“You’re a good kid,” she said, “and a good friend.”
“We’ll still see each other,” he said. “I’ll take you to dinner when you retire.”
He stopped at Chuck’s desk on the way back to the IT office. “I can’t talk, I’m on deadline,” Chuck said.
“I just want to tell you that I’m quitting.”
“What? You can’t quit,” Chuck said.
“I hate working here.”
“We all hate working here. That doesn’t mean we quit. Only quitters quit.”
“I’m quitting.”
“I guess this is good-bye, then,” Chuck said.
“It’s not good-bye. We can still play golf.”
“Piffle,” Chuck said. “You’ll get a day job. You’ll forget us. There won’t be anybody to help us do math.”
“You might be right,” Lincoln said.
“Bastard.”
“Don’t tell anybody until tomorrow.”
“Bastard defector.”
When he got back to his desk, Lincoln decided he wasn’t coming back tomorrow to quit in person. He wasn’t ever coming back. He didn’t want to see Beth again. Didn’t want to find himself opening the WebFence folder after he’d promised himself he wasn’t going to for the four-thousandth time.
So he took out a pad of paper and wrote two notes. The first was to Greg. A quick resignation and an apology.
He slipped it into an envelope and stuck it into Greg’s keyboard where Greg would see it first thing the next morning.
The second note he lingered over. He didn’t have to write this one. He probably shouldn’t write it. But he wanted to walk away from the newspaper tonight (this morning, actually) feeling truly and completely free, with his conscience as clear as he could make it without publicly crucifying himself.
“Beth,” he wrote, then started over. They weren’t exactly on a first-name basis.
Hello,
We’ve never met, but I’m the guy whose job it is to enforce the company’s computer policy. Your e-mail gets flagged. A lot. I should have sent you warnings the same way I do everyone else, but I didn’t—because reading your e-mail made me like you. I didn’t want to tell you that you were breaking the rules because I didn’t want to stop hearing from you and your friend, Jennifer.
This was an egregious invasion of your privacy and hers, and for that, I deeply apologize.
I won’t blame you if you turn me in, but I’m quitting anyway. I never should have taken this job, and I don’t like the person I’ve become here.
I’m writing this note because I owe you an apology—even a cowardly, anonymous one—and because I thought I should warn you to stop using your company computer to send personal e-mails.
I really am sorry.
He folded the note up and sealed the envelope before he could change his mind or think about rewriting it. She didn’t need to know that he was in love with her. There was no point making the note any weirder than it had to be.
Lincoln was giving Beth proof, written proof, that he’d read her e-mail, but he wasn’t sure what could come of that. Greg couldn’t fire him, even if he wanted to. He probably wouldn’t want to. Reading e-mail was Lincoln’s job. Greg had pretty much given him permission to read whatever he wanted, even the stuff that didn’t get flagged. In Lincoln’s position, Greg probably would have done much worse.
Lincoln wanted to confess. He wanted to apologize. And he wanted to make it impossible for himself to turn back.
The newsroom was dark when he got there. He turned on the lights and walked to Beth’s desk. He set the envelope on her keyboard, then decided to tape it there so that it wouldn’t get knocked off. And then he left.
Enough is enough is enough.
CHAPTER 86
THE PHONE WOKE Lincoln up at seven forty-five the next morning. It was Greg. He was pissed, but he also really wanted Lincoln to change his mind.
“I’m not going to change my mind,” Lincoln said, not even opening his eyes.
Greg offered him more money, a lot more money, making Lincoln wish he would have tried to quit his job a few months before he was actually ready to leave.
“You didn’t even give me two weeks,” Greg said.
“That was crappy of me. I’m genuinely sorry.”
“Give me two weeks.”
“I can’t,” Lincoln said. “I’m sorry.”
“Do you already have another job?”
“No.”
Greg yelled at him for a few minutes, then apologized and said that Lincoln could use him as a reference if he ever wanted to.
