the door behind her and return to my dinner and later fall asleep on the couch. In the morning I would go to work and, except for five or ten solitary adventures, forget Teresa as easily as I’d forgotten all the other women who’d taken friendliness with me only so far. You learn to release because otherwise you’re pulled in directions you can’t go. But even as I registered this warning, wondered if being thin could make so much difference in my attractiveness to women, and thought about newspaper accounts of femmes fatales who seduced men in order to rob them or turn their bodies over to the internal organ black market, as well as about the venereal risks involved in sleeping with someone so brazenly pursuing anonymous sex, I ran to the living room and then the front door and then the common space from which both the stairwell entry and the elevator were visible. I was too late. She’d gone.
When I got to work late the next morning at 9:45, having dozed off just before my alarm sounded and then slept for an hour, most of my coworkers were putting on their coats and crowding around the elevator, making quiet conversation and picking hairs from their clothing. One stood motionless off to the side with his eyes closed, leaning against the wall as if asleep or recovering from a dizzy spell. They were all men.
The office, despite its vaulted ceilings with propeller fans, felt particularly warm and close that day, like a ship hold. My cubicle mate, Max, talked on the phone and stared at the kidney-shaped glass bowl between his desk and mine, in which a Japanese fighting fish swam through Neptune reefs and arched castle gates, trailing a gossamer of skin. I loosened my tie and unbuttoned the top of my starched yellow shirt and, feeling the nausea pangs that stabbed me every morning, held my stomach as if to keep it from swelling back to its former size.
“Max,” I said. He shook his head, switched the phone to his left hand, and wrote “angry girlfriend” on a piece of paper.
Across the room Elizabeth, Mr. Raven’s secretary, waved me over to her desk. I had invited her out to dinner the week before, and although she’d begun refusing before I’d finished asking, it seemed possible as I walked across the houndstooth carpet that she was one of those women with a default no response that, although it cost her a few good dates, saved her from the many undesirable men who saw deliberation as foreplay, and that, breaking character, she had reconsidered me. In a flattering blue pantsuit, she smiled and poured steaming water from a tulip-decorated teakettle into a matching cup.
“Are those new earrings?” I asked.
“You’re late and—”
“They bring out the auburn in your hair. Where’s everyone going?”
“The sexual harassment sensitivity course at the Prescription for a Superior Existence Station,” she said.
“I forgot that was today. Only men seem to be leaving.”
“That’s the directive.” She squeezed a lemon wedge into her teacup, beside which a pewter condiment caddy held honey, sugar, cream, and echinacea powder. “Mr. Raven asked me to remind you that he needs the Danforth file by four o’clock.” Her eyebrows, sharpened and defined and darkened since I’d last seen them, came together as she looked up and curled a ginger lock of hair behind her ear. She had not reconsidered me.
“I emailed it to him yesterday,” I said.
“He must not have gotten it.”
“I’ll send it again.”
She nodded and I returned to my computer, where I found no record of the email in question. Also, the Danforth file I opened was not the one I’d worked on for eight hours. The date and time of its last modification was Monday afternoon, when Philippe had given it to me.
“We broke up again,” said Max, shutting off his phone.
“My Danforth file has been replaced with an older version,” I said.
“She thinks I hate her brother.”
“This is impossible.”
“Everybody hates him. She says other people just don’t understand him, and since I’ve spent so much time with her family I’m supposed to see past his unattractive qualities, but it’s precisely because I’ve been around him so much that I can’t stand him and don’t want him over for Seder.” He turned off his computer and desk lamp. “Come on, let’s go. We’re the last guys here.”
“I can’t redo Danforth today and go to a training seminar at the same time.”
“You have to go. You’re a man.”
“Mr. Raven wants the file by four.”
“Your absence would be noticed in a big way.”
Discreetly but unmistakably Max was referring to the conference in Chicago I had attended in January with my squadmates, one of whom, Juan, had used a company credit card for our six-thousand-dollar gentlemen’s club bill. Although he later called and finessed the charge down to a more realistic thirty-seven hundred dollars, and in spite of company policy not to reveal employee money matters, the story got out and the four of us were forced to give the Employee Conduct Board a lurid and damning account of our trip.
“Is Mr. Raven still here?”
“He left twenty minutes ago.”
“What about Mr. Grobalski?”
“Gone too.”
Max handed me my coat and I followed him out slowly.
It’s hard to say if I would have been more open to the seminar if Danforth hadn’t hung over me that morning. I knew I could be more sensitive—as much as the next man, certainly—but I was wary of the involvement of Prescription for a Superior Existence. Maybe I shouldn’t have been. Beyond what was common knowledge, all I knew then about PASE was that its founder, Montgomery Shoale, a rich venture capitalist, had self-published The Prescription for a Superior Existence, a thousand-page book that introduced and explained the eponymous religion, nearly two decades ago, when it was widely considered a vanity project designed to lend depth and credibility to his company training seminars—he had built a reputation around the Bay Area for speaking about intra-office social cohesion and running more time-efficient meetings—until eventually PASE’s religious bona fides were established and the IRS granted it tax-exempt status as a faith-based organization. When the Citadel, the flagship building of its Portrero Hill headquarters called the PASE Station, became the sixth-tallest structure in San Francisco, there was speculation that Shoale would go bankrupt, but instead he expanded the operation by building the Wellness Center, a four-acre campus in Daly City where people could study PASE intensively. Then he started the PASE Process, a charitable organization that infused money and crackerjack administrative staffs into underfunded soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and daycare centers in low-income areas of the city. It also gave grants to arts companies, medical research labs, and neighborhood development centers. At some point within the last couple of years a small but high-profile group of celebrities had begun talking in interviews about their conversion to PASE, and it had made international headlines the previous spring when the French government objected to its building a Wellness Center in Marseilles. That surprised me because I’d thought PASE was strictly a California phenomenon.
In general, though, I didn’t think about it. The West Coast gives birth to several religions annually, and although PASE had lasted longer and was better financed and more diversified than most, like them it seemed destined to struggle for a place on the country’s spiritual landscape before fading into the same horizon
