Bentley Little - The Ignored

But I ignored him and uncapped my pen and silently went back to work.

That night, when I got home, Jane said she wanted to go somewhere, do something. We had not really been out of the house since I’d gotten the job, and she was feeling cramped and restless and more than a little housebound. I was, too, to be honest, and we both decided that it would be nice to get out for an evening.

We went to Balboa, and we ate dinner at the Crab Cooker, buying individual bowls of clam chowder and eating them on the bench outside the restaurant, watching and commenting upon the passersby. Afterward, we drove down the peninsula to the pier across from the Fun Zone, parking in the small lot next to the pier itself. This had always been “our” spot. The site of many a free date during our poorer days, this was where I had taken Jane on our first night out, and where we had later made out in the car. Throughout the first two years of our relationship, when we could not even afford to go to a movie, we’d come here: walking through the Fun Zone itself; window-shopping in the surf stores and T-shirt shops; watching the kids in the arcades; following the boats on the bay; walking out to Ruby’s, the hamburger stand at the end of the pier.

Afterward, after most of the people had gone and the stores had closed, we usually ended up making love in the backseat of my Buick.

It seemed strange going through the Fun Zone now. For the first time, we could afford to buy T-shirts if we wanted. We could afford to play arcade games. Out of habit, though, we did neither. We walked, hand in hand, through the crowds, passing a gang of leather-jacketed punks lounging against a faded fence near the broken Ferris wheel, past a booth offering nighttime harbor cruises. The air was filled with the smell of junk food — hamburgers, pizza, fries — and under that, more subtly, the fishy scent of the bay.

We went into a shell shop and Jane decided that she wanted a sand dollar, so I bought her one. After that, we took the ferry across the bay to Balboa Island, strolled for an hour around the island’s perimeter, bought frozen bananas from an ice cream stand, and took the ferry back.

Returning to the parking lot and the pier, we heard music and saw a crowd of well-heeled yuppies standing on the sidewalk in front of a small club. The neon sign on the wall between the open door and the darkened windows read STUDIO CAFE, and a makeshift sandwich marquee said NOW APPEARING: SANDY OWEN. We stopped for a moment to listen. The music was amazing — jazz saxophone, alternately bop hot and smooth cool, played over soaring, shimmering piano — and was unlike anything I had ever heard. The overall effect was mesmerizing, and we stood on the sidewalk listening for nearly ten minutes before the press of the crowd compelled us to move on.

Instead of walking back to the car, we continued up the sloping sidewalk to the pier. Ruby’s was little more than a square of light against the darkness of the ocean night, and the pier itself was lined with fishermen, dotted with other strolling couples. We passed a group of dark-haired, dark-skinned, dark-clothed high school girls speaking in Spanish, an old man fly-tying on the worn wooden bench, and an overdressed couple leaning against the railing, making out. The music followed us, ebbing and flowing with the breeze, and for some reason it didn’t feel like we were in Orange County. It seemed as though we were in some other, better place, a movie version of Southern California, where the air was clean and the people were nice and everything was wonderful.

Ruby’s was doing a thriving business, a crowd of would-be diners clustered outside the small building, people eating at the chrome tables inside. Jane and I walked around to the rear of the restaurant and took a spot at the railing between two fishermen. It was black on the ocean, the night deeper and darker than it ever got inland, and I stared into the blackness, seeing only the lone bobbing light of a boat on the water. I put my arm around Jane and turned around to face the shore, leaning my back against the metal railing. Above Newport, the sky was orangish, a dome of illumination from the buildings and the cars that kept the real night away. The sound of the waves was muffled, a distant breaking.

In the movie Stardust Memories , there’s a scene in which Woody Allen is drinking his Sunday morning coffee and watching his lover, Charlotte Rampling, read the newspaper on the floor. The Louis Armstrong recording of “Stardust” is on the turntable, and Woody says in a voice over that at that moment the sights, the sounds, the smells, everything came together, everything dovetailed perfectly, and at that instant, for a few brief seconds, he was happy.

That was how I felt with Jane, on the pier.

Happy.

We stood there for a while, saying nothing, enjoying the night, enjoying just being together. Along the coast, we could see all the way to Laguna Beach.

“I’d like to live by the beach,” Jane said. “I love the sound of the water.”

“Which beach?”

“Laguna.”

I nodded. It was a pipe dream — there was no way in hell either of us would ever earn enough money to buy beachfront property in Southern California — but it was something to strive for.

Jane shivered, drawing closer to me.

“It’s getting cold,” I said, putting an arm around her. “You want to head back?”

She shook her head. “Let’s just stay here for a while. Like this.”

“Okay.” I pulled her closer, held her tight, and we stared into the night toward the twinkling lights of Laguna, beckoning to us across the water and the darkness.

We were still living in our small apartment near UC Brea, but I wanted to move. We could afford it now, and I didn’t want to deal with the constant flood of drunken fraternity boys who paraded down our street on their way to or from this week’s keg party. But Jane said she wanted to stay. She liked our apartment, and it was convenient for her since it was close to both the campus and the Little Kiddie Day Care Center, where she worked.

“Besides,” she said, “what if you get laid off or something? We could still survive here. I could afford to pay the rent until you found another job.”

That was my opening. That was my chance. I should’ve told her then and there, I should’ve told her that I hated my job, that I’d made a mistake by taking it and wanted to quit and look for another position.

But I didn’t.

I didn’t say anything.

I don’t know why. It wasn’t like she would’ve jumped down my throat. She might have tried to argue me out of it, but ultimately she would’ve understood. I could have walked away clean, no harm, no foul, and everything would have been over and done with.

I couldn’t do it, though. I didn’t have any work-ethic phobia about quitting, I had no loyalty to some abstract ideal, but as much as I despised my job, as unqualified as I seemed to be for my position, as out of place as I felt among my coworkers, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was supposed to do this, that somehow, for some reason, I should be working at Automated Interface.

And I said nothing.

Jane’s mom dropped by to see us on Saturday morning, and I tried to pretend that I was busy when she came over, hiding in the bedroom and tinkering with a broken sewing machine that had been given to Jane by one of her friends. I had never much liked Jane’s mom, and she had never liked me. We hadn’t seen her since I’d gotten my job, although Jane had told her about it, and while she pretended to be happy that I had finally found full-time work, I could tell she was secretly annoyed that there would be one less thing she could criticize me for and harp on Jane about.