The Dinner Party

by Joshua Ferris

  More Abandon

  (Or Whatever Happened to Joe Pope?)

  They’re leaving. An exodus. Out of the elevators, onto the street. Into the waning mild midwestern sunlight. Taking their first real breaths of the day. Thank God to be done with that. Lighting up cigarettes, loosening ties. Clustering at corners to await the light change. Joe Pope’s window on sixty-two looks down on only a small tight angle of this manic outrush. The women returned to tennis shoes. The men without wives stopping in Burger Kings and Popeye’s Fried Chickens for dubious meals laid out on laps during the express ride home. If they don’t leave on the 6:12, they’re stuck riding the milk train, making all the stops along the route—can’t do that. Their evening hours are time-sensitive material made personal: they shimmy and jaywalk, juke and dart toward their destinations in a pathological state of hurry-up-and-get-home. Joe remains standing at his office window because, he tells himself, there is work to do. Looking down on an open courtyard, he watches people cut across angles of least resistance, heading toward buses, waiting taxis. Just beyond the courtyard, there’s the entrance ramp to the Outer Drive, and the cars are lined up in tight formation to get on, all the city’s to’d froing again the way they came. Light descends. It is the settling-in of dusk, the draining, abandoning psychology of dusk, and in a few minutes there will be an ebbing, a point of no return. But there is work to do, work to do, and that, he tells himself, is why he stays. It is nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow, but he is incapable of breaking free.

  Genevieve Latko-Devine has left. Benny Shassburger has left. Jim Jackers has gone for the night—Joe Pope’s coworkers, his friends. Two doors down the hall, Shassburger keeps a pair of binoculars handy for the closer inspection of unsuspecting women on the rooftop pool of the Holiday Inn. The office without Shass is airless and quiet, stilled as it seldom is during day hours. But Shass has long cut out, and despite the neon Yuengling sign and collection of World Series caps on the walls, his office appears anonymous. Joe Pope stands hovering over the desk. He gets down on his haunches and rifles through the drawers. He wonders how creepy he looks. Finally he finds the binoculars under a stack of back issues of Sports Illustrated, and he takes to the hall again.

  He goes to the office full of pigs. Oh, how fatiguing, he thinks, not for the first time—how vaguely oppressive. Pig calendars, pig posters (“It’s been a trough day!”), stress relievers in the shape of pigs on top of her computer. Her name is Megan Korrigan and she loves pigs. Pig pencils, pink pig notepads, pig jokes taped to the door. Pigs hung from key chains pinned into corkboard. Her screen saver is a repeating pattern of dancing pigs, and the credenza is filled with pig figurines, piggy banks, stuffed-animal pigs, pigs made of glass and crystal, of eraser and plastic, porcelain Porky Pigs, and a Babe the Pig that talks when you pull its string. She keeps two copies of Charlotte’s Web on her bookshelves, alongside marketing textbooks and binders full of branding guidelines, and hanging from her wall is a metal sign of a bibbed pig licking its lips, promoting the eating of itself by crying, “This way to the BBQ!” Why pigs? He walks past them and approaches the window. There is an orchid and three small rows of unbudded herbs in red clay pots. The need for green at work. Traps to catch the sun in. This he understands more clearly than pigs. He lifts the gray binoculars to his eyes.

  This is the reason he’s here: from Megan’s northern office on the sixty-second floor, there is a clear view of the building opposite. He can see into fifteen floors of it, about twenty offices from left to right—roughly a total of three hundred windows set in the steely black glazing of skyscraper, easily penetrated by Shassburger’s binoculars. The pattern of lit windows is switchboard random. Looking into the first window—what is he hoping to see? What relief will it bring? Must be something interesting going on in one of them.

