Who You Know

by Theresa Alan

  Over beer Ben told me he had been a leisure studies major in college, a statement I immediately laughed at, mistaking this for his first humorous comment of the night. I stopped laughing when I noticed the pained expression on his face.

  “You’re joking, right?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Oh. So, what exactly does one do with a leisure studies major?” Was there really such a thing, or was he pulling my leg? He seemed incapable of humor, so I was inclined to believe him.

  “There are many career possibilities. In my job, I think of activities to occupy the patients’ time. I help them keep their mind off food.”

  I thought this man, this entertainer of anorexics, was more than a little strange, but by the end of the night I had been plied with enough beers that when he asked to come inside my apartment, I didn’t think anything of it. It had been such a long time since I’d been on a date, I’d forgotten how it all worked.

  Once we were inside, I was at a loss for what we should do. I got as far as suggesting he have a seat on the couch. I sat beside him and suddenly Ben fell on me in a burst of probing tongue and groping hands and excited murmurings. In moments, we were horizontal and his large, odd-smelling body was on top of me, his jeans grinding against mine. I pushed him off and said that I didn’t want to rush things. Anyway, maybe men could be aroused through layers of denim and cotton, but his determined, noisy thrusting did nothing for me. He said he understood.

  We sat awkwardly beside the other for a few minutes. “Well, I should get going. I’ll give you a call sometime,” he said.

  “Great,” I said.

  I walked him to the door, waved a cheery good-bye, and returned to the couch where I stayed for a long time, thinking about everything and nothing at all.

  JEN

  Dating: More Fun Than a Root Canal (Barely)

  I’d lost my touch. Tom hadn’t called me all week, and when we saw each other at the office, he acted distant. At the clubs with Rette on Saturday, not a single guy asked for my phone number! Some guy asked Rette to dance. Had even one guy asked me? No! And Rette weighed about fourteen tons. It was all so cruel and unfair.

  In any case, my ego was in serious need of bolstering. Plus, Kitty was purring for attention.

  Dave had pounded on my door at 12:30 one night last week looking for sex, and while I’d had every intention of chewing him out and kicking him out the door, when I saw him, I melted. I gave a feeble attempt at bitching at him, pointing out that I had been sleeping, thank you very much.

  “I know, babe. I’m sorry. I just missed you. I still love you, you know.” I could smell alcohol on his breath, mixing with the smells of his cologne and aftershave. He smelled so good, so familiar.

  He put his hand on my neck and looked into my eyes. He pulled me toward him and kissed me. When he began kissing my neck, my defenses vanished entirely. Kitty ached for him. I was still mad at him, but it had been so long since I’d been properly fucked that I didn’t protest as he shed my clothes.

  Afterward, as we lay entwined in each other’s arms, I cried. I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d ever meet another guy whose touch could electrify me like Dave’s could. But I had no choice but to try to find him.

  So the next weekend, I called Mary from marketing. I despised Mary, but I’ve discovered it’s best to befriend people as two-faced and viper-tongued as Mary. She was the kind of person who flirted with everyone, even women. She smiled and kidded and patted you on the shoulder. But as soon as you were out of hearing range, she’d attack. She would mimic Jim from sales’s lisp or Marty from accounting’s limp. She scathingly mocked Teresa from teleresearch’s crispy, tortured hair. Mary was the kind of woman you were always on guard with because you knew she’d seize your slightest frailty and turn it against you. Only her closest friends, the people she considered cool and worth her time, were immune from the most scorching assaults, and even then, she could turn on them in seconds flat if she thought they’d committed the slightest infraction against her. I couldn’t stand her, but I think I’d managed to get her to think of me as part of the McKenna Marketing in-crowd. Normally you couldn’t pay me to go out with her, but I hadn’t realized how few close girlfriends I had until I needed someone to go to the bars with me to scam for men. I could only convince Avery and Rette to go out with me every so often. For the last five years, I’d spent so much of my time and energy with Dave, I hadn’t put much into my friendships. Now I was paying for it. Even drunk, Mary was sooo boring, but I needed to get out, and she was willing to go out, and there you are.

