Ask Again Later (2 page)

The woman who waters the plants at the law firm sees me and steps up her pace heading in the other direction. I want to call out to her to explain, but she waters plants for a living. What would she know of dodging bullets? Of the loveliness of a squinted eye pressed tight against the cool scope of a rifle? If you've got dead leaves, root rot, she's your gal. Of course maybe she's being warehoused, too. Her greatness ripening right there on the branch of life that is the weighted, muggy air of Midtown.

Free Ride

MY FATHER AND I
commute to the office together. I walk from York to Fifth and meet him on the corner of Seventy-ninth.

Today he has a shopping bag, which he clumsily presents to me.

“It's for you,” Jim says.

He hails a cab. In the backseat of the car, I open the box that's inside of the bag. There is a suit for me. Gray flannel with chalk-colored pinstripes.

“Thanks,” I say. Then I notice that it matches his suit. The words
Dad
and
Lad
come to mind.

“Wow. You really wanted a son, didn't you?” I say.

“No, sir! Why would you say that?” Jim says, pointing out that it's a skirt and jacket, not pants and jacket.

“You just called me ‘sir'…” I say.

“Buster, I call everyone sir,” Jim says.

“Thank you,” I say. I think it's the only gift I've ever received from him that he selected himself. “Seriously, thanks.”

“You're welcome,” Jim says. “You don't have to wear it if you don't want to. What you're wearing is just fine.”

It's bittersweet, of course. He thinks he gets a say in what I wear. The subconscious owns no fancy timepiece. In his mind there's been no gap. Nothing lost. I'm still five.

Pizza Party

WENDY, THE OFFICE MANAGER,
approaches me with papers in hand. “It's Sarah's birthday today; want to sign her card?” Wendy asks. “She's going to be—oh, I'll never tell!” She laughs, and smiles. “Okay, forty-two. She's going to be forty-two. But you didn't hear that from me!”

“I don't know who Sarah is,” I say. “Do you still want me to sign the card?”

“Sarah's really nice. You'll like her. She works in billing. She's been here forever. We're getting pizza and cake. Party starts at six in the conference room,” Wendy says.

“Okay,” I say. I sign the card. “Dear Sarah, Happy Birthday. I look forward to meeting you.—Emily”

“Okay, now I just need four dollars for the pizza and cake. Everyone chips in,” Wendy says, “fair and square.”

“Oh, okay,” I say. “I don't have change for a five. Keep the dollar.”

“No, no, I'll bring your change back to you,” Wendy says. “This is strictly nonprofit.”

She puts a checkmark next to my name and makes a note that she owes me a dollar.

I look at the employee list. There are thirteen professionals and eight support staff, including myself. Twenty people (not including the birthday girl), each contributing four dollars. Eighty dollars for pizza and cake.

I buzz extension #1.

“Hello?” Jim says.

Jim is so many things. He is my boss. He is my father. He is where I place the blame for my incomplete and unsatisfactory relationships with men.

“I think you should start paying for pizza and cake for staff parties,” I say.

“Okay,” Jim says.

In general, he's so much more agreeable than I ever could have imagined.

“Don't you want to know why?” I ask.

“Sure—why?” Jim asks.

“Someone's wasting ninety minutes getting a birthday card signed, collecting cash from people, making change, interrupting those who are working…it's more cost-effective for the firm to pay for the party. She doesn't even carry change with her—just to prolong the process,” I say.

Silence.

“Well,” Jim says, “I get the impression Wendy likes arranging these festivities. I agree that the process is a waste of time. But it does give her a real sense of getting out of work. Being paid to chat people up. I think it's a good outlet for her.”

“Well, then, never mind,” I say. “But why not give her a raise if you want her to be satisfied and excited about her job?”

“Oh, I think she's happy with her salary. It's the work she's not so fond of,” Jim says. “I think everyone in this office can relate to that, don't you?”

“Yeah,” I say.

