Diary of a Working Girl

by Daniella Brodsky

  Here we both look around at the crowd, because it’s getting tense between us. Samantha is a little more hostile than I’m used to. I spot a man who I’m sure is British across the bar. He’s got that tallish air and a great, pointy nose. In fact, being with Liam so much, I almost feel British. Like the other day, I actually bought tea that doesn’t come in a bag. But now it turns out that the distinguishing factors of British men are not very distinguishing at all; as soon as he speaks, and loudly uses the phrase “fouggetaboudit,” it’s obvious he hails from somewhere closer to Staten Island. I guess sometimes things aren’t what they appear to be.

  Samantha is meeting Seth here in a few minutes anyway, and while you’d think that could be awkward, it really turns out to be just fine. It’s funny, though. Seeing them together really is quite romantic. They do seem to fit nicely. And if I didn’t know any better I’d think that odd tugging in my heart when he whispered a little joke in her ear, which she laughed coyly at, was … jealousy. Me and Liam have lots of secrets. Lots. Or we will have when he comes back anyway.

  By the time Wednesday rolls around, without a word from Liam, I’m bitterly impatient. I can’t help but take out the scrap of paper he wrote his London phone number on and stare at it. I said that I would wait for him to call—and not just because Joanne advised it, but also because this is the way things are supposed to go, aren’t they? But the self-control required becomes impossible to maintain. And I really want to get started telling him something about me. I’ve rehearsed a narrative of the time I was in the Kennedy Day School fifth grade production of The Wizard of Oz and I came in with all of these rewrites of the script, whereby Dorothy and the scarecrow fall in love and get to live in Oz, giving birth to little scare-people and people-crows who get everyone started on the overalls trend.

  I stare and stare until the numbers congeal in a blurry mass.

  There’s no reason to be worried! He’s just busy. He warned me he would be. And besides, he only has one more month to tie up all the loose ends before he moves to New York for good, and then we can be together forever and have plenty of time to learn more about each other.

  But all of the negative views from my so-called friends have started to get the best of me. I mean, I’ve managed to keep myself busy at work most of the time, what with the big meeting coming up soon, but every time I write something in the Diary of a Working Girl—it’s just doubtful, capricious stuff. My mind is getting me into an hysterical, paranoid state. Too good to be true. I keep hearing that phrase in my head. I can allay my fears for a few minutes at a time by replaying some of our wonderful moments in my head. I can still feel him—sturdy and lovely—and I remember that smell, and I know Liam embodies everything I’ve ever dreamed of. I have my dream come true right now at this very moment. How many people can say that? And so I try to remind myself to enjoy it. But in the end this hollow feeling creeps in. It’s just an uncharted part of our enormous love, I’m sure. Of course there will be moments of confusion; I’m not yet familiar with all of its symptoms.

  Still, just to feel better, I’d love to speak with him—even if it’s only for a second.

  I’m sure when we speak he will be the wonderful, sweet, romantic Liam that I know and everything will be perfect. I’m sure. I probably shouldn’t even call. He’s probably going to call me any minute. He probably just doesn’t want to bother me at work, and by the time it’s five here, he’s so tired he just falls asleep by the phone waiting to call me.

  So here I am once again splashing around in these uncharted waters of our love, and decide I’ll just work and not think about it anymore.

  This works for about ten seconds until all of the words I’m proofing on my page say, “Liam.” Good thing I always double proof.

  When an overwhelming wave overtakes me, my hand picks up the telephone, dials the number and I sit, waiting and shaking slightly. Finally, after nothing—no ringing, no busy signal or anything else, a recording picks up and says, “The number you have dialed is incorrect, please hang up and dial again.” All the ones and zeros you have to dial on international calls are so confusing that I have no idea where I’ve gone wrong. Or how to fix it. Why can’t we all just be one big global community? Why all these barriers?

  I take another crack at it, altering the configuration a bit—the zero first, the two ones second. Tears are dangling, ready to spring. Something as simple as a phone call seems to be the sole thing keeping us apart, the way class, wars, or evil stepmothers do in fairytales. After each failed attempt, I slam the phone down on the receiver.

