And as for a way out…He thought desperately, but for the life of him he couldn’t recall dropping a single clue as to the direction one might move in. Was he, he wondered, a small panic rising in him at the thought—deep down—truly interested in the subject of his play, or had he found it merely “interesting”? Had he really considered, the way Mary had said that he had, the question of why—or had he, like Cassel, merely deferred the question?
“It’s a real dilemma,” Jeff said again. Again his tone, which included a barely detectable sigh, indicated that he was ready to talk about other things.
“IT’S THE SAME EVERY MORNING. The alarm beeps, I slam it shut, then I slide out of bed. I have to be careful to get up quickly. If I wait too long, my brain starts to kick in; I start thinking about how ungodly it is to wake up at this hour, and then about what would happen if, just this once, I simply turned over and went back to sleep.
“I start to picture everyone flapping around at the studio, wondering what to do, slamming drawers and shuffling pages and snapping at one another. I picture Stacy, the intern, being shoved on the set at the very last minute and stumbling her way through the morning report. I picture the phones ringing off the hook afterward, everyone wondering if the daytime high is eighty-two degrees in Tucson and eighty-eight in Benson, or the other way around.
“I could call in sick, of course—that would prove only slightly less dramatic. I have not used a single sick day this year, and in fact have only ever used five sick days in my entire career. Some people find this pretty unbelievable, but it’s true. Five sick days and on a single occasion, back in the early nineties, when my appendix burst on set. I know exactly the moment it happened. I’d had this searing pain in my gut all morning, and then—I was staring into the camera, still smiling, waiting for the cut—the pain just sort of gave way. It was like a wave rolling back. I could feel my smile flex at the edges; I had to hold on to the rim of the desk in order not to float away. Finally, I got the all-clear sign, and got up and drove myself to the hospital. I was out for a week.
“If I get up right away, as soon as—or even just a half beat before—the alarm goes off, it’s all pretty automatic. I snap off the alarm and slide out of bed—careful not to disturb Regina. My slippers are next to the bed and my robe is on the chair, next to the slippers. I slide into these (robe first, then slippers) and head to the guest bedroom across the hall. I use the guest bathroom to shower, shave, and brush my teeth, and the bedroom to dress. All my clothes have to be laid out the day before—everything pressed and ready, lined up neatly on the bed. If I’m not careful, and something goes wrong—like I find a stain on my shirt, or I’ve forgotten my socks and have to start rooting around for them in the drawer—I can get a little suicidal. I imagine suffocating myself, for example, amongst two hundred identical button-down shirts, or strangling myself with a striped tie. What a shock it would be, I think, for Regina to find me that way when she finally wakes up—sometime after eight o’clock. In all probability, though, Regina wouldn’t be the one to find me. She has no cause to use the guest room as she disturbs no one, getting dressed at such a reasonable hour. She’d probably just go about getting ready for her day as usual. Blow-dry her hair, fix a light breakfast, some coffee; wonder briefly why I’d decided to forgo mine. You’d think finding the car in the drive would alert her that something was up, but no—. Regina is so infinitely reasonable that she would probably just assume I’d decided to get a lift into the studio with Mark, who is also on the morning show, and lives nearby. Have I ever once done this? No. Mark’s mentioned it a couple of times, but Regina knows how I feel about the idea. Still, with the car in the drive, it’s the only reasonable explanation. I must—Regina will think—have gotten a lift with Mark, who (just as I might have anticipated) disrupted my morning routine to such an extent that I was able neither to drink my coffee, nor turn off the warmer under the cup.
“Realizing this, Regina will flick off the warmer and go off to work herself. So it will be Amira, the cleaning lady, and not Regina, who will find me—either suffocated or hanged in my closet—when she comes in at noon.
