Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

But Marcia refused, and after hugs and good-byes walked toward the elevator with Roland, carrying nothing but that denim bag that served as her purse. She probably hadn’t even reached the lobby floor before Jim Jackers began to scavenge the useless shit she had left behind.

Nobody could believe Benny was just going to let Marcia leave without admitting he had a crush. He had promised himself he would and stupidly spread word of that promise to the rest of us, but every time the timing was right, he had a new excuse. The Monday after Tom’s spree, he was too busy accumulating conflicting versions of events and offering his own to tear himself away. That continued through Tuesday, and on Wednesday he claimed he was too busy working on the new business. On Thursday Joe told us Lynn was in the hospital, and we got wrapped up debating whether or not it was a good idea for us to visit her. But now it was Friday, and suddenly Marcia was leaving forever, and still Benny had said nothing. It was a mystery to us how he could be such a confident and lively raconteur and yet such a bashful lover. Jim came out of Marcia’s office holding the souvenir of the Statue of Liberty Marcia had disparaged on her way out, along with a shot glass and a copy of Vogue.

“Benny,” he said, “are you really going to let her leave without saying something to her?”

It happened all the time. Maybe someone had a legitimate gripe that deserved airing. Maybe someone had a compliment that shouldn’t go unspoken. No one said a thing. So long and stay in touch, that’s usually all we said. Take care of yourself, good luck. We said nothing about affection, appreciation, admiration. But neither did we say don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

“She’s coming with us tomorrow to see Lynn, isn’t she?” he asked. “So I’ll see her tomorrow. I’ll say something then. What’s the big deal?”

But Saturday came and went, we paid our visit, and still he said nothing. The following Monday, Marcia showed up in the building lobby, as if taking a page out of Tom Mota’s book.

Roland was at the front desk and wouldn’t let her go up, not even as a visitor.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “After the incident, we can’t let former employees back in the building. You’re not even supposed to be in the lobby,” he said.

She convinced him to call Benny. “Send her up here!” Benny hollered at Roland into the phone. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I can’t do that, Benny,” Roland said helplessly as Marcia stared at him across the lobby post. “It’s against the new rules.”

“Well, then tell her to hold on,” Benny replied, standing up. “I’ll come down to her.”

He fixed up his corkscrew curls in the cloudy brass of the elevator. When he reached the lobby floor he sucked in his gut and stepped out with several others. It was lunchtime. People were coming and going through the revolving doors.

“Come on, man!” he said as he approached Roland. “Does she look like a threat to you?”

“It’s the new rules, Benny!”

“Don’t give him a hard time,” said Marcia. “He’s just doing his job.”

“What are you doing back here?” Benny asked.

She had returned, she said, in order to take apart Chris Yop’s chair, that used to be Ernie Kessler’s, so she could toss it piece by piece into the lake.

“Of course you have,” said Benny. “Let’s go outside and talk.”

Which is how it came to pass that we saw them conversing outside the building on our way to lunch. We spent that hour speculating on what Marcia was doing back at the office and what the two of them were discussing. Perhaps she liked him. Perhaps Roland, at his post in the lobby, was wondering the same thing, because despite the hard time Benny gave him about keeping Marcia in the lobby according to the new rules, we knew the two men were friends, and that Benny had talked to him just as he talked to the rest of us about his paralyzing and unrequited crush. “So what are you going to do about it, Benny?” he’d ask. “I’m going to tell her,” Benny announced at last, after Tom’s spree. “I promised myself I would and I will.” Maybe, thought Roland, that confession was happening right now, right outside the building. He returned his attention to his small amount of daily paperwork. When he looked up again ten minutes later to see how things were progressing, Benny and Marcia were gone.

ROLAND HAD APPEARED TO LOOK right at them as they walked past, but they were sheltered within a group of incoming lawyers from the firm below us and eventually he looked away again. They passed by freely, and after stepping off the elevator on sixty, walked together in the direction of Jim’s cubicle.

Marcia wanted Benny’s reassurance that Jim wasn’t there. Benny explained that he had sent Jim out to pick up sandwiches at the Potbelly, where the line was always atrocious.

“I’m telling you,” he said. “He won’t be back for hours.”

“If you tell anybody about this,” said Marcia, with a familiar, scolding, clawing tone. How he loved that tone!

“I wouldn’t be threatening me right now if I were you,” he said to her. “One call down to Roland and I could have you arrested.”

They made it down to Jim’s cube and Marcia set the envelope upright between two rows of keys on his keyboard before noticing the souvenir she had purchased during a visit with her family to the Statue of Liberty. “Hey, what’s this doing here?” she asked. Then she noticed that Jim also had her Fighting Illini shot glass, several magazines, and her Scorpio keychain, which listed the attributes of her personality. After his initial pillaging, he’d gone back for more. “What the fuck?” she said.

“Well,” replied Benny, sheepishly. “You did leave them behind.”

Jim wasn’t the only one with Marcia’s things. If she had stayed and scoured more workstations, she would have found them divvied up among us and scattered across the office. The only items we left behind were her unused tampons and marketing textbooks. Within two hours of her departure, her boxes had been picked clean. Don Blattner took her radio. Karen Woo swept down on her bookends. Someone of remarkable stealth stole in and took Chris Yop’s chair, which used to be Ernie’s, which Marcia had replaced with Tom Mota’s, which Chris Yop had tossed in the lake. Now someone else had the burden of possessing the wrong serial numbers but the pleasures of an ergonomic masterpiece.

“I don’t even feel like giving it to him now,” she said, reaching for the envelope.

“Don’t do that,” said Benny.

She left the envelope where it was.

Those of us who didn’t go to lunch that day saw them talking by the elevators. That was most of us, because of the pressing demands of the new business. We wondered the same thing those of us who’d gone to lunch wondered. After Marcia slipped past Roland on her way out — coming off a full elevator, ingeniously disguised as one of us — we all went down to Benny’s office and asked him what they had been talking about. He refused to say. “Never mind,” he said, dismissing us outright. We had to think that could only forebode bad news. Someone as loquacious as Benny Shassburger reduced to “Never mind”? No doubt that meant he had been rejected. We asked him a second time and a third. We came back fifteen minutes later and asked the same question in a different way. We sent him e-mails. “Never mind,” he wrote back. Not wanting to rub it in, we let it drop.

When he returned to his cube, after dropping Benny’s sandwich off, Jim puzzled over the white envelope on his keyboard. On the cover of the card, a cheap generic Hallmark item made of recycled paper, a hound dog’s fat snout and heavy ears rested on a pair of crisscrossed paws, while his blubbery furry body floated in a background of blue. Above his cocked and woeful head, a cumulus-shaped thought bubble announced, “I feel so blue. .” And on the inside, “For the way I treated you.” There was no note, no revisiting specific slights. Only her name to inform him who had left it. Marcia. It was scrawled reluctantly. He pinned the card to his cube wall.