The Ignored (8 page)

“I can’t be expected to keep track of every little movement made by
every little person in this organization. To be honest with you, Jones, I’ve
never known Accounting to make a mistake like this before. If they say you only
worked four days last week, then I’m prepared to believe them.”

He returned to his magazine.

I stared at him. This was an Orwellian nightmare, a real-life
Catch-22.
I couldn’t believe it was happening. I forced myself to take a
deep breath. Over the years, I’d grown immune to this sort of reasoning. In the
abstract. The three-hundred dollar Pentagon hammers, my dealings with the cable
company, all of this had caused me to take for granted the absurdity of the
modern world in which I lived. But to come face-to-face with this sort of
thinking on such a personal level was not only unbelievable but truly
infuriating.

Stewart continued to ignore me, made a big show of licking his thumb and
turning the page of his magazine.

He was smiling to himself, and I wanted to smack him, to just walk
around the side of his desk, slap him upside the head, and wipe that smirk off
his smug pretty-boy face.

Instead, I turned and left, walking straight to the elevator. Accounting
was on the third floor, along with Personnel, and I saw Lisa behind the counter
as I walked through the third-floor lobby. I ignored her and headed down the
main hallway, in the opposite direction of the conference room.

I spoke to a clerk, then an accountant, then the finance director, and
though I’d half-expected to hear that I had to get Stewart to sign a form
verifying my whereabouts on each working day last week, the director apologized
for the error and promised to get me a check for the difference by Monday.

I thanked him and left.

I told Jane about it when I got home, related the entire story to her,
but I couldn’t seem to impart to her the feeling of frustration, the
powerlessness I felt in the face of Stewart’s disbelief in me and his complete
faith in the infallibility of the system. No matter how much I talked, I
couldn’t make her understand how I felt, and I ended up getting mad at her for
not understanding, and both of us went to bed angry.

I don’t know why my job affected my relationship with Jane, but it did.
I found myself being unnecessarily curt, getting angry at her for no reason at
all. I guess I resented her for not being stuck in a crummy dead-end job like I
was. It was stupid and irrational—she was still going to school and working
part-time, so of course she couldn’t be in the same boat I was in—but I took
my frustrations out on her anyway. I felt guilty for doing so. Throughout all
those frustrating months when I could not find work, she had been there for me.
She had put no pressure on me, she had never been anything but supportive. I
felt bad that I was doing this to her, treating her this way.

That made me resent her even more.

Something was definitely wrong with me.

I’d called my parents when I’d first gotten the job but hadn’t talked to
them since, and although Jane kept pressuring me to do so, I kept putting it
off. My mom had been supportive, my dad happy that I’d finally found work, but
neither of them had been thrilled, and I’d felt vaguely embarrassed. I didn’t
know what kind of job they’d expected me to get after graduation, but it was
obviously something better than this one, and I felt even more awkward about
discussing my work with them now than I had that first time.

I loved my parents, but we didn’t exactly have the closest family in the
world.

Jane and I were not as close as we had been either. Until recently, we
had occupied the same little universe, that of the college student, and our free
time had been spent together, doing the same things. But there were differences
now, gaps. We were no longer in sync. I worked from eight to five, came home,
and my day was done. I relaxed and read, or watched TV. She had night classes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays and on those evenings did not come home until after nine.
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she did schoolwork or prepared activities
for the kids at the day care center.

Her weekends were spent in the library or in the bedroom, buried in
textbooks.

My weekends were free, but I still wasn’t used to that. Truth be told, I
didn’t really know what to do with myself. Throughout my college years, I’d
either had a part-time job or, like Jane, I’d done schoolwork when I wasn’t in
class. Now, having two days with nothing at all to do left me at loose ends.
There was only so much work that needed to be done around the apartment, only so
much TV I could watch, only so much time I could spend reading. Everything grew
old fast, and I was conscious of the weight of all this free time. Occasionally
on weekends, Jane and I would go grocery shopping or hit a movie matinee, but
more often than not she was doing her school stuff and I was left to my own
devices.

