5

THE UNBELIEVABLE REPORT — ON NOT KNOWING SOMETHING — CHAIRS — FURTHER DEBATE — BENNY’S OPTIONS — THINKING ABOUT BRIZZ — THE U-STOR-IT — THE YOPANWOO INDIANS —THE TRIPLE MEETING — CHANGES TO THE PROJECT — JIM ALWAYS THE LAST TO KNOW — TOM’S MOTHER DIES — SCREWY ASSIGNMENT — UNCLE MAX — JIM TAPPED — YOP’S REQUEST — WE STAND UP TO KAREN

SOMEONE PASSED AROUND a link once to a news article posted on a reputable website that we all read and talked about for days. A man working at an office much like ours had a heart attack at his desk, and for the rest of the day people passing by his workstation failed to notice. That wasn’t the newsworthy bit — there are, what, a hundred and fifty million of us in the workplace? It was bound to happen to somebody. What we couldn’t wrap our heads around, what made this man’s commonplace death national news, was the unlikely information provided in the first sentence of the dispatch: “A man working in an Arlington, Virginia, insurance firm died of a heart attack at his desk recently and wasn’t discovered until four days later, when coworkers complained of a bad-fruit smell.”

The article went on to explain that Friday had passed, and then the weekend, and no one had discovered this man fallen in his cubicle. Not a coworker, not a building guy, not someone collecting the trash. Then we were supposed to believe that Monday came around, Monday with its meetings and returned phone calls, its resumption of routine and reinstatement of duty, Monday came and went, and they didn’t find him then, either. It wasn’t until Tuesday, Tuesday afternoon, when they all went in search of a rotten banana, that they saw one of their own dead on the floor by his desk, obscured by his chair. We kept asking ourselves how could that be possible? Surely someone had to come by with a request for a meeting. Someone had to come by to inquire why a meeting was missed. But no — this poor jerk was the subject of not so much as a morning greeting from one of his cube neighbors. We didn’t know how that could happen.

We hated not knowing something. We hated not knowing who was next to walk Spanish down the hall. How would our bills get paid? And where would we find new work? We knew the power of the credit card companies and the collection agencies and the consequences of bankruptcy. Those institutions were without appeal. They put your name into a system, and from that point forward vital parts of the American dream were foreclosed upon. A backyard swimming pool. A long weekend in Vegas. A low-end BMW. These were not Jeffersonian ideals, perhaps, on par with life and liberty, but at this advanced stage, with the West won and the Cold War over, they, too, seemed among our inalienable rights. This was just before the fall of the dollar, before the stormy debate about corporate outsourcing, and the specter of a juggernaut of Chinese and Indian youths overtaking our advantages in broadband.

Marcia hated not knowing what might come of being caught with Tom Mota’s chair, with its serial numbers that would not match up with the office coordinator’s master list. So she swapped Tom’s chair for Ernie’s and left Tom’s in Tom’s old office. Even so, she was still scared that the office coordinator would look for Ernie’s chair in Ernie’s old office — from which Chris Yop had taken it, swapping it with his own lesser chair when Ernie retired — and discover not Ernie’s serial numbers but Chris Yop’s, and upon that discovery, go in search of Ernie’s chair, which Marcia was presently sitting on. Sooner or later, Marcia feared, the office coordinator was bound to find out what she had done. So she felt the need to get her original chair back from Karen Woo, who had received it some months prior when Marcia took Reiser’s chair when Reiser offered it to her after taking Sean Smith’s chair after Sean got canned. She went to Karen to ask for her chair back, but Karen didn’t want to part with her chair, which she claimed wasn’t the one Marcia had given her at all, but was Bob Yagley’s chair, which she had swapped with Marcia’s late one night after gentle, soft-spoken Bob was let go. Bob’s old office was currently occupied by a woman named Dana Rettig who had made the leap from cubicle to office less by virtue of merit than by management’s perception that so many vacated offices looked bad to potential visitors. When Dana made that leap, she brought along her own chair, which had once belonged to someone in Account Management and was a better chair than Bob’s, which was really Marcia’s. “What was wrong with my chair?” Marcia asked her. Dana replied that nothing was wrong with it per se; she had just gotten attached to the Account Management person’s chair. “So where is my chair, then?” asked Marcia. Dana told her it was probably in the same place she left it, Dana’s old cubicle, but when she and Marcia walked down to that particular workstation, they found some production person fresh out of college — he looked all of fifteen — where Dana used to sit, who told them that somebody a few months back had passed down the hall only to return, pull rank, and take his chair, which was replaced by the cheap plastic thing he had been sitting on ever since. All attempts to get the fresh-faced peon to pony up a little information on who had strong-armed him out of his chair were for naught until Marcia asked him point-blank how he expected to get out of production hell and make it to Assistant Art Director if he couldn’t even sketch a face on a legal pad. So the production kid made a rough sketch from memory of the man who took his chair, and when he was through filling in the hair and putting the final touches on the eyes, Marcia and Dana examined it and determined it was a dead ringer for Chris Yop. Was it possible that Yop had grown bored with Ernie Kessler’s chair, walked past a chair he liked better and bullied it out from under a production nobody, and walked away with Marcia’s chair, which he sat on until the office coordinator came around giving him heat and he found himself without any alternative but to take it down to Tom’s office and pretend it was Tom’s, so that when Marcia went in to swap Tom’s real chair with Ernie Kessler’s, it wasn’t Ernie’s chair at all but Marcia’s original one that she took back with her? Did Marcia have her own chair again? “Are you absolutely sure that this is the guy who took your chair?” she asked the production peon. The production peon said no, he wasn’t sure of that at all. Marcia had no idea whose chair she had. It might have been hers, it might have been Ernie Kessler’s, or it might have been the chair of some indeterminate third party. The only person who knew for certain was the office coordinator, who owned the master list. Marcia returned to her office beset by the high anxiety typical of the time.

Larry Novotny hated not knowing if Amber Ludwig could be convinced that it was in both of their best interests for her to have the abortion, because he hated not knowing what his wife might do to him if the affair came to light, while Amber hated not knowing what God would do to her if she were to go through with it. Amber was a Catholic who hated not knowing a lot of the mysterious ways in which God worked. Was it possible, for instance, that God could send Tom Mota back into the office with all of God’s wrath to rectify the sins Amber had committed there on desks we hoped to god were not ours?

We, too, hated not knowing the specifics of Tom’s intentions to change history. Most of us thought Tom Mota was not a psychopath, and that if he had wanted to return he would have done it a day or two after being let go. He had had time to cool off now and collect his wits. But some of us remembered the way he treated Marilynn Garbedian in the hospital the day her husband was admitted for a serious illness, remembered how he smirked in his trench coat and stared at her neck, as if he were about to land a blow in that delicate place, and couldn’t help thinking that that was perfectly psychopathic behavior. But to others that was just good old-fashioned misogyny. Tom was just confusing Marilynn Garbedian for Barb Mota, his ex-wife, and was taking out on Marilynn what he wanted to take out on Barb. But if that were the case, some of us argued, who was he going to take it out on next? Tom subscribed to Guns and Ammo. He had a sizable collection of firearms in his possession. Most of those guns, however, were collectors’ items and probably couldn’t even fire anymore. Well, some of us thought, what’s stopping Tom from going out and buying new guns? How easy it was to visit a gun show and three days later find yourself in possession of the assault weapons ideal for a situation like the one we were envisioning. We had to remind ourselves that because of Barb’s restraining order, he’d probably have to wait more like ninety days. Besides, he was on record saying those items were unsportsmanlike. “Automatic rifles, man — where’s the sport in that?” he used to say. That was little relief to some. It would be unsportsmanlike to kill us with anything more than old-fashioned handguns, therefore Tom won’t kill us? That was not a winning argument. Tom could have easily had a change of heart with respect to those heavier items, owing to the more recent setbacks of his failed life, and after some less-than-truthful data entry, using a shady Internet dealer, he might be taking possession of those unsportsmanlike items from a UPS man even as our debate raged. Some of us said that was absurd. Tom was not coming back. Tom was trying to move on. But others pointed out that we had had the very same conviction that Lynn Mason wouldn’t show up for work on the day she was scheduled for surgery, and look how that turned out.

We hated not knowing what Lynn Mason was doing showing up for work on the day she was scheduled for surgery.

JIM JACKERS SPENT his lunch hour in the waiting room of the oncology ward at Rush-Presbyterian surrounded by some very sick people. Present also were a number of robust family members, either staring off into the distance with their arms folded, or retrieving water for their loved ones. Jim waited and waited for the doctor with whom his father had put him in touch. Jim’s father sold medical equipment, and when Jim told him of his recent project, he contacted an oncologist on his son’s behalf and told Jim the doctor was willing to speak with him. Jim wanted to talk to the doctor in the hopes of gaining the insight necessary to arrive at the winning concept for the fund-raiser, but at that particular hour the doctor proved too busy to spare any time, so Jim thanked the nurse and returned to the office.

He was taking the elevator up to sixty, where his cubicle was located, when at fifty-nine the elevator came to a stop and Lynn Mason got on. They greeted each other and talked briefly about Jim’s shirt, which Lynn said she liked. Jim turned around and showed her his favorite feature, the hula dancer stitched on back. The dress code of any creative department will always be casual; they may reserve the right to take our jobs away, but never our Hawaiian shirts, our jean jackets, our flip-flops. Lynn said she liked the hula dancer’s skirt, which Jim could make shimmy back and forth by moving his shoulders up and down. He turned around once again and demonstrated.

“I used to be a hula girl,” said Lynn. “In college.”

Jim turned back to her. “Serious?” he said.

Lynn smiled at him and shook her head. “Kidding.”

“Oh.” Jim smiled. “I thought you were serious.”

“From time to time I do kid, Jim.”

The elevator bell rang and Jim stepped off. He walked down the hall to his cubicle, thinking how stupid it was to ask Lynn if she had really been a hula girl.

When he got back to his desk, he began to stress out about his lack of insight into the fund-raiser ads. He was disappointed he hadn’t been able to speak to the oncologist, whom he hoped would give him inspiration. He sat down but didn’t know where to start. He checked his e-mail, he got up and ate a stale cookie from a communal plate in the kitchen. He came back and there it was, the same ogle-eyed computer screen. There was a quotation pinned to Jim’s cube wall that read, “The Blank Page Fears Me.” Everyone knew it had been mounted up there out of insecurity and self-doubt, and that there was nothing more true than that statement’s opposite. But whenever Jim found himself in the position he was currently in, staring helplessly at the blank page with a deadline and a complete lack of inspiration, he looked up and read that quotation and took comfort. The blank page fears me, he thought. Then he thought, What was Lynn Mason doing in the elevator with me on the day she was scheduled for surgery?

He went down to Benny Shassburger’s office. Benny was the first guy Jim went to when he had something. We all had someone like that, someone we took our best stuff to, who then typically took that information somewhere else. Benny was on the phone. Jim went in and sat down and started listening to Benny’s end of the conversation. Benny was saying something about renegotiated prices — he was trying to get the person on the other end to come down a little. He said over and over again he couldn’t afford it. Jim wondered momentarily what that was all about, but then he returned to the fact that he had just shared the elevator with Lynn Mason on the day she was scheduled — and it wasn’t just surgery, was it? A mastectomy, that wasn’t like an outpatient sort of thing, thought Jim, where you go in in the morning and they patch you up and you’re back at work by one. An operation like that takes days to recover from. He didn’t know much about breast cancer but he knew that much. He wanted Benny off the phone. We accumulated days and days in other people’s offices, waiting for them to get off the phone.

“That was the U-Stor-It,” said Benny once he was off. “They’re jacking up my fees.”

“Oh, man,” said Jim. “To what?”

Jim’s red eyes bugged out when Benny told him the price. “Steep, huh?” said Benny. “But I don’t know what else to do, man. I gotta keep it somewhere.”

When we found out Benny had received a totem pole from Old Brizz, we told him he had a few easy options. Leave it for the future owners of Brizz’s house to deal with — that would probably be the easiest. Or he could find a collector and they’d probably come and take it away for free. Chris Yop suggested he leave it on the corner of Clark and Addison and watch until one of the homeless carried it away in a shopping cart. Karen Woo said he should hire a stump-grinding company to go over to Brizz’s and turn that totem pole into multicolored wood chips. Tom Mota liked the idea of sawing it into pieces and giving each one of us a head to decorate our offices with in remembrance of Brizz.

“Are you guys not in the least curious why Brizz had it in his backyard to begin with?” Benny asked.

Sure we were curious. But there was probably a simple explanation for it. Brizz himself had inherited the thing from those who sold him the house, or something along those lines.

“So why did he leave it to me in his will,” asked Benny, “if he just found it in his backyard when he bought the place? Why deliberately leave it to me?”

One night we had drinks after work at this nearby underground sports bar. We brought together several checkerboard-cloth tables and talked around pitchers of beer in various stages of consumption. We were getting buzzed on that airless bunker’s dank fumes more powerfully than on the watered-down swill they served, when Karen Woo asked if we knew what Benny was doing with his totem pole. We ran through Benny’s options for her. “No,” she insisted, “no, that’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if you know what he’s actually doing with it.”

We did not.

“He’s visiting it,” she said.

We asked her what she meant by that.

“He’s going down to Brizz’s,” she said, “and spending time with it.”

