Leaving Word. Steven Boykey Sidley
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Karina, and pushed over the line by a feeling of existential drift, so she decided to throw in with solidity and overpay for the honor of landed gentryship. She had insisted on only one thing, a view—even a poor view—of the sea. After all, what was the point of living near the beach if the sea was out of sight? Fifth Avenue enjoyed a slight topological rise in elevation above the other avenues, so a view she got, albeit from a tiny balcony that could barely accommodate a table for two. But after the clutter of New York she went on a merciless throwaway, determined to live light. Her apartment was indeed that, a bare minimum that would make Marie Kondo proud—other than the overflowing book-piled surfaces. Kondo clearly did not love books as she did. Unread books, much beloved books, partially abandoned books, gift books, friends’ books, loaned books. Books she loved and books she hated. Books she had edited and books she wished she had. Periodically neatly categorized on shelves by genre and author but always and often chaotically exploded after just a few months of quiet military discipline. And now she was pacing around the small but otherwise neat space, wishing for more chaos and clutter to distract her. She had a small Japanese refrigerator, the icebox of which cocooned a frosty bottle of expensive Absolut, unopened, patiently awaiting an occasion, now presented. She poured a tumbler, neat and cold, and called her sister.
‘I killed Buddy,’ she wailed.
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘He’s dead. Buddy’s dead.’
‘WHAT? ARE YOU SERIOUS? WHAT DID YOU DO?’
‘I caused it. Shamanism. Demonism. Witchery. Necromancy,’ she sniffled.
‘Oh. You had me worried. I was already planning to bust you out of prison. Is he really dead? How?’
‘They don’t know yet.’
‘Why are you so upset? I thought he fired you for not sleeping with him?’
‘I may have exaggerated a bit. And I’m upset because I told you that someone needed to die. I didn’t mean Buddy.’
She refilled her glass and tried to understand why she was so upset. She hadn’t really dwelled much on it, but it was pretty clear now. Buddy was her mythical house on the hill. Someone she might, in her wildest dreams, have loved. Someone different enough to allow for vigorous sparring, from which they could emerge re-energized rather than exhausted. Someone who swam if not in, then at least proximal to her pool of intellectual passions. She wondered now whether she had seen something that was never there at all. She wondered about those moments when she caught him looking at her in a meeting. Or how he held her gaze when he talked to her. Or how he would call her at home about a business matter, and then just let the conversation range, tell her about things that are only the concern of friends and intimates, his fears, his insecurities, his sudden sadnesses and unbidden joys. He would ask her about herself, her loves and other lives, her mother’s death, her sad and isolated father, her smart sister. He would ask her her opinion, on everything, and remember it. At editorial meetings he would defer to her, support her against dissenting opinions. She could not have been misperceiving this. All that was missing was the call, a date, and the certainty of where it would lead. But he never went there. She always assumed it was simply a matter of timing. She remembered the stories of people, men and woman, who insisted that Bill Clinton was talking directly and meaningfully and sensuously to them alone in an auditorium full of people. Perhaps Buddy was just that, a man of practiced arts, a supernatural collector of fealties. She was more upset about his death than she was about losing her job, in which he certainly had a hand. She was more upset about losing the uncertainty of Buddy than what might have been the certainty of her career. In fact, he had personally come to her office to tell her. She replayed it.
‘Joelle, you have a minute?’ He stood uncertainly at her office door.
‘Of course, come in.’ Against her better judgment, her heart did a brief tango.
He lowered his ample frame down on the only other chair in her office, a little art deco number built for a smaller species. She prayed it wouldn’t collapse.
‘There’s no other way to say this, Joelle. We have to let you go. I’m sorry, the board has given me no option. We are, um, downsizing our book business.’
She felt herself stop breathing, and stared at him without expression.
He continued. ‘We’ve arranged a very generous package for you.’
‘How nice.’
‘Please understand—you know the reading trends better than I do. It’d be insulting to someone like you to be asked to edit, um, less weighty stuff. We would like you to stay for the month, and then, if you want, take your current projects with you and we’ll pay you as a contractor while you finish them up.’
‘I’m so grateful. I mean, not to be insulted. Thank you.’
He ran out of things to say, but sat there, dejected, avoiding her death stare.
‘Let me ask you something, Buddy. What are you reading these days? What’s next to your bed?’
‘Um, some non-fiction stuff.’
‘Like?’
‘Tech trends, business stuff, that sort of thing.’
‘So did you read the Russians, the Brontës?’
‘Most of them.’
‘And?’
‘They were very good. Some were much more than that.’
‘And so in your world, good fiction like that, what happens to them? The writers, I mean. You know, the imaginations you so articulately asked us to carry gently in our hands?’
‘Don’t make this harder than it is, Joelle. There’s a board, shareholders. I do their bidding. If there was a larger reading market with larger margins I wouldn’t be in your office. Maybe we could discuss this over a drink after work.’
She held in outraged laughter. Now? Now you want to fuck me? You think now is a good time to ask me out? I was available last week, you dick.
But she just looked at him, hoping that her face betrayed nothing.
‘Sorry. No. Now you’ll have to excuse me—I have a lot of work to finish if I am to be out of here before the end of the month. But thanks for stopping by.’
For a while he sat there like a scolded child, and then heaved himself out the chair and backed out of the door. Joelle breathed deeply, stood up, went to the bathroom, locked herself in the stall and waited for a Category 5 cry. It didn’t come. Perhaps the milk had long been spilt.
He was right, of course. Companies need to go where the big profits are, even if it means going to places where they have never gone before, like virtual reality, an experience she was determined never to have. Pivoting, they called it. No need for sentimentality. Everything is a product—an item whose value is negotiated between buyer and seller. Nothing man-made rises to the level of deity. All is commodity, impermanent, transitory, degradable. Potatoes, shirts, cars, great art, mobiles, pencils, great literature, newspapers, ex-boyfriends, great music, vacations, toothbrushes. Fuck it, she’d do something else. Something with margin, dammit. Import and sell Ethiopian coffee. Start a porno site. Write erotica. Open a flower shop. Pet shop. Sell her labor on a farm. Go back to college and study finance and buy and sell companies. It’s all the same. Oh, and growth. She forgot about growth. She must grow. Profits are not sufficient. No pathetic three percent revenue and profit growth for CrossMedia. Oh no, they need to grow like a tumor. Our companies need to grow, like our countries, our populations, our ambitions, our self-regard, our usage of this planet, which, sadly, cannot grow. More, more, more. Was there no end to it? She remembers reading, who was it? Naomi Klein? In which the author said, simply, if you don’t want to crash the planet in a number of unpleasant ways, stop growth. Companies, countries, cities, populations, GDP. Just stop. We’ll be fine. What a dumb idea, Joelle had thought at the time.
And what of art? What audacity. What arrogance to think she could contribute. And the artists themselves?