by Cai Emmons
After a few weeks of work Adrian begins to wear jeans, but he retains the button-down shirts and suit jackets which set him apart from the others. He doesn’t resemble a businessman, but a man who thinks for himself. Consider this, he seems to be saying with all his gestures. A tardigrade. A fractal. A worry doll. The pursuit of beauty. She wonders if the amount of time he devotes to thinking would make him not so good in bed. During their group lunches she tries to draw him out, talking about her love of New England and suggesting places around Boston and Cambridge he might be interested in exploring. He evinces only subdued interest at best. She asks him about what he likes most about the study of biology. “The structure of leaves,” he tells her, a remark she cannot use as a conversational launch pad, mostly because of the clipped, almost curt way he said it. Eventually she is bold enough to ask about his writing, a sensitive subject for her boys, as many of them are secret writers with fragile autobiographical material at odds with their grandiose aspirations. His mouth twists into an enigmatic slash. “Not writing much,” he says.
“What do you think of Adrian?” she asks Dan one evening when the others have left.
Dan pauses, frowns, slides a hand over his crown as if taming wild invisible hair. “He’s okay. A little aloof.”
She nods. “I’ll say.”
“He’s perfectly good. He’s just not one of the gang.”
She nods again. Maybe it was a bad hire.
“Don’t worry,” Dan says. “It’s not the end of the world.” He collects his things, grinning the trademark grin he uses as a tincture to liven people’s spirits. “It’ll be fine.” He pauses at her office door. “But it would be easier if Randy didn’t have the hots for him.”
“Oh?” she says. “I didn’t—does he lean that way?”
“Who—Adrian or Randy?”
“I know about Randy.”
Dan flaps his palm. “Who knows. That’s the thing. No one knows. It’s not obvious.”
When Dan leaves she sits in her silent groove wondering if she has seriously misread things. Should she let Adrian go and thereby remove him from everyone’s consciousness? But on what grounds when he’s doing good work?
The end of the world never arrives fast enough, especially when you wait for it. Dan likes to say this. She reminds him a meteor could crash at any moment. She likes to imagine such a collision being predicted a week or two in advance—impossible, of course, but when does the imagination defer to fact. In her vision people dash around, knowing what’s coming and trying to put their affairs in order, as if their affairs still mattered. She wouldn’t be one of the dashers, however. She would watch the mania from a wry distance. On the appointed day she would savor the sky erupting into shades of red and orange then etiolating to extreme whiteness. As retinas were being seared and people were stumbling around in semi-blindness, she would still be watching at some remove, welcoming the end. She has a soundtrack to accompany this vision. It begins with atonal cacophony that deliquesces to a single note, a melancholy oboe that dies out slowly as blackness takes over. How comforting it is to think of a time when matters of the future, sex and work and family and meaning, will finally be immaterial.
The transition to spring is problematic. The light is inscrutable, useless for telling time. During the winter months she leaves the office in darkness; now, however, stepping into the still-sunlit streets is too much exposure. She feels the whiteness of her legs and the fleeting gazes of strangers assessing her. Her pallor. Her size. Her singleness.
Another disturbing aspect of the transition to spring is they all depart at different hours. In the depths of winter when it gets dark just past 4:00, they all leave as a group reliably at 5:30. But now at 4:45 a restlessness sets in, and Randy begins to pack up. Zeke is usually next. Josh and Dan often stick around past 6:00 or 7:00 when their projects demand extra work. She stays as long as necessary to lock up—unless the last person is Dan who also has keys. She hates the feeling of her work force dribbling away.
Today, a few minutes before 5:00 Adrian and Dan parade past the cubicles to the front door, Dan’s body bobbing up and down with each step, his pate unmistakable, smooth and inviting as the skin of a ripe mango. Adrian floats past without any obvious up and down motion. They’re conversing with great animation, surprising for Adrian, though not for Dan.
She hurries out and finds herself in the reception area with nothing to do. Dan spins and backtracks to his cubicle to retrieve something, hey in passing. She stands with Adrian and receptionist Maven Dave, who has begun to pack his things.
