The Ignored (14 page)

I was right. David and I hit it off immediately. We were close in age so
there was that generational connection, but he was also friendly and easygoing,
one of those people who were naturally open and accessible, and from the
beginning he talked to me as though we’d been close for years. There was nothing
about himself he could not discuss with me, no opinion that he would refrain
from expressing. The wall of formality that seemed to exist between me and
everyone else did not exist between David and myself.

He not only noticed and accepted me, he seemed to like me.

It was Wednesday before he asked The Question. I knew it would come up
eventually, I’d been prepared for it, but it was still something of a surprise.
It was afternoon, I was proofreading the GeoComm instructions I’d printed out
earlier in the day, and David was taking an early break, leaning back in his
chair and munching on Fritos.

He popped a chip in his mouth and looked over at me. “So do you have a
wife or girlfriend or anything?”

“Girlfriend,” I said. “Ex-girlfriend,” I corrected myself. I felt a
funny sort of fluttering in my stomach.

My feelings must have shown on my face, because David quickly backed
off. “Sorry, man, I didn’t mean to pry. If you don’t want to talk about it…”

But I did want to talk about it. I hadn’t talked about our breakup to
anybody, and I found that I had a sudden need to tell someone what had happened.

I told David everything. Well, not everything. I left out the part about
my being Ignored, but I told him how we’d begun drifting apart ever since I got
this damn job, and about how I’d been too stubborn to meet her halfway and how
one day I’d come home and she’d been packed and gone. I’d expected to feel
better after talking about it, but in truth I felt worse. The memories were
recent, the events still fresh, and dredging them up only made me relive the
pain, not exorcise it.

David shook his head. “That’s cold. She just hit the road and left a
note?”

I nodded.

“Well, what happened when you went after her? What did she say when you
confronted her?”

I blinked. “What?”

“What happened when you tracked her down?” He looked at me, frowned.
“You did go after her, didn’t you?”

Should I have? Was that what she’d wanted? Proof that I cared, that I
loved her, that I needed her? Should I have gone after her like some sort of
hero and tried to win her back? I had this sinking feeling that I should have,
that that was what she’d wanted, that that was what she’d expected. I looked at
David, slowly shaking my head. “No, I didn’t.”

“Oh, man. You blew it. Now you’ll never get her back. How long’s it
been?”

“Two months.”

He shook his head. “She’s found someone else by now. Your window of
opportunity’s closed, dude. Didn’t you even try to call her?”

“I didn’t know where she’d gone.”

“You should’ve called her parents. They’d know.”

“She said she just wanted to cut off all contact cold, not see each
other anymore. She said it’d be easier that way.”

“They always say things like that. But what they say and what they mean
are two different things.”

There was movement in the doorway. Stewart. “Hey, girls,” he said,
peeking his head into the office, “stop your talking. Get back to work.”

I quickly picked up my pen, began going over the instructions.

“I’m on break,” David said, eating a Frito. “I still have five minutes
to go.”

“Then you take your break in the break room where you won’t disturb—”
There was a pause as he blanked on my name. “—Jones.”

“Fine.” David got up slowly, grinned at me as he followed Stewart out
the door.

I smiled back, but I felt sick inside.

What they say and what they mean are two different things.

I had the horrible feeling that he was right.

There was traffic on the freeway, a three-car accident in the fast lane,
and it was nearly six-thirty by the time I got home. I parked in the garage and
trudged up the stairway to my apartment. I opened my mailbox and rifled through
the envelopes as I unlocked the door. There was a bill from the gas company,
this week’s
Pennysaver
… and something that felt like a card.

A card? Who would be sending me a card?

Jane?

My hopes soared. Maybe she’d gotten tired of waiting for me to make
contact. Maybe she’d decided to contact me. Maybe she missed me as much as I
missed her.

I quickly ripped open the envelope and saw the words “Happy Birthday!”
above a picture of hot-air balloons sailing into a blue sky. I opened the card.

