She didn’t say, “How was your day, dear?”, but the intent was the same and for some reason it rubbed me the wrong way. It was… too Ozzie and Harriet. I shrugged, sitting down. “Okay.” I wanted to say more. I wanted to tell her about Lisa and Banks and Stewart and Derek, about my horrible office and the horrible break room and my horrible job, but her question put me off somehow and I sat silently, staring through the kitchen doorway at the TV in the living room.
I opened up later, during dinner, telling her everything, apologizing for my earlier silence. I was not sure why I’d taken out my frustration on her — I had never done that before — but she took it in stride and was more than understanding.
“First days are always the worst,” she said, collecting our plates and carrying them to the sink.
I closed the lid of the parmesan cheese container. “I hope so.”
She returned to the table, reached underneath and gave my penis a small squeeze. “Don’t worry. I’ll cheer you up later,” she said.
We watched TV after dinner, our standard lineup of Monday sitcoms, but I told her I had to get to bed early because I had to wake up at six for work, and we walked into the bedroom at ten instead of the usual eleven.
“Do you want to take a shower with me?” she asked as I sat down on the bed.
I shook my head. “I’m not in the mood.”
“Too tired?”
I smiled. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m too tired.”
“Too tired,” was our own personal euphemism for oral sex, one that had gotten started when we’d first moved in together. She’d wanted to make love one night, but I wasn’t sure I’d be up for it, so I told her I was too tired. I’d closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew, her mouth had been open and ready for business. It had been wonderful, and ever since then the phrase “too tired” had taken on a new meaning for us.
Jane gave me a quick kiss. “I’ll be right back, then.”
I took off my clothes and crawled into bed. I was excited and already had an erection, but I really did feel tired, and I lay back and closed my eyes, listening to the sound of the water running in the bathroom, and by the time she finished her shower, I was dead asleep.
Three
Assistant Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation.
Despite the implications of my rather pretentious title, I turned out to be little more than a glorified clerk, typing memos that needed to be typed, proofreading instruction sheets that needed to be proofread, doing the jobs the Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation didn’t want to assign to a secretary and didn’t want to do himself.
That first assignment was either an aberration, or else I’d failed so miserably at it that Stewart was not willing to risk having me work on a real job again.
I was afraid to ask which.
I tried talking to Derek the first few days, saying hello when I arrived in the morning, good-bye when I left for home, occasionally attempting to start a conversation at other times throughout the day. But all of my efforts were met with the same stony silence, and I soon gave up. Technically, we were office mates, but our relationship was even more impersonal than that. We shared the same work space.
Period.
The depressing thing was that it was not just Derek. No one, it seemed, wanted to speak to me. I did not know why this was. I was new and knew no one, and in an effort to become acquainted with my coworkers, I tried nodding or waving to other employees I passed in the halls, saying “Hi,” “Good morning,” “How are you?”, but more often than not, I was met with blank looks, my greetings ignored. Every so often, someone would wave back, smile slightly, or say hello, but that was the exception rather than the rule, and pretty damn rare.
Among the computer programmers, my presence was barely tolerated. I was not required to deal with them on a regular basis, but several times those first few days I had to go over to their area and either deliver copies of memos or pick up papers to be proofread, and they made clear their disdain for me by ignoring me and treating me as though I were a slave — an emotionless, personalityless automaton there only to do my professional duty.
Every so often, I would meet one of them in the break room, and I always tried to break the ice and establish some sort of one-on-one relationship, but my attempts invariably failed. I talked twice to Stacy Kerrin, the blond woman, and I gathered from reading between the lines of what she said and what she didn’t say that my predecessor had been well-liked within the department. Apparently, he had maintained friendships with many of the programmers outside of work and had seen them on a social basis. She spoke of him fondly, as an equal.
But I was clearly a second-class citizen.
I wanted to feel superior to these people, should have been able to feel superior — they were dorks and nerds, geeks to a man — but I found myself feeling uncomfortably out of place around them and even slightly intimidated. In the real world they might be losers, but here in their world they were the norm and I was the outcast.
I took to spending most of my breaks at my desk, alone.
On Friday, Stewart had assigned me to correct the grammar on an old chapter of the department Standards Manual, and I spent at least an hour trying to get the paper aligned in the printer. I was supposed to have the assignment finished before noon, and I had to wait until all of the pages were printed before leaving, so I was late for lunch.
It was twelve-thirty by the time I xeroxed the chapter, placed a copy on Stewart’s desk, and finally went outside.
The two BMWs that had flanked my car this morning were gone, and I pulled out easily. The Buick was almost out of gas, and there was no gas station between here and the freeway, so I decided to try the other direction. I figured I’d find a Shell or a Texaco or something at one of the intersections.
Ten minutes later, I was hopelessly lost.
I’d never really driven through Irvine before. I’d driven past it on my way to San Diego, I’d passed through a corner of it on my way to the beach, but I’d never driven in it. I didn’t know the city, and as I headed south on Emery, I was amazed by its monochromatic sameness. I drove for miles without encountering a store, gas station, or shopping center of any kind. There was only row upon row of identical two-story tan houses behind a seemingly endless brown brick wall. I passed four stoplights, then turned at the fifth. None of the street names were recognizable to me, and I continued turning, right and left and right and left, hoping to find a gas station, or at least a liquor store where I could ask directions to a gas station, but there was only that brown brick wall, lining both sides of every street. It was like some labyrinthian science fiction city, and I was getting worried because my gas gauge was now definitely on E, but there was also a part of me that found this exciting. I’d never seen anything like it before. Irvine was a planned community, with businesses all in one area, residences in another, farmland in another, and apparently stores and gas stations in another. Something about that appealed to me, and though I was afraid of running out of gas, I also felt strangely comfortable here. The mazelike uniformity of the streets and the buildings fascinated me, and seemed to me somehow wondrous.
Finally I did find an Arco, deceptively disguised in an unobtrusive corner building the same brown brick as the wall, and I got my gas and asked the attendant how to get back to Emery. The directions were surprisingly easy — I hadn’t gone as far afield as I thought — and I thanked him, and drove off.