stolithecat

[stolithecat]

Happy Hour.

Janie was working through the needlessly briny, settled half of her shitty martini, in gulps of two, when she spotted his blazer, jeans, and wingtips breaching the stained glass gates of the asinine hipster drinking den on which he had insisted via text at 2:51 in the morning when she had made the tragic mistake of telling him.

In retrospect, she knew better.

He approached with befuddling confidence upon spotting her at the high top. One steady foot in front of a steadily planted other. Light, modest smile. Eye contact. He possessed a certain blasé about him that she couldn't quite place, an unsettling aura suggesting familiarity with the circumstances teeming off the plaid of his outer layer.

She blinked with surprise. Then she blinked out of rage. And blinked once more in an attempt to cleanse the palette. This could not be real life.

His confidence, however, was not indicative of his circumspect.

"You're drinking..." he murmured in a whiny, whimpering, abject undertone.

Between gut-punched, wincing eyelids, she noticed his careful gaze fixed with interested bewilderment presuming far beyond his wiles. Her right eyebrow and upper lip moved up and over as one. This was either an act of hubris or naivety.

What did he think?

She might keep it?

"Yeah...and? What the fuck, Chris."

Full stop.

Her words cut through any potential for pleasantries like a razor lengthwise along soft, suburban, teenage skin. Her eyes sought to unearth his arrogantly grounded stature, shuddering slightly with each salty swallow as if timed to a heartbeat, but remaining affixed to his stupid fucking nose that she remembered more than she ever cared to. It had been cold. So goddamn cold. And while he had smiled up at her with ridiculous pride between the press of lips, tongue and mouth, she had desired desperately to slap the shit out of him for ruining an inevitably less than satisfying but serviceable fuck.

The sting of her profane retort was immediate, self-evident, and most importantly, effective. Shoulders pulled back. Pale palms flattened out with perspiring fingertips against the purposefully uneven, reclaimed tabletop. Widening eyes retreated. Stiffened jaw line. Smile turned flat affect. He hadn't prepared himself at all for this possibility. His presumption had anticipated mere anxiety. She had too firm a command of the situation for his liking.

Even Janie was a bit miffed by her own disposition.

You're pregnant. It's norrrr-mal.

Liz had assured her of as much after she brutally accosted the waiter at lunch for having brought sparkling in lieu of still. She remembered becoming visibly infuriated at Liz's suggestion. As if emotional infirmary existed solely within the boundaries of hormonal volatility.

No, she owned her inner bitch just fine, thank you.

"Isn't this, quite literally, your only job?"

Speechless, the waiter had scurried away, nearly tripping, taking his befuddled blinks, rose-colored cheeks, pursed lips, and worried brow with him to forewarn his supervisor of an impending customer complaint. He had to get ahead of it, after all.

She now eyed the boy before her with similar contempt.

"Look, I don't know, Janie. This is new to me."

Lie.

"I just...thought...I don't know...we'd have a conversation or something. I'm going to support you no matter what decision you make."

Lie.

He was desperate to hear the words "I'm going to deal with it."

"You must be kidding me..." she offered flatly. "You told me two weeks ago that you weren't looking for anything. That you just wanted something casual - you liked it how it is. 60 hour work weeks or some other shit excuse. How long have we been doing this, Chris? And now you expect me to believe that you're good with this? Fuck you. You must think I'm pretty fucking dumb."

"You know I don't think that...I mean, it's just...let's back up. This is a big deal. Janie, I get that. And yeah, things aren't exactly concrete between us. That's true. And yeah, that's probably on me. But I'm going to be here for you, no matter what. I just thought, I dunno...that maybe..."

Pathological. 

