the language of the industry

today they threw a surprise party for my department's vp, who was recently inducted into the publishing hall of fame. i didn't know there was a publishing hall of fame, but there is, and my boss's boss's boss has been recognized by it. and i'm happy for him, i am. he's a good guy. he thought enough of me to escort me down to human resources after my return interview for my current job, he came by my office on my first day to welcome me. he wants to explore options for making the company carbon neutral, he's promised to save me a spot on the committee. a good guy who does good things—not always the type of guy who receives a lot of notice, sadly enough, and i wasn't at all put out at the thought of applauding him as he entered a room.

the forty or so minutes of standing around uncertainly after he had entered and the applause had died down weren't so great. picture me in my standard social-gathering position: back to the wall, hands in my lap fiddling with some inanimate object (in this case my keys), gaze fixed upon a point in the unknowable distance, acknowledging no one. and i'm listening. i'm listening to the entire room, waiting for any line of conversation to resonate in my ear, to speak to me. the odds of that happening aren't always great even at a normal party, where people generally know each other and have made a firm choice to be together, when they're in it for more than the free cake and root beer. but office parties, man, they're interesting-idea vacuums. they're communication voids. the guy who wrote the neverending story, with its nightmarish threat of the Nothing, the emptiness that replaces all beauty and creativity in the universe after people forget how to dream? i bet he'd gotten stuck at a lot of office parties.

"hi, i'm me. you're you, right? what division are you in? oh, i'm in a different division. how long have you worked here? really? that's a very interesting length of time. i've worked here for a different length of time, and that person over there, she's worked here for a whole other length of time. she also used to have long hair. gee, it sure is nice to be away from my desk. this windowless space is such a refreshing change of pace from the one i'm usually in."

"i'm working on a project. it's a very big project. i'm incredibly busy. i'm so busy that i shouldn't even be standing here right now eating this cake and drinking this root beer and telling you how busy i am, because it's taking up so much of my time, and i don't have any time to spare, because my very big and important project keeps me so very busy. oh, you're busy too? yes, everyone's so terribly busy. but not like i am."

"i like this bar. do you like this bar? what about that bar? i never go to that bar. i used to go to one bar, but now i go to another bar. except for sometimes when i go to a different bar."

"hey, let's all talk about that woman over there. she's a bitch, isn't she? i hate her. just look at her. look at her standing there all bitchy in those clothes, wearing those shoes like a bitch who wears shoes. now she's looking at us, what a bitch, let's smile and wave like we've been trying to get her attention and ask her about her division and her very important project."

"hi! i'm unnervingly eager to speak to you with tremendous enthusiasm about something of absolutely no consequence! i'm going to stand very close to you while i do it to impress upon you how deeply sincere i am about my desire to share this utterly irrelevent fragment of nondata with you! i dare you to refrain from recoiling when i grab your arm and lean toward your face so fast and so far that you are momentarily convinced that i'm going to break your nose with my skull! ha, you flinched! we have such a bond now, even though we've never spoken before, i feel like i could tell you anything! i'm in this division, i'm working on a very important project with that woman over there, who's such a bitch that i never tell her when i'm going to this bar that i like!"

and so on and so forth, etc., ad infinitum, or until everyone realizes that if they don't leave within the next thirty seconds or so they may be asked to help clean up. someone always approaches me at these gatherings to offer me cake and a vast "what's your name, little girl?" smile, and to tell me that i look so sad. and i'm sure that i do. but it isn't because no one is speaking to me, and it certainly isn't because i don't have cake.

