Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

The guilelessness of the question caught her off-guard, as if a child had asked it, and it was her duty to explain. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know the dictionary definition, but I would define it as someone who thought of himself as better, or superior, to other people — someone who looked down on them and maybe deep down didn’t like them all that much.”

“Then I’m not an elitist,” he replied quickly. “I like people a lot.”

“I know you do — which is why I like you, ” she said. “And it’s me asking you to talk to her. Not Jim Jackers. Not Karen Woo, or Amber, or Marcia. Me. Because I’m convinced there’s something wrong and that she might be scared and she might need help.”

She hung forward, waiting for a reply. His eyes never wavered from hers, her incredible blue eyes, persuasive just by their sheer force of clarity and beauty. He merely said, “Let me think it over.”

He was standing in her doorway ten minutes later. “Want to get some lunch?” he asked.

It was a cool day for late May, with a crisp lake breeze. Postage-stamp gardens lined Michigan Avenue all the way to the Water Tower. Red and yellow tulips were hanging on in the last days of spring. The sky was bright but the sun had peaked — it was just past one. They headed north, moving in and out of the city’s large swaths of sunlight and shade created by the tall buildings and the streets that ran between them. They stopped for sandwiches on the way. They sometimes had lunch together on the benches in the courtyard of the Water Tower where the pigeons pecked at the ground and the man in gold paint stood on a milk crate still as a statue in hope of donations, and the tourists shopping at the department stores along the Magnificent Mile stopped to consult guidebooks or take pictures. They had eaten there so often, apparently, that they didn’t need to ask each other where they were headed, which revealed a familiarity between them that was frankly a little surprising.

He was accustomed to the men catching sight of her and staring as she walked past. She was magnetic even in blue jeans and a simple cotton brown sweater, walking with her hands tucked deep into her back pockets. She would remove a hand from time to time to resettle a wind-whipped strand of hair.

They sat at one of the benches and ate their sandwiches. Once they were finished and he had returned from the trash bin, he said, “I looked the word elitist up in the dictionary. Do you think I’m a dork or what?”

“You’re a copywriter,” she said. “All copywriters are dorks.”

“‘Resembling someone with the belief —’. . how did it go?” he asked himself.

“You really looked it up?”

“‘. . the belief of being a part of a superior or privileged group —’. . something like that. ‘Part of a superior or privileged group’ — I know that’s right.”

“You really looked it up,” she said. She was turned to him with her legs crossed, one hand holding her hair flat while her elbow rested on her knee. The gold tips of her hair wavered in the wind.

“Well, first you said you thought they had made me into a cynic,” he said. “But I’m not a cynic, and I can prove it. I came back to your office, remember? Twice. I came back to argue it. I was a skeptic — there’s a big difference between that and a cynic. And the difference,” he said, “was you. If it was just them saying she had cancer, I’d be a cynic, you bet. But because you were saying it, too, I was willing to give it some credit. But you have to admit that most of what they say is bullshit, which I try to avoid. And because I avoid it, people think I’m an elitist. I personally never gave any credence to that, but when you said it, I had to wonder. But your definition didn’t sound right to me — that an elitist was somebody who probably didn’t like other people. That’s a misanthrope,” he said.

“So you looked it up.”

“Yes, and I’m happy to report back that I’m not an elitist.”

“It really bothered you.”

“It did,” he said.

“Just to clarify,” she said. “I never said you were an elitist. Just that you sounded like one.”

“Okay, but listen. I’m not an elitist by the definition I just gave you, either, Genevieve, the dictionary one, because I’m not a part of the group. I refuse to be a part of any group.”

“Everybody’s a part of a group,” she said.

“In the group photo, maybe. In the Directory of Services. But not in spirit.”

“So what does that make you?” she asked. “A loner?”

“That sounds like somebody wandering at night down a highway.”

“So you’re not a loner. You’re not an elitist, you’re not a cynic. What’s left, Joe? You’re a saint.”

“Yes, a saint,” he said. “I’m a saint. No, there is no word for it. Okay, listen,” he said, straightening on the bench and looking away from her. “So I have a story for you.”

She took the lid off her fountain drink and pulled out an ice cube. She put it in her mouth, fastened the lid back on, and, shivering, resumed holding her hair against the wind.

“How can you eat that?” he asked. “Aren’t you cold?”

She rattled the cube around in her mouth. “Tell me your story.”

He paused, looking down at the pigeons pecking nearby, and at people walking past. There was an art exhibit within the Water Tower and groups of two and three kept passing in and out. “So I started running with this clique in high school,” he began. He had turned away again and wasn’t looking at her while he spoke. “I found myself doing a lot of stupid shit. Going along with the flow, you know. I smoked a lot of pot with people who were. . Christ, they were all fucked up. Did you know I went to high school in Downers Grove?”

“I thought you were from Maine,” she said.

“We lived in Maine until my dad got laid off. Then we moved here. I didn’t want to move. Who wants to move when you’re just about to start high school? Starting over again with new people, it sucked. The first couple of years sucked. But by the time I was a junior I had made some friends. Poor fuckers from bad homes. It was actually a great year. More fun than I’d had as a freshman for sure. So the year goes by, school’s about to let out for the summer, and me and my friends are going to kick the shit out of this kid because he’s been calling up this girl who goes out with a friend of ours. Calling her up to ask her out, and bad-mouthing my friend while he’s at it. Bad-mouthing his parents, too, because these people. .” He trailed off and shook his head. “This friend of ours, his parents were serious drunks. All I remember is going over to his house and all the dogs everywhere, and bottles of whiskey stacked along one wall in the kitchen. Dog shit just lying around the house and nobody ever picked it up. Anyway, it got back to my friend that his parents were being bad-mouthed, and naturally we decided that this little shit had to get his ass kicked. The shit’s name was Henry. Henry Jenkins. Henry Jenkins of Downers Grove North. He had been a friend of ours for like a month, until he annoyed somebody and we got rid of him. Henry was a scrawny little dude, almost looked stunted, like he never got any bigger than eighth grade, even though he was the same year as us. Anybody could kick the shit out of this kid. Our friend didn’t need our help. But we all agreed that because he bad-mouthed his parents and tried to steal his girl that we needed to get in on it, too.”

“Boys,” she said.

“No, I wouldn’t call us boys,” he said, shaking his head. “Some of those guys were already big pituitary dudes. Not boys. And I remember thinking, nobody needs anybody’s help kicking Henry’s ass. Henry could walk past a shoe store and be bruised for weeks. So the day it’s supposed to happen, after school, I have terrible butterflies in my stomach, because I’m nervous — was I really going to do this thing? There are six of us, right, six — and then little scrawny Henry. It’s not my fight. I know I should step away. But even that isn’t enough — that’s just cowardly. What I really need to do is object. To my friends. What, am I crazy, right? They’re my friends. You only have so many friends in high school, and I had gone a long time without any. You don’t object. You do what they do. So when I tell them it isn’t my fight —”