She realized how no one, not her friends, not her sister in Florida nor her cousins in Vermont, knew how she felt, sitting in front of the interviewer’s desk. All of the interviewers behaved as though she were a person; they glanced at her résumé and asked her questions and decided whether she was the correct one or not, if she fit their needs, and she stood up and smiled and shook hands and left and never saw them again. She was a person, she knew that, a capable one, but she felt more and more like a shell, her skin cracking thin over nothing but air.
There was the sight of the hand holding out this ridiculous item, the hairbrush.
It was not an insult; it had not felt like one. When Mrs. Barron handed her the hairbrush, it seemed that the interviewer thought she was important somehow—real.
Ms. Gold paused. After interviews, she sometimes glanced at her résumé to check the precise diagram of her life; though the list of her experience never revealed anything new, the fact of the structure itself comforted her.
The sidewalks blazed pale before her, under an empty blue sky. She was walking to her final interview.
Mr. Holland thought he should cancel the interview. He stood up and closed the blinds. He needed to sit, for a moment, in the bluish shadows of his office.
He thought the doctor was, at first, telling him a joke. He would say what he said and then, with a pause, add, Kidding! But there had been no laughter, and there was the mention of prognosis and time. His body told him nothing. There was nothing but a constant sour throb in his stomach, not even that bad.
He could not believe he was sitting in this chair, sitting still. He thought he should get up, walk out of the office, take the elevator and run out of the building, into the cool air outside, hail a cab to the airport. He imagined looking at the list of cities: Paris, Taipei, New Delhi, Moscow. His palms were damp and he wiped them on his jacket. But assertion would do nothing. He was sitting here, at his desk, ridiculously waiting for this interview. And if he hired this person, six months later he would, probably, be dead.
Mr. Holland’s office chair was a gray swivel chair with coffee stains. It would belong to someone else.
He pressed the buzzer for his secretary, about to tell her to cancel, but she said, “Oh, Mr. Holland, she’s here! I’m sending her in.”
And here was the applicant, rushing into the bizarre, hopeful country of employment, holding out her hand.
“I’m thrilled to be here,” she said.
He felt his hand lift to reach hers. She grasped it and he registered her surprise at his nervousness, but he was glad in a way, she could detect his heart in his hand, the warm dampness of his palm.
“I’ve read Metro Daily for years,” she said.
She had the peculiar honor of being the first person to see him since he received the news. But she would never know this. Her résumé was, somehow, on his desk, as he had been reading it before the doctor called.
He thought he had the right to tell her to get out. She was here under the illusion that she had a future. Who were they, the idiots that believed this? Who needed anyone’s enthusiasm? He could barely look at her, sitting there. He did not want to be asking her questions.
In fact, he thought, she should be asking him.
“Ms. Gold,” he said, and he felt he was hearing his voice for the first time. Was this how he sounded his whole life? A faint Brooklyn accent. He hated the way he pronounced a G.
He had a thought.
“We have our applicants ask the questions,” he said. He leaned back in his chair, trying to appear relaxed.
“What kind of questions?”
“Ask them about me.”
“About you?”
“Yes.”
It didn’t matter if she thought he was crazy. It didn’t matter at all, he thought. He wanted to hear his own answers, not hers.
She stared at the floor for a moment, as though her question were located in the linoleum. Then she looked at him.
“What is most rewarding about this position?” she asked.
“Very little,” he said. “Most of the copy is shitty. The people are crap. I’ve been here thirty years and I still watch my back. I have years of overtime, and you know what? I’ve never seen a dime.”
Did he just say that? A sort of joy, like gray sunlight, flashed through him. He could say whatever he wanted. She glanced at the door as though she believed there was somewhere else to go. But there was nowhere to go, he wanted to tell her, not the waiting room, not the elevator, not the lobby, not the other office buildings. Where did she think she could walk to, in this world? Nowhere. Each moment was a room, protecting him.
“What is the most important thing for a new employee to know?”
“Watch out for Mr. Johnson. He’ll flatter you and then try to grab you by the coffee machine. And the junior reporters, give them some of your takeout when you’re here late or they’ll get surly. Starving, all of them. They’re paid crap.”
She sighed, sharply. “Is this really—”
“Ask me more,” he said.
“Mr. Holland,” she said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand the—”
“Please continue, Ms. Gold.”
She regarded him with a fierce, probing expression, one that would have made him uncomfortable other times, but he found himself now welcoming it; her gaze seemed oddly kind. He was a large man, late sixties, a stiff swath of gray hair. He wanted her to see everything, to perceive every cell in his body, his elbows, his fingernails, his eyelashes. He wished she, or anyone, would memorize him.
“How long is your commute?” she asked.
“Fifty-five minutes. If the trains come on time. I’m coming in from Queens. Before, it was shorter, twenty minutes.”
“Why was it shorter?”
“I was in Murray Hill. Rent-controlled apartment. My ex grabbed it. That place was nine hundred square feet, one thousand a month. A view of the East River. Now you don’t want to know what I look out at.”
“What?” she asked.
