Then We Came to the End (28 page)

Twenty minutes after their talk in the cafeteria, he was seen entering Genevieve’s office. She set her pencil down and took off her glasses, which she used only when looking at the computer. He shut the door. He moved inside and sat down. He scooted the chair forward and placed his arms on her desk. He looked at her from under his thick brows and said, “Look, it’s not because it’s none of my business. It isn’t, but if I knew for a fact that she needed help —”

“You would do it.”

“Yes,” he said. “I would help. I just can’t say I’m convinced she’s sick. I will admit,” he added, “that it was weird that she said she would be out the entire week, and then she showed up and never explained why. And she’s been preoccupied, no doubt about it. But okay, so what? That means she has cancer? Maybe she’s just worried about winning the new business.”

Genevieve stopped biting her pinkie nail. “Or maybe she’s really sick.”

“And you want me to be the one to go in and ask her which it is.”

“Hard to think of anyone better.”

“Why? This, by the way, is not the reason I refuse, either,” he said, “but try to see it from my perspective. I’m a man. Women’s issues — not something Lynn and I talk much about. But I’m supposed to go in there and talk to her about an incredibly personal matter. Whereas,” he said, gesturing as if to present Genevieve to herself, “you are a woman — much more suited to the topic. But you’re asking me to be the one.”

“Joe, I wasn’t asking you to go in there alone,” she said. She lifted herself up using the armrests of her chair, crossed her legs, and sat back down again Indian-style. “I’ll be with you.”

“So why do you need me in there at all?”

“I need you . . .” she said. She bit her nail again while thinking and then said, “I don’t need you, to be honest. I’ll go in there on my own, if I have to. I’d
like
you in there because I think you can make the difference. Everyone knows Lynn’s opinion of you.”

He was skeptical. “What does everyone think they know about Lynn’s opinion of me?”

“That she respects you,” she said. “That you’re a voice of reason. That she listens to your suggestions and delegates to you and even defers to you. She doesn’t do that with the rest of us.”

“I think,” said Joe, “that what most of them see is Lynn and me talking, they see me in her office at night and they think whatever it is they want to think.”

“Well,” she said, “what should they think? Don’t you talk privately with her?”

“But about
what,
Genevieve? It isn’t . . . is Larry screwing Amber? It’s not what pathetic thing did Carl do today. We’re not talking personal matters, we’re discussing business. We’re talking about ways to keep this place from going under.”

She left it at that. He had said no. Not out of any lack of sympathy, but for his own perhaps valid reasons, and better to stay friends than to push too hard. And besides, she was startled to hear him say so baldly,
We’re trying to keep this place from going under.
Such an admission momentarily distracted her from the question of Lynn’s health. When it got around, it distracted us, too.

But the first thing he did when he got back to his desk was call Genevieve on the phone.

“So if it’s so important to them,” he said, “if they’re so concerned, why don’t
they
go in and talk to her? What’s stopping them?”

“She’s an intimidating person.”

“So they’re cowards.”

“That’s a little harsh,” she said. “Haven’t you ever been intimidated?”

“Of course,” he said. “But if I feel strongly about something, I go in with my knees knocking and try to get the job done.”

“And that’s why you are where you are,” she said, “and they are where they are. That’s the difference between you and them, Joe.”

He hung up the phone, no change in his decision. Within fifteen minutes he knocked again and shut the door and sat down. His seat was practically still warm from their earlier conversation. “So because Karen Woo makes a telephone call, Lynn has cancer?” he said. “Do you know who we’re talking about here? These people get things very, very wrong, Genevieve. It’s the same group that’s absolutely convinced that Tom Mota’s coming back here to blow everyone to pieces.”

“Hold on,” she said. “That’s unfair. There are only a few people who actually believe that. And then maybe just Amber. Most of them don’t think that.”

“But they sure do talk about it. And talk, and talk, and talk. But okay, forget that. One time, I overheard Jim Jackers saying that he believes Freemasons rule the world. Jim Jackers doesn’t even know what a Freemason
is.
”

“Jim Jackers is only one of many,” she said.

