Chapter Thirty-One The Recovery
Chapter Thirty-One
The Recovery
I had two big canvas bags in the bottom drawer of my desk, plus the Beast. I hadn’t expected to go home toting everything I’d ever brought to my desk to keep me from going crazy while I edited at night, while I slept there so we could meet deadlines, so the last edit could go through, so the last tiny mistakes could be caught.
I sat in my desk chair. I took the pictures of Molly and Pete and the ones of my mom and dad, and the one of me and Julie and Bella at the zoo, and I laid them inside one of the bags. I took two legal pads that were filled with my notes, with only one or two blank pages left. I took my pens and my headphones, my Post-its and my two water bottles. I slid open the big desk drawer. I took out the Advil and the Tylenol, the cold medicine, the nail clippers, the warm socks for when the office was cold and the handheld fan for when it was hot. I packed up the aspirational apple and the night chocolate and two granola bars. I packed up the floss, the toothbrush, the deodorant, and the hair ties, all left over from when I couldn’t go home.
I took down a few complimentary notes I’d gotten over time from people I admired, which I’d tacked to the wall of my cubicle. I packed my spare sweatshirt and a mug that said Sound is my vision . I took out a fat stack of business cards and threw them into the recycling.
I picked up all of it and headed for the elevator. But as I got close, I realized I could not, in fact, carry it all. I couldn’t bear to go and find anybody to tell them what had just happened and ask them to help me with my stuff. Not like this. I was going to have to make two trips home. No glorious exit. Just slinking back in to get my other bag. The moment I had dreamed about was ruined. I would, as I so often had in this building, settle for so much less than I’d envisioned.
I took the elevator down with one of the bags, and I passed through the lobby. I stepped out onto the sidewalk, and when I looked to my left, I thought I was hallucinating. Either I was hallucinating, or the damnedest series of coincidences I had ever experienced or even heard of had come for me one more time.
“Hi,” he said, and he smiled.
Maybe I’d brought Will here. Maybe I’d brought him here with my mind. I’d certainly tried hard enough over the last two days. “Hi,” I said back, on a long sigh, and I put everything down. “I guess it’s inevitable this would all end with bumping into you again.”
“You didn’t bump into me,” he said. “I came to get you.”
I was afraid to believe it. “Why?”
“Well, your friend Julie texted me. She thought I might want to hear the big finale. Which I did. And she told me you might have a hard day with your boss. So I figured I’d come by in case you needed me.”
“You came here looking for me?”
“Yeah.” He pointed to my bag. “I found you just in time, huh? You ready to go?”
“No,” I said. “I actually have to go back in there for one more bag.”
He shook his head. “I’ll get it. Do I need your ID?”
I took my badge from around my neck. “The bag is just sitting right outside the elevator on the third floor. Canvas bag, red straps. And hey, can you do me a favor? Just throw my ID in the trash on your way back out.”
This was all so emotional to me, but he was so calm. “Got it. Don’t move.” He vanished into the building, and I glanced down at my phone, which I’d been ignoring, and which was filling up with messages of every kind from practically everyone I’d ever known. They loved the finale. They couldn’t believe what I had done with the finale. They were shocked by the finale. I could think about all of it later.
But as I slipped my phone back into my pocket, I looked up to see Justin, again, walking toward me. There was nothing to do anymore except laugh, so I did.
“You look like you’re in a good mood,” he said. “Did Toby tell you we’re going to be working together?”
“I’m afraid you’re a couple of important developments behind, Justin,” I said. “I just quit.”
“What did you do that for? You just finished your show.”
“I’m aware of that. Listen, be decent to these people, okay? They don’t deserve any of what’s about to happen to them.”
“They’ll be fine,” he said confidently. “I’m going to take care of them.”
“Uch,” I said, already feeling the sweet freedom of unemployment.
Just then the door opened, and Will stepped out. “Okay,” he said, “we’re all set. My car’s around the corner.”
Justin looked at me expectantly. Will didn’t appear to care. “Will, this is Justin. Justin, Will.”
“It’s great to meet you,” Justin said.
Will just stared at him, then after looking like he was perhaps counting to ten in his head, he said, “Oh. Sure.” For some reason, I found this the funniest thing he possibly could have said.
Apparently looking for an opening to talk about himself, Justin said to Will, “So it’s a big day for all these guys, right? Are you, like, really, really into podcasts?”
Will thought about this for a second. He reached out and picked up my other bag of desk stuff, leaving only the Beast for me, and he leaned conspiratorially toward Justin. “You know what?” he said. “I’m not. I’m really, really into her.” He gestured toward me with a tiny flick of his head, and he walked off, and I tried to burn into my memory the way Justin’s face wilted. He didn’t say another word. He just walked into the building, into his future, into whatever. I didn’t have to care.
As we walked to the car, Will said, “Sorry, was that too much?”
“Oh my God,” I said. “The only thing I didn’t like about it was that you had clothes on. I’m glad Julie told you what was going on.”
