The Ignored Read online

  When he was through with his diatribe, I went back to my office.

  Derek looked up when I returned. That in itself was unusual. But what was even stranger was that he actually spoke to me.

  “Were you at the picnic?” he asked.

  I was still ticked off at Stewart and was tempted to give Derek a taste of his own medicine, to not answer him, to ignore him and act as though he weren’t there. But I couldn’t do it. “Yeah,” I said, “I was there.”

  “Do you know who won the drawing? The grand prize?”

  Was this a joke? I frowned at him.

  “It’s for the employee newsletter,” he explained. “I’ve been asked to compile a list.”

  “I won,” I said slowly.

  He looked surprised. “Really? Why didn’t you go up and collect your prize, then?”

  “I did. Here it is.” I picked up the certificate from my desk and waved it at him.

  “Oh.” He started writing, then looked up at me. “What’s your first name?” he asked.

  This was ridiculous.

  “Bob,” I found myself answering.

  “Last name?”

  “Jones.”

  He nodded. “It’ll be in the next issue of the newsletter.”

  He went back to his work.

  He did not speak to me for the rest of the day.

  Jane was not there when I came home. There was a note from her on the refrigerator telling me that she’d gone to the library to find some books on the Montessori method of teaching preschool children. It was just as well. I wasn’t in the mood to either talk or listen to anyone else. I just wanted to be alone and think.

  I popped a frozen burrito into the microwave.

  After my short conversation with Derek, I had not been able to concentrate on work for the remainder of the afternoon. I had placed papers before me on my desk and, pen in hand, had pretended to read them, but my mind had been on anything but instruction manuals. I kept going over everything Derek had said, searching for something that would indicate he had been joking or playing with me, not willing to believe that he really had not known my name. I kept wishing he had asked for the spelling. That at least would have allowed me a legitimate out. I could have rationalized that he had known my name but had not known the spelling.

  But that wasn’t the case.

  No matter how much I replayed that conversation in my head, no matter how much I tried to analyze what we both had said, I kept reaching the same conclusion. He had not known my name, though we’d been sharing an office for over two months. He had not seen me win the drawing, though I had stood on the stage in front of him.

  I was invisible to him.

  Hell, maybe the reason he never talked to me was because he didn’t even notice I was there.

  The bell on the microwave rang, and I took out my burrito, dropping it on a plate. I poured myself a glass of milk and walked out to the living room, turning on the TV and sitting down on the couch. I tried to eat and watch the news, tried not to think about what had happened. I blew on my burrito, took a bite. Tom Brokaw was reporting the results of a recent AIDS poll, looking seriously into the camera as a the image of a caduceus flashed on the blue screen behind him, and he said, “According to the latest New York Times — NBC poll, the average American believes — ”

  The average American.

  The phrase jumped out at me.

  The average American.

  That was me. That’s what I was. I stared at Brokaw. I felt as though I were sick and my illness had been successfully diagnosed, but there was none of the relief that would have accompanied such a medical breakthrough. The description was true, as far as it went, but it was also too general, too benign. There was reassurance in those three words, the implication of normalcy. And I was not normal. I was ordinary, but I was not just ordinary. I was extra ordinary, ultra ordinary, so damn ordinary that even my friends did not remember me, that even my own coworkers did not notice me.

  I had a weird feeling about this. The chill I’d felt when Lois and Virginia had insisted they’d seen me at Stacy’s birthday lunch was back. This whole thing was getting way too freaky. It was one thing to be just an average guy. But it was quite another to be so… so pathologically average. So consistently middle-of-the-road in every way that I was invisible. There was something creepy about it, something frightening and almost supernatural.

  On an impulse, I reached over and picked up yesterday’s newspaper off the table. I found the Calendar section and looked at the boxed statistics that showed the top five films of the past weekend.

  They were the five films I most wanted to see.

  I turned the page to look at the top ten songs of the week.

  They were my current favorites, ranked in order of preference.

  My heart pounding, I stood and walked across the room to the block-and-plank shelves next to the stereo. I scanned my collection of records and CDs, and I realized that it was a history of the number one albums over the past decade.

  This was crazy.

  But it made sense.

  If I was average, I was average. Not just in appearance and personality, but in everything. Across the board. It explained, perhaps, my adherence to the Golden Mean, my unshakable belief in the rightness of the adage “moderation in all things.” Never in my life had I gone to extremes. In anything. I had never eaten too much or too little. I had never been selfishly greedy or selfishly altruistic. I had never been a radical liberal or a reactionary conservative. I was neither a hedonist nor an ascetic, a drunk nor a teetotaler.

  I had never taken a stand on anything.

  Intellectually, I knew it was incorrect to think that compromise was always the ideal solution, that truth always existed somewhere in the middle of two opposing passions — there was no happy medium between right and wrong, between good and evil — but the equivocation that rendered me impotent in regard to minor practical decisions afflicted me morally, too, and I inevitably vacillated between differing points of view, stuck squarely in the middle and unable to definitely and unequivocally take a side.

  The average American.