It was on one such Saturday that I found myself in Brea Mall, checking
out Music Plus, buying tapes I didn’t really want because I had nothing else to
do. I’d just stopped by Hickory Farms for some free samples when I saw Craig
Miller coming out of an electronics store. I felt a sudden lift in my spirits. I
hadn’t seen Craig since before graduation, and I hurried toward him, smiling and
waving as I approached.

He obviously didn’t see me and continued walking straight ahead.

“Craig!” I called.

He stopped, frowned, and looked over at me. The expression on his face
was blank for a second, as if he didn’t recognize me, then he returned my smile.
“Hey,” he said. “Long time no see.” He held out his hand and we shook, though
that seemed like kind of a weird and formal thing to do.

“So what are you doing now?” I asked.

“Still going to school. I’m going for my master’s in poly sci.”

I grinned. “Still hanging out at the Erogenous Zone?”

He reddened. That was a surprise. I’d never seen Craig embarrassed by
anything. “You saw me there?”

“You took me there, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.”

There was a moment of silence, and it was awkward because I didn’t know
what to say and it was obvious Craig didn’t either. Strange. Craig was a natural
motor-mouth and had never been one to let silences remain unfilled. As long as
I’d known him, he’d never been without a comment or a reply. He’d always had
something to say.

“Well,” he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “I
better get going. I’m supposed to be home now. Jenny’ll kill me if I’m late.”

“How is Jenny?” I asked.

“Oh, fine, fine.”

He nodded. I nodded. He looked at his watch. “Well, hey, I’d better be
going. Nice seeing you again, uh—” He looked at me, caught, instantly aware of
his mistake.

I met his eyes and I knew.

He didn’t recognize me.

He didn’t know who I was.

I felt as though I’d been slapped in the face. I felt like I’d been… betrayed. I watched him trying to come up with my name.

“Bob,” I prompted.

“Yeah, Bob. I’m sorry. I just forgot for a second.” He shook his head,
tried to laugh it off. “Alzheimer’s.”

I merely looked at him. Forgot? We’d hung out together for two years. He
was the closest thing to a friend I’d had at UC Brea. I hadn’t seen him in a
couple of months, but you didn’t completely forget the name of a buddy in less
than half a year.

I understood now why he’d been so awkward and formal with me. He hadn’t
known who I was and had been trying to bluff his way through the conversation.

I thought he’d try to make up for it now. He knew me. He remembered me.
I figured he’d loosen up a little, stop acting so stiff and distant, start a
real conversation, a personal conversation. But he looked again at his watch,
said, “Sorry, I really do have to go. Good to see you.” Then he was off, giving
me a quick impersonal wave, heading briskly through the crowd, away from me.

I watched him disappear, still stunned. What the hell had happened here?
I looked to my left. On the bank of televisions in the window of the electronics
store I saw a familiar beer commercial. A group of college chums was getting
together with beer and potato chips to watch a Sunday afternoon football game.
The young men were all good-looking and good-natured, comfortable enough with
themselves and each other to pat one another’s shoulders and slap one another’s
backs.

My college life had not been like that.

The scene of the men laughing as they sat around the television faded
into a close-up of an overflowing glass of beer, overlaid with the beer
company’s logo.

I had not had a group of friends in college, a gang with whom I hung
out. I had not had any real friends at all. I’d had Craig and Jane, and that had
been it. My Sunday afternoons had been spent not with a group of pals, watching
football, but alone in my bedroom, studying. I stared at the TVs as another
commercial came on. I had not realized until now how solitarily I had spent the
four years I’d attended UC Brea. Those media images of close camaraderie and
lasting friendships had been only that for me—images. Their reality had never
materialized. I had not known my classmates in college the way I’d known my
classmates in grammar school, junior high, and high school. College had been a
much colder, much more impersonal experience.

