In Connecticut the Birds Also Sing (Pam/Jim, Karen/Pam)
Rating: PG-13 (language only)
Word count: 5,021
Prompt: Pam/Karen: Pam transfers to Stamford instead of Jim.
A/N: It's on time! ...if you live in Hawaii, and have a flexible notion of the date shift. Thanks to paper_jam11 for her speedy and very helpful beta, and for her willingness to tolerate inane grammar questions, and also to persnickety_er for her helpful but somewhat less speedy beta, and also for being inspiring.
Congratulations to the Scranton Times, the only news source that I don't physically assault newsies for selling.
It’s weird that they’re still at work, still in the parking lot; it’s weird that they can faintly hear Michael’s announcement to the casino crowd and see the tarp-covered boxes they moved out of the warehouse. But Pam is totally certain that if she hadn’t blurted out her announcement at the exact moment she did, she would never have mustered the courage to try again.
“I’m sorry if this is…not the right thing to say, but I couldn’t - couldn’t leave without you knowing. So, um.”
Jim looks as though she’d thrown a brick at him. His features are slack and almost expressionless, but he looks her straight in the eye.
“I don’t - Pam, I’m sorry -“
“I know,” she says. His eyes are glassy and watering and she hates that she’s the one that did it. This moment, she thinks, has been inevitable for years; she standing here in her very best dress and he in the same sweater he’d worn to his engagement party, with night air and (for once) honesty between them. “It’s okay.”
“No, it’s - I’ve always thought of you as, as a friend; I’m sorry if I, uh, gave you the wrong impression, but -“
“You didn’t,” she lies, but as a prophylaxis against his emotional pain, it sucks: a tear is actually running down his cheek. “So, um, now you know, I guess.” She really can’t look at him any more and turns towards her car, brown taffeta hissing around her so loud that she doesn’t hear him take a step until he’s grabbed her hand. She has a moment to think about what’s happening as Jim looms closer, but she doesn’t take advantage of it, and then he’s kissing her while she stands stiff and shocked.
Numbly she thinks that he tastes like the ocean - salty and inexorable and overwhelming. But she can’t let things happen like this, so she’s already insinuating a hand between them. Then he pulls away, says “I’m sorry,” again, and she lets his hand fall, and that’s the end of that.
***
But not the end, either, because when she gets home she’s crying harder than she knew a person could cry, hard enough that and she goes into the kitchen to call her mom but ends up slumping against her refrigerator and sliding down the side of it. And then she’s crying on the kitchen floor next to a fallen Domino’s Pizza magnet, with her skirt bunched up around her hips and nothing between her bare thighs and the linoleum, and thinking about that makes her cry even harder.
***
She’s mostly herself again in the morning, when Roy and Cal and McEvoy come to pick up her old furniture. She tries to avoid being alone with Roy, because he’s giving her that look like he’s going to ask her to get back together with him again, but instead he just congratulates her for the thousandth time and reminds her to invite him to Stamford when she’s settled. Pam promises she will, and then Cal comes in and asks if she’s leaving the conch-shell lamp, and if she is, can McEvoy give it to his mom for her birthday?
Pam grins a little, because for just a second, she remembers that she’s glad to be moving to Connecticut. Somewhere where she won’t hang out with the same lame gang of guys that have been mooching off of her cooking and birthday-remembering skills since high school. Somewhere with more than one museum, with a train to New York, with more restaurants than just pizza or sandwiches or bad Chinese.
But then the reality sets in again, constricting her chest and making her miss a breath. She’s moving to Connecticut because Jim and Dana are getting married, because they love each other and they’re always going to love each other, and there’s no two ways about it.
Fuck it. She’s never coming back. McEvoy can have the lamp.
***
The worst part of it is the humiliation. During the long drive east she thinks about Jim’s reaction, which is already fuzzy in her memory, and she tries different stagings in her mind to tease out every bit of nuance. Did that “I’m sorry” carry regret, or was it more of a horrified pity? When she stops to pee and pick at a flavorless pretzel, it occurs to her that he wasn’t sorry that she loved him, he was sorry that she’d worked up the nerve to say so. And that triggers a little spark of resentment that feels better than anything has in two days.
