Fluorescent Hours

This story was first published by Printers Row in September 2017.

We all knew Lisa and Cliff were in love, even though they were both married. That doesn’t always mean as much as you think. Such fancy names, they would joke, because they were really Elisa and Clifford but none of us ever called them anything but Lisa and Cliff. When Bruce, the CEO, introduced them, she’d always say to call her Lisa, and then Cliff would say,

“And call me Cliff,” and she’d add, “As a jumping-off point,” so fast half the people didn’t get it, but he’d always smile.

This was around the time when standing desks were popular. They both had one—we’d catch them meeting eyes sometimes over our heads. When someone new was in the office and asked about the desks (and they always asked), Lisa would be half embarrassed and half evangelical, like she knew it was a fad as much as anything,

“But I just have more energy at the end of the day.”

And the investor or the reporter (later, though we didn’t always know they were reporters) would look at Cliff and say, “You too?” and Cliff would say, deadpan, “She ordered it on Black Friday. They were two for one,” which would always make Lisa kind of half-laugh, smile in a way that you knew there was more to the story. One of their private jokes. They’d both been here since the foggy early days of the company when desks and chairs were still being ordered and staying late was normal and even a little cozy.

On Mondays, she’d buy bagels. The Einstein’s downstairs had a deal, thirteen for six dollars, and she’d wave away our thanks because,

“How couldn’t I?” she’d say. “Six dollars?!” Like it would be insulting to have bagels available at that price and not buy them, and we’d attack them like seagulls, the way people attack food in an office, no matter what it is. But she’d always manage to set aside an onion for Cliff because his wife was doing paleo back then the way you pretty much had to and he missed bread.

Right up until the end she brought them and we ate them. I’d always wind up splitting a second one with Katie before noon, even though we were both doing paleo too, or trying to, and we’d feel guilty and bloated and eat salads for lunch to make up for it. I never thought of those as heady days, but looking back, knowing what came later, they were. Oh, how they were.

I guess the time I really think of when I imagine us all was that summer, right before Dave Schwartzman left, which is how we knew things maybe weren’t one-hundred-percent on the up-and-up because he was the CFO and very proper and diligent. I remember when I was setting up my 401(k), he sat with me for a good hour because I had so many questions and he wanted to make sure I balanced my investments right and got the full match, which was four-point-five percent—pretty competitive, according to Dave. So when he walked out of the office with a cardboard box of his stuff—just like in the movies, so we almost thought it was a joke—one Wednesday in September and word got around that he was walking out for good, I remember Lisa looking at Cliff with this expression on her face like she’d just heard her dad died and he seemed to say “What?” with his eyebrows and she nodded to her screen and he clicked something and then they left and came back thirty minutes later with coffee.

She looked flat when they got back, the way she did days his wife came to get him for lunch. I’m sure she never thought we noticed—she and Marcy were friendly, they’d chat together about this show they all watched while Cliff finished something up on one of his spreadsheets—but when they walked out, she’d turn to her computer and then stare out the window for a while, not doing anything. That’s what really gave it away, the stillness. Usually, Lisa was nonstop, typing fast and talking fast and walking fast to the kitchen to refill her water. I even saw her refill it from the sink sometimes, because the cooler was so slow. It was hard to see her still like that. None of us liked it.

When Marcy came, Katie and I would sometimes ask Lisa to eat with us, and sometimes she would and she’d listen to us talk about the stupid men we were dating who were incapable of making plans (“They’re not men, they’re boys!” Katie would always say), or she’d tell us about her husband Jesse’s project of repairing lampshades and how it baffled her that he’d spend three hours on something when they could have gotten a new one for twelve dollars. She was usually better after these lunches, though she always returned to her desk before we did (and before Cliff)—she was always working so hard, doing so much. We were busy that summer. Our head writer had moved to Boston and just before they were about to hire a replacement, Lisa came out of a meeting with Dave with her jaw set and nobody new ever started. (“I don’t understand,” I overheard her say to Cliff in front of the elevators, when I was going to use the bathroom. “He said we had the budget.”)