  More abandon. Light’s on but no one’s home. He eyes these interiors that resemble the interiors of the building he’s in but strike him, because they’re in a different building, as exotic, rife with sexual possibility. People in other offices have trysts on desks. It doesn’t happen here—doesn’t happen to him—but that it happens in that building over there seems inevitable. Plants along windowsills cascade over air-conditioning vents. Chairs are turned awry, screen savers churn. In one office, a small mobile, a red Calder reproduction, hangs from the soft tile ceiling, turning slowly in the central-air draft. There are only a handful of windows still lit, and those are empty. Finally, he finds a woman two floors down, a dozen windows over, sitting fortuitously near the window, turned to him and applying herself to paperwork. He trains and refocuses. Not his type. Hair like a fern, tight glossy curls. Bad blouse. He looks for some crack in it, revelation of body beneath. She’s all sewn up. He keeps the glasses trained on the space between buttons, where the fabric sometimes poufs out, for the possibility of a glimpse. But no luck. And after a while it becomes no different from joining her at her paperwork. What relief there, what pleasure that?

  He missed the window almost directly across from him, one floor down, from which light emanates. He quickly swings the binoculars around front and center, but no sooner does he do so than the light blinks off, a sunspot burning out. What, leaving? Why and where to? What plans have you made? He pictures a man. The man enters the hallway and heads toward the elevator bank. A handsome man, he’s dressed in a gray suit with a starched white shirt mildly wrinkled after the crush and wrangle of a day, briefcase in hand, holding the suit coat over a shoulder with two fishhook fingers. Where does this image come from? Does it exist in real life, or only in the opening print ads of GQ? Well, someone just left, Joe saw the light go out, and just because he made it a man in a gray suit with a blue-and-tan striped tie and handsome features doesn’t mean the man doesn’t exist. He is just now taking the elevator to the lobby floor. He will climb into the back of a waiting cab. Where to, pal? Home? Meeting a woman in a bar? Now the cab is speeding away. The back of the man’s head in the rearview window is disappearing toward the Inner Drive, and Joe’s curiosity about the man’s destination turns quickly into a kind of envy that has no object but the vague conviction that other people are happier and getting more out of life than he is. He is at work, still at work, no place to be but work, where there is work to do. Difficult to do work, though, when he wants to be out there with them. Where are they all going, those people in the backs of cabs?

  He ventures into other offices with views onto other buildings. He takes the stairs to reception, on sixty-one, with its calla lilies and pitchers of cucumber-and-lime water. All the ice is melted, and the sofas are empty. He opens the glass door and enters another hallway. He goes into the first office on the right, which looks west. Ten minutes later, he leaves that office and takes the elevator to the sixty-sixth floor, passes the coffee bar, where he pauses for a few stale pretzels in a bowl. He continues past a cluster of cubicles and into a conference room, to a wall-length window. Standees of Tony the Tiger and the Pillsbury Doughboy lurk anthropomorphically in the corners. Here is where Shass goes to look down on the hotel’s rooftop pool. Joe trains the binoculars out the window, but it is too dark now, and the pool is empty. No swimming after sundown. He walks to the north side of the building and enters another office—whose is this? Oh, what’s-his-name—the guy collects snow globes. Go somewhere, bring back a snow globe, and he’ll pay you for it. Appropriately harmless distraction, or a real passion? Joe can’t imagine it either way. Turn it over and make it snow. There’s some kind of pleasure in that? It sustains you? He walks up to the window. The sun’s fully down now. Building tops reflect the black sky, roof spurs are blotted out, the construction crew working a half-finished skyscraper has gone home long ago. Stilled cranes angle in the air. Farther out is a blinking manic circuit board of light. Signal lights pulse faintly as airplanes circle holding patterns above O’Hare. Objectless longing again. Where do people go when they board planes? Who awaits them in the terminals, in purring SUVs, in warm beds across the hushed and longing land? He
is office-locked, deskbound, and how did that happen? He trains the binoculars down on the building across the way and into an angle of windows where no human presence offers itself again.

  Joe, Joseph—go home, for God’s sake, he can hear someone telling him. His father: “Get your butt home, boy. Call someone. Make plans. Enjoy your youth. It only comes around once.”

  But who could he call that doesn’t work here? Who would it be that he won’t see tomorrow?

