Chapter Thirty-One #2
“Now, after Atom I thought I might do something with my hands,” Ellison went on.
He held them up for Jamie to admire; they looked like ordinary hands to Jamie, although the nails were nicely shaped and smooth.
“I wanted to be a massage therapist. I took some classes, but it turns out I far prefer receiving massages to giving them. I was driving around a few days later and saw this place and thought: well, the Satisfaction Café. That’s an interesting name. ”
Ellison set down his mug. He seemed to expect constant interaction; as a decent listener, Jamie had often found himself victim to such personalities. “Are you full-time?” Jamie asked.
“Nearly. I have a good number of customers. Though lately I’ve been getting a lot of wives.
” Ellison sighed. “I’m sick of these wives.
All they want to talk about is their husbands.
How they came home and he was wearing their dress or they went to Victoria’s Secret and he tried on a bra.
They’re all trying so hard to be understanding .
It’s the consistency that’s boring. How much they want to understand. ”
“How do they know to request you in the first place?”
“They see my photos. In the binder.” This was a recent introduction of Joan’s, a physical binder kept at the check-in stand.
Each host had their own page, with their name, a few sentences of introduction, and a photo.
Joan took the pictures: she allowed the hosts unlimited do-overs but insisted she be the photographer.
As a result, when Jamie first flipped through the binder he’d been struck by its resemblance to a yearbook.
The descriptions also had a flat consistency.
Ellison is a graduate of Yale and has fifteen years’ experience in finance.
He likes brisket sandwiches and recently returned from a holiday in New Zealand.
Jamie and Lee had told Joan to put the binder online, to attract more customers, but she’d refused.
“I do not want an Internet sort of customer” was Joan’s reasoning.
“Are you in the binder?” Ellison asked.
“No. I don’t work here.”
“You would make a good host. Joan told me you were in the military. Do you still talk to people from there?”
“A few,” Jamie said, although it was more like none.
Most of his former teammates were now married with children, with the attendant obligations, whereas the few single ones he’d met up with had all been kind of weird, outlining their personal branding strategies with the grim determination of a second-year MBA candidate or loudly boasting about past operations in bars.
Jamie always left such encounters a little sad, a feeling he would try to crush by watching TV for hours.
When Lee was in an annoying mood, she would sometimes say the military had been a phase.
Just something Jamie had to do, as if it’d been a jacket he’d tried on and then taken off.
“Come on,” she said. “Chewing dip? Guns and steroids? That isn’t you.
” And yes, it was true it wasn’t him any longer, but what Jamie couldn’t explain was that it had been him—that while he was in, there had never been a moment when he’d thought he wouldn’t live the rest of his life this way.
He saw now how it all looked. Moving through house after house in Baghdad, who do you know, what are you hiding, what have you seen?
The sirens up high, explosions in the street, the staccato of gunfire—the silence of Hemin, Jamie’s favorite interpreter, as they watched a grove of palms felled for a highway.
The owner crying for his lost trees. Nick’s face swept with dust, the delicateness of his last breaths.
Lee had shown Jamie a photo of her ex-fiancé’s family home.
“Eleven bedrooms,” she said. “The dad sells software to the military.” Jamie had peered at the image, a turreted castle in the heart of Fairfax County. Six-car garage, custom stone and brick.
Yes, he couldn’t help but see how it all looked now.
“There are so many movies about wars,” Ellison went on. “People are interested in that. You need a thing , is what I’ve learned. Maybe it’s not what you end up talking with customers about, but it’s what you start with.”
“I don’t know. I was in Iraq. People have feelings about it.”
“What kind of feelings do people have about Iraq?” Ellison asked innocently. He looked at Jamie with wide eyes. Jamie couldn’t tell if he was fucking with him.
The next week, Lee called Jamie. “Guess what,” she said.
“What?” Jamie answered. He could see Chloe in a conference room on the other side of the floor. They had been fighting recently: it wasn’t that Chloe wanted to ruin her life and get married and have children, she said, but still Jamie should propose.
“I don’t see why I have to propose if you don’t want to get married,” Jamie had said.