But it was a happy kind of busy.

Normal days—or normal days that summer—they ran the marketing team in tandem. Our CMO had left that April when he got hired (or “poached,” as Cliff said) to lead some other startup nearby and they hadn’t replaced him. I guess that should have clued us in that something was going on—me and Katie, I mean—all those people leaving and not being replaced, but at the time we just assumed it was a long recruitment process.

I usually got in by eight-thirty and Lisa was always deep into her work by then. She was a small woman, a runner, and gave the impression of extreme efficiency in both form and function. She dressed simply, with little jewelry. She wore her hair short, just long enough to tuck behind her ears. She drank black coffee and seemed capable of an intensity of focus that would have bored through her screen, if we were in a cartoon.

I made that joke one morning when she was especially dialed-in.

“Lisa,” I said, and she looked up, startled, like she’d forgotten we were there. “You have laser-beam eyes right now.”

She turned to her screen and back to me and laughed.

“Uh-oh,” said Cliff, across the spine of desks. “That puts me in the danger zone.”

I said the thing about the cartoons, and Cliff said, “If focus were a weapon, Lisa would have destroyed us all a long time ago.” He cut his eyes to her as he said it, so that she could see he was giving her a compliment.

“Not all of you,” said Lisa, mostly to him. “I’d keep Maddy around to help with emails.” She winked at me.

“What about me?” said Katie, who sat beside Cliff.

“How many emails does a bloodthirsty warlord really need to send?” said Cliff, reasoning. “I think we’d both be toast.”

“Unless you could make yourselves useful,” said Lisa. “For example, I could foresee us needing someone to decorate the bunker and then measure the success of our raids.”

“So a graphic designer and an analytics guy?” said Cliff.

“Phew,” said Katie.

We settled back into our work but I saw Lisa click an email right after and laugh to herself, then glance up at Cliff, who was smiling at her.

They went into the smaller conference room together at nine-fifteen every morning for half an hour. That started when Mark left, the CMO. When they realized they were running the show. They’d go in with their mugs and notebooks and sit side by side, pointing to their notes, which we knew because the conference rooms had glass walls, and you could tell from looking at them that it was their favorite part of the day. One morning Katie emailed me, “What do you think they do in there?” and I looked up and she was making a face that said she thought the same thing I did and at lunch that day we agreed that they were probably in love and it was one of those heart-rending tragic stories that is kind of beautiful in its sadness, like violin music. And Cliff and his wife were trying to get pregnant, we knew, even though he never said anything. You can just tell sometimes. Anyway, I think it was mostly her who wanted it.

They were not old, of course, but they seemed old at the time. She was thirty-three and he was thirty-four—he made a big fuss during the two months they were the “same age,” though she was always quick to ask whether he’d made restaurant reservations for his birthday yet, because it was just around the corner. I was two years out of college at that point and Katie was maybe three. A world away. We were happy to be part of their doomed romance, to witness it, I think because it seemed redemptive somehow, that two people could be part of a tragic love affair even in a fluorescent-lit office dedicated to selling insurance for the sharing economy. We needed that right out of college, the promise that there might be more to life than nine-to-five work that left us so tired all we wanted to do was drink and watch stupid TV. Katie had been a design major and I’d studied English. It’s disheartening, going from a world where all you do is think about art to an office. Of course, now I’m embarrassed to remember that attitude, to think their situation was anything other than deeply sad.

One afternoon in June, Bruce came over to Cliff and asked about that week’s SEM report, how the bids were, how much we were paying for applications. It wasn’t exactly unusual for him to come over—it was a small company, no more than forty of us—but it wasn’t common, either, if there were no investors to show around. Cliff answered Bruce’s questions, pointing to his screen and explaining things like CPA and ACPA, acronyms whose meanings I was never one-hundred-percent clear on, and then Bruce asked Cliff to bring his laptop into his office, and while he was bent down detaching it, Bruce asked Lisa how the content was doing.

“Barreling forward,” she said, in the polite neutral voice she used to talk to him.

