My Year of Rest and Relaxation (47)

“What is it, Reva?” I groaned. “Spit it out. I’m not feeling well.”

I heard her open and close a few cabinets. Then she came back with a mug and sat down in the armchair and poured herself a cupful of gin. She wasn’t crying anymore. She sighed once morosely, and then once again violently, and drank.

“Ken got me transferred. And he says he doesn’t want to see me anymore. So that’s it. After all this time. I’ve had such a day, I can’t even tell you.” But there she was, telling me. Five whole minutes spent on what it was like to come back from lunch and find a note on her desk. “Like you can break up with someone over memo. Like he doesn’t care about me at all. Like I’m some kind of secretary. Like this is a matter of business. Which it is not!”

“Then what was it, Reva?”

“A matter of the heart!”

“Oh.”

“So I go in and he’s like, ‘Leave the door open,’ and my heart is pounding because, you know? A memo? So I just close the door and I’m like, ‘What is this? How can you do this?’ And he’s like, ‘It’s over. I can’t see you anymore.’ Like in a movie!”

“What did the memo say?”

“That I’m getting a promotion, and they’re transferring me to the Towers. On my first day back to work after my mom died. Ken was at the funeral. He saw the state I was in. And now suddenly it’s over? Just like that?”

“You’re getting a promotion?”

“Marsh is starting a new crisis consulting firm. Terrorist risks, blah blah. But did you hear what I said? He doesn’t want to see me anymore, not even at the office.”

“What a dick,” I said robotically.

“I know. He’s a coward. I mean, we were in love. Totally in love!”

“You were?”

“How do you just decide to turn that off?”

I kept my eyes closed. Reva went on without any breaks, repeating the story six or seven times, each version highlighting a new aspect of the experience and analyzing it accordingly. I tried to disengage from her words and just listen to the drone of her voice. I had to admit that it was a comfort to have Reva there. She was just as good as a VCR, I thought. The cadence of her speech was as familiar and predictable as the audio from any movie I’d watched a hundred times. That’s why I’d held on to her this long, I thought as I lay there, not listening. Since I’d known her, the drone of what-ifs, the seemingly endless descriptions of her delusional romantic projections had become a kind of lullaby. Reva was a magnet for my angst. She sucked it right out of me. I was a Zen Buddhist monk when she was around. I was above fear, above desire, above worldly concerns in general. I could live in the now in her company. I had no past or present. No thoughts. I was too evolved for all her jibber-jabber. And too cool. Reva could get angry, impassioned, depressed, ecstatic. I wouldn’t. I refused to. I would feel nothing, be a blank slate. Trevor had told me once he thought I was frigid, and that was fine with me. Fine. Let me be a cold bitch. Let me be the ice queen. Someone once said that when you die of hypothermia, you get cold and sleepy, things slow down, and then you just drift away. You don’t feel a thing. That sounded nice. That was the best way to die—awake and dreaming, feeling nothing. I could take the train to Coney Island, I thought, walk along the beach in the freezing wind, and swim out into the ocean. Then I’d just float on my back looking up at the stars, go numb, get sleepy, drift, drift. Isn’t it only fair that I should get to choose how I’ll die? I wouldn’t die like my father did, passive and quiet while the cancer ate him alive. At least my mother did things her own way. I’d never thought to admire her before for that. At least she had guts. At least she took matters into her own hands.

I opened my eyes. There was a spiderweb in the corner of the ceiling, fluttering like a scrap of moth-eaten silk in the draft. I tuned in to Reva for a moment. Her words cleansed the palette of my mind. Thank God for her, I thought, my whiny, moronic analgesic.

“So then I was like, ‘I’m tired of you jerking me around.’ And he starts talking about how he’s my boss. All macho, right? And actually evading the real issue which is the thing I told you about, which I can’t even think about right now.” I had no memory of her telling me anything. The sound of more gin. “I mean, I’m not keeping it. Obviously. Especially not now! But no. Ken can’t be bothered about that. Being evasive is totally his thing.”

I turned around and peeked at her.

“If he thinks he can get rid of me so easily . . . ,” she said, wagging her finger. “If he thinks he’s gonna get away with this . . .”

“What, Reva? What are you going to do to him? Are you going to kill him? You’re going to burn his house down?”

“If he thinks I’m just going to eat his shit and slink away . . .”

She couldn’t finish her sentence. She had no threats to make. She was too afraid of her own rage to ever imagine it through to any violent end. She would never exact revenge. So I suggested, “Tell his wife he’s been fucking you. Or sue him for sexual harassment.”

Reva wrinkled her nose and sucked her teeth, her rage suddenly transformed into calculated pragmatism. “I don’t want people to know, though. That puts me in such an awkward position. And I am getting a raise, so that’s good. Plus, I’ve always wanted to work in the World Trade Center. So it’s not like I can complain exactly. I just want Ken to feel bad.”