Cult Classic(28)

“I don’t think I should have to keep following people places.”

“You never have to do anything.” He bristled at the suggestion. “We are wholly committed to free will.”

“We?”

“It’s just there’s no conference room on this floor.”

“Oh, well, when you put it that way…”

Errol smiled again, a pleasingly crooked smile with one front tooth curtseying behind the other.

“You are funny,” he said.

The three of us crammed into the strange elevator, which I half expected to shoot through the ceiling. Vadis stood in front of me. I could smell her perfume, an expensive mix of fireplace and bergamot. Errol faced forward as well, readjusting his spine. The elevator seemed unnecessary as the whole place couldn’t have been more than four floors and it moved extraordinarily slowly. But neither of them acknowledged the slowness. My view of the atrium was intercepted by the whirling of brass gears, but I could still see the barista below us. He was staring into space, eyes unmoved from the spot where we’d been standing, as if having a small stroke.





4




Clive was waiting for us in the glass-walled conference room. A tray of bottled water sat atop a wooden console behind him. He looked both more and less composed since last I’d seen him. More because he wasn’t drunk out of his mind, less because he was visibly anxious. He paced around the chairs like a caged animal, jacket flapping, exposing a silk lining. It was creased at the elbows, likely from a long day of maniacal plotting. When we filed in, he stopped pacing and flashed a winning smile. I sensed Vadis and Errol move behind me, trying to hide. Then I realized they weren’t hiding, they were bowing. Actually bowing. And not to me.

I was too appalled to react.

Behind Clive was the only decoration in the room, a reproduction of a Magritte painting. I knew the one. It was not his most popular but it was his most populated. The painting featured dozens of men wearing suits and bowler hats, scattered against a blue sky, rooftops below them. Clive could be one of them, minus the hat. He stood in front of the painting as if in charge of it. I refused to be dazzled in his presence. Whatever this was, I knew who I was. And I was not a Clive Glenn groupie.

When I’d first met Clive, he was a mid-level editor at a free newspaper. I used to see his byline exploding from kiosks. We went to the same parties, disliked the same people. Before long, we split off from the herd to talk about art and psychology and how technology would ruin us all. His paper was about to open up its online content to comments. Comments. From readers. Readers with no expertise! He’d heard a rumor from a Silicon Valley friend that Apple was working on combining music and cellular capabilities into one device. Who would want their songs interrupted?! Being around this charismatic older man made me feel established at a time when feeling established seemed important. I liked how Clive presented his opinions, as if with everything he said, he was bringing to bear all his deeply held ideals. And it wasn’t just me. He had a natural rapport with everyone. I’d meet him at a bar, and when I walked in, he’d be sharing a joke with the bartender, asking for another round before stepping outside for a cigarette. Were they friends? No, they had always only just met.

We nearly kissed a couple of times, which would have been a gateway to some scarring, useless affair. Clive was still married then, to his college sweetheart, a fact I often forgot because he rarely mentioned her. I was young and so I confused her absence in conversation with an alienation of affection when it was only a compartmentalization of affection. I did not realize that I was being doted on precisely so he could stay in his marriage. So we walked it back, calcifying ourselves as friends, analyzing our flirtation in real time. Talking about it served the purpose of scratching the itch without acting on it. We were only flattering ourselves. If our attrac tion had been that potent, the tension that important, no amount of analysis could have kept it at bay. By the time Clive and his college sweetheart divorced, there was no more itch left to be scratched.

I was Clive’s first hire when he became the deputy editor of Modern Psychology, a magazine we respected from afar, because of its history, but with which we did not actually engage, as the reading experience so closely resembled eating balsa wood. But Clive gave it energy and style. He made it human without making it dumb, glossy without making it superficial. I was there to witness his lightning ascent to editor in chief. This did not surprise me, given how invested Clive became in the whole field. He couldn’t shut it off. He liked to talk about his staff’s feelings as if they were data. Or the men I dated as if they were lab rats, the way married people do, as if their life is the control and yours is the experiment. Indulgence disguised as empathy, judgment disguised as friendship. But I spilled every detail because I wanted to stay close to him.

He claimed he didn’t like the public face the editor-in-chief role required. He felt like a fraud, attending conferences on behalf of the magazine, appearing on morning shows with lists of ways to “destress before work.” What could’ve gone so wrong with your day that you needed to calm yourself down before 8 a.m.? He used to text us videos of him humping cardboard cutouts of talk show scientists. When he became a regular fixture on those same talk shows, he still joked. At least the designer suits were a tax write-off. No pinstripes, though, Clive said, regurgitating the admonishments of segment producers.