There were several plausible answers for why Benny would do a thing like that. It was a novelty item, and Benny got a kick out of owning a novelty item. Or he was measuring it for removal. Or he was meeting with someone to appraise it. Maybe it was worth some money.

“No, you guys don’t understand,” Karen said, “this isn’t a onetime deal. He’s been down there . . . Jim,” she said, just as Jim returned to his seat after tending to some business with Mr. B. “Tell them how many times Benny’s been down there to see that totem pole.”

“I don’t know,” said Jim, shrugging his shoulders.

“You do too know, Jim — how many times?” Jim was reluctant to give up his friend. “Ten times!” cried Karen. “In a month! Isn’t that right, Jim?”

We asked Jim what Benny was doing down there.

“He’s just looking at it,” said Jim. “It’s something to look at. I got goosebumps the first time I saw it.”

“The Art Institute has things in it that’ll give you goosebumps, too,” Karen replied. “Not many people go there ten times a month, Jim.”

The following day we asked Benny if he was really going down to Brizz’s to visit the totem pole. If so, we asked, why? We said Jim Jackers mentioned he’d been down there ten times in the past month. Was that true?

“I don’t know, I don’t count,” Benny said. “What’s with the third degree?”

We asked if he was going down there to meet with someone to appraise it because maybe it was worth money. Or if he was measuring it for its eventual removal. Or if he got a kick out of owning a novelty item.

“What does it matter?” he replied. “I go down there. What’s the big deal?”

We didn’t understand, that was the big deal. Because soon we found out that he wasn’t just going down there. He was leaving direct from work. In other words, he was driving down there during rush hour. We asked him why he would brave traffic just to look at a totem pole. He mumbled something evasive and wouldn’t commit to an answer. Had he given any more thought, we asked him, to what he was going to do with it when Bizarro Brizz put Old Brizz’s house on the market? The sensible thing was to leave it for the future owners. Benny replied he didn’t think he would do that. In that case, we wondered, what were his plans for it? Somebody mentioned there might be some real Indians out there who’d like to have their totem pole back, who would know what to do with it better than he would. Benny’s response?

“Brizz gave that totem pole to me,” he said. “He didn’t give it to a real Indian.”

That was the stupidest thing we ever heard. A month earlier, there had been no totem pole. The idea of owning a totem pole would have probably seemed totally absurd to Benny. Then Brizz leaves him a totem pole, and he’s braving traffic to go visit the thing. We just wanted to know why.

“You guys need to get a life,” he said.

We asked a favor of Dan Wisdom. He lived in Brizz’s neighborhood. We asked Dan to take a few hours off one night from his fish paintings, drive by Old Brizz’s, and find out what Benny was doing — you know, how he spent his time.

“He told us how he spends his time,” said Dan. “He looks at the thing.”

Yes, but it had to be more complicated than that. Get out of the car, we told Dan, and look at it with him, and then ask him what’s going through his head.

“Who knows what’s going through his head?” said Dan. “What’s going through his head is his own business. Besides,” he added, “I don’t really live in Brizz’s neighborhood. I do live on the South Side, but the South Side, you know, it’s a big place.”

We told Marcia Dwyer that Benny had had a crush on her for a long time. Just ask to go down there with him, we urged her. Tell him you want to see it. He would be thrilled to have you join him. Then ask him why he’s become so obsessed with the thing.

“Okay, first of all,” Marcia said, “you guys are losers. And second of all, I don’t really care what he’s doing down there. Maybe he’s finding out something about himself. Maybe — and I know, this sounds crazy to you guys — but maybe he’s looking for something. A signal from Brizz. Some sort of sign.”

We had forgotten that Marcia was into Buddhism in a big, sloppy way — reincarnation, the laws of karma. Religious fancies she probably didn’t know the first authentic thing about.

“And third,” she said, “Benny Shassburger has a crush on me?”

We’re not sure what you may or may not know, we said one day when, happily, we stumbled upon Benny’s father, waiting for Benny in the main lobby. Some of us recognized him from the picture in Benny’s office, an imposing man with beard and skullcap. But about a month ago, we said to him, his son was given an odd little bequest by a guy who used to work here. Did he know what we were referring to?

“The totem pole?” his father asked.

Yes, the totem pole. And did he also know that during the past six weeks, Benny had gone to the guy’s house a dozen or more times? After work, when he had to sit in traffic, he went all the way down to 115th Street to look at the totem pole. We asked him if he was aware of that.

“I knew he went down there.” His father nodded. “I didn’t know it was that many times, but I knew he went down there, sure. I’ve been down there with him.”

He had been down there with him?

“Sure.”

And what did the two of them do while down there?

“We looked at it,” said Benny’s father.

That was it? All the two of them did was look at it?

“Well, then we put on our headdresses and prayed for corn. Is that what you’re looking for?”

No doubt we had the right man. That was a response that would have come from Benny Shassburger’s own mouth in the days before he clammed up and refused to say a word about why the totem pole had such a hold on him and drove us crazy with his secrecy. We asked Benny’s father if he was at all curious about why someone Jewish like Benny would become obsessed with a pagan artifact like a totem pole.

“If you’re asking me, does my son pray to it,” his father replied, with a change in tone, “I don’t think he prays to it. I just think he likes it.”

Yes, we said to Benny the next day, we had a conversation with his father. No, we never asked him if Benny prayed to it. We didn’t mean to offend anybody. We just want to know, we said to Benny, honestly, we just want to know why you go down there to look at the totem pole so often, and what you’re thinking about when you’re down there.

“I go down there,” he replied simply, “to think about Brizz.”

So it was funny. While Benny was thinking about Brizz, we were thinking about Benny. What could Benny be doing down there in Brizz’s backyard, what is he thinking about standing in front of the totem pole — that’s what we were wondering. And Benny, he was wondering — well, what, exactly? What was there to think about with respect to Brizz? His cigarettes, his sweater vest, his conversation with the building guy, and all the unmemorable days he spent in our company. That takes about ten seconds. Where do you go after that? What more was there to think about?

“Look,” said Benny, reaching the limits of his patience. “I didn’t purchase the thing. I didn’t put it in my backyard. I’m just visiting it. What would you have done to Brizz if you’d found out he had a totem pole in his backyard, and when you asked him why, he refused to tell you?”

Hound him, threaten him, torture him, kill him. Whatever it took.

But the point wasn’t Brizz. We weren’t going to get any answers from Brizz. Brizz was gone. Benny, on the other hand, was still alive. Benny could tell us what we wanted to know.

“I’ll never tell you,” he said. “It’s a secret I share with Brizz and you scumbags can’t know about it.”

“Has Benny gone insane?” Karen asked Jim.

Inexplicably Benny gave us all ten dollars. He went from office to office, cube to cube, handing out ten-dollar bills. What’s this for? we asked him.

“A refund,” he said. “I don’t want your blood money.”

Turns out he was returning the ten bucks he’d won from each of us when he put Brizz on his Celebrity Death Watch.

“He’s gone insane,” said Jim.

Bizarro Brizz finally put Brizz’s house on the market, and now the situation, we thought, had to change. There would be no backyard for Benny to visit anymore. There was no — what would you call it? — memorial site, or whatever, to spend time at, and to reflect upon the recently departed, and all the mysteries Brizz left behind, or whatever else Benny was chewing on down there. Naturally we thought he would give it up. He would either leave it for the future owners, or give it away, or have it appraised, or hire a stump-grinding company to dispose of it. Instead, he hired a moving company to transfer it out of the backyard into the largest unit available at the U-Stor-It facility at North and Clybourn, where he kept it in bubble wrap horizontally upon the cement floor, because it was too big to fit inside his apartment.

When we heard Benny was not getting rid of the totem pole but had chosen to keep it, even going so far as to store it at great personal expense, we kept asking him why. Why, Benny? Why? Benny, why? When he continued to refuse to tell us — or perhaps he just found himself unable to explain his reasons even to himself — we let the full force of our dissatisfaction be known. We did not like not knowing something. We could not abide being left in the dark. And we thought it was the height of hypocrisy for Benny, who was always telling everyone about everyone else, to try and keep a secret from us. So we took up squawking at him. We did mockeries of ceremonial dances in his doorway. The worst thing we did was take scissors to this old toupee Chris Yop had in his basement, and put the mangled thing on Benny’s desk, which Karen Woo doused with a bottle of fake blood she kept in her office, so that what lay on the desk looked like a fresh scalping. Someone suggested we find a yarmulke to put on top, but we all sort of agreed that to marry those two atrocities together would be stepping over a line.

In our defense, it was Chris Yop and Karen Woo’s idea, the fake scalping, and they were really the ones who went in and executed it. Hank Neary said it best when he said, “Yeah, that was really just a Yop and Woo production.” We picked up on that, and afterward, it became the name of the tribe Benny belonged to, the Yopanwoo tribe. We said, Hey, Benny, how do you and the Yopanwoo stay warm in the winter? Have you and the Yopanwoo received restitution from the U.S. government, Benny? Your fellow tribesmen, Benny, do they consume firewater to excess? Benny just smiled at these jibes and nodded his head amiably and returned to his desk, and without a word of explanation, continued to store Brizz’s totem pole for three hundred and nineteen dollars a month.

On the afternoon Lynn Mason should have been recovering from surgery, Benny discovered they were raising the price of his storage unit by thirty bucks. That in and of itself was not outrageous, but compounded with the rest, he was shelling out a preposterous monthly sum.

“It’s time I get rid of it,” he said to Jim. “It’s not doing anything except sitting in there.”

Jim was chomping at the bit to tell Benny his news of riding the elevator with Lynn Mason when she should have been at the hospital. But he was surprised to hear that Benny was thinking of giving up the totem pole.

“You’ve always said that Brizz gave that totem pole to you for a reason,” he said. “Now you’re talking about giving it up?”

“What choice do I have?” Benny replied. “I can’t spend three hundred and fifty bucks a month on a totem pole. That’s insane.”

“It wasn’t insane at three-nineteen?”

“No, it was insane then, too,” said Benny. “By the way, you want to know how much it’s worth? I had an appraiser look at it. On the antiques market, this guy tells me, it could sell for as much as sixty thousand dollars.”

Jim’s jaw dropped. He let out a few choked grunts of disbelief.

“Oh, and here’s another thing,” said Benny. “Lynn Mason’s in the office today.”

Jim’s expression turned from incredulity over the worth of the totem pole to disappointment at hearing from Benny the very news he had been waiting patiently to reveal himself.

“Aw, man!” he cried. “I wanted to tell you that!”

Joe Pope suddenly appeared in Benny’s doorway carrying his leather day planner.

“Guys,” he said, “we’re meeting down at the couches in ten minutes.”

A TRIPLE MEETING was bad news. Especially if it came so quickly on the heels of a double meeting. The announcement of a triple meeting could only mean the project had been canceled or postponed, or changed. We had ten minutes to ruminate on which was the worst fate. If canceled or postponed, our only project went away, and with it, all hope of looking busy. Looking busy was essential to our feeling vital to the agency, to mention nothing of being perceived as such by the partners, who would conclude by our labors that it was impossible to lay us off. (No need to look too closely here at the underlying fact that our sole project was pro bono, and so something we weren’t getting paid for.) If the project was changed, the work we had put in so far on our concepts would all be for naught. That was always a pain in the ass. As much as we loved a double meeting, we always approached a triple meeting with trepidation and discomfort.

And for good reason this time. After detours to the restroom, to the coffee bar for a pick-me-up, to the cafeteria for a can of pop, we shuffled down to the couches to hear the bad news. We were no longer developing ads for a fund-raiser.

Joe sat on a sofa and tried to explain. “Okay, here’s the thing,” he said. “It’s not really an ad for anything anymore.” He immediately retracted that and said of course it was an ad for something. Or rather it was an ad for someone. But no, in the traditional sense of an ad, it wasn’t really an ad. Of course it was an ad, but more in the spirit of a public service announcement.

“I’m not doing a very good job of explaining this,” he said. “Let me start over. What the client wants from us now is an ad specifically targeted to the person diagnosed with breast cancer. We’re no longer reaching out to the potential donor with a request for money. We’re talking directly to the sick person. And our objective,” he said, “is to make them laugh.”

“Make them laugh?” said Benny. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” said Jim, from the floor.

“You come up with an ad,” said Joe, “that makes the cancer patient laugh. It’s that simple.”

“What are we selling?”

“We’re not selling anything.”

“So what’s the point?”

“Think of it — okay,” he said, sitting forward and putting his elbows on his knees. “Think of it as an awareness campaign, okay? Only you’re not making the target audience aware of anything, you’re just making them laugh.” When that still made little sense, he added, “Okay, if we’re selling something, we’re selling comfort and hope to the cancer patient through the power of laughter. How’s that?”

“That’s an unusual product,” Genevieve remarked.

“It is an unusual product,” he agreed. “We have no product. We have no features or benefits, we have no call-to-action, we have no competition in the marketplace. We also have no guidelines on design, format, color, type styles, images, or copy.”

“What do we have?” she asked.

“We have a target audience — women suffering from breast cancer — and an objective — to make them laugh.”

“Why did the project change?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Lynn just forwarded me the e-mail with the changes and asked me to pass them on to you.”

“Who’s paying for the ad now that it’s no longer for a fund-raiser?” asked Dan Wisdom.

“Good question. Same people, I think. The Alliance Against Breast Cancer.”

