Forget About It Page 7

  Finally in the office I stopped by the kitchen to pour myself my usual two cups of shockingly bad coffee. I was immune to the bad taste at that point and knew that one cup wouldn’t do it, so I poured two cups at once, two cups that I’d pound in record time to save myself a trip. When I got to my desk, I was once again confronted by an e-mail from my father to my mother. Not only was it none of my business but also it nearly made my eyes bleed.

  From: wallygator317@hotmail.com

  To: judypatootie521@hotmail.com

  Subject: Wally through the wall?

  Patootie with the great booty—At work. Sam is asking for a new laptop. Should we indulge even though she still has no job? Eh, Dell can probably give us a good deal, right?

  It had to stop. The copying of me on every single e-mail, the shameless spoiling of Samantha, and must he talk about my mother’s ass? Blegh!

  After about ten minutes of doing not a whole hell of a lot, it dawned on me: Lydia hadn’t barked any orders at me or run around in apoplexy as she normally did on the day of a big presentation. We had the KidCo bigwigs coming in, and Lydia’s pitch was being boarded up for the presentation. It was so eerily quiet, I wondered if she wasn’t even in, so I got up from my desk and found her door was just slightly ajar. I peered through the teeny gap so as not to disturb her if she were indeed crashing to get something done. She was in there all right—and so was someone else, his back to me, sort of half sitting on the edge of her desk. From the perfectly moussed, bleached-blond-tip do and the little tweak at the front, like a tiny rhino horn of hair, I could see it was Kurt. Then I saw something that I didn’t believe I was seeing at first, thought I was imagining, even hallucinating, so out of place and utterly discordant did it seem.

  She was softly stroking his jaw.

  Now, if I hadn’t known better, much better, I’d have thought something was up. But I figured there must have been a reason. Maybe somebody had punched him and she was administering first aid. He’d certainly driven me nearly to violence more than a few times, so it was somewhat understandable.

  Until I saw the kiss.

  At least I thought it was a kiss. I backed out before they saw me and tried to wrap my head around what I’d just observed. Lydia and Kurt? In what alternate universe would Lydia give it up to a guy in traffic, probably ten or fifteen years her junior? I’d actually been under the impression that she had some sordid thing going with Billingsly, but it looked like I was wrong. Way wrong.

  I felt sick and shaken, but there wasn’t time for a reaction yet. I’d throw up into a corner waste can on my way home if I had a chance. Right now, we were into full-speed presentation prep mode. When Kurt slithered out of Lydia’s office (I’d assumed a posture of intense interest in a sheet of foam core down the hallway in order to observe his exit), everything got back to normal. Lydia was running around between the studio and the conference room even more than I was. Which was kind of weird. Usually she had me doing all that, but she was totally hands-on this time. The only thing she had me do was get the comps from production and bring them to her. She pretty much did everything else.

  I sat at my desk, contemplating if she could possibly be considering me more of an equal finally, and if that was why she wasn’t ordering me around like a rented mule. Then I heard the ding of an incoming e-mail.

  From: judypatootie521@hotmail.com

  To: wallygator317@hotmail.com

  Subject: re: Wally through the wall?

  Re: Sam . . . already ordered one online. Great minds (and behinds) think alike. LOL!

  Nauseating. Truly. I may have even thrown up a little in my mouth. Poppy seed bagel with cream cheese, honoring Ruth. I was getting a jump on my later release.

  “Everyone . . . can I have your attention, please?” I heard Lydia say, so I deleted the e-mail and looked in Lydia’s direction as a group of about ten or so people from traffic and creative congregated in our common area. “We have in our midst someone who’s extremely bright and unappreciated very often, I think. This person’s worked very hard and wanted this for a long time . . . so I’d like you to join me in welcoming them to the creative team.”

  I felt a rush of excitement and panic. I was right. Lydia was going to promote me. And publicly. So sudden! So unexpected! Yet so deserved! The girl who kept her nose out of trouble, but always did her best for the agency and was always there with a bright idea for a promotion or the perfect block of scintillating copy . . . it was my time at last. I’d suspected that it was going to be a good day, but I’d never allowed myself to think it would be that good.

