James clucked his interest, but he did not appreciate being in this particular lineup.
James leaned into Finn’s line of vision, tried to catch his attention. He felt Bruce watching as he blew him a kiss that went uncaught.
James crossed the street, glancing back at the daycare.
As he did at least once a week, James walked back to the TV station where he used to work and sat facing the building on his favorite bench. He thought of these visits as a kind of crime-scene reenactment, as if by going back again and again to the site of his firing, he could make sense of it. He lit a cigarette.
The day James got fired had not been the worst day of his life. He was as still as a man Tasered to the ground and he contemplated this calmness as Sly—his old friend, his boss—sat across from him, slick with sweat, panting, saying what they both knew was coming. “This kind of television isn’t resonating in our research.… It’s not you, we think the world of you, it’s the genre … the demographic … the economy … the Internet …”
James’s mind was a jumble of all the things that made this moment not so bad: the unwritten novel, the untapped potential, the upcoming summer.
He had suddenly thought of a parlor game he and Ana had played in the early years of their marriage. “Who are you? Four things only.” James, when he read aloud his own list, was always: “Husband, journalist, hockey player, future novelist.” He thought that listing his marital status first would flatter Ana, but she saw through it. When Ana did James, she put journalist first. But now what he had written had come true: He was mostly her husband.
Ana would know what to ask. Severance package. Legal loopholes. He got into her head, tried to emulate her thinking, as ordered as a plastic binder divided by tabs. James said some adult-sounding things, and Sly gave answers. Sly even lowered his accent to something kind of Cockney for the occasion, as if they were a couple of British coal miners at a union meeting in the Thatcher years. Then, when Sly had wrung out every cliché, he leaned in, as if about to go for a hug: “I’m so sorry, mate.” He reached out a hand. James thought: I’ve never heard him use the word “mate” in my life. He noticed that Sly’s hand was shaking, and he felt bad for him. James had never had a job that required him to fire anyone.
A thought crept into his head, surprisingly, of his old favorite childhood thing, the rock tumbler—and how he would sit for hours in his bedroom watching the rocks go up and down the tiny conveyor belt, growing smoother and more similar to one another—and then he thought of his wife, of Ana’s ass, particularly, turned toward him in bed. The first thing I will do is my wife. And the ass image faded to be replaced by a face, that of the intern Emma. Emma: a name no one used to have, but now there were three Emmas working on his show.
This Emma’s face in his head was all lips, red, which of course meant baboon ass, and soon James was thinking about the fact that he was an animal and marveling at how base it was to be a man, waking up his goaty longing.
It was Emma who brought in a stack of collapsed cardboard boxes.
“At my last job, they, like, escorted this guy from the building. They didn’t even let him take his pictures or turn off his computer,” she said, standing near the open door. Her voice was shrill, pointed. It corrupted a unique silkiness in her body.
James had nodded. He took a framed picture of Ana from the desk and put it into the empty box, facedown.
“So you know, they obviously like you here,” said Emma. She was wearing all black—black T-shirt, a tight black skirt, black boots. But she looked naked to James. He could barely stand to look at her, the curve of her breast, her dark skin. What was she? Was she black? Asian? Some modern hybrid.
If she knew what he was thinking, he’d be called a racist, on top of being a sexual harasser. It was as if, by being fired, he was able to see new shapes in the picture, to really look at this woman without the echoes of workplace propriety seminars and interoffice “plain language” memos. He felt like a priest who had been handed civilian clothes.
“I don’t think I’m unliked, I just feel—” James paused. “Obsolete.” Before the word was out, he realized he had potentially bricked a wall between them. It was a word that drew attention to his age, which was about fifteen years worse than hers. But the repulsion he anticipated didn’t happen: Instead, she made a clucking, aww-ing sound, like she was tickling Finn under his chin. Then she turned and shut the door, faced him again in the sealed room. She walked toward the desk, smoothing her skirt at her hips. It was a surprising gesture, and it amplified for James the sensation that, with his firing, a range of previously unthinkable things could now occur.
“Can I say something to you?” she asked. She was quite close to him, eye to eye, with only the desk between, at the level of her crotch.
A peep escaped James’s throat. He nodded.
“I really love what you do,” she said. He tried to smell her, but his nose was useless from smoking. “I think it’s really important. Like, seriously, no one else is going to do the stuff you do. That piece you did on the Inuit film collective? I totally loved that. I think they’re making a huge mistake.” She stepped back, shook her body a little, relieved to have unburdened herself.
James wanted to lean over, curve a finger, and say: Come here. He wanted to make her climb across the desk on her knees, put his hand between her legs. He wanted to shake her for her feeble attempts at consolation. He loathed her inexperience and her boots that were too pointy for walking. Then he loathed himself, too, the never-ending stream of hateful thoughts like these. A lifetime of images of women glorious and grotesque trotted beneath his eyelids, unfulfilled, ungrabbed hands and fists never inserted, things that occupied his mind, filled him up, kept him dumb. He wished she would leave.
“Thanks for saying that,” said James. She stood there, as if waiting for something.
James doubted she was waiting for the same thing he was. Without looking at the title, he pulled a book from the shelf and handed it to her.
“You should have this.” She flipped it this way and that, like she had never touched a book before.
“Thanks.” She held it out to him: “Could you write your number in there?” James hesitated: It was the phrasing. “Could” he? Well, he could. And so he did, his cell phone number in red ink, right on the title page, like an author’s autograph under the title: Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television. It was the first time he’d cracked its spine.
James had walked home with the box of books dragging down his arms, his back moaning. He had decided to carry the box because it was the first really, truly nice afternoon of the year, the kind of day when he would usually leave early anyway. He walked with purpose, wondering if anyone in the windows of the cubic building where he’d worked for years was watching him go. Perhaps there was someone standing at a revolving door, under the propaganda-size posters of the network’s news anchors, head shaking sadly: Glad it’s not me. James was almost certain this was not happening, but still, he couldn’t bring himself to look back.
When he was far away, and standing in a grassy area near the art college, he dropped the books and smoked a cigarette. Then he called Ana on his cell phone. He left a message: “It’s just me.”
James heaved the box back into his arms, felt the sweat at his forehead. He had not gotten fat yet, but it was coming. Oh, he was old, old, old. He still couldn’t fathom that he was forty-two. He felt seventeen, always, expected to see seventeen every single time he looked in the mirror.