“What are you going to say I’m good at,” Lincoln asked, “sitting around?”
“You weren’t just sitting around,” Greg said. “How many times do I have to tell you? You were keeping the home fires burning. Somebody has to answer the phone and say, ‘Help desk.’”
“I’m sure you’ll be able to find someone else who can handle it.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Greg sighed, “only whack jobs apply for the night shift.”
Lincoln wondered if Beth had read his note—probably not yet—and whether she would file some sort of complaint against him. That threat still didn’t seem substantial enough to worry about. He hoped his note hadn’t scared her; he hadn’t meant to scare her. Maybe he should have thought more about that.
ON SATURDAY MORNING, Lincoln drove to Eighty-fourth Street and West Dodge Road to watch a demolition crew tear down the Indian Hills theater. They’d stripped the place the day before. All that was left was the screen and the building. There was a good-size crowd gathered in the parking lot, but Lincoln didn’t get close enough to see any faces; he watched from the parking lot outside the doughnut shop across the street. After about an hour, he went inside and bought two crullers, a carton of milk, and a newspaper. He threw every section but the Classifieds away before he sat down.
Then he took out an old spiral notebook and opened it to the middle. To his list. He copied four entries in the margin of the Classifieds:
“No. 19. Unfreezing computers/Untangling necklaces.
“No. 23. Being helpful.”
“No. 5. Not worrying about things he really shouldn’t worry about.”
And finally, “No. 36. Being GOOD.”
The ads were full of computer jobs. He crossed out any listings that seemed vague or sneaky and anything that said, “Great people skills a must.”
He circled one. “Senior computer technician needed. St. James University, Department of Nursing. Full-time. Tuition + benefits.”
CHAPTER 87
EVE TEASED HIM about working on campus and taking almost a full load of classes. “It’s like you went back to school through a loophole,” she said after his first semester. “What is it with you and school? Are you addicted to the smell of musty auditoriums?”
Maybe he was. Musty auditoriums. Creaky library chairs. Wide green lawns.
Lincoln had his own desk in the Dean of Nursing’s Office. He was the only man on the administrative staff and the only person younger than forty-five. His computer skills awed the office ladies. They treated him like Gandalf. He had a desk, but he didn’t have to sit there. He could go to class or do whatever he needed to do to keep everything humming.
Part of his job was Internet security—but it was little more than updating antiviral programs and reminding people not to open suspicious attachments. His supervisor in the central IT office said that there had never been a pornography incident in the Nursing College and that, besides porn and gambling, people were free to go and do whatever they wanted online.
“Is there an e-mail filter?” Lincoln asked.
“Are you kidding?” the guy said. “The faculty senate would flip.”
LINCOLN STILL THOUGHT about Beth. All the time, at first.
He subscribed to the newspaper so that he could read her reviews at breakfast and again at lunch. He tried to figure out how she was doing through her writing. Did she seem happy? Was she bei
ng too hard on romantic comedies? Or too generous?
Reading her reviews kept his memory of her alive in a way he probably shouldn’t want. Like a pilot light inside of him. It made him ache sometimes, when she was especially funny or insightful, or when he could read past her words to something true that he knew about her. But the aching faded, too. Things get better—hurt less—over time. If you let them.
When fall classes started, Lincoln developed a crush on his medieval literature professor, a flammably intelligent woman in her mid-thirties. She had full hips and bluntly cut bangs, and she got rhapsodic when she talked about Beowulf. She’d underline phrases in his papers with bright green ink and write notes in the margins. “Exactly!” or “Ironic, isn’t it?” He thought he might ask her out when the term ended. Or he might sign up for her advanced seminar.
One of the women in his office kept trying to fix him up with her daughter, Neveen, an advertising copywriter who smoked organic cigarettes. They went out a few times, and Lincoln liked Neveen well enough to take her to Justin and Dena’s wedding.