  “Effective today, there’ll be one less traffic person.” I held my breath and waited for it. “Our newest copywriter is Kurt Wyatt! Congratulate him,” she said with as close to a smile as I’d ever seen struggle to dominate her thin lips.

  I exhaled. No, I more than exhaled. I completely deflated. If I’d been a cartoon, I would have flown around the room like a balloon with a bad leak, zipping around in a whirlwind until there was nothing left in me . . . and then I’d drop to the ground. And probably get stepped on.

  Kurt? Was getting my promotion? I was stunned. I didn’t know what to say. Everyone was congratulating him, and I just stood there silent until he looked at me.

  “I didn’t know you wanted to be a copywriter,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said casually. “It’s always been my dream.” No, it wasn’t. It was my dream. I half suspected he’d found it while rummaging through the drawers in my cubicle and stolen it. He didn’t give a damn about it, but since it meant everything to me, he thought he’d keep it, just to watch me disintegrate.

  I was so frustrated, I bit my tongue—not as in stopping myself from saying something I’d regret but literally; it was bleeding. I stopped into the bathroom to rinse my mouth out on my way into the conference room where the KidCo presentation was taking place. Lydia was smoothing out her frizz in the mirror, but she darted out of the bathroom the second I walked in.

  When I walked into St. Bart’s conference room (our conference rooms were named after vacation hot spots), the presentation was just about to begin. I looked up at the board and stopped dead in my tracks.

  Wow, I thought for a split second, there are my ideas, mocked up in glorious color.

  Then I thought, son of a bitch, there are my ideas, mocked up in glorious color! My Broadway sets, my kids on the assembly line—all the ideas I’d brought to Lydia, shined, supersized, and on display. And she was pitching them as her own. No mention of me. She’d stolen my entire campaign! The frustration I felt boiling up inside was like nothing I’d ever experienced. A fury starting in the pit of my stomach, filling my lungs to a point that I’m sure I could have spat fire if I’d tried.

  I’d have said something, or at the very least singed her hair with my breath, but the clients had already taken their seats at the table. At least that was the fine fiction I sold myself a few minutes after I stood just outside the room, my eyes closed to trap the tears that wanted to fight their way through. If I was being honest with myself, I’d admit that I would never have said anything, even if Lydia and I had been the only two people on the planet. And I hated myself for my lack of resolve. For my gutlessness. For being Jordan Landau once again.

  * * * * *

  I walked away from the meeting and straight out the front door. I’d decided that at the very least I needed to take a long lunch. I unlocked my bike and started pedaling fast, even though I didn’t know where I was going. When I got to 59th Street, I rode along Central Park and suddenly knew exactly where I was headed.

  Alice’s Tea Cup on 73rd and Columbus. It was the most enchanting little restaurant. Dirk brought me there when we first started dating, and it was so unlike him, I remember being totally floored and wondering how he’d found it. They served about a thousand different kinds of teas, and then you had your choice of scones or finger sandwiches of the traditional English variety. Everything was served on charming plates with matching tea sets, and I completel
y fell in love with the place. And even more in love with him.

  We hadn’t been there since, but it was such a sweet memory that it was exactly where I wanted to be, even if I was by myself. I locked my bike against a street sign that said NO STANDING. I remembered one time when I was a little girl and saw a No Standing sign for the first time. I contemplated the rationale. Why weren’t people allowed to stand there? And if they were supposed to sit instead, why weren’t there any chairs? Just as I was pondering this, I noticed a policeman approaching—looking right at me—so I screamed at the top of my lungs and dropped to my behind, skinning my left knee in the process. When my mother asked what on earth I was doing, I confessed I believed the policeman was coming to arrest me.

  I called Todd on my cell phone as I walked toward Alice’s and started to rant about Lydia and what an evil bitch she was.

  But then I lost my voice.