“How many words we going to write this week?”

“Ten thousand,” she said, which is what she said any time he asked, even though it wasn’t really true, especially now that we were down a writer and anyway content success wasn’t really about number of words anymore.

“Atta girl,” said Bruce, and saw that Cliff had his computer. They walked away.

She kept her eyes on her screen but didn’t resume typing for at least a minute.

Katie and I went to lunch and when we came back, Lisa was standing beside Cliff at his desk, their backs to us. They were talking softly.

“Why would he want them before you send them to Dave?” she was saying.

He shook his head. “I don’t like it.”

We weren’t sneaking. Katie settled into her seat, which I’m sure they saw.

“Anyway, I think every six weeks is enough,” said Lisa, in her regular voice, and Cliff said he agreed and Lisa strode back around the spine to her desk, asking us what the outside world was like, making fun of herself for being glued to her screen.

In July, there was a conference in New York. Cliff had been invited by a software vendor who was courting us and had offered free admission. He told us during our weekly marketing meeting, which we had on Mondays at three.

“You think it’ll be useful?” said Lisa, looking up from her notebook. She took notes in legal pads and had a whole stack of them in her filing cabinet. I always thought it was kind of excessive until she was able to find two-year-old notes (signed by Cliff) documenting that, if we were still fighting for a new blog platform in two years, he’d buy the entire team dinner. Of course, the team back then had just been the two of them (“I was kind of hoping we’d be bigger by the time he had to pay up,” she said, passing me the bread basket at the Italian restaurant she’d chosen).

“We’ve been thinking of switching over,” said Cliff, about the new software. “They’ve got a lot of great content management features Brightedge doesn’t have.”

“Ooh,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “Tell me more.”

“Actually,” he said, “I’m thinking it only makes sense if we both go. I wouldn’t really know how to evaluate the content stuff.”

She nodded, flipping back a few pages in her pad. “I don’t know,” she said. “Think Dave would green light it?”

He tapped his pencil on the table. “I bet they’d comp us another ticket, and then it would just be airfare and a hotel.”

She looked up. “Can’t hurt to ask. When is it?”

He said it was at the end of the month and she asked me, teasing, if I thought I’d be okay without her in the office for two days, if I’d be able to get four thousand words written, and I met eyes with Katie and I could tell she was as impressed as I was.

“Right out in the open,” Katie said, biting into her chicken salad lettuce wrap the next day. We were sitting on the edge of the fountain in Daley Plaza. “He’s so bold.”

“He’s smart,” I said. “This way, there’s nothing improper about it.”

“I wish someone would figure out how to get me to a conference in New York for two days,” said Katie, wiping mayonnaise from the edge of her lip. “Can you imagine?”

I shook my head and sipped my LaCroix. The guys I’d managed to date in the last two years were barely capable of remembering to charge their phones. I was lucky if I got a text before eight p.m. about plans for the night.

“Do you think anything will happen?” she said.

A pair of men in business suits passed, checking us out.

I smiled.

“Why don’t they ever say anything?” I said, when they were out of sight. “The real adults.”

“They were married,” said Katie, and I asked her how she knew, and she said I had to get better about checking for rings. I think that’s something that happens right around twenty-four, checking the left hand, but that summer it hadn’t hit me yet.

Anyway, my best guess is that something did happen while they were in New York. I can’t say what, but they were definitely changed when they got back that Friday. The last day of the month. Lisa was at her desk when I got in, same as ever, but there was a kind of mania about her. She jumped when I greeted her and then laughed at herself.

“Lord,” she said. “I need to cool it on the caffeine.” She took another sip of coffee. She knocked the cup of pens from her desk later, reaching for her water. When Katie asked her if she’d left her coordination in New York, teasing, she laughed hard even though it wasn’t that funny. She’d always been fast, upbeat. But now she seemed propelled by her energy, no longer in control of it. She was downright jumpy.