“Joe,” said Karen, “how come I can’t find any presence for this ‘Alliance Against Breast Cancer’ on the Internet?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Can’t you?”

Karen shook her head. “There are charities, institutes, research centers, and about a thousand alliances, but none with the name ‘Alliance Against Breast Cancer.’”

Joe suggested that Alliance Against Breast Cancer might be some kind of umbrella group of regional organizations, each of which had their own website.

“So what are we supposed to do now with the fund-raiser concepts that we already have?”

“Shelve them.”

“Well, that blows,” said Karen.

“It’s not like we had anything good anyway,” said Larry.

“We did, too, Larry. We had ‘Loved Ones,’ okay? Joe, when did this change occur?”

“Like I said, Lynn just forwarded me the e-mail.”

“I thought Lynn was off today.”

“Change of plans, I guess.”

“So everybody knows that Lynn’s in today?” said Jim, looking around at us. “How come I was the last to know?”

“Because you’re an idiot,” said Marcia.

“Okay, guys,” said Joe. “Let’s get to work.”

HEADING BACK FROM the couches, knowing we had to toss out our ad concepts for the fund-raiser and start over again in the disagreeable hours of the afternoon — which tended to stretch on and on — we felt a little fatigued. All that work for nothing. And if we happened to cast back, in search of edification, to days past and jobs completed — oh, what a bad idea, for what had all that amounted to? And anticipating future work just made the present moment even more miserable. There was so much unpleasantness in the workaday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough to make those of us still full from lunch want to lie down in the hallway and force anyone dumb enough to remain committed to walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their PowerBars and bags of microwave popcorn would surely end up within an arm’s length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we could make little toys out of runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort.

But enough daydreaming. Our desks were waiting, we had work to do. And work was everything. We liked to think it was family, it was God, it was following football on Sundays, it was shopping with the girls or a strong drink on Saturday night, that it was love, that it was sex, that it was keeping our eye on retirement. But at two in the afternoon with bills to pay and layoffs hovering over us, it was all about the work.

YET SOMETHING HAPPENED that afternoon that made it hard to concentrate. Benny Shassburger called Joe into his office to inform him he had received an e-mail from Tom Mota. The subject line read, “Jim tells me you’re doing some pro bono cancer ad.”

“So he’s been in touch with Jim, too?” asked Joe, taking a seat across the desk.

“Apparently. Like I said, I only got this a few minutes ago.”

“Read it to me.”

Benny turned to his computer. “It’s kinda long.”

“That’s okay. Read it.”

“Okay. He starts off, ‘So Jim tells me you’re doing some pro bono cancer ad over there. YEEE-HOOO! I’m free!!! But as you aren’t, for what it’s worth, I thought I’d tell you the story of my mother’s cancer, and you can use it if you want. My mother was one mean bitch. When she wasn’t being a mean bitch, she was being deaf and mute. And when she wasn’t being deaf and mute, she was crying in the bathtub. And when she wasn’t crying in the bathtub, she was sharing a bottle with Mr. Hughes. Let me tell you, that there was one slimy glass-eyed fuck, Mr. Hughes. Anyway, those are my four memories of my mom. She looked like Rosie the Riveter — you know the woman I’m talking about, who wears the bandana and says “We Can Do It!”? It was the unsmiling face they shared. But that’s where the similarity stopped because my mom couldn’t do anything and she had Xs over her eyes like in a cartoon of someone dead. I never bought her a Mother’s Day card but I’m sure they never wrote one for her either. Can you imagine? “Happy Depressive’s Day, Ma. Love, Tommy.” But then she started to die. None of us wanted a THING to do with her. I got one brother on a ranch in Omaha, he didn’t want her. I got another brother in Newport Beach in Orange County, California — they only want their red convertibles and their yachts out that way, rich fucks. Anyway, my sister, she was doing my mom one better in the Tenderloin. That’s a little piece of paradise full of whores and drunks in San Francisco. No way SHE could have taken the old lady in. (My sister’s a whole different story. I’ll tell you about her sometime.) So anyway, my mom was still in the same apartment we grew up in — imagine living your whole goddamn life in the same two rooms in Romeoville. Me being about six miles from there, I had to be the one to go pick her up and bring her over to the house. BUT NOT THOSE FUCKING CATS! NO WAY. NO CATS. Barb couldn’t believe that my mom was on her deathbed and I didn’t want a thing to do with her. But that’s because she never knew the woman when she was throwing dishes at the wall in her goddamn robe. The point I’m trying to make here is that it was Barb who convinced me to go over there and get her, and man, just between you and me, Benny, I REALLY, REALLY fucked things up, to be honest with you. With Barb, I mean. Don’t you think you and I should get together and have a beer? I miss her and I’d like to talk about it. Anyway, we put my mom up in the attic until she died and eventually she did die and it was even painful to watch. She absolutely refused to go to the hospital and then she refused to sit up for the home nurse we hired. But then, I couldn’t believe THIS. She asked for a priest. I had no idea she had a religious bone in her body. So we brought in a priest and if I could only tell you what it was like to watch my mom hold a priest’s hand. She was pretty out of it by then, without her dentures and looking like HELL. I felt sorry for whatever Higher Power was about to receive her but I also have to admit that I felt some envy for how God or whatever could convince her to hold the hand of His servant when I couldn’t even recall the last time she’d held MY hand, if ever. And that’s because she was a mean bitch, but also because her father was a drunk and an abusive son-of-a-bitch and all of THAT daytime talk-show psychology. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself, because before she asked for the priest, between the time I picked her up in Romeoville (WITHOUT CATS) and the time she lay dying in the attic, I sat with her after I got home from work and we would watch Wheel of Fortune together. And while we were silent and just watching TV, it was more than I remember us ever doing together when I was a kid. We’d watch Wheel of Fortune while Barb made dinner downstairs, and over four or five months I saw how no matter what kind of a mean bitch you have for a mother, it’s tough to watch her die, because ovarian cancer is a much meaner bitch than any bitch it ever consumes. It just WASTED her, Benny. I did not even recognize her. She looked more like the skeleton in your office than my mom. Man did I cry when she died. I kept asking Barbara WHY, WHY was I crying? And she kept saying, of course you’re crying, she’s your mom. But WHY? I hadn’t talked to her in ten years. And I didn’t give one fuck about her. But then you see someone just WASTE like that. And if there is ONE THING I wish I could take back, ONE THING in my entire life I wish I could do differently, it would be when we were going through all that shit during the divorce when I REALLY lost it one time and I just screamed at Barb, I HOPE OVARIAN CANCER EATS YOUR CUNT! I didn’t mean it. I’m ashamed of it now. No, that doesn’t even half describe it. You’re the only one I’ve told that to. Can you tell me WHAT THE FUCK I WAS THINKING? Man oh man oh man. Anyway. Use any of this in your ads if you want, and hello to all those fucks. Tom.’”

That e-mail got forwarded around pretty quickly, and some of us felt vindicated. He was talking about having a beer with Benny, and how he regretted the awful thing he had said to Barb. Those weren’t the ravings of an imminently homicidal former employee seeking to even a score. Even Amber, though horrified by practically everything he had written, reluctantly agreed that it might have indicated a more stable person than the one she had imagined moving in and out of Tinley Park gun stores since the day he walked Spanish. One thing she couldn’t let go of, however, was wanting to know just exactly what Tom had done with his mother’s cats.

“Did he just leave them behind when he went to pick her up?” she asked. “He didn’t just leave the cats in the apartment, did he?” She wanted Benny to e-mail him back to inquire about the fate of the abandoned animals, but nobody else thought that was a good idea. “But what happened to them?” she persisted.

“Oh, will you just shut the fuck up about the goddamn cats, Amber?” said Larry.

We knew there was some domestic tension between the two, owing to the ongoing abortion debate, but nothing on the order of that. Trouble in paradise, folks. Those of us in Amber’s office at the time departed it hastily.

JOE WENT DOWN TO Jim’s cubicle to ask what he’d heard from Tom. “Building security asked us to relay to them any communications that we might get from Tom,” he told Jim.

“I didn’t know that,” said Jim. “Nobody told me that.”

“Don’t sweat it. Just be sure to forward the message to Mike Boroshansky.”

“Why am I always the last person to know anything around here?” he asked Joe. Joe didn’t have an answer for him. Jim squared himself to his computer and opened Tom’s e-mail. “You really want me to read this to you?”

“Please,” said Joe. “First tell me what the subject line says.”

“The subject line,” said Jim. “It says, ‘I Need a Wetter Mare.’”

“I’m sorry. It says what?”

“That’s what he wrote. ‘I Need a Wetter Mare.’”

“Is that some private thing between you and Tom?”

“‘I Need a Wetter Mare’? No, I don’t know what the hell that means. What could that mean? How the hell should I know?”

“Jim, relax. Go ahead and read me the e-mail,” said Joe.

“‘Smalls — remember when we shot that laundry detergent commercial? I’m talking about the one of all the guys playing a game of football, and bringing home their grass-stained clothes to their loving wives? Well, they weren’t really landing on the grass when they were tackled, were they? They were actors. We laid mattresses down for them. They were landing on mattresses! Gotcha, TV America! But anyway, my question to YOU, JIMBO, is this: when Captain Murdoch throws his grenades at the BAD GUYS, and the BAD GUYS go leaping up, do those BAD GUYS have mattresses, too? Wouldn’t it hurt, JIMBO, to have a grenade explode and to be NOWHERE NEAR a mattress?’”

When that got forwarded, we just thought Tom was having a good time with his old friend Smalls. Convincing Amber of that, of course, was impossible. It sent us right back to square one with her. She even pressed and pressed until we were forced to agree that at the very least, the variance in tone between the two e-mails indicated that Tom Mota had his bad hours along with his good.

AFTER LEARNING OF THE CHANGE to the project, Genevieve stepped out of the office and walked down Michigan Avenue to the Borders near the Water Tower, where she purchased a few books. She came back to the office and started reading. Halfway through a breast cancer survivor’s memoir, she was interrupted by Joe. “Hey,” he said, knocking on her open door.

“Oh, this stuff is just way too emotional,” she said. “Oh, I have to stop reading it.” She put the book down. She stretched her face out and ran her fingers under her eyes to dry them. “Oh,” she said. She took a deep breath and sighed.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m okay.”

“I just stopped by to make sure you were clear on what we’re doing.”

They were a team, Joe and Genevieve, copywriter and art director, and they worked together in greater harmony than the majority of other teams. “I guess so,” she said finally. “Although to be honest, I can’t imagine coming up with anything.”

He moved inside and sat down across from her. “Why not?”

“So I’m reading this memoir, right?” she said, lifting the book off her desk and setting it down again. “And basically it’s all sadness. It’s panic, fear, anguish, a lot of bravery. There’s some crying. Everyone in the family is wonderful. The woman’s brother quits his job to take care of his sister. He’s a saint. The woman is a hero. Because there’s nothing but bad news for her, and then more bad news. But every once in a while there’s a little dollop of humor. Without it, trust me, you’d kill yourself reading it. Like the brother comes in, right. The woman has just found out like two pages earlier that her cancer’s not responding to the treatments. Then the brother comes in — he’s shaved his head so she won’t be the only one who’s bald. He comes in wearing a big, bushy blond wig, and the woman just dies laughing for how ridiculous he looks. And you die, too, it’s such a relief. But of course midway through laughing, she breaks down into tears for how much she loves him, how good he is to her — I mean, he’s just her brother, for god’s sake. He isn’t required to, to . . . oh, and here I go again,” said Genevieve, returning her fingers to just below her eyes. She let out a long sigh. “The point I’m trying to make,” she said, grabbing a tissue forcefully from a box on the desk, “is that there is really very little humor in a diagnosis of cancer. And what humor there is, is humorous only in the context of a whole lot of sadness. Now, how can we be expected to do that with a stock photo and a ten-word headline?”

Joe sat back in the chair. “Yeah,” he said. “I agree.”

“You do?”

No one ever expected Joe Pope to say something was hard because, when it came to thinking up ads, the guy was something of a savant.

“Make the cancer patient laugh,” he said, and his voice got quiet. “Isn’t this assignment a little screwy?”

THE IMPORTANT THING was that it was our screwy assignment, and it was all we had. By late afternoon Genevieve had finished her memoir, while Hank Neary, combing carefully through Internet sites, could soon pass himself off as a practicing oncologist. Benny Shassburger took the opposite approach. He found a stock photo of a beautiful woman draping herself across the red felt of a pool table. He doctored it in Photoshop by covering her breasts with surgical masks. That, he thought, was a brilliant image. The cancer patient would really laugh once he had the right headline in place. Two hours went by before he condemned the brilliant image to the dustbin of bad ideas and moved himself down to the coffee bar for a late-afternoon latte.

Jim Jackers got on the phone and started calling people. With no inspiration and frightened by the blank page, his only recourse was the imaginations of other people. He caught his mother, a librarian, at the checkout desk of the Woodridge Public Library.

“Let’s say you have breast cancer,” he began.

“Oh, Jim,” she whispered, “please let’s not even think about it.”

She quickly changed subjects, asking him what he wanted for dinner. His mother was a sensitive and superstitious woman who believed even the most casual mention of disease was a morbid flirtation with death that conjured bad luck and evil spirits and should be avoided at all costs. He should have known better than to call her first.

