Monday, February 02, 2004

 

ENTRY 074


Last night I was taking the subway home from a dinner party that Hamilton and Eric threw at Eric's apartment (it was a lovely meal, marred only by the presence of olives in the main course). Just as I was reflecting that I'd had one glass of wine too many (Hamilton being a relentless foister of libations), a very attractive fellow boarded at Times Square, sat across from me, looked deep into my eyes, and threw up on his shoes.


I chose not to take it personally.


But it did make me want to vomit myself. Not, I decided, because I was feeling particularly tipsy, but because I had the sense of needing to purge some other kind of poison. So much about my job soured in the past year, and the dull plodding resigned silent horror of it all had twisted my insides into knots.


The final severing occurred on Friday. When I got to work, my replacement, a rotational associate at the company who's going permanent with my former position, had already lined up boxes of her stuff outside my office door. I spent the morning clearing out all my emails and packing up all the stuff I wanted to take home. Whenever I leave a familiar physical place for the final time, my body seems to feel the grief of the act viscerally and kinesthetically, and the previous day's hangover, even though I'd basically recovered from it, couldn't have helped matters. Finally, my light-headedness reminded me that it was 2:00 and I hadn't eaten, so I ran out to get a sandwich and soup, the latter of which I was unable to finish. I was being turned out; how could I eat?


At last I was cleared out and my replacement quickly settled in, and I went to hang out in Hamlet's office while he attended a meeting. I used the time to write out a farewell card I'd bought. There was so much to say about the past year and a half, and I'm better at writing things than speaking them. There was the fact that I'd come to view him as an older brother, that he had taken a chance on me and given me a foot in the door when I was nearly alone in New York and almost out of money, that his belief in me had finally allowed me to develop the sense of self-confidence I'd never possessed in a business environment. "There are a lot of shit bosses, and a fair number of good ones," I wrote, "but there are very few who ever come to feel like family."


I tucked the card into my bag, and Hamlet returned a few minutes later. He said, for the umpteenth time, that he was sad today, and I went to say goodbye to all the other people on the floor who'd been good to me. I sat in the office of a very nice assistant I always liked talking to, just down the hall from Troll, who had expended so much effort to get me fired in the past year but who had failed, despite her best efforts, to do more than make me miserable at work. I was leaving for other reasons, which in its own way felt like a victory, though the personal cost had been great. But I knew that I had stuck to my ideals, that I had shown class and refrained from retaliating in kind. And I knew I would leave without the ugly confrontation with Troll that I'd fantasized about, that would be truly cathartic only in my imagination. Catharsis would come from my absence, from my not-being and not-doing, and nothing else would ever have worked.


So many people stopped into the office to express their sadness about my leaving, their goodwill toward and fondness for me, their wish that I stop by to see them whenever I'm in the neighborhood, and I know they all honestly meant it. It is still difficult, after all this time and all this self-reflection and even all the psychotherapy, for me to absorb that I mean something to people.


I returned to Hamlet's office with my work friend for the final goodbye, but Hamlet had left for the day. For a split second I was flabbergasted, but I realized then that this was his way, to go quietly while I did my thing, to unwittingly give me the opportunity to lay my farewell in writing on his desk so that he would find it, but not me, there on Monday morning. We had a lunch date for the following Friday, anyway.


But even so it just wouldn't be the same. This is the unspoken thing we both knew. And though I was pleasantly surprised this morning when Hamlet telephoned to thank me for the card and to say, "I miss you and love you and all that funny stuff," and to assure me that I was a lifelong friend, there is the grief that comes from not being the every-weekday duo anymore, sharing the private jokes and the office frustrations and the eye-rolling at idiocy and the strange counterintuitive intimacy of contracts and emails and phone intercoms. The nurturing part of me is what I most readily suppress, but I had nurtured this man every day, had made sure he was taken care of. It was the same thing, but on a platonic level, as what I'd done for Neil, when I'd watch over him in his sleep. Whom could I nurture now? Myself was the easiest answer, and the hardest.


On the walk to the subway that evening, lugging all my office possessions, I found my eyes stinging, slightly blurred. The winter wind swept around me and tore away the warm, suffocating cocoon of the past eighteen months, leaving me raw, relieved, aching, new.

7:38 PM

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