  He window-shops like this till late in the evening. Part of the night he gives over to the contemplation of why his colleagues put such things on their walls. What it means to be the person who hangs up autographed eight-by-tens, African masks. There is one office—Janine Gorjanc’s office—filled with pictures of her murdered child. Everyone knows the story. The child was taken from an open window. The body wasn’t found for months. And only many months after that did Janine return to work, now bearing pictures of the dead girl. Everyone avoids the office like the plague. Several of the frames are meant for a flat surface, so across the desk and bookshelves, and the credenza along the back wall, and on top of her filing cabinet, any number of overlapping eight-by-tens proliferate at cross-purposes. Others hang from the wall—Jessica straight on, quarter profile floating in white cloud; Jessica in T-ball outfit; Jessica on her father’s knee. Janine’s office is among the most mournful things Joe has ever seen, as when a soldier dies and a shrine appears. The first time he entered it and saw the sheer quantity of photos, he found himself reluctant to move. It was like finding the walls covered in bats. There was a fluttering, and a hum in the air, and he didn’t want to move too quick lest they all fly up and start screaming.

  Without his knowing it, the lobby guards change shifts. So do the security men monitoring the television banks. Hispanic women in uniforms emerge from the elevator, trundling supply carts and industrial vacuums. This is the other side of things, the time of lockdown and cleanup, when the tenders of the building replace its daytime occupiers in order to keep the occupiers from noticing the things to which they tend. One of the vacuumers, with the full lips and sad oval eyes of a dispossessed princess, sees Joe as she pushes her cart down a hallway. He emerges from an office holding binoculars, walks across the hallway and enters another office. He doesn’t see her. Then he wanders out of the second office just as quickly and begins to walk toward her. They are both startled—she that he is coming toward her, and he that she is present at all. He’s wearing a navy-blue button-down and belted pleated slacks, a shiny pair of black oxfords. He commands a presence in this space, she thinks, more vital in the hierarchy than her own, and she averts her eyes. She is beautiful, he thinks, and must be wondering why he is still here long after he should have gone home, and he averts his eyes. They pass each other by.

  An hour later, he is sitting in Jim Jackers’s office in a chair of remarkable comfort, an ergonomic triumph, holding Jim’s phone in contemplation. Not to his ear but in the cradle of his shoulder, so that he can hear the faint hum of the dial tone. He likes Jim’s office better than his own. Shaped the same. The same ceiling-tile count. But somehow Jim has made his more anonymous—absolutely nothing here that couldn’t be packed away within minutes. He looks around for even a single personal item. People must wonder about Jim more than they do about him. Is that what it means to put stuff on your walls—that people no longer feel a need to wonder about you? Sports, old movies, pigs—doesn’t matter, so long as you take an interest in something. He reaches out and renews the dial tone. Well, should he call?

  Oh, what the hell. He dials, knowing the phone will ring, ring, ring, until it goes to voicemail. Not your average voicemail. That voice. Tone of hope, pitch of happiness. If the small of a woman’s back could sing. What’s she saying? “Hello, you’ve reached Genevieve Latko-Devine at the Brand Investment Group. I’m away from my desk at the moment, but if you’ll leave—” This is normally as far as he gets. He calls to hear her voice, not to leave his message. He cups the phone in his hand. He shifts in the chair. He should hang up and call back, play the message again. There are nights, make of them what you will, when he repeats the exercise beyond the reasonable. Sometimes calling from his apartment, midnight, two in the morning. Four, five beers roiling in his stomach, television blaring mutely, alarm set for six. He feels moderately less unhealthy now calling from Jim’s office. Its cold officeness gives the enterprise a veneer of legitimacy, as if he might be reminding her of a meeting tomorrow morning or changes that need inputting. Is he going to hang up now or what? “…encountering an emergency, please press one now, and you will be directed to—” He hangs on nervously, anguished by the possibility of saying something into the machine without really knowing what that might be, of having nothing to say but wanting to say something anyway. He’s afraid of himself. Time is never so real—never so forcefully marching on—as when he hears her voice unfurling scripted instructions to leave a message and, at the end of it, after the beep, he’s forced to confront himself. That unprescripted longing, the inarticulate, memorialized, permanent confession that every time, somehow, he just restrains himself from issuing into that perfect hostage, the telephone.

  Beep—

  “Hey, Eve—”

  Do two little words give him away? Bittersweet that she might know his voice so well. But could he hang up now and deny it tomorrow?

