The Dinner Party Read online

  His relief when he finally hangs up the phone is immense. How long he has wanted to tell her these things. Three long years of days. Consider the discipline it takes. Consider the agony of a single weekend, when she flees the space in which he loves her for her real and substantial life—the one she shares with someone else—leaving him with the pathetic desire for the weekend to speed by so that his real and substantial life can begin again. Fool! What depths of despair are you trawling when your happiness hinges upon work—the meetings you both attend, projects you share, the gossip she lets you in on? Is that why you’re still here, when there is all that life to be had out there, beyond the office? Joe Pope had tried to tell himself he was here to do work. But there is nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow. He is here because he feels closer to Genevieve at the office than he does at home.

  He had to tell her, didn’t he? Had to unburden. Otherwise the years would continue to pass, and he would end up, what? A slight and regretful old man. Feel good about yourself, then, Joe. It was long overdue! Husband, baby—what does any of that matter? For Joe Pope, they are beside the point. He’s not even sure the torch he carries concerns her anymore. It’s a fixation now, an obsession. His days are hell, his nights are worse, something had to give.

  So why does he feel juuuuust a little anxious? Well, it’s not easy to confess love, not to anyone, not even to an immense heart like Genevieve’s, that boundless heart, that ever-widening and sympathetic heart. What power a confession of love confers upon the beloved, what opportunity for a flattening. But look at what’s been gained. There’s reclamation. There’s taking charge of his life. And the unburdening—hey, the relief of the unburdening can’t be underestimated. And that was the whole point, was it not, to unburden? Because what could he hope to gain by telling her of his love when she has a husband, and a baby on the way? Yes, the unburdening was all.

  Brian Ford, manic media buyer and martini drinker, keeps a pack of emergency smokes in a top desk drawer. Joe heads down to sixty-five and teases a bent pipe of a cigarette from Ford’s pack and returns by hallway and elevator to Megan Korrigan’s office, to smoke among the BBQ pigs. He lies down on the carpeted floor of Megan’s office and, smoking in defiance of building and city ordinances, ashes into the orchid he’s dragged down there with him. Despite a kindling anxiety, he feels good. Laughing the spontaneous, mysteriously prompted, rock-bottom laughter of the recently shriven, he stabs out the cigarette in the orchid’s vase and rests for a moment, a blue forearm thrown over his eyes. Light here never goes out completely. Always a little hallway light. Stay the night and no true rest will be had. But at a point when he’s dazed enough not to notice the soft trundling of a supply cart down the hallway, the cleaning woman, the dispossessed princess, catches a glimpse of what might be a heel, two heels, a pair of legs—is that a person? Is someone asleep on the floor in there? He missed the sound of her, but the momentary heat of her stare is enough to make him remove his forearm. He sees a doorway figure. He sits up just as she moves on, and both of them shiver uneasily over the next moment or two, her down the hall, him on the office floor, in the recognition of catching and being caught doing something human.

  There’s something human, too, suddenly, about all these pigs. He looks around him. He’s not sure he’s seen it before just now. The sheer number of them on display has made it impossible to pay attention to any particular one. It’s their combined effect that dominates. But from where he sits on the floor, he begins to make out individual pig expressions: ruddy cheeks, heads half-cocked, drowsy brows at half-mast. They sit like babies in a Michelin commercial. They stand on tip-hooves in a balletic twirl. He’s going from pig to pig when the anxiety he’s been trying to suppress explodes inside him: he has just left fifteen minutes of unchecked confession on Genevieve’s voicemail! Holy shit! And what was the purpose again? Can’t locate it! Was it, uh…something about unburdening? He’s not remembering clearly. It was something, something prompted him only a half hour ago, when it all seemed so appropriate…yes, to unburden. But was that it? Or was there something more? Uh, yeah, there was, and now he can see it clearly. He allowed himself to hope. That despite the husband and the baby-to-be, she might play back those messages, run down to his office, and confess that she harbors feelings for him.

  Oh, fool! Delusional fool! He has to find a way to erase them!

  But first, he needs to do something with the pigs. It’s worse for them here than a life on the farm. At least there they can oink around, nose each other’s asses, roll over in the warm muck. Here they look infinitely more penned in. They never leave. They never move. They’re ignored, undusted, calling out. They should prefer the slaughterhouse.

  He returns from Marnie Telpner’s office with shopping bags, into which he begins to carefully place one pig after the other, thinking, Feel good about yourself. It’s liberating. Like these pigs here. It had to be done. For your own sake, if not for hers. Joe is spinning himself the other way again, back to the feel-good story. He tells himself, It had to be done, right? To unburden. It had nothing to do with hope. How Genevieve responds to the information doesn’t even matter. Keep that in mind. It’s beside the point. Hope is beside the point. What’s important is, what’s important…What exactly, Joe, do you plan on doing with all those pigs?

  He removes the last of them—the wall calendar, the BBQ sign—and carries them down the hall.

  Idiot! He spins himself back just as quickly. Two times an idiot! Once in recording the message and once in sending it! And how do you think she’s going to respond, when he’s just revealed himself to be a lonely, anguished, lovesick, delusional fool? Confessing defeats his very purpose. He wants her to admit that she, too, has feelings for him, but how could Genevieve love a fool?