“Regina will receive the call at work…She’ll listen, lips parted, eyes darting—bewildered—around the room. Then she’ll put the phone down. She is so eminently reasonable that at first she won’t believe it. Afterward, she’ll tell her friends: I didn’t believe it. Her voice will be breathless, soft; her eyes filled with tears that never actually spill…
“This is why I’m careful to put my clothes out the night before. If everything is laid out ahead of time, I can be dressed in under two minutes and I don’t have time to think about anything save whatever is absolutely necessary to allow me to get fully dressed in under two minutes. I can go to the kitchen, where my cup of coffee—set on the automatic setting for 5:00 a.m.—is already brewed. I can click off the warmer, grab the cup of coffee, and—without thinking—walk out the door.”
* * *
—
I tell all of this to Dr. Yaun. She sits across from me, behind a large desk, kept pretentiously bare, nodding and frowning just slightly, so as to suggest attention rather than disapproval. From time to time she shifts in her chair, leans an elbow on the edge of the empty desk, and places a single finger just above her chin. She’s attractive; about my own age, I would guess—nearing forty. Though it is difficult to tell with women. She isn’t Asian, as her name would suggest. She must have married an Asian man and figured that the outdated trend of professional women taking their husband’s name was balanced by the progressive trend of interracial marriage.
She has been recommended by Greer, who for all intents and purposes is my boss—though she doesn’t like to call herself that. She’s the senior producer of the morning show, but likes to foster what she calls a sense of “workplace equality.” No one, she says, is worth any more or less. We’re a team where everyone (a brief pause here for a moment of deliberate eye contact all around) is Most Valuable Player. It is no coincidence that the equality bullshit started just after September 11, when my own ratings went through the roof.
It wasn’t just me. For some reason—who can say why exactly—sometime right after September 11, people all across America just started loving weathermen. It happened slowly at first, then—bam—I woke up one morning and I was a celebrity. I got fan mail from all over the state, then from all over the nation. I couldn’t keep up. I typed up a stock response on program stationery, which the intern signed, folded, and mailed away:
I’d like to personally thank you for your support and appreciation of our show. It fills me with a deep sense of pride and satisfaction to be able to deliver reliable weather reports to you every morning.
There was even a point—sometime in the mid-2000s—when I was being stalked by this group of young women. I’m not kidding. They would hang out behind the station’s back door most mornings, waiting for me to emerge. They brought T-shirts, notebooks, even—yes, at least once—a lacy undergarment for me to sign. Which I did, with an appropriately modest smile.
Greer was over the moon at first; my popularity did wonders for the network’s ratings. But then I noticed a shift in her attitude. It was as though it was suddenly my fault I was getting all this attention—even though she was behind the whole thing, pushing it as far as it would go. We had plastic dolls made, and snow globes with gold flakes of sand instead of snow and a half-inch figure approximating me standing next to a saguaro cactus. When you shake it, the gold dust swirls then falls, like thermonuclear fallout, finally coming to rest on our outstretched limbs.
* * *
—
“You asked me before why I thought there was all this fuss suddenly about weathermen. I guess I always just figured it was because everything else in the world is so uncertain. That the weather is going to change is the one thing we can, with any confidence, rely upon. Also, it’s not personal. The weather has nothing to do with you. You can’t change it, or even really prepare for it, aside from in t
he most limited ways. You just have to wait and see. Check in with the weatherman, see what he knows. Half the time he’s wrong, of course, but then, that’s all right, too. Sure, people complain—I get it all the time. But it’s also a sort of a joke. No one ever really blames a weatherman. No one holds it against him if he tells you, ‘chance of rain,’ and then it doesn’t rain—especially in the desert.
