Two Medicine (2 page)

As I listened to her I
knew that John Jeffries would not be pissed because I had never
seen him get pissed over anything, especially a few missed edits
here and there. He barely ever read our magazine; he cared
primarily about readership numbers: our “circulation.”

But everything was a
disaster
to her Linda,
everything was
crucial
.

“
What’d I miss?” I asked,
shrugging my shoulders and staring at my computer
monitor.

Linda flipped the magazine
open with a flourish and jammed a thick finger onto one of the
pages. “Right
here
, you missed a
comma
and you don’t have a closing
quotation
at the
end
!
”

Linda’s voice was rough
and throaty from having to be forced out of her giant bulk of a
torso. Also, worst of all, she always slathered on this hand lotion
she had that smelled sharply sour and always remained in the room
after she left, like a toxic cloud. Everything about her repelled
me; my soul always dried up a little and a part of it flaked off
like flint just having her in my office.

“
John is
seriously
pissed off,
and said I
gotta
make sure it doesn’t happen again!” She raised her
eyebrows high and jerked a thumb back towards John’s
office.

I still hadn’t looked at
her but I was fake-typing and kept my eyes on the screen. I felt
enormously depressed having Linda stare down at me, her big flowery
dress billowing around her like a spent parachute caught in the
wind. That lotion cloud…

“
Yea well, won’t happen
again,” I muttered.

She wouldn’t leave so I
finally looked up at her. I felt absolutely no enthusiasm to defend
myself to her, though; I just wanted her gone from my sight. After
an increasingly tense silence, I said to her in a flat, grim voice,
“I’m sorry Linda, won’t happen again – I had a lot going on that
day that I working on this one.”
And
PLEASE JUST LEAVE!

She frowned at me, raised
her eyebrows as if in warning – her eyebrows were pencil thin, and
with her breathing and her parachute dress and her shifting
eyebrows she stared down at me.

“
Well
what’s the
problem
here?” she rasped. “
Why
did you miss such
obvious
mistakes…”

I tuned out the rest of
her heaving voice and typed meaningless words again on the screen.
But it kept going; she was in rare form that morning – even for
her. When I couldn’t take anymore I suddenly slammed my fist down
on the desk, almost involuntarily, and she stopped and gaped at
me.

She almost spoke again, but
then with a worried expression she finally turned around muttering
something about
professionalism
and
standards
, heaving her bulk into the
hall and rolling off, no doubt looking for something else
crucial.

I let go
a long, long sigh, and my head slowly sank to my
chest.
This can’t be what I was meant
for,
I thought.
Is
this where you end up if you love reading the classics?? Do those
damn Free Lancers have ‘Lindas’ to deal with?

Worst of all, and
ironically, I actually felt a little guilty about my hatred of
Linda, too, not only because of the disgust she brought out in me,
which was not altogether deserved, and of which I was always
ashamed, but also because for all her blustering, her heaving bulk,
her terrible “people skills,” she was just doing her job, and was
actually a good editor, and even a good writer. She had shown me
some of her work in fiction when I had started the job – in those
few heady early days in my office – and her writing was good, with
a kind of intensity to it.

It was all a very bad
business, this whole mess of a job in Atlanta, a very bad business
indeed.

That morning after Linda
left, I finally began editing my first article of the day,
something about new, nitrogen-powered, off-road shocks for jeeps.
None of the words made any sense to me though, and the pictures of
the parts could have been parts of some alien spaceship for all I
comprehended.

As I printed out the
article I wondered about John Jeffries, my true boss at the
magazine. As I mentioned, I wasn’t worried about him firing me – he
would never let me go, no matter how bad it got, at least I didn’t
think he would. This was not just because he didn’t really care
about the articles in the magazine, and not just because of my
father was (and that was part of it), but because Jeffries had been
building me up as some kind of pet project. He knew I plainly
didn’t like my job, and he was, for some reason, intent on making
“a publisher out of me,” as he often said. I think he simply just
liked me, just liked me being there at the magazine, and I think he
probably felt like it was his fault for some reason that I had lost
my feel for the job, like a salesman seeing interest dying in a
customer’s eyes, like a father who realizes his son is bored with
their camping trip.

John was constantly giving
me special projects to work on, articles to work over that he
thought I’d like, some “cool stuff” to “exercise my literary
muscles.” But the attention was wasted on me, and I didn’t have the
heart to tell him.

So it came down to this, I
told myself that morning as I stared at my keyboard: I was simply
not meant to
edit
– but to
create! T
o give something to
other
people
to edit, be it music, writing,
something was what I needed… That’s what I believed, and the belief
grew and smoldered every day.

I had only been there a
few months and I already felt like I had wasted years in the wrong
life, like I had was missing out on some fabulous life somewhere
else – and “missing out” is a feeling I never have been able to
stand – not for long. I simply had to get out of that job, out of
that business, once and for all.

Later after Linda
left I went to lunch at a nearby deli that I
frequented. I sat down to eat a plate of my favorite dish there -
the Greek pasta salad - and set my cell phone on the table. It was
then that I saw a text from Holly, the redhead, my sweet little
girlfriend who I had been dating for three years now, and who at
that time was my one solace in an otherwise grey existence, this
bad business of mine.