Some days, he didn’t mind the view from his studio, the narrow brick alley between his building and the next. He heard the yelling of the family across the alley, and he valued the silence in his room. Other days, he felt the quiet of the room as a weight crushing him.
“Nothing,” he said. His heart thrummed in his chest.
“Why didn’t Elaine love me enough?” he said. “Ask me.”
“Is that really—”
“Go ahead.”
“Why did . . .” She paused. “Why didn’t Elaine love you enough?”
“Excellent question,” he said. “I thought I was a good enough guy.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice annoyed.
What was good enough? Now he thought of anyone who paid him any attention at all. The girl who smiled at him at the subway booth, that was something, wasn’t it? His cousin who sometimes dropped by to make martinis for him. But before this, before the hoarding of any interaction, he had wanted more—he wanted to touch his wife more than she wanted to touch him, he wanted her asleep beside him every night, her hair, the sweet, dour coffee smell of her breath.
“How did you know you were good enough?”
He was not expecting her question. She was observant now, in an annoying and thorough way, sitting up, ready to take notes. He felt sorry for her.
“Who was it that left you? Girlfriend, wife, partner, what?”
“Wife,” he said; he had not said the word in some time.
She clapped her palms together and regarded him.
“What did she want from you?” she asked.
“How should I know? I was better-looking when she married me. My apartment? Not kids, she didn’t want them. Not money, I never had any.” He looked around the office, taking in its feeling of crowded scarcity—there were piles of papers and books on chairs around the desk, but no photos, nothing on the walls. Panic was a silver line through his
chest; he thought it might unzip him.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. He touched his forehead. “Just go on.”
“I’m not sure what to ask now,” she said.
“Ask me about my past,” he said.
“What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?” she asked.
He could tell that she still, foolishly, thought this was an interview; she was trying to flatter him.
“Maybe I should have been a lawyer. Or a poet. Or a botanist. Maybe I lived the wrong damn life—”
They looked at each other and their gaze held the same fear. Ms. Gold firmly put her hand on his desk.
“Stop,” she said. “You have answered enough. Let me answer some questions,” she said.
He stared at her.
“All right,” he said.
He looked out the window of his office; the mirrored buildings being constructed across the street, the crappy gray blinds in his office, the blue sky, everything was receding from him. Soon it would all vanish. But when he was gone, what would the world be?
Suddenly, he made a decision.
“You have the job,” he said.
This was not true—he did not know why he said it. He didn’t even have the power to decide this, but he said it anyway. She blinked hard, as though he had thrown water into her eyes.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“Why not?”
“You can’t decide just like that. You have procedures, Human Resources—”
“I’ll hire you,” he said. “I’ll hire you and your sister and your mother and your father and your lover and your children, I’ll just hire them all—”
He wanted to, sincerely, then. Maybe he was this—generous! This new feeling, this abundance made him feel lighter. He wanted to bring her on board.
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “This is too quick.”
“You’re hired!” he said, realizing the more he repeated it, the less convincing it sounded. “Did you hear that? You’re a reporter at Metro Daily. You’re hired.”
She looked so tall, now, standing up, though she was not even that tall a person, but appeared now completely different—like a tree.
“Really?” she asked, briskly. “Hand me the paperwork. I’ll do it now.”
He didn’t have any paperwork. She waited for a long moment, and then, obviously, she knew. “Come on,” she said. “I don’t need any more bullshit. What the hell is wrong with all of you? I need something real.” She picked up her purse.
“Wait,” he said.
He stood up and walked around his desk, so he was facing her.
“I just want to ask you—” he said.
She set her purse on her shoulder and stepped back from him. He was standing in front of her; he could smell his own odor, which was rotting and bitter.
“I have to go—” she said.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait.”
He could hear his own heart in his chest, its ridiculous song.
“Are you okay?” she asked him.
She was about to leave, watching him.
He knew that, in a minute or so, she would leave for her next appointment. She would take the elevator to the lobby, walk through the revolving doors to the street, fade into the crowd. He would never see her again. He had already forgotten her name.
“A pleasure to meet you,” she said, which was clearly a lie, and she held out her hand, as though this was actually a job interview. The gesture moved him in a way that surprised him. He shook her hand, but there was no energy in his handshake, and he knew she could feel that; he wondered what else she could tell.
She turned to leave. “Wait,” he said, softly, so she would not hear. He stood, uncertain, in front of her, and tried to figure out what he wanted to say.
Ms. Gold walked out onto the bright street. The late afternoon glare reflected off the glass of the skyscrapers so they looked as if they were made of sun. People rushed around her, each one with a place to belong. She felt a flash of love for all of them—the businessman, the nurse in scrubs, the cabdriver, the hot dog vendor; she wanted to grab any one and become them. She was so tired; she did not want to be herself. There were so many disappointments. She had done three interviews today, more than she had done in weeks; she doubted any would lead to a job.