Janie wasn't stupid. I mean, she was fully prepared to acknowledge that she was stupid enough to have put up with his on-and-off-hot-and-cold for more than a year, or even stupid enough to have let him fuck her sans condom when she was between birth control and place faith in the pull-out, but in this moment, she saw right through his bullshit. Chris wasn't interested in responsibility of any kind, let alone one attached to her and her womb. And she was even less interested in playing this game. She had been duped into a whatever-the-fuck-this-is attachment by a mutual friend who had used phrases like "up and coming" and "great with his nephew" to convince her of his compatibility. She had known better, but at that time, was new to the city and in desperate need of regular sex, and truth be told, he was a pretty boy. Certainly not a forever boy. But a pretty one nevertheless. And for the time being, that was going to do just fine as her mother had liked to say.

Pregnancy was not part of the plan, either. Even in the most, how did it go, "favorable" of circumstances? Uncomfortably but willingly settled in that blindsiding, growing up part of her late twenties, she had yet to unearth a maternal bone in her body, which had her sister and not-so-favorite aunt on high alert, prompting recycled, once rage-inducing, and now banal anecdotes about some co-worker's daughter "...who had said the same thing, but when she turned 30, she met a man and changed her mind!"

She had found the rejuvenating face cream bone, though, resting high on both cheeks just beneath the bags she was convinced would arrive ten years too soon. She had expertly identified the sumo squat bone, too, stabilizing cellulitis along the olive complexion of what her trainer insisted were otherwise perfectly toned inner thighs. Daniel had said it was the product of stress. She had laughed one of those 135-pound belly laughs that really don't live up to the hype. Ultimately, it had checked out. She had even located the Lycra bone, bulging from the rear in the same defiant fashion with which she had beaten her StairMaster into warranty replacement.

Her proudest discovery, however, was the gravitational chicken wing bone, nestled in the underside of each tricep. Her grandmother on her dad's side had given her right arm a thick tug two Thanksgivings ago with the kind of cavalierness that dismissively rifles and whips through stuck together hangers of two times discounted sale selection, charitably advising, "You need to work on this, honey..." with fluttering, residue-rubbing-ridding fingertips as if her left hand had contracted this year's iteration of SARS, while mercilessly sinking a right claw-ful of crudités into a ranch dressing bowl down to her always polished and painted red fingertips. Janie ultimately took her advice; that very same Winter, she shelled out about five grand transforming her home office into a home gym, and had sought out Daniel like a fiend for a fix.

But alas, no pregnancy bone of which to speak.

Exhausted, she realized he hadn't left yet. For fuck's sake.

"Chris, I'm only here because you practically beat me into it. I figured I'd give you a few minutes to come up with something human. But I knew you'd fail. Miserably. And that ultimately, I'd do exactly what I'm about to do now, which is tell you that yes, I'm going to take care of it, yes, you are indeed an asshole, and yes, we're done fucking."

"Janie, I'm trying here. Don't do this. Let's talk about it. We can get through this." He shook his lowered head slowly, diagonally, and resignedly, for effect. He was afflicted with an insatiable thirst for her curiously freckled skin. She was the best he had ever had. Hands down.

"Don't call me.

Don't ask me when.

Don't offer to take me.

I'm good."

Nostrils opened out and steady, she inhaled the residual with a right hand coveting the saucer, then set the glass down gently by the stem, guided by the inside tips of her index and middle fingers, the foot stabilized by her palm, clutched her patterned tote with her left, and as she turned away to leave him to revel in his relief, glanced towards the remainder of their daytime soap of a meeting and confirmed,

"You got this, right?", completing her about face without waiting for an answer.

He nodded immediately, though she never saw it, right hand eagerly fumbling at the bifold in his back pocket, racing to extract the nearest credit card, as if that was his way of contributing to the solution.

Suffocating under the weight of what smelled like wet hay, peanut shells, and PBR fermenting within the cracks of the floorboards, the ensuing smack of 30 degree windchill might as well have been an orgasm. She was finally able to breathe.

