This is the fourth and final installment of a story I finished not too long ago. Your comments are welcome.
The next morning he was up before the alarm went off. He went downstairs, made coffee, and sat on the couch drinking it, looking out at the sun on the Pacific. After all, he thought carefully, it’s not a bad life. He let the sentence linger in his mind while he circled it slowly.
“I’ve got a job for you.”
“Sure.”
“Can you track how much we’ve spent on shipping in the last two weeks on the Quincy project?”
“Yeah, no problem,” she said. “Is that it?”
“Yes. I have a suspicion that we’re starting to go over budget, and I want to nip it in the bud before anyone else notices.”
She smiled. “Okay. Do you need this right away?” Direct eye contact seemed never to bother her.
“No, just sometime today is fine,” he mumbled, studying her desk. If he caught himself off guard, he might let himself think he knew her by heart. The flash of teeth, the shout of laughter, the fearlessness, the way she knew without being told when he was sinking and needed a hand. He might. But he didn’t like being caught off guard, and took preventive measures to avoid it in all areas of his life.
When he went on business trips she kept him updated on the ancient, cranky secretary’s antics. Today I caught hell from Luanne for bringing a plant in to put on my desk. Apparently it is against policy to have non-company-commissioned flora anywhere in the vicinity of one’s workspace. It is a grave error I’ve committed, punishable by squawking and a reminder that BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING. He would send bits of absurdity from the road. My hotel room is slightly larger than a coffin, and only slightly less comfortable. I am never leaving this land of delights. PS, Whatever you do, do not go into my office and take quarters from the container on the small bookshelf in order to not have to pay for your own @#$&^@ coffee. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING.
His phone rang and he headed toward the sound.
“Good morning, Clive speaking,” he said.
“What’s got into you then?” Fiona laughed, in the manner that meant she was peeved.
“Pardon?”
“Leaving without saying goodbye! What’s all that?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, lowering his voice.
“Did you forget?” she said, no longer laughing.
“I suppose I did,” he said, after a momentary pause.
Silence.
“Well,” she said.
“Sorry, darling. I was late for a meeting and just ran out,” he said miserably.
“I’m home alone all day, Clive. It would be nice to be remembered now and again,” she said.
“I always remember you. I just forgot to say goodbye. I’ve had a lot on my mind. I’m sorry.”
She sighed.
“Look, I’ve got to go – “
“Oh, yes, I see,” she said.
He rose, pulling the phone cord over the desktop carefully, and shut his door very, very quietly.
“Fiona, I forgot to say goodbye one morning. Is this some kind of joke?”
He heard a high-pitched noise of indignation, and then she began to cry.
“You don’t understand how hard it is for me,” she sobbed. “I don’t know anyone!”
He was silent.
“Clive? Are you there?” she asked sharply.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m here, and I’m sorry I didn’t say good-bye this morning, and I know how hard it must be for you. I’m grateful that you were willing to do this for me. I want to make it as easy as possible for you. Let’s finish talking about this later. I have a lot of work to do.”
“Fine. Let’s finish later.”
“Right then.”
“Good-bye.”
“Bye.”
He hung up the phone and stared down at his keyboard, words spontaneously forming and burning into his retinas. GET, BACK, HOUSE, HER, IT, WHAT, CUT, GO, FIGHT, MONK, BEEN, BE, IS.
A knock on the door.
“Come in,” he said.
She opened the door, grinning.
“Okay,” she trumpeted, “I have here—“ She stopped abruptly when she saw his face.
“You all right?” she asked, lowering her voice.
“Fine,” he said briskly, gesturing toward the papers in her hand.
Ignoring the command, she studied his face a moment longer. Calmly. He turned red. She held the papers out.
“Shipping details for the last two weeks, Quincy project. Total of one thousand dollars and eighty-seven cents,” she said.
He took the records and pretended to study them.
“Wonderful. Thank you,” he said. He ignored her until she left his office.
During meetings, when the bureaucracy and the political babble got so thick that he’d forget how to speak, he would turn to Kate, and she’d be waiting with a smirk no one else would catch. The perfect pinprick in the big corporate balloon. And he’d be able to go on. Oh, it was absurd, yes, but she provided something that felt like oxygen, without ever having been asked. She just knew. Certainly that arse didn’t hurt, either. But the thing was. The thing was this. He didn’t think, he’d never thought – this was the sort of thing that was never going to happen to him. The sort of easy, honest, sincere… not that it mattered. Not that any of it mattered. But what was the point, then, if it didn’t matter?
An hour later, he rose from his desk and went down the hall to speak to a colleague. As he passed her he threw a look. Just to see. She looked up and smiled. He looked away, quickly. On the way back he dared himself to do it again. Do it better. Stared right at her until she looked up. He held it for a second and looked away just as she began turning pink. Once he’d gone past her he turned to get a good look. She was frowning at her monitor. His heart beat rapidly. He didn’t know what he was doing — he wasn’t doing anything, really.
“I was expecting you at six,” Fiona said.
“Yes,” Clive mumbled. “Sorry.”
“Mm.”
“You alright?”
“What’s her name?”
“What?”
“What’s her name?”
“Who?”
“Save it, Clive. It’s just like before.”
“No. No, it’s not,” he said steadily. “There is no her. I’m flat out, is all. Reports due, the conference coming up.”
“If you expect me to believe that –“
“I expect you to believe that because you are my wife,” Clive said, with a force that surprised him. “I’m tired of this. I paid for what happened before. Either you’ve gotten over it or you haven’t, and if you haven’t, there’s not much else I can do. But I’m telling you, there is no her, and I’m not going to hear any more about it.”
Fiona was silent.
He went out onto the deck and watched the waves come in. He thought of the day he and Kate had shown up at the door of the conference room in their suite, each carrying lunch and a book. After an overly-polite debate about whether one should leave the other in peace to eat and read, they both ate and talked, instead. It was extraordinary; within fifteen minutes, Compressed Clive had told her—a perfect stranger, more or less, and a workmate to boot—about his father having left when he was seven. About how infrequently he’d seen the man. About the horrible brown sweater and slacks he’d worn to Clive’s black-tie wedding. About the awe he’d always felt toward his older brother. About the gorgeous Italian sports car he’d managed to get his hands on, shortly before finding out Fiona was pregnant, and how he’d had to sell it.
Afterward he’d sat at his desk, stunned. It was as though she’d removed his skin.
As a child he’d had a sort of recurring panic attack; sometimes, if he stayed too long at the home of a friend, he would find that he could no longer remember what it was like at his own house. He would think and think, but his mind’s eye would shut tightly, and he wouldn’t be able to recall his own bedroom, or the smell of his mother, or the sound of his father’s keys. “I went away from myself,” he would tell his mother afterward, when he had calmed down. “I went away, and I didn’t know how to get back.” She would try to hide her worry. “You’re back now, son,” she would say, tracing the streaks his tears left on his face. He would throw himself into her arms, leaving the bright, metallic smell of little-boy sweat on her arms and chest and in the crook of her neck.
Earlier, in the car headed toward home, he had noticed something in the rearview mirror. Something about the eyes. They had a flat look about them, as though they’d been ironed. No expectancy, no surprise. Had they always been that way? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember whether his nose had always been that size, either, or whether his thumbnails had always been so rectangular. I am here, he thought. My name is Clive. I’m forty-five years old. I have a wife and a son. I’ve been here a long time.
“Here I am,” he said out loud, and immediately regretted it.
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