supposed to guess. What was it?”
“Pip, I’m sorry. I’m taking my sons to the A’s game. This is not a good time.”
“I was just kidding about the lawsuit.”
“Are you really feeling all right? You don’t seem like yourself.”
“Are you going to answer the question?”
Igor’s look of fear was reminiscent of Stephen’s two nights earlier. “If you need more time off, you can take it. Take the rest of the week if you want.”
“Actually, I’m thinking of taking the rest of my life off.”
“It was a stupid joke, the twenty questions. I apologize. But my sons are waiting for me.”
Sons: even worse than siblings!
“Your sons can wait five minutes,” she said.
“We’ll talk first thing in the morning.”
“You said you liked me, although you don’t know why. You said you wanted to see me succeed.”
“Both things completely true.”
“But you can’t take five minutes to tell me why I shouldn’t quit?”
“I can take the whole morning, tomorrow. But right now—”
“Right now you don’t have time to flirt.”
Igor sighed, looked at his watch, and sat down in the other guest chair. “Don’t quit tonight,” he said.
“I think I’m going to quit tonight.”
“Is it the flirting? I don’t have to do that. I thought you enjoyed it.”
Pip frowned. “So there wasn’t actually anything you wanted from me.”
“No, just fun. Just teasing around. You’re so funny when you’re hostile.” He seemed pleased with his explanation, pleased with his own good nature, not to mention his good looks. “You could have California’s Most Hostile Employee of the Year Award.”
“So it was never going to be anything but flirting.”
“Of course not. I’m happily married, this is an office, there are rules.”
“So in other words I’m nothing to you except your worst employee.”
“We can talk about a new position for you in the morning.”
She saw that all she’d done by confronting him was ruin the longrunning game with him, the game that had made her work here halfway bearable. Earlier in the day, she’d thought she couldn’t feel more alone than she already did, but now she saw that she could.
“This is going to sound crazy,” she said, with a catch in her throat. “But could you possibly ask your wife to go to the game tonight? Could you possibly take me to dinner and give me some advice?”
“Ordinarily, yes. But my wife has other plans. I’m already late. Why don’t you go home and come back in the morning?”
She shook her head. “I really, really, really need a friend right now.”
“I’m so sorry. But I can’t help you.”
“Clearly.”
“I don’t know what happened to you, but maybe you should go home and see your mother for a few days. Come back on Monday and we’ll talk.”
Igor’s phone rang, and while he took the call she sat with her head bowed, envying the wife to whom he was apologizing for being late. When he was finished, she could feel him hesitating behind her shoulder, as if weighing whether to lay a hand on it. He apparently decided against it.
When he was gone, she returned to her cubicle and typed out a letter of resignation. She checked her texts and emails, but there was nothing from either Stephen or Andreas Wolf, and so she dialed her mother’s number and left a message, telling her that she was coming to Felton a day early.
THURSDAY
The Oakland bus station was a mile-and-a-half walk from her friend Samantha’s apartment. By the time Pip got there, wearing her knapsack and carrying, in a roller-skate box that she’d borrowed from Samantha, the vegan olallieberry cake that she’d spent the morning making, she needed to pee. The door to the ladies’ room was blocked, however, by a cornrowed girl her own age, an addict and/or prostitute and/or crazy person, who shook her head emphatically when Pip tried to get past her.
“Can’t I quickly pee?”
“You just gonna have to wait.”
“Like, how long, though?”
“Long as it takes.”
“Takes for what? I won’t look at anything. I just want to pee.”
“What’s in the box?” the girl demanded. “Those skates?”
Pip boarded the Santa Cruz bus with a full bladder. It went without saying that the bathroom at the back was out of order. Apparently it was not enough that her entire life was in crisis: all the way to San Jose, if not to Santa Cruz, she would have to worry about wetting herself.
Control pee, she told herself. Control-P. As a teenager, when she was living in Felton and going to school in Santa Cruz, all her friends had owned Apple computers, but the laptop her mother had bought her was a cheap, generic PC from OfficeMax, and what she’d typed on it, when she needed to print, was Control-P. Printing, like peeing, was evidently a thing you needed to do. “I need to print,” the people at Renewable Solutions were always saying. This exact, strange phrase: I need to print. Need to P. Need to control pee … The thought struck her as good; she prided herself on having thoughts like this; and yet it went around in circles without leading anywhere. At the end of the day (people at Renewable Solutions were always saying “at the end of the day”), she still needed to pee.
When the freeway momentarily rose out of the industrial East Bay bottomlands in which it wallowed, she could see fog piling up behind the mountains across the bay. There would be fog over the hill tonight, and she hoped that if she had to wet her pants she could wait and do it under its merciful cover. To get her mind off her bladder, she stuffed her ears with Aretha Franklin—at least she could finally stop trying to like Stephen’s hard-core boy rock—and reread her latest exchanges with Andreas Wolf.
He’d emailed back to her the night before, while she was knocked out with Samantha’s Ativan on Samantha’s couch.
The secret of your name is safe with me. But you know public figures must be especially careful. Imagine the state of distrust in which I move through the world. Revealing anything shameful to anyone, I run the risk of exposure, censure, mockery. Everyone should be told this about fame before they start pursuing it: you will never trust anyone again. You will be a kind of damned person, not only because you can’t trust anyone but, still worse, you
