Her computer asks her for David’s name the next morning. It doesn’t know that it’s asking after David, it just wants her password, but that’s what Vicky has to give it to make it happy, “davidmetzger.” That’s the first thing she changes, even before she tosses the picture from the company picnic into a desk drawer she seldom uses. For the next 60 days, she will answer “tulipblossom” when she turns on her computer.
Before she can check her e-mail, she has to tell the computer the date they first slept together: “031703,” after a St. Patrick’s Day happy hour when too much flirting and too much Irish beer and too much shared crap at work got the best of them both. For a week after they hardly talked at all, avoided each other at lunch, skipped their afternoon chat by the vending machine when they just “happened” to meet at 2:15 (Vicky knew that it wasn’t happenstance for either of them, but she wasn’t going to be the first to acknowledge it). And then eleven days later—it was a Friday—they both left late and rode the elevator together, silently for two floors, until David spoke first.
“About last week,” he said, looking at his shoes. They were penny loafers, but he never carried pennies in the little slots.
She was getting ready to say, “I’m really sorry that happened, I don’t want it to wreck our friendship, let’s just pretend it never happened,” when he said, “I’d really like to try that sober.”
And Vicky said, “So would I,” and took the bus to his home instead of her own, holding his hand and blushing like a teenager with her first crush. She counted their anniversary from St. Patrick’s Day, though he counted from the 28th.
She changes her e-mail password to “bitterend.”
It’s almost noon before her computer asks about David again. She needs to look something up in the corporate handbook, and the web site asks about that phrase they shared, “g33w1llik3rs.” (The web site becomes petulant if her password doesn’t contain the right ratio of numbers to letters.) The handbook always makes her think of David, since it was the project they worked on together last year, he the IT project manager, she the representative for the communications department.
They actually shared that phrase, and quite a few others, before St. Patrick’s Day last year. It was originally his, like “bee in your bonnet,” “cat’s pajamas,” and “boy howdy,” but Vicky had started to absorb his phrases into her speech even before she noticed the afternoon meetings weren’t an accident. Those strange little phrases, so hopelessly anachronistic in that year of “shock and awe” and “what up?,” had been one of the first things she loved about him. And the penny loafers. And how he opened doors for her and walked on the street side when they went to the bus stop and always seemed to have an umbrella.
But “gee willikers” was special. The third time they made love—second by his counting, she supposed, since he seemed to have forgotten about St. Patrick’s Day—she pressed her cheek against his chest and tangled her fingers in his sweaty hair and whispered in her huskiest voice, “How was it?”
He took a deep breath and said, “Gee willikers!”
From then on, “gee willikers” had been their code for anything amazing, sublime, or far exceeding expectations. “How was the chocolate cake?” “How’s the view from the balcony?” “What did you think of having sex a half dozen times between dusk and dawn until you couldn’t see straight and were doomed to walk bowlegged for the rest of your natural life?” The correct answer to all these questions was, “Gee willikers!”
This morning Vicky catches herself saying “boy howdy!” when Janet tells her about a great shoe sale at Marshall Field’s, and she has to run to the ladies room to keep from crying. Or at least to keep from crying in front of Janet. In the last stall she cries and cries, quietly, into a wad of toilet paper, until she decides she really should get back to work. She’s proud of her forethought, at least, in skipping the makeup this morning. She certainly doesn’t feel like the “the cat’s pajamas,” unless the cat in question is a chronic bed wetter and insomniac.
Now, though, “g33w1llikers” only makes her feel like a dupe. She lets the rage and disappointment rise up into her chest and feels her heart race with primitive adrenaline. There have been very few “gee willikers” moments in the last three months, and those few have been charitable at best. David was distracted, bored, and distant ever since the disastrous weekend in Chicago. No, even before then—that weekend was her idea, her plan to get back to last year’s St. Patrick’s Day by spending this year’s in a city with a green river and the world famous Abbey Pub. And it failed, miserably, the silent drive back to Minneapolis only pounding the last nail into the weekend’s pine box.
“Do you know what today is?” she asked when they went downstairs for breakfast in the hotel restaurant. They had taken off the whole week for this trip, this break from the distractions she feared were distorting their sense of each other.
The hotel bar was draped in green and orange crepe paper, with paper leprechauns cavorting around the liquor shelves. Even the tables in the restaurant had little cardboard shamrock centerpieces, and the specials board proclaimed that corned beef, cabbage, and colcannon were abundantly available.
David glanced around and drawled, “I’m not absolutely sure, but I’m going to guess it’s St. Patrick’s Day.”
“Well, yes. And last year—after we went to Kieran’s Pub—“
“Oh, God. I can’t believe we did that.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“Well—what I remember of it, I guess it was better than a sharp stick in the eye.”
“Oh.” She pushed her coffee cup along the table, spilling a little.
“It got a whole lot better.”
“Uh huh. I guess it had no place to go but up, right?”
“I didn’t mean—“
Vicky turned her face away from him and bit her lip to keep from crying. It was dumb, she knew, but it made her mad that he denied the significance of that first night, even if they had both been drunk and stupid.
David spent the rest of the day trying to apologize, when he wasn’t calling work to check his voice mail. Vicky denied there was anything to apologize about. They didn’t even make it to the Abbey Pub: David was sure it would be too crowded, and he went to bed early.
“r3st1np3ac3” is her third choice, after the website rejected “allal0n3” for having too few numbers and “3atsh1ty0uassh0l3” for containing “inappropriate words.”
