The Ignored (11 page)

We’d made reservations ahead of time, two weeks ahead of time, and we
were promptly seated and provided with a calligraphically hand-printed
description of the day’s dishes. From what I could tell, we had no choice to
make; there was only one meal available, a multi-course dinner de jour, and I
nodded my approval to the waiter, handing back the description. Jane did the
same.

“What would you care to drink, sir?” the waiter asked me.

For the first time, I saw a wine list on the table in front of me, and
not wanting to appear as ignorant as I was, I studied the list for a moment. I
looked to Jane for help, but she only shrugged, looking away, and I pointed to
one of the wines in the middle of the list.

“Very good, sir.”

The wine and our first course, some sort of smoked salmon appetizer,
arrived minutes later. A dash of wine was poured into my glass, and I sipped it,
the way I’d seen it done in movies, then nodded to the waiter. The wine was
poured into our glasses. Then we were left alone.

I glanced across the table at Jane. This was the first time we’d had a
meal together in over a week. There were legitimate reasons—she’d had to see
her mother; I’d had to take the car into Sears to have the brakes checked; she’d
had to study at the library—but the real truth was that we’d been avoiding
each other. Looking at her now, I realized I didn’t know what to say to her. Any
conversation starter would be just that, a forced and awkward effort to initiate
talk. Whatever rapport we had once had, whatever naturalness had previously
existed in our relationship, seemed to have fled. What would have once come
easily was now stiffly self-conscious. I realized that I was becoming as
estranged from her as I was from everyone else.

Jane looked around the dining room. “This is really a nice place,” she
said.

“Yes, it is,” I agreed. “It really is.” I had nothing to follow this
with, nothing more to say, so I repeated it again. “It really is.”

The service was amazing. There was a virtual platoon of waiters assigned
to our table, but they did not hover, did not make us feel uncomfortable. When
one dish was done, a waiter silently and efficiently took it away, replacing it
with the next course.

Jane finished her wine soon after the salad. I poured her another glass.
“Did I tell you about Bobby Tetherton’s mom?” she said. I shook my head and she
started describing a run-in with an overprotective parent she’d had at the day
care center that afternoon.

I listened to her. Maybe nothing was wrong, I thought. Maybe it was all
in my head. Jane was acting as though everything was normal, everything was
okay. Maybe I’d imagined the rift between us.

No.

Something had happened. Something had come between us. We had always
shared our problems, had always discussed with each other our difficulties at
school or work. I had never met her coworkers at the day care center, but she’d
brought them alive for me, I knew their names, and I cared about their office
politics.

But now I found my mind wandering while she recited the litany of
today’s injustices.

I didn’t care about her day.

I tuned her out, not listening to her. We had always had a balanced
relationship, a modern relationship, and I’d always considered her work, her
career, her activities, as important as my own. It was not rhetoric, not
something I forced myself to do out of obligation, but something I truly felt.
Her life was as important as mine. We were equals.

But I didn’t feel that way anymore.

Her problems seemed so fucking petty compared to my own.

She chattered on about kids I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. I was
annoyed with her and my annoyance soon graduated to anger. I had not told her
about being ignored, about discovering I was some sort of quintessentially
average… freak, but, damn it, she should have noticed something was wrong
and she should have asked me about it. She should have tried to talk to me, to
find out what was bothering me and cheer me up. She shouldn’t have just
pretended that everything was okay.

“…these parents entrust their children to our center,” she was
saying, “then they try to tell us how to—”

“I don’t care,” I said.

She blinked. “What?”

“I don’t care about your damn day care center.”

Her mouth closed, flattened into a grim line. She nodded, as if this was
something she’d been expecting. “Now it comes out,” she said. “Now the truth
finally comes out.”

“Come on, let’s just enjoy our meal.”

“After that?”

“After what? Can’t we just try to have a nice meal together and enjoy
our evening?”

“Enjoy it in silence? Is that what you mean?”

“Look—”

“No, you look. I don’t know what’s wrong with you. I don’t know what’s
been bothering you lately—”

“Why don’t you try asking?”

“I would if I thought it would do any good. But you’ve been living in
your own world the past month or so. You just sit there brooding all the time,
not talking, not doing anything, shutting me out—”

“Shutting
you
out?”

“Yes. Every time I try to get close to you, you push me away.”

“I push
you
away?”

“When’s the last time we made love?” She stared at me. “When’s the last
time you even tried to make love with me?”

I glanced around the restaurant, embarrassed. “Don’t make a scene,” I
said.

“Make a scene? I’ll make a scene if I want to. I don’t know these
people, and I’ll never see them again. What do I care what they think of me?”

“I care,” I said.

“They don’t.”

She was right. Our voices were raised now, we were definitely arguing,
but no one was looking at us or paying us even the slightest bit of attention. I
assumed it was because they were too polite to do so. But a small voice in the
back of mind said that it was because they didn’t notice me, because I created a
kind of force field of invisibility that surrounded us.

“Let’s just finish eating,” I said. “We can talk about this at home.”

“We can talk about it now.”

“I don’t want to.”

She looked at me, and it was like she was a cartoon character or
something. I could see in the exaggerated expression on her face the birth of an
idea, the dawning of realization. “You don’t care about this relationship at
all, do you? You don’t care about me. You don’t care about us. You’re not even
willing to fight for what we have. All you care about is you.”

“You don’t care about me,” I countered.