  “You okay Lane?” John’s so tall he can stand up and look right over the cubey wall, and he does this now. It’s too late to say yes, because he sees me crying and shaking.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks, coming around to my cubey. He rests against the work surface and after hesitating for a couple of seconds, puts his hand on my back as lightly as a feather.

  “Nothing, nothing.” I stare through the line of buttons on his shirt. And without shifting my gaze, I do my best to undesperately explain my desperate needs. “It’s just, do you know how to make an international call to London? I thought I did, but I can’t seem to make this number go through.”

  John takes a look at me: I feel him assess via the sort of expression that shows we both know there’s something more going on here than an incorrectly dialed phone number. But John would never come out to suggest something as bold as that.

  “Sure. Let’s see,” he says, holding the paper close to his face.

  And like an angel from heaven, he dials the number for me, puts the receiver to my face, and I wait intently, so happy to hear the double-ring sound I’ve only ever heard on Faulty Towers.

  A woman’s cockney voice answers, “Tate’s carpet cleaning services.”

  What? I’m completely thrown and unsure of what to say.

  And then it comes to me. Of course! This is just one of his family’s other businesses. He hasn’t mentioned it before, but maybe he just doesn’t like to talk about it. After all, carpet cleaning isn’t very glamorous. Although, I’m not sure how carpet cleaning fits under the media umbrella. But don’t smart investors dabble in all sectors of the marketplace, just to balance things out? I’ve definitely read that before. Yes, a “balanced portfolio” is what it’s called. It’s all making sense now. Doesn’t Phillip Morris own Kraft? There’s no obvious relation there. See, silly! You’re just getting paranoid now. I instruct myself to take a deep breath. And then I take a deep breath and venture, “Is Liam Kampo in?”

  John gives me a wink and a thumbs-up and disappears around the cubey wall.

  “Liam? You mean Liam O’Neill?”

  Is it possible he uses another last name at this company? Why would he do that? Maybe they keep the carpet cleaning hush-hush because again, it is so unchic, and so he uses his mother’s maiden name for this end of the business. I’m not sure this is his mother’s maiden name, but I’m so desperate I’ll tell myself anything in order for this to be true, for this to be the right number.

  “Yes. Can I speak with him?”

  “Hold please,” says the woman on the other end. The seconds I wait feel like hours, days even, and the Muzak version of “Oops! I Did it Again,” is not doing anything to soothe my mind or my stomach, which is doing a crazy flip-flop, because I feel as if the fate of my entire existence depends on whether or not Liam picks up the line. I really have a lot riding on this, don’t I? An innocent Post-it note suffers a slow death as I tear it apart shred by shred.

  “Hello, Liam here,” says a voice I’ve never heard before.

  This is not the voice I know. Not the voice that said, “Splendid,” to me on that last evening. In fact, this is a distinctly Irish voice.

  “Hello? Anyone there?” the voice asks, but I can’t bring myself to speak. I just sit with the receiver to my face, thinking that maybe, if I just stay on the line and don’t hang up, then there is still a chance. I feel like a prank caller, breathing heavily
into the receiver, until … finally, he hangs up, but not before he expresses his feelings about me. “Wanker!”

  The busy signal comes, and I’m frozen. I can’t imagine the expression on my face. I will have to get this telephone surgically removed, because I cannot command my hand to hang it up. Questions run through my mind as the busy signal pace picks up and grows louder. Why would he give me the wrong number? Why hasn’t he called me? I play with the possibility that he just wrote it incorrectly, but I’m not buying into this head-in-the-sand theory. I feel deceived. I try to ground myself with the memory of his hand tracing around my eye. For one second I can close my eyes and know the feeling.