“Let’s say you have breast cancer,” he said next to his father. “What’s funny about it? How do you want to be cheered up?”

His father gave it a second’s thought. “Call me up with a scenario where I have breast cancer and you ask what’s funny about it,” he replied. “That should do the trick.”

“I’m serious, Dad,” Jim urged him. “What’s funny about breast cancer?”

“What’s funny about it? Son,” he said. “Very little.”

He tried to explain the assignment to his father but his description was a muddled briefing of the morphing project, and it ended with Jim saying he’d have to get back to him with certain details. “Sounds to me like you need to figure out what the hell’s going on over there,” said his father.

“Well, it’s a confusing assignment.”

“Talk to your great-uncle about this,” his father suggested. “I imagine he’d be a good resource.”

Everyone knew that Jim’s creative coup d’état came from a suggestion from his great-uncle Max, who lived on a farm in Iowa. According to Jim, his uncle had Mexicans running the farm while his days were spent in the farmhouse basement reconstructing a real train car from scratch, which was the only thing he had shown any interest in since the passing of his wife. He traveled to old train yards collecting the parts. When someone asked him at a family function why he was doing it, his answer was so that no one could remove the train car from the basement after he died. When it was pointed out to him that the boxcar could be removed by dismantling it, reversing the process by which he had constructed it, Jim’s great-uncle replied that no Jackers alive was willing to work that hard at anything. Picturing this ornery farmer at his lunatic task, lost in the rural delusions of grief and old age, we probably laughed a little too hard, spurring Jim to defend his uncle’s singular hobby.

“What?” he said. “It’s like Legos, but for adults.”

That only made us laugh harder.

“The man lost his wife,” he said.

Jim was so desperate one day to come up with inspiration for an ad, he exhausted his traditional list of people, broke down, and called his uncle Max. “You know how when you buy a new car,” he began — and immediately Max interrupted him.

“I haven’t bought a new car in thirty-five years,” said Max.

Jim suspected then that this was probably not a man with his finger on the pulse of the buying public. Patiently he tried explaining his assignment. When people buy a new car, he said, they usually have an image of themselves that corresponds to the car they buy. Jim wanted to know from Max how Max would want to perceive himself when purchasing a new ink cartridge.

“Ink cartridge?”

“Yeah,” said Jim. “You know, for your printer.”

“Uh-huh,” said Max.

We had a client at the time whose marketing objective was to make their customers feel like heroes when purchasing one of their ink cartridges. Our charge in every communication was to inspire the potential buyer with the heroic possibilities of man-using-ink-cartridge.

“I want to see myself as Shakespeare,” Max said. “What’s this for, anyway?”

Shakespeare, thought Jim. Shakespeare. That’s not bad.

“It’s for a client of ours,” he said. “They make printers and ink cartridges and that sort of thing. I’m trying to come up with an ad that makes you want to buy our specific ink cartridge after you see our ad because it inspires you and makes you feel like a hero. Will you tell me more about wanting to feel like Shakespeare?”

“So you’re trying to sell ink cartridges?”

“That’s right.”

Another long pause. “Do you have a pen?” his uncle asked. He began to quote: “‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity . . .’”

Finally Jim reached out for a pen. He tried to keep up with him. At a certain point, Max stopped quoting and told Jim the lines should start to fade out, gradually at first, eventually disappearing altogether. Then he suggested the headline: “A Great Writer Needs a Great Ink Cartridge.” The small print could explain how, if ink cartridges had been used throughout time, the history of literature might have been at stake using a cheap ink cartridge.

Not only was Jim startled that his uncle could quote what he thought was Shakespeare seemingly off the top of his head; he was floored by the speed and ingenuity of his advertising abilities. Who was a greater hero than Shakespeare? And the person encountering the ad that his uncle had just pulled out of his ass could immediately put himself in Shakespeare’s shoes. Max had just made a million Americans feel exactly like Shakespeare. He told Max he’d missed his calling. “You should have been a creative,” he said.

“A creative?” said Max.

Jim explained that in the advertising industry, art directors and copywriters alike were called creatives.

“That’s the stupidest use of an English word I ever encountered,” said Max.

Jim also told him that the advertising product, whether it was a TV commercial, a print ad, a billboard, or a radio spot, was called the creative. Before he hung up Jim asked Max for two more examples of great pieces of literature, suspecting that an entire campaign could be generated from Max’s concept. He went down to Hank Neary’s office — Hank was just then engrossed in a printer manual. “‘The best of times, the worst of times,’” he said. “That’s Shakespeare, right?”

“Dickens,” said Hank. “A Tale of Two Cities.”

“And what about ‘To be or not to be’? Shakespeare?”

“Shakespeare,” said Hank. “Hamlet.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Jim.

Sometime later that afternoon, Max Jackers surprised Jim by calling him back. “You folks over there,” said Max, “you say you call yourselves creatives, is that what you’re telling me? And the work you do, you call that the creative, is that what you said?” Jim said that was correct. “And I suppose you think of yourselves as pretty creative over there, I bet.”

“I suppose so,” said Jim, wondering what Max was driving at.

“And the work you do, you probably think that’s pretty creative work.”

“What are you asking me, Uncle Max?”

“Well, if all that’s true,” said the old man, “that would make you creative creatives creating creative creative.” There was silence as Max allowed Jim to take this in. “And that right there,” he concluded, “is why I didn’t miss my calling. That’s a use of the English language just too absurd to even contemplate.”

With that, Max hung up.

JIM TOOK HIS FATHER’S advice and called Max about the breast cancer ads. When Max picked up, Jim asked him to imagine that he was a woman recently diagnosed with the disease. As the words “breast cancer” escaped his mouth, Jim had the conviction once again that he’d called the wrong man. Max had come through for him in the past, but what did a man who’d spent his entire life working a farm in rural Iowa know about a predominantly female disease? Still Jim persevered while Max remained silent on the other end. He wanted to know what Max, as a woman with breast cancer, might find funny if he were, say, flipping through a magazine at a doctor’s office. Still more silence from Max, so Jim explained further that this woman was probably impatient for her name to be called, her mind was probably half on other things, but when she came across the ad, she stopped and read it and it made her laugh. “What we’re looking for is what’s funny about it,” he said. Then he stopped talking and put the ball in Max’s court.

“What’s funny about what?” Max finally said.

“What’s funny about breast cancer,” said Jim. “Not breast cancer per se, you know, but what’s funny to somebody with breast cancer flipping through a magazine.”

Max cleared his throat. “Jim,” he said, “do you recall a sweet old gal, just the salt of the earth, probably the sweetest woman you ever met in your life, by the name of Edna?”

“Edna,” said Jim. “Edna . . . Edna. . . . No, I don’t think so, Uncle Max.”

“You don’t remember your aunt Edna?”

“Oh, Aunt Edna. Of course I remember Aunt Edna, Uncle Max.”

“Edna died of breast cancer,” said Max.

“She did? Aunt Edna?”

Now Jim realized why his dad had suggested he call Max. It wasn’t because of Max’s marketing wit. It was because Max’s wife had died of the disease. Suddenly Jim realized he should have approached things differently. His phrasing might have been a little cavalier. “Uncle Max, I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I didn’t remember how Aunt Edna died.”

“It sounds to me,” said Max, “that you don’t know much of anything on the subject.”

“I remember the funeral,” said Jim. “I was seventeen.”

“They don’t typically sit in the waiting room flipping through magazines,” said Max. “Their minds aren’t half on something else.”

“You see, we’re . . . we’re doing this, uh, a pro bono campaign,” Jim stuttered.

“But there ain’t nothing funny about it,” said Max, “that I ever saw.”

“And what we’re trying to do is, we’re just trying to lift their spirits a little.”

“And there ain’t nothing left to say in this conversation.”

“WELL, I’M TAPPED,” said Jim, when he made it down to the coffee bar.

“It’s an impossible assignment,” Benny agreed, pulling a stool out for him.

“I got a few ideas,” said Marcia, taking possession of a chai latte from the barista. “Thanks,” she said, handing off a dollar. “But they’re all tired and stale.”

“I have one thing that’s funny,” said Larry. “One thing. But I think it’s funny only if you’re already dead.”

“There are two things you just can’t advertise,” said Hank matter-of-factly. “Fat people and dead people.”

“Is that a quote, Hank?”

“They’re not dead, Hank,” said Amber. “They’re just sick.”

“Fat people and dying people, then.”

“Suicides are tough,” added Larry.

Chris Yop showed up looking furtive and unwell, vigilant despite familiar surroundings, carrying some rough layouts on sketch paper. Significant sweat blots under the arms of his Hawaiian shirt indicated a higher level of vascular dysfunction than we were accustomed to. He had evidently been hard at work. “I need someone to take these in to Lynn,” he announced, setting his layouts on the coffee bar. We asked him what they were. “My concepts for the fund-raiser ads,” he said. “I think they’re pretty good.”

“Humbly you submit,” said Larry, picking them off the coffee bar.

It was obviously just plain wrong that the man was still in the building a full day after being laid off. But to have concepts, too? Some nerve system crucial to an understanding of the agreement one enters into when engaging in the capitalist system had obviously gone haywire in him, along with the rest of his ailing networks.

“The problem I’m having,” he said, glancing back as if spooked, “is I can’t get credit for them because, well, you know, officially . . .”

“You’re insane?” said Marcia.

“No, Marcia,” he said, “not because I’m insane. Because officially I don’t work here anymore.”

“Oh, right,” said Marcia, taking a sip of her latte. “Forgot that detail. But I wouldn’t worry, Chris. I’ve seen your resume. They’re going to scoop you right up.”

“Why are you being mean to me, Marcia?”

“Because you called me Karen!”

“Chris,” said Benny, “listen. The project’s changed.”

Yop’s attention was suddenly focused on the opening elevator doors.

“Chris? Are you listening to me?”

“Sorry,” said Yop, snapping back. “Benny, is Lynn really in today? Or was Dan Wisdom just fucking with me?”

“Chris, listen. It’s no longer an ad for the fund-raiser. It’s this other thing now.”

“What other thing?”

“The project’s changed,” he repeated.

“But I’ve been working on fund-raiser ads,” said Yop. “I was hoping you guys could take these in to Lynn and, you know, let it slip I came up with them.”

“I don’t think you want credit for these,” said Larry, setting the ads back down on the coffee bar.

“Now you’re telling me the project’s changed? — Go screw, Larry. — Benny, I spent a lot of time on these. I worked hard, man. I’m trying to get my job back here.”

He paused to order a decaf from the barista.

“Chris,” said Benny. “Shouldn’t you go home? Shouldn’t you stop worrying about these ads and go home and talk to your wife?”

Yop looked away, distant and pensive. He removed a napkin from the dispenser on the coffee bar and wiped sweat from his brow. Then he set his head down on the bar, losing it inside his arms. He stayed that way for a while. When he looked up again, nudged by the barista holding his coffee out to him, his eyes were bloodshot and veiny. “Thanks,” he said, taking the cup. He handed off his dollar. “Will somebody do me a favor, please,” he asked. “Will somebody please e-mail me with details on how the job has changed? Will someone do that for me, please?”

Before departing, he turned back to Marcia. “I’m sorry I called you Karen this morning,” he said. “I know you’re Marcia. My brain is fried, I just got confused.”

He hurried off down the hall, staying close to the walls.

“‘Tomorrow morning there’ll be laundry,’” said Hank. “‘But he’ll be somewhere else to hear the call.’”

Karen Woo came toward us from the opposite direction.

“Everybody come with me,” she said.

She reversed in her tracks and headed back to her office.

When we got down there she was sitting behind her desk holding the phone to her ear. She said to the person on the other end that she wished to speak with a nurse in the oncology department. As she waited to be transferred, no one spoke. We couldn’t believe it — she was making the call. Her cool composure was astounding, preternatural, and somewhat sinister. When the nurse came on, she remained confident and in character. We held her in awe.

But as we waited, it was almost as if something swept the room and a collective epiphany dawned upon all of us at once and we knew for certain how wrong we had been about everything. No one would just miss a crucial operation. A crucial operation must have never been scheduled. Why had we not bowed to the eminently more reasonable likelihood that there was no cancer? That it was just a rumor, as Larry had suggested. Or if Lynn did have cancer and an operation had been scheduled, there were a thousand very simple explanations for why she might have missed it. Some scheduling conflict with the doctor, some clarification was needed in the diagnosis, more tests had to be taken, blood drawn, the doctor was sick, the hospital had lost power. All today’s intrigue was just cheap talk to better dramatize our lives. Why had we not seen it before Karen got on the phone with the nurse? Oh, to be seduced by that meddling, insensitive woman! To play along in her deception just to have our craven tabloid hysterias confirmed or denied. It was despicable. We were despicable. We should have stood up immediately, denounced her actions with one voice, and demanded that she —

She hung up the phone. “Her operation was scheduled for nine,” she said. “The doctor was prepped and waiting. They called her at home, they called her at work. The nurse sounded irritated. She wanted to know when I wanted to reschedule.”

The Thing to Do and the Place to Be

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE OPERATION she has no association dinners to go to, no awards ceremonies, no networking functions. A plan comes to her impromptu in the back of the cab as she steps in and instructs the driver to take the Inner Drive. She envisions her sofa, her two cats, something good ordered in, and a bottle of wine she’s been saving. They ask you not to eat anything twelve hours before, but honestly, that’s unreasonable, isn’t it — your last chance at a normal meal for how long?

