Cake Time

by Siel Ju

  “We should go,” I said. “Take the party home. Cake time.”

  “I want cake!” Carrie said. I saw across the bar that Anne had found the girls she’d arrived with, her sorority sisters. They gesticulated energetically to communicate over the noise of the crowd.

  Exiting the bar was like entering another world, an eerie silence amplified by the glow of a lone streetlight. During the quick drive home Ben seemed preoccupied, but once back at the house we were united by our effort to have a good time. I helped him unload the party stuff from the trunk, then we created a mini assembly line in the kitchen, me chipping apart the ice cubes to put in the red plastic cups, Ben filling them with equal parts Bacardi and Coke. Marcy cut generous slices of supermarket sheet cake onto paper plates. Carrie tuned the radio to a top 40 station, and we started drinking in earnest.

  “To Carrie,” Ben said.

  “To me!” Carrie said. She was a happy drunk, if slightly belligerent. She commanded us to dance and we did, bopping to a new hip-hop track none of us had heard before. After a while of this, a slow love song came on. I plopped down on the couch and took some gulps from my drink. Ben grabbed Marcy and started slow dancing. Carrie kept gyrating on her own for a while off rhythm, then gave up and sat down too.

  By this time it must have been around two in the morning. My drunkenness was settling into a lethargic buzz. We watched Ben and Marcy dance. Ben started putting on a show. He pulled Marcy in really tight so their whole bodies were pressed against each other, making it hard for them to move. Then he started kissing her. Marcy complied, miming passion.

  “Get a room,” Carrie said.

  Ben seemed to relent, sitting down on the couch and pulling Marcy down to sit next to him. But then he started kissing her again. The song droned on to its third verse. As it ended Ben snuck another glance at us before sliding his hand down to one of Marcy’s breasts, rubbing his palm over it, then squeezing it.

  “Just fuck in front of us, why don’t you,” Carrie said.

  “Yeah, seriously,” I said.

  Ben looked up. “If you don’t want to see it, don’t look,” he said. Then he jammed his face into the crook of Marcy’s neck. Marcy closed her eyes and tilted her head back affectedly.

  Carrie and I looked at each other, then burst out laughing. Then Carrie got an impish gleam in her eye. “No, we mean it,” she said. “Do it.”

  Ben and Marcy kept kissing.

  “Do it, do it,” Carrie said in a rhythmic chant. She looked at me, nodding, and I joined her. “Do it, do it, do it.”

  He shifted his eyes to look at us, his mouth stuck on Marcy’s. We kept chanting. “Do it, do it, do it, do it …” We watched his expression morph, going from puzzled to questioning to scared, his hands groping about Marcy’s body aimlessly, until our chorus lost its energy and faded out. Carrie picked up her drink, took a big gulp, then turned to me. “He’s always all talk,” she said loudly.

  I snorted. “Pathetic,” I said.

  Ben acted like he didn’t hear us, but I saw his jaw set. Suddenly he started kissing Marcy more aggressively. He unbuttoned her shirt, then pushed it off her shoulders to reveal a beige bra, a thick, padded polyester thing with cups that looked like they could stand up on their own. At this, Carrie and I got quiet. The radio was playing a Matchbox Twenty song. Marcy’s body turned rigid but didn’t make any move to stop him. He unlatched the bra, then as he took it off glanced over at us to make sure if we were watching. We were. He pushed Marcy on her back, and at this Marcy put her left arm over her breasts, hiding them. While leaning over and kissing her, he put his hands under her skirt and started taking off her panties. They were a basic cotton pair with a daisy print and blue elastic trimming, the kind a kid would wear. Marcy had her face turned away, toward the back of the couch, her eyes closed in an expression simulating sexual concentration. Ben then positioned himself between her legs, got up on his knees, then unzipped his pants and took out his erect penis. He stroked it, peeking at us again, this time with a look that seemed somewhat shy, like he was seeking our approval.

