Greg Baxter - Munich Airport

You left your old firm.

That’s right. To start my own business.

But you’re back with them now.

As a consultant.

Are you willing to work here as a full-time employee?

Yes, I think this is a unique opportunity.

Why?

And I’d tell them, but during my explanation of what it was that I liked so much about the opportunity, a certain gloom always came upon me. I’d run out of energy to make eye contact. I’d look at my hands. I’d yawn. I’d start with ebullience and expansiveness, with wit and a sense of purpose, and with each sentence I seemed to tire myself out, as though I were trying to climb the circular steps of an inconceivably tall tower. The fatigue began before I noticed it, and when I did notice it, I always tried to wrap up my speech as soon as possible. After that, we’d go through other questions and scenarios. But I’d already talked myself out of it. I loved that moment — the moment I knew I was going to say no. It was like stopping, turning around, and coming down the stairway of the tower. I felt revived, and generally the interviews went exceedingly well after that, and though I’d get some questions that annoyed me or felt insulting, or outdated, I’d stay engaged, stay polite, because I knew that when I called them to tell them that I couldn’t take the position because my heart was still in my business, I would add, Please keep me in mind for the future.

I finally stopped interviewing for full-time positions.

We can set you up to work remotely, said Chris. You can start when you feel ready, from anywhere, and join us here when it’s appropriate.

Absolutely, I said, that’s perfect, let’s do that as soon as possible.

Perfect, she said, and I was glad to have made her happy, except that I had no energy to work, I had no ideas and I had no enthusiasm. Otis, at that moment, lit another cigarette as he found something else that was either his or that reminded him of Miriam, warmly, or that he figured was worth some money.

Let us know if we can do anything else for you, said Chris.

I sure will.

I could have ended the conversation there. There was nothing else to say. In a week they’d have me set up remotely and I’d be sitting in a café somewhere in Berlin, or in the living room of my father’s house, working on a computer. But I also knew that I could not possibly begin work in a week. I felt then, standing in Miriam’s apartment, that I might never work again, or I might at least leave marketing. So I said, She starved to death. And I said that I was standing in her apartment, sifting through the debris of her life with some guy named Otis, who probably, at one time, was her boyfriend, and didn’t even have the fucking decency to move out of her building after they split up. Chris was silent. I imagined her going immediately to the director and suggesting they find a way to cancel the contract. So I apologized and hurriedly got off the phone.

I went back to wander among the stacks of Miriam’s possessions. Not everything was in an orderly stack, or separated into uncontaminated categories, though my mind keeps trying to remember it that way. There was the couch, which I had turned on its end and surrounded with rolled-up rugs. There were tall standing lamps I had gathered and stood in a crowded circle, and they looked a little bit like brass and chrome flamingos. There was the wardrobe and the sideboard and the squat drinks cabinet, and I had pushed them close together. Close together, it was easy to see how fine these pieces of furniture really were. I thought it was telling that Otis wasn’t saying anything about them, or going near them. I assumed it was because he wanted them the most. It was fifties furniture, what was called Contemporary in the fifties. And they were original. And as I saw how conspicuously Otis ignored them, how transparently little attention he was paying them, the three pieces assumed a great weight in my thoughts, and I felt that I had better protect or destroy them, or whatever it took to make sure Otis could not get his hands on them. Miriam’s wardrobe and sideboard and cabinet were not in perfect condition, but all the brass knobs and handles were original, the keys were original, the glass was original, and the panels were original. They needed some oil, but they weren’t chipped anywhere. They were just the things a young family might spend a month’s salary on in an antiques store. I knelt down by the pile of books. She had a huge variety of books, a variety that, all by itself, dispelled any fear that she had lived a life of imaginative surrender. I opened one of them and saw that she had made notes throughout the margins, in pencil. I opened another. It was the same. And another. Mostly these notes were one-word or brief responses to passages she’d underlined, but also, in the bottom and top margins, sometimes, the passages themselves, transcribed in her own handwriting. At first I couldn’t believe my luck. The first day I arrived, I had gone superficially through drawers and shoeboxes looking for notebooks, diaries, anything that might have contained her everyday thoughts. All I could find were meaningless scribbles on bits of paper, to-do lists, numbers, addresses. I was not looking for an answer to the cause of her death, because I didn’t believe such a thing could exist, but I felt as though it would be the closest thing possible to having a conversation with her. I hadn’t looked inside the books because I never wrote anything inside books, in fact I was sure I had told her, when we were young, that she was not to write in books. But there it was — the thing I sought, a record — contained within her disordered library. But then the feeling of luck was supplanted by distress, because the notes were self-evidently too multitudinous to achieve shape — either in isolation each note would imply its own incompleteness or in the wholeness of them would be torrential white noise, and anything between was an illusion. I also felt distress because her library, though it appeared disarranged, might actually have had some structure, and in my haste and in my presumptuousness I had mishandled it, and erased it. And I felt distress because I could already see that the discovery was lost. Otis had removed some of the books and whatever he did not take we would leave here. We had the money to ship them, of course, but we had already let her discard her things once, and to act, now, as though we were the kind of people who would unbox them at home and go through them was only going to feed our desire to put off, or possibly delay forever, an appreciation of her death. I knew instantly that I wasn’t even going to tell my father I had found them.

Otis had a long dress in his arms, and he was holding it high. He examined it and decided he liked it, and he put it in a pile behind him. The mound of clothes behind him was bigger than the one in front of him. I also saw that he had taken all her jewelry. It was in a small mound by his feet. Hold on with that stuff, I said. He stopped and put his hands on his knees. I said, I just want to make sure there’s nothing that belongs to our mother. He reacted in a way I hadn’t expected, which was to ignore me and continue, and I reacted to him in a way I didn’t expect, which was to do nothing at all, to simply pretend I hadn’t spoken. I went back to reading. Otis kept separating out the things he wanted. I was building up the courage to demand that he stop — but that meant preparing for the possibility that I would have to physically stop him, and I hadn’t had a physical confrontation since I was a teenager. Then Otis stood. He held another dress up by its hanger. It was a dark spring green. It, too, seemed from the fifties. Otis said, This is the dress she got married in. Married? I said. He said, It was a fake marriage, he was gay. Oh, I said. But it was a nice day, we had a big party, said Otis, and Miriam was really happy. I felt a little disarmed by the fact he had said something affectionate about Miriam, and I asked, Have you asked him to meet us for drinks? Otis said, I think he moved to Boston about ten years ago, or Portland. I said it would have been nice to have the husband around for a drink, even a fake husband.