  Mary was telling me I shouldn’t be jealous of Rette getting married, that my time was coming. I insisted that I wasn’t jealous, but she’d hit a sore spot. I did wish it were me trying on bridal gowns.

  “Anyway, you’ll get a guy soon. A guy who can afford a little better ring. I mean my god, she’ll have that ring forever, you’d think he could spring for a little more than a diamond the size of a grain of sand!” She laughed at her own hilarity. I focused on sucking down my vodka tonic as fast as I could, hoping that a buzz would help make the evening go by a little faster. What I went through to meet men! “I mean not that my ring is huge or anything. Todd went for quality.” She brandished her wedding ring in front of my face. I scanned the bar looking for a fork I could jab into her hand.

  “I mean some things, you just have to put the money into it. Quality is important. Like with furniture. Have you seen my new couch? Oh my god, you have to come over. It’s divine. It was pricey, but it was worth it. It’s going to last us years and it’s so elegant.”

  I nodded, miserable.

  Blessedly, just then a guy hit on me. He was short and blond, which was so not my type, but even so, he was a break from Mary, and I gave him my full attention.

  He said he was a lawyer and that I was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, I should be an actress or a model, I was truly a vision. He wouldn’t shut up about what a knockout I was, and believe me, I didn’t try to make him. Except for Mike’s unfortunate height—he must have been five-six, five-seven tops because I was five-five myself, and with the tiny heels on the boots I was wearing, I positively towered over him—he wasn’t bad-looking. When he asked to take me to dinner at Vesta’s in Denver and then to a concert at the Bluebird Theater, I couldn’t help feeling benevolent and forgiving about his diminutive stature and pale coloring.

  The more Mike and I talked, the poutier Mary got. Mike was buying us both drinks, so I didn’t see what she had to complain about.

  Soon she started whining about how late it was getting. She was right. I had a date to rest up for. I gave Mike my phone number and my most seductive smile. He said he was counting the minutes until we saw each other again. The rush of adrenaline coursing through me kept me wired for the next few hours, but I finally managed to fall asleep, dreaming of what it would be like to be a lawyer’s wife.

  The next day I spent the entire afternoon primping, so by the time Mike picked me up, I looked good. He told me so all the way to the restaurant.

  Once we got there and were shown to our seats—out of the way by the window—a pall came over the conversation. He ordered an expensive bottle of Cabernet. We looked over the menu and discussed what looked good. The waitress came and took our order.

  Silence. I sipped my wine. More silence. Then Mike began talking about the case he was working on. He said he’d spent weeks going through phone bills and whatever documents to find incriminating evidence to win the case. I waited for a plot, a point to his story, a punch line. It didn’t come. The story went on for a hundred years. He spoke in a monotone and was woefully ignorant of concepts such as pacing and timing and a little thing called editing out extraneous, boring details. His voice droned on and on, eventually fading into little more than the mwah-mwah voice of adults in Charlie Brown cartoons.

  I started in on my second glass of wine and braced myself for the long night ahead.

  RETTE

  Eau d’Asshole<
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  On my first day at work, Eleanore took me around the office and introduced me to everyone. I promptly forgot their names and what it was that they did exactly.

  A big part of my job was simple copyediting, but I had to learn McKenna Marketing style and Eleanore’s preferences and the way they marked things up for the typesetter. The training was not exactly stimulating. For several hours I listened to Eleanore prattle on about style and grammar; it took a lot of effort not to yawn.

  Finally she left me with some reports to edit. They were focus group studies on what features people looked for in an oven, which were just about as interesting as Eleanore’s opinions on the use of hyphens in modern journalism. I drank coffee with abandon, determined to be alert enough to catch every mistake.

  The next morning I finished the thermos of coffee I’d brought from home before I even got to the office. I wasn’t used to waking up at 6 A.M., and of course I didn’t get much sleep the night before because of new-job stress and my previous afternoon’s caffeine orgy.