all social animals establish working relationships of varying degrees of camaraderie and intimacy. some relationships are purely functional and require no friendship or pretense of friendship in order to satisfy the needs of all involved parties. others seem to require an inordinate quantity of pretense in order to be functional. human animals are overwhelmingly in favor of pretense when it comes to any relationship that's likely to last for more than forty-five seconds. in unfamiliar group settings, we default to bland approximations of cordiality; in more familiar groups, we default to conspiratorial cattiness. apparently, there is something in our coding that tells us this is comforting. i find it maddening. i am sitting with my back to the wall and pressing the teeth of my apartment key into the pad of my thumb because i am so afraid that if i stand or look up or draw any kind of attention to myself one of those default, pretense-heavy conversations will pounce on me and suck me into its gray, chilling vortex, and i don't want cake, i don't want cake! did you hear that bush vetoed the proposed expansion of children's health-care coverage? do you know where myanmar is? yes, i know that you've been very busy with your large, important project, but sometimes i take a break from building books and try to read one. have you read one? any one at all? can we talk about that? *sigh* no, actually, i kind of like her shoes.

by the time i dragged myself back upstairs i was exhausted and tense and incapable of focusing. i spent another hour, hour and a half, trying and failing to get back into a working rhythm, and then i gave up. the day was shot. i needed a walk, a long, hard walk, and while i was lacing up my sneakers so i could tear down the street and away from the office, the cleaning lady came in to empty the trash. i like the cleaning lady. she's older, in her early sixties, maybe, small and wrinkled but straight-backed and nimble. she always says hello when she walks into the room, softly but making sure that i hear her, so she doesn't startle me. she always smiles. and then she hushes about, emptying bins and straightening blinds and checking on plants, so quiet, like a mother cleaning around her sleeping child. one day i saw her in the kitchenette fishing photocopies out of the trash barrel and tossing them into the recycling barrel next to it. she looked up at me, half-smiled, shook her head. "people always make this mistake," she said, her accent slavic and heavy. she has one gold tooth, her upper right canine or first premolar. she wears her curly brown hair down, it falls over large gold hoop earrings. i half-smiled back. "i know," i said.

today when she came in she smiled as always, reached for the trash. i was happy to see her. the last few times i'd been in the office that late there'd been someone else, a younger girl, sullen and abrupt. she didn't care about the paper. i told the cleaning lady i was glad she was back, the other girl hadn't been friendly. i asked if she'd been on vacation. no, she said, her brother had died.

i looked at her for a few seconds. her english isn't strong, i think maybe she thought i hadn't understood. "an accident," she said, "in his car. for nine days i had to go, for my family. everyone is very sad, and i went for them, very far. but only nine days, and now i am here."

i know what i am supposed to say when someone tells me that he is running on empty because of a Very Important Project. i know what i am supposed to do when someone tells me that her commute was a nightmare and she's had the Worst Morning Ever. i'm supposed to draw my eyebrows together and up and tilt my head to the side, tsk my condolences, say it'll all be better soon. that's the line. i have to recite it so the performance can continue, so the relationship will function. there isn't a line for "my brother died." there's just the fall-back ad lib, "i'm sorry."

"i'm sorry," i said. she smiled. "he is seventy, was not young man." "but still," i said, "he was your brother." "yes," she said. "yes. my brother." she looked down at the floor, and then i did, too, because i didn't know what else to do. normal social involvement doesn't prepare you for these moments. they require special training, intensive courses and fieldwork, rigorous self-discipline. "i'm so sorry," i said, and stood up to leave.

as i was picking up my backpack she turned and reached toward me, took the hem of my cardigan between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand. "i like your sweater," she said. "i like the pattern. so pretty. very nice." it was a white crocheted sweater with tatting in a vaguely leafy pattern, acrylic fabric, something i'd picked up from a thrift shop years ago. not fancy, but one of my favorites. i thanked her. she ran her thumb over the raised stitching, across the wide weave along the bottom edge. "my sister makes fun of it," i told her. "she says it's an old-lady sweater. but i love it."

