How much time had passed? I really couldn’t say. The huge proposal had gone out the door, and right behind it a whole slew of other bidding opportunities had come into view, like Alps on Alps arising. Some of them were a bit of a stretch, some more far-fetched than not, some wholly absurd—as far as I knew, none of Acme’s interpreters were willing to relocate to the Green Zone in Iraq—but Acme bid on them all.
It was spring. How could this be? I didn’t understand it—somehow months had blown by. And maybe because it was spring, a rush of nostalgia overtook me. I found myself thinking of my younger self as if she were a person in her own right, with little to do with me. And it occurred to me that besides being clueless in just about a thousand other ways, what this young me didn’t understand was how much sadness is in these words when an older person says them to you: Time is really flying. I found myself thinking of books I loved when I was young, the kind of books that maybe you can love only when you’re young, Le Grand Meaulnes, Sentimental Education, First Love, Novembre, and it seemed to me that they were all about one thing: the first loss. And from that first loss you understand, for maybe the first time, the idea of time passing. There’s a preciousness in this, in this realization; there is the exquisite ache of it. And there is the idea that maybe the first loss will always be the most painful one.
Well, I was mostly alone in these thoughts. Fitz was up at an artists’ colony and I was by myself in the city. I’d been all over him to apply the year before, he’d been thrilled to get in, and then when the time came to go he managed to tear himself up with guilt because he was the one who got to go off and do art while I was stuck working the gig at Acme. Truly, I have to say that at first I had a private little life-is-not-fair temper tantrum in our four-foot-square bathroom, and then when I had finished screaming into a towel, I realized (with no small surprise) that I’d gotten all the stupidity out of my system and was simply happy for him. This seemed to be an index of some newfound grown-up understanding, and I stood blinking in amazement at myself as if at a genuine miracle.
At any rate, with Fitz not there I was having mad insomnia, so instead of trying to sleep, most nights I’d sit out on the fire escape above the East Village and look at the sky over Manhattan.
This should have been stirring and filmic, but half the time I’d find myself itemizing all the jerky things I’d done over the course of my time on this planet. And although some were ancient, I could still feel the full force of embarrassment around every last one of them. There was a particular cluster around college, and I lingered over loans I’d meant to repay but never had, phone bills I’d stiffed suitemates on, things I’d borrowed and completely ruined. I thought of how I’d always been a conscientious door-holder, and how sometimes in the tunnel system beneath the Barnard campus some stupid chick would sashay through as if I were her personal door-holding assistant. And this started to happen so frequently that one day I said, Fuck it, I’m not holding any more doors for these entitled assholes, and so I let the door leading to the underpass between Altschul and Milbank Halls drop behind me and then heard an Oh!—and turned to see that I had just dropped the door on the dean of my class year, Dean Deborah Deutscher. Oh, God. The worst of it was that Dean Deborah Deutscher was staring at me with a keenly, deeply wounded look in her eye. It was as if she were saying, I’d heard you were a difficult person, Francesca Varani, and didn’t think it was so, but here’s all the evidence I need. And I was so embarrassed and such an all-around spaz that instead of apologizing, I ran away.
It was on one of these insomnia nights when something occurred to me.
Maybe so many of my troubles started with the course I’d set for myself when I was still a teenager. Maybe my troubles came from the fact that I hadn’t stayed down there in Barfonia and gotten a BA at a perfectly nice college in a town where they had one art-house cinema, one record store, and one professor with a cool, asymmetrical haircut, but instead had put on those big britches of mine, moved up here, and gone to Barnard College. You know? Maybe Barnard should have saved the tens of thousands of dollars it had spent on me for a worthier candidate, more of a go-getter, someone who had her eye on a career as an art curator, tenure-track Janeite, or commercial real estate broker. Someone who knew how to plan. Anyway, as the night hours sailed by, I got stuck on this notion and wondered if maybe it was all those twinkling stars in the Barnard firmament, all that Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston and Laurie Anderson and Ntozake Shange business, that had put these ideas in my little peasant head in the first place. Maybe, no fault of its own, the school had given me false expectations about my course in this life.