  But, embarrassingly enough, it’s only a matter of seconds until I start down a road of self-doubt that can only lead to bad things; my stomach feels unusually large. I chide myself for my fast-food binges, the gym sessions I never got to; it’s my fault, I should have worked harder with someone like Liam. I recast my memories so that suddenly I see myself as an overanxious, calling-too-much, unsexy, badly dressed, conversationally- challenged moron, with a big nose and a horrible personality. I feel as if I’ve eaten bad fish—sick to my stomach—and suddenly I could fall asleep right in my chair, sitting up, with the phone to my ear. The pile of papers in my inbox is impossible to look at, much less sort, type, fax, and format. I have to go home. I can’t be here now. It’s the only thing to do.

  I can’t bring myself to face Tom, as I know I’ll start crying the second I try to speak. So I dial his extension instead.

  “What is it, Ab Fab?” he asks. “Got a new project you’d like to make me a guinea pig for? Going to give me a new hairdo? A mullet? Mohawk? Pluck my eyebrows maybe?”

  He’s being funny and sweet, and part of me would love to laugh with him right now, but I have that distinct feeling that I’ve been zoomed outside the rest of the population. I can watch, but I can’t seem to join in.

  “Um, I’m not feeling very well. Is it okay if I take the afternoon off?” The last word barely comes out as my voice trails off.

  “Everything okay? Can I help you at all?”

  He’s concerned and that feels nice, but really, I just want to be alone.

  “That’s okay, thanks.”

  “Well, call a car then, I don’t want you standing outside trying to get a taxi forever. No, never mind, I’ll do it for you; I’ll call you as soon as it’s here.”

  I don’t want to wait here, but I don’t know what else to do. I’m actually glad that Tom made a decision for me, because I doubt whether I would have been able to do something as simple as raise my hand to hail a cab.

  When I hang up with Tom, I’m just sitting, as if on pause, staring at my computer screen; I can’t even bring myself to shut the thing down. I can’t lift my jacket off of its hook and thread my arms through it. All I can think is how stupid I have been to once again put all of my eggs in one basket. Every time it doesn’t work with a guy, you promise yourself that the next time you won’t let yourself get swept away, you’ll keep your sense of self and just hope for the best without letting it get the best of you—but that never works when you’re once again in the middle of something.

  My feet are ostensibly still dangling below my ankles, but I can’t feel them at all. If I could, I would try to kick myself in the ass. I am so stupid. But I guess I don’t really have to kick myself in the ass. Life has already done this to me, as if to say, “Wake Up! This is not reality!” I am again thinking of myself as the old woman with the birds, perhaps sunny canaries. They seem nice. Yellow.

  “Hey, Lane, don’t let him get you down,” John is whispering and bending down next to me. It doesn’t occur to me that I’ve never mentioned anything about Liam to John, and that he must have a very sensitive side to see what’s going on here.

  I just say, “I know, I know.” But my head is shaking from side to side, undermining my words.

  I’m so pitiful. Leave it to me to screw up the opportunity of a lifetime!

  It’s a miracle that I make it downstairs into the town car, and this is in no small part thanks to Tom, who pulls one arm after the other through my coat sleeves as one would for an infant, shuts down my computer, leads the way to the twenty-sixth floor and into the elevators, past the turnstiles and the guards, and across the courtyard to the car.

  Of course it’s pouring rain and I don’t have an umbrella. In a masochistic way, I’m glad for this. It’s the perfect scene for a perfectly horrid turn of events. Tom is holding his suit jacket up over my head.

  When he helps me into the car he looks at me, as if he’d like to say something, opens his mouth, and begins, “I—” but he stops himself, closing his eyes, as if it’s now his turn to be on pause. When he reopens them he whispers, “I’m here if you need me,” and passes me a slip of paper.

  I take it without looking. Numbly I manage a thank you, but I’m sure my measly mumble doesn’t do his kindness justice. I hand him back his blazer. We both look at it, and after a second he places it gently over my shoulders, smiles, and steps back to close me inside. The driver sees an opening in the traffic and drives off.

