Then We Came to the End (13 page)

Anyway, Karen Woo. Did we dislike her because we were racists, because we were misogynists, because her “initiative” rankled and her ambition was so bald, because she wore her senior title like a flamboyant ring, or because she was who she was and we were forced by fate to be around her all the time? Our diversity pretty much guaranteed it was a combination of all of the above.

“I think the problem I’m having with this project, Joe,” said Benny, astraddle a sofa arm, “is knowing the fundamental approach we should be taking here. Is this just a benign reminder that breast cancer research needs money, or do we want to kick some ass à la Karen’s dead relatives there and get people to send checks overnight?”

“Maybe somewhere in between,” Joe answered, after a moment’s thought. “That’s not to rule these out, Karen. I like them. Let’s just have some of us go in one direction and the rest of us go in the other.”

We discussed print dates, who the project services people would be, and then we broke into teams. Joe was the first to stand. Just before leaving he announced that we would not be showing finished concepts to Lynn; we would be showing them to him.

We all wanted to know how come. Joe replied that it was because Lynn would be out of the office for the rest of the week.

“The rest of the week?” said Benny. “Is she on vacation?”

“I don’t know,” said Joe.

But he did know. He knew just as we knew that she was in surgery that day and would be in recovery when the concepts were due — the difference being that he probably got his information straight from Lynn, whereas we had to get ours from other sources. We never disliked Joe more than when he had information that we had, too, which he then refused to tell us.

“CAN WE PLEASE STOP
talking about Joe Pope for two minutes?” asked Amber Ludwig when Joe had left the couches after the double meeting. We had stuck around to discuss the fact that we knew what he didn’t think we knew and how annoying that was.

“What should we be talking about, Amber?” asked Larry. “Karen’s dead people?”

“They’re called Loved Ones, Larry.”

Amber was, we all knew, preoccupied by something that had come to light just last week, when Lynn Mason received a call from Tom Mota’s ex-wife informing her that Tom had apparently dropped out of sight.

Barbara, the ex-wife, had received some curious communications — voice mails, e-mails, handwritten letters — full of quotations from various sources: the Bible, Emerson, Karl Marx,
The Art of Loving
by Erich Fromm, but also, disconcertingly,
The Anarchist’s Philosophy,
a McLenox publication. Amber looked on the McLenox website and discovered they brought out such titles as
Hiding Places Both Underwater and Underground
and
How to Make a Fake Birth Certificate on Your Home Computer.

Tom’s messages to his wife were oddly lucid arguments for correcting the awful predicament of an individual who found himself stuck in a rut, with many allusions to love, compassion, tenderness, humility, and honesty, along with some not-so-lucid references to doing something that would “shock the world,” as he put it, that would make his name go down in history. “‘All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons,’” quoted Tom in an e-mail that had, by three o’clock the previous Friday afternoon, been forwarded to everyone in the office. “Barbara,” it concluded, “you laugh, but I intend to be one of those persons.”

Barbara called Lynn to find out if anyone else had heard from Tom. “And I guess to sort of warn you,” Barbara added. “I hate to put it that way, because I never used to think of him like that. But then he shows up at the house with a baseball bat and destroys everything in sight, which causes you to think, maybe I never really knew this person. I didn’t know him then and I don’t know what he’s capable of now, and I don’t really want to stick around to find out.”

“I can’t say I blame you,” Lynn replied.

“So I’m calling just to say that I’ve been trying to get in touch with him, just to make sure . . . you know. But . . . and I don’t want you to think he’s going to do anything . . . unexpected. I just thought I should let you know I can’t find him.”

“I appreciate the call,” said Lynn.

She got off the phone and called Mike Boroshansky, the South Side Pole in charge of building security. Mike let everyone on security detail know about the possible situation. They taped a picture of Tom to the security desk in the lobby, and during the day, Benny’s friend Roland compared it with visitors coming in through the revolving doors, and at night, the other security guard did the same.

We alone had perspective. Tom Mota was not going to do anything crazy. He was crazy, but he wasn’t
crazy.
We couldn’t believe how worried they were. Posting a picture of Tom? Everyone knew that was nuts.