  The radio was now playing a Shania Twain song. Ben lay down on top of Marcy and appeared to enter her, though I couldn’t see; the skirt was in the way. Once he started thrusting, Marcy’s body seemed to go limp, like she’d passed out. He kept going at it somewhat alone, then clutched Marcy’s hair near her scalp, pulling it roughly. At this she started emitting small, squeaky moans to his rhythm, like a squeeze toy. He started fucking her harder. He balanced himself up on one hand and played with the waist of Marcy’s skirt, eventually sliding it off; it was a wraparound. When he did that Marcy bent her legs and with her feet pushed off Ben’s pants and boxers. He helped by wiggling until they were half way down his thighs. Then he pushed Marcy’s right leg so it was hanging down over the couch, and tilted their bodies so that we could get a better look at his penis moving in and out of her. She had reddish pubic hair.

  They went at it steadily in this position for a while, long enough to feel anticlimactic. Eventually Marcy’s protective arm dropped off to dangle off the side of the couch. I noticed that one of her breasts was significantly bigger than the other. Finally Ben grunted, then sat up while simultaneously pulling up his pants. He zipped up, then looked at us. His expression was dazed and anxious, like he didn’t know what had just happened.

  “Cover me,” Marcy said in a whiny tone. She looked sleepy with a sheen of sweat, as if she’d just woken up from a bad dream. Ben put his forearm over her pubic hair. He leaned over her body and with his other hand started picking up Marcy’s clothes from the floor and placing them on her chest. Once he’d accomplished this, the two started working together to get Marcy dressed, using weird, cumbersome movements that attempted to shield her nakedness. Then they sat side by side on the couch, meekly, hands on their laps.

  Bon Jovi came on the radio. “I hate this song,” Carrie said, then stumbled over to change the station. She found a rock station with a thrumming beat. She made a raise the roof gesture. “Get up,” she said.

  “Hey, it’s not your birthday anymore.” Ben said. He reached for his drink.

  “It’s still her party,” I said. I poured more rum into Carrie’s and my cups, though they were still mostly full. I drank some then got up and danced with her.

  The night returned to its former disheveled revelry, all of us dancing and drinking again. At a certain point Marcy said she thought she was going to puke and I went outside with her, rubbed her back while she took some deep breaths. For a moment I held her wrist; its pulse quivered and twitched, like a feather stuck in a revolving door.

  Eventually I must have dozed off on the couch, because Carrie patted me awake. “You’ll feel better if you sleep in bed,” she said. The music had been turned off and her face looked saintly and luminous, framed by the light of the floor lamp and the quiet of early morning. When I sat up I saw Ben and Marcy collecting cups and plates in a careful, inefficient manner, awkwardly holding a gauzy trash bag between them. “Leave it, I’ll get it in the morning,” I murmured, and staggered off to bed.

  The next day, after I finally woke up, I sat at the dining table with my coffee, focused on the vacant throbbing in my head. The familiarity of the sensation was oddly comforting, almost pleasurable. It was a little after ten, and the sun cut through the windows, slicing the room with bands of light, suffusing my body with a sharp, benevolent heat. I heard small, shuffling noises from Carrie’s room; I imagined her still in her red T-shirt and jeans, her face runny with makeup and bloated from last night’s alcohol.

  But when she came out, she looked as she did every morning, sleepy but well-rested. “Is there coffee left?” she asked, and when I nodded, said “All right!” and went into the kitchen to get a cup.

  When Carrie sat down to join me I had my eyes closed, slowly turning my head from side to side to stop the ringing in my ears. I was trying to recreate the feelings I’d had the first time Allen and I slept together, when afterwards we giggled like
coconspirators, hiding under the comforter while his roommates came in, banging around looking for a basketball. But this time I could only remember Allen’s expression at the bar, his contorted lip and grimace, the ugly, taunting voice that somehow seemed more like mine than his. I remembered my shock at this change in him, but couldn’t relive that sensation either. All my memories felt dulled and flattened, like I was watching them via a faraway screen, the sound on mute.

  “Hey, wake up,” Carrie said. “Seriously, you sleep way too much.” I opened my eyes. She blew on her coffee before sipping it; she’d added a creamer that smelled synthetic and luxurious. As she drank she caught me up on what I’d missed after I’d fallen asleep, which was that Ben and Marcy had apologized right before leaving. “I was actually feeling kind of bad, like we forced them into it. But when they sobered up they were like, ‘Sorry, we were really drunk.’ So I was like, ‘It’s okay, don’t worry about it.’”