She brought no work home with her, not tonight, because work would not be an appropriate way to spend the evening. Yet whenever she’s without it, even for the duration of a cab ride, she starts to feel anxious. Luckily it’s a short ride. She pays the cabbie and steps out in front of some serious real estate. She lives in the top-floor condo overlooking the winding coastal edge of Lake Michigan.

The doorman stands at his post in the lobby; they exchange greetings and she heads up the elevator. Inside the condominium, she slips off one heel while hanging her keys on the hook. She slips off the other one, and with two heels in one hand, walks down the hall to where her pajamas await. Getting into pajamas — now that’s appropriate. Here is a good place to be, she tells herself, right here in this apartment, and getting into her pink hospital scrubs and jersey zip-up — that’s the right thing to be doing.

At the kitchen table she pours herself a glass of wine. She reflects on the day, it can’t be helped. Chris Yop broke down when she delivered the news. If Martin were here, she’d say to him, A grown man crying! Would you do that? Of course you wouldn’t! Let me tell you something, I think I’ve grown immune to the emotion involved. His crying? It didn’t faze me one bit. You want to know when I feel something? It’s the person who says to me, Lynn, you’ve been terrific to work for, and I understand you’re just doing what you have to do — that’s who I feel sorry for. Those people kill me. A grown man crying? Uh, no. And listen to this! An hour later, he shows up for a meeting. I come in, he’s sitting in my office. I just fired him, he’s sitting in my office. I said to him, Chris, you have to leave. God knows I can’t have them sticking around!

Wait — did she just say that last part out loud? A hazard of living alone. One of the cats is looking at her from the floor. Or is it just a look of hunger? She reminds herself — Martin’s not actually here, Lynn. “But you are, aren’t you, Friday,” she says, bending to scruff up the cat’s black coat. The cat bow-backs and asks for more. “Yes, you are,” she says, “and so am I, and so who needs him?” She straightens up and takes another sip of wine. Look at all of the chairs! A total of four chairs at the kitchen table! Why do I need four chairs? It’s important that she not second-guess anything, now that she’s home. She’s home, she’s in for good. Stop thinking, stop thinking, stop thinking.

She wonders where Martin is. Is he at work? What time is it? Six-forty-five, of course he’s at work. Stop thinking. He’ll be at work for hours. Stop it. Lynn Mason, on the other hand, knocked off early today. Two very important new business pitches, absolutely crucial to the agency’s future, and strategies for both still need to be worked out with the account people, but Lynn left the office at a reasonable hour, to come home to her cats, to spend the evening before her operation in a relaxing manner, unwinding with a little television, going to bed early and getting a good night’s sleep. What could be better, more desirable than that? Don’t think about Martin. And if she’s tempted, remember — it’s Martin at work. Just a man at his desk, grumpy, nasty with the day’s odors, engaged in some dull legal matter. Consider how undesirable his company would be right now. How could she want that, with all she’s got going on right here — the Chinese food on its way, and so many chairs to choose from.

The doorman calls up from the lobby. Her delivery has arrived. Thank god, send him up. If he’s cute, she’s going to seduce him. No joke. It’s done, it’s decided. Think she has time to play games tonight? No, if he’s in the least way cute, she’s going down on him in the hallway. Well, not in the hallway. Why don’t you come inside? Will you shut the door for me, please? Delivery boys must dream of this. Maybe choose different pajamas? The pink scrubs and zip-up — not very mistress-of-the-night. She needs a robe, nothing underneath. Because it all sounds like a joke until you understand that someone has to be the last one to hold her breast in his mouth — tonight’s it — and she’d really rather it not be Martin.

But he comes and goes. Young Asian, has his charms, but she loses the nerve. She takes the food over to the couch. The initial comfort of a seat on the sofa — yes, this is the right place to be, right here, and turning on the TV the right thing to be doing. She eats her dinner and drinks her wine while watching an episode of The Simpsons, and a half hour later her conviction is still nearly intact.

On her third glass of wine, she repeats it to herself: Here is a good place to be, right here, and this thing the right thing to be . . . wonder what Martin’s doing? He’s working. Lynn, you know this. He’ll be there for hours. Think about something else. Wonder . . . wonder what movies are playing. She likes to see a movie when she has the time. Always better to see them with someone, though. Alone, there is that awkward ten minutes between the time you arrive and the time they dim the lights for the previews when against all reason you believe everyone in the theater is staring at you because you are a woman alone at the movies. It’s probably a good thing she’s here on the sofa, rather than waiting self-consciously for a movie to begin. This is the right place to be. Unless the alternative was a movie theater with Martin.

Television isn’t working out. She turns it off, gets up, makes the cold transition from carpet to tile — but what is there in the kitchen for someone looking to indulge? No food for twelve hours my ass. This could be it. Let’s see — some freezer-burned ice cream. What’s in the cupboard? A third of a bag of mini marshmallows. For the life of her she can’t remember buying those. She’s not interested in any of it — though when she turns her attention to cleaning the bedroom closet, she does take the ice cream with her. It’s a spoon-bender. What compels her to do that, to clean? She stabs at the tub after every new pile of mess she drags from the closet out into the tidy room. It will be nice, she thinks, to have a nice clean closet during my recovery.

Fifteen minutes later she does not want to be cleaning the closet. On this night of all nights, cleaning the closet? Does she have such a deficient imagination, that’s all she can come up with? Imagine if one night in a lifetime were looked upon as a scientist might look upon it, or some other life form studying our species, and from that one night, the worth of the entire life were derived. Well, she’d rather hers not be evaluated by the TV she’s watched or the closet she hasn’t cleaned. Besides, that goddamn ice cream requires a pickax. Abandoning everything, she returns to the kitchen and finishes the bottle of wine.

MARTIN IS FORTY-FIVE and has never been married. His parents divorced when he was young and he never forgave the institution for any of its false comforts. He goes on and on about it, until finally she tells him, “Okay, I got it the first eight hundred times, you’re not the marrying type.” Still, he needed someone to go to Maui with. His firm kept a luxury box at Wrigley, there wasn’t a restaurant in the city he couldn’t afford — he wasn’t about to sit in them alone. He needed companionship, he needed sex. But perhaps that paints too one-sided a portrait of Martin. He could have dated only younger women, girls practically, paralegals and secretaries without a brain in their heads, attracted to his partnership, his money, the broad chest under his starched shirts. Instead he was with her, someone his own age, someone whose professional achievements he respected. And last August, he spent a week in Florida, an entire week in Cocoa Beach, taking her old dad around. Eating at five-thirty, speaking loud so he could hear — the whole routine. He never complained. That was something, wasn’t it — giving of his vacation time, meeting her family? And once in a while, he would show up with flowers, he would come up behind her and kiss her neck, and that would be enough to look past the birthday he forgot, or the dates he’d have to cancer because of work.

Cancel. The word she wants is cancel.

But what would commonly happen was that he would call at the last possible minute. “Deposition . . . judge moved up the court date . . . important conference.” Whatever it was would leave her alone, looking down the long double-barrel of Saturday and Sunday when it should have been three bottles of Merlot on Mackinaw Island and bedsheets warm with body heat. “Oh, fuck, Martin, not again.” “Hey, I’m sorry,” he’d offer. “But this is work, Lynn. This is what I do.” “Yeah, but you know what? Fuck you, because this was planned. We planned this thing, you and me — and what, I’m going to call Sherry now? I’m going to call Diane and say, Martin stood me up again, the asshole, want to rent a movie?” “Does it even count,” he’d ask, “does it even matter that I’m sorry?” The sorry part was how well she knew that Sherry, with twin ten-year-olds, was not in a position just to drop things and listen to another Martin story, and the other sorry part was how loathsome it sounded, renting a movie with sad, fat Diane. Sometimes she almost wished Martin were married and that she were fucking another woman’s husband so it could all be simpler — easier to deal with a cliché than Martin’s overriding obsessions. He wasn’t just not the marrying type. He was pathologically noncommittal. “I can’t do this,” she’d say. And there was silence on the other end. “Can’t do what?” “This,” she’d say. And that was it, they were off again.

Then a night would come along — hey, not unlike this one — when enough time had passed that the specifics of their last conversation grew vague, when Lynn discovered that in the intervening days her anger at Martin had shifted toward understanding, which had spilled over, that night, into regret for how she had reacted when he canceled their plans. It had always been an understanding we share, the thought went, how important work is, and when we get together it’s what we talk about — this frustration of mine, that fascinating case of his, how we’re succeeding and failing and working hard. She would reflect back and think how selfish she had been, and slightly childish, too — and she would call. Or a few days would pass and he would call. “You were right, I fucked up, we had it planned,” he’d say. “Can we do it this weekend?” How good it was to have her hands on his chest again, how good to trip over his shoes again on the way to the bathroom.

But not this night — no calling him this night. Not after their last conversation. No way to shift any of that emotional content. That back-and-forth is frozen like a mastodon in ice, and the rider on top, with his spear and animal urges, he is their year together, suspended forever with his mouth gaping wide, his whoop and howl finally silenced.

WHOA — SUDDENLY it’s like something in a science fiction movie: how’d she get here? Just a second ago, she was sitting on the sofa with the cats, eating Chinese. There was television, and the last of the ice cream. Next she knows, she’s dressed and sitting in a public place, seeing and being seen. A delicately lit wood-paneled wine bar new in the neighborhood. She feels on display for being the only one actually sitting at the bar. The crowd’s in back. What was that she kept repeating to herself? Here is the right place to be, alone at this bar, and this thing I’m doing, having my, what, fourth? my fourth or fifth glass of wine for the night, what a wise and prudent thing to be doing. Not any more convincing here than it was back home. She can’t even work up a conversation with the bartender, who seems fixated on the contents of his wallet. Jeez, don’t let me distract you. No need for a little conversation, what they used to call the human touch. By all means, keep looking through your ATM receipts. She’ll just content herself with mulling it over again: the fact that there is some place — she’s absolutely certain of it — one place that is the right place to be tonight, and one thing that is the right thing to be doing. Is it really sitting in Martin’s office, under very familiar fluorescent lights, amid all those oppressive document boxes, watching Martin read Westlaw downloads, just so she can be in the presence of Martin? No, goddamn it, no — that is bullshit. There is something else, something that is Lynn Mason’s, that belongs to her and to her alone and is not contingent upon the existence of Martin Grant. But what? Only thing she can say for sure, it’s probably not here. Amazing how quickly a glass of wine goes when you’re the only one at the bar. Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be saying good night now, you won’t be seeing me tomorrow. “Another one?” asks the bartender. “Just the tab,” she says.

One day she said to him — they were on again — “Hey, come here, will you, and feel this for me?” She was in the shower. It was a workday, one of the rare occasions Martin slept over during the week. He came to the shower door. “Hey, I’m going now,” he said. “Have to get home to shower.” He was standing behind the opaque glass. “Did you not just hear me?” she asked him. “What?” he said. “I asked you to feel something.” He didn’t move. “What is it? I’ll get wet.” And instantly, she had a thought. More like a suspicion. It was when he said, “I’ll get wet” — what sort of thing was that to say? Roll up your fucking sleeve then, you jerk! It led her to believe he had heard her, heard her all too well. It can’t be helped, when a woman is in the shower and says, come here and feel this, that a tone creeps in. Not fear, not just yet. Concern, and she’s looking to unburden some of it. She’s looking for somebody to say, that feels to me like it’s nothing. But Martin, Martin was quick. Martin would immediately grasp the implications of a request like come here and feel this, and he would pick up on the tone, too — and knowing what that tone implied, all it might lead to and all it might require of him, he came to the shower door with his own agenda. Have to go home, have to shower. Was it true, or was it just her suspicious mind? “What is it, Lynn?” he said. “What is it you want me to feel?” “Never mind,” she said. “No, what is it?” he said, with an impatience intended now to make her believe that he was eager for it, really wanting the opportunity. “It’s nothing, forget it, get out of here,” she said. He opened the shower door, startling her. She slammed it shut. “Get out of here! Go home and shower.” He already had his keys in his hand. They jangled as he spun them around on his finger. “Okay,” he said — and that was the extent of his protest. She hated the disappointment she felt when, with the water off, she heard the front door slam.

He spent the next month in California on a case. He left messages but she didn’t return them, and then he stopped calling. It was two weeks after his return that they next saw each other, and they should have been thick in a fight before even taking a step inside the restaurant — about the calls put in and not returned, the monthlong silence, the insult of the two additional weeks. But being across from him again was where she wanted to be. She had missed his conversation. God — had she not realized how much? It was always the same thing — pissed-off judges and incompetent prosecutors and legal issues she needed explained. But the way he talked, his mannerisms, his inimitable masculine mannerisms — she had missed them. And he had missed her company, too, it seemed. He listened to her talk about the difficulties the agency was facing and the miserable experience of laying people off. Later that night they went back to her place and it was even better having him inside her than it was having him across the table from her. She had to interrupt it briefly to tell him not to touch there, not the left breast, to spend his attention on the right breast but not to touch the other one, and he guessed appropriately that it would not be the time to ask, “How come?” and so said nothing.

