keep it hip. Talmadge often thinks how odd it is that she has become an element in the calculus of hip, she who has made it the business of her adult life to conceal her family’s lack of education and embarrassing dearth of sophistication. She could teach a course in how to maintain such a façade if anyone would sign up.
They are given a rectangular table and Adrian sits on one end, gazing from person to person in wry, amused silence. Talmadge sits next to him. She would rather be sitting a distance away so she could do the watching. Shouldn’t she be presiding at the end of the table? Ordinarily she wouldn’t care, but today, with a new employee on board, the seating arrangement seems wrong.
The topic is the end of the world. All her boys are gleeful little freighters of pessimism, clear-eyed and clearheaded about the facts of the earth’s decline—the killer viruses leaping from the jungle, the islands disappearing under rising sea waters, the mega cyclones, the unstoppable fires. They know and remember arcane facts and bandy them about playfully—it’s still a game to them, still theoretical, with no attendant depression or urge to suicide. Perhaps she feels a little the same way—it’s fun to talk eco-gloom—but the ten or fifteen years she has on them skew things a little differently, and each time there’s a polar vortex she wonders if now is the time to think more
strategically about her options.
Josh is talking about NOAA’s destroyed data. It’ll take years for all that data to be reassembled, he says, and that won’t happen until the science is held in high regard again and funding resumes. “Beyond my lifetime,” he says triumphantly.
She turns to Adrian. “Ever hear such a bunch of pessimists?”
He smiles—a little mocking?—and adheres to his silence. His interview was deceptive—he was perfectly talkative then. Maybe he’s just shy. But how little eagerness he exudes, what scant need to impress. The other boys were terrible show-offs when they arrived, and she worked hard to ease them from nervousness. Even Dan, relaxed with her as he can be, still defers.
She falls into silence herself. The group has been made lively by the presence of someone new, even a silent someone. Watching them makes her proud, though their qualities of intellect and humor have nothing to do with her. When her burger comes she dives into it enthusiastically, but after two bites, feeling Adrian’s eyes on her, she puts it down. She is too sheepish to look at him. By the numbers she’s a normal-sized woman, but she has always seen herself as large due to her barrel chest. Her face is dominated by a wide forehead and broad cheeks. Her best feature is an aquiline nose that could be seen as patrician. She is in the habit of looking in mirrors and seeing the ruinous palimpsest of her mother’s square jaw, one day to be hers.
She steals a glance at him, and he looks back with that unreadable smile that looks simultaneously flirtatious and uncertain, amicable and armoring. Armor, amour, she thinks. A trickle of sweat runs between her breasts. Her skin’s flashing seems confused, even as she sweats she is letting things in. Her burger languishes on its plate.
“You’re the only woman at the magazine?” he says.
“Oh,” she says. “Yes. Why?”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
She shrugs. What’s not to love.
“You’re not one of those women who hates other women, are you?”
“Of course not.” She wants to ask him why he asked. Does she appear to be that kind of woman? It occurs to her she doesn’t know if he has a girlfriend. He hasn’t mentioned a partner, and she has assumed he doesn’t have one, though maybe she’s wrong. None of the other boys have mates. It’s not a requirement for hiring, it’s simply the way they are at this age, uncommitted yet to anything, enjoying their fluidity.
She has given Adrian an article to edit. It’s really a photo essay with a few accompanying statements about the demise of glaciers above the Arctic Circle. The photos of the ice are stunning, sensual. Huge icebergs calved from the glaciers, tall as skyscrapers but far more shapely, in pale shades of blue and mint, floating in darker cerulean water. She has spent a great deal of time looking at these photos, wondering if beauty almost always portends something dire. On the basis of recent Vitruvian articles alone, one might conclude that. Another recent article featured newly discovered viruses whose beauty under the electron microscope was breathtaking, then deeply disturbing when you remembered they were agents of the worst routes to death. She oversees everything but she knows very little about the science itself. Or the art for that matter. She got the job because she met Steve when he was just starting out and looking for someone he could rely on. Reliable she certainly is. She’s organized, a good synthesizer and delegator, a reasonably good communicator. Privately, she finds this convergence of art and science elusive, wonders if the juxtaposition reveals anything useful. She keeps these thoughts to herself, however, because Steve believes in the magazine’s mission fervently, all the more since the advent of what they only half-jokingly call ‘The New Order.’
Adrian comes to her office three times that afternoon with questions he could have emailed. Each time he wears that masking smile. “The Oxford comma,” he says on the third visit.
If it’s a question she can’t tell. It has been forever since she’s discussed the Oxford comma, and now it takes her a second to locate herself and focus on the strength of that comma.
“What are you asking?” she says.
“Do we use it?”
“Absolutely. In certain cases it’s critical to clarify meaning.”