“I used to think that was the problem. My ratings were just as good or better than a lot of the guys working in the Northeast or the tornado belt, or along the Gulf, but I couldn’t help but think there would be more overall—how should I put it?—job satisfaction—a sense of purpose, I suppose—in a location where I had more to report. I would watch the guys out in Kansas, for example, reporting floods and hurricanes; study the way they conveyed the news. With the good ones, there was never even a ripple of alarm. They had the resignation of newscasters—but they had something else, too. Because the thing about the weather is, it’s not like the news; it’s not about reporting what already happened somewhere. It’s prophetic; it’s an art. Watching those guys, I was even more sure of it. Like, remember a while back, Oklahoma getting slammed with—I don’t know—something like three or four tornadoes right in a row? It was like the Last Judgment. It must have felt like that out there, anyway. They must have just been waiting for it—for the sky to turn black, and start charging. You’d turn on your television because you’d be looking for someone to warn you—to explain to you when it was coming, and why.
“Because the weather isn’t about resignation, like the evening news. There’s a practical urgency to it; simple steps to be taken. If a weatherman is good, all the wisdom of the ages can be conveyed through an appropriate gesture, a well-chosen phrase. Even his physical presence (framed by complex, uninterpretable weather patterns swirling beyond) should suggest strength and resolve. Fairness, too. If a weatherman is good, he should be able to convey a sense of there being certain parameters, not only to expectation and desire, but also to ignorance and loss.”
* * *
—
There is such a very long pause that after a while I give up on the idea that Dr. Yaun will actually respond. But then she does. “And so, what you’re saying,” she says, finally, “is that it’s the stability of the weather conditions here that you began to…resent.”
“Yes, exactly,” I say. “I began to resent living in a place where, even in the winter, the temperature hardly dips below fifty degrees. I began to feel that it was…deeply meaningless to live in a place where the weather is predictable, where on almost any given day I can be counted on to report, ‘sunny, clear skies.’ I watched those guys out in Kansas and Oklahoma, in New York after Sandy, in Ohio after yet another bad flood, and I started to—”
I shift position, sinking even lower into the deep cushions of Dr. Yaun’s armchair. I’ve gained quite a lot of weight recently, and my extra pounds help to pin me among the chair’s soft folds. I realize it will now take a noticeable effort to extract myself.
Dr. Yaun nods encouragingly, but I’ve lost my train of thought; I can’t finish my own sentence.
Dr. Yaun doesn’t say anything either. She just sits there, looking at me, pinned to my chair, and for almost three full minutes (which I watch tick by slowly at the end of one of my outstretched arms) we sit together in near-perfect silence.
I think about how rare that is. How we’re always so eager to complete our own, or each other’s thoughts—to fill in the gaps, finish sentences. It was a particular habit of mine, in fact—finishing other people’s sentences. When you work in television long enough, you start to hear every extra beat. Even off camera it gets so you can’t stand it, listening to people hem and haw as they hunt for the right expression, or word. Whenever I can I always jump in and supply one. My last intern, Jeff, for example—I don’t know how many hours I would have lost out of the three full months he worked at the studio if I had waited patiently, like Dr. Yaun, for whatever it was he was trying to say.
This habit irritated Regina—I knew that. “Just—listen, for chrissakes, will you?” It was one of the many things in our relationship I was supposed to be “working on.” There were so many of them—things I needed to “work on” and things we needed to “work on together”—I had trouble keeping track. But she didn’t. She always noticed. Women do. In general: they notice things. It would continually amaze me, for example, going over to other people’s houses with Regina, or watching something on television. How afterward she’d want to discuss all these little details about other people’s lives: their personal idiosyncrasies, their subtle flaws—all things I hadn’t noticed, and never would have, if she hadn’t mentioned them. Once she did, I’d have to admit she was right, though. She almost always was.
And yet—strangely, she hadn’t noticed anything about my own behaviour over the past few months, which even I knew had been a little odd.
Even Mark, who was hardly what you might call perceptive, was always giving me the look: a raised eyebrow and half a smile. On anyone else it would’ve seemed like he’d just told a bad joke and was waiting for the delayed reaction—a groan, or an ersatz guffaw—but it was probably the closest Mark ever came to expressing genuine concern.