She needed to get back to the office. She planned on staying late to make up for her early exit. Her coworker John, a senior programmer with the company, had been assigned her "company mentor", and had been putting in double-time since her start, due to what Liz referred to as "baby brain."

She was making mistakes. Careless ones. Un-Janie-like. And it would only be a matter of time before even John, a pleasantly depressed, well-meaning diminutive man, beaten down by all the hallmarks of a mid-life crisis (responsibility heaped upon round, sinking shoulders, breadwinner stress resting along the overlapping creases of his acne-scarred forehead, the too-eager and eyeful angst of unsatisfactory sex, and burgeoning waistline), who snuck anti-depressants when he thought no one was looking, politely turned his back on her and informed suits in an impromptu closed door corner office meeting, legs crossed, hands folded, with the classic opener:

"I really don't want to make trouble, but..."

Even though the brainwashing Silicon Valley tech-start-up-we-care-about-you-and-your-well-being-so-let's-build-an-adult-playground-for-the-kiddos management style had ravaged board meeting makeovers of corporate America like a fuselit fire raging along a leaky pipeline through the heart of middle America, what with the ping pong tables, foosball, and subsidized vending machines, there was still an unalterable truth to office politics: if someone else had to clean up your mess one too many times, you had better update your resumé.

Janie felt compelled to salvage their working relationship. They could be strong allies over time. Maybe even work-husband and work-wife. He was classic nice. And pretty smart, from what she could glean. She had noticed his poorly set MIT diploma in a cheap, black frame that he probably bought at Target after he graduated, with money in a Congrats! card before his wife had gotten ahold of him and his poor taste.

There was a greyish thumb smudge imprinted on the lower left-hand corner. Its paper texture, quality, and color suggested he had to be at least 45 at this point. She wondered how many times he had taken it out of the frame to feel its weight.

She composed an email with one hand while she buckled her seatbelt with the other, innocently smiling as she typed.

“I know I haven’t said anything, but I really appreciate everything you’ve done to help me acclimate since I’ve arrived. You’re the best coworker a girl could ask for!” – Janie.

She figured an upbeat tone would set the table for a forgiving conversation in which she revealed too much but then promised to exceed his expectations in short order. Caught off-guard, he would briefly bathe in shame for having quietly cursed her name in her absence, fall prey to her soulful reveal, and offer to support her in any way she needed. She would respond with sincere appreciation. But specifically insist that he was going to be surprised in the weeks to come. Her plan was to correct his work. Not the other way around. His eyes would lift, brightening at her confidence, as if she were an adult version of his college girlfriend whom he let get away, the one destined for big things, the one his mom still asked about. She sensed that this was what he needed.

What frustrated Janie the most was that she was, undeniably, the best programmer at the company. They would one day know her brilliance. Come to rely on it. She would be on-call, 24-7, not as a function of her job description, but by default. She would be the consummate originator, designer, and fixer. She'd even be invited to an off-the-books company holiday party at the CEO's vacation home in the Vineyard. John would not.

But right now, all they saw was a shell of her actuality. They needed her to put on a show and prompt the kind of competing side eyebrow raises between upper management personnel that meant not only "She was my pick!" but also "She's taking your job - not mine."

She had always been the best. First semester of Berkeley, she had wiped the floor with all of the stereotypes.

Chubby. Still actively dealing with teenage acne. Flaming-hot Cheetoh-stained fingernails long overdue for a trim. Stringy, greasy brown but almost black hair scattered across his forehead. Straight-leg, loose-fit jeans in a grandma shade of blue just shy of acid-washed. One-size-too-big Pantera shirt. The one who sat in the very far right seat of the very first row playing World of Warcraft on his overpriced Alienware while the professor droned on about syntax. He typed /s after everything and had recently been dumped by his chatroom girlfriend.