“Cashing it in early?” she says to Adrian, hearing the words sound like a reprimand when she meant them as a joke. Adrian raises his eyebrows and looks at his watch, turning its digital black to her. 5:01, it reads. “Everything’s coming along okay?” Locked in, she has no idea how to shift gears.
Dan returns, holding his phone aloft. “Don’t let this woman give you guff,” he tells Adrian, elbowing Talmadge playfully.
“What are you boys up to this evening?” Home, bed, is Dan’s standard teasing reply to this question. We young people get tired too.
“Catching the new Jarmusch movie,” Dan says.
Adrian’s face absorbs her, taking thorough inventory. He and Dan seem like people she has spotted on another train traveling in the opposite direction. The Jarmusch movie. She remembers hearing a review of it, but can’t remember what the review concluded.
“That should be good,” she says.
“Hope so.” Dan shrugs, beset with uncharacteristic impatience. “We’ll tell you tomorrow.”
She’s a spider dangling above a possible location for a web. She could suspend herself forever deciding. She might have hung herself from the wrong place. Dan and Adrian disappear, gabbing again as soon as they pass through the door. Within twenty minutes the others have left too, except for Josh who tells her he’ll be done by 6:00.
She wanders aimlessly past the cubicles. Dan’s has always been cluttered with tchotchkes and slips of paper, two-day talismans, he once said, defending himself. Fortune cookie prophesies. A found keyring with the hologram of a stripping girl. Glow-in-the-dark stars. A blowup hippopotamus from an amusement park. Above his desk is a calendar she’s never noticed. The month of March is displayed with a closeup of a strange blue insect. The fifteenth is blocked out with a black X. The Ides of March—or is there a more obscure meaning? Adrian’s cubicle is spartan by contrast. He has equipped it with black accessories for pencils and pens and papers. A black stapler and black pencil sharpener. It could be a display in an office supply store, devoid of personal details. She’s tempted to open the desk drawers, but she doesn’t because Josh is nearby and it would be obvious she was snooping.
Steve puts in one of his surprise visits in late March. These surprise visits used to unnerve her, make her feel as if he was checking up on her but, now that she knows he trusts her, she has adjusted to his unpredictability. They often go for coffee to chat about ideas for upcoming issues, the magazine’s general direction, sometimes fundraising. She enjoys Steve’s peripatetic mind. He has an interest in everything and credible knowledge of so much—ornithology, medicine, music, fine art. His grasp on so many subjects puts her to shame, and, for a man who knows more than most, he’s not a bad listener either. She only offers a suggestion if it’s something she’s considered for a while and has real merit.
Today he’s his usual shabby self—baggy khakis and a worn red corduroy shirt he once told her dates back to college. His hair, rumpled as Boston lettuce and badly in need of a cut, wisps around his neck and down into his eyes. She is still, after years of knowing him, trying to detect if his dressing style is a result of his living more in his mind than in the physical world, or if it’s a strategy to deflect speculation about the size of his bank account.
He announces himself at the door of her office and they exchange a few pleasantries, then he spends
an hour in his office before coming back to announce he is taking Adrian to lunch. She can’t tell, for a second, if he’s inviting her too, and then she realizes he’s not. She watches them leave the office, ambling side by side past the cubicles, Adrian lively as he was with Dan, smiling even as they exit the front door.
Steve doesn’t connect with everyone but, if the cant of another mind is similar to his, he detects this immediately and something alchemical happens. Judging from what she’s just seen, that alchemy is happening now.
Adrian is gone with Steve for almost two hours, and he returns to the office alone and disappears immediately into work at his cubicle. She realizes Steve must have come to the office for the sole purpose of meeting with Adrian. Of course he’d want to know his new employee, but the thought of them over lunch without her for a full two hours makes her feel as if they were discussing something covert. A coup perhaps, Adrian replacing her. Would Steve feel more comfortable with someone like Adrian—younger and male and more conversant with science—running the show?