the cleaning lady looked up, her eyes bright. "my sister, she make things, like this, everything. no one teaches her, but she's so smart, her mind, she can look at it and see this stitch and that stitch, and then she just does for herself, dit, dit, dit." she dropped the hem and made sharp sewing motions in the air. "not now, it's too hard for her eyes, they've gone bad. but when she was young, a girl, anything, she could do. she lived with my brother who died, and now she is so sad, she cries, and i cry for her, i try to help, but is just too bad." and she did cry for her, right there in my dim office, in her powder blue uniform dress with its wide white collar and her worn white reebok sneakers and her gold hoop earrings. just for a second she cried, and then she drew it back in. "i'm sorry," she said. "is so hard to be not with them at this time."

some relationships don't function, exactly, in and of themselves. instead they support functions, those of the parties immediately involved and other external goings-on, the way the subterranean foundation of the cn tower supports its sky pod, its spire. i hugged her, suddenly and tightly, let her hug me, and out of her poured a rapid broken story of her family, its entire history. i caught pieces, just pieces, even though i struggled for the whole, wanted so much to receive this small, wracked woman's every utterance, to hollow out a space in myself for her words and carry them like a new and eminently vital organ.

her brother had died in the car accident with his friend, who was not his brother but was, and her brother was not her brother but was, they had different mothers, his mother died when he was twelve and he had come into her family, two families but still one, different blood but still family. her father had died when she was not very old and her brother, the new not but still brother, had mourned privately and briefly and then become a man, become a father, took care of the children so the children could be children, and they were so close, all of them, so close [and she banged her fists together in front of her face to show me, like this, there was no space between]. her mother had lived a long time, her aunt too, but now they are gone and she misses them, so much she misses them, but she has family still, even though they are far away. she has to live here, she can't be with them, and it's so hard, it's very hard, but for everybody it is this way. her sister, now, she is alone, and she is so sad for her, everybody is too sad, but for everyone it is this way.

again she told me that her brother had been seventy years old. "but he was like forty-year-old man, so young in his soul, he took no medicine, was healthy and had life, but was accident, you know? sudden. is hard. my english is not good, but you understand me. he was old man, but in his heart, in my heart, in my head was my young brother, and i didn't think the time. seventy, but still."

i thought of my grandmother, at seventy-five, clapping her hands and squealing like a child when she spotted a cardinal on her front-porch railing. i thought of how no one had been more shocked by her death than my grandfather, who had seen her every day and watched her weaken over her last few months and still expected to go first, had been counting on it. "but still," i said, "your heart breaks. no one thinks it's the time. how can it ever be time?"

she hugged me again, apologized. "maybe i talk too much," she said, "but i need to get the words out of my chest. thank you. thank you. i'm sorry, i'm sorry, but thank you."

"don't be sorry," i said. "please don't ever be sorry. i wanted the words."

she held my hands between hers and smiled, wept, smiled. "i pray that your family and who you love is healthy and strong. i pray. do you have family here?"

i told her no, that my family is far away, and here in the city i am alone. she sighed. "is too sad. is too hard. but is this way for everyone." and i thought, is it? is it? do we talk about nothing and laugh at unfunny nothing and enforce the familiar laws of cocktail-party prattle and beige, unprovocative, impersonal nothing because beneath all of that everyone actually is too sad? even to speak of it, too sad? i think most people would tell you that's rubbish, but maybe this woman knows something we don't. and maybe all of the important words are being held back by people who don't think they have a right to speak them. i didn't know this woman's name, she didn't know mine. some working relationships aren't "relationships." sometimes those are the only relationships that work.

on the street, on the train, in the atm vestibule, the same conversations, nothing, nothing, nothing. and i'm staring at the floor, i'm staring at the ceiling, i'm staring at the walls and out the window and i'm listening. i'm listening for the sound of a person who wants to say something that resonates, i'm listening for someone who's trying to speak. you can hold my hand, maybe we'll say everything wrong but we'll understand, refreshments will not be served but you can wear any shoes you like. don't tell me what you do, i won't tell you what i do, and when it's over i'll thank you. and i'll be sorry. and i'll thank you.