But it had seemed, when Cory broke up with Greer, that she became like a piece of knotted wire. Where were the qualities he had loved in her? He had taken on some of them himself. Because of course everyone was soft and hard. Skeleton and skin. But women claimed for themselves the province of softness, which men cast off. Maybe it was easier to say you liked it in a woman. But really, maybe you wished you had it yourself.
Cory pulled tissue after tissue from a box that had been augmented by an overbox made of gold-painted metal. What a sad item this was, designed to disguise tissues, which Lisa Henry’s clients needed all the time. Just being in front of her, they were probably transformed into emotional wrecks. Faced with tenderness, they became tenderized, and it made them cry. Cory blew his nose harshly, as if in an attempt to gain control. The goose honk was anything but gentle.
“I suspect you’re not used to talking about yourself,” she said.
“No, I’m not. It’s stopped being a thing for me.”
“Why is that?”
He shrugged. “Bad breakup. But it was a long time ago.”
She closed her eyes and opened them; instantly he was reminded of Slowy, who often did that. Was Slowy thinking hard in those moments, or was he adrift in reptile space-time?
“I’m not sure time is always a determinant to acceptance,” Lisa said. “You still think about this person?”
“Yes. Greer.”
“Greer was someone you talked to about yourself, which means about your feelings. And now you’ve lost that.”
“Yeah. That and basically everything else.”
The word lost made him think of SoulFinder. But he would not find Alby, ever. He had lost Greer in a more ordinary way: a breakup. People rarely spoke of a breakup as tragic; instead, breakups were part of life. But when you and the other person broke up, you could look for them everywhere, and maybe you would physically find them, but even if they were the same person, they were not for you; they were not yours. The evaporation of love was like a kind of death. Lisa Henry obviously understood this. She looked at him with an expression that was so compassionate, it was as though she thought he had been pierced with a thousand arrows.
Time was up. She stood, and then he stood, and they both nodded to each other, and then she opened the door. This one session was enough for him, he realized. Seeing her had been useful, but it was enough. Cory went outside, where the afternoon was fading but seemed as if it had been gently buffed while he was indoors. Boy meets world, he thought, and he headed for his car.
FOURTEEN
Daytime, when you didn’t have a job, wasn’t just something to rush through, but to spend time in. Greer, unemployed, found patches of sun and little swirls of wind, and a coffee shop in Brooklyn with a good mix of chatter and quiet. She sat in all these places and read books the way she used to when she was a girl, back when there was nothing else she had to do, nowhere else she had to be, and no one looking out for her. She read with “abandon,” it would probably be called, though when you read a book you didn’t abandon anything; instead, you marshaled it all. After she’d left Loci and left Faith in such a dramatic way, books were still there. She read Jane Austen and she read Jane Eyre; the two Janes, which Zee had once confused. She read a contemporary French novel in which all the characters were desperate, and there were no quotation marks, only little dashes, which made Greer feel kind of crazy, but also kind of French.
She sat in the coffee shop taking her time, and she thought about how she’d always wondered who those people were who sat in coffee shops in the middle of the day, and now she knew. Some of them were, like her, the jobless, the lost. She sat there feeling very much unlike herself. She had enough money to last a couple of months, so she didn’t need to rush into another job. Loci was over, and more than that so was Faith Frank. Zee was only half-over; they’d had a series of email exchanges recently in which Greer had tried to prostrate herself again, at first seriously, then wittily, and Zee had written back a few short, amused notes, so it seemed that a thaw was starting.
One afternoon when she was home, drowsing on her couch, Cory called.
“Greer,” he said. “It’s Cory Pinto.”
“As opposed to Cory who?”
“You might know another one,” he said. “It’s possible. So do you remember you told me I could stay with you if I ever came to New York?”
“Sure.”
“Feel free to take it back. But I’m coming down to go see a play. Immersive theater. Our investor wants me to go, and he bought me a ticket. I thought I could stay over for two nights, if it’s convenient.”
Cory drove down from Macopee and showed up Thursday night with a backpack. They hugged awkwardly in her doorway. Right away she ordered takeout from the Thai place, knowing that food would be a distraction from the strangeness. They sat and ate at the small table in Greer’s living room. In the low light, with the containers of food open all around them, he told her more about the slow, painstaking creation of the video game, his partnership with his friend from Valley Tek, the environmental artists who had been hired, and the investor who was paying for all of this.
“There’s no guarantee it will become anything,” Cory said. “It’s not mainstream at all, and the market is flooded. But I don’t know, is it obnoxious to say I’m a little hopeful?”
“No. I think it’s great,” she said.
“And as for my mom, I didn’t know there could be improvement after such a long time, but there is. I don’t think she needs me in the same way.”
“That’s so great. And what does that mean for you?”
“That’s exactly what I asked myself,” Cory said. “I’ll be okay, Greer, you don’t have to worry.”
“I’m not worried,” she said, but she remembered that she had done nothing but worry about him after Alby died. She had worried so hard that he would lose himself and that she would lose him. But it wasn’t that he had lost himself. He was always going to be the person who stayed and helped. She hadn’t seen that. “I’m sorry about how I was,” she said. “With you.”
“Well, I am too. How I was, I mean.” He smiled. “If there was ever a more generic and vague conversation, I’ve never heard it.”
“It’s weird,” she said, “the way sometimes you’re in your life, but other times you’re looking back at it like a spectator. It kind of goes back and forth, back and forth.”
“And then you die.”
She laughed a little. “Yes. And then you die.”
“Hey, I watched your speech,” he suddenly said.
“You did?” She was shocked, tense; the speech was out there, findable.
“You were good,” he said. “It’s cool to think of you getting up there in front of everyone.”
“Me with my outside voice, not my inside one,” she said quickly. Then she added, “Well, that’s over, anyway. The whole Loci thing.”
What she felt, talking about Loci, above and beyond her anxiety and anger, was a strange and strangled kind of grief. It couldn’t be compared with Cory’s grief, which would’ve blown it away, but still it qualified. Her grief wasn’t for the job—a job could be recovered from. Maybe she would give other speeches someday, wherever she ended up working, even little speeches in a conference room, to twelve people. And there would probably be other jobs with a do-good tang to them; other offices with desks for Greer to sit at, and a minestrone or moo shu smell around the noon hour, and coworkers who had good days and snappish ones. People with coffee on the breath and personal habits that you would learn, as though you were lovers and not just people who worked in the same place.