“Yes, I do. I always have. But you don’t care about me.” She sat there,
staring at me across the table, and the way she looked at me made me feel not
only uncomfortable but profoundly sad. She was looking at me as though I were a
stranger, as though she had just discovered that I had been cloned and replaced
by a soulless look-alike impostor. I could see the sense of loss on her face,
could tell how deeply hurt and suddenly alone she felt, and I wanted to reach
across the table and take her hands in mine and tell her that I was the same
person I’d always been, that I loved her and was truly sorry if I’d said or done
anything to hurt her. But something kept me from it. Something held me back. I
was dying inside, desperate to right the things that had gone so wrong between
us, but something made me look away from her and down at my plate.

I picked up my fork, began eating.

“Bob?” she said.

I looked at my plate.

“Bob?” Questioningly, tentatively.

I did not answer, kept eating.

After a moment, she too picked up a fork and started eating.

Smoothly, silently, a waiter took my plate, replaced it with another.

August became September.

I arrived at work one morning to find a manila interoffice envelope and
a small rectangular cardboard box sitting on my desk. I was early; Derek had not
yet come in, and I had the office to myself. I sat down and picked up the
envelope, staring at the rows of crossed-off names on its front. The envelope’s
itinerary for the past month was printed plainly on its cover, in different ink,
with different signatures, and it made me realize just how much I hated my job.
As I scanned down the list of names and departments now hidden behind
ineffectual lines and halfhearted scribbles, I found that there was not a single
individual I felt warmly toward.

I also realized how long I’d been here.

Three months.

A fourth of a year.

Pretty soon it would be a half a year. Then a whole year. Then two.

I dropped the envelope without opening it, feeling unaccountably
depressed. I sat there for a moment, staring at the ugly blank office wall in
front of me, then reached for the box. I picked it up, pulled off the top,
looked inside.

Business cards.

Hundreds of cards, making up a single solid block of white, filled the
inside of the small box. On the face of the front card, I saw my name and my
title printed next to the Automated Interface logo and the corporation’s address
and P.O. box number.

My first business cards.

I should have felt happy. I should have felt excited. I should have felt
something positive. But that huge stack of wallet-sized cards filled me instead
with an emotion akin to dread. The cards bespoke commitment, a belief on the
part of the corporation that I would be there for a long time to come. The cards
seemed at that moment as binding as a contract, as adhesive as glue, an
investment in obligation. I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw the cards away.
I wanted to send them back.

But I did nothing of the sort.

I took a few others out of the box and put them in my wallet and placed
the rest in the upper right drawer of my desk.

The drawer closed with a metallic clank that sounded disproportionately
loud and had about it a tone of finality.

I found myself focusing on the permanently jammed keyhole in the center
of the drawer. So this was it. This was my life. Here I would spend the next
forty years or so, then I would retire and then I would die. It was an overly
pessimistic view of the situation, maybe a little melodramatic. But it was
essentially true. I knew what I was like. I knew my personality and patterns.
Theoretically, I could move on to another job. I could even go back to school
eventually, get another degree. There were many options available to me. But I
knew that none of those things would happen. I would simply adjust to my
situation and live with it, the way I always had. I was not an initiator, a
doer, a get-up-and-goer. I was a stayer and a stick-it-outer.

And then my life would be over.

I thought back to the dreams I’d had in grammar school and junior high,
my plans of being an astronaut and then a rock star and then a movie director. I
wondered if it was this way for everyone, and I decided that it probably was. No
little kid
wanted
to be a bureaucrat or a technocrat or a middle
management supervisor—

or an Assistant Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II
Documentation.

These were the jobs we settled for when our dreams died.

And that’s all they had been—dreams. I was not going to be an
astronaut; I was not going to be a rock star; I was not going to be a movie
director. This was where I was, this was who I was, and the reality of the
situation depressed the hell out of me.

Derek came in just before eight, ignored me as usual, and immediately
started making phone calls. At nine, Banks called and said he wanted to have a
meeting with me and Stewart, and I went upstairs to his office where the two of
them berated me for half an hour and told me how unsatisfactory my GeoComm
documentation had been until now.

I spent the rest of the morning and the afternoon rewriting the GeoComm
function descriptions I’d already written.

Exactly five years ago this month, I realized, I had started attending
UC Brea. What a difference those five years had made. Then I’d been just out of
high school, my whole future ahead of me. Now I was rapidly speeding toward
thirty, locked into this horrible job, my life a dead end.

Typing my revisions into WordPerfect on the PC, I accidentally pressed a
wrong key and deleted ten pages of work. I looked up at the clock. Four-thirty.
A half hour to go. There was no way I’d be able to retype all of that in a half
hour.

This was the bottom, I thought. This was hell. There was no way things
could get worse than this.

But, as usual, I was wrong.

The apartment was dark when I got home, and it still smelled of
breakfast. Faint traces of toast and egg and orange juice lingered in the still
air. I reached next to the door and flipped on the light switch.

The living room was empty. Not just empty as in no people, but empty as
in no furniture. The couch was gone, as was the coffee table. The TV was still
there, but the VCR was gone. Both the ficus and the Boston fern were gone, and
the walls were bare, all of the framed art prints missing.

I felt as thought I’d stepped into another dimension, into the twilight
zone. An overreaction, maybe, but the look of the apartment was so shocking, so
unexpected, that my mind could not focus on particulars, could only take in the
totality of the situation, and that totality was so overwhelming that I could
not put anything into perspective.

But I knew instantly what had happened.

Jane was gone.

I pulled off my tie as I hurried into the kitchen. Here again, things
were missing: the toaster, the cookie jars.

There was a note on the kitchen table.

A note?

I stared down at the folded piece of paper with my name on it, stunned.
This was not like Jane at all. This was totally out of character. This was just
not the sort of thing she’d do. If she was unhappy, if she had a problem, she’d
talk to me about it and then we’d fight it out. She wouldn’t just pack her stuff
and sneak away and leave me a note. She wouldn’t just give up. She wouldn’t walk
away from me, from us, from what we had together.