The Glitch
The quality of the writing was not what I would have expected from an unclaimed screed. I caught not one misspelling or syntactical miscue—a fantastic blend of fastidiousness and self-indulgence.
This person was obviously deranged, but you could fairly say that about anyone who writes a long note with the expectation that it will be read by someone of Jones’s professional standing. My first year of college I wrote a chatty email to a professor describing my interest in her field and asking to meet to discuss her career path, and six minutes later she sent back “O K.” I never bothered to follow up. I understood Jones. I understood the emails.
I got to the state house an hour before the talk was scheduled to begin. It was early in my tenure, and I was terribly naive. I still thought professors mainly taught classes, and I thought showing up early might make me seem like a serious young professional.
I was seated on a bench in the lobby, obsessively checking my phone, when a tall man sat down next to me. Maxon offered me a stick of gum. Behind his back they called him MaxoSmithKline due to a rumored Paxil addiction. Very clunky, in my opinion, to say nothing of the taste. I told him I knew who he was, to which he responded with neither surprise nor presumption. I wasn’t going to tell him that I worked for Jones, but he asked about the nature of my interest in the event, and I felt I had to confess. He turned to face me, crossing one bent leg atop the other and smiling broadly.
“Have you been on the team long?”
I shrugged. “About two months.”
He was bouncing one leg off the other and nodding thoughtfully. He said something like, that could be a lifetime or a blink, and I nodded and pretended I understood. I could understand why he was the source of so much frustration on Jones’s part, and so much (I then suspected and now know) envy.
He asked where I came from, and the answer to that didn’t surprise him either, although out of habit I braced myself.
“Do you know what I think of when I think of my youth?”
I shook my head.
“I was seventeen, driving with my father in the passenger seat, and I had just worked up the courage to show him a poem. It ended with this line: We cloak ourselves in this deathless sorrow. And do you know what he said? We’re going LIE to Cross Island to Southern State. But for now we’re sailing down the LIE, damn near the only ones on the road, and I was driving because he still had a cast on his leg. He said, Yeah, okay, well your sorrow won’t be deathless for long if you keep driving like this.”
I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help myself. I was immediately worried he would feel mocked, but he was giggling too. We sat in smirking, subliminal harmony: a tiny yet sustaining petit four of metaphysical revenge.
He had his phone balanced precariously on the bend of his knee, and it lit up with an incoming call. He straightened his tie, excused himself, stepped away, paused, turned back to me, and winked. As Maxon disappeared down the hallway, he passed Jones, who was staring up and away and obviously pretending not to notice his erstwhile colleague.
“Ms. Weber,” he said with affected politeness, nodding at Cara as he passed.
The presentation and panel session went well, I thought. I was riding high on the joy of finding some echo in Maxon’s history, and uncharacteristically cheerful as a result. I discreetly slipped Jones a note when it seemed like he might forget to work his research on postpartum depression into the conversation. At our group dinner afterward, he mentioned it gratefully.
“That’s why I hired you,” he said, winking. Actually it was Cara who hired me, bafflingly, after noticing her husband taking notice of me at an alumni dinner at our shared alma mater. At first I was very confused by this move, and then I thought I understood, and then it turned out that that theory was wrong, and at that point I figured I’d best just keep my head down and do the job as well as I could manage.
While I was sleeping Cara slipped a twenty under my door with a note (whisked away, have a nice breakfast, check in soon. C). Jones would facilitate ridiculous, spur-of-the-moment excursions to various far-flung destinations every so often, ostensibly in the name of sustained romance. For me it just meant apologetically canceling meetings last-minute on his behalf, telling rank-and-file types the truth and lying to the bigwigs. I could never have survived like that, but it seemed to suit them just fine. I ate instant oatmeal as planned and used the cash to buy a book about the legacy of corruption in the New York state legislature for the train ride home.
I got about thirty pages in before I thought to check Jones’s work emails. He was a man in high professional demand, particularly in the days following high-visibility events like last night’s. A Canterbury Email! My book fell heavily onto the seat beside me, immediately forgotten.