“I won’t be in a relationship unless the man loves me ten percent more than I love him,” Chloe said. “It’s a personal rule.”
Chloe was in a meeting with Mickey Kim from finance, whom Jamie didn’t like.
Mickey was always asking Jamie to play basketball (Jamie was bad at basketball, which both he and Mickey knew).
And when Jamie saw Chloe like this, teasing with someone else, he thought he did love her ten percent more than she loved him—and yet even as he was seized with desire, mentally pricing out engagement rings, some lizardy part of his brain prevented him from going through with it.
Chloe saw Jamie looking at her. She laughed in Mickey’s direction.
“Go to the window,” Lee’s voice said in his ear. “The one facing the lobby.”
Jamie rose. “I don’t see anything.”
“You don’t?”
“No.” Jamie craned his neck, but there was only parking lot. He looked again at the conference room. Chloe and Mickey were sitting side by side now, facing away from him.
“Darn. Well, then go to the lobby.”
First Jamie returned to his laptop, where he edited the research and development costs for Electron Cloud 6.
0 from $12 million to $1.2 million. He immediately felt better.
He then took the stairs to the lobby, where he saw Lee.
She was professionally dressed, in a white shirt and black skirt.
“I got a job!” she cried when she spotted him.
“Where?”
“Here, dummy.”
“How?” He tried to hide his alarm. “When did you interview?”
“I didn’t. I’m a contractor. I suppose I did interview with the staffing agency. But they only asked me, like, five questions. All behavioral.”
That Atom’s contractors were so easily qualified was disturbing; Jamie hoped Lee hadn’t told Joan about her interview, since Joan held Atom in rather high regard. “What are you contracted to do?”
“Something with servers.” Lee looked around. “Check out this building! Won’t it be cool to lunch together?”
“Yes. Sure.”
“Though I don’t actually know what a server is. You can teach me.” She peeped at him hopefully, the way she had as a kid.
“Yeah, of course,” Jamie said, though come to think of it, he didn’t know what a server was either. He, who once aspired to conduct major business deals as an investment banker, now had no idea how the company he worked for made money.
There was a quaking in his chest.
“Jamie? You look weird.” Lee was studying him the way that had driven him crazy when they were kids—she was always watching him then.
Because he was the good one, Lee said. And Jamie could admit that as a child, yes, he’d been good, in retrospect even embarrassingly so.
At school, he cleaned up the yard after recess.
When others fought, he gave up his share.
Sometimes, rarely, when there bubbled in him that swell of resistance, he would go outside and run circles in the backyard or, later, the JJS campus, doing laps around the track until he was too exhausted to feel shame.
Once, when Joan yelled at him for some slight, he had gone to her room and taken one of her necklaces and thrown it from the window into the street.
Later he’d run outside to find it, but it was gone.
The idea of a truck driving over it, crushing the pearls, had haunted him for years.
Lee was still looking at him. He began to gulp; he felt like he might run out of air.
Recognition bloomed in Lee’s face. She walked him quickly to a small glass room called a privacy cube, meant for phone calls.
The door had been shut for only a second before he began to cry.
And here he was, for the first time he could recall in his adult life, he was crying, no, actually sobbing.
Jamie tried to keep his body still; he could see in the reflection of the glass the security guard behind his desk.
Lee sat next to him, their backs to the lobby.
She searched her bag and handed him a tissue.
“Jamie. What’s wrong? Whatever it is, it’ll be fine.”
Jamie wiped his face. It was the start of the lunch hour, and in the reflection of the glass there began to appear employees walking in and out of the building.
Some were holding food, their grilled chicken and passionfruit smoothies and spinach salads nearly spilling from their hands.
Jamie had the urge to run out, to hit each one, to throw them against the ground.
These stupid, condescending, selfish pricks.
“Jamie, talk to me.”
Jamie didn’t talk. There were more employees in the glass’s reflection; it was as if they had all simultaneously decided to stop working at 11:50 and go out for lunch in the sunshine.
They were laughing and smiling. He hated them.
He loved them. For bicycling to work and volunteering on weekends and all their good intentions.
Who were you before combat? Who do you believe you are now, after?
I was nothing. I am nothing.