third job part two

Another of my temp jobs during the summer of 1999 was answering phones for three days at the corporate offices of Washington Mutual in a warehouse somewhere in the sepulchral, pedestrian-free industrial zones of the Peninsula. I wore knee-length board shorts to work and sat at a desk just behind the glass doors, which permitted glare to reflect off the windshields of the cars in the parking lot directly into my eyes.

There was one skill to master - transferring calls to the number requested - but the three- or four-button sequence one had to finger into the phone was very difficult to remember, and I misdirected approximately 25% of the calls I received. Some callers were disenchanted Washington Mutual customers who must have simply looked in the phone book and dialed in desperation, seeking customer service from the source, but the corporate offices had no traffic in untangling personal banking snarls, and I was left to listen to their grousing. One person berated me for a banking error, and I could only whisper (so as not to disturb the prarie dogs hibernating in their homasote bunkers), "Sir, I am just a temp receptionist . . . sir, I am just a temp receptionist," until the person cursed me and hung up.

I don't remember driving to the site, or where I got my lunch, or what the bathroom looked like, or whether I watched the clock and sped away gleefully at 5 p.m. What I remember is that the receptionist desk had a computer, and I spent all of my time, except for the 5-10 minutes per hour when my attention had to be turned to the phones, drafting what accidentally became flirtatious emails with my first girlfriend's then-girlfriend, Y.

They began innocently enough. She was unemployed and nursing a laptop all day, I was underemployed and facing a screen all day, so we wrote to entertain each other. I told her about the callers who cursed me out, she wrote to me about a fantasy of hopping trains. The flirtation was accidental because I didn't intend it, and I felt powerless to change the tone once I recognized that it had changed, and I recognized it all at once, and at once when I recognized it, the blood drained from my face.

I was in the habit then of writing terribly purple prose - I say that in the same way that water says it was once in the habit of being wet - and reading the epic, erotic hysteria of the homosexuals Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. This came to bear on the game-changing sentence I wrote that I didn't know how to take back.

We had been discussing what a bore was the labor of life, the foolish preoccupations of un-extraordinary people, the difficulty in convincing our rationalist girlfriends that love was not a pie but a bottomless bucket of supernatural confetti to be grasped by the handful and thrown into the air to float like dandruff on to the shoulders of passersby - I'm just guessing now, who knows what pairs of eighteen year-old idiots talk about, let alone those where at least one in the pampered pair had not had to give a moment's thought to actual struggle, or deprivation, or suffering.

So in the context of this, in an email full of outlandish enjambments and italicizations, without such conformist conventions as capital letters, I wrote something like this: "we fight and we fight and we fight / but sometimes i just want to shake you and say i love you i love you i love you."

Even paraphrasing it here gives me the mysterious but strong desire to flood the seat of my pants with urine. It is so bad. I wish that like the photos of me with my late 1990s pineapple hairdo and baby dyke outfits (prominently featuring boys' AYSO jerseys), which can be so casually swept into the furnace, the evidence of my bad diction could be so easily erased, but the memory, the painful memory, persists.

And not only was this writing bad, it was unclear. For I thought the object of the sentence was obvious: I was referring to (1) my girlfriend, with whom I had spent the summer long-distance fighting, or (2) the generic second person, standing in for the world, which we all know from song needs love, sweet love, the only thing there is just too little of, preferably in the form of my verbal diarrhea.

Imagine my horror, then, when Y returned my email with something like, "i've been hoping you'd say it, but i love you too."

This was a mistake. A horrible, stupid mistake. I had no intention of declaring my love for my ex-girlfriend's then-girlfriend, but she believed I had, and I did not know how to undo what I had done. To correct her error would embarrass her, to cease communications would upset her, and I was so afraid of conflict, even momentary conflict in the service of long-term clarity, that I did nothing; I continued the email volley, knowing that what had seemed like amusement to me seemed like ardor to her. I briefly convinced myself it felt like ardor for me, too, but in reality I just liked the attention. I am not proud of this.

It all ended soon enough, when my ex-girlfriend X discovered these emails and called me out, rightly, for interloping. I was too spineless to simply admit fault, apologize, and get myself far the fuck away from their relationship. Instead I offered tears and excuses . . . I may even have claimed to have been suffering from the after-effects of recreational drug use. Ugh, self, weak.

The longer version of this story doesn't really end until the summer of 2000, or 2005. Actually I'm not sure these things have clean endings. Things were weird with me and X for a while, then we fell out of touch for a few years, but I feel very fondly about her now and see her once every few months. X is engaged to a strong woman; they want to start a family soon. Things were weird with me and Y for a while, then she lived with me and my then-girlfriend in the extra bedroom for a few months, then we fell out of touch for a few years, but I feel very fondly about her now and see her once every few years. She lives in the rural southwest and keeps baskets of homegrown carrots in the bed of her truck. X and Y aren't in contact much, so far as I can tell.

There wasn't much left of the summer after my three days of work at Washington Mutual. At the end of August, I packed my bags and flew back to Boston. X and Y drove down the street and moved into their new dorm, ready to start their sophomore years together. Labor Day passed without event. We forgot all about the heartaches we caused each other in the summertime, and replaced them with new heartaches, unrelated to the old, for the autumn.