  My extraordinary ordinariness was not just an aspect of my personality, it was the very essence of my being. It explained why I alone among my peers had never questioned or complained about the outcome of any election or the winner of any award. I had always been squarely in the mainstream and had never disagreed with anything agreed upon by the majority. It explained why none of my arguments in any of my high school or college classes had made even the slightest dent in the course of a debate.

  It explained, as well, my odd attraction to the city of Irvine. Here, where all the streets and houses looked the same, where homeowners’ associations tolerated no individuality in the external appearance of houses or landscaping, I felt comfortable and at home. The homogeneity appealed to me, spoke to me.

  But it wasn’t logical to think that the fact that I was average rendered me invisible, caused people to ignore me. Was it? Most people, when you came down to it, were not exceptional. Most people were normal, average. Yet they were not ignored by their coworkers, friends, and acquaintances. It was not only the sublime and the horrific that were noticed, not only the individual and idiosyncratic that had their existences validated by attention.

  But I was average.

  And I was ignored.

  I tried to think of some action or event that would disprove my theory, something I’d done that would prove I was not totally ordinary. I remembered being picked on by bullies when I was in the third grade. I hadn’t been average then, had I? I had been different enough to have been specifically chosen as the object of harassment by the three toughest kids in the school. One time, in fact, they’d caught me on my way home. One of them held me down while the other two took off my pants. They played Keep Away, tossing the pants over my head to each other while I tried vainly to intercept their throws. A crowd gathered, laughing, and there were girls in the crowd, and for some reason I
liked the fact that the girls were there. I liked the fact that they saw me in my underwear.

  I used to think of that later, when I was a teenager, when I was masturbating. It made me more excited to think of those girls watching me trying to get my pants from the bullies.

  That wasn’t normal, was it? That wasn’t average.

  But I was grasping at straws. Everyone had little offbeat fantasies and perversities.

  And I probably had the average number of them.

  Even my out-of-the-ordinary experiences were ordinary. Even my irregularities were regular.

  Christ, even my name was average. Bob Jones. Next to John Smith, it was probably the most common name in the phone book.

  My burrito was cold, but I no longer felt hungry. I no longer felt like eating. I looked up at the TV. A reporter was describing a mass killing in Milwaukee.

  Most people were probably watching the news right now.

  The average American was watching news with his dinner.

  I got up, switched the channel to M*A*S*H. I carried my plate into the kitchen, dumped the leftover burrito into the garbage, placed the plate in the sink. I took a beer out of the refrigerator. I felt like getting good and drunk.

  I brought the beer back with me into the living room and sat there watching TV, trying to concentrate on the M*A*S*H episode, trying not to think about myself.

  I realized that the lines punctuated by the laugh track were the ones I found funniest.

  I switched off the TV.

  Jane came home around nine. I’d already downed a six-pack and was feeling, if not better, at least far enough out of it that I no longer cared about my problems. She looked at me, frowned, then walked past me and put her notebooks down on the kitchen table. She picked up the certificate from where I’d left it. “What’s this?” she asked.

  I’d forgotten about winning the dinner. I looked at her, hoisted my current beer. “Congratulate me,” I said. “I won a drawing at work.”

  She read the name on the certificate. “Elise?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “This is great!”

  “Yeah. Great.”

  She frowned at me again. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” I finished my beer, put it next to its empty brothers on the table, and headed to the bathroom where I promptly threw up.

  We went to dinner at Elise three weeks later.

  A child of the suburbs, I could not remember ever eating at a restaurant that was not part of a chain. From McDonald’s to Love’s to The Black Angus to Don Jose’s, the restaurants I patronized were not unique, individually owned businesses but corporate cookie-cutter eateries, comfortable in the reliability of their conformity. As we walked into the entryway and I saw the elegant decor, the classy clientele, I realized that I did not know how to act here, did not know what to do. Despite the fact that both Jane and I had dressed up — she in her prom gown, me in my interview suit — and outwardly fit in with the restaurant’s patrons, I felt jarringly out of place among the other diners. We seemed to be decades younger than everyone else. And instead of actually paying for our meal, we’d be using that stupid gift certificate. I put my hand in my pocket, felt the ruffled edge of the certificate, and I wondered if I’d brought enough money for a tip. I suddenly wished we hadn’t come.

  We’d made reservations ahead of time, two weeks ahead of time, and we were promptly seated and provided with a calligraphically hand-printed description of the day’s dishes. From what I could tell, we had no choice to make; there was only one meal available, a multi-course dinner de jour, and I nodded my approval to the waiter, handing back the description. Jane did the same.

  “What would you care to drink, sir?” the waiter asked me.

  For the first time, I saw a wine list on the table in front of me, and not wanting to appear as ignorant as I was, I studied the list for a moment. I looked to Jane for help, but she only shrugged, looking away, and I pointed to one of the wines in the middle of the list.

  “Very good, sir.”

  The wine and our first course, some sort of smoked salmon appetizer, arrived minutes later. A dash of wine was poured into my glass, and I sipped it, the way I’d seen it done in movies, then nodded to the waiter. The wine was poured into our glasses. Then we were left alone.