“I listened to Karen Woo give an explanation of photosynthesis once,” he said. “God only knows why they were discussing photosynthesis. They hung on her every word, like she was a PBS special.
Her explanation didn’t even involve sunlight.
These people will believe anything. They will
say
anything.”

“Joe —”

“Genevieve, you know the way things work here. One person says something at lunch, and next you know they’re all walking into Lynn’s office as one big mob to carry her over to the hospital for a disease she might not have. These people — you can’t trust anything they say.”

“I had no idea you were such a cynic, Joe.”

“No,” he said, “it’s not cynicism.” He leaned back in his chair. “Trust me. Not just yet it’s not.”

He left, and that really should have been the end of it. But as she sat trying to concentrate on her work, bits and pieces of their conversation kept nagging at her, objections she had been too slow to consider came to her suddenly, subtleties she had let pass now demanded she speak for them.

She found him on the phone. She waited for him to get off without taking a seat. “‘These people,’” she said, when his call ended. “You kept saying that. You said it several times — ‘these people.’ I want to know what you meant by it.”

“What do you mean,” he said, “what did I mean by it?”

“When somebody says ‘these people,’” she said, “you can hear it, can’t you, Joe? A little condescension? I’m just wondering what sort of opinion you have of the people who work for you.”

He leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands together behind the back of his head. “They don’t work for me,” he said. “They work for Lynn.”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” she said.

“Genevieve, I’m not really their boss. I’m not Lynn. But I’m not really one of them, either. I’m caught somewhere between being a partner, and being the guy in the cubicle, and they know that, so they come to me for certain things if it’s in their interest, but on the other hand, if they don’t like something, I’m usually the one they blame.”

“And for that,” said Genevieve, and she began to count off on her fingers, “you have a better title than the rest of us, you make more money, and you have a lot more job security.”

She had yet to sit down. Neither of them spoke. You didn’t talk about money or job security during a time of layoffs, not in the tone she had taken, and not when you were friends. The silence extended into awkward territory.

“You’re right,” he said at last. He let his hands fall from his head to the padded armrests of his chair. “I have advantages others don’t, and I shouldn’t complain about the price I might have to pay for those advantages. I’m sorry if I came across as some kind of martyr or something.”

“And I wasn’t trying to be snide just then,” she said, finally sitting down, reaching out to touch the edge of his desk as if it were a surrogate for his hand. “You do get mistreated here. I don’t blame you if you’re frustrated. But you kept saying ‘these people,’” she said, “lumping everyone together, and that didn’t sound fair to me, Joe. Because some of them happen to be good people.”

“I agree,” he said.

“But then you lump them all together as ‘these people’ who will ‘say anything’ and ‘believe anything,’ and it just makes you sound like an elitist.”

Which was the criticism we made of Joe most often — that he was aloof, that he held himself apart, that he held himself
above.
More than the juvenile speculation over his sexual orientation, more than the exaggerated claim of his social awkwardness, it was his elitism we kept coming back to time and again, like the stereotype that must have some truth to it if it gains such traction. “An elitist,” he said, as if hearing the word for the first time.

“I’m not saying you are one,” she said. “I’m just saying that I’m one of ‘those people’ this time, because I happen to think they’re right — I think something’s wrong with her. So when you lump me in with a guy who believes Freemasons rule the world — which I’m not sure he actually does, by the way. I think he might just think he’s being funny. Jim’s very desperate to be funny. He’s very desperate to be liked. But, anyway, you can’t dismiss all of us just because of Jim Jackers.”

He looked at her. He swiveled almost imperceptibly in his chair. “An elitist,” he said again — not defensively, but with a tone of curiosity, as if Genevieve had just introduced him to a new word. “What
is
an elitist?” he asked.

The guilelessness of the question caught her off-guard, as if a child had asked it, and it was her duty to explain. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know the dictionary definition, but I would define it as someone who thought of himself as better, or superior, to other people — someone who looked down on them and maybe deep down didn’t like them all that much.”

“Then I’m not an elitist,” he replied quickly. “I like people a lot.”