Preprinted on the white background in laser-jet perfection was the
message “Happy Birthday From Your Friends at Automated Interface, Inc.”

My heart sank.

A form birthday card from work.

I crumpled up the card, threw it over the stairway railing, and watched
it hit the ground.

In two days it would be my birthday.

I’d almost forgotten.

I spent my birthday typing and filing, filing and typing. David was
sick, and I was alone in the office all day.

I spent that night watching television.

No one at work did anything for my birthday. I hadn’t expected them to,
but I had half expected a call from Jane—or at least a card. She knew how
important birthdays were to me. But of course there was nothing. What was even
more depressing was that my parents didn’t acknowledge my birthday either. No
present, no card, not even a phone call.

I tried to call them, several times, but the line was always busy and I
eventually gave it up.

In five years, I thought, I would be thirty. I remembered when my mom
had turned thirty. Her friends had thrown her a surprise birthday party and
everyone had gotten drunk and I’d been allowed to stay up way past my bedtime.
I’d been eight then, and my mom had seemed so old.

I was getting old, too, but the strange thing was that I didn’t feel it.
According to the professor of a Cultural Anthropology class I’d taken, American
culture has no rite of passage, no formal initiation into manhood, no clear
demarcation between childhood and adulthood. Maybe that was why, in many ways, I
still felt like a kid. I did not feel the way my parents had probably felt at my
age, did not see myself the way my parents had probably seen themselves. I might
be living an adult life, but my feelings were a child’s feelings, my attitudes
and interests those of a teenager. I had not really grown up.

And my twenties were half over.

I thought about Jane all night, thought about what this birthday could
have been, what it should have been, and what it wasn’t.

I went to bed hoping against hope that the phone would ring.

But it didn’t.

And sometime after midnight I fell asleep.

Thanksgiving came and went and I spent the holiday in my apartment by
myself, watching the
Twilight Zone
marathon on Channel 5 and wondering
what Jane was doing.

I’d tried ringing my parents the week before, calling them several
times, planning to wrangle a Thanksgiving dinner invitation out of them, but no
one was ever home when I called. Although they’d invited me and Jane over for
the past three Thanksgivings, we had never gone, begging off because of school,
work, whatever excuse we could think up. Now this year, when I finally wanted to
go, when I needed to go, no invitation was offered. I wasn’t exactly surprised,
but I couldn’t help feeling a little hurt. I knew my parents weren’t trying to
be mean, weren’t going out of their way to purposely not invite me—they’d
probably assumed that once again Jane and I had plans of our own—but I didn’t
have any plans and I desperately wanted them to provide me with some.

I still hadn’t told them I’d broken up with Jane. I hadn’t even called
them since the split. My parents and I had never really been close, and talking
about something like this with them would have made me feel extremely
uncomfortable. I knew they’d ask a million questions—How did it happen? Why
did it happen? Whose fault was it? Are you guys going to patch things up?—and
I didn’t want to have to talk to them about things like that. I just didn’t want
to deal with it. I’d rather they find out later, secondhand.

I’d been planning to lie if I’d gone down to San Diego to spend
Thanksgiving with them, to tell them that Jane got sick at the last minute and
was spending the holiday with her family. It was a pretty flimsy and pathetic
excuse, but I had no doubt that my parents would buy it. They were pretty
gullible about things like that.

But I never did get ahold of them. I could have invited myself, I knew.
I could have just shown up on their doorstep Thursday morning. But somehow I
didn’t feel comfortable doing that.

So I stayed home, lounged on the couch, watched
The Twilight Zone
. I made macaroni and cheese for my Thanksgiving meal. It was pretty damn
depressing, and I could not remember having ever felt so alone and so abandoned.

I was almost grateful for Monday.

On Monday morning, David was there before I was, feet up on the desk,
eating some type of muffin. I was glad to see him after the four days I’d just
spent in semi-isolation, but at the same time I felt an emotional weight, a
feeling almost like dread, settle upon me as I sat down at my desk and surveyed
the array of papers before me.

