Jesus, how had I gone ten years without daily interaction.
I snorted softly at the thought. You weren’t dreaming of his bum then, Faye.
When Meghan was back in her dressing room, Jackie leaned into me to speak. She kept her voice low, unlike Meghan.
“Imagine if Stellan hadn’t told you about his dad’s heart attack.”
“That’s not the same. I love Stellan’s dad.”
“And Stellan loves you.”
The sound of the words swirled in my chest, casting light wherever they traveled. “It’s not the same.”
Jackie tilted her head from side to side as she thought. “They’re both events that changed your lives. How would you feel if he had kept that from you?”
“I just changed my major – his dad nearly died!”
She rolled her eyes at me. “Faye! He isn’t upset about your freaking major.”
I didn’t want to acknowledge how devastated I would be if Stellan kept something from me. I didn’t want to consider how troubled my mother would be knowing my father had tracked me down or more importantly, that the conversation caused an psychological upheaval that threw my entire life in a different direction. Even if I told her about his declarations of clean living, of AA meetings and getting his life together, she might have still lost sleep. I kept it from them to spare them worry. Or maybe, I kept it from them to avoid explaining myself.
By the time we climbed into the car to head home, I’d made the decision to hunt Stellan down. It was Tuesday evening again. I knew where to find him. I took a breath and texted him from the backseat -
Do you still want me to come to class tonight?
After a few moments, my phone buzzed to life. I nearly jumped out of my skin.
Sure. That’d be great. Thanks.
Jackie smiled back at me to hear he’d responded, but I knew Stellan. This wasn’t how Stellan spoke to me. This was cordial, ‘I’m merely tolerating you’ Stellan. I sat silently in the backseat as my companions sang along to Lady Gaga, dreading with each passing mile the evening ahead of me.
I arrived at the dojo just a few minutes early, clad in the same uniform that Stellan had sent me home with last time. Yes, I washed it. I arrived to the other students milling around the front hallway, Daniel being the only one past the arched door. Stellan was nowhere to be seen. I stood at the back of the room, almost afraid to move past the main entrance. It was as though I could feel Stellan in the air, feel him unhappy with me. I did my best not to sigh openly as Candyce approached.
“Couldn’t stay away either, I see?” She asked, giving me an eyebrow wiggle.
I nodded, letting the small talk go to the subject of Stellan, his being handsome, how long I’ve been taking classes, and as a result of my answer, how long Stellan and I have been friends. Before I could answer her, a figure appeared. He glanced over, caught sight of me and quickly turned for the dojo, hollering for everyone to line up. Candyce hurried ahead of me, and I tossed my gym bag into the girl’s dressing room before taking my place.
Stellan stood at the front of the room, said something in Japanese, and the room took to their breathing exercises. I did as I was told, feeling taut in his presence, as though some wire had been hung between us and someone was attaching the red end of jumper cables.
When his eyes passed over me, it was as though I wasn’t there. My chest deflated, and the strength in my legs quickly diminished, but still I held my stance, letting the burn of my leg muscles be my punishment. When this part of class was done, he ordered everyone to run around the room, stopping with each lap to do pushups or jumping jacks or some other torture of the human body. Candyce had trouble the first time through, and Stellan took a moment with her. I glanced their way and again, Stellan’s eyes seemed to look right through me. I felt moisture at my hairline, my breathing heavy, but I hardly felt it over the tightness in my stomach. I caught myself glancing at Stellan every few seconds, just waiting to meet his gaze. We finished laps and were broken into groups for punches. He paired Candyce with Daniel and sent the new kid off with another older student. I stood in the lineup, unpaired, and watched Stellan tell Daniel to head up the class before marching out of the dojo and into his office. Daniel smiled at me.
“How about the two of you pair up for the first few rounds, then I’ll -”
“That’s all right Daniel. Thank you,” I said, and I was off. I didn’t know what I would say, or how I would say it, but at that moment I was petrified, and I have never responded well to fear. The only thing I could do was to make Stellan acknowledge me. I stormed into his office.
“What, you’re not even going to look at me?”
He glanced up, but still his eyes did not meet mine. “I’ll look at you all you want.”
I stood there and waited, but he continued to simply slide papers across the desk, as though he was reading them one by one.
My fists clenched at my sides. “Is this how it’s going to be? You’re never going to talk to me again?”
At this, he looked up. “No, but I think you can begrudge me a couple days to be pissed.”
“Who are you to be pissed?”
His lip twitched. “Oh, fucking nobody, apparently.”
He rounded the desk and moved to pass me out the door, but I stood my ground, blocking his way. I knew if he wanted to pass he would, but I also knew, or prayed, that he would never physically move me in anger. He stopped in front of me.
My legs were shaking. “I didn’t mean it that way, I – I just don’t understand why you’re so upset with me!”
He looked down at me, meeting my eyes for the first time since I’d sat across from him in his kitchen, and I shrank before him.
“This isn’t the time, Faye.”
“It is the time.”
He sighed, running his hand up over his face before rubbing his eyes.
“What do you want me to say? You know why I’m mad. You kept something important from me and put me in a position -”
“I didn’t keep anything from you out of spite.”