I must have dozed off on the fire escape as I sat with these thoughts, because in no time at all I heard my alarm go off.
It was time to go to work.
*
I have to say, Qi-Shi and I had become pretty tight over the months. This was a great joy to me, and whenever I felt despair creeping over me, he could cheer me right up with his sweet, absurd ways. From time to time we’d go to lunch, and something about being offsite seemed to give us a new lease on life, helped us share intimacies that went beyond dissecting the Japanese concept of mono no aware (“the ahh-ness of things”), discussing the playing of Nim in Last Year at Marienbad, or hating on the wretched Nadir scene. At any rate, although I’d barely slept the night before, I was in high spirits on this particular day: it was Friday. Qi-Shi and I decided to go down to Soul Fixins’ to partake of the day’s $7.99 Bail-Out Special.
We lingered over our coffee after we ate, looking out on the parade of humanity going down Thirty-Fourth Street, many of them with huge boxes of booty from B&H Video. We both couldn’t help but look at one family that had stopped directly in front of our window: a pair of chubby, benign-faced parents wearing identical periwinkle Michelin Man parkas, bright running shoes, and idiotic foam Statue of Liberty crowns. They were studying a smartphone while their daughter stood ten paces off, all Gothed out like early-era Siouxsie Sioux and glaring at the tops of her parents’ heads like she would gladly set them on fire.
With an air of confessing, Qi-Shi began telling me just what freaks his own parents were. They were fire-and-brimstone Pentecostals, he said, and they did things like exorcise the mailbox and speak in tongues before meals at the neighborhood Applebee’s. He said they believed in witches and demons and scary things flying around the room. Cap-E evil, he said, was a reality to them, just the same as orange juice or jumbo packs of Swiffer refills.
I found myself telling him that my mother was not really so different from that, that she’d been heavy into the Catholic Charismatic movement of the ’70s and I’d heard her speaking in tongues when I was a child. And how weird it was—it really was like she had been seized by something. And I told him how after my father died, all this morphed into something much worse, much sadder, and she’d gotten increasingly credulous and superstitious until she was prey to every last right-wing hater group with a direct-mail stamp. And I told him how, ha, it’s funny, but she was lost to Alzheimer’s now. I had forgiven her for so much, forgiven her everything by now, but she didn’t even know me anymore. One time she had rallied, though. She looked at me, her eyes had lit up, and she took my hand. Ada, I’m so glad to see you. How is it that you’re here? Ada was the name of her best friend when she was a girl.
And maybe it had something to do with his mentioning Applebee’s, I told Qi-Shi then, but I was thinking of the awful people around my mother in her adult life, and how she was sorely tested but always managed to treat others kindly. There was one horrible woman in particular, Mrs. Bacon, who was part of some interparish Catholic-Protestant sodality group and who loved having people over to admire her big, bloated, book-free house while she force-fed them entirely undelicious vanilla refrigerator cookies. Mrs. Bacon was the whitest person I had ever met in my young life, quick to condemn the behavior of others and certain of her supremacy in all things. She also happened to look like the Goodyear Blimp in a floral-print dres
s, but with a big, mean face. I told Qi-Shi about this one time my mother had taken me to Ho-Jo’s after mass and how I’d been looking forward to spending some time with her, just the two of us, as well as eating a French dip sandwich, and then how suddenly Mrs. Bacon appeared from nowhere, pushed into our booth, and began, out of the blue, to lecture my mother about how she should be tougher, how she should be more assertive, Rachele, and not let people walk all over you. And I told Qi-Shi how my mother didn’t say a word in her own defense, how she just deferred to the stupid woman, nodding and making helpful listening noises as this awful bully terrorized her, and how when our food came I couldn’t even eat it but instead sat there fantasizing about reaching under the table to pull out a shotgun and blow Mrs. Bacon’s fat fucking head right off. All these people, I told Qi-Shi, mistook my mother’s compassion for weakness.
Qi-Shi was looking out the window when I finished, but he turned to me and said, “I used to weigh nearly three hundred pounds.”