  “Really?” I said. I thought about Marcy’s ragdoll postures, the way she turned her face away, almost burying it from view, the way she let Ben tilt her pelvis toward us, pressing her leg down off the couch as if the appendage didn’t even belong to her. I remembered her one self-protective gesture, how she kept covering her breasts with her arm, right up until the end. The feeling behind the gesture seemed oddly familiar to me, though I couldn’t remember ever taking it on.

  The Supplies

  The temp agency was on the sixth floor of a tall glass building that looked glossy, almost glamorous from the outside. But the one-room office itself was dingy, crammed with metal desks and chipped veneer counters, vaguely demarcated with gray partition walls. I was made to wait sitting against one of these for half an hour until I was called before Lisa, a slender woman with thin, tense lips that clashed with her expressionless forehead, probably Botoxed. She looked to be in her early forties, two decades older than me. She wore an expensive gray skirt suit that seemed wasted in the cramped office, which employed just two other women, a receptionist who kept adjusting her wig and a nervous girl who rushed back and forth, making photocopies.

  Lisa glanced at my résumé then studied me with more care, her eyes pausing over the unironed legs of my pants. She said that her office really handled only administrative, data entry type jobs. I said that was exactly what I was looking for. She pursed her lips. I said ten dollars an hour was all I expected. She looked unconvinced but assigned me a battery of tests.

  I was great at typing and getting around Microsoft Word, but was made to retake the data entry and Excel assessments until my scores were deemed adequate.

  When I left, it was mid-afternoon. There was a Whole Foods across the street; I went in and picked out “natural” Oreos. I opened the package while walking to the car and ate as I drove home. Then I got back into bed and unpaused the Dexter episode streaming on Netflix. “But it’s not that simple,” Dexter said. “I have a code. Rules. Responsibilities.”

  I’d seen all the episodes before, but rewatching them, I felt a predictable, wallowing comfort.

  I hadn’t always been this way. Until a month ago, I’d done just fine at a new tech company that did IT work for all the internet startups popping up. Basically, I was an assistant there, but after learning I was an English major, my bosses—three MBA grads from UCLA—slapped me with the title Corporate Communications Manager and had me write copy for their website, which I cribbed from other websites. This title was why Lisa thought me overqualified. When the company went belly up in the dot-com crash, I thought I’d try freelance writing. But on my own, I fell into a funk. I woke up at five in the morning one day, two in the afternoon the next. I ate junk food. It was tough to get motivated, and tough to find gigs. I picked up just a trickle of assignments, churning out rewrites of press releases for soft news websites. I started to fantasize about menial jobs. I wanted to file, photocopy, and collate, to stick neatly typed labels on folders before alphabetizing them by last name in long, metal file cabinets, even to spend quiet afternoons segregating paper clips by size. That’s how I’d found myself at the temp agency.

  The next day, Lisa called mid-morning with my first job, a one-day gig at a law office in West Los Angeles that needed an assistant to come in immediately. “It’s a traditional firm,” Lisa said, “so what you wore when you interviewed here—something like that would be fine.” I said I could be there in an hour; she said she’d tell them two, then hung up. I mussed around the bed for that interview outfit and found the pants wedged between the sheets.

  Lisa was right; I hurried but still got there at the two-hour mark. The job was in the billing department. A mousy girl about my age gave me two stacks of papers; I was to match the check stubs with the invoices. I don’t think I really helped much; most of the stubs had little identifying information, so I kept having to ask the girl for help. The actual task too seemed pointless, circular; I asked the girl what happened to the paired papers and she shrugged and pointed to a file cabinet. It stood big and pristine in its corner, like a readymade in a museum. “No one ever looks in there,” she said. She seemed to like me though; perhaps she liked having an underling, or was lonely. At the end of the day she said if it were up to her, I’d be hired full-time. The department really needed to make this a permanent position, she said, then signed and faxed my timesheet for me.

