Everything Changes (13 page)

And let me tell you, that perennial erection of his is not helping his case any.

Morning. Dr. Sanderson warned me that I might experience some discomfort urinating in the days immediately following the procedure. It turns out the good doctor has understated things a bit. A hot, searing pain rips through me, like I’m pissing molten lead, and I let out an agonized cry as I double over in shock, splashing the floor and my legs in the process. What little urine has made it into the bowl is dark with blood. I stagger into the shower and finish there, groaning softly as my bladder empties. The final drops pass through me like shards of glass, and then, miraculously, the pain is gone. If I had to guess, I’d say that today is not going to be one of my better days.

This is what happens. You get to your office and everything looks different. Nothing is, of course, but the place feels suddenly alien, like it’s been replaced with a perfect replica of itself. You say hello to your buddies, same as always, make your way through the honeycomb of partitions to the sanctuary of your cubicle, and drop into your worn, ergonomically correct, mesh-backed chair, a knockoff of a popular German design, looking around your office with a stupefied expression. There’s your L-shaped workstation, your monitor and keyboard, a metal wire frame that holds your current files in graduated elevations, a Toshiba telephone, and a picture of Hope in the Crate and Barrel frame she supplied because no way was she going to have you pin her to the cubicle wall, to be lost amidst the various CAD renderings from the engineering department. This is it. This is the extent of the niche you’ve managed to carve out for yourself after almost a decade in the workforce. Your voice mail light blinks urgently; your computer emits a low chime heralding the arrival of each new e-mail with a disturbing frequency that borders on rhythmic. This is the job you’re supposed to refer to in interviews with Entertainment Weekly as the soulless drudgery you engaged in before you realized your dream of becoming a screenwriter. Beyond that, of what use can it possibly be?

The dull clatter of my coworkers’ scurrying fades to white noise and I stare at my walls, locked in a state of suspended animation, waiting for something, some cosmic intervention, to push me in one direction or another. My eye falls on the snapshot of Rael, Jed, and me dressed in black tie and leaning against the bar at Rael and Tamara’s wedding: Rael in the middle, looking flushed, happy, and only a little drunk; Jed on one side, looking customarily dapper, a young James Bond; and me on the other side, distinguishable from the waitstaff only due to the shredded boutonniere pinned to my lapel.

Hey, Rael. What the fuck do I do now?

Between my cancer fears and thoughts of a meaningful career in something, I find myself completely unable to focus on anything. I am filled with an intense nervous energy that shakes my legs and makes me drum my fingers ceaselessly on the laminated surface of my desk. I’m thinking I don’t want to end up like Clay, driven to madness by a nebulous career in a nonexistent field. I want to do something I care about. I sit twitching at my desk, staring into nothingness, while something undefined broils ominously inside me. My brain seems too big for my head, my organs pressed against the sides of my body. The upholstered walls of my cubicle suddenly seem claustrophobic to me, and I know I have to get out of here.

Tamara calls me on my cell phone. “My Zack alarm was going off,” she says.

“Your timing is impeccable.”

“What’s up?”

“I’m going a little crazy,” I say.

“I’m downstairs.”

“Thank God.”

Tamara’s in the lobby, dressed in jeans, a long, belted sweater coat, and boots that add a good two inches to her height. I practically dive into her hug. Lately, I’ve noticed that the nature of our hugs is changing. Where we used to simply hug and separate, we now cling for a few extra moments, and there’s significantly more body contact. And then there’s the way her cheek rests against mine, and the way her arm wraps itself over my shoulders so that she can curl her fingers around my neck, which seems somewhat telling and, I don’t know, just a tad naughty. These hugs have become something else, a nonverbal expression of an unspoken feeling of . . . what, exactly? I don’t know, but the fact that she hugs me like this is terrifying and thrilling, and though we’ve never discussed it, not once, it’s become an integral part of our ritual. These hugs are no accident. They’re neither a greeting nor a farewell, but a destination all their own.

“So, how’d it go?” she asks me.

“That’s still unclear,” I say. “They might have found something.”

Something petty and needy in me shivers gleefully as her expression falters. “What?” she says softly.

I tell her about the spot and the biopsy, leaving out the gory details of the procedure. “So it’s still probably nothing,” she says.