I think Cliff was concerned. I caught him watching her sometimes, when she was on a call or listening to music, dead focused on a piece of writing. When there was no danger she would notice. He was pretty tall, above six feet, so he could raise his eyes just slightly from his screen to watch her, and he did, all through August. A few times she’d look at her phone and pick it up and hurry off, murmuring, “Hey,” before disappearing into the hall. She never used to do that. And one day when I thought she was meeting with Dave about the new software, I went into the bathroom and heard crying and I’m almost positive it was her but I didn’t check. Serious crying, like waves bashing rocks. I didn’t want to know. At the time, I told myself she’d want her privacy, though now, looking back, I wish I’d done something.

During our first August marketing meeting, Lisa announced that the conference had been great and they were going to ask for budget for the software. Cliff mentioned that it wasn’t cheap, though, so we shouldn’t get our hopes up.

“They still owe me a writer,” she said, twirling her pen around her fourth finger. “This would be less than half as much.”

They exchanged a look I couldn’t read. He started walking us through the weekly report when Bruce knocked on the glass wall. He pointed to Cliff, who glanced at Lisa before leaving, laptop in hand. He wasn’t back before we finished, and didn’t return to his desk until nearly five. Almost as soon as he’d settled in, Dave appeared. I had given up working for the day, was just reading news articles, trying to convince myself I was doing research for the blog post I was supposed to be writing. Cliff and Dave went into the conference room and shut the door but didn’t sit.

An email from Katie popped up: “What’s going on?”

“No idea,” I typed. “Doesn’t look good.”

They emerged at five, just as I was shutting down. Dave walked straight toward his office without saying hi to us, which was unusual because he was pretty friendly. Always made a point of asking about my parents, who somehow knew his parents, which we’d discovered when he was helping me with my onboarding paperwork.

Cliff looked worried. He connected his laptop and I saw Lisa click an email almost at once. They didn’t move, though, didn’t talk. I imagine they waited until we left.

The next day, they were both in the office when I got there, which was odd because Cliff usually came in closer to nine. They were in the conference room, talking, and didn’t emerge until ten.

Lisa put her head in her hands, which I saw out of the corner of my eye. Only for a minute, though. Pretty soon, she was back in her flow.

In the last week of August, Dave came over to us. He seemed distracted. He stood beside Lisa. I wasn’t eavesdropping, but it was an open-plan office, so you could hear everything. He asked her if he had the address right and showed her some paper.

She nodded, then pointed.

“Wait,” she said. “That’s my old zip.” And she wrote something.

“Thanks,” he said. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?”

She nodded. “Thanks, Dave,” she said, and then said that she’d be fine, really, and she raised her coffee mug to her lips and I got an email from Katie that said only “Ring.”

I looked across the desks at her and she made a face and tilted her head toward Lisa and I looked and saw that she was no longer wearing any rings on her left hand.

“NO,” I typed. “What happened?”

“Should we say something?” typed Katie.

“OMG, do you think it has anything to do with NY?”

“I can’t even right now,” she typed. “Coffee?”

So we went downstairs to the Starbucks and I asked if she thought Jesse had found out and had kicked her out and Katie said she doubted it, her bet was that Lisa had just made the decision, had decided that she couldn’t stay married to him when she was in love with Cliff.

“But what about Marcy?” I said, sipping my latte.

Katie shook her head, then widened her eyes. “What if she’d pregnant.”

She had no reason to say it, I don’t think. Just trying to be dramatic. But she was right, even though we didn’t know it until a year later, when we met for dinner and stopped to do the math.