  My second job was at the small management office of a high-rise office building in El Segundo. It was a two-day gig, ten to three each day. I validated parking tickets and transferred the occasional phone call to one of the three employees. The manager was a friendly, overweight man. At noon he asked me if I wanted the banana his wife had packed for him; it had freckles, which he found unappetizing. I took it and thanked him. There was little for me to do, the phone calls were so few and far between that I wondered why they didn’t just answer their own calls, but when I packed up for the day the manager said, “We really should have someone here full-time. I’ll talk to Maira about it in the morning.”

  Maira was the boss. “I’m not sure,” I said the next day, when she asked what my long-term plans were.

  “I just don’t want someone who’s going to leave in six months,” she said in a haughty tone. When I said I understood, her eyes widened, then turned hard. She gave me a sharp nod and clicked her heels back into her office.

  Lisa called me on my way home. “They’d like you back next week, but I’ve got a full-time thing for twelve dollars an hour too,” she said. “It’s an ad agency. Temp-to-hire.”

  I took it. When I hung up I felt an anxious sort of happiness. Two companies had wanted me. As I drove my mood swung erratically, giddy one moment, then self-satisfied to the point of being sardonic, then flaily and frantic with apprehension.

  On Monday I got to the agency a little before nine. The office had a sleek, modern look, like it had recently gone through an expensive remodel. At the reception desk sat an Armenian girl who held her face tilted down under the weight of her heavy high ponytail. She looked sixteen. When I introduced myself she buzzed someone, then kept smiling at me until I turned away to study a well-trimmed fern.

  A middle-aged woman called Maureen came out and shook my hand. She asked if I wouldn’t mind waiting a bit. “A few fires to put out this morning,” she said, wagging her hands around her face, eyebrows raised. I figured I would still get paid. I took a seat on a white leather divan and picked up a copy of Ad Age. Less than five minutes later Maureen was hovering over me. “Ready?” she said, grinning.

  The job consisted primarily of emailing project drafts to the creative team, then circulating hard copies of the same drafts, though no one looked at the printouts except the copyeditor. I walked through the quiet office dropping papers into plastic inboxes. The soft, middle-aged geniality of the employees clashed with the sharp image I’d had of creative ad agency types. The women wore busy polyester blouses and skirt suits made with dense, no-iron fabric. Their kids’ crayon drawings fidgeted on the cubicle walls. The head writer was a stringy man in his s
ixties who ran during his lunch break in purple shorts, dodging pedestrians. He tipped an imaginary hat to me whenever I passed his cubicle. Next to him sat the production manager, a heavy woman who drank constantly from a Starbucks cup but still always looked bleary-eyed.

  I decided I liked them all, the whole team, in a passive, untaxing way, though I wondered how they’d been hired, if they’d all come in to their initial interviews with the same fusty clothing and droopy attitudes they displayed now. The only artsy-looking person was the copyeditor, a guy in his mid-thirties called Roy, who had a toned-down Mohawk. He always had his earbuds in; he smiled hazily when he saw me. Maureen said he was newly married. “He got the haircut right after the honeymoon,” she confided in a low voice, then asked me to email him to check if black-and-white proofs would do.

  To me the office seemed a peaceful place, where I could wallow in its drab, noncompetitive spirit.

  When I got home that night I felt calmer than I had in a long time, then the next morning, oddly energized, purposeful. I drank extra coffee and drove to work with an eager, curious attitude. The traffic was unusually light so I arrived a half hour early with a sense that the world had cleared a new path for me. I felt willing, confident. I would beat this junk food habit once and for all. I went into a juice bar on the first floor and ordered a fruit-and-greens smoothie to go. Afterwards, a woman holding a yogurt parfait cup the same way I was holding my smoothie got on the elevator with me. We smiled at each other. I thought positive, encouraging thoughts about the cumulative rewards of diligent work. I felt like I was coming out of a long sleep to join the good people in the world, all with their crucial small roles to play. When the parfait woman got off before me, I said “Have a good day,” and she said “You too.”

  “Well, hello!” Maureen said when she got in, her head bobbing over our shared cubicle wall. “Usually I’m the first one here!”