“I know you do — which is why I like
you,
” she said. “And it’s
me
asking you to talk to her. Not Jim Jackers. Not Karen Woo, or Amber, or Marcia. Me. Because I’m convinced there’s something wrong and that she might be scared and she might need help.”

She hung forward, waiting for a reply. His eyes never wavered from hers, her incredible blue eyes, persuasive just by their sheer force of clarity and beauty. He merely said, “Let me think it over.”

He was standing in her doorway ten minutes later. “Want to get some lunch?” he asked.

It was a cool day for late May, with a crisp lake breeze. Postage-stamp gardens lined Michigan Avenue all the way to the Water Tower. Red and yellow tulips were hanging on in the last days of spring. The sky was bright but the sun had peaked — it was just past one. They headed north, moving in and out of the city’s large swaths of sunlight and shade created by the tall buildings and the streets that ran between them. They stopped for sandwiches on the way. They sometimes had lunch together on the benches in the courtyard of the Water Tower where the pigeons pecked at the ground and the man in gold paint stood on a milk crate still as a statue in hope of donations, and the tourists shopping at the department stores along the Magnificent Mile stopped to consult guidebooks or take pictures. They had eaten there so often, apparently, that they didn’t need to ask each other where they were headed, which revealed a familiarity between them that was frankly a little surprising.

He was accustomed to the men catching sight of her and staring as she walked past. She was magnetic even in blue jeans and a simple cotton brown sweater, walking with her hands tucked deep into her back pockets. She would remove a hand from time to time to resettle a wind-whipped strand of hair.

They sat at one of the benches and ate their sandwiches. Once they were finished and he had returned from the trash bin, he said, “I looked the word
elitist
up in the dictionary. Do you think I’m a dork or what?”

“You’re a copywriter,” she said. “All copywriters are dorks.”

“‘Resembling someone with the belief —’ . . . how did it go?” he asked himself.

“You really looked it up?”

“‘. . . the belief of being a part of a superior or privileged group —’ . . . something like that. ‘Part of a superior or privileged group’ — I know that’s right.”

“You really looked it up,” she said. She was turned to him with her legs crossed, one hand holding her hair flat while her elbow rested on her knee. The gold tips of her hair wavered in the wind.

“Well, first you said you thought they had made me into a cynic,” he said. “But I’m not a cynic, and I can prove it. I came back to your office, remember? Twice. I came back to argue it. I was a skeptic — there’s a big difference between that and a cynic. And the difference,” he said, “was you. If it was just them saying she had cancer, I’d be a cynic, you bet. But because you were saying it, too, I was willing to give it some credit. But you have to admit that most of what they say is bullshit, which I try to avoid. And because I avoid it, people think I’m an elitist. I personally never gave any credence to that, but when you said it, I had to wonder. But your definition didn’t sound right to me — that an elitist was somebody who probably didn’t like other people. That’s a misanthrope,” he said.

“So you looked it up.”

“Yes, and I’m happy to report back that I’m not an elitist.”

“It really bothered you.”

“It did,” he said.

“Just to clarify,” she said. “I never said you
were
an elitist. Just that you sounded like one.”

“Okay, but listen. I’m not an elitist by the definition I just gave you, either, Genevieve, the dictionary one, because I’m not a part of the group. I refuse to be a part of any group.”

“Everybody’s a part of a group,” she said.

“In the group photo, maybe. In the Directory of Services. But not in spirit.”

“So what does that make you?” she asked. “A loner?”

“That sounds like somebody wandering at night down a highway.”

“So you’re not a loner. You’re not an elitist, you’re not a cynic. What’s left, Joe? You’re a saint.”

“Yes, a saint,” he said. “I’m a saint. No, there is no word for it. Okay, listen,” he said, straightening on the bench and looking away from her. “So I have a story for you.”

She took the lid off her fountain drink and pulled out an ice cube. She put it in her mouth, fastened the lid back on, and, shivering, resumed holding her hair against the wind.

“How can you eat that?” he asked. “Aren’t you cold?”