I guess I haven’t done such a good job of showing the heady days I mentioned earlier, but it’s funny how when you look back everything seems to lead to everything else. At the time, when we were doing bagel Mondays and drinks on Fridays and teasing Lisa days she drank too much coffee (“And what?” she’d laugh to us, giddy and wired, “Got too much done?!”) and sending group emails making fun of each other (though always with Cliff and Lisa leading the charge, Cliff finding a screenshot from the Simpsons of someone wearing the same outfit as Lisa, for example, or Lisa sending us the Belle & Sebastian song “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying” when Cliff told a story that went on too long), when all that was happening, we were a unit in a way I haven’t experienced since. When we found out Mark was leaving, Cliff had joked that we were home alone, and Lisa had said, “Ice cream for dinner!” and Katie and I had laughed because to us they were real adults already and purely joking about not knowing how to be in charge. And because that was my first office job, my first “real” job, I didn’t know things could be different, didn’t realize that the marketing department under Lisa and Cliff was a sort of magical world, a sort of happy nine-to-five family—of course it couldn’t have lasted. They both worked hard, they were both good at their jobs. That was clear—Cliff’s charts made it clear. Our numbers kept going up. The producers never had a shortage of applications to work on. And even when Bruce started interfering, in July, when he insisted that Cliff’s weekly reports go through him before going to Dave, we still managed to do well. Lisa was in charge of organic traffic, which didn’t require bidding on keywords, which Cliff now had less money to do because of changes Bruce had decided to make.

I think my twenty-four-year-old self would have liked this story to end with Lisa leaving Jesse and then Cliff leaving Marcy the next day and them announcing to us that they were getting married—not even dating, just getting married, because that seemed back then the only way things were ever settled, even though I knew as well as anyone how divorce worked—that divorce, was, in fact, built into that particular fantasy of happily-ever-after. But now I realize it was more complicated, it was always more complicated. In my early thirties, I dated a guy I’d met at work and it was one of the most disappointing experiences of my life. He was so well dressed and cheerful and well liked at the office, but after we’d been going out a couple of months, all he ever wore were basketball shorts and t-shirts. He never bothered doing his dishes and never wanted to make plans. Always the same thing: let’s watch the game at the Dark Horse. Boring. And the deal breaker: he never stopped pressuring me to try anal—it was an obsession for him, like he was mainly interested in me as a source of potential anal sex. People are on their best behavior at work, is what I’m saying. You can build up a whole fantasy about them, about how they’re better than the people you live with, but usually it’s only that—fantasy.

At the time, Katie and I assumed Lisa and Jesse split up because of her and Cliff, but now I wonder. I’m married now, is part of it, and I see how it is: you still have crushes. You still fantasize. But it would have to be pretty serious to actually end the marriage. I would never actually leave Steven—crushes are just a necessary distraction to get you through the fluorescent hours (which is a phrase Lisa would definitely have edited out, “fluorescent hours,” something she would have said was a little too Creative Writing 101 for marketing content) you’re forced to spend away from the people you really care about.

When Lisa and Cliff got back with coffee that Wednesday in September after Dave walked out, they called us into the conference room. We sat around the table and I noticed how tired Lisa looked, dark circles under her eyes. Stretched out. Thinner, possibly—she’d always been thin but before it had always looked healthy, lean. That day, she looked almost bony, the way people look when they’re stressed out and sad.

“Dave Schwartzman has resigned,” said Lisa, setting her coffee cup on the table.

“We decided it’s best to let you guys know what we know,” said Cliff.

“Which isn’t much,” said Lisa. “But at this point….”

There were some accounting irregularities, Cliff said. Bruce was demanding things that Dave didn’t like, and his guess was that Dave had decided he’d had enough.

“What do you mean, ‘irregularities?’” said Katie and I gave her a grateful look because I certainly wanted to know but didn’t have the guts to ask.

Lisa sighed. “Guys, don’t repeat anything we say, okay?” she said. “We’re just making a guess, putting together what we’ve been able to figure out.”

We nodded.

She looked at Cliff.

“It seems like someone is using company money for non-company expenses,” he said.

“Someone?” said Katie, and I gave her a look.

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to,” said Lisa, short.

Katie’s eyes widened. It was the first time we’d heard anything close to snapping.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Cliff. “They might bring in a new CFO next week.” But, he said, it was not a good sign that Dave had left. They’d decided—he and Lisa had—that it was best if we knew that things were up in the air right now, that it was possible the company would have to close.

“What?” I said. It was not what I’d expected. I had four hundred dollars in my savings account and had not paid the month’s phone or Internet bills yet.