  He takes the bag full of pigs and enters Janine Gorjanc’s office. When Janine returned after her child’s funeral, she cried during input meetings. Once she cried walking into the men’s room without realizing her mistake. She encouraged everyone who came into her office to read the newspaper clippings she kept in an album and to pick up the frames on her desk and look into the blue eyes of the dead girl. Months have passed since then when Joe takes one of the frames in his hands—it is now as dusty as Megan’s pigs. He collects all the frames from the desk and the credenza and those hanging on the wall and puts them in a corner. Everyone has grown so familiar with the girl’s tragedy that they don’t see her face anymore. Not even her mother, who on some days can be very busy. With nervous energy he replaces the frames with Megan’s figurines. Pigs begin to populate across wood grains, over disheveled papers, on the dusty top of Janine’s clock radio. He hangs pig key chains from frame hooks, the calendar and BBQ sign from nails that once supported pictures of the girl. The pigs appear refreshed in their new setting, ridiculous smiles renewed. Then he packs the frames into the shopping bag and carries them down the hall. He sets them up across all the pig-free surfaces of Megan’s desk, pointing the lost child’s smiling face into the hall, so that everyone will have no choice but to notice her again, in the morning, as they walk by.

  Around one now. He ends up in Genevieve’s office, a floor below his own and a better place to be. It’s carefully decorated with merchandise from art museum gift shops—a clock that bobs on a stem, miniature Eames chairs on the windowsill. On the wall behind the desk is a Rothko reproduction in a red plastic frame. And on her desk are photographs of her adoring husband. The message light on her phone beats a steady red pulse. Might it give out by morning? No more likely than his own sturdy heart. He picks up the receiver and presses the message light. The same conspiring female voice that prompted him to press one now instructs him to input Genevieve’s PIN. He tries her birthday. He tries her address. He tries 1234. He spends a good half hour going through various combinations. In a moment of truly lush preposterousness, he tries his own name plus zero. Then his own name plus one, plus two, et cetera. Eventually he resigns himself to not knowing what four digits are closest to her h
eart.

  Maybe it’s the phone. Are messages stored in the phone, or in the wires, the connections, some central processing hub? What is a message? What if he were to disconnect the cord and replace it with a different phone—say, his own? He could easily switch it with one from a closer office, but her receiver, he’s noticed, emits a musky variation on her shampoo, something he’d like to have for himself. So he carries it up to his office and returns down the stairs with his phone in hand. He has the sudden feeling of being watched. That cleaning lady! He turns his head quickly but finds only that pattern of diminishing office doors and, at hallway’s end, the blank expression of a door to an office that belongs to someone long gone home.

  When the switcheroo fails to stop her message light from blinking, he considers the wholesale theft of Genevieve’s phone. But Kathy the office manager would quickly find her a new one, and when Genevieve got around to finally checking her messages, who would she suspect had stolen the old one?

  Teddy Reiser keeps a toolbox under his desk in the event something should go wrong during a photo shoot. Joe takes a Phillips-head from Teddy’s office and returns to Genevieve’s, where, with the door closed, he opens the silver wall plate supporting the phone cord. With a pair of dull scissors, he works his way through many thin, multicolored wires. The phone goes dead, thank God. But he doesn’t stop there. Only cutting the phone lines will look suspicious. People will wonder why they were cut, and if ever the messages surface—Wait, he thinks: won’t recorded messages survive cut phone lines?…Oh, God!—they will know it was him. But will they know it, would they even ever suspect it, if there was more than cut phone lines?

  And so, without much thought or deliberation, his crimes snowball. He gathers up all her personal things, including the pictures of her husband and the Rothko reproduction, and places them, for the time being, in the corner, while he carefully vandalizes her office. Doesn’t want to do any actual damage, though, so with the deliberateness of an artist he lays the phone on the ground in a way that suggests tossed-off violence. He does the same with the documents on her desk. He unshelves the books, eases the bookshelves down onto the floor, and places everything at a rakish angle. Standing on her chair, he pulls on the latticework of metal that holds the ceiling tiles together. The ceiling buckles. A few of the tiles he removes, setting them down where they were likely to fall anyway. He turns over the chair and the computer monitor. Then he retrieves her undamaged belongings and places them, including the picture of her husband, gently upon the ground, between gaps of destruction. The last thing he does is rehang her reproductions.

  Leaving, he shuts the light off. An odd scruple. But it’s not the world that needs destroying, just his world. And shutting off the light just seems the right thing to do.

  They’re coming back. To the footstep, the wheel turn, returning to their stations from the day before. The El cars are crammed, each a tinderbox of body heat and morning breath, and there’s stop-and-go traffic on the highways. Everyone converging on the city’s center of gravity: the skyline in the distance. There is every suggestion of renewal in the sun’s slow predominating, as it warns them of another long day ahead. The early-morning shine begins to slake the buildings’ black-metal thirst for heat. They deboard from trains and subways, hundreds of them, from buses and taxis, gaining the street from the platform stairs. Shouldering backpacks, pulling luggage carts over the curbs and potholes, they become vaguely aware of last night’s storm by skirting around pools of opalescent rainwater. Otherwise, not much thought in the head at this hour. In the last few blocks, their paths present inefficiencies that must be indulged: they go afield for lattes, fruit cups, fat-free muffins, packs of cigarettes, aspirins to cut the morning dread. Oh, don’t want to go back there. Have to go back there. Here we all are again, happy to be back.