Secret Life

I LISTEN IN
on my father's personal phone conversations through the firm's not-so-sophisticated phone system. Mostly boring stuff. Sometimes he's very funny, but I can't quite figure out if it's because he has a highly developed sense of humor or if it's because he's out of touch.

I secretly need to know him, and spying on him seems like good practice for not missing opportunities. If he knew I was listening to his calls, I don't think he'd care, which makes this breach of trust easy to justify and too tempting to ignore.

I make a list of his best traits. Traits that are less obvious outside of work. At work, he's competent. Smart. Nice. Caring. Generous. Outside of work, he's lost. The one place left that is safe for us to go is work.

At approximately eight thirty-five each morning, while reading the
New York Post
, he calls officer manager Wendy Corbett's extension. She's always in the staff kitchen making the second pot of coffee at that time. So curious was I that I finally got the courage to listen in on the daily call. Turns out he leaves each day's horoscope for Aries on her voice mail. Last week it was Valentine's Day, and he left two messages. Her horoscope and her romance-scope.

Yesterday I heard him talking to a woman, in a whisper that was supposed to sound sexy or something. I suspended my own private wiretap for the rest of the afternoon out of empathetic embarrassment. Today there have been a series of calls from a younger woman.

We all regress when we're scared. Why shouldn't he? That was his upside to our crisis. During my mother's treatments he started a maniacal dating spree. It has always been his favorite coping mechanism. A similar
spree ended my parents' marriage twenty-five years ago.

A few weeks ago he was dating a woman who'd graduated from school three years ahead of me and made her living selling makeup out of a pink suitcase. When she was in the waiting room, I was curious, so I asked to hear her sales pitch and ended up buying some moderately priced lip gloss from her out of guilt. We chatted for twenty minutes. There was nothing overtly objectionable about her, and at the same time there was nothing obviously wonderful either. Yet my father landed himself here.

There are moments when I believe I could travel down this path of thought and never return. But the ringing phone snatches me back—a literal tether to reality.

Breakdown

IF I WERE LOOKING
at a map of my life, this is the point of the journey at which I'd have to ask myself: How the hell did I end up
here
? Answering phones? Reunited with my father? Trying to micromanage office pizza parties? This was not the future I envisioned. These are not the dreams I hatched while sleeping on rainbow sheets in my single bed. It has nothing to do with lack of ambition. Far from it. I graduated from college and went directly to law school without taking a summer break. Two days after graduating from law school I started logging seventy-hour work
weeks at the respected firm of Schroeder, Sotos, Willett, and Ritchie.

I kept myself buried in work. Obsessed with it. Glancing up every so often to see there were other important things in the world. Things I had no time for until my mother found a lump. A small lump that changed everything.

All of the things in my life that worked suddenly seemed broken. So I abandoned my former life. Truth be told? It was an emergency escape hatch that released me from a job that had kidnapped my personal life, and got me out of a relationship I was too afraid to engage in.

When pressed to tell people how I got myself into my current nepotism-gone-bad situation, I like to describe it as a mini-breakdown. The prefix makes all the difference. It makes it sound more like a vacation than a condition best treated with medication and art therapy.

I can pinpoint the morning that things changed. As usual, I was on a self-improvement mission from the time the alarm clock sounded. Each morning I woke with the same promise to myself. I would work less and live more. Every day I broke that promise and ate takeout for dinner at my desk and pretended not to be in love with Sam. I was looking for ways to enhance my life without having to change anything significant.

My Shrink

PAUL'S OFFICE IS COZY,
and by cozy I mean there is a white wicker daybed in lieu of a couch. The first time I came to see him there were pastel-colored butterfly sheets on the daybed, and I almost didn't come back because of that single detail. I tortured myself with what it could all mean—his choice in sheets. Are we all meant to soar in this world? To see things from the vantage point of a metamorphosing insect? Or were they just sheets that happened to fit the daybed? As soon as he gets an actual couch, I'll be lying on it. Until then, I'll sit across from him in the black, foam-stuffed pleather club chair.