“Well,” he said. “What happened first was that my sister heard the episode. She got very excited, and she called me, and she was upset when I told her that I wasn’t, at that moment, naked in your apartment or anything. Because that’s where she thought I would be. And I explained to her what was going on, and I told her you came to see me, and a little bit of what we talked about. And she said, ‘I love you very much, but you are being a dipshit.’ And so I did a lot of thinking while I was walking Buddy all over the city, and it occurred to me that I was being a dipshit. And my sister is always right. And then your friend texted, and then I listened, and that’s about the size of it.”
“I just quit my job,” I said.
“Yeah, I hope so, because I threw your ID into the water feature in the lobby.”
“It doesn’t really matter, because I’d probably get fired anyway. They sold the company.”
“To who?”
“Caravan. And Justin’s going to run it, which is why he was there. It’s just the kind of hilarious, extravagant disaster I specialize in these days. I don’t honestly know whether working for him or getting laid off by him would have been worse, but with Julie gone and Toby pissed at me about the finale, I decided not to hang around to see.”
We got to the car, and he unlocked it, and we put all my stuff in the back. When we were settled, he reached over and picked up my hand. He laced his fingers through mine—he locked them in mine—until it was like we were making one joint fist. And then we just sat like that, and he put his other hand over mine, and he said, “I told you everything I really need I can fit in the Kia.”
“You did,” I said. “You did say that.”
“Let me take you home, okay?” I nodded.
It turned out that by “home,” Will meant his, not mine. As soon as he opened the door of his apartment, I almost tumbled into it, as relieved as if I’d found a king bed at the end of a transcontinental flight in coach. “Ugh,” I said, dropping everything I had on his floor.
“Aww.” He pulled me to him and I just stood there with my head on his shoulder, feeling him squeeze me almost tight enough that I couldn’t breathe. It was what I wanted; it was all I wanted. “Are you okay?” he said into my hair.
“Ugh,” I repeated. “I quit. I don’t have a job, I don’t have anything.”
“That’s not true,” he said. “Look, you have Buddy.” The dog came over and sprawled on the carpet by my feet. I was back in his good graces. “That’s loyalty.”
“I think he’s about the only friend I have left,” I said. “Present company excepted, obviously.”
“Tell me everything.”
We sat down, and I did. About Eliza. About Toby and Julie, and all of the screwy conversations I’d been having for the last few days. And when I was done, I said, “I really don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t think anywhere else is necessarily going to be better. I just feel…I mean, I loved what I did. I never saw myself as somebody who was going to need to walk away from my work to be a happy person.”
“Not your work,” he said. “Just maybe your job.”
I turned to him. “That sounds good. Talk more about that.”
“Well, your work is still your work. I’ve seen you do it, you could sit right here and do it. Just not for these losers.”
“But everything is changing, you know? I feel like maybe sound is dying and we’re all going to be screwed, and I don’t know how to feel about that.”
He moved closer to me on the sofa until he was right next to me, and he lifted one arm and put it around my shoulders. I wiggled around until I could settle my head by his collarbone. “Did I ever tell you about my dad’s darkroom?” he said. I could feel his voice vibrate against my cheek; it was one of the most instantly sedating things I’d ever felt. The anxiety drained out of me.
“I don’t think so.”
“When I was a kid, my dad had a darkroom in our house. He had a Nikon he bought used. He’d go around and take pictures of L.A. He loved paint that peeled in patterns, or the way buildings would get a patina after a while. So sometimes he’d let me come in the darkroom when he was doing prints. I used to sit in there, and he made this chair for me that I had to stay in so I wouldn’t get into the chemicals or be in the way. He built handles onto the sides of the chair, and I could only stay in there if I held on to the handles the whole time, so he’d know exactly where my hands were.”
“That’s genius.”
“He was very smart. No touching anything, but I could ask as many questions as I wanted, and he’d tell me exactly what he was doing.”
“So that’s where the photography started for you?”
“It is, yeah. So this was maybe mid-late 1990s. You were just starting to see regular people ditching their film cameras for digital. And he told me, ‘Will, it’s all dying. Nobody wants to make prints, nobody wants to handle film, nobody develops anymore.’ Really upsetting for him, right? He just kept saying that everything was going to be fake now, everything was going to be cold. Not real.”
“Do you agree with that?” I put my hand flat against his chest, so his voice could buzz against it, too.
He laid his hand over mine. “Do you know what a polarizing filter is?”
“No. It sounds like something you turn on to make the internet worse.”
“A polarizing filter is a little round piece of glass. You screw it on the end of your lens. They do all kinds of things with light and reflections, they change how everything looks in the picture that you’re taking.”
“So you’re telling me the thing on my phone that makes it look like I have bunny ears is not the first filter in the history of photography?”
“It’s not, no. Anyway, what I told my dad when I was a little bit older, old enough that he’d listen to me, was that digital photography wasn’t any less real than those filters. It was all a vision of how you wanted the picture to look. You just got it to look like that in a different way.”