But at breakfast the next morning, at a place in the neighborhood where they sat in a courtyard on a wrought-iron table under the new spring sun, he surprised her. “I’m putting two and two together,” he said, “and it may come to equal five, but I thought I might ask. How are you feeling, healthwise?” “Why are you asking me that?” she said. “Because last time we were together you asked me to feel something. And this time you tell me not to feel something. Is it just a monthly . . . a matter of bad timing? Or is there something else going on?”

Martin, who cared only to talk about the law. And when it wasn’t the law it was jazz — the history of jazz, how to listen to jazz, this one particular recording that changed jazz forever. “Everybody would disagree with me, but it was Louis Armstrong’s ‘St. Louis Blues.’ There had never been anything like it.” She knew it by heart by now. Oh, god — had she misread him? Had her decision not to return his phone calls when he went to California been based on a presumption that when he came to the shower door, he thought, Reach in, and I’m doomed. Two minutes of sexless inspection of the thing he lavished his attention upon at certain convenient hours and he was in it for months, maybe years. He was in for meeting the doctors and learning the terminology and driving her back and forth and holding her head as she retched. If he wasn’t likely to commit to something that included security, love, protection, how eager was he for a commitment like that? But was it possible he had in fact simply not heard her? “I have a lump in my breast,” she said. “I found a lump.” He raised his eyebrows. “A lump,” he said, looking down, suddenly toying with an empty cream container. “What’s . . . what’s a lump?” What’s a lump? He hadn’t expected that answer, had he, even if it was the obvious one — not here, not at breakfast in the sun. “Why don’t you just forget about it?” she said. “No, I mean, of course I know what a lump is,” he said. “But what have you done about it? That’s what I mean to ask. What do the doctors say?” “I’m doing fine,” she said. “Is that what they say?” “Martin,” she said, “I’m fine.” “Were you ever going to tell me?” “I told you last night,” she said. On a dime he turned into the litigator. “No, you didn’t tell me last night. You told me not to touch last night. You didn’t tell me you found a lump.” “Why don’t you not worry about it, Martin — because I think you’d rather not worry about it than worry about it.” “I brought it up, didn’t I? Wasn’t I the one who brought it up?” Well, she thought — wasn’t he? Just where did Martin stand? Who was this man she had been fucking for the past year really, and how would he react with his back up against the wall? Let’s find out. “Okay,” she said, “go to the doctor’s with me.” He returned to futzing with the creamer. He didn’t look up for some time. “So you haven’t seen a doctor?” “I just asked you to go with me,” she said. “So obviously I haven’t.” “Why not?” he asked. “Because I need someone to go with me,” she said. He returned his attention to the creamer. “Sure,” he said, not looking at her. “I’ll go with you. Of course.” She smiled at him. He looked up. “What?” he said. “I’m fine,” she said.

BETTER THAN BEFORE, anyway, because here is a good place to be, not a half-bad place, anyway, and this thing she’s doing may be a little uninspired, but certainly better than getting blotto at a wine bar. She parks in the underground garage and goes up by elevator and steps lightly into the bright and soothing atmosphere. Home, then bar, and now, a half hour before closing time, a department store — not a very fertile imagination on me, she concludes. She wishes to god she could think of the thing she knows is right. It probably isn’t shopping, but as she told herself on the way over, shopping’s not a bad interlude. And would you look at all the shoes? She wanders around the displays. Pumps, heels, sneakers, sandals — you know (thinking back on all those shoes she pulled from her closet when eons ago it sounded like a good idea to be cleaning), I don’t really need any more shoes. She doesn’t really need any more anything. But will you just look at all the hard work these good folks have put in to make you feel like nothing could ever be wrong when there’s so many pairs of shoes to buy! She hasn’t even gone into the main body of the store yet, it’s all so lovely and pleasant already.

And all of it soured by the lack of the one thing she wants: not likely to find Martin here in the women’s shoe department, is she? In any department of Nordstrom or anywhere else at this hour of the night. Nine-thirty — right now Martin’s walking the hallway toward some associate’s office. Is she really longing to be a part of that? She would replace these bright and open spaces full of the world’s best footwear, fashions, perfumes, and accessories — and for everything else, there’s MasterCard — just to join Martin in a hallway of bare walls and ugly carpet as he moves toward an associate’s office on some inconsequential item of business? Come on, be reasonable. So it is Martin, it is Martin’s body — he’s still standing in some boring jerk’s doorway talking about document production and privileged materials. Shop, for god’s sake! Buy something! Make this night memorable in shopping’s extremely cheap way. What she has in mind is something extravagant, something outrageously expensive. You wear it once and put it away forever. No, not that, not a wedding gown. She doesn’t want to marry Martin, believe it or not. She just wants to follow him around the corridors of his office, stepping into the supply closet with him to pick up some file tabs, or whatever. That’s a far cry from vows. It’s not not having Martin forever that makes her momentarily wacko for Martin; it’s not having him tonight.

She passes the man at the piano. What’s he playing? Can’t name it. She drifts around the perfume and makeup counters, fending off the lab-coated jackals that want to spray her and paint her and make her look her best. Just looking, thanks. Which is what she’s been doing, for twenty years more or less, with respect to men. She doesn’t mind finding herself unmarried, it’s just how things turned out, and she’s not eager to marry just to marry. Only those with the most dull and conventional pieties, looking in at her from the outside, would suspect or pity her for being forty-three and still unmarried. Would they pity a man? They would envy the man. She heads up the escalators. That’s not to say that when she sees her friends marry, she doesn’t have moments of, not jealousy, but envy, though not envy of the friend for getting married but rather of that conviction both the bride and bridegroom seem to share that, well, this thing they’re doing is the right thing. Where does that come from? She did think for a time that she and Douglas would marry, and when instead it went in the opposite direction, because Douglas was not, in the end, what she wanted, she woke up one morning and thought, not unlike finding herself all of a sudden in that wine bar, “Whoa, I’m thirty-eight! Who’s playing tricks on me here?” And for a moment she thought along the conventional line herself, reflecting on what a loss it might be if she never married, and if she did, how old would she be by then — no younger than forty, if she got lucky — and so maybe too old to have children, and what a loss that might be, too. But do let it be known — what floor is she on? — let it be known in Women’s Apparel, at nine-thirty-five PM — dinner is probably being delivered to his office about now — on the night before she’s scheduled for major surgery and at the age of forty-three, that her marital status has not been, for whatever reason — because she is “cerebral,” because she is “cold,” because she is “ambitious” — it has not been the focus of her life. If she had spent a tenth of the energy finding the right man as she has building the agency she started with the other partners, she would be living in Oak Park right now putting dinner plates into the dishwasher. Have you finished with your homework? Should I take the car in tomorrow? With some circumspection, with some healthy amount of doubt, she can say that right here is a better place to be, in Nordstrom, and this thing she’s doing a better thing than loading up the dishwasher in Oak Park. And those people who think, Oh woman, oh sister, oh girl you have no idea what you’re missing out on, we just have to part ways, me and them, because I have made a good life for myself. I know what to do with my life. I just don’t know what to do with this one night.

SHE ENDS UP in the lingerie section. If it’s invasive, and they think it is, and if a couple of other factors are in play, she’s agreed to have a mastectomy. Basically they put it to her this way: if we go in there and we find this and we find that, we don’t see how you have much of a choice. And if she’s going to have a mastectomy, she needs to start thinking about breast reconstruction. They’re going to save as much as they can, and they’ve asked that she come in tomorrow with a favorite bra, which they will use to measure where the incision line should be. They will cut just inside the bra line so that the plastic surgeon can do his thing after she has completed her six months of chemo and radiation, should they be necessary, which they likely will be. There’s nothing but bad news for her, and then there’s more bad news. So come in, they told her, with a special bra, and with that in mind, she gravitates toward Intimate Apparel. Her choices are endless — slinky, padded, sheer, cotton, rhinestoned, patterned, leopard-printed, silky, hot pink. This is what makes the country great, isn’t it? And it’s what’s made her life in advertising possible, the opportunity afforded by this glut to market one particular offering in a way that allows it to stand alone as the leader in the marketplace. She would know exactly what to do with any one of these brands, if they were fortunate enough to win that account. But marketing one for her particular needs tonight? Picking the one bra in this haystack of bras that will define where they make the incision and that will, somehow, when all this is over, make her feel sexy again — even she admits there’s not likely to be one bra here that can fill an order like that. She takes one off the rack. Maybe this one. Another one — maybe. Soon she has ten bras in her hands, she has twelve, fifteen. She takes them to the fitting room and despite the pain caused by the chafing tries a few of them on. She looks at herself in the mirror. The idea is to look sexy again. And for whom exactly? Yourself, of course. Yes, well, that’s all wonderfully self-affirming and very strong-minded as any decent woman should be these days, but let’s just face facts here and say that when a woman — no, when a person is thinking about feeling sexy, it is always with the idea of someone else in mind. Someone in the back of the mind who says, “I can’t believe how sexy you look in that.” And just who is that person for her? Unfortunately the timing is such that it can’t be anybody other than you-know-fucking-well-who, and that is not an option. Sexiness with Martin in mind is no longer an option. And sexiness after Martin? That’s where it gets complicated, because first she’ll have the stitches. Those will scar up quickly, and for six months, while the post-op treatments are doing their tricks, she’ll wear the prosthesis. Then the plastic surgeon does the breast reconstruction in stages — who knows how long that takes. So what is she looking at here? A year, a year and a half? How is she going to feel sexy during any of that? Who’s going to look at her scars, at her prosthesis, and say, “I can’t believe how sexy you look in that.” You see, there is no man after Martin, not for a long, long time, and before she can help it, she’s screaming. She’s in the tiny dressing room with a thousand bras screaming as loud as she can. It sounds like AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHH!!! When she stops she feels the pulse of her blood pumping in that part of her breast that is sore to the touch, and a rawness in her throat. She has a terrible head rush from the wine and the scream. She sits down on the bench. Salesclerks come running. “WHAT’S WRONG IN THERE? DO YOU NEED SECURITY?” She will not cry. No. She stands up and starts handing bras over the door. “I don’t want these!” she says. “Take them!” At first she offers a few at a time, then she scoops them up and tosses them all over. “I don’t want any of them! I just want out of here!” What a stupid place to be, this dressing room, and trying on bras, trying to look sexy, what a ridiculous thing to be doing.

AFTER HE FOUND OUT, he left long voice mails for her at work. Who knows what effect he intended by them. Typically she picked up the phone and listened to them thirty seconds after he had left them, and carried on a dialogue with his recorded voice. “What I don’t understand,” he said in an early one, “is how an intelligent, reasonable person could possibly wait, despite knowing that something was wrong, feeling sick, and still refuse to see a doctor. I don’t get that, I don’t understand that behavior coming from an intelligent person.” “That’s because,” she said into the phone, as the message unfurled, “intelligent people are not always guided by their intelligence. Sometimes, Martin, something called fear is a little more powerful.” He would know that basic fact of human psychology, she thought, if he were in marketing, but as a practitioner of the law, he believed that the decision that was most rational, or at least most shrewd, would always triumph if it determined one’s own self-survival. “Yes, I should have shown an interest earlier,” he said in a later voice mail. “I was wrapped up in my work, I wasn’t paying attention. But now,” he said, “now that I know, I can’t not know anymore, Lynn, I can’t just unlearn it, and now that I know and can’t not know, I feel . . . you know . . . a certain obligation . . .” “Obligation?” she said out loud. “. . . concern for you, Lynn, and your well-being . . .” “Oh, Martin, be still my beating heart.” “. . . that I can’t just — well, what is it you want me to do exactly, huh?” he asked. “Just forget about it? Is it one of those things, you know — we do this together, we do that, but this is one of those things we just don’t talk about, it’s off-limits, when frankly, Lynn, you could be very, very — uh, yeah, I’ll be with you in a minute, okay?” he said to someone who must have just shown up in his doorway. Returning to the message, he continued, “. . . that you should, uh . . .” He had lost his train of thought. “Look, the point is, you have to see a doctor,” he said. “Okay? Look, I have to go. I should have said all of this to you in person but you won’t pick up your goddamn phone. Please call me back.”

In one of the last messages he said, “There’s something I’ve been thinking about and wondering about and I’m very curious: am I the only one who knows? Have you told your father, or any of your friends? Because if you haven’t, and I’m the only one, you can see how I might feel a great deal of responsibility. In fact you could see how it’s just a little unfair of you, even . . .” “Oh?” she said. “I’m curious to see how this works.” “. . . because now I know,” he continued, “and you won’t take my advice to see a doctor, and that leaves me to worry about you . . .” “Oh, poor Martin!” “. . . but without any recourse to remedy that worry. Now that’s unfair, Lynn . . .” Then you should have kept your fucking hands off me! she thought. You shouldn’t have crawled into my bed and tried to bite my nipple! “. . . I’m not complaining about it, I don’t want you to think I’m complaining. I’m just trying to plead my case here, that you should go to the doctor. If you don’t want to do it for yourself, for fuck’s sake, Lynn, do it for me.”

He convinced her at last, or she simply yielded — after a week’s time it was tough to determine if she agreed because she had found some reserve of strength, or because she was hopelessly weak and he had worn her down with his voice mails. He would go with her, that was the condition. In the car on the way to her appointment, she tried putting into words her fear of doctors, hospitals, procedures — but there was no articulating it. “I spent a lot of time in hospitals when my mother was dying,” she said. “I was just a kid. Maybe that’s when it started.”