Everyone except Amber Ludwig, who could remember with characteristic anxiety Tom Mota after he’d had two martinis at lunch. How rare it was for anyone to have a martini at lunch anymore. To watch Tom have two, it was a pure delight. “What has happened to America,” he would ask, and then stop himself. “Hey, I’m talking here.” We had to halt our conversations and pay attention to him. “What has happened to America,” he continued, “that the two-martini lunch has been replaced by this, this . . .” He gazed at us with disdainful shakes of his bulldog’s head. “. . . this boothful of pansies, all dressed up in your khakis and sipping the same iced tea? Huh?” he said. “What has happened?” He genuinely wanted to know. “Didn’t General Motors,” he continued, lifting the new martini in the air delicately, so as not to spill, “IBM, and Madison Avenue establish postwar American might upon the two-martini lunch?”

It was only the beginning of the vodka talking in him. “Cheers,” he said. “Here’s to your Dockers and your Windbreakers.” He reached out for the glass with his full, flushed lips while trying to hold the stem steady in his hand.

After returning to the office on those days, in the dull hours from two to five, we never knew what to expect from him. Sometimes he would nap in a stall in the men’s room. Sometimes he would stand on his desk in his socks and remove the panels of fluorescent lighting from his ceiling. Passing by, we’d inquire just what he was doing up there. “Why don’t you go fuck your own asshole?” he’d suggest. That was always lovely. But it wasn’t the behavior of a madman, in our opinion. He was someone inconsolably trapped and going stir-crazy, aggressive and in need of release, which was, after all, the reason for the two-martini lunch. We spent a lot of time talking about how the job and the divorce were turning Tom Mota into an alcoholic.

Who was an alcoholic, whether early onset, functional, or fall-down drunk — that was always a topic of conversation. Who was fucking who, that was another. It was no secret that Amber Ludwig was fucking Larry Novotny. Amber would like us to stop talking about that now. But was it not true? If not true, not another word on the subject. Well? Amber? Unresponsive. Okay — what, then? If not the subject of fucking Larry, and if you’ve just asked that we stop talking about Joe Pope, what should we talk about? After all, the democratic principle underpins this madness. The floor is yours. Argue, once again, that you don’t feel safe here anymore, that Tom Mota always gave you the creeps, and that what we call antics and low comedy you call homicidal insanity. Amber?

“Last night I tried to sleep,” she said, “but I couldn’t stop worrying.”

We tried telling her for the fiftieth time that he was not coming back. She gazed around as if she were Marcia, as if she had Marcia’s power to reduce us with a single withering glance to small and ridiculous beings. But when Amber did it, the gaze turned inward and revealed something about her, that she felt misunderstood and therefore hurt.

“What are you talking about?” she asked. “Are you guys talking about Tom Mota again? How can you be talking about Tom Mota at a time like this?”

Who was
she
talking about?

“Who else?” she said. “Who could I
possibly
be talking about right now?”

By then it was certainly time for us to get up, return to our desks, and try to catch Karen in the pursuit of the best fund-raiser concept, but for some reason nobody moved. “Can you believe she might be in surgery right now?” Amber asked us. “I mean this very minute. Does anybody know what time it was scheduled for?”

“I don’t think anybody knows that,” said Genevieve.

“Last night,” continued Amber, “I don’t know why, but I was wondering if she had a boyfriend.”

“Oh, I actually know something about this,” Genevieve announced.

Amber was startled. “What, what do you know?”

“That she was dating a lawyer.”

“How do you know that? She told you?”

“Oh, no. I saw them at a restaurant with my husband. He knew the guy. They were opposing counsel on a case.”

“You saw them at a restaurant?” said Amber. “What did he look like?”

“Kind of heavyset, if I remember. But not fat. Sexy, I thought. I thought they made a good-looking couple.”

“So what happened? Are they still together?”

“Oh, I don’t know that,” said Genevieve. “I only saw them once at a restaurant.”

There was silence. It seemed pretty clear we were all wondering what Lynn Mason did at night when she went home. Did she watch TV, or did she think TV was a waste of time? What hobbies did she have? Or had she sacrificed hobby-having to professional ambition? Did she exercise? Was her diet particularly bad? Did she have a history of cancer in the family? Who was her family? Who were her friends? What had happened between her and the lawyer? And how did she feel, being in her forties, never having married?