In her schedule for the drive, she allowed one half-hour crying jag. She takes the time, but not the crying; she stares steel-eyed at the McDonald’s logo on the building and tries to muster cold fury at Jim.
What can you do with someone who brings you a tomato plant on Valentines Day just because you said that you hate that you can’t get good winter produce in Scranton? The guy who slept on his own couch for a week so you could have a bed the night you left your fiancé. The guy who leaves you (used to leave you) such thoughtful, funny voicemails on the days that you call in sick that food poisoning seemed worthwhile.
And she can’t believe that he’d pretend that he didn’t know what she was thinking that whole time. Jesus Christ, the worst part of it is the humiliation.
No, it isn’t either. She’s making a valiant effort to convince herself, but that’s not the worst part and it never will be. The very worst part of it is that he doesn’t love her back.
***
She doesn’t like her new boss on first sight, but after Michael, that barely matters. She’s only nominally reporting to Josh anyway; her real supervisors are Jan at Corporate and Anissa Vaziri, the vice-president of marketing. Josh drones so long about how the new marketing projects she’s going to be art-designing are going to affect Dunder-Mifflin Stamford’s business plan, and how his clever plan for new design strategies is going to revolutionize the way Dunder-Mifflin does business, that by the time he’s done she’s wondering about lunch. He leads her around the office, introducing her to her new coworkers. They’re mostly unremarkable, but a guy named Martin seems pretty nice, and a woman named Jocelyn refuses to shake her hand because it’s cold season.
Josh shows her the break room, where there’s a woman digging through the crisper in the fridge and making slightly disgusted sounds. Josh introduces her as Karen, a member of the sales team, and Karen gives her a disinterested once-over. Her handshake is cool and loose. “Oh, I guess Pam is going to be on your team,” Josh says, with obviously feigned casualness.
“What? How is that fair! Nina was our best player, and you’re replacing her with her?” And then she obviously remembers that Josh is her boss, and continues in a more moderate tone. “Andy’s out today; we’re going to get killed.”
“We took Martin; it’s your turn to get the new person.” Karen looks almost mutinous, but Josh precludes any further argument by answering his Sidekick (pretending to answer his Sidekick? Pam didn’t hear it ring. Also, what grown man has a Sidekick?). “Can you show Pam her desk? I’ve got to…” he gestures vaguely at the sales floor.
“Yeah,” Karen’s tone is not gracious.
“Teams for what?” Pam asks Karen as she walks through a row of desks.
“Just…this team building game we play. It doesn’t matter.” Karen inclines her head at the second desk in the trio, the one without knick-knacks, and - hey, her desk has an ocean view, how about that? It’s in the middle of everything, which is not so great; she kind of got used to the privacy of nobody being able to see her monitor. “Is this the sales floor?” Pam asks Karen as she takes the desk immediately behind her own.
“Yeah. We’ve been short a salesman for two months and Josh decided to hire an artist.”
Ouch. Obviously she and Karen aren’t going to be best friends. Still, it’s kind of nice to get called an artist.
Pam spends most of her first day making appointments to look at apartments and waiting for Anissa to call her back. Josh sends her four emails; one to set up a meeting to discuss Dunder-Mifflin’s design strategy, and three more to reschedule that meeting. She and Martin discover that they have nothing to say to each other over sandwiches. Pam’s only just getting settled after lunch when Josh comes out of his office to turn off the lights. Karen leaps out of her seat to close the blinds.
“What’s going on?”
“We’re playing Call of Duty. It’s, um, team building.”
“Teams,” Pam says, figuring it out.
“Yeah, we’re the Allies. There’s an icon on your desktop, CODII?”
“Thanks.”
Pam follows Karen’s terse directions for how to log into the team server, clicks fast through the introductory screens. Pam doesn’t like Karen much, so she doesn’t see any reason to correct Karen’s assumption that she doesn’t know how to play - actually, she and Roy and McEvoy used to have long tournaments on McEvoy’s Playstation, back when she thought the road to reconciling with Roy involved forcing herself to be interested in his interests.
She gets sniped by Josh while she’s figuring out how the controls work on the computer. Karen snorts behind her. She respawns in a building with a shitty Desert Eagle, which hits pretty hard but doesn’t have the fire rate or long accuracy she prefers. Jocelyn has an MP44; Pam kills her and takes it.