I was in love with my
little redheaded girlfriend. She had a wonderfully eccentric
personality – she was an art student who was also studying to be an
art teacher. She lived at that time in Savannah, about three hours
away, so we had been doing long-distance dating for a while, but
she was about to graduate and move.

One thing that was cool
about her was that she had grown up in a weird family out on a farm
and this gave her a weirdness that was enduring, charming, wholly
unique, simple and different, and fun. Her mother was this oddball
who worked at Walmart and who had given birth to all nine of
Holly’s siblings, yes, nine, at home without a doctor or any drugs.
It made Holly one of a kind.

She was young but
well-read, well-traveled, funny, and loved to do the stuff I loved
to do. She was also sexy – had a long, flowing, thick mass of
scarlet hair, that kind of white marble-like skin redheads have,
and grey-green eyes that always glinted with freshness and
happiness. She was not a model type by any means, but was very
pretty in her own unique way, as redhead girls who are pretty
always are. There are no two redheads on this planet that look
alike, I have found, and after dating her I realized I had become
somewhat of an expert on redheads. I didn’t know at the time
sitting with my salad at the deli, however, that I was never to see
those eyes again – and my days of being an expert all things
redheaded were about to be over.

Her text came as I took a
bite of pasta, and I stopped chewing when I read: “We have to
talk.”

Two

A kind of cold feeling
struck my chest when I read that. I stared at the little electronic
letters, so tiny but pregnant with meaning, a sense of dread coming
over me. I knew that this phrase had never preceded anything good,
and I immediately guessed what the cause was. We were planning on
moving in together in a month and I had signed a lease on a nice
place near downtown just last week. But I had been harboring a
feeling that she was going to say she couldn’t move in with me
because of her parents or something, and that she was going to be
living elsewhere next year, which worried me. There was an age
difference of a few years, and I was starting to worry that she may
have been unhappy with me, that I wasn’t young and crazy enough for
her.

I had detected lately a
kind of cooling-off in her, a slight change in her voice. All of
the stubbornly shoved-away suspicious I had avoided, though,
suddenly roared back into my conscious mind as I stared at her
text.

I immediately called her
number and she picked up after a few rings. I could tell just from
her “hello” that something was different; her voice was now
contained, held back, some of the light had dimmed in her
voice.

“What’s up baby?” I asked,
a little constrained now myself, wary, automatically readying my
defenses. I pictured her cute little face against her phone, her
hair pushed back behind her ears.

“Hey Will. I need to talk
to you… about Tennessee.”

My mind suddenly jumped to
issue of our road trip that we had planned in the Smokey’s, and the
cabin rental I had secured. This trip I had set up with another
couple who were supposed to meet us there was a big deal for me. I
loved going up into those mountains and I knew Holly would love it
too. We were supposed to leave a couple of days later, to drive out
to the cabin.

“
What about it?” I
asked.

“I don’t think I should
go.” She paused...

Boom
… Like a bomb had gone off over the phone line. Any other time
I would have assumed that some school-related thing had come up or
something trivial would prevent the trip, something like that… But
those recent, subtle, damnable, nagging suspicions had been telling
me something wasn’t right – that cold sense of fear crept further
up in my chest, gripping my ribcage tight.

What was worse, and what
she didn’t know was that the trip was more than just a weekend
getaway for me. I had secretly bought an engagement ring and was
planning on proposing to her at this cabin I had found. I had never
proposed to a girlfriend before in my life, never really had come
close to it before. So I had been thrilled and scared all at once
the last couple of weeks at the prospect of asking her to marry
me.

And this was much more
than just being a huge milestone for a young man after college,
getting married to Holly was really the only thing I had to look
forward to currently in my life at that point. It was the only good
thing, the only happy situation, I had. The only thing that made
sense, that felt “right.”

I returned to the
conversation on the phone, doubt and fear growing with each passing
minute. “Why can’t you go?” I asked.

There was a pause that
seemed to last forever. I looked around at the crowd eating near
me, at little tables here and there, but my thoughts existed only
within that little plastic phone.

“
I just don’t think I
should go. I… think we need to back off, Will, and I don’t think we
should get too far… get farther in our relationship,” she said. Her
voice was very quiet, so constrained that I pressed the phone hard
against my ear as I felt my heart sink further. There it was, now
out in the open, no more guessing, no more wondering. Open and ugly
in front of me.

A long silent pause, then,
still quietly, “I don’t think I can continue doing what we’re
doing…” she said. “It’s complicated. And I need to tell you…” A
long pause. “I’ve been kind of hanging out with Jonathan
more…”

She faltered… I could hear
tears forming in her tone.
Jonathan
. That South American guy,
the swarthy, lithe young man who was studying in the same program
as her – the skinny, tan dude with the scrabbly beard. I had
distrusted him from the start! She studied with him, and she had
been coaching soccer with him. She had only known him a semester,
and had first described him as “like a brother to me,” and she was
always aware that I didn’t like him being around her.

But after a little while
she had
stopped
talking about him, and that worried me more. The two of them
had started out as study partners in a group, then study partners
not in a group, then friends, then good friends, and now… All the
while I didn’t like him, but I had never asked or told Holly to
stop seeing him. I should have.

“I know you’re at lunch
Will,” Holly continued, “and this is all out of nowhere, but baby I
didn’t want you to pack everything up for the trip until we could
talk. I didn’t want to come out and say it like this… you must
think I’m crazy…”