“What does that matter?” He asked and his voice dropped deep into his chest. “Do you realize that for the past ten years I thought you’d been date raped. I thought someone had hurt you, and you didn’t tell me because you knew I’d find them and kill them?”
I stared up at him, my mouth going dry. Oh fuck.
Again, he didn’t look at me.
“I’m sorry, Sensei?”
The voice was soft and wary from behind us. I turned to see Daniel looking in. It was clear that though our words were indecipherable, the fighting tone of our raised voices had carried. Daniel on the other hand, had heard that last part.
Stellan’s tone still carried anger. “I’ll be right out.”
Daniel bowed to him and quickly disappeared. I moved away from the door, leaning against the wall to alleviate the pressure in my legs. Stellan stood where he was, his head down.
“Why did you think that?” I asked finally, fighting to form each word without letting them waver.
“Because you changed. One day you were – I don’t know, you - and the next day you weren’t.”
I swallowed, fighting the knot in my throat. I remembered the heartbreak of every choice I made that day, of the pain of telling my professors I would no longer be in class. Every single minute of it hurt. “I didn’t want anyone to know.”
He leaned into the doorjamb, and I was painfully aware of his eyes on me. After all that effort to get him to look at me, now I didn’t want him to.
“Know what? Just tell me what fucking happened,” he said, crossing his arms across his chest.
“I’m afraid of what you’ll say.”
“Try me.”
I took a deep breath. This was a moment I would have paid to avoid. “He said I was his mirror image. Said I couldn’t have followed in his footsteps better if he’d drawn me a map. He spent the whole time telling me how alike we were, h
ow I’d inherited so much of him. How if I kept it up, I’d be-”
My throat grew tight. I’d hated saying every word as much as I’d hated hearing them. Stellan stepped closer to me.
I stepped around the desk to get away from him. “I didn’t want to be like him.”
“You’re not, and you know that,” he said.
I laughed softly. “No. I don’t.”
Stellan didn’t know that I’d started losing myself in alcohol almost every night back then, or that I’d taken acid or mescaline five weekends straight when my dad appeared. When my father said I was his mirror image, it was too true for me to hear.
Stellan paused. “That’s why you went into marketing – because you didn’t want to be like your dad?”
Yes.
I didn’t speak.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”
“I was afraid you’d try to change my mind -”
He stepped toward me. “No, Faye. I would have fucking succeeded.”
I grew shrill. “I didn’t want to end up some drug addicted starving artist!”
“That would never happen.”
“It was a responsible decision to make, damn it! I made good money!” I said, unsure of whom I was trying to convince. “It’s not like I ruined my life or anything.”
“No. You just lived someone else’s for ten years.”
I slumped there like a rag doll, trying to keep my face from contorting in grief. I took another deep breath to steady my voice. The breath shuddered violently. I was losing it. “That’s not fair. I did really well -”
“So you tell me.”
“Fuck you!” I hollered. I didn’t care who heard me.
“You were unhappy. You’ve been unhappy for years. Tell me I’m fucking wrong!”
He stood close, but I refused to look at him. I shook my head. “I wasn’t always miserable?”
It was more a question than a declaration.
We listened to the sound of students whooping and hiya-ing as they practiced their forms.
“If you’re so worried about my happiness, then stop being mad at me,” I said and despite my efforts, my voice cracked. He moved toward me then, half laughing. He put his arms around me, and I lost it. My lip curled, the tears welled up and over, spilling onto his Gi. I wrapped my arms around his waist and curled my fingers into the fabric of his uniform, fighting to keep my body still despite the urge to openly weep. I could feel those same anchors I’d been tied to for years deciding whether to cut loose and let me float with the current again, or pull me to the bottom. We stood there for a long time, Stellan swaying just so as he held me. I heard Stellan send Daniel away again and finally pulled free of his arms. I wiped my face, frowning at the sight of the waterlogged clown face on the front of his shirt. This was beginning to feel like an unfortunate pattern.
He bent down to meet my eyes, pinching my chin with his thumb and forefinger. “These are unfair tactics, madam.”
I laughed, wiping my face with the sleeve of my uniform. “You mean you’re not mad at me anymore? Score. You fell right into my trap.”
I smiled despite my state. He gestured for me to take his chair behind the desk and told me to relax until the end of class. He winked at me as he left the office, hollering something about the rest of the class clearly slacking off as he disappeared. I smiled there in his rickety leather office chair, the smell of him still on my clothes, and my breathing steadied.
CHAPTER ten
I opened the front door to find Mom was already heading up the stairs, her tea and a book in her hands. She had on her fuzzy peach pajama bottoms, her fading white bathrobe tie swinging about her thighs as she turned to greet me. I thought she looked like Christmas morning the first year we lived with Grammy Jensen. The first year she’d spent without dad. She looked warm.
“You’re in early tonight.”
I nodded. “Yeah, feeling a bit homebody-ish, I think.”
She smiled. “Nothing wrong with that. Kettle’s warm in the kitchen, if you want some tea.”
I thanked her.