  At least I lost the power to use it for a minute. I blinked to make sure I was seeing correctly. Then I blinked again, thinking that maybe if I blinked hard enough it would go away. But it didn’t. There, sitting at a quaint little table in the whimsical Alice’s Tea Cup, was Dirk, or rather, were Dirk and some skinny blond girl, holding hands in the center of the table!

  As if things weren’t already bad enough. I was spiraling down the rabbit hole, not knowing what kind of mad tea party could possibly be waiting at the bottom.

  “Jordy?” I heard Todd say. “You still there?”

  I cleared my throat and peered into the window. They were oblivious to me. They were the only two people in the world. “I’m looking at Dirk,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Dirk is about fifteen feet in front of me, at a place that I thought was our place . . . hand in hand with some other girl!”

  “What a dick. Is she pretty?”

  “Yes, Todd. She’s pretty. She’s pretty and skinny and she has good hair. I hate my life.”

  “Maybe it’s his sister,” he offered

  “He doesn’t have a sister.”

  “Fuck her and her hair. Go tell him to fuck off!” Todd yelled, but I couldn’t move. I just watched them, phone stuck to my ear, Todd barking orders for me to go stand up for myself. I watched her laughing at the things he said, and I wondered if I’d heard them before. “Jordan! What’s happening now?”

  “He’s moving her hair out of her face,” I whispered, although I wasn’t sure why I did.

  “Maybe she’s got some food on her face,” he said. I didn’t answer. I just kept watching. “What’s going on now?” he asked.

  “I can’t see.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he moved his face in really close to hers.”

  “Oh God,” he said.

  “Well, that could be nothing,” I offered weakly.

  “Right. Maybe he’s eating the food off her face,” he said.

  “Well, who knows, maybe he has some excuse . . . or something.”

  “What’s with you?” he screamed. “Are you cultivating the art of being a doormat?”

  No, I wasn’t. I just didn’t want this to be my reality. But it got worse.

  The next time I looked up they were no-doubt-about-it kissing. Full-on making out.

  “He’s kissing her!” I said, very much not in a whisper.

  “God! That fucking asshole! Go confront him!”

  “I don’t want to confront him. I don’t want to do anything! I just want it all to go away!”

  “Jordan!” he said, “you have to make it go away!”

  “I gotta go.”

  I hung up on Todd and stood there, taking one last look. I didn’t want to watch, but at the same time I couldn’t pull my eyes away. I was completely nauseated. And the added bonus: It began to rain.

  I started back toward my bike and thought that maybe Dirk saw me. At least he looked in my direction. I didn’t wait around to find out if he’d caught me catching him.

  * * * * *

  Riding away from the wreckage that was my relationship, I could barely see because tears were streaming down my face. I wasn’t even crying actively. I was just riding my bike and the tears kept coming, flooding my eyes, and blurring everything in front of me.

  I was thinking about all of the crap I’d put up with, all the times I should have broken up with him and hadn’t. Now here I was, left with no choice.

  I wondered how long he’d been seeing her . . . if there were others . . . if he was nicer to them than he was to me. I blinked back some more tears and noticed that someone had spray-painted on a wall:

  GOD IS DEAD

  —Nietzsche, 1883

  Great. So, my asshole boyfriend was cheating on me, I didn’t get the promotion, my boss had stolen and used my treasured brainchild, my credit card debt was higher than my pothead super, my family treated me like a dog treats a hydrant . . . and God had apparently been dead for 124 years. Turned out, this was not a good day. At all.

  Then I was flying.

  Flying, floating, free—but only for as long as it takes a human body to sail twelve feet in the air over a car hood and crumple, head and shoulder first, onto the street. I can’t say exactly what happened, but I do remember a loud buzzing and a sensation like thunder trying to push its way up my spine out through my ears.