Average height. Well maintained upper body. Mismatched skinny legs. Olive green hemp messenger bag. Blue corduroys. Grey and pink plaid button-up. Probably JCrew. Messy hair that took him 15 minutes to get right. Tortoise shell rimmed Dolce glasses with a prescription-less lens. Varvatos sneakers. They looked just like Chucks. Windows running on a Mac. Schwinn cruiser that he never locked up. The one who sat in the back row of the lecture hall so that when he was called, socially awkward girls far from home would look back and notice that he was surprisingly good-looking and think, "Smart and good-looking? I could bring him home!" He had a thing for Asian women.

Asian background. Hair cut by roommates. Parents' pressure visible in the uneven trajectory and shuffling of his aimless and yet spirited pace. He spent more time in a quiet corner in the basement of the Doe, where he sometimes got himself locked in on purpose, than he did in his dorm. Blue Berkeley hoodie. Black G-Shock, watch face exceeding the width of his wrist. Grey, nylonish cargo pants. Navy blue and white New Balance shoes. Japanese-designed backpack with more velcro than zippers housing a covert, built-in phone charger. Off-market-no-name-brand South Korean cellphone glued to the inside of his front right pocket. Wireless earbuds. Spent lots of time gazing at the pavement. He had a crush on Janie. She was the smartest woman he'd ever met. With each passing class, he would position himself one seat closer to her. He spent every shower with her.

Short. Unathletic. Vegan. Heavily pierced and tattooed pale skin. Emerald green eyes. "Hang in there" cat tee-shirt. Black jeans with handmade knee hole rips. Beat to shit camouflage hi-tops. Eye contact intended to provoke fear. From a gated community in the Phoenix burbs. Learned she was into girls after getting drunk at her friend Cassidy's for her 16th birthday after no-showing to a dinner with the rents. Cassidy ultimately abandoned her for NYU. On the day she herself left for college, after she had finished packing her 76' VW Bug purchased with money squirreled away from working at Old Spaghetti Factory, she punched her stepfather in the face and broke his nose when he told her not to turn into some kind of sorority slut.

They had endeavored, valiantly even, to dethrone her. Except G-Shock, of course. But had been spectacularly undefeated in their collective failure.

Mostly, they had hated her. Because she looked as if she had just stepped out of a goddamn Saks Fall Magalog, and yet, delivered coding assignments in half the time, lines, and  energy required of others. Professors loved her. They were wholly uninterested in anything other than the work-product and hers was of the kind recalled at retirement dinner parties as a sort of nonchalant and yet conceited tribute to their professional accomplishments. They offered themselves like sacrificial lambs come time for recommendations letter requests in the weeks preceding graduation.

"I'd be honored, Janie."

"Please, keep in touch and do let me know where you land."

She had liked Jin Soo. When they had partnered together during the second semester of her inaugural year, he had focused on the work. Never not so innocuously suggested a working lunch or some other sideways step towards extra-curricular niceties. Just the work. He had unceremoniously brought her a surprisingly delicious, hipsteresque, pour-over coffee during their first meeting in a dusty, cloistered, and somehow oddly established corner of a campus library basement she had never before visited, without so much as even suggesting a prideful eye upon handing her the cup. She was almost certain that he didn't even make eye contact. It was simply a working formality. How else would they set the curve if not properly fueled? She smiled to herself every time she spotted his cartoonishly large black watch on his wrist; it was so ridiculously massive that covering it with his sweatshirt sleeve was an exercise in futility. And while he appeared so detached from any romantic ambition, had he made a move, she probably would have rewarded him right there in one of those musty aisles somewhere between historical copies of Cold War propaganda and periodical assessment of Nixon's undoing. She found his civility, earnest, and patent intellect supremely attractive. And his good-natured wise cracks felt like a proper complement to the blunt-force trauma that she regularly inflicted upon the world at large.

Auto-pilot for the entirety of the fifteen minute return to the office precipitated an ephemeral and yet shiver-chill-inducing, adrenaline-coursing warning shot throughout her physicality. Coming to felt a lot like the backhand her dad had gifted her at the age of 15. She and her mom had been discussing college options, and she had told him she wasn't interested in his opinion. Apparently, she was going to hear it anyway.