I thought back on my college classes, and I suddenly realized that I’d
gone through my entire academic career having had no personal contact with any
of my instructors. I had known them, of course, but I’d known them in the same
way I knew characters on TV, from observation not interaction. I doubted that a
single one would remember me. They’d known me only for a semester and even then
only as a number on a roll sheet. I never asked questions, never stayed after
for extra help, always sat in the middle of the room. I had been completely
anonymous.

I had been planning to hang around the mall a little longer, check out a
few other stores, but I no longer felt like doing so. I wanted to be home. All
of a sudden I felt strange wandering from shop to shop alone, anonymously, not
noticed or known by anybody. I felt uncomfortable, and I wanted to be with Jane.
She might be busy studying, she might not have time to do anything with me right
now, but at least she knew who I was, and that alone was a comforting thought,
incentive enough to make me leave.

I found myself thinking about my meeting with Craig as I drove back to
the apartment. I tried to explain it, tried to rationalize it, tried to play it
off, but I couldn’t. He had not been a mere acquaintance, someone I saw only in
class. We had gone places together. We had done things together. Craig was not
stupid, and unless he’d had some sort of brain tumor or mental illness or drug
problem, there was no way he could have forgotten who I was.

Maybe the problem wasn’t with him. Maybe the problem was with me.

That seemed the most likely answer, and it frightened me to think about
it. I knew I was not the most interesting person in the world, but was I so
hopelessly boring that even a friend could forget who I was within the space of
a couple months? It was a terrifying idea, and an almost unbearably depressing
one. I was not an egomaniac, and I certainly didn’t harbor any illusions about
my making a significant mark on the world, but it nonetheless unnerved me to
think my existence was so meaningless that it passed entirely unnoticed.

Jane was on the phone when I arrived home, talking to some girl from
work, but she looked up when I entered, smiled at me, and that made me feel
good.

Maybe I was reading too much into all this, I thought. Maybe I was
overreacting.

I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I studied
myself for quite a while, trying to be objective, trying to see myself as others
might see me. I was not good-looking, but neither was I ugly. My hair, light
brown, was neither long nor short, my nose not big and not small.

I was average-looking. I was of average build, average height. I wore
average clothes.

I was average.

It was a weird realization. I cannot say that I was surprised, but I had
not really thought about it before and I felt strange being able to categorize
myself so easily and so completely. I wished it weren’t so, wished there were
something about me that was unique and exceptional and wonderful, but I knew
there wasn’t. I was completely and totally ordinary.

Perhaps it explained the situation at work.

I pushed the thought out of my mind and hurried out of the bathroom,
back to the living room where Jane was.

I was acutely conscious, the next few days, of everything I did,
everything I said, and I was both horrified and discouraged to discover that,
yes, I really was thoroughly and consistently unexceptional. My conversations
with Jane were banal, my work was never less or more than adequate. No wonder
Craig had not remembered me. I seemed to be so average in every way that I was
entirely forgettable.

Was I also average in bed?

It was a question that, in one version or another, had been haunting me
for some time, even before I’d seen Craig, lurking in the back of my mind when I
was with Jane, unfocused but there, a vague threat. Now it had been, if not
voiced, at least given shape, and I knew it would not go away. I tried to push
it out of my mind, tried not to think of it when we were together, when were
eating or talking or taking a shower or lying in bed, but it gnawed at me,
growing in my brain from a whisper to a shout until I felt compelled to bring it
up.

On Saturday evening, as always, we made love, doing it during the
half-hour local news before
Saturday Night Live.
I did not usually
analyze our love-making while it was happening, did not examine what we were
doing or why we were doing it, but I found myself watching from a distance this
time, as though I were a camera, and I realized how limited were my moves, how
scripted my responses, how boring and goddamn predictable everything was. I had
a difficult time maintaining an erection, and I had to force myself to
concentrate in order to finish.