  I was already having trouble focusing on my work when Eleanore stopped by.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “Well.” I tried to look awake and perky.

  “I think you’ll really enjoy working here. I’ve worked here three years.”

  She looked thoughtful. Was I supposed to say something? Was this supposed to impress me? “Really?” was what I finally came up with.

  “The editorial department was really a mess when I got here. We were losing money, the reports were always coming out past the deadline. But I was able to turn this place around.” Her tone was defensive as if I would doubt her. “I’ve put in a lot of hours of overtime over the years to get us here. It can get pretty stressful.”

  “I bet.”

  “I run to relax. It’s important to have an outlet for stress. I run at least fifty miles a week. Not bad for someone who is forty-six, huh?”

  “That’s great. Fifty miles. Wow.”

  “I run in marathons. It’s what keeps me in shape. I’ve never been more than ten pounds overweight in my entire life.”

  Did she not notice that she was sharing this information with a person who had struggled with her weight her entire life and was quite obviously thirty pounds overweight?

  “I gained those ten pounds when my first marriage broke up. Michael was my high school sweetheart. We got married right after graduation. We were married seven years. Then I discovered he was cheating on me. It wasn’t the first time either. So for a while I ate a little more than I should. Then I looked in the mirror and said, Eleanore Kelly—my name was Kelly then—I didn’t change it after the divorce. My maiden name was Smith; then when I was thirty-two, I got remarried and for six years my name was Chase. Then I married Dwayne, that’s how I got the name Neuman. What was I saying? Running. Right. It was the breakup of my first marriage that got me into running. I’ve never been more than ten pounds overweight in my entire life because I made a decision when I looked in the mirror that day and said, ‘Eleanore Kelly, I will not tolerate self-indulgence . . .’ ”

  For more than two hours she went on in gruesome detail about the demise of her first two marriages, every place she ever traveled, all the marathons she’d run in, and about how perfect her current husband, Dwayne, was. I said nothing except for the occasional, “Oh really?” or “How interesting.”

  “I’m not ashamed of having been married three times. I mean it would be nice if Michael and I could have spent our lives together, but it’s not always possible. My therapist thinks that I may have abandonment issues because once, when I was five years old, my parents took me to my grandmother’s house and left me for a week-long vacation without saying good-bye.”

  She had a can-you-believe-it? expression, her eyes large and accusative, as if her parents had sold her five-year-old body to strangers for sex.

  “They thought it would be easier for me that way, but let me tell you, it wasn’t. Really they just didn’t want a scene; they didn’t want to see me crying. But I cried all right. That week I cried a lot.”

  Eleanore continued to analyze this event and all of its perceived repercussions on her life. After a very, very long time, she asked me about my wedding plans.

  “We’re hoping to have it at the Broker Inn if we can . . .”

  She clapped her hands together. “That’s where Dwayne and I got married four years ago. Everything was just so perfect. You’re going to have a wonderful time. For our reception the food was perfect and the champagne was delicious—normally I don’t like champagne! I try not to drink very often. When I do drink, I usually only have one glass of wine. I’ve never been drunk in my life. Our little niece and nephew were the flower girl and ring bearer and they looked so adorable. Particularly little Josh in his little tuxedo. His sister Nina tried to keep him walking straight down the aisle, but he just zigzagged around with a big smile on his face—he just loved the attention. I’ll have to bring in pictures sometime.”

  “Great.”

  “Well, I guess we’d better be getting back to work. I think you’ll really enjoy working here.” Eleanore looked at me for a moment. Was she waiting for me to say something or was she deciding if she had finished saying all that she wanted to say? “Well, I guess we’d better get back to work,” she repeated and finally left my office. I smiled and exhaled, a survivor of a verbal hurricane. Eleanore was a talker, but she seemed nice.

  Funny thing, first impressions.