It was held at a giant Catholic church in the suburbs. (Who knew that Justin was Catholic? And devout enough that he made Dena convert. “My kids aren’t growing up Unitarian,” he told Lincoln at the rehearsal dinner. “Those cocksuckers just barely believe in Jesus.”)
The reception was at a nice hotel a few miles away. There was a Polish-themed buffet and a string quartet that played during dinner. Lincoln felt anxious about seeing Sacajawea play. He ate way too many pirogi.
The band took the stage after the bride and groom’s dance (“My Heart Will Go On”), the wedding party dance (“Leather and Lace”), and the father-daughter dance (“Butterfly Kisses”). Justin made an announcement while they set up, warning his elderly aunts and uncles that they better take advantage of the open bar or get packing “cuz it’s about to get fucking twisted in here.”
The sting Lincoln expected to feel when he saw Chris never came. Chris was still a beautiful specimen. A few of Dena’s adolescent cousins clustered at Chris’s end of the stage and fiddled with their necklaces. An older girl, college-aged, had come with the band. She had long blond hair and luminous skin, and she handed Chris beer and bottled water between songs.
There was no sting. Even when Chris seemed to recognize Lincoln and waved. Now—to Lincoln, anyway—Chris was just another guy who wasn’t with Beth.
It’s hard to dance to music that sounds like Zeppelin dragged in Radiohead, but most of Justin and Dena’s friends were drunk enough to try. Including Lincoln’s date. Lincoln wasn’t drunk, but he still felt like jumping and shouting and singing too loud. He caught stage divers. He spun Neveen until she was dizzy. He shamelessly made devil horns at the sky.
CHAPTER 88
IT WAS COLD for October. The kids would have to wear puffy coats over their Halloween costumes, and they’d get asked at every door who they were supposed to be.
October, Lincoln thought to himself. Callooh, callay.
He stood at his open bedroom window, just for a moment, to let the memory pass through him. Merry October.
One of the nicer things about his apartment was that there was a movie theater in walking distance. An old art house called the Dundee, just about a mile away. It was the only place Lincoln knew of that served RC Cola on tap. He ended up there almost every weekend. Most of the time he didn’t even care what was showing.
Tonight, Lincoln put on a thick turtleneck sweater and his jean jacket over a pair of olive green pants. He checked his hair in the mirror he’d hung inside his entryway. He’d kept the Morrissey hair—even though Eve said it made him look like Luke Perry. Or like he was trying to look like Luke Perry. “You need that?” she’d asked. “You’re not tall enough already?”
“I don’t need it,” he said. “I like it.”
Eve had invited him over tonight, but he’d passed. He was supposed to meet up with the copy deskers later, at some bar in Iowa that served tomato beer. Maybe he’d go …Maybe.
It was already dark outside at six thirty. That felt right. The cold felt right.
Lincoln could see people eating dinner inside the big houses on his way to the theater. It was the kind of neighborhood where people never closed the curtains on their picture windows. “You know why those old houses have big windows up front?” his mother had asked him once. “Because it used to be, when somebody in your family died, you had the wake right in your house. You needed a window big enough for the casket.” Lincoln had decided to go on believing that the windows were there so that people could show off their Christmas trees.
When he got to the Dundee, an employee was changing the marquee from Dancer in the Dark to Billy Elliott.
Lincoln ducked into the small lobby to buy his ticket, an RC, and a box of buttered popcorn. The theater was nearly empty, and he took a seat near the front. A red velvet seat. This must be the only place left, now that the Indian Hills was gone, that didn’t have plastic recliners or “love seats” with adjustable armrests. There were still curtains hanging in front of the movie screen that would draw back just as the previews started. Lincoln used to think that was pointless. Now it was the thing he waited for.
Just then, while he was waiting, someone at the back of the theater spilled a box of candy, something hard and loud, M&M’S or Everlasting Gobstoppers, that clattered down the sloped concrete floor. Lincoln turned around without thinking. That’s when he saw her, sitting a few rows behind him and a few seats over.