  Joe Pope the dependable one wakes in Sonya Hutton’s office, sharing her upholstered couch with Benny’s binoculars and a racquetball racket. There’s an electric guitar at his feet. Sonya is at her desk early this morning, eating breakfast from a black container and listening to NPR on an antique Bakelite radio. He feels he is waking into a dream, a soft-lit and underwater world of cold sunshine, broadcast voices, and cooked eggs. Sonya is uncomfortably near—not much room between him, on the sofa, and her, at the desk. She is looking right at him, tree-stump calf and combat boot elevated to desk level, egg trough in one hand and plastic fork in the other. “Comfortable?” she inquires.

  “Not really,” Joe replies, rising to sitting position. A lick of hair on the left side stands straight up like a wall of tiny feathers. “I’m in your office, am I?”

  “Mi casa es su casa,” she says. “Sofa’s company issued, anyway, and the smell will go away. What’s with the guitar?”

  Joe has to think. It was that tricky, anxious hour between the decision to sleep and sleep itself when he took it from Gary Need’s office. Bad choice of bedmate, an electric guitar, both cumbersome and cold. The racket belongs to Trish Miller.

  After destroying Genevieve’s office, he found himself down at Trish’s, where he discovered a gym bag and racquetballs. He thought he’d work off some nervous energy, keyed into the gym, and batted the ball around barefoot until a Rorschach-like stain blossomed down the front of Trish’s snug University of Wisconsin T-shirt. He found that in the gym bag, too. He looks down. He’s still in it.

  “What time is it?” he asks.

  Sonya, peering up into a wall-mounted Hamm’s beer light box and clock display, where a fountain of white water flows eternally into a crystal stream behind the black hands of time itself, currently moving the morning forward, and Joe toward a reckoning with last night—Sonya squints and admits to not having her glasses. Eight thirty, she guesses. “Were you here all night?”

  He was, but that’s all over with now. Time now to start the day. And in the daylight this is no place for indulging the inefficiencies of human need. Joe Pope isn’t a worker bee, but nor is he quite the boss here, either. As dreaded middle management, he’s tasked with more than most around here and is damned dependable. Ordinarily at this hour, you’d find him arriving, well rested and squeaky clean, with bagel bag in hand, left pant leg pinned back for the bike ride in, as deadlines and priorities started to percolate through his caffeinated mind. Not so now. Joe took leave of his senses last night, and in the light of day, he’s wondering what he should do about that.

  To be honest, they probably won’t press charges. Fire him, sure, and require that he pay for the damages—but arrest him? He’s Joe Pope. He’s beloved around here.

  “I did it,” he says.

  “Did what?”

  As if on cue, there’s a sudden commotion, that call to gather and witness some strange happening in an otherwise staid workplace.

  “What did you do, Joe?” she asks.

  He leans back on the sofa, and air breathes out of the cushion through a cigarette burn. “First, I looked out the windows with Shassburger’s binoculars. He has a good pair of binoculars. I did that for about three hours. I was looking for something interesting.”

  “Find anything?”

  “Nothing. So then I smoked one of Brian Ford’s cigarettes.”

  “I’ve done that.”

  “And then I took all of Megan’s pigs out of her office, and I switched them with all the pictures in Janine’s office.”

  “Switched them?”

  “Right. I took the pigs in Megan’s office, and I brought them down to Janine’s office, and then I took all the pictures of Jessica that Janine has in her office, and I brought them down to Megan’s office. So now the pigs are in Janine’s and Jessica is in Megan’s.”

  Sonya lets her combat boot fall to the floor. “You serious?” Between “you” and “serious,” a yellow speck of egg flies from her mouth and lands somewhere between her and Joe. They acknowledge it unspokenly.

  “How does that strike you?” he asks.

  “So I could go up there right now and see all the pigs in Janin
e’s office.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And all the pictures of the dead girl in Megan’s office.”

  “Yep.”

  Sonya sets the plastic container of eggs on her desk and picks up her coffee. Her underwear is bunched under her cut-off fatigues, and she wiggles to free it. “This I got to see.”

  “Start in Genevieve’s office,” he says. “I’m responsible for that, too.”

  She leaves him on the sofa. His back aches and his head aches and the smell of eggs makes him want to flee the building. Run, never to return. But he doesn’t. This is just who he is in the a.m. A man responsible for things.

  He stands and stretches—necessary to start the day off right. Then he returns the guitar to the stand in Gary’s office. In Trish’s office, he discovers his blue button-down, which he draped last night across Trish’s chair. He makes the switch. The size medium Wisconsin tee is stretched out and not nearly as clean as it was when he found it. But it’s back in Trish’s gym bag now and, frankly, low on the scale of his concerns.