She finds an excuse to visit Dave in reception and passes Adrian’s cubicle. His posture is straight and still, but for his typing fingers, his face composed and serious as if what he is doing, who he is, is so much more important than everything about her. She can’t bring herself to puncture his concentration.
In a strange convergence her mother and Dan share the same birthday in early April. April 8th. Lila is turning sixty-four and, as always, wants Talmadge present for a celebration. There are few occasions Talmadge dislikes more than these birthday celebrations of Lila’s which are occasions for an uptick in Lila’s complaining about the world and her position in it. Talmadge rarely has any credible reason for bowing out. Last year she said she was sick, but that won’t fly two years in a row. The 8th falls on a Friday this year, so she agrees to go to New Hampshire for a Saturday dinner. She’ll spend the night, return on Sunday. Short and sweet and still the dutiful daughter.
For Dan’s birthday, his twenty-eighth, she makes plans for champagne and cake and hors d’oeuvres to be delivered to the office a little before 5:00, a surprise she has apprised everyone of, except of course, Dan himself. She always makes a big deal about birthdays, due to her general belief in ritual, but Dan deserves a little extra, given what a pillar he is. And this year he’s twenty-eight on the 8th which seems notable. In the past she’s taken him and one or two of the others out for drinks, but she likes the less inhibited option of having a celebration in-house. She visits a party store in Waltham where she orders a bouquet of helium balloons, and comes away with bags of streamers and plates and napkins and silly hats and the blowers common at birthday parties when she was a kid. A week or so before the occasion she notices the moon will be full on the 8th. Some howling is in order—what a bonus!
“Plans for your birthday?” she asks Dan.
“The usual.”
“That being?”
“Drunkathon. Drown my sorrows. What else compensates for getting so old.”
“Yeah, right.” She makes a face.
“We can’t all be ageless like you.”
She swats his shoulder. “Upstart,” she says. “Get to work. Hey, how was the Jarmusch movie?”
He blanks for a moment. It’s been several weeks. “Oh. Great. Plotless as usual. Well, there is some plot, but it doesn’t kick in until close to the end. You might not like it.”
“I love plotless. My whole life is plotless.”
He shakes his head. “Don’t undersell yourself.”
She never gives her boys presents, but this year a present for Dan seems to be in order. She’ll have to slip it to him in private so it won’t be seen as favoritism. He’s a big reader—a book seems like a good choice. No, a gift certificate to the Coop so he can choose himself. On the Wednesday evening before the Friday party she hits the Coop at lunch to purchase some poster board for a Happy Birthday sign. On the ground floor before buying the gift certificate she pays her ritual visit to the science section where she browses the coffee table books. There’s one she frequently returns to when she’s feeling unsettled. It’s called Blue/Green/Brown Planet and it contains dozens of photographs taken of Earth from space. The book’s intention is to show the extremity of climate change already underway, but the photos are mainly compelling for their beauty. She wonders if it’s wrong to admire what is devastating, but nevertheless the photos never fail to diminish her own paltry anxieties.
She looks up and there is Adrian, back to her, also immersed in a book. The reticulations of his long bare bent neck bring to mind the spikey spine of an iguana. She freezes, wanting and not wanting him to see her. If he does see her she’s afraid it will appear she’s stalking him. She inches quietly to the register. As she waits, he takes a place in line a few people back. Now he’s the one stalking her, and it’s his place to initiate conversation first. Of course he doesn’t. She leaves the store with perfectly constructed tunnel vision that eliminates him.
Out on the street she hesitates, then takes a right turn away from the office. Her red jacket is still in the window, today an irresistible Siren. She goes in and removes her sweater and tries it on, bare-armed, creating a moment of privacy in the eye of the salesgirl’s blather. She shivers beneath the soft stroking hide of an animal that once had a pumping heart. “Yes, it’s gorgeous,” she agrees with the girl, “but not quite yet.”