“I wanted to call her last night and offer to drive her to the hospital,” said Amber. “Can you imagine that? She’d have been like, ‘Amber, please don’t call me at home at eleven o’clock at night.’ Click.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Genevieve. “She might have been touched. Remember her birthday?” We had made an infomercial for her on her birthday, editing together testimonials from everyone about how great she was. “She was very touched,” said Genevieve. “I don’t think we give her enough credit for being human.”

“It’s hard,” said Benny. “She’s scary.”

“I can’t picture her on a date,” said Larry.

There was more silence, until Genevieve asked, “Do you really think she needed a ride to the hospital?”

WE BROKE APART,
climbing down to fifty-nine and up to sixty-three and to the floors in between. If something was on the radio we kept it low. The weather outside, telling from our windows, was overcast but not cold. Spring had finally arrived. We settled down to the fund-raiser ads. We opened a new Quark document, or took out our pencils. Every once in a while a nicely sharpened pencil would crack on the page upon impact and we’d have to go in search of the one electric pencil sharpener. That was annoying. Back in our chairs we drummed the eraser between our teeth. If a stray paper clip happened to be lying around we were likely to bend it out of shape. Some of us knew how to turn a misshapen paper clip into a projectile that could hit the ceiling. If our attention was drawn to the ceiling, we usually recounted our tiles. When we returned to our computer screens, we erased whatever false starts we found there, suddenly embarrassed by them. We had the feeling that our bad ideas were probably worse than the bad ideas of others. Those of us who worked on sketch pads were engaged by that point in the great unsung pastime of American corporate life, the wadded paper toss. This, more than anything, was what “billable hour” implied. It was always annoying when an eyelid started to twitch. We did some drag-and-drop. What was missing was an interesting color palette, so we leaned back in our chairs and gave it some thought. What Pantone would be perfect for a fund-raising event? No one ever admitted to it publicly, but there were days of extreme sexual frustration. The phone would ring. It was nothing. We checked our e-mail. We clicked back into Quark and established new snap-to guides. Sometimes our computers froze and we would have to call down to IT. Or we needed something from the supply room. Lately inventory in the supply room seemed half of what it used to be, and the woefully bereft shelves recalled to mind TV programs that documented seasons of drought and low crop production in the history of a foregone people. But usually we needed nothing from the supply room. We took out our bags of snacks from our desk drawers, or we chewed our fingernails. Suddenly a blinding flash of the obvious would strike, and a flurry of keyboard noise filtered out into the hall. We thought, “This is not a half-bad idea.” That was all we needed, one little insight. Soon the roughest look, the crudest message, started to shape itself into coherence. Inevitably when we reached that point, we stopped to use the restroom.

What was the likelihood, if we were being honest, that this one fund-raiser, one of a thousand, no matter how many donations it might receive, would really get us any closer to a cure for breast cancer? Who knows, maybe it would. None of us understood how advances in medical science worked. Maybe they needed only one more dollar and our solicitations would put them over the top.

We also saw our work that day as doing a personal favor for Lynn, even if we couldn’t help feeling that, by choosing not to tell us that she had cancer, she had cheated us of one of our most dearly held illusions — namely, that we were not present strictly for the money, but could also be concerned about the well-being of those around us.

MAYBE THIS WAS
why she didn’t tell us:

Not long after layoffs began, things started going missing from our workstations. Marcia Dwyer’s handcuffs, Jim Jackers’ Mardi Gras beads. At first we thought we must have misplaced these things. We had loaned them out, or maybe they’d fallen behind a bookshelf. Don Blattner ran framed movie stills around his walls, with a particular emphasis on scenes from
The Lost Boys
and
From Here to Eternity.
Larry Novotny had a collection of World Series pennants dating back to 1984. Who could say why we felt the need to display such things in our offices? For some it helped to say, Hello, this is me. Others just liked having their useless shit around in the place where they spent most of their time. When that useless shit began to disappear, we got angry.