Dark hair. Heart face. Freckles.
So pretty.
Beth.
Lincoln looked away as soon as he realized it was her—but she’d already recognized him. She’d looked right at him. She’d looked …How had she looked?
Surprised. Just surprised.
You’d think that he would have thought about this moment, as much as he’d thought about her over the last few months. It’s not like they lived in Tokyo or Mumbai or a place where people could ever really lose each other. This was a small city. A small city with relatively few places you’d want to go, especially if you were a movie reviewer. Lincoln had thought of the Dundee as his theater, but, really, it was like he’d shown up at Beth’s office.
And now he had to leave. She’d want him to, right? Especially if she’d put it all together by now. That’s another thing he’d gone out of his way not to think about. Did Beth still think about him as her Cute Guy? Or had she figured out that he was the creep who read her e-mail?
He had to leave. Immediately. No. As soon as the lights went down. He couldn’t bear to think of her eyes on him again.
Lincoln leaned forward in his seat, covered his face with one hand, and willed the lights to dim. After a few painful minutes, they did. The lights fell, the projector squeaked to life, the ancient curtains parted, and Lincoln started putting on his jacket.
Just as Beth sat down beside him.
He froze, one arm still in his jacket. He didn’t speak. Or move. Only his autonomic nervous system chugged on.
He couldn’t leave, not with her sitting next to him—why was she sitting next to him?—and he couldn’t look at her. So he sat back slowly in his seat, careful not to touch her. He sat back and he waited.
But Beth didn’t say anything.
And didn’t say anything. And didn’t move. And didn’t say anything.
Through the coming attractions, through the opening credits.
Finally, Lincoln couldn’t keep from looking at her. He glanced over. Beth was staring at the screen like she was awaiting instructions from the Holy Spirit, eyes too wide, holding on to her ballpoint pen with both hands. Some T. Rex song was playing on the soundtrack. “Cosmic Dancer.”
Lincoln looked away. He told himself to be patient, to wait for her to do something or to say something. But the wait was suffocating. Or maybe it was the sitting so close to her that was suffocating. The wanting to look at her again. More. And again.
Then Lincoln found himself saying the thing he always s
aid to women, the thing he actually needed to say to Beth.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, looking over his shoulder.
“Don’t,” she said.
She was looking up at him now, direct and determined. Her jaw was set. She must know, he thought, his heart sinking into the concrete floor. She must know that he was the creep. Maybe she was even going to yell at him. Or slap him. He found himself counting the inches between them. Fifteen, sixteen tops. He’d never been close enough to see her ears before. They were perfect.
Beth raised her right hand then, still holding the pen, to his face. To his chin.
Lincoln closed his eyes. It seemed like the right thing to do, no matter what happened next. He closed his eyes and felt her fingertips touching his cheek, then his forehead, then his eyelids. He took a breath—ink and hand soap.
“I”—he heard her whisper, closer than he expected, and shaky and strange—“think I might be a very stupid girl.”
He shook his head no. Just barely. So that only someone who was holding his cheek and his neck would notice.
“Yes,” she said, sounding closer. He didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes. What if he opened his eyes and she saw what she was doing?
She kissed his cheek, and he let his head tip forward into her hands. She kissed his other cheek. And his chin. The groove below his bottom lip. “Stupid girl,” she said near the corner of his mouth, sounding incredulous, “what could you possibly be thinking?”
Lincoln found his mouth. “Perfect girl,” he said so quietly that only someone with her hands in his hair and her lips all but touching his could possibly hear. “Pretty girl.” He found her mouth. “Perfect.” Kiss. “Magic.” Kiss. “Only girl.”
There are moments when you can’t believe something wonderful is happening. And there are moments when your entire consciousness is filled with knowing absolutely that something wonderful is happening. Lincoln felt like he’d dunked his head into a sink full of Pop Rocks and turned on the water.