“Again, nothing’s definite,” said Lisa. But she recommended we spend the rest of the day updating our résumés and LinkedIn profiles.

“We’re both happy to serve as references,” said Cliff.

They wanted us to be prepared for anything, said Lisa.

Katie looked like she was in shock, and I guess I probably did too.

“Okay,” said Lisa, after nobody had said anything for a while. “That’s it.”

“Are you two going to leave?” said Katie.

They looked at each other and I swear to god it was the most agony I’ve ever seen in a single look, or it was at that time in my life. Lisa looked down first and she must have known then about Marcy, must have known that Cliff would leave if he could find something more secure, that this might be the end of their working together, of their seeing each other every day. Of their seeing each other at all.

“I’m keeping my ears open,” said Cliff. And I don’t know if Katie picked up on that, but it really killed me, the “I,” when everything else up to then had been “we.”

We went back to our desks and it was the quietest afternoon I remember at that job—bright, sunny, but it felt like someone had died. It felt like the end of something.

If I’m honest with myself, I guess I would have to admit that, day to day, the job didn’t really feel “heady,” even in the summer with no real boss. It felt like an office job. Interminable. Great stretches of being hungry and bloated from having too much salt with lunch and tired and not knowing how I would make it to five p.m. And then those startling periods when I’d be hit out of nowhere with this death-march worry that my life was passing me by while I sat in front of a computer, that I would never meet anyone and would end up alone, that I was completely unable to control anything that mattered and that consequently nothing would ever work out.

But all that tends to disappear in memory.

Now, of course, when I mention that I worked at InShare, people always want to hear what it was like. Not on the scale of Enron, of course, but locally it made a bit of a splash. Bruce had started and sold a couple businesses that went on to be local powerhouses, and he had a presence on the charity circuits, from what I understand. His father had been a state senator. So when it came out that he was using investor money to fund an affair with a much younger woman (someone he’d hired as his executive assistant at InShare, in fact), the local media was all over it. It was a nice change of pace, too, in a winter that was otherwise an endless stream of protests and shootings. Something we could all be outraged about in unison.

The company was dissolved in November, by which point Katie had already taken a job with Groupon. I was still searching, but Lisa fought to get me a little severance, so I ended up being okay. It was scary at the time, but not so bad looking back on it—I didn’t have a mortgage or kids or anything, and because they’d warned us, I managed to save up a little cushion in those last few months. Lisa and Cliff stayed until the end, too, though I know they’d both started consulting on the side. Those last few weeks, all we did was talk to the board, who were really nice people, grateful for the help we were able to offer them. I was glad not to be in their shoes because I had no idea what I would do if I had to close down a business I’d lost millions of dollars on.

It’s funny how much it’s all faded over the years—at the time, it seemed like such an unimaginably big scandal. To me, anyway. But when I got the mail this afternoon, the new Chicago magazine was in there and Lisa was on the cover, lean with bright-gray hair—she must have never dyed it, which didn’t surprise me—looking sharp as ever. She was posing with two other women in front of the tiger cage at the Lincoln Park Zoo and the headline read “Prairie Tigers.” The piece was about the companies each of them had started, which were three of the most successful in the city, getting lots of attention for being women-owned. I flipped through the pages and there was another picture of her inside, sitting on a desk in a small, cheerful office full of primary colors, a pair of running shoes on the floor beside her. She was smiling and holding a mug of coffee, her left hand still bare. Would you believe that the first thing I felt was pity, that she’d never married again? My daughter would really let me have it if I told her, remind me how old-fashioned and sexist I am sometimes. And she’s right. But I like to think I wasn’t sad for Lisa about being single generally, more sad that she hadn’t ended up with Cliff. I guess I wanted some validation that this grand romance I remember actually meant something, that I hadn’t just been young and naïve, reading meaning and weight into relationships where there was none. Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe I’m just like everyone else and I want every story with a female protagonist to be a love story. Lisa would have hated that, though I think she would have been pleased with me, at least, for recognizing it.