Don't You Cry(21)

First-world problems.

I take the elevator up to the forty-third floor, smile at the receptionist, who smiles at me. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know my name, but at least she no longer asks to see my ID. I’ve had this job for an entire three hundred and sixty days. That’s a whole lot of Mondays. I don’t like the job one bit, a project assistant job that is lower on the totem pole than the janitors even, the men and women who wipe the floor and clean urine off the toilets.

The reason I wanted this job was that it paid. Not much, but it paid. And there wasn’t a whole lot I could do with a liberal arts degree from a crappy college. But this I could do.

The first thing I do when I arrive at work is try to find Ben. Ben, who never returned my call last night because he was too busy doing things with his girlfriend, Priya. But I won’t let my mind go there; I can’t. I don’t want to think about Ben and Priya right now, Ben and Priya and my insatiable jealousy. Instead, I focus on the task at hand. I have to find Ben. I have to talk to Ben about Esther.

And so I slip into the stairwell and start to make my ascent to Ben’s floor. Our firm, a national law firm with well over four hundred attorneys, occupies eleven floors of office space in the black building. Each floor is essentially the same, with the paralegals and project assistants like me shoved into small cubes in the interior of each floor, forced to dwell among the stacks and files and photocopy machines. Where we reside, there is no such thing as natural lighting, but rather fluorescent troffers, which do nothing for the tone of my skin or the shade of my hair. The lighting makes me look yellow and sickly, so one might think I’m afflicted with a serious case of jaundice, caused by some sort of liver or bile duct disease. Now that’s classy.

I work on the forty-third floor. Ben, the forty-seventh. I start climbing the steps one by one, trying hard to ignore the creepiness of the office stairwell. I don’t use it all that often, but there are times when a girl doesn’t want to be crammed on a small elevator with three or five or even one hotshot attorney, and today is one of those days.

When I get to Ben’s cube on the forty-seventh floor, it’s empty. His computer is on, and beside his swivel chair is a leather bag and a pair of black running shoes. I know that he’s here, somewhere—in the building—and yet he’s not here in his cube. I ask around to see if anyone has seen Ben, trying to mask the angst I feel with a weedy smile. “He was here,” some blonde paralegal tells me as she scampers by with a box in hand, her sling-back heels clickety-clacking down the wooden floors, “but now he’s not.” Obviously.

I find a piece of scrap paper and jot down a quick note in the best handwriting I can muster, though my hands shake for about a million reasons, or maybe a million and one. We need to talk. ASAP, I write, and leave the note on the plastic keyboard before returning to my own cube, disgruntled.

This morning I’m given the all-important task of Bates labeling documents. It sounds important, it really does. It has a name even, Bates labeling, like the fact that those little dots over a lower case i or j have a name—a tittle it’s called, a simple fact I discovered while searching the internet and charging my time to one of the firm’s more opulent clients—or when your second toe is bigger than your big toe, it’s called a Morton’s toe. Important things worthy of names. Like Bates labels. Matters of life or death.

But no. What I’m doing is placing hundreds of thousands of numbered stickers on a looming document production before being given the task of photocopying them three or five or ten times. There are boxes of documents, and worse yet, they’re not even full of scandalous details like the divorce lawyers get, but rather financial documents. Because I get to work for transactional lawyers, boring men who get their kicks staring at financial documents and talking about money all the livelong day while paying me pennies above minimum wage.

As I settle into my task of Bates labeling, my movements become hurried and repetitive, my mind far removed from the stacks of financial documents that lay before me. I’m at work, but I certainly can’t focus on work. All I can think about is Esther. Where is Esther? I can’t focus on a single thing, not Bates labeling the piles of documents before me, nor skimming through a mountain of correspondence and pleadings, marking over and over again our client’s name with a red Post-it flag, until all the words start to blur before my eyes. I replay our last conversation in my mind. Did I miss something hidden there in the tone of her voice or her weary smile? She was sick; she didn’t feel well. I’d be a killjoy, Quinn. Go without me. You’ll have more fun.

But now I have to wonder: Was this a test? Was Esther putting me to the test? Seeing what kind of roommate I really was, and whether or not I’d put her needs before my own.

If that’s the case, then I guess I failed. I went out without her; I had fun. I didn’t even think to stop by Esther’s room when I got home to see how she was feeling and if she was okay. The thought never even crossed my mind. I didn’t offer to bring her a blanket or warm up a bowl of soup. Another roommate, a better roommate, would have made soup. Another roommate would have said, “No way,” to Esther’s insistence that I go. “No way, Esther. I’ll have more fun here with you.”

But that’s not what I said. I said okay, and left in a hurry out through the front door. I didn’t think twice about my decision not to stay.

“Damn,” I say out loud now as a sheet of paper slices the fragile skin of my index finger, and red blood swells to the surface, leaving its mark on a statement of cash flow. “Damn, damn, damn,” I repeat, knowing my escalating frustration is directed far more at Esther than this insignificant amount of blood loss. My finger hurts and yet my heart hurts even more.