  “—this is, uh—”

  Not if he says his name…

  “—it’s Joe.”

  He pauses. What the Jesus God almighty do I think I’m doing?

  “It’s about, uh—”

  Do not be honest about the time.

  “—eight thirty, nine thirty, something like that, I’m still at the, I’m still at the office, if you can believe it, just trying to, uh, just finishing—getting a lot of stuff that’s been piling up lately, like, well, you know, you know how… And I was looking over your, uh, your—the ads you did for the hardware convention? The banner ads. And I thought, I should call, because those are really, the images are really beautiful. Hard to believe we’re selling hammers. We should be selling, I don’t know what. They’re that good. What they reminded me of was, they reminded me so much of those screen prints we saw at the Contemporary. Remember? We were there for lunch, I think, like, when was that, six months ago? I forget the woman’s name. But when I saw these, I thought of those screen prints. You’ll have to remind me of her name. Ha, ha, am I just blabbering into your machine?”

  Here begins a long pause. He should cut his losses and hang up. But something strange happens as the pause expands. He comes to realize that it might be possible to separate what he’s now saying into the phone from the anxiety he feels at the prospect of her listening to it in the morning. Separating the message he’s leaving from the message she’ll play back, separating them into two distinct realities—one that he commands and sanctions and is all about him, the other vaguer, involving her (and something he doesn’t have to think about just yet). It takes the pressure off momentarily. Relax. Talk. What’s the big deal? They’re friends. He’s just talking to an old friend here, and he settles back into Jim Jackers’s chair.

  “Yeah,” he says, “I guess I am just blabbering into your machine. Can’t you tell? Are you still there? Still listening?” Another pause. “What do I want to say?” A third pause. “I did call for a reason, believe it or not. There were any number of people I could have called, but you were the first one I thought of when I thought to call someone. And I know that it’s not really talking when you leave a message, that’s not really talking, but I’d feel weird calling you at home right now, obviously. You might be sleeping, or your husband might pick up. It’s really more like ten fifteen, to be honest. Ten thirty. Maybe I should feel even weirder leaving a message. It’s a little, I don’t know, a little one sided…well, yeah, it’s just so one sided. But I really, I wanted to, uh, to say how lately I’ve been feeling… What I want to say is how great you are—” Oh, Jesus. Great? Really? “—how great I think y
ou are, and that we’ve worked together for, how long, like, three years now, and in that time I’ve—”

  “If you’re satisfied with your message, please press one now. To listen to your message, please press two. To rerecord your message, please press three.”

  Well, he thinks, it all works out in the end. Joe Pope doesn’t have to send his train wreck of a message after all. Press three and it’s all erased. The quivering, that sped-up heart and stomach full of jumble—all false alarms in the end. Even his minor triumph—his refusal to be cowed by the indelible recordedness of the things he was saying, and by his future accountability to them—can be rendered moot now by the press of a button. He should be grateful. So why is his finger poised above the one button? Why is there part of him that wants to send it?

  He leaves her a total of five messages. He’s cut off from each one after three minutes. When the recorded voice interrupts him to give him options, he presses one every time. Fifteen minutes of message, in which he tells her everything. How he loves her. How she is the reason he gets up in the morning and is eager to return to work. How her presence beside him in meetings, that arbitrary arrangement, means everything to him. How unmoored he feels lately, how rudderless. How lunch with her gives him some sense of purpose, and how quickly lost he becomes after five o’clock, when she leaves for home. He knows she can’t love him back. The irrefutability of it has been made clear by the fact that she is pregnant. And now he fears losing her because the baby is due soon. He attacks himself for this selfishness and says into the phone that he could not be happier for her, honest. And that leads him into darker, more vulnerable territory. Why does her life cast a shadow over his own? Why does her happiness, hers and her husband’s, follow him everywhere he goes, quietly qualifying the things that might normally bring him delight? Walking his dog on a Sunday afternoon—why does this simple pleasure turn into something irredeemably sad? Why does a cab ride through the city without her make him an empty and unrealized dreamer? And since when, and by what right, has he hitched his happiness to hers and forsaken the power to be the source of his own contentedness?