Some people will offer you a hand. Others will pull that hand away. Robert was the former, pretending to be the latter, which gave him a reputation in our office. “Robert,” Amelia would say, “is a puzzle-box.” Amelia was the boss, which was bad luck for Bob. She was also his ex-wife, which was worse. Which is not to say it was a relationship defined entirely by animosity. “You know,” she would say, “as a young man, when life was all trips to Mississippi and articulated pleasures, there was no one better. But he has aged and stiffened, and not in the good way." At least one of these things was a euphemism, and at least one was a double entendre. Robert didn't say much about Amelia, positive or negative. He had moved on, to Tess, his second wife, with whom he had a young daughter. Word around the office was that he was creeping on her. For a year or so he had made a practice of announcing that he was going on a business trip to some far-off place that we all knew was a lie or a joke or an irresponsible exaggeration. “Off to China,” he would say, or “Sahara-bound,” or “Packing up for the moon.” Most thought that there was some underlying truth to his statement—that there was in fact a trip. Theories circulated as to where that trip was actually taking him. Consensus landed on Waterville, two towns over, and the bed of a young regional manager named Karen Koechner. Amelia did not engage in speculation one way or the other. The rest of us may have suspected that Robert was creeping. didn't laugh. Amelia knew it for certain. Once upon a time, she had been in the Terri seat. She held in her mind not a single doubt what Robert was up to, but that was only one reason she did not talk with the rest of us. She was the boss, which was a second reason. Thirdly, she worried that if she discussed Robert and Terri and Karen Koechner she might arrive at a place of sympathy for one party or another, and that was at cross-purposes with the rest of her motives. Amelia was, though she would not have admitted it, a bit of a sadist. The notion that Terri and Robert might eventually squirm filled her with pleasure. It heated her from the inside out. She did not want any conversation that might end with a sad shrug or a vague “I feel bad for her” or “him.” It would douse her ardor and ardor was what she wanted after a long day pushing numbers through the strainer of a spreadsheet. I am not sure if everyone knew that about her. I knew it, of course, because after Amelia had split up with Robert she had married me. Was it strange to be married to your boss? There were evidently many people in the office to ask. We had a daughter of our own, about the same age as Robert and Terri's daughter. Once a month or so we all got together at a steakhouse or Thai place, drank one too many drinks, pretended to like one another. "You cannot say that that we are not civilized," Amelia would say on our drive home, usually while in the process of unbuttoning something on the clothes that surrounded her body or mine. Amelia mostly only wanted to be filled: with pleasure, anger, with flesh, with money, with any flame that burned away the thin layer of death that always seemed to accumulate between one morning and the next.
©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