It wasn’t anything really bad. It was just—I’d started acting different. I’d drift off—stare into space sometimes, for no reason. Laugh too long or too hard at something that wasn’t funny. Notice only after everyone else—embarrassed—had turned with renewed purpose back to their work.
I knew it was odd. “Out of character.” But honestly, I didn’t think too much about it, except to feel vaguely annoyed whenever Mark gave me one of his looks. Then, out of the blue, Greer called me into her office and slipped me Dr. Yaun’s card. “She’s simply the best,” she said as she slid the card across her desk. “I just know she could help you to manage your…stress.”
I remember I just stared. I was genuinely surprised. So I drifted off sometimes, I remember thinking. So what?
“I’m fine,” I said. And laughed. Not long or hard or anything. Just a quick, totally standard, guffaw. I kept waiting for Greer to shrug and laugh, too; to say something like, “Oh great, Tom, I just, you know, have to offer the option to every employee…that sort of thing!”
But she didn’t.
“I’ve never really been into that sort of thing,” I joked. “Plus, I’m fine. Really.” I was still staring at her—trying to figure her out. Regina would have known what was up in a flash. One look at Greer looking at me and she would have said something like, “She’s acting like such and such, but underneath she’s feeling such and such, and because of that, you can tell what she’s really after is such and such…” But I just saw—Greer. Looking at me like she always did. Maybe a touch more tired—a little “stressed” herself. Makeup a bit shiny in places.
“Greer…” I said. Then—I can’t explain it. Maybe it was something about the way she was sitting, sort of leaned in, so that I could see the way her pores showed beneath her makeup; how they refused to be concealed. I felt tender toward her all of a sudden, almost unbearably close. It was impossible, I thought, that she wouldn’t understand…
“Greer…” I said again. And in another moment I would have told her everything. About how some days I didn’t even hear the alarm go off. I would get up automatically and realize only after I was already standing that I’d missed it by a single beat. About how I had to be careful to buy new pants before the old ones didn’t exactly fit me anymore because there is nothing—I was this close to telling Greer—like trying to button a button at the top of pants that are just a little too tight to induce in me a now familiar desire to strangle myself with one of my striped ties.
“Greer…” I said again.
But in ordinary life, you can’t hesitate like that. You can’t start a single sentence three times. Someone is bound to cut you off.
“Look, Tom,” Greer said. “If you don’t call Dr. Yaun and get some help immediately, we’re goin
g to have to start looking at other options.”
It was the way she said “other options” that brought me back to earth. I got angry then. For a few moments I could hardly see straight I was so mad. Of course, I thought. It’s the extra weight. I’d practically made her career for her and here was Greer ready to have me committed because I’d put on a few extra pounds. “If it’s—” I began, but I was ashamed to even say the words out loud. I tried again. A different approach this time. “My ratings haven’t gone down,” I said. “They haven’t gone up in a while, but they’re steady.”
“Tom,” Greer said. She pointed to the card with Dr. Yaun’s name and telephone number on it, then nodded toward the door.
* * *
—
It’s funny: you’d think—especially back in the early 2000s, with the weatherman craze—I would’ve had lots of opportunities to get myself into compromising situations with women, but the only genuinely compromising situation I’d ever gotten myself into was with Greer.
It was a few years ago now. She’d called me into her office one day; said, just like this time, that she wanted “a word.” But it wasn’t a word that she wanted, and I had a hell of a time extricating myself. I don’t think I’ve ever had a more complicated feeling. Sleeping with Greer had never occurred to me before that moment, except in the most banal of ways—but suddenly I had never desired anything more. And yet…I was afraid. I almost panicked, to tell you the truth. I kept seeing myself from above, thinking, This is how it happens; how you sleep with your boss…But I wasn’t really in the frame. I kept sort of shifting out of it, and nothing was in focus, and after a while everything felt—just totally off. I wanted to sleep with Greer more than anything, but I wanted to do it…some other time. I wanted to “be prepared.” I told her that; used those words, even. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
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