“What did he think?”
“At the time, I don’t think he was very impressed. But now, he’s very good with a digital camera.”
“So I gather you don’t want me to fear change.”
“I don’t, but it’s not that exactly,” he said. “I just think…something’s always dying. It’s film cameras and darkrooms or eight-track tapes or CDs or tube televisions where people watch three channels. And the business models die all the time. Halls of Power is still on, and how many times has TV already died since that show started? TV with ads, TV without ads, TV over the internet, TV for a fee, TV for no fee, and still, that freaking guy survived in that metal trunk until a beach bum on a WaveRunner picked him up.”
“That is definitely the most inspirational possible use of that storyline.”
“My point is that stories about people coming back from the dead aren’t going away. Photography isn’t going away. And sound isn’t going away. And I don’t know what your next thing is going to look like, but you’re going to be okay.” He squeezed my shoulder.
“I had a way that I wanted things to go,” I said. “And I worked very hard to make them go that way, and they’re just not going to. And I’m really disappointed.”
At exactly that moment, Buddy heaved himself up, limb by giant limb. He sat down in front of the couch and put his chin on my knee, which required him to lean down like a tall person trying to get into a selfie with a short person.
“Did you train him to do that?” I asked.
“Absolutely not. He just knows what you need.”
I put my hand on top of Buddy’s head. “I guess he always has, right?” Satisfied that he’d done his job, Buddy wandered off.
“So what now?”
“I have no idea. I quit. And…that’s how far I am.”
It took this long for us to lean toward each other, for me to put my hand on the back of his neck and kiss him to say sorry, to say I didn’t mean it, to say I should have known better from the beginning, while he said the same. But just as I was really starting to enjoy it, the noise from the kitchen turned into a sloppy, slapping, splashing racket. I tried to ignore it, I really did, but a dog going to town on his water bowl while you’re trying to make out on the sofa can really make you self-conscious about the actions of your own tongue. We pulled apart and he swore and I laughed, and he smiled and ran his hand over my hair, from my forehead to my neck, and he said, “Come with me.”
We stood up and he looked back at me, and I said, “I know I don’t look great. I was pretty discombobulated when I left for work. I didn’t even brush my hair.”
He turned and started leading me toward his little bedroom. “I’m just going to mess it up anyway,” he said. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
—
We both were awake at 3:00 in the morning this time. We just lay there, and he wound a bit of my hair around his finger and unwound it, over and over. “Are you working in the morning?” I asked.
“No, I have to work brunch on Sunday, though.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s good money. It’s a pain in the butt, though. When I did it last weekend, I think I had twelve people at one table. The drink orders make it seem like more.”
“Ah, they got you on the drinks,” I said.
“Exactly. I don’t mind the omelettes, I don’t mind all the crab and the bacon and the cheese on everything. I don’t even mind the people who are so hungover they’re still drunk. But the drink orders. When people order dinner, they drink some water and some wine. But when they come to brunch, they end up with glasses and tumblers and those giant coffee mugs that are constantly trying to spill all over the place. Up at the coffee bar, the barista paints a fern on the top of a latte and by the time I get to the table, it looks like a skeleton.”
I turned toward him in the dark. “Now I have to know, what were they having, the twelve-top? Or is it too much of a blur?”
“Oh, no, I’m up for it.” I could hear a smile in his voice, and I just wanted to keep making that happen. “Two of them were having coffee. Coffee, coffee, coffee, nothing else. Loved them, they were my favorites. Keep the cup full, top up the milk once or twice, they’re happy.”
“That’s who I would be.”
He tugged, just barely, on my hair. “Of course it is. One was doing lattes with skim milk. One, lattes with oat milk. Cappuccino on the end—the kind of cappuccino guy who’s always surprised a cappuccino is a little short drink, you know? Let’s see. One Bloody Mary that was followed by several more. A mimosa, an orange juice in a mimosa glass, another mimosa.”
“The mimosa contagion.”
“Listen, ‘I’ll have that, that sounds good’ is real. It’s why I try not to start the orders with the person who’s going to ask for four substitutions.”
“How can you tell who that is?”
“Oh, believe me, I can tell. Okay, I’m on a roll, I’m almost done. The leopard jumpsuit was having cosmos—four in two hours, at least. An iced green tea next to her. And…the guy on the end with the sunset margaritas.” He put his face into my neck. “I think those are all right, give or take an orange juice and a cranberry juice I probably forgot about.”
“I could never keep track of all that in a million years.”
“I have a good memory.”
“I could never tolerate that many people asking me for things at the same time.”
“I have a lot of patience.”
“Can I say something to you?” I ran the tips of my fingers down his forearm.
“Sure.”
“If you’re happy doing both of these jobs, and you’re good at both of them, why is there this thing about needing to figure out your life? Maybe this is your life. Maybe you found it, and you didn’t notice.”
“Are you suggesting I should stop searching for my next great adventure?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “You stop, and I’ll start.”