Forget about all that, I told myself. Focus on the meeting. I tried to read my handout, but the memory of what had happened with my ex was bubbling up now. Screw the meeting. The truth was, I wouldn’t be in this job if I had a choice. What I really wanted was to marry him, fill our place with meticulously selected antique-style furniture, and do housework for him all day long. I was confident in my ability to cook, clean, and launder to perfection. So why did you have to be walking down that street, of all streets, arm in arm with her? All you had to do was do it discreetly so I didn’t find out. Or at least have the decency to come clean when I confronted you, instead of ghosting me! Was that how little I was worth? Not even worth dumping? Was I an old hag? I was so thankful that I’d managed to hold back from crying out when I first spotted the bulge in the curtain. If I had let out some kind of shriek, I probably would have had to fall to my knees out of sheer humiliation.
The third person finished presenting. I was beyond being able to come up with any appropriate feedback. I said, “Okay, time to discuss as a group.”
My team seemed to be taken aback by my unexpected suggestion. “Right now? Don’t you think we should hear all the proposals first?” they asked.
I cut them off, saying, “No, this’ll do.”
They could hardly keep complaining after that, so they all gathered around the whiteboard and started brainstorming. I was the only one who stayed seated, glaring directly at the curtain.
The main question is, Why on earth are your curves quite so suggestive? I lost my confidence there for a minute, but I refuse to accept for another instant that anything about you could be a figment of my imagination. It can’t just be me—how many people all around the world have you bamboozled, all bloused out like this? Is there someone in there? Or isn’t there? Make up your mind! I’ve wasted too much of my life waiting around for ambivalent beings like you. Ghosters. Men who let you down easy. You must think you’re really something. Calling yourself a phenomenon. What’s the big deal about three points looking like a face? Maybe this makes me sound over the hill. A girl as young as the one he was cheating on me with wouldn’t give you a second thought. But I can’t just forgive you, not when you’re puffed up so suggestively. You have no idea what kind of effect you have on people around you. Do you understand the heartbreak of realizing you’ve lost the ability to respond to things you’ve seen with your very own eyes with genuine surprise? How it feels when rationality, and hard-won experience, and your career all suddenly seem pointless? How far I’ve strayed from the carefree, innocent child I was. All that youth, and the potential that I must have once had, wasted. When I look at you, I’m confronted by the fact that I’ve turned into a totally uninteresting person. Don’t you dare make me remember who I used to be.
“You’ve got to be joking. A roomful of grown men put their heads together and this was all you could come up with? I can’t believe you’re actually getting paid for this shit.”
Maybe it’s like this. Sad people like me are on the rise because of numbskulls like you who blow up like balloons without a single thought for the consequences. You get all our hopes up. We think, This time, this time, I’ll find someone for sure. But because you’re never there, we have to learn to be pragmatic, explain things away rationally. Sure, there might be other things that teach us to do this, but the first betrayal each of us goes through is at the hands of a bulge in a curtain. At least it was that way for me. You were the very first to let me down. You imprinted me with some kind of habit for being betrayed. Men keep lying to me and abandoning me. No matter how devoted I am to them. You’re where it all starts.
“Put down your markers this instant and eat some chocolate. Get your blood sugar up. Eat until you come up with some ideas.”
Why don’t you show yourself already? You can’t possibly think people are going to keep looking for you forever? I was sick and tired of it all. I wanted to get to a world where there was only yes or no. Ones and zeros.
“Eat, then write. Squeeze some ideas out of your sorry brains. Get on it!”
When I looked again, the bulge in the curtain—unless it was my imagination?—had shrunk a little. Wait. You’re leaving? Without a word? Just because I told you how I really felt? That’s exactly what I mean when I say you’re unfair. Wait a second. I didn’t mean it. Don’t go. I don’t have the strength to make it through this life on my own. Why do you all try to leave me? You’re not even there anyway, are you? Of course you aren’t. In which case the least you can do before you go is listen to the story of my first time. I was in third grade when I first found you all swollen up. Upstairs, in my room. Just after lunchtime, during summer vacation. Both my parents were out. I was rearranging posters on the wall, trying out one unsatisfactory layout after another. At first I thought you were a trick of the light. When I came closer timidly and touched you, it even seemed like you got a little bigger, right there in front of my eyes. See, it’s starting to come back to you, isn’t it? Right away, I ran out to the garden and looked up to the second floor to check on you through the window. But there was no one inside. I even climbed out onto the roof, but it made no difference—I still couldn’t see anyone.
I was scared at first, but I also sensed that you were a presence that would protect me, so I let you stay. You lived with me for twenty days. I got to know you enough to wish you sweet dreams every night, and since I couldn’t use my curtains, I set up a cardboard box to keep the sunrise from disturbing us. Huh, I guess I was already desperate to make people stay, even back then.
Our parting came suddenly. One day, I went into my room to find the edge of the curtain, which I’d carefully tied back, undone, and the curtains firmly closed. It was my own fault, for keeping our relationship a secret from my mother. I rushed to open them, in tears, thinking you’d left me without even a word. We’d spent twenty days together, but there was no one there. Just the lace curtain puddled in the corner, like a shell you’d discarded. I called out your name. That’s right. I’d given you a name.
Never mind. It’s too painful remembering the way I used to be. Back then I never bothered with boring explanations. My mind was open to anything. I wasn’t worried about being disrespected by my team, or of people thinking I was a crazy woman. I didn’t let myself be bound by anything as common as common sense.
I looked at the whiteboard and saw the colorful ideas that my men had scrawled onto it, all overlapping each other. There was no way I could decipher who had written what. Ugh. Were they all idiots? Feeling that I’d just remembered something precious, I drew three black dots on the back of my handout, and chuckled.
“Hey, come look at this. It looks like a face, even though all I did was go dot, dot, dot!”
My team leaned in and peered at the sheet.
“Is everything okay, boss?”
“Are you feeling all right?”
I got out of my chair, gave them a cute little wave when I reached the door, and put the conference room behind me. I skipped down the long tiled walkway we complained about having to walk down in heels to go buy lunch, and broke into a sprint, rounding a corner shouting, “Ch-ch-chaaaaaaaaarge!” I looked over my shoulder and there, on the face of a high-rise, I saw three yellow window-cleaning platforms suspended in midair. When I realized they were positioned precisely like those three points I’d drawn earlier, I nearly peed myself. I knew that someone—someone very big—had found me. It’s about time you finally turned up, I said to him as the tears rolled down my face.