The Ignored (41 page)

Taking things from shelves was not new to me, but being seen was. I was
used to walking through stores unnoticed, and it took me a while to get
reacquainted with the fact that people could see me. I felt self-conscious in
the midst of so much visibility, and it was several weeks before I felt at ease
in public.

In addition to movies, videotapes, and cable TV, there was a museum in
Thompson, filled with the most mundane art imaginable. There were also pop
concerts each Friday in the convention center. And community theater productions
of
The Fantastiks
and
Annie.

I loved it all.

Everyone did.

But something was wrong. I was provided with everything I needed,
surrounded by all the things that should have made me happy. Yet something was
missing. I knew what that something was, but I didn’t want to admit it, didn’t
want to think about it.

There was a rumor in Thompson that there
was
a real town
somewhere in Iowa, a city founded
by
Ignored people
for
Ignored
people, and I told myself that if I could find that place I would be happy.

I told myself that.

And every so often I could almost make myself believe it.

It was the first Sunday in June. June 5, to be exact. During the past
month, I’d invited James over for a barbecue and he’d canceled, and he’d invited
me to meet him for drinks one Friday and I’d canceled, so I figured it was my
turn again, and I went to Von’s to pick up some steaks. I thought I’d ask again
if James wanted to come over for grill and grog. If not, I planned to ask Susan,
this girl from the office who seemed to be showing a little interest in me.

I was pushing my cart through the supermarket, heading toward the meat
counter at the rear of the store. I’d just dropped three boxes of Rice-A-Roni
into the basket and I turned the corner at the end of the aisle.

And there she was.

Jane.

My first reaction was to hide, to duck quickly back down my aisle,
pulling the cart with me, like a hermit crab retreating into its shell. My heart
was pounding crazily, and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. I was thrown
totally off balance. I had imagined variations of this scenario hundreds of
times in my dreams, in my fantasies, and I should have known what to do, how to
react, but the sight was such a shock that I was at a complete loss, and I stood
there, at the head of the aisle, holding too tightly to my shopping cart,
staring. I’d thought I’d forgotten the way she looked, the specifics of her
face. I’d thought time and memory had blurred her into the generic. But I had
not forgotten, not deep down, not where it counts, and it was painful to look
upon her. That face, those eyes, those lips, they brought back a rush of memory.
All the time we’d spent together returned in a flood of sensory overload. The
good times, the bad times, everything.

She was wearing tight new jeans and a T-shirt, her hair was pulled into
a ponytail, and she looked achingly beautiful to me. I was suddenly conscious of
the fact that I was wearing the same ratty clothes I’d worn while washing the
car this morning. She started to turn her head in my direction, and without
thinking I backed behind a display stack of Tide boxes. My heart was thumping,
my hands shaking. I was afraid. Afraid she still didn’t want to see me, afraid
she would hate me, afraid she would be indifferent.

Afraid she was changed.

That was the big fear, that she was not the same Jane I had known. It
had been nearly three years since we’d last seen each other, and a lifetime of
experience had occurred during that period. We were different people than we had
been, both of us, and maybe we weren’t compatible anymore.

Maybe she had met someone else.

That was the other big fear, the one I didn’t want to acknowledge.

I peeked around the boxes, inched my cart forward. Part of me wanted to
run away and leave her to memory, convinced that meeting again would only
shatter my long-held illusions. Nothing could possibly ever be as it was before.

But part of me wanted to talk to her, touch her, be with her again.

I watched her sort through packages of chicken breasts. I hadn’t thought
I’d remembered her this clearly, but I had. I remembered everything about her:
the way she blinked her eyes, the way she picked up meat, the way she pursed her
lips. It was all there, in my mind and in the flesh, and at that moment I
realized how much I truly loved her.

As if responding to some signal or vibration, she suddenly looked up,
looked in my direction.

And saw me.

We both stood there dumbly, staring at each other, unmoving. I watched
her put the package of chicken breasts she’d been holding into her cart. Her
hands were shaking as badly as mine were. She licked her lips, hesitantly opened
her mouth as if to say something, closed it.

“Hi,” she finally said.

That voice. I hadn’t heard it in three years, but I remembered it
perfectly and it was like music to me. There was a lump in my throat. My eyes
were suddenly moist, and I wiped them with my fingers so the moisture wouldn’t
turn to tears.

“Hi,” I said.

And then I was crying, and she was crying, and she was holding me,
hugging me, kissing my wet cheeks.

“I missed you so much,” she said through her sobs. “I missed you so
much.”

I held her tightly. “I missed you, too.”

After several moments, I pulled back, grasped her by the shoulders, and
for the first time looked at her closely. She truly was prettier than ever.
Whatever she had gone through during the past few years, whatever had happened
to her, it had left her even more radiantly beautiful than ever.

I realized that I had not really thought of her as beautiful before,
when we’d been living together. I’d been attracted to her, of course, but I had
not seen in her this exquisite objective loveliness. She was beautiful now,
though.

She was also Ignored.

That had not really sunk in yet. I knew it, recognized it, but somehow
it didn’t quite register.

It also didn’t matter at this moment.

I looked closely at her face, at her mouth, at her lips. I looked into
her eyes. I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to bring up what I was
thinking, what I was feeling. What were we now? Just friends? Old close friends
who had met again after a long absence? Or was she feeling the same thing I was
feeling? Did she want to jump back into a relationship, take up where we’d left
off? There was so much to go over, so much to talk about. Yet as close as we
were at that moment, as close as I felt to her, there was still a barrier
between us. We’d been apart for a long time, almost as long as we’d been
together, and we couldn’t read each other the way we once could.

Then I looked into her eyes, and I knew how to cut through it all. I
said what I wanted to say, what I felt: “I love you.”