  One hand extended over the back of the passenger seat, he tries to make small talk with some comment about cats and dogs, which I guess is referring to the rain, but rather than egg him on, I act like I haven’t heard. Every store we pass seems to be there just to remind me of Liam. A pet store—Liam has a dog. A shop called Good—I remember him using that word. A coffee shop-—he likes his black. The driver misses my block and I find my voice somehow, to tell him this. And even though I would normally be incensed by something like this, I behave very un-New York and barely pay the error notice. Instead, I watch the raindrops hit the window and eventually slip down until they are gone. Like my relationship with Liam. Like the idea that I’d met my M&M. M&M. M&M, M&M … I say it over and over until it is just mmmmmminmmmmmmmmm. It too, is nothing now, a meaningless nothing. Like my article and my career, which I foolishly tossed away for a fantasy.

  When I get to my apartment, which is dark in the way only rainy days can make a space, I don’t bother undressing. I throw myself onto my bed, next to an open window, a position that affords the raindrops the chance to hit me every now and again, and I fall into a deep sleep. In my dream, Liam is sitting with a beautiful girl, tall with long black hair to her waist, and they are looking over me in my bed and laughing hysterically, and he keeps saying, “Splendid, absolutely splendid,” which sends them into hysterics all over again.

  By the time I wake, it’s 11 P.M. My breath tastes stale; my bags are strewn on the floor. I’m wearing my raincoat and I’m soaked through with sweat. I’m unbelievably thirsty, but I don’t want to get up.

  The phone rings.

  On the desperate hope that it might be Liam, I throw the blankets from my body and run for it.

  “Hello?” I ask, breathless.

  “Hey, what’s up?” It’s Joanne. Her normalcy feels surreal.

  “You’ll never believe this,” I say, and tell her the whole story. All I want to do is run through the episode from beginning to end, feeling the faster I get it out, the faster it will all be over.

  But now that she’s just worked everything out with Pete, she fancies herself a relationship guru, and so she keeps interrupting with irritating questions that might hold obscure clues like, “So what time exactly did he leave your apartment on that last night?” and “Did he write the number quickly?”

  Each time she stops me it’s physically painful.

  When, finally, I’m done, she sums it all up. “He’s an ass. Well, at least you know now, before it’s too late.”

  I’m listening, and thinking that it’s already too late, and wondering why people always say this, when obviously, you’re already hurt. Then the oddest thing happens. My rapid-fire thoughts stumble abruptly on an image of Tom, not in one of his beautiful new suits, but in that funny globe tie, pulling the half-smile, amused by something I’d said without meaning to be amusing.

/>   And that makes me think of before I met Liam—when I walked into that office with hope and confidence, and felt as if the whole world was mine for the taking. If I could have just gone with my head instead of my heart, just this one time, maybe everything would have been okay. We are our own worst enemies, aren’t we?

  Still, I think, If I get anything out of this experience, I’ve made a fantastic friend. Tom had been so kind to me earlier—it turned out in the end to be a good thing I’d told him about Liam. I feel the need to call him. Thank him. I fumble for the paper he’d given me in the car, wondering if it was his number, but I can’t find it anywhere. I give up the search when I realize that I couldn’t deal with that world right now, the one where I failed to do what I set out to, anyway. I’d have to face the reality of it all.

  “Yeah, before it’s too late,” I mimic.

  “There must be someone at work you’ve spotted,” she says, looking towards the future, the article, which is very easy to do when it’s not you who’s right in the middle of a major crisis.

  I hear a beep, signaling another call. Again, my heart jumps and even now, I squeeze my palm into a fist, thinking maybe, just maybe.

  “Hello?” I say, clicking over. It’s a friend from college I haven’t spoken to in quite some time. And of all things, she wants to know if I feel like meeting up for a drink. At any other time, I’d doubtless have all of the catty resignations about this—her calling out of the blue when obviously I’m the last one in her telephone book, the fact that there’d been some boyfriend whose appearance in her life marked the end of my presence in her life. But at the current moment, she fills the exact qualifications I’m looking for in a companion: she’s not male, and she doesn’t know anything about my current state of distress—something that now I’d gotten out, I can’t bear to think about anymore.

  “Sure,” I say. “How about The Reservoir?” suggesting a little neighborhood spot.

  I don’t change. I don’t apply deodorant. This is a pity expedition—embarrassing, but much more mature that I recognize it, right?