“What did she die of?”

“Give you one guess,” she said.

There was silence. Then he talked in general about the amazing advances they’d made in medicine over the years, with the same optimism that marked every conversation of its type, and she could only think how naive he was to think she would be responsive when she had always been immune to that sort of hopefulness. Technology would never advance past primal fear. It would never trump human instinct.

He parked in the hospital parking lot and for a half hour tried to coax her from the car. She wanted him inside the room during the exam, would that be okay? He said it would be. She didn’t want him to leave her side, was that understood? He said he had understood that from the first time she had asked, and the second time, and the third. “Why are you stalling?” he asked. When had Martin become so . . . committed? Had she misjudged him from the beginning? Or was this what was required for that commitment to take hold, that she be sent to hell and back? For she was in hell, in that car in the hospital parking lot, and not one cold hand had yet been laid upon her. After three or four attempts to articulate her fear on the ride over she had finally given up, but now she said to him, “I think I can finally explain it,” she said. “It comes down to this. And it’s so simple, Martin, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.” “Well,” he said, “so tell me.” “I cannot physically enter that building,” she said. “I cannot get out of this car and enter that building. See that building? I can’t. I won’t.” There was silence. Then he said, “Well, sounds like fear to me.” But he said he still didn’t understand. “What is it fear of, exactly?” he said. “Fear of death? No, you tell me that’s not it. You don’t fear death. Is it that they might tell you something’s wrong? You know something’s wrong. It’s not that either. So what is it? Most people, Lynn, they feel something ain’t right, they get scared. That’s natural. But the next step is getting it fixed. They’re eager to get it fixed. You,” he said, “you have all that reversed. You know something’s wrong — that doesn’t scare you. You go weeks letting it get worse! The idea of getting it fixed? That’s what scares you. Am I right? Isn’t that how it works with you?” That’s why he made partner, she thought. Good insight, good reasoning skills. “Yes,” she said. “I never thought about how fucked up it is until you put it like that, but yes, that’s it.” There was silence. “Do you think there’s a word for that?” she asked. “I could think of a few choice words,” he said. A moment of levity. After that he stared through the windshield, thinking. “Look,” he said, turning to her. “I’ll be right back. You stay here, okay?” “Where are you going?” she asked. “You said you wouldn’t leave me.” “Once we got inside,” he said. “We’re still in the parking lot.” He reached out and took her hand. “Trust me,” he said. So she let him go and he went inside the building. Ten minutes later he came out again and told her that her appointment had been rescheduled. The wave of relief that came crashing over her quickly receded again into a sea’s depth of despair when he said it was only rescheduled for later that day. “What time?” she asked. “Don’t worry about what time,” he said. “Just put this on.” “What is it?” “What’s it look like?” he asked. “It’s a handkerchief.” “But how am I supposed to ‘put it on’?” He started the car and placed it in reverse. “Like you’re a pirate’s captive,” he said, “and you’ve just been told to walk the plank.”

SHE WALKED INTO THE FIRST BUILDING holding his hand. They took an elevator that made her ears pop. She felt ridiculous because the elevator was full and what the hell was she doing in this blindfold? At one point she heard Martin say, “Stop staring.” “I’m not,” she said. “How could I be?” “I wasn’t talking to you,” he said. After what seemed like an eternity the elevator stopped and everyone got off. He led her by the hand. When he brought her to a halt he undid the blindfold and she knew instantly where she was: on the viewing deck of the John Hancock building, overlooking the city. She was surprised and delighted. “What is it you’re up to, Martin?” she asked, cocking an eye at him. He shrugged innocently and gestured at the view. “I’m showing you the city,” he said. There was the Sears Tower ahead of them and Lake Michigan to the left and to the right the grand and gaudy suburbs. They pointed out where they worked and where they lived and identified the buildings they knew by name. They put money into the viewfinder and looked out at Wrigley Field. They cast their eyes west as far as they would go and they still couldn’t exhaust that endless metropolis. When they were through, Martin put the blindfold back on her. They took the elevator down, walked back to the car, and climbed in again. They drove. Again he parked and led her by the hand. This time they walked up some stairs and she knew there were no stairs in a hospital entrance and so they had to be some other place, and when he held the door open for her and guided her in, she couldn’t see a thing but she could still smell, and she knew right away where they were. She heard a man say, “Two?” “Two,” replied Martin, who made her walk all the way to their table in the blindfold. “All right, take it off,” he said. “I knew it!” she cried out. “I knew just where we were!” They waited twenty minutes for a deep-dish pizza in a back booth under the dim light of Gino’s East, where the black planks above them made them feel as if they were eating under the main deck of a creaky old pirate ship. Those planks had been mercilessly graffitied and dollar bills had been stapled to them. When they stepped out again into the bright shock of daylight, he put the blindfold back on her. She wondered now if her luck had run out.

But they drove what she thought was too short a distance to be back at the hospital and when he took the blindfold off again, she said, “I should have known.” They were at the Jazz Record Mart on East Illinois. “Yes,” he said, full of an irony she loved, “an aficionado like you deserves to be indulged on a day like today.” “Please,” she said, “here’s my credit card, buy what you want — just take your time.” He spent almost twenty minutes looking through the dusty bins for his obscure recordings. “Not long enough,” she said, when he was through. Then it was back to the blindfold and the car, parking the car and being led by the hand. Stairs again, and not just six or seven of them — three long flights, almost enough to make her winded. She couldn’t believe what he was doing, holding her hand and guiding her along, devising this scheme so uncharacteristic of him, or at least uncharacteristic of that understanding she had arrived at long ago of the living breathing man — a Martin who was without whim or fancy, who drove home only the nail of hard truth, or chose to avoid the issue altogether. What the day had proven more than anything, she thought, was her haste to judge, and the rigidity of those judgments once made. They were inside now — the place had an airy, echoic atmosphere, rumbling low with hushed voices, and footsteps on marble stairs she could pick out one by one. He took the blindfold off and they spent an hour guiding themselves through all the highlights of the Art Institute. “I thought you weren’t an art fan, Martin,” she said. “I’m not a fan of any of the bullshit,” he replied, “but at this level, there are things I enjoy.” “Is that right?” “Sure,” he said. “Point one out to me,” she said skeptically, “when we come upon it, will you?” “This one here, for instance,” he said. “This one?” “Yes, this is a fine piece,” he said. “Care to argue?” They were standing in front of Georges Seurat’s giant Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte. “No,” she said. She didn’t care to argue.

It was three in the afternoon by the time they left and she knew now, getting out of the car, walking with him, that her luck had finally run out. “Don’t take it off,” he said. “Martin,” she said, and her voice trembled. They were walking across a parking lot that was unmistakably the parking lot of a hospital. “Lynn,” he said, “do not take it off.” Her hands began to shake as they had in the car earlier in the day. “Just keep walking,” he said. And she managed to because she could trick herself: maybe not, maybe not just yet. . . . But there were no stairs, and when he opened the door and the slightly warmer air from inside hit her and the light coming in above the blindfold got lighter, more fluorescent, she knew for an absolute fact where they were and she was terrified. “Just keep walking,” he said. He brought her to a stop and made her sit, and the chair beneath her was hard and plastic like a chair in a hospital waiting room, and she was terrified. “I’m not leaving your side,” he said. “I’m just going about ten feet away for a couple of seconds to talk to someone, then I’ll be back.” He returned. “I’m right here,” he said. They sat there a long time. After a while, he said, “Why don’t you take the blindfold off now.” “No way,” she said. “Trust me,” he said. “Take it off.” “I’d really rather not,” she said. “Come on,” he said, “you can do it.” She did as she was told, squinting a little as she looked around. Clerks stood behind glass. There were digitized numbers on the walls. “The DMV?” she said. “You bastard!” She swung at him with the blindfold. “You see!” he cried. “You can do the hard part!” She sighed with relief. “But now you might as well resign yourself,” he said. “You’ll never know when we’re actually there.”

THIS IS PROBABLY not the right place to be, probably the wrong place, actually. Matter of fact, if the wrong place could be identified on a map — “You Are Here” — this would probably be it. And this thing she might do, enter the building and have the night guard call up and inform him who he had waiting for him in the lobby? Not the right thing to be doing. But she’s been driving around for half a gas tank now and lo and behold she ends up here. The street where his firm’s office is located is one block east of Michigan Avenue. The Mag Mile is deserted like always this time of night. She’s parked illegally, but the only vehicle to drive past in twenty minutes is a cabbie with his light off. Going home, probably. That’s the wise choice, cabbie — big day tomorrow, take yourself home and rest your weary bones. Why can’t she have a cabbie’s good sense? Lynn Mason in her Saab outside Martin Grant’s office building doesn’t feel forty-three so much as fourteen, unhinged by strong affections. “Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait!” she says out loud, pounding the steering wheel and grabbing onto it, shaking it. She can’t actually be where she is! How did the night, starting at the top of the mountain with Chinese and TV, run like a landslide of shit down to this low ravine here? Does she really want to go up there and just be in an office? There is no mystery, no attraction, no reward, no surprise in the empty corridors of an office at ten at night — she knows from firsthand experience. Spending her last night in an office, that’s insane. But the thing is, in that office up there? There is Martin. There is Martin. And the universal truth is, it matters not where he is, if he is drowning in the ocean or burning in a fire — that’s where his lover wants to be. So it doesn’t matter if he’s an unshowered, crabby, gaseous, overworked, eye-twitching, mind-dulled man under the purgatorial light, walking the barren halls with their unringing phones and bad art. She wants to be up there. How could she help but find herself parked here, regardless of what she told herself earlier in the evening — that there would be no calling Martin tonight, no talking to Martin? A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and at this hour, she has thrown all consistency to the wind.

And yet, something stops her from going in. She sits in the car for twenty minutes and doesn’t move. If you’re the night guardsman, and you’re listening carefully, after a while through the glass you can even hear the car start up again. She drew your attention because she just sat out there for twenty minutes. Then you saw her bang really hard on the steering wheel, she looked like a crazy! You had to ask yourself, What’s she up to? And then to just leave! Almost a peel-out. Sit in your car twenty minutes, just to leave again? Wonder what that was all about.

It was about coming to your goddamn senses, she thinks, driving off. And here’s why: Martin has made it clear to her what the terms are, and she can’t accept the terms. It’s as simple as that. He did all those wonderful things — he took her to the top of the Hancock building, to Gino’s, to the Art Institute, and then when the time came he took her back to the hospital, and she thought she knew they had arrived but because of his canards she was able to think but maybe it’s another DMV, which was all she needed, that and the blindfold, to follow him in and sit next to him and deal with being in the hell she was in. And he didn’t leave her. And when the doctor said, in essence, things are bad, by using words like “advanced,” “aggressive,” “better for chances of recovery,” Martin was the one, because she was too stunned, to ask the questions. He was good to her, she had reason to be parked outside his building. But he had also done something terribly, terribly unexpected, something truly surprising, revealing of his true character — something terribly honest.

The doctor’s visit was on a Friday, and after the trauma of it, the night followed in a deep funk, and it was a godsend to have Martin next to her in her bed. Saturday she woke up and found the funk replaced by a burning need to know a thousand things. All the questions she would have asked the doctor, had she had the power to the day before, came to her all at once. Martin had to remind her of many of the things the doctor had said. He practically took her through the entire prognosis again, the options that were available and the consequences that followed from them. But his expertise was limited, so midmorning, he went out for breakfast and stopped at a local bookstore, where he picked up a book that took a breast cancer patient step by step from discovery and diagnosis all the way through remission. He returned with it and together they ate and they read and they debated, and they came to conclusions: the goal was to do whatever gave her the best chance of a complete recovery. It would not be without its consequences.

“You think I should have the mastectomy,” she said.

“No, I think you have to wait until the doctors get in there,” he said, “and let them decide that, but yeah, I think you should give them permission beforehand, that if they think they should do it, they do it.”

“And what do I do without my breasts,” she said, “such as they are?”

“You . . . I don’t know,” he said. “You don’t do any nursing for a while.”

He must have seen it on her face. Don’t do any nursing? Was he not aware that the prospect of having children was becoming dimmer and dimmer, and was he so insensitive that he didn’t think in advance that she might be bothered by that? Not that she was bothered — she was fine with it — but to be reminded like that? What was wrong with him?

“No, that was a bad joke,” he said quickly. “That was a terrible joke. I’m sorry I said that. I was trying for a little humor.”

“I think you should stick to reasoning,” she said.

What she had wanted him to say, of course, was, What do you do without breasts? I don’t know. I won’t mind. But they weren’t talking about the two of them at the moment. They were talking only about her, getting her to a place where she could admit these difficult circumstances to herself so she could make the right decisions. Somehow, by the end of Saturday night, they had gotten there, more or less. She looked past the bad humor. She thanked him many times. He went home. She wanted it that way. It had been an exhausting two days.

It wasn’t until Sunday — or three days before the scheduled operation — that they got around to talking about the two of them. He came over early and was standing in his spring overcoat and wouldn’t sit down. She came out from the kitchen and said, “Why are you still standing?” “I’ve been thinking about something,” he said, “and I think you should know what it is.” She knew not to like the sound of that. For all the things she had had to worry about since her diagnosis, she had not forgotten that a busy man, a workaholic, a sworn bachelor would probably not find it in his best interest to play nursemaid to a sometime girlfriend. He had acquitted himself the past two days like a gentleman — a king, really — but it was going to happen sooner or later, something like this: I wish you the very best of luck, Lynn, but I’m not equipped for it. I do hope you call me when all of this is through. “Will you at least take your coat off?” she asked. “Of course,” he said. When that was done, she handed him his cup of coffee. “Let’s take this over by the sofa,” she said.

