When I get to Ben’s cube on the forty-seventh floor, it’s empty. His computer is on, and beside his swivel chair is a leather bag and a pair of black running shoes. I know that he’s here, somewhere—in the building—and yet he’s not here in his cube. I ask around to see if anyone has seen Ben, trying to mask the angst I feel with a weedy smile. “He was here,” some blonde paralegal tells me as she scampers by with a box in hand, her sling-back heels clickety-clacking down the wooden floors, “but now he’s not.” Obviously.
I find a piece of scrap paper and jot down a quick note in the best handwriting I can muster, though my hands shake for about a million reasons, or maybe a million and one. We need to talk. ASAP, I write, and leave the note on the plastic keyboard before returning to my own cube, disgruntled.
This morning I’m given the all-important task of Bates labeling documents. It sounds important, it really does. It has a name even, Bates labeling, like the fact that those little dots over a lower case i or j have a name—a tittle it’s called, a simple fact I discovered while searching the internet and charging my time to one of the firm’s more opulent clients—or when your second toe is bigger than your big toe, it’s called a Morton’s toe. Important things worthy of names. Like Bates labels. Matters of life or death.
But no. What I’m doing is placing hundreds of thousands of numbered stickers on a looming document production before being given the task of photocopying them three or five or ten times. There are boxes of documents, and worse yet, they’re not even full of scandalous details like the divorce lawyers get, but rather financial documents. Because I get to work for transactional lawyers, boring men who get their kicks staring at financial documents and talking about money all the livelong day while paying me pennies above minimum wage.
As I settle into my task of Bates labeling, my movements become hurried and repetitive, my mind far removed from the stacks of financial documents that lay before me. I’m at work, but I certainly can’t focus on work. All I can think about is Esther. Where is Esther? I can’t focus on a single thing, not Bates labeling the piles of documents before me, nor skimming through a mountain of correspondence and pleadings, marking over and over again our client’s name with a red Post-it flag, until all the words start to blur before my eyes. I replay our last conversation in my mind. Did I miss something hidden there in the tone of her voice or her weary smile? She was sick; she didn’t feel well. I’d be a killjoy, Quinn. Go without me. You’ll have more fun.
But now I have to wonder: Was this a test? Was Esther putting me to the test? Seeing what kind of roommate I really was, and whether or not I’d put her needs before my own.
If that’s the case, then I guess I failed. I went out without her; I had fun. I didn’t even think to stop by Esther’s room when I got home to see how she was feeling and if she was okay. The thought never even crossed my mind. I didn’t offer to bring her a blanket or warm up a bowl of soup. Another roommate, a better roommate, would have made soup. Another roommate would have said, “No way,” to Esther’s insistence that I go. “No way, Esther. I’ll have more fun here with you.”
But that’s not what I said. I said okay, and left in a hurry out through the front door. I didn’t think twice about my decision not to stay.
“Damn,” I say out loud now as a sheet of paper slices the fragile skin of my index finger, and red blood swells to the surface, leaving its mark on a statement of cash flow. “Damn, damn, damn,” I repeat, knowing my escalating frustration is directed far more at Esther than this insignificant amount of blood loss. My finger hurts and yet my heart hurts even more.
Esther is trying to replace me.
My mind considers for one split second a world without Esther, and it makes me feel sad.
“Bad day?” a voice asks then, and I peer up from my paper cut to see Ben in the doorway, standing arms akimbo (that, too, is a thing also discovered on a random internet search, meaning: standing with hands on hips), as he spies the driblets of blood on my hand and says to me, “Here, let me help.”
Ben wears a pair of slim cotton chinos, taupe, and a piqué polo shirt the color of peacock feathers. He’s impeccably dressed and looks amazing, though chances are he rode his bike to work as he so often does, a Schwinn hybrid that he locks to the galvanized steel bike rack outside the building. He’s got a runner’s build, lank but muscular, always adorned in tight-fitting clothes—tailored tops and skinny bottoms—so you can see each and every one of the gluteal and abdominal muscles. Or so I imagine you can see them.
It’s no secret I have a crush on Ben. I’m pretty sure everyone in the world knows but him.
Ben grabs a tissue from a box and presses it firmly to my hand. His hands are warm, his movements decisive. He holds my hand in his, inches above my heart. He smiles as he tugs on my arm and raises it higher. “It’s supposed to help slow the bleeding,” he says, and for the first time in a while I smile, too, since we both know good and well no one ever bled out from a paper cut. The only thing it will do is leave a mess on these stupid financial documents—nothing a little Wite-Out can’t fix—but I’ll be just fine.
“Sorry I missed your call last night,” he says to me, then, “What’s up?” He carries with him my note: We need to talk. ASAP.
I have this urge to unload on Ben right here and right now, to tell him everything: Esther, the fire escape, the bizarre letter to My Dearest and more. There’s so much to tell Ben, but I don’t. Not yet, anyway, not here. I don’t want to talk here. Gossip in this place spreads like wildfire, and the last thing I need is the nosy PA down the hall telling the rest of the firm about what a shoddy roommate I am or how Esther has renounced me.
Ben, Esther and I are like the three stooges, the three musketeers. It was me who brought us together. I knew Ben from work—we started working at the firm on the same day, and together sat through eight painful hours of filling out mounds of human resource forms, watching mindless videos, surviving orientation. I was bored beyond belief when two hours in Ben turned to me in our swivel chairs at some fancy-schmancy conference room table and parodied the HR lady for what was clearly a surfeit of Botox injections. Her face was frozen stiff; she couldn’t smile.
I laughed so hard I was pretty sure coffee shot up my nose.
We’ve been friends ever since, sharing lunch together almost every day, an extravagance of coffee breaks, rumors about the firm’s attorneys.
And then came the day when I moved in with Esther, about two weeks before Ben and my twosome became a threesome. Esther suggested we host a party to celebrate my arrival. She put up decorations; she made hors d’oeuvres galore. Of course she did; she’s Esther. That’s the kind of thing Esther does. She invited a whole slew of people she knew: people from the bookstore, from grad school, from the building and around the neighborhood; Cole, the physical therapist from the first floor; Noah and Patty from down the street.
I invited Ben.
Everyone else came and went, but by the end of the night it was just me and Esther and Ben, rattling on and on about nothing until morning came and Priya called him home, interrupting our fun. He went, grudgingly, and then the next weekend when Priya was too busy studying for a midterm exam to hang out with Ben, he came back.
You like him, don’t you? Esther had asked knowingly once Ben was gone.
It’s that apparent? I’d asked of her, and then, stating the obvious, It’s not like it matters, anyway. He has a girlfriend, as she and I sat on the sofa side by side, staring at a blackened TV screen.
Well, said Esther in that unselfish way that was all Esther, he’s missing out on something really great. You do know that, don’t you, Quinn? And I said yes, though of course I didn’t know. His loss, Esther told me, and she made me repeat it so that in time I’d start to believe.
The next weekend, Ben was back, chilling with Esther and me.
If there’s anybody in the world who can help me find Esther, it’s Ben.
And so there in my tiny little cube when Ben asks, “What’s up?” I ask instead, clutching that tissue to my hand to clot the nearly nonexistent blood, “Want to go to lunch?” and though it’s not even eleven o’clock, Ben doesn’t balk.