She was impatient, wanting answers. What was the key? What could she have done differently? Perhaps she should have bought the jacket. Perhaps she should have used the Cambria font on her résumé instead of Helvetica. Perhaps she should have walked down another street when she met the last man she loved. Perhaps she should have listened to her parents. Perhaps she should not have moved away from her place of birth, or perhaps she should have. She wanted to know the mistake, the moment that would explain everything to her. She stopped on the sidewalk, people flowing around her. A man bumped against her and he muttered something. She did not care. She did not move because she was thinking. She was thinking. The buildings loomed, large boxes of light. She wanted, for a moment, to run back and ask Mr. Holland one more question; then she kept walking.
The New Order
We were friends, or we knew each other, and both of us had been in the other room when the attack occurred. This was in the 1970s, when these events didn’t happen at schools. A teacher and a ninth grader were shot in the cafeteria and another teacher was injured so that, from then on, her arm hung down like a broken wing. The girl who was killed was a member of the cello section, and she was named Sandra. We were all part of the Intermediate Orchestra of our junior high school, and she had been in the cafeteria, where we were also supposed to be ten minutes after she had left the multipurpose room. The cafeteria was serving fish and chips and Sandra left early because she wanted to be first in line. The man went to the table and shot two teachers and also her, one, two, three, everyone looking on, in disbelief; the man had been one of the fathers at the school.
As part of the process to get us past the incident, which was what they called the attack, after the assemblies, and the short and not fruitful discussions in homeroom telling us to report any suspicious behavior to the vice principal, our orchestra teacher, Mr. Handelman, decided to proceed as usual. In two weeks we were supposed to audition for our chairs in the orchestra. We would each play for one minute and the teacher would rank us on tone, musicality, and pitch, and arrange us in a new order.
Lori and I had become, strangely, better friends after the incident. We didn’t know Sandra very well—mostly we knew her as a good cellist. She had a deep tone that you could hear in your stomach, when she played, that made the air feel like velvet. She usually occupied Seat Three. Lori was Seat Two. She had always been Seat Two. Seat One went to John Schubert, who was adept at pieces that required rapid finger work, whose thumb slid buttery up the strings and who was always, in a way that seemed almost supernatural, on key, but whose tone was sometimes thin, as though revealing some deep unsolved craving within him. We all regarded each other with sharp, interested eyes.
The new order was especially important because the first cello would perform a short, one-minute solo as part of a fall festival performance for the school. In the center of my heart, I wanted to be Seat One someday. I practiced a lot. I was going to audition with my favorite piece, “The Dying Swan,” which felt perhaps problematic, but it was what I was best at playing, and I loved how I felt when I played it—my chest pressing against the wood of the cello, the sense that I was inside the music, which felt like the heart of everything, and, at that age, I wanted to crouch inside the heart of the world.
I tried not to think about Sandra or the teachers when we sat in the cafeteria. We had not been allowed in it for a week as the school administration scrubbed any evidence of the incident from the room, but, unfortunately, there was nowhere else to feed us, so they let us back in. The room was now clean in a stringent, terrifying way, as though it represented all the thou
ghts we were not supposed to have about our futures. There were rumors about the incident. Everyone wanted to have a theory. Sandra had been wearing a tube top, and the murderous father instructed his daughter, a ninth grader named Jen, not to wear tube tops; he was rumored to find them immodest and harmful in some way no one could explain. Or he shot at Mrs. Simon, an algebra teacher, who had recently turned him down for a date, and Sandra, unfortunately, just got in the way. There was no clarity on anything (as though there could be), but the cloudiness of the incident made everyone eager to contribute to the memorial the school now set up in a corner, a peculiar display with a few bouquets of flowers, some posters with large hearts drawn on them. Everyone was eager to show a capacity for love.
We talked about the other members of the orchestra with an intense desire to categorize them, sort them in ways that were flattering and not. Lori assumed a new mantle of authority following the attack, a new hardness that made it seem she wanted to press herself like a bug into amber, into the air. I looked at Lori and I wanted to fold myself into her, which was an impulse that alarmed me; I didn’t know why I thought I would be safe in her; I wanted her, or someone in the world, to locate me. I wanted this so much I was dizzy. We glanced at the teachers, the other students, wondering who might kill us. It could be anyone, apparently, and it was unclear what could be the armor to stop it.
In this realm of anxiety, we briskly, authoritatively, ranked the others. We agreed that John was overrated in his playing but had a beautiful way of spinning the cello when he was bored, his long legs stretched out, and that Tracy L. in the flute section was a bad player because her high notes never quite hit the right way.
Lori called her mother a loser; her parents divorced, mother always out, or her mother’s girlfriends coming over and all of them drinking vodka shots in the car. My parents were always home, but moved as if the air were made of Jell-O, and they believed the world was always about to break. We sat in that gleaming, scrubbed cafeteria and ate our sugary hamburgers. The world was trembling around us, and it seemed it was going to eat us. We did not talk about the incident. We did not talk about everything we did each day to our classmates in our minds, for the boundary between the violence outside and inside our minds seemed thin and permeable; routinely I would be murdering an unbearable violinist who gave me cold, diminishing looks, or pressing myself naked against the first clarinetist who had delicate, beautiful arms I wanted to wrap around me; I wanted so much, always; the world was spangled and nothing felt quite real.
The New Order Page 6