“Wait—what?” I said. “You?”
He took off his enormous groover glasses and gently swiped his hair across his forehead.
“I was eating myself into oblivion because I realized I was gay and I knew my parents would hate me for it.”
“Oh, my dear! I’m so sorry. When someone’s mean it’s like I’ll call them fat, but if someone’s nice they’re really just—”
“Oh, you don’t have to say that, Frances! But yeah, I was fat. I was huge. Panda size. Then I came out to my parents, and I don’t know, everything started to equalize. I told everyone I knew and everyone I didn’t know—I was, like, running down Broadway in a rainbow bunting yelling, I’m Qi-Shi, I’m queer, I’m not going away! Then I met a guy and cooled it with the Taco Bell. Of course my parents don’t talk to me, don’t support me at all, and whenever I have the foolish notion to call them up, they love to tell me how I’ll burn in hell. Anyway, I guess, like, in different ways, we both lost our parents.”
We sat looking at each other. A wave of tenderness for this boy rose up in my heart.
“If you want, Qi-Shi, I’ll be your mom,” I said.
He tilted his head at me and smiled.
“Oh, thanks, Frances. But that’s totally loco and unnecessary,” he said.
Our moment was abruptly cut short when we realized we had four minutes to get back to the office. I slapped down some cash and we took off running down Thirty-Fourth Street, catfish jumping inside us like live bait. We raced up the avenue and into the building lobby and slid across the economy terrazzo flooring as Mr. Shah, who knew a frantic Acme moment when he saw one, slashed his hand between the doors of the just-closing elevator. We hopped in and sailed up and dove out of the elevator, through the door, and into the office—and the skinny hand on the clock showed a full nine seconds to spare. We held our hands over our racing hearts. And then, with one last tender look at each other, it was Qi-Shi back to his workstation and I back to mine.
When my young friend was called into Dee-Dee’s office later in the day, I took no special notice. But suddenly Nikki materialized at my elbow, her eyes with their L’Oréal Paris Lineur Intense Liquid Eyeliner enormous.
Qi-Shi, she mouthed.
What? I said and then, “What?”
She drew her finger across her throat.
“What? What the fuck?” I said.
I leapt out of my chair and charged toward Dee-Dee’s office. Just then the door opened and Qi-Shi shot out and slammed the door behind him.
“But we weren’t even late,” I said to him.
“Insubordination,” he said.
“What?”
“General insubordination,” he said.
Everyone sprang up from their seats and glued themselves to him.
“That’s bullshit,” Françoise said.
“That’s fucking bullshit,” Nikki said.
“Fuckers.”
“Fucking fuckers.”
“Fucking fuck sticks!” Nikki shouted.
Qi-Shi was locked out of the server, given ten minutes to gather his stuff—we all pitched in to help, popping off about what a cruel and skeezy fuck Dee-Dee was all the while—and then building security showed up to perp-walk Qi-Shi off the premises. We stood at the window of the locked card-key access door as he stepped into the elevator and then turned to wave a sad, fond hand at us.
Minutes later my phone rang. It was Qi-Shi, calling from the street.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“I’m fine. It’s okay. I’m just standing in front of the OTB, having a good cry.”
“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay, Frances! It’s really okay. I should’ve got out of there a long time ago.”
“Oh my God, I just…” I swiveled to my computer and watched as the FedBizOpps.gov procurement page, with its gradient-fade waving American flag header, went all fuzzy. “I just…so selfish…I just don’t know what I’m going to do here without you.”
“Awww, bitch!” he said. “Just stop being so employable!”
*
It was amazing how newly horrible it was at Acme with Qi-Shi gone.
Not long after, I was staring off into space over the copier when Cissy came of nowhere, leaned her witch face with its highlighter eyebrows into my face, and hissed, Oh, do we miss our widdle fwiend? I blinked at her, wondering if this might in fact be the most moronically cruel thing a grown-up had ever said to me. I grabbed my coat and fled the building. I had no idea where I was going, but I had to get out of there.