I was ready to curl up with America’s Funniest Home Videos, or a new book, or a warm bath, or some strange conglomerate of the three. Before I made my final decision, I poured myself a cup of Raspberry tea and meandered into the office. The drawing tablet was still perched at the edge of the desk. I slipped it off to the side and settled into the chair, and for the first time in weeks, opened up Facebook. I immediately saw Meghan’s statuses. She was a Facebook addict, and self-proclaimed. I scanned past the declarations of how adorable her Halloween options were, and the posted photograph of her in a Greek Goddess costume asking what everyone thought. She looked stunning, and she knew it. The eighty seven likes and thirty comments seemed to back her up, nicely.
I glanced at a few of the other statuses; a few melancholy song lyrics by old college friends, a rant from an old high school buddy about her husband. I lifted my tea, testing it with quick dabs of my lips at the surface of the mug. It was still a singe-worthy temperature, so I let it warm my hand a moment longer. I accepted a Friend Request from Patty Hannity, grumbling about her Scottish husband with the huge cock. As I was about to close the window and call it a night, a small screen of text appeared, a small square image of someone’s face beside the words, ‘I can’t believe you’re on!’
I stared at it a moment, trying to recognize the face in the tiny square.
Yvonne Porter. I nearly spilled my tea as I hurried to set it down.
‘Hey!! Wow! How are you doing?!’
I barely contained my use of exclamation points I was so excited to hear from her. Having the ego bruising of job loss and eviction was enough to keep me despondent, but as I suddenly realized, adding heartbreak to that equation had resulted in an all-around disappearance from the world.
Yvonne - ‘I’m great! We’re all doing really well.’
I exhaled, unaware that I’d been holding my breath.
I never saw it coming – my last day at work. Everyone in the office was accustomed to the stress of the job. We spent meetings brainstorming on how to better represent our clients when I first started working there. As we neared what would be the end, those meetings began to resemble fall out preparation. I heard it on the news, on sitcoms, on the radio – how everyone is getting hit hard. It’s something one comes to consider background noise. Stories of companies going under, people losing their homes - that was all noise to me, to everyone I worked with. That was the other guy. We were still doing really well.
Until the clients began evaporating like an exhale on cold air. First it was small companies – the Winery in Vermont, or the startup club that catered to grown up gamers. We made due with the small losses, adding a brainstorming session to our weekly meetings on how we might drum up new clients. I listened to Francine, a broad shouldered blond with a pixie cut and roman nose, spewing her desire for higher numbers, for better maintenance of the current clientele. Please, please, please the client, was her mantra. She was the first to tell you a sixty hour work week lacked initiative. Doug in IT often sent me emails suggesting we receive proper training in how to please the clients by hiring an escort service for lap dances after work.
“I’ll go halves,” he’d say.
The last day I went into work had been one of my harder mornings. As the client base dropped, bigger companies releasing our services, or going under themselves, I began having trouble sleeping – and eating for that matter. I was nauseous at the thought of food and hated myself after actually consuming it. Still, I convinced myself it would pass once the client base picked back up. I had three potential clients in the works; an all-natural beauty line, a young fashion designer out of Boston, and some hipster photography firm headed up by a man working his way through the local model population with his dick. They weren’t the huge conglomerates we’d once had, but they were business.
I remembered the faces when I walked into the off
ice at 8:00 am; wistfully oblivious faces, nodding and waving over their morning coffees as I walked past them to my office. I spoke to a few of them, smiled to the rest that made eye contact, and settled into my office, waiting for my assistant to bring me my coffee. Instead she brought me an invitation to Francine’s office. I joined her and Greg Higgins, my counterpart and friendly rival. By the look on his face, he may have seen it coming, or perhaps she’d already told him.
Francine didn’t even bother to let me sit down.
The firm was dissolved as of that morning. The company hadn’t been paying the lease on our office space. Not even Francine knew. I remember her slender face, ruddy and glistening in the fluorescent light, dabbing at her eyes with an endless string of tissues from the floral patterned tissue boxes she kept at hand.
I felt the floor shifting under foot, the way walking feels after you step off an escalator or a treadmill – as though you’re simply shifting your weight from side to side, but the world is moving beneath you. I wasn’t allowed to react, to think about my house, my mortgage, my bills, or that new designer line La-Z-Boy recliner I’d ordered for my reading nook in the living room. I was given the job of relaying that information – that your job, your only source of income, your livelihood, was no longer – to the fourteen people who worked beneath me.
I went to my office, sat at my desk, and breathed. There was nothing shielding me from the rest of the office but a wall of glass with “Faye Jensen” etched on it in white letters. I took almost half an hour to steady myself, determined not to get emotional in front of any of them.
I couldn’t look any of them in the eye when I told them. I didn’t want to see the dawning on their face, the same dawning I was trying desperately to hold off until the end of the day. If I show hope, if I give them an encouraging send off, perhaps everything will be fine.
The first three or four were young interns; college kids making less money than would require them to actually care. They received the news with a shrug and wanted to know if they could leave early. I asked them to respect the rest of the office and wait until I was finished breaking the news to the others. All but one of the interns honored my request.
Catch My Fall Page 15