And she answered the way I wanted her to, the way I hoped she would: “I
love you, too.”

And all that uncertainty was gone. We knew where we stood now. We knew
what the other one was feeling, what the other one was thinking.

The words flowed freely from us then, bubbling out and over each other,
colliding, overlapping, weaving an interconnected tapestry of two unconnected
stories. She said she’d regretted walking out but had been too stubborn to come
back and apologize. I told her I’d been willing to crawl but had been too afraid
to approach her. I told her I quit Automated Interface, and I told her about
meeting Philipe and the Terrorists for the Common Man, but I left out my murder
of Stewart and the acts the terrorists had later performed. She told me she’d
discovered on her own that she was Ignored, and while working as a waitress had
met another woman who was Ignored, an older woman, and had come with her here to
Thompson.

Both of us expressed our amazement that we had found each other again.
And here of all places.

“We were meant to be together,” Jane said, and there was only a hint of
playfulness in her voice.

“Maybe we were,” I said.

We got our groceries and went to her house, a one-story tract home near
Main Street. I was surprised to see a lot of her old furniture, the furniture
she’d taken from our apartment, arranged in the spacious living room. She’d
obviously felt no need to prove anything to anybody. There’d been no attempt to
make the room look unique or outrageous; there were only the furnishings she
liked arranged in the way she liked them. I felt comfortable here, instantly at
ease, and though I now recognized intellectually the anonymous homogeneity of
Jane’s taste, it still pleased me. It felt right.

How could I not have noticed that she was Ignored?

Why hadn’t I figured it out before this?

Stupidity, I guess.

She made dinner—baked chicken and Rice-A-Roni—and it was just like
the old days. I lay on our couch and watched TV while she worked in the kitchen,
and we ate in the living room while
Jeopardy!
was on, and it was like we
were married and had never been apart. The rhythms were there, our habits and
speech patterns and little personal traits all unchanged, and we kept the
conversation current, superficial, and I could not remember when I’d ever been
this happy.

After dinner, I helped with the dishes. I grew quiet as Jane scrubbed
the last of the silverware, and she must have noticed because she looked up.
“What is it?”

“What?”

“Why are you so quiet?”

I looked at her, nervously licked my dry lips. “Are we going to—”

“—make love?” she finished for me.

“—have sex?” I said.

We both laughed.

She looked up at me, and her lips looked red and full and infinitely
sensuous. “Yes,” she told me. She put her soapy hands on my cheeks and stood on
her tiptoes and kissed me.

We needed no foreplay that night. By the time our clothes were off, I
was hard and she was wet, and I got on top of her and she spread her legs and
guided me in.

I fell asleep afterward, a blissful sleep, free of dreams, and sometime
in the middle of the night she woke me up and we did it again.

I called in sick the next morning, talking to Marge Lang, the personnel
assistant, and I could almost hear her smile over the phone as she spoke. “We
figured you’d be calling in today.”

Big Brother was watching me.

I kept my voice nonchalant. “Really?”

“It’s okay. You haven’t seen each other for a long time.”

Such intimate knowledge of my movements and motives and private life
should have offended me, but somehow it did not, and I found myself smiling into
the phone. “Thank you, Marge,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

“Bye.”

I glanced through the sheer curtains of the living room and saw outside
the bright blue Arizona sky, and I knew that nothing could ruin this day.

I crawled back into bed, where Jane was waiting.

I moved into her house the next weekend.

I took only the clothes and personal belongings I’d brought with me to
Thompson. Everything else stayed with the condo for the next inhabitant.

Unpacking my box on the floor of the living room, I came across the pair
of Jane’s panties I’d taken with me when I’d left the apartment. I presented
them to her, and she turned them over in her hands. “I can’t believe you kept
these,” she said. She grinned. “What did you do? Sniff them?”

“No,” I admitted. “I just… carried them with me. I just kept them.”

“To remind you of me?”

I nodded. “To remind me of you.”

“Wait here a minute.” She went into the bedroom, was gone a few moments,
and returned with an old T-shirt of mine, a promotional Jose Cuervo T-shirt I’d
gotten free at UC Brea and that I used to wear while washing my car. “I stole
it,” she said. “I wanted something to remember you by.”

“I didn’t even notice it was gone.”

“You wouldn’t.” She sat down next to me, put her head on my shoulder. “I
never stopped thinking about you.”

Then why did you leave me? I wanted to ask.

But I said nothing, only bent down, lifted her chin, kissed her.

I was happy, truly, and honestly happy. What Jane and I had together was
average, I suppose—how could it be otherwise?—the same feeling millions of
people across America, across the world, had every day—but to me, it felt
wonderful and unique, and I was filled with a deep contentment.

We got along better now than we had before. The wall that had existed
between us prior to our separation was gone. We communicated intimately and
openly—without the miscommunications, misinterpretations, and
misunderstandings that had once marred our relationship.

Our sex life was more active than it had ever been. Morning, night, and
on weekends, noon, we made love. Some of the old fears and anxieties, however,
had not gone away, and even as I enjoyed the pleasures of our newly energized
love life, I found myself wondering if Jane was really as blindly and
uncritically satisfied as I myself was. One Sunday morning, as I lay on the
couch reading the newspaper, Jane pulled open my robe and gave my penis a
squeeze and a quick kiss. I put down the paper, looked at her, decided to voice
what I was thinking. “Is it big enough for you?” I said.

She looked up at me. “That again?”

“That again.”

She shook her head, smiled, but there was no sign of the old impatience
or annoyance on her features. “It’s perfect,” she said. “It’s like
Goldilocks
and the Three Bears.
You know, one bowl of porridge was too hot, one was
too cold, and one was just right? Well, some are too big, some are too small—and yours is just right.”

I put down the paper, pulled her up and on top of me.