The conference room is a windowless room adjacent to reception and, with Maven Dave’s help, she is able to decorate and usher in the balloons and cake and champagne and trays of catered food without anyone else noticing. She posts the crude HAPPY BIRTHDAY poster she has made, and with the assistance of a ladder she and Dave tape streamers to the ceiling so they fill the room like beaded curtains. Normally she would do this kind of thing with Dan, laughing and chatting and acknowledging how juvenile they were being. Dave is a good worker, but he’s quiet and too submissive to be a barrel of fun.
Everyone but Dan has been instructed to come to the conference room at 4:50. Presumably Dan, finally alone, will come to investigate and they will yell SURPRISE and begin popping champagne corks. Dave locks the front door at 4:45, and she and he go to the conference room. The room looks pretty darn good, the balloons floating among the labyrinth of dangling streamers. The catering is top drawer: several kinds of bruschetta, olives, crudites, gourmet crackers and cheeses. The poppyseed cake says: DAN THE MAN. No Happy Birthday. No number. Only DAN THE MAN.
The others file in, one by one, Zeke, Josh, Randy, and finally Adrian, their expressions furtive more than mischievous. They whisper. Within a minute or so Dan is in the doorway, grinning. “Surprise!” she says loudly, and the others echo her, speaking rather than shouting, more subdued than she hoped.
Dan nods, still grinning, though obviously not shocked. “Thanks guys. Just what every twenty-eight-year-old needs.”
“You knew?” she says, a little crestfallen.
“I know you. I thought you might do something, but I didn’t realize it would be so elaborate. Twenty-eight isn’t exactly a milestone.”
“Dig in,” she says. “Drink up.”
Champagne is poured. People help themselves to small plates of food and stand around filling their faces, batting balloons and streamers away from their plates, saying little. Talk, she wants to say, laugh! Adrian has taken neither food nor champagne. He has caught one of the balloons and he palms it near his waist, eyeing the ceiling and the sloppy taping of the streamers. Randy has sidled over to him. She looks for secret signals between them, but sees none.
She stands with Dan and gulps her champagne. They’re all acting like kids finding themselves at an adult occasion they can’t wait to escape. It was never like this before. She’s misjudged something. Dan goes through his champagne as fast as she does. “I gotta pace myself,” he says as she pours them more.
“Plans later?”
He shrugs.
“It’s a full moon. You know what that means.”
He smiles. She’s never seen him so stiff. What’s his problem?
“We need music,” she says. “Hey, Dave, can you get some music in here?” An oversight to have forgotten music—it’s as good a social lubricant as alcohol, sometimes better, and Dan loves to dance.
Dave sets up his phone with a small blue tooth speaker and streams a rapper. Not what she had in mind, but it’ll have to do. Zeke and Josh are mouthing the words: Bad thang, fine as hell, thick as fuck. . . .
“Good looking cake,” Dan observes. “You thought of everything.”
“Music. I forgot music.”
“You got it now.”
“Yes, I do. The hostess with the most-est. Hey, what’s up? Why are you being like this? Someone told you about the party, didn’t they?”
Dan reaches for the cheese plate and palms three cubes which he tosses into his open mouth basketball-style. He speaks through the cheese. “Yeah. Hey, thanks for the gift certificate. You didn’t have to. Really.”
“I know what I have to do. You don’t need to tell me. Stop being so damn formal.” She’s never chided him, not sharply like that. The others have overheard, but she doesn’t care.
His eyes pop wide. He upends his champagne and lays down cup and plate. “I’m leaving. I’m going to grad school.”
The champagne bubbles through her nose. She grabs a napkin and dabs her face. “What kind of grad school?”
“Writing. MFA. Fiction.”
“You never mentioned—”
“I didn’t think I’d get in. But I did. Arizona. Wait-listed at Virginia.”
“Well, congratulations. Hey, everyone, a toast to Dan.” She raises her empty cup. “He got into grad school and it’s his twenty-eighth birthday. What more could a guy want, right? To soon-to-be-famous-writer Dan!”