“The statistics are in my favor,” I say.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

I look at her. “I went there to hear that it was nothing. Statistically speaking, that would be a lot better, wouldn’t you say?”

“I see your point,” she says, grinning lightly. For some reason, I am uncharacteristically transfixed by her today, dwelling on all of her individual features instead of the whole person. “What?” she says self-consciously. “Do I have something in my teeth?”

“No,” I say. “It’s just, you look very pretty today.”

She breaks into a full, surprised smile. “You’re just saying that because it’s true,” she says, blushing.

My phone rings. I let it go to voice mail. “You’re screening?” she asks, raising her eyebrows. Screening is the universal marker of an embattled middleman.

“I’m just not in the mood today.”

Tamara grabs my arm and steers me toward the door. “You need Bloomingdale’s,” she declares.

Tamara tears expertly through the labyrinth of racks in the evening wear department at Bloomingdale’s, pulling dresses off and folding them over her arm, handing them to me when her pile threatens to become unmanageable, all the while insisting that the odds are still in my favor. “It could be anything,” she says. “A kidney stone, a muscle tear, or a million other things that mean nothing.”

Although she’s shed it for the most part, the trained ear can still occasionally pick up the last vestiges of Tamara’s suburban New Jersey accent, the softer r’s and stretched vowels betraying an adolescence of food courts, big hair, and Bon Jovi albums. The accent becomes more pronounced whenever she’s speaking forcefully, whether in anger or, as is now the case, stern, maternal tones, and I always take a secret pleasure in hearing the unpolished syllables roll off her tongue, a vocal intimacy to which few are privy.

“I know,” I say.

“Just don’t jump to conclusions,” she says. “You’ll make yourself crazy.”

“I just can’t shake this feeling that it might be something serious. Things have been going too well for me lately. I feel like I have some bad karma headed my way.”

Tamara frowns at me as she leads me toward the dressing rooms. “That’s a pretty dire outlook on life,” she says. “What’s the point in working to be happy if you’re going to be constantly looking over your shoulder, wondering when it’s time to pay the bill?”

“What are we shopping for?” I ask her through the dressing room door, trying not to think about what she looks like slipping in and out of dresses on the other side.

“A dress for your thing.”

“What thing?”

The door swings open and she steps out, making minor adjustments to a snug black cocktail dress. “Your engagement party? This Saturday?”

“Oh,” I say. “Right.”

“You forgot your own engagement party?”

“Just for a second.”

She looks at me inquisitively, seems about to say something, and then flashes a wry grin. “She’s a lucky girl, Zack.”

She steps back into the changing room and within seconds the dress is flung half over the door. What technique does she employ, I wonder, that enables her to doff it so quickly? “Come in and zip me,” she says.

Christ.

I step into the stall and she turns her back to me, staring critically at her dress in the mirror. When I pull on the zipper, the dress moves ever so slightly back, giving me an accidental view of the spot where her spine descends into her backside, and I am afforded an inadvertent glimpse of the twin uppermost curves of her bottom, just below the waistband of her thong. As I move the zipper up past the creamy expanse of her back and the soft curves of her scapulae, I can feel my hand starting to tremble. When I’m done, I look up to find her staring back at me from the mirror, a strange expression on her face. We stand like that for a few seconds, daring each other’s reflection, and then she turns around to face me. “So,” she says, banishing the moment with her bright tone. “What do you think? A little too slutty?”

I step back and affect a critical pose. “Just slutty enough, I should think.”

“Just slutty enough,” she repeats delightedly. “That’s exactly the look I was going for.”

It’s close to noon when she’s done shopping. We step out of the store into midtown, a cold October wind battering our cheeks as we walk downtown, toward my office. The sidewalks are teeming with the professional lunch crowd racing to and from lunches, grimly purposeful, looking up only to invoke their right of way against turning cabs at crosswalks. “Listen,” Tamara says, looking at her watch. “I have to get home. Celia’s babysitting, and I told her I’d be home by twelve.”

“Where are you parked?”

“Around the corner from your office.”

“You’re going to be late.”

“I always am. Just ask her.”

“Don’t you two get along?”

“As well as anyone can get along with the overbearing mother of her dead husband,” she says.

“So, no,” I say.