She parked her black 335 right next to the garage entrance of a building buried at the end of a corporate cul-de-sac, moments later waving her keycard in front of the lobby elevator sensor. Seven floors later, she faced a set of glass double doors with the word "Subtilitas" in thick, Copperplate font, all caps, etched crudely across its distance as if the adjacent business nameplate was insultingly insufficient.

After taking her first two rights and rounding her second corner, she spotted John knocking back one of his pills straight from the bottle, easing its swallow with a quick gulp of cold, leftover, Keurig-crafted coffee.

It was Lexapro. 10 mg. She had looked.

And it had come in the same bottle they had found in her mother's car after they pulled her body from the choppy, freezing seafoam beneath the Golden Gate Bridge towards the end of her second semester of undergrad. 

Jin Soon had cried real tears when she told him. There was an empathy in his eyes that had frightened her in the way that a small child can't know if ghosts are real or not. As if some secret between the two of them buried beneath the surface of the Earth had been anticipating this exhumation. She remembered a numbness free-falling within her, cementing her feet to the visually dizzying 80s carpet of a library begging for a reno.

Her dad hadn't called until the day after.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know how to tell you."

She was 45 minutes away.

With traffic.

She slowed her gait, now approaching with definitive pronouncement in her step, swing, and breath so as to alert him of her intrusion. What appeared an incensed stare at his screen while coaxing medication down the hatch morphed into a startled, sudden, left-snapping doe-eyed fixation upon her presence over the wall separating despondence from promise.

Pretending not to notice his eye, searching hers, for his secret, as she set her bag down, Janie retrieved a hair-tie and began industriously and furiously weaving thick, professionally cut-and-colored strands of blonde in and out of a one-inch diameter circle, made smaller and smaller by her repetitive pretzeling of its elastic form. Split-endless tips slapped against her hands with each hair pull through while she committed to the ceremony in an effort to postpone the inevitable eye contact that was going to need to happen, while inside, struggling desperately to access appropriate words of reintroduction that might mask just how intimately she was aware that he was mismanaging his mania, marriage, and manhood.

Through. Widen. Twist. Through again. One more for good measure.

Fashioning a melodramatic dissatisfaction with her work, she turned to him with a heavy sigh as if nothing were awry other than her subpar ponytail.

She looked over to find his ever-fixed eyes.

And his silent inquisition.

His request for an admission of guilt.

She stared back.

With an air of feigned surprise.

She would give him nothing.

But the pill was still in his fucking throat.

She could see it.

He hadn't managed to get it down in time.

Was he going to fucking choke?

Good lord.

In this moment of time, like countless others prior to the present, she was exhausted by having to manage someone else's feelings, especially those belonging to yet another participant in a parade of disappointing men in her life, and particularly at the expense of addressing her own. 

He was going to have to shelve his privileged mid-life crisis pity party. He was going to have to take one for the team.

"I have to get an abortion."

Yes...that was going to do just fine.

[stolithecat]

Office work.

Like clockwork, his horn-rimmed glasses inched away from the bridge of his nose along a perspiring slide of sweat induced by the air conditioning which had gone out…again.

The office manager wasn’t very good at keeping up with those kinds of things.

Whites of eyes hiding behind magnification revealed spider webs of red diluting the clarity of his sight; it was his fifth straight 14-hour day spent cleaning up the mess of an inspiringly attractive but shockingly incompetent cohort who had managed to score the cubicle position next to his. On paper, she had been a hit of a hire, but her diligence before deploying code on a server-wide scale was severely lacking, and since her six-figure start date a week ago, he had spent countless hours covering for her pretty ass.

It was a nice, ass, though.