I liked David, but, God, I hated my job.

I looked over at him. “This is hell,” I said.

He finished the last of his muffin, crumpling the cupcake paper and
tossing it into the trash can between our desks. “I read this story once where
hell was a hallway filled with all the bugs you’d killed in your life: all the
flies you’d swatted, all the spiders you’d squished, all the snails you’d
dissolved. And you had to keep walking back and forth down this hallway. Naked.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Forever.” David grinned. “Now
that
would
be hell.”

I sighed. “This is close.”

He shrugged. “Purgatory, maybe. But hell? I don’t think so.”

I picked up a pen, looked at the latest batch of GeoComm instructions
I’d written. I was sick of documenting that damn system. What had once seemed
like a great step forward, a huge increase in responsibility, was now a burden
around my neck. I was starting to long for the days when my job had been less
defined and my tasks varied with the day. My work might have been more pointless
and frivolous then, but it had not been so stultifyingly the same.

“I think it might be,” I said.

It was four o’clock and the employees who were on flexible work
schedules were starting to leave, passing by our office and heading down the
hall toward the elevators, when David leaned back in his chair and looked over
at me. “Hey, what’re you doing after work?” he asked. “Anything?”

I knew where this was leading, and my first instinct was to beg off, to
invent an excuse why I couldn’t go with him, wherever he was going. But it had
been so long since I had done anything or gone anywhere with another person that
I found myself saying, “Nothing. Why?”

“There’s this club I go to in Huntington Beach. Stocked with babes. I
thought you might wanna come.”

The second level. An invitation.

Part of me wanted to say yes, and for a brief second I thought that this
might turn the tide, this might save me. I’d go out clubbing with David; we’d
become good buddies, close friends; he’d help me meet some women; my entire life
would change in one smooth, easy stroke.

But my true nature won out, and I shook my head and smiled regretfully.
“I wish I could, but I have plans.” I said.

“What plans?”

I shook my head. “I can’t.”

He looked at me, nodded slowly. “I understand.” he said.

David and I were not as close after that. I don’t know if it was his
fault or mine, but the bond that had existed between us seemed to have been
broken, the closeness dissipated. It wasn’t like it had been with Derek, of
course. I mean, David and I still talked to each other. We were still friendly.
But we were not friends. It was as though we had approached friendship but had
backed off, deciding we were better suited to acquaintanceship.

The routine returned. It had never really gone away, but since David had
started sharing my office I had been able, to some extent, to ignore it. Now
that I was fading into the periphery of David’s life, however, and he into mine,
the mind-numbing dullness of my workday once more took center stage.

I was an uninteresting person with an uninteresting job and an
uninteresting life.

My apartment, too, I noticed, was bland and characterless. Most of the
furniture was new, but it was generic: not ugly, not wonderful, but existing
somewhere in the netherworld of plainness in between. In a way, gaudiness or
ugliness would have been preferable. At least it would have stamped an imprint
of life upon my home. As it was, a photograph of my living room would have fit
neatly and perfectly into a furniture catalog. It had the same featureless,
antiseptic quality as a showroom display.

My bedroom looked like it had come straight out of a Holiday Inn.

Obviously, whatever character the place had had was attributable to
Jane. And obviously it had departed with her.

That was it, I decided. I was going to change. I was going to make an
effort to be different, be original, be unique. Even if civil-service chic
became all the rage, I would never again fall into a rut of quiet
unobtrusiveness. I would live loud, dress loud, make a statement. If it was my
nature to be Ignored, I would go against my nature and do everything I could to
make myself noticed.

I went that weekend to furniture stores, charged a couch and bed and end
tables and lamps—mismatched items from the wildest and most disparate styles
I could find. I tied them in the trunk of the Buick, tied them to the roof, took
them home and put them in places where they weren’t supposed to be: bed in the
dining area, couch in the bedroom. This wasn’t ordinary; this wasn’t average or
mundane. No one could ignore this. I walked around my apartment, admiring the
extravagantly gauche decorations, satisfied.