Somehow, I’m not sure why, I crashed through the doors of Macy’s and found myself in the men’s department. As I slashed down the aisles with my mind aflame, I thought of how Fitz would be home from the colony in a week—a fact I was crazy with gratitude about—and even though we didn’t have the money, I suddenly thought, Buy him a gift! A sweater. Yes!
But it was all terrible. Everything looked wrong and misshapen and not like clothing people wore on their bodies. Everything had cinchy Euro waistlines, and anything that looked halfway good cost a million dollars. Really, Fitz was no kind of spendy, dressy fellow anyway. What was I doing there trying to find some probably sweatshop-made sweater for such a man? This place was bullshit. I turned and made for the door, and just then “My Funny Valentine” swept down from the PA.
“My Funny Valentine”! It was a big, heart-swelling tangle of strings, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I stopped in my tracks as a huge rush of melancholy rolled over me.
What was I doing with my life? Why couldn’t I get ahead? Why was I so incapable of being a proper, successful grown-up? What was wrong with me?
I pushed out of the store and blasted up Seventh Avenue. I had to get it together, not ooze around Manhattan like a walking wound. I had to find a way to cope. What could I do? Simone Weil might have offered up her labor to God as a kind of prayer when she was sweating at the milling machine over at the Renault plant, but what could I do?
I stopped in the middle of the avenue, “My Funny Valentine” still ringing in my head. I realized then. It was clear as day. I had to transform the experience. I had to do what everyone else did at a sucky job: I had to plug in! Put on some headphones, put on my music, and float away.
The next day I went in armed with an old CD player. I nestled the earphones into my ears, popped in a CD, and turned it on. I signed in to the procurement page on the New York State Contract Reporter, but then, as soon as the music started, a world of beauty swept over me.
It was Jorge Ben. How to explain this? As soon as I heard the first notes of the guitar of “Ôba, Lá Vem Ela” I could taste the music on my tongue like sugar. It was so strong that I had to put my fingers to my lips to contain it. And when I heard the pause in the strumming and Jorge takes a tiny intake of breath just before he sings the first words, I felt the sugar explode in my mouth. It was impossible that I was allowed to listen to such beautiful music in such a terrible place. Oh, but all at once I wasn’t there—I was in anoth
er world. The music carried me and I floated away, all time suspended. When the song I loved most began, when I heard the beginnings of the song called “Apareceu Aparecida,” the lilting guitar and then the percussion comes down and Jorge starts singing…ah! He sounded like the most beautiful man in the world to me. It wasn’t that I could understand Portuguese at all, but I could feel the joy in his heart at this song: he’s seeing someplace beautiful to him, Aparecida, he’s seeing it, it appears to him, apareceu, it must be a play on words, but I didn’t want the translation, because to me it was simply about the realization of joy that you didn’t know was possible. And my heart was ready to burst with this joy.
I felt this all over me, this perfect sound, the breath of life.
Oh, how could I complain? Now when I was at work and feeling any kind of way, I could always find the music to match it. I could put on The Fall and rock out to Mark E. freaking out like a crazy spaz, I could put on Memphis Minnie and shake my head around to the “New Dirty Dozen” while she whales on that big guitar of hers, I could put on Lys Gauty singing “La Chaland qui Passe” and float down the most melancholy canal in Paris with her. I could put on anything I wanted—it was all my world, mine. One day I put on my favorite Duke Ellington song, my favorite version of this song, Duke Ellington & His Orchestra, July 30, 1945, when he comes in with the piano in that massive, chiming, inimitable way, and then the whole band slides in and there’s Johnny Hodges on the alto sax, that smoky, specific, magisterial sound, and then the coolest trumpet comes in, this is Taft Jordan, and things start to gallop and then comes in that fat big sound of the trombone and this is Lawrence Brown, and he brings the whole band up jumping, this is the hottest brass in all the world as they all slide back in together, they’re so tight and it goes up up up until it’s that beautiful tremendous controlled screaming that ends with a huge finish, the hugest finish, the song that will always kill me in the heart, a song about inevitable change and sad-sweet nostalgia and fleeting beauty, a song called “Time’s a-Wastin’.”
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