Explaining to his other half his evening absence from home, yet again, would not be easy. It had reached dizzying heights of tension. He was concerned. He wasn’t even sure that she was happy. Things had changed since the baby came. What was once an average of 15-20 texts per 8-hour work day imbued with a living quality had declined sharply to 3-4 of the mundane variety.

Then.

“I haven’t stopped thinking about last night, baby; it reminded me of when we first met, when we would stay up all night, not watching movies and fucking whenever you were ready again. Come home early. I want you.”

Now.

“Get eggs on your way home.” “We need diapers.” “Are you working late again?”

He reached with instinctive desperation for his lukewarm cup of coffee and guzzled what remained in search of amnesic and/or restorative effect. His eyes darted down and to the right. Task bar. 3:32 p.m. It was getting close to the point of no return. Where staying late would be the only option and leaving a mere fantasy. If he could manage to scan 50 more pages in the next hour, tonight could be the one in which he finally escaped the inevitable, claustrophobic closing-in of his push-pin strength office walls.

Who was he kidding? His neck lengthened slightly up and out of his too-many-times-dry-cleaned blue and black check dress shirt, the one that fit him, so his eyes could carefully peer over the chipped paint atop the abysmal cream-colored cubicle barrier to study her status. Surely, she would be promoted first. Look at her.

She had already left. She was likely standing at a high-top in some swanky lower downtown speak-easy-by-night sipping a martini because she was kinda classy.

Dirty. Shaken. Chopin. 3 blue cheese olives. Her index finger and thumb swirling the toothpick slowly around the rim while her left-leaning face feigned interest in a man not quite up to par.

A furious fervor bubbled up within. Why was he there? What was the point? What the fuck was he even doing with his life? What was the plan? She had asked that of him many times. What’s your plan for us? What do you want for your life?

He had stared back blankly. What? 6 figures, 4 bedrooms, 2 ½ baths, and a yearly vacation on the big island wasn’t enough?

There were times he envisioned leaving. A single backpack, sporting his best layers, his comfy Nikes, booking a one-way, and not returning. Not to spite her. To spite himself.

A preview notification pinging in the upper right-hand of his monitor brought him back down. It was from her.

“I know I haven’t said anything, but I *really* appreciate everything you’ve done to help me acclimate since I’ve arrived. You’re the best coworker a girl could ask for!” – Janie.

Sent from my iPhone

He shuddered. Eyes welled amidst a mixture of defeat, angst, and self-deprecation. His right hand reached blindly for the top right drawer of his desk, outstretched fingers, searching, scrambling to pull it open. Inside, there sat a single orange-tinged, white-capped plastic bottle with his last name first. Take once daily with food.

Lexapro, 10 mg.

Not even his wife knew. She couldn’t. She would judge him harshly, with a vigor she no longer brought to the bedroom, and ensure his 15 mg escalation inside of two days. He didn’t do it for her, anyway. He didn’t even do it for himself.

He did it for the giggling, sparkly-eyed, naïve bundle of his best intentions, wrapped in a ratty dog blanket, chewing on a tv remote, that hung from a lint-riddled piece of partially-torn scotch tape affixed to the upper left corner of his Dell monitor. She was the reason he never went through with the meeting with his old college roommate who had ultimately opened up a family law practice. He couldn’t risk it. Partial custody. Visitation. Two bedrooms. Alternating holidays. Faking positive commentary about her mother for her sake. Diminishing glances from soccer moms in the park. Not so quiet whispers. 

“Wait, he doesn’t have a ring…”

No. He would not risk it. He would live in that world, in that cubicle, next to the pretty brunette, fix her code, direct deposit his family’s lifeline, increase his 401k contribution to 10%, pay for college, and teach the single thing that mattered inside of breaths, that in her lifetime, he expected her to follow only her heart into the bright light of a path he could no longer see. So that maybe when it was his time to go, she would hold his hand and tell him a story or two.

The pill was about halfway down when he spotted her next error.

A fucking comma.