  Someone said, “Oh my God!” about six times very fast. I kept my eyes closed, to keep the thunder from pouring out, but I could still sense a shadow blocking the light. I felt like half my face was sweating, so I stuck my tongue out to lick it, and discovered it was blood. I couldn’t wrap my mind around anything that was happening. I grasped at thoughts, different people popped into my head—Kurt, Lydia, Dirk, Samantha, Spandex Cock Guy, all slipped through my mental grasp like so many greased pigs. Then I reached for those who were much closer—my mom, Todd, Cat—but even they eluded me, and it started to feel like I was drowning.

  The voices said different things. “Is she okay? Who is she? Did you see it? Did anyone see it?” They hovered over me, and I heard again, “Who is she?” I heard them speaking and I could have said my name, but what was the point? Jordan Landau. Who was that, anyway? No one I wanted to be.

  It grew darker, but I wasn’t nearing death—it was just shadows, shapes. Through the slits of my eyelids I could make out very little.

  One thing seemed certain. Somewhere above me was an angel. “Are you okay?” the angel said with panic on his sweet face. I turned my head toward him and felt my hair stuck to my face.

  “No, no, n— I . . . not okay,” I said, and everything began to swirl faster and faster, and I felt myself drifting inexorably. “I’m in such . . .”

  “Pain?” he asked.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I’ve had enough.”

  9.

  do-over

  I heard the ambulance wailing in the background and remember thinking briefly that it was something of a mating call—the siren reaching out to me. Or maybe just telling everyone else to get out of the way. When the medics got there, I heard one of them say something about immobilizing me. They rolled me around and started to cut my clothes off, checking for bleeding. I was rotating in and out of consciousness, and objects would zoom into my foreground, startling me beyond what seemed possible, and then get hazy and dissolve before my eyes. A neck brace was suddenly around my neck. I remember my forehead being taped to a board, which frightened me. Someone kept saying, “Stay awake, stay with me.”

  I overheard the other guy on the phone, talking to the triage nurse. He said I was early twenties and weighed 135 pounds. I wanted to tell him my weight was none of his damn business, but the “early twenties” comment gave me enough of a feel-good, so I just lay there while the other guy asked me questions, I guess to keep me awake.

  “What was your first pet’s name? How long have you been riding a bike?”

  I knew that my first pet was a bunny named Thumper. I opened my mouth to tell him, but I felt dizzy again so I just shut my eyes. I heard the guy on the phone say “mo
tor vehicle versus bicycle,” and I distinctly remember thinking that it wasn’t a fair fight.

  Once we got to the ER, a whole new team of people started asking me questions, dizzying questions—not the inquiries themselves, which were fairly basic, but the speed at which they were getting thrown at me. What’s my name? How old am I? Who is my nearest relative? But all of it, coupled with the pounding in my head and the fluorescent lights directly above me, was confusing and way more than I could manage to focus on. So I just closed my eyes—although I remember a single, heavy tear managing to sneak out and roll down my cheek.

  * * * * *

  The next thing I remember is a glaring light penetrating my eyelids. I lay still, eyes closed against the light, and concentrated on the sound of a man’s voice turning into actual words. I hadn’t opened my eyes yet, but I could hear someone talking.

  “Everything looks okay so far, pupils normal, CT images show a hairline fracture to the skull. I want to do an MRI and possibly an EEG to check for damage to the brain. She’ll be here at least overnight while we run some more tests.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” said a voice, unmistakably my mother, uncharacteristically weak. And then I started hearing the rest of them. Samantha was first.

  “I can’t believe she fell off her bike. It seems so fifth grade.”

  Then Walter chimed in, coming to my defense, “Sam, honey, she got in an accident with a car.”

  “I wonder if she can get her nose fixed while she’s in here,” Sam said hopefully. “Her nostrils sort of flare.”

  “Her nose is fine,” assured my stepdad.

  But then came Samantha again. “Or a boob job. Maybe some lipo?”

  I opened my eyes and blinked a few times, still not believing what I’d just overheard.

  “Well,” said my mother, “if I was stuck lying in a hospital bed anyway, I know I wouldn’t mind a few nips and tucks. But Jordan is comfortable the way she is.”