“I guess not. She and Paul are constantly checking on Sophie, like there’s no way I could be taking care of her properly without Rael there to help me. And I don’t know if I’m projecting this or it’s real, but I feel like I’m not allowed to seem happy around them. Like, how can I be happy when Rael’s dead, you know?”

“Are you ever?”

“What?”

“Happy.”

She sighs. “I have my moments.”

It’s begun raining by the time we reach the Spandler building, just a faint mist, and Sixth Avenue is chilly and gray. Tamara isn’t wearing a coat, so she stands shivering under the building’s awning, hugging her arms to her sides for warmth, her shopping bag between her knees. I look into the lobby uncertainly.

“What are you thinking?” Tamara says.

“I’m thinking I can’t go back up there,” I say.

“You’re worried about the biopsy.”

“Of course I’m worried. I don’t want to die.”

She reaches forward and grabs my forearm. “Zack. You’re not going to die.”

I nod. “Suddenly, nothing in my life seems right.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “My life, this job, getting married. I feel like none of it makes sense to me.”

“You were just saying how well things were going,” Tamara points out.

“That was what I thought,” I say. “But now everything makes no sense. There are so many things I want to do with my life that I’m not doing. If I did die, I would die never having done them.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I think I just need to get out of here for a few days, to do some thinking.”

“You’re going to just sit in your room until Friday, waiting to hear the results of your test?” she says. “You’ll go crazy.”

“I’m going crazy here,” I say. “If I stick around, I’ll be climbing the walls.”

Tamara takes my hands and centers herself in front of me. “Zack,” she says softly. “Is it possible that you’re overreacting a little?”

I look at her dark, wide eyes and the soft lines of her lips. I wonder why I’m finding her so utterly captivating today. “I’m beginning to suspect that I’ve been underreacting for some time now.”

Her smile conveys perfect understanding. “It’s going to be okay,” she says. “I know it.”

“Maybe,” I say. “But until it is, I just don’t want to be here.”

“Okay, then,” she says. Her face is burnished pink from the drizzle, and she looks adorable bouncing in place lightly to keep warm.

“Tamara,” I say, a powerful rush of warmth vibrating in my chest. “You’re the greatest.”

She smiles, and steps forward and there we are again, in one of our patented hugs. I inhale the clean aroma of almond shampoo and scented soap. “It’ll be okay,” she whispers in my ear, giving me a light kiss on my temple. And then, without any warning, I pull back and plant a kiss on her lips. It’s a medium-length kiss, openmouthed, with only the incidental contact of tongue, and maybe it could have been explained away later as an accident, except that while I’m kissing her, my hand comes up to brush the cool, damp skin of her cheek. Her lips are amazingly yielding, built for kissing, and seem to absorb mine automatically, ready for them, even though I’m not sure she’s actually kissing me back. The rhythmic patter of the rain is all around us, punctuated by the swishing sound of taxi tires rolling through puddles, and when I finally pull away, her eyes are wide and questioning, her lips still in the half-opened position of a kiss.

We look at each other for a long moment, my lips still reeling from the sense memory of hers. She nods slowly, as if to register the kiss in some internal log, and then flashes a bemused smile and says, “What was that?” There is no anger in her voice, nor even surprise, for that matter. Her tone is inquisitive and even mildly amused.

“I have no idea,” I said. “It just seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

“Well,” she says. “You certainly did it.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t.” She waves her hand to cut me off. “Don’t apologize. You’ll just make it weirder.”

“Okay.”

She leans forward to hug me again, and gives me a light kiss on the cheek, as if to undo the first one. “Call me tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay.”

She smiles at me and heads uptown, toward her garage. I watch her walk away until she rounds the corner, and then pull up the collar of my jacket and head west, toward the subway, feeling strangely uprooted; a spectator to my own inconceivable actions. I cross Broadway to Seventh Avenue and the 1 and 9 trains, struggling to quell the powerful urge to run back upstairs to my office and reclaim the normalcy of my life. I can still feel Tamara’s lips, still taste her on my tongue, and it brings a crazy smile to my rain-soaked face. My cell phone vibrates and I instinctively lift it to glance at the screen. Six messages. Without removing it from my coat pocket, I know my Blackberry is heavy with unreturned e-mails. I turn the phone off in midring and jam it into a coat pocket, a move that feels every bit as reckless as kissing Tamara.