“So, what's happening in your internal life?” Paul asks.

“Who's got time for an internal life?” I say.

“Not a hell of a lot happening in your conscious life,” Paul says.

“Ouch,” I say.

“Well, not anything you're willing to talk about,” Paul says.

I steal a glance at him. He needs a haircut. Like all shrinks, he wants me to talk about my mother.

“Whatever happened to that guy? The one who had the appointment after me?” I ask.

“Why do you ask?” Paul says.

“I think I miss him,” I say. I can't handle separations that aren't accompanied by lots of advance notice.

“I see,” Paul says.

“You cured him, and I'm not sure I'll be able to forgive you,” I say.

Silence.

“Because you miss him? Or because I ‘cured' him and not you?” Paul asks.

I look him over for thirty seconds or so.

“You're good! And feisty, too,” I say. “But either way you're in the wrong, and I'm not forgiving you.”

He laughs. His eyes go from happy to sad on a dime. A hair trigger. He's mastered empathy.

“I liked that ratty backpack he carried. Even though he was too old to carry a backpack—in my opinion. And then, just before he stopped seeing you, he switched to a leather briefcase. No scuffs. Brand new. I should have taken that as a sign,” I say.

“Sign of what?” Paul asks.

“That he was ready to move on. That he'd grown up or something,” I say.

“It's about being a grown-up?” Paul asks.

“Ask again later,” I say. It's my favorite non-answer.

Then I shrug. I wait. I have no idea what “it's” about. But I return week after week in hopes of finding out. One day I'll walk in, and my number will be called, and he'll hand me my fortune, which will tell me everything. I need only to keep showing up. You can't win if you don't play.

I access some of my conversation filler, something along the lines of: Isn't it time to stop screwing around and grow up?

“There's no such thing as ‘grown-up,'” Paul says.

“That's encouraging,” I say.

“If you really think about it—it
is
encouraging,” Paul says.

Silence. I stare at the trees in the park. There is ice on the branches. I can see the skeletons of old bird nests. Every so often the branches catch the wind, like a kite. A visual lullaby. Some ice falls. Then I imagine the cost of pruning those trees. That always breaks the spell. Must be absolutely astronomical.

Peace on Earth and The New Yorker

I LEAVE HIS OFFICE
and sit in his waiting room. I'm not quite ready to go home—to mine or my mother's. There is a white noise machine. Four mismatched chairs, one couch, one coffee table. A dysfunctional family of furniture.

On the wall is a small hand-made sign that says: “Please, turn off cell phones in waiting room.” I cross out the comma after “Please.” It's my way of giving back. This is just one example of my quiet helpfulness.

And suddenly I'm struck with an understanding of why people go to church. It's a lot like this waiting room.
I don't associate it with anything other than dog-eared copies of
The New Yorker
—and quiet waiting. It's a good kind of waiting, because there is no line and the appointment always starts on time. The outside world doesn't knock on the door here. It's genuinely peaceful. Peace on Earth.

My mind travels back to the morning that changed things.

Tin-Foil Swan

I AM IN MY NEW
kitchen thinking about myself. I am envying my own life up to this point. I am
that
person. The one who buys the gigantic, shiny coffee-espressolatte-cappuccino machine in hopes that it will replace or enhance my internal life.

It's not your father's Mr. Coffee…no sir! It's the kind of sleek stainless steel “system” that takes up several cubic feet of the pricey Manhattan real estate that is my kitchen counter. Could be worse, I could be a fan of mug caddies. Those spindly little racks that display mugs for people who can't manage the extra effort it takes to put the mugs inside a cabinet. You never want to be too far from your mugs…don't want to be separated by prefab cabinetry. Or even a hardwood, such as maple.

When the coffee fad is over—though let's face it, I hope it's not a fad but an accepted addiction that will never be socially demonized—this “system” will not be obsolete.
It's also a hot-water-on-demand machine! Good strategizing, if you ask me. It's too heavy to move, so at least it's also capable of emitting scalding hot water.