Lisa Owens - Not Working

This lunchtime crowd of suited male youngsters teeming from the entrance of my bank’s HQ had better be schoolchildren on a field trip. I may not be sitting on a vast fortune, but I do think it’s fair to expect that the people entrusted with my entire worldly savings are old enough to, at the very least, shave.

Today it seems as though every person I pass is trying to lock eyes with every person they pass, in the hope they’ll recognize the One among the masses; also, that the One will recognize them too.

In a new bar with a halfhearted and confused theme (light-up globes, old wooden tennis racquets, oversize keys) comes bottle after bottle after bottle of white wine, which started off sour and stringent but has developed a mellow pineapple-ish flavor in the drinking. The conversation has tacked this way and that, growing more confessional as sobriety ebbs.

“I’ll tell if you do,” Rachel says.

“No way!” says Lauren. “All right, fuck it. Fifty.”

“As in fifty thousand ?” I clatter my glass down with more force than intended, soaking both hands and cuffs with wine. To save money, I skipped dinner and the inevitable consequences are now taking their toll. “As in that’s what you, personally, earn: fifty thousand pounds. To yourself, every year. Wow .”

Lauren clarifies, “Before tax. What, does that seem a lot to you?”

“Are you kidding? Why? What do you make?” I ask Rachel.

She twirls her glass by the stem. “Not as much. Forty-seven.”

I wring my hands to dry them. “Forty-seven!” My voice, shrill with shock, can’t get any higher.

“I earn way less than my school friends, though,” she adds. “They’re all making sixty, seventy plus. Actually, Fran’s raking in seventy, aren’t you?”

Fran nods, blushes, sheepish.

“I don’t want to say what I was making,” I say. “Where did I go so wrong?” I turn to Lauren. “I thought you got paid a pittance like me. When did you start raking in the big bucks?”

“I suppose I just stuck around long enough. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t love it there, but it’s nice to know these years haven’t been wasted, that I’m actually worth something tangible. Does that make sense?”

—

Later (one bottle, two, whatever: keeping track is pointless and boring ) the talk turns, inevitably, to babies.

“Rob and I are trying,” Lauren says and clamps a hand to her mouth. “I shouldn’t have said that. We’re not meant to be telling anyone!” she squeaks through her fingers.

I dutifully join the oh-my-God chorus, then Fran leans in. “So are we! I’m not meant to tell anyone either, but”—she clutches fingers with me and Rachel—“I have to tell my girls!”

There follows an onslaught: Since when? How often? Was it weird the first time? How did you know you were ready? et cetera. It’s like virginity all over again; now, as then, I have little to contribute. I don’t even know the right questions to ask.

“You’re very quiet, Claire,” says Rachel. “If you weren’t knocking back the wine, I’d wonder if you were already on the way. When do you think you and Luke will? This could be the perfect time without a job to worry about, no?”

“Except a job is precisely what I’m worried about.”

“Okay, so here’s what you should do: get a job in management consultancy, put in a year or two max, then get pregnant just in time to enjoy your corporate maternity package. Problem solved!” says Fran.

“How does that solve my problem? The whole point is that I want to find a job that means something — and please, before anyone says anything, I know motherhood is meaningful, and I know it’s a job. But is the best use of my skills and time really producing another human who will only grow up to disappoint me the way I’ve clearly disappointed my parents? Aren’t there enough people already?” I exhale and cover one eye with one hand, stare at the table, dab at stray grains of salt with the other. “Oh God, I’ve totally hijacked this. Sorry, sorry, I think it’s lovely you’re ready to start families, honestly. And I don’t not want to have children. I just…” I take a few breaths. “How can I bring another life into the world when I don’t know what I’m doing with my own?”

“Babe,” breathes Lauren.

“Anyway, I’m barren.”

“Oh what ?” says Fran. “Shit, sorry. We didn’t know.”

“Well, not officially, but I know . You know? Isn’t it exactly the sort of thing I’d be?”

Someone puts their hand on mine, strokes the back with their thumb.

“We love you, Claire. We’re here for you — you know that,” says Fran, as more hands pile on.

I feel ludicrous, like a sad Disney princess consoled by a coterie of cheerful woodland fauna.

“So, to sum up: babies! Yay!” I shake my fists by my shoulders and look up to a trio of lopsided smiles: everyone’s too far gone to disguise their concern. “Hey! What are you all still doing here? Go on, go home and get procreating!”

Perhaps these two beautiful Italian women chatting with their backs against the toilet mirrors would be so kind as to step aside so that the less naturally fortunate among us might have a chance to disguise our many flaws.

Now all my friends have left, but I’m still here and have somehow slipstreamed into a conversation with a young man, a poet and playwright. (He tutors wealthy children for money.) He is twenty-three years old, with eyes so big and intense I can hardly bring myself to meet them, and a name I can’t get right, no matter how many times he tells me — Calum or Caleb or Conrad; it becomes a running joke in which he keeps changing it to confuse me. He’s earnest, idealistic, and his hair curls perfectly, as though for me alone, and he’s listening to everything I say with something that feels close to awe, as though he’s never met anyone like me before; and he laughs at all my jokes with his head thrown back so that I can see the baby-pink ripple of his palate, and he touches my shoulder, my elbow and (once) the small of my back with feather-light fingertips — as if he wasn’t really touching me at all, but rather wanted to show the impulse was there, one I understand because I’ve felt it too; not romantic, of course, because I have Luke, who I love and who I only haven’t mentioned because it simply, honestly hasn’t come up, nothing more sinister, however, being equally honest, there is nonetheless an attraction in the purely scientific sense of two discrete entities drawn together; but when he mentions a film by a director from Hong Kong, a film Luke made me watch, about yearning and forbidden love, I go, “Oh! That’s my—” and I’m about to confess, about to say boyfriend’s favorite film, but I so don’t want this boy’s attention to curdle, because when do I ever get to feel this good, this charismatic and this un-monstrous ? So, I say like a traitor, “That’s my favorite film,” though I found it in truth a little slow, but no, credit where it’s due, still beautiful; and right now I love that he loves it. I love that he loves it more than I care that Luke loves it, because this boy is new and full of possibility, he is a poet who thinks I am “rare” (it glows like a coal in the pit of my stomach), and he thinks I know things, such as WHO I AM and WHAT I WANT, whereas Luke, good, old, devoted Luke, knows I don’t know anything, and not only that, he also knows all my faults and bad habits — he has seen me on the toilet, seen me squeezing my pores at the mirror, kissed me despite putrid morning breath, made love to me despite all the horrors of my body, heard me say mean, bitter things about people, about himself, to his face for nothing, less than nothing — for being supportive, patient, constant, too loving, too accepting; for simply sticking with me even when he knows what a hollow person I am, and, “Um…” I’m saying to the boy, daring to look into those huge bovine eyes, to steady myself with a hand on his shoulder, “um, just…I’ll be…Give me one minute,” and then I get out of there, plowing through bodies, and tumble into the first taxi I can find, my insides humming, disappointed but grateful, ultimately, that I never did get a proper handle on his name, so that I can’t spend tomorrow, or next week, or next month Googling him and in turmoil about what might have been.