  I glanced across the table at Jane. This was the first time we’d had a meal together in over a week. There were legitimate reasons — she’d had to see her mother; I’d had to take the car into Sears to have the brakes checked; she’d had to study at the library — but the real truth was that we’d been avoiding each other. Looking at her now, I realized I didn’t know what to say to her. Any conversation starter would be just that, a forced and awkward effort to initiate talk. Whatever rapport we had once had, whatever naturalness had previously existed in our relationship, seemed to have fled. What would have once come easily was now stiffly self-conscious. I realized that I was becoming as estranged from her as I was from everyone else.

  Jane looked around the dining room. “This is really a nice place,” she said.

  “Yes, it is,” I agreed. “It really is.” I had nothing to follow this with, nothing more to say, so I repeated it again. “It really is.”

  The service was amazing. There was a virtual platoon of waiters assigned to our table, but they did not hover, did not make us feel uncomfortable. When one dish was done, a waiter silently and efficiently took it away, replacing it with the next course.

  Jane finished her wine soon after the salad. I poured her another glass. “Did I tell you about Bobby Tetherton’s mom?” she said. I shook my head and she started describing a run-in with an overprotective parent she’d had at the day care center that afternoon.

  I listened to her. Maybe nothing was wrong, I thought. Maybe it was all in my head. Jane was acting as though everything was normal, everything was okay. Maybe I’d imagined the rift between us.

  No.

  Something had happened. Something had come between us. We had always shared our problems, had always discussed with each other our difficulties at school or work. I had never met her coworkers at the day care center, but she’d brought them alive for me, I knew their names, and I cared about their office politics.

  But now I found my mind wandering while she recited the litany of today’s injustices.

  I didn’t care about her day.

  I tuned her out, not listening to her. We had always had a balanced relationship, a modern relationship, and I’d always considered her work, her career, her activities, as important as my own. It was not rhetoric, not something I forced myself to do out of obligation, but something I truly felt. Her life was as important as mine. We were equals.

  But I didn’t feel that way anymore.

  Her problems seemed so fucking petty compared to my own.

  She chattered on about kids I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. I was annoyed with her and my annoyance soon graduated to anger. I had not told her about being ignored, about discovering I was some sort of quintessentially average… freak, but, damn it, she should have noticed something was wrong and she should have asked me about it. She should have tried to talk to me, to find out what was bothering me and cheer me up. She shouldn’t have just pretended that everything was okay.

  “…these parents entrust their children to our center,” she was saying, “then they try to tell us how to — ”

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  She blinked. “What?”

  “I don’t care about your damn day care center.”

  Her mouth closed, flattened into a grim line. She nodded, as if this was something she’d been expecting. “Now it comes out,” she said. “Now the truth finally comes out.”

  “Come on, let’s just enjoy our meal.”

  “After that?”

  “After what? Can’t we just try to have a nice meal together and enjoy our evening?”

  “Enjoy it in silence? Is th
at what you mean?”

  “Look — ”

  “No, you look. I don’t know what’s wrong with you. I don’t know what’s been bothering you lately — ”

  “Why don’t you try asking?”

  “I would if I thought it would do any good. But you’ve been living in your own world the past month or so. You just sit there brooding all the time, not talking, not doing anything, shutting me out — ”

  “Shutting you out?”

  “Yes. Every time I try to get close to you, you push me away.”

  “I push you away?”

  “When’s the last time we made love?” She stared at me. “When’s the last time you even tried to make love with me?”

  I glanced around the restaurant, embarrassed. “Don’t make a scene,” I said.

  “Make a scene? I’ll make a scene if I want to. I don’t know these people, and I’ll never see them again. What do I care what they think of me?”

  “I care,” I said.

  “They don’t.”

  She was right. Our voices were raised now, we were definitely arguing, but no one was looking at us or paying us even the slightest bit of attention. I assumed it was because they were too polite to do so. But a small voice in the back of mind said that it was because they didn’t notice me, because I created a kind of force field of invisibility that surrounded us.

  “Let’s just finish eating,” I said. “We can talk about this at home.”

  “We can talk about it now.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  She looked at me, and it was like she was a cartoon character or something. I could see in the exaggerated expression on her face the birth of an idea, the dawning of realization. “You don’t care about this relationship at all, do you? You don’t care about me. You don’t care about us. You’re not even willing to fight for what we have. All you care about is you.”

  “You don’t care about me,” I countered.

  “Yes, I do. I always have. But you don’t care about me.” She sat there, staring at me across the table, and the way she looked at me made me feel not only uncomfortable but profoundly sad. She was looking at me as though I were a stranger, as though she had just discovered that I had been cloned and replaced by a soulless look-alike impostor. I could see the sense of loss on her face, could tell how deeply hurt and suddenly alone she felt, and I wanted to reach across the table and take her hands in mine and tell her that I was the same person I’d always been, that I loved her and was truly sorry if I’d said or done anything to hurt her. But something kept me from it. Something held me back. I was dying inside, desperate to right the things that had gone so wrong between us, but something made me look away from her and down at my plate.