Maybe, she thinks, it was the natural death of the relationship. Maybe different affairs have different life spans. There are the fruit fly one-night-stands, which live out their imperative to mate and then die abruptly. And at the other end are the tortoises, slow and plodding, destined to outlive even their participants. With David, she decides, it was like a dog’s lifespan. Young and playful at first, then loyal and steady, but finally something always goes wrong—a tumor on the spine, an infection that won’t heal—and the kindest thing is to put it down, let it go to some dog heaven where there are always new smells to sniff and plenty of squirrels to chase.
Just like when you get a puppy, she realizes, and know that you will outlive it, so she expected from the start to outlive David’s love. Maybe not consciously, maybe not in the very beginning when it was sex and cuddling and pet names and sex all the time. But not long in, when they started doing more than just rolling around n the blankets, when they started talking, she knew.
In less than six months, she was repeating herself. She told the same story about her seventh birthday, when her grandmother made her a cake that said “Grrrrr!” because she was grouchy all the time and she ran to her room and cried, she told that story at least three times. But David was repeating himself, too, telling the story about running from the police on a hot July 4th in Texas when he was twelve with bottle rockets in his fist, telling it a dozen times, she was sure. Though she could never remember exactly how it ended, if he was caught and had to be bailed out by his father the next morning, or if he got away by lying very still in a storm drain while the cop ran back and forth just inches from his head.
She wishes she could be more like her computer. It doesn’t let her repeat a password for almost a year in any system except her e-mail, which possesses an elephantine memory she has yet to stump. “You may not repeat a previous password” it complains, though she herself thinks she has come up with a unique and charming password. If only something would say, “You may not repeat a previous story” before she opens her mouth.
She skips the 2:15 stop at the vending machine. For one thing, Janet brings her a big chocolate brownie after lunch, covered with a liberal smear of darker chocolate frosting, and it’s so chewy and so rich and so perfect—she needs a word besides “gee willikers,” which is now forever banned from her vocabulary, maybe “superfluous”—it’s so superfluous that she half-doubts she will ever need chocolate again. For another, she’s afraid that she’ll get to the vending machine at 2:15 and David won’t be there.
At 2:30 she gets an e-mail from David. She lets it sit until almost 2:45, watching the little clock in the corner of her computer screen mark the minutes. But when she opens it she sees that it’s all business, just a regular e-mail addressed to a dozen people, announcing the start of an IT project aimed to integrate all the passwords people have to remember and inviting her to be part of a pilot group. Were she in an ironic mood, she would laugh at this, because with an integrated, master password she would have been able to erase David forever first thing in the morning with a simple “fuckyoudavidmetzger.” She deletes the e-mail.
What really makes her mad is that it was her idea first. Ever since Chicago—maybe before, she can’t recall—she had been trying to find the right moment to break things off with David. She practiced the opening a thousand times on the morning bus: “We need to talk.” “I think things have changed between us.” “I value our friendship, and I don’t want a failed romance to ruin it.” The middle was less rehearsed, because David would surely have something to say there. And the end was a little hazy; she wanted to avoid both, “I hope we can still be friends” and “I hope you burn in hell.” But she was almost decided on the beginning.
And then last night, in her own living room, on her own couch, David said, “I don’t think we love each other anymore.” Vicky was having doubts about her doubts, because over the last week he suddenly became the funny, charming, sweet “gee willikers” David she loved again, if only for brief but intense moments. She was thinking maybe things could work out after all, and was slowly dismantling her arguments in favor of breaking up. The problem was that she hadn’t yet built up the arguments in favor of staying together, and could only fall back on tears and sobs and recrimination until in the end they hated each other and she sent him away with “I hope you burn in hell.”
She thinks about changing that first password from “tul1pbloss0ms” to “burn1nh3ll.” But she decides that she doesn’t need to start every day for two months with bitterness on her fingertips. So she changes her e-mail password to “cr0cusbl0om5”, and is somewhat surprised that she has never used it before.
At 4:30 Vicky decides to leave. She hasn’t accomplished much, but there are no deadlines looming, nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow. Even before that first St. Patrick’s Day, David would have been hovering outside her cubicle by now, waiting to walk her to the bus stop. But tonight she’ll leave on her own, say goodnight to Janet, maybe stop for coffee and take a later bus. She doesn’t have anything in particular to do tonight.
David is in the elevator lobby, standing near the door. He hasn’t pressed the down button. She thinks about turning back, maybe finishing up some e-mails she plans to send tomorrow, but decides instead to be brave. She won’t speak first.
“Hi,” he says. He’s looking at his ridiculous, penniless penny loafers.
She nods, looks away.
“I didn’t see you at the vending machine,” he says.
“Oh—no. Janet brought me a brownie.”
“That Janet’s a good egg.”
“The bee’s knees.” She starts to smile, then pushes the warm feeling back with a cold shudder.
“About last night,” he says. She’s about to say, “Doesn’t matter. Don’t even think about it. It was bound to happen eventually,” when he says, “It didn’t end the way I wanted it to.”
Indeed not, she thinks. It was a deep, slow cut with a nicked blade that left a lot of blood on the floor, not a quick slash across the windpipe that was over with just a faint sense of shock. And she made damned sure some of the blood was his.
“Well, it ended, and that’s the point,” she says, pleased with the bile in her voice.
“I know. I didn’t want that.”
“I—“
“Look,” he says. “I’d like—I want—“ He shuffles his loafers like he’s getting ready to do a tap dance. “Would you like to go get a coffee?”
She looks at her watch. “Not tonight. I’ve got stuff to do.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Maybe,” she says. “Sure.”
He smiles, the dopy, loveable, “gee willikers” smile. She feels ashamed about her new passwords, but there will be time to change things tomorrow, or maybe the next day.
“Great,” he says. “Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” she says and presses the elevator button.