  Eleanore trained me for the first couple of days, but Paige was really the person who told me what needed to get done and funneled work my way. It was odd working under a person who was only a year older than me, but I liked Paige. Eleanore always seemed annoyed with me when I asked questions, especially if she didn’t know the answer. Paige was more relaxed.

  Paige’s voice trailed off at the end of her sentences when she did talk, which wasn’t often. She wore braces on her wrists and hands. I asked her if she had carpal tunnel. She nodded.

  “Did you get it from this job?”

  She nodded again.

  “I have a bunion from when I waitressed in college. It still hurts sometimes . . .” I was cut off when Eleanore came into Paige’s office and said she had some proofs for me to go over. I took the pages and promptly went back to my office. I sat down and thought, I have a bunion from when I waitressed in college? What kind of information was this? I’d meant to strike up a conversation about workplace hazards, and instead I’d delivered a ridiculous non sequitur that had catapulted out of my mouth at a dizzying speed. I couldn’t exactly go back and explain to her what I’d meant. Shit. If there were a perfume named after me, it would be called Eau d’Asshole.

  Eventually I extracted from Paige the information that she took an anti-inflammatory drug for her carpal tunnel. She worked an average of sixty hours a week, and since the assistant before me quit, she’d been working even more, which had done some significant damage to her hands. She didn’t complain or seem upset that she was in constant pain for working sixty or seventy hours a week when she was paid for only forty.

  Paige was nice, but she was the kind of person who probably didn’t get asked to parties very often; she was the type to hover on the edges of the room as unnoticeable and innocuous as dust. But I liked her. Several times in the first few days she told me that I was doing a good job, and a few times when I queried her about something that looked odd she said “great catch.” I’d return to my office smiling. Great catch! I’d made a great catch! I’d finally found something I was good at.

  I was kept busy because there was too much work for our department, especially with Eleanore’s unbelievable verbosity—her endless monologues could easily devour two hours of my day. I had no idea how she managed to get any work done because she felt compelled to share her stories with just about everyone in the entire office.

  Eleanore’s conversations always had a tirade quality to them. Every story seemed to have the same moral: Everyone in the
world was hopelessly flawed except her, which thus put an undue burden on poor beleaguered Eleanore, who always rose to the occasion through heroic efforts.

  At first, I didn’t mind the heavy workload. I liked having a little stress. I liked pushing myself to see how much I could get done in a day. What I didn’t realize was that in my first few days, Paige was keeping my workload to a reasonable level. Soon, however, I was expected to plow through as much work as Paige did, and the stress became overwhelming. One day I worked at such a hectic pace for so many hours on end that when my stomach rumbled to tell me it was almost six o’clock, it was like coming out of a trance, and I could suddenly feel how much my right forearm and wrist ached from the keyboard and mouse, and my neck was stiff and sore. By the time I got home from work, my eye was twitching like a mad scientist from staring at the computer screen so long.

  The thing was, my body didn’t have a chance to heal. I worked the same long intense hours day after day. In less than a week, I was wearing braces like Paige. I tried to remind myself to look away from the computer screen, but my eye twitch lingered. I was beginning to look like someone who should be named Igor.

  In stark contrast to the beaten-down ergonomic wrecks in the editorial department were the people from sales who were positively ebullient at all times, always complimenting me on my gorgeous outfits and asking me questions like how my commute was or how the wedding plans were coming along. They acted as though I was the most fascinating person they would talk to all day. I’d answer politely, but people that happy scared me, and anyway, all I wanted to do was not think about the wedding. The fact that we hadn’t found a place to have it at was keeping me up at night, as were my dismal prospects of finding a dress that didn’t make me look like Snuffalupogous in taffeta.

  Unfortunately, all my coworkers knew about me was that I was getting married, so in that polite but distant way coworkers feign interest in you, the wedding was a perpetual topic of conversation, particularly with Paige. She was so shy, I couldn’t get past feeling we were little more than strangers. I would ask her about her wedding; she would ask about mine. She’d had a huge wedding and an elaborate reception at an expensive restaurant. Her ring was gargantuan.