And there he laid it all out for her: he was hers. Entirely. Whatever she needed from him, she had it. He would take days off work. He would be by her side at every appointment. He would see her through the entire thing. “From start to finish,” he said. “If you’d rather have Sherry or Diane or whoever, that’s fine. I’m just making myself available.” “Thank you, Martin,” she said. She was stunned again, speechless — what a surprise. “I’m touched,” she said. “I won’t know what I’m doing,” he said, “but I’m willing to try — whatever it takes.” “I’m pleased,” she said. “Really, I’m very touched.” “But there’s one thing I have to make clear,” he said. “It’s a condition, I guess. And I know it’s terrible timing, but I can’t . . . you see, I watched you, the past couple of days, Lynn. You surprised me — especially yesterday. Yesterday, it was like you came alive. You wanted to know everything. And you dealt with these hard . . . these goddamn hard facts. I was so impressed. And that got me thinking last night, when I went home, got me thinking that you could handle anything. Anything.”

“Why don’t you tell me what it is you have to tell me,” she said.

He set his coffee down on the table and took her hands. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. It predates all . . . this,” he said. “And it is bad timing, but it’s not the time to be dishonest. Not now. And so I’ll just say it — I’ve been thinking for a while now that you and I are not right for each other. In the long term, I mean. And I would hate to go through this with you and the whole time you’re thinking . . . well, I don’t know what — that I’m doing it because I’m in for the long haul. I am in for the long haul to make you better, but not because —”

“Yeah, I get it, I know!” she cried, cutting him short. “You’re not the marrying type, I get it!”

“No, it’s not just that,” he said. “It’s that, you and I . . . I’m just being honest here. I am totally committed to seeing you through this. But as a friend,” he said. “Only as a friend.”

Well, wasn’t that something? Martin Grant was honest. He was an honest man. Of course he had had to give her a swift kick in the ass before she could realize it. He had had to knock the wind out of her to show her just how honest he was. Tending to her, nursing her — he’d take that. Breast cancer, that part was fine. It was the sum of her parts that was not, in the end, what he wanted. She told him she couldn’t do it that way, impose on him that way if he . . . and he tried to object by saying . . . but she said I’m sorry, I just can’t . . . and he said will you think it over . . . and she said no. He left soon after. She spent a sad Sunday afternoon alone.

And now, maybe she should ease off the gas a little. Doing ninety down Lake Shore Drive — that’s a suicide mission, which can sometimes be a dream of rescue. They don’t fix the potholes this far south. There are longer spells between working streetlights, too, when the black sky descends through the open sunroof, blotting her out again — until, first hood, then dash, then her hand on the wheel, she is lit all too brightly once more. She’s avoiding her face in the mirror and all the lachrymose self-pity etched there. Fuck that. And for those of you who think Lynn Mason in addition to cancer suffers from the disease the talk shows diagnose as Needing the Man, if you think that’s why she was parked outside Martin’s office building, then you haven’t yet understood the special circumstances of this Tuesday night, the forces at play that make her desperate and wanting in a way that is wholly unlike her. She has never — or not often — suffered from Needing the Man. Self-sufficiency has always been her first and last commandment. And not because she was of a generation of girls taught to reject the dependency suffered by their mothers and grandmothers. It wasn’t a man she was afraid of losing herself to. It was a person, another person. It wasn’t political, this headstrong determination to answer to no one, to achieve, to be the boss, to earn and sock it away, to use foul language whenever she goddamn well pleased, to eat rich, to fuck who she wanted to fuck and to fire who needed to be fired even if they broke into tears. It was personal. She did not care to hitch her wagon to anyone else, because she knew truth, happiness, success, all of what was deep and holy, was already present in the car with her. She just didn’t have access to any of it tonight and wanted someone with her in the passenger seat.

Because fear of death, boy, that has a way of menacing your convictions and making you feel lonely. Death has a way of ruining your plans and sending you on a tailspin on what should be a work night. Really, Lynn, better slow down, she tells herself. If not for your life, at least for the price of a ticket. She looks at the clock in the dash: midnight. She loves the Saab. What will happen to the Saab if she does, in fact, die? Better question: just where is she headed in the Saab at midnight at ninety miles an hour down Lake Shore Drive? Well, it’s probably not the ideal place to be, this club she knows on the South Side — this club Martin introduced her to, where they spent some time together, called the Velvet Lounge. And the thing she plans on doing, catching the midnight set — is not something she’s doing out of a genuine love of jazz, she admits that. She’s going there for Martin, to remember Martin, to mourn Martin. She’s going for nostalgia’s sake. So isn’t it just perfectly appropriate that the Velvet Lounge should be closed on Tuesdays? She sits in her car outside the bar, listening to “St. Louis Blues” on a CD Martin had left behind. Got the St. Louis Blues! / Blue as I can be! / Man’s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea! Appropriately, it’s a very short song. These stupid enduring artifacts — a bar, a song — that stick around after the lover has cast his heart into the sea, they are solace and agony both. She is drawn toward them for the promise of renewal, but the main experience is a deepening of the woe.

It’s past midnight. She’s miles from him. Home. The word she wants is home. She doesn’t believe she will have the strength to submit herself to the doctors tomorrow without him. In a moment of clarity, she asks herself, is she really in love with Martin, with Martin, or is her broken heart circumstantial? Would she feel such emotion for him if she were not going into the hospital tomorrow, if he hadn’t arranged her first trip to the doctor with such compassion, if he were not the last man to know her body intimately before it would be grievously altered? And then the answer comes to her: all broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making. She might as well admit it — yes, she’s in love with Martin, and she’s discovered it at the worst possible time, after he’s broken her heart. In a sudden reversal of all that conviction she had when peeling away from the curb that Martin’s office was the worst place to be, and contacting Martin the worst thing she could do, she goes in search of a pay phone. She has her cell phone, but if she calls on the cell she won’t have the option of hanging up at the last minute without Caller ID informing him who was calling.

She calls from the pay phone of a closed gas station. It isn’t unreasonable to expect to catch him at his desk. In fact, despite the late hour, it doesn’t even cross her mind that he could be anywhere else. The familiar ring, the familiar voice mail — speak now or forever hold on to your self-respect. She hangs up. Wise choice. She calls back. “Martin, I’m at this number, it’s —” She gives him the number. “Can you call me here when you get back to your desk, please? It’s urgent.” She peers about as she waits. There is a dark orange light cast above the gas pumps that is almost supernatural in its hazy Halloween glow, illuminating, though that’s not the right word — animating the pumps and the oil stains and the pockmarks and the overflowing garbage pails into something ugly and vaguely menacing, and when a man pushing a shopping cart rattles his way across the pavement in the dark, the noise unnerves her, and she looks around. Great, now she’s frightened of being attacked, too, of rapists and murderers and of all men lurking this late at night. Talk about a landslide of shit. At this eerie-ass gas station at the witching hour, folks, she has officially been buried in it. All she needs now is the start of rain, the motor failing to turn over, a car with tinted windows to stop at an uncomfortable distance, and a plague of locusts. Wouldn’t that make the night complete? A football field’s distance away the highway looms. She hears the faint whir of whizzing cars. Has it been two minutes, or four hours, since she called? She tries again. “Martin,” she says. “I need to talk, please call me back.” “Martin,” she says, on her third try. “Are you at home?”

He is at home, sleeping. “What time is it?” he says, after the sixth ring. Oh, no — how long has he been at home? Why is he home? How could he be home? Now in the time before her reply, the entire evening requires rethinking. She envisioned him in familiar surroundings — refilling his coffee and pulling out a file and popping aspirin and readjusting his trousers after sitting down. She took comfort knowing where he was, even if she wasn’t with him. Finding him at home, however, waking him up, she realizes she knows nothing of where he might have been or what he was doing, and that’s very, very unsettling. She thinks the worst — a drink with someone new, fresh conversation, the beginning of what he does want. She’s lost him. “What are you doing home?” she asks. “What am I doing?” he says. “I’m sleeping.” “When did you leave work?” she asks. “I don’t know,” he says. “Seven?” Seven? She doesn’t say it aloud but inside it’s a scream as loud as that in the dressing room. Seven? She’s been picturing him for five hours in a place she thought she knew and now she knows nothing. What she badly needs is a step-by-step explanation of everything he’s done tonight. But she can’t ask for that. Better come to the business at hand before she says something pathetic. Too late: “What have you been doing at home since seven?” she asks. “I mean, isn’t it unlike you, to go home at seven?” “I was tired,” he explains. “I wanted to come home.” “So you went home at seven?” “Yes, Lynn,” he says. “I came home at seven. I ordered food, I watched TV — what’s going on?” So nothing out of the ordinary, she thinks. Nothing social. No dates. He’s honest with her, she knows that by now — at last, tell the man why you’re calling.

“I’ve changed my mind,” she says. “I need you to go with me. I don’t know what I was thinking. I won’t be able to do it without you.”

There’s silence on his end. “But I thought . . .” he begins. “Okay,” he resumes, a second later. “I’ll go with you.”

“You don’t have to worry,” she says. “I understand the conditions. I fully accept the conditions.”

“Okay, but . . . what’s changed? Because on Sunday you said —”

“I’m scared,” she says simply. He doesn’t reply. “It’s just that I’m scared.”

“Okay,” he says. “What time do you need me to pick you up?”

HEADING BACK ON LAKE SHORE DRIVE, she is calm as a dove in a cage. No music, just the wind coming in from the sunroof and the Saab’s faithful trill. To her right is the quiet lake. She remembers the time the car went kapooey. As she drove along someone might have been strapped to the underbelly banging on it with a monkey wrench. It jerked and tottered, and the strange movement and the clanking filled her with anxiety, as if she were the extension of consciousness of the machine she loved. She took it in and when she got it back three days later, all had been returned — the familiar purr of the motor, the smooth palpable glide of the tires on the street. She feels like that now: steady, quiet, functioning, recovered. No longer gadding, flitting like a pinball. Those hours are behind her, and only now can she see it: at twelve-forty-eight AM enveloped by the sturdy Saab and moving north at a reasonable speed she knows exactly where it is, the right place that has eluded her all evening, and what she should have been doing all along. The night’s drama had muddled her, obscuring her rightful destination, and within fifteen minutes she arrives. She enters the building and greets the man who watches over it at night. He knows her by name. “Surprised to see you here this late!” he says, and with these words she knows instantly that her biggest mistake was ever leaving to begin with. It was climbing into that cab and heading home. She takes the elevator to sixty and walks down to her office. Has anyone but her yet recognized the critical importance to the agency’s future of these two new business pitches? And the strategies haven’t even been worked out yet! They have two weeks until presentation. It’s insane to think she even has a moment to spare. She sits down at her desk. Here is a good place to be, right here, thinking, What must be done? What must I do first? Amazing how energized she feels, given these last few months of everyday fatigue. No different than waking up after a long night’s rest, and she is ready to start the morning. She reaches out to her mouse, disrupting the screensaver. The clock says it’s just after one. Just a very early morning, that’s all. She works until six.

She’s exhausted. She rises off her chair and goes to the window. Just now the sun is coming up, the city dot-matrixing into life again, one dark spot at a time turning into light, brightening the buildings and the streets and distant highways. The stippling reminds her of the giant Seurat painting in the Art Institute, the one Martin liked. Not that Chicago, with its hard charm and gray surfaces — practically still with inactivity at this hour — is anything like Seurat’s colorful sprawling picnic. But watching the sky open at her window, it is magnificent, especially after all the work she’s put in, and a minor epiphany hits. We’ve got it all wrong. Normal business hours should be from nine p.m. to five A.M. so that we’re greeted by the sun when work is through. All that was despairing and hopeless the night before has evaporated, and all that talk about the transformative power of the light of day has come true for her. She is strong again, on firm ground again. She has done things as best as she could imagine doing them, and if her imagination is an impoverished one, if it lacks in some fundamental way and the result has been a default to working harder, working longer, her life defaulted to the American dream — hasn’t it been a pursuit of happiness all the same? Her pursuit of happiness. And no one, not Martin, not anyone, can take that away from her. It can be taken away only by death. And because of these new business opportunities, death, she’s afraid, will have to wait.

She picks up the phone. She just wants to let him know that last night she went a little crazy — who knows why. But with the light of day, her senses have returned, and she doesn’t need him to take her to the hospital after all.

“What are you talking about?” he says. “I was just about to leave to pick you up.”

“No,” she says. “That’s not necessary.”

“Lynn,” he says, “I’m picking you up.”

“Martin, I’m already at work. I’m a block away from the hospital. I don’t need to be picked up.”

“Lynn, why are you doing this?”

She promises to call when she’s out of surgery. He protests again, but she insists. She hangs up and staggers over to the white leather sofa. It’s cluttered with free samples of former client products — cans of motor oil, boxes of lightbulbs — and accordion file folders full of documents. Moving all this to the floor she lies down and, just before falling asleep, resolves that when she wakes up, the first thing she will do tomorrow — today — is clean this shameful office, and make a new start of things.