“Meaning.” He smiles toward the floor as if she’s quaint, as if the whole idea of meaning is antiquated. As he examines the linoleum she thinks he might be right, they probably should question meaning, how stupid not to. He closes her office door quietly, almost covertly, and vanishes back to his cubicle. Each time he departs she finds herself inhabiting a quiet lacunae of inactivity.
At least she had the good sense not to bring Grant to her Somerville apartment. It’s a dim two-bedroom, sizeable enough, but a little lackluster, notable mainly for its remarkable tidiness. She understands how constipated it looks with its many collections of tiny things: miniature boxes, ivory figurines, dozens of smooth beach pebbles half the size of a pinkie nail. Her response to small things is immediate and involuntary. They arouse the aww response most people reserve for babies.
She can’t stand the thought of anyone else’s gaze coming to rest on these things, drawing conclusions, sensing pathology where none exists. Yes, she is a big woman obsessed with tiny things, but she is not only that woman. She isn’t a control freak and she’s not deprived. She has been at Vitruvian for fourteen years because it suits her, she likes it. She has chosen this life and feels no need to change it out for another one.
Over the next week Adrian visits her office frequently, always polite, his questions always legitimate, if a bit minor. He lingers longer than is strictly necessary, but she doesn’t mind. He is a comma in her day, a dash, then an ellipsis. With each visit time stretches so a patch of wintry sunshine from her office window seems to settle around them, lustrous and pulsating, a place they might exist for a while, like a vacation snatched suddenly from a pocket. In their conversational pauses the commotion from nearby Harvard Square sounds unnecessarily crass, the emanations of human beings who have never considered meaning. She turns in the direction of a distant busking saxophonist. “Relax!” she commands. Adrian smiles broadly. They discuss only work. He is now editing an article about an artist from California whose work is inspired by the shapes of leaves. In the sunlight she sweats and her face pinkens. She searches for symptoms in him.
She could be deluded. One minute she’s quite sure he’s smitten too; the next, his composure tells her he’s only being a good employee, trying to curry favor. How did he learn to smile so ambiguously? He wanders to her bookshelves where she keeps a dish of half-inch Guatemalan worry dolls given to her by a friend. He picks one up, squints at its featureless face.
“A worry doll,” she says. “From Guatemala. You’re supposed to fondle it when you’re worried.”
“Does it work?”
“If you believe in it, maybe. Take one. Try it out.”
He lays it back in the dish. When he turns to go his smile flickers, almost extinguishes, like a wind-snuffed flame. She feels silly. Did she shame him by implying he needed a worry doll? The word fondle was a bad choice. At the door he turns.
“The magazine’s mission isn’t really about the convergence of science and art, is it? It’s about beauty. The beauty of fractals, the beauty of neurons, the beauty of clouds and leaves and the solar system.”
“Maybe,” she says. “You might have a point.” How did he learn to converse in this destabilizing way, saying things that seem to come from left field, making it seem as if he is either not present, or more present than anyone else in the room?
Lila calls bursting with news. Talmadge puts the phone on speaker and continues making her omelet, listening without saying much in response. She used to admire her mother, want to emulate her. That was when Lila was working as a paralegal, supporting the whole family after her husband, Tim and Talmadge’s father, died. Tim was only a baby then, Talmadge sixteen. But now her mother, since being laid off, sits on the exculpating thron
e of ageism. No one wants to hire an old bag like me, she says. Talmadge has watched Lila let herself go, gaining thirty pounds, becoming the old bag she speaks of. It doesn’t have to be that way, Talmadge thinks; she’s still a couple of years from retirement age, she could find some kind of work.
She takes the omelet into the living room and sits on the couch to eat, leaving the lights off. It’s cold out and the radiators are groaning and hissing as if they’re furious. The Levys are not going to press charges, Lila says, isn’t that great. No, Tim never apologized, she has no idea why they changed their minds. And Lila spoke to the manager at the 7-11, an old friend of hers, who has hired Tim on a provisional basis.
Her mother pauses and Talmadge stares at the phone. This is her cue to play cheerleader. Good for you! I knew you could do it! But the Levys should have pressed charges. Tim deserves it. You don’t just steal a motorcycle because a garage door was left open.
“Make sure he doesn’t spend his whole paycheck on beer,” she says.
“Cut him some slack,” Lila says. “He never had a father.”
Outside urban squirrels scream like rats in the trees. She thinks of her boys, working diligently away on projects that only half interest them, until something cracks and their secret dreams explode into public. Special lives await them. But how many special lives can the world really support?
Why aren’t more people exhausted by the thought of family as she is. She’s never been remotely tempted to give up her independence. No kids. No marriage. She’s free to travel. Free to stay up all night if she chooses. Even if she doesn’t do these things, the thought that she could supports giant stadiums in her mind housing the eventual, the someday, the maybe could be.