Karen stops tapping the keys for a second when the Allied kill message shows up on the screen. And then she picks off Josh, and Pam gets Martin and then Josh again. It feels natural to high-five when they get to the seven kill lead and call in an airstrike, winning the game. Josh actually comes out of his office long enough to congratulate Pam, and promise that they won’t go easy on her next time; for the rest of the day, everyone treats her like a minor celebrity, which is weird. She does her best to be uninteresting.
Pam has an email from Anissa when she closes the program. Anissa wants her to design a logo for marketing specifically to elementary schools. It’s a project that Pam and some of her colleagues were talking about while they were in the design training program, and Pam is happy to have gotten it; it’s a prestige project, and there’s a little more leeway for creativity here than rote package designs. Plus, it gives her a chance to do some hand drafting. She’s still working at a quarter past five, when Josh wheels his expensive-looking bike past, and five minutes later, when Karen drags her knuckles across her desk.
Pam looks up expectantly. “Can I buy you a drink?” Karen asks, looking uncomfortable and maybe sheepish.
Pam really just wants to go back to the motel and watch some free HBO, but this probably isn’t a great time to be turning down olive branches. “Yeah, that sounds great. Is there someplace we can walk?”
Karen leads her to a Mexican restaurant that she says is mediocre, but which has the essential virtues of $3 happy hour margaritas and a fried Oaxacan cheese appetizer. Pam holds the table until Karen can get the bartender’s attention; when she comes back to the table with drinks, she sits heavily in her seat.
“So, I owe you an apology.”
Pam would have liked to start out a little slower, but Karen obviously has an agenda. “Oh, no, please don’t…you don’t have to do that.”
“It’s just….Josh. It’s personal. There used to be another woman on the sales team, and she was a friend of mine, and Josh kind of hounded her out. And he’s been pissed since she left that we aren’t making our sales quotas, and it’s kind of a boys’ club now. And now he wants to hire, uh, you, actually. And that’s a little frustrating. But that’s him being an ass, and I shouldn’t have been rude to you.”
“Thanks.” It occurs to Pam right then that Karen didn’t actually apologize. She kind of appreciates that.
“So, apology margarita,” Karen says, and nudges the drink closer to Pam. Her smile is a friendly, pretty v, and Pam decides not to hold a grudge.
“Apology margarita,” Pam answers, and clicks her plastic hurricane glass against Karen’s.
***
She feels faintly disconnected from her real life most of the time, punctuated by brief periods of intense yearning. She finds an apartment that’s a little bit smaller and a little bit more expensive than she wanted, and turns the walk-in closet into a studio. That’s mostly a pointless exercise; she’s not painting much lately, and when she does it’s usually an inchoate mess. She buys a cheap wardrobe on Craigslist. It’s ugly and takes up almost a third of her bedroom, but it does look artistic.
About a month into her tenure in Connecticut, Pam notices that she’s been having long bouts of what seems like highway hypnosis, where she perks up after ten minutes or a half hour of staring at her computer screen or stirring a pot of soup, with no memory of what she had been doing or thinking. It makes her nervous; makes her wonder if she’s going a little crazy. Twice she almost buys a book about the grieving process, but then stops herself at the last second before her life completely devolves into melodramatic absurdity.
Work is…interesting. Pam considers herself something of an expert on petty office conflicts, but she’s never seen a war of attrition like the one between Josh and Karen. Pam really wants to be good friends with Karen, because she’s smart and funny and odd, but there’s something a little frightening about the intensity of Karen’s anger. She takes every opportunity to mess with her boss, sabotaging him with his clients and coworkers and treating Call of Duty like it’s an actual war. In return, Josh sets her impossible tasks and embarrasses her in meetings by loudly pointing it out when she fails to accomplish them. Pam isn’t quite sure whether Josh has figured out that they’re fighting, or if he’s just an asshole.
Pam joins Karen’s gym without knowing that it’s Karen’s gym until they meet on the treadmills. They get to be workout buddies. Karen is unsurprisingly competitive, but not in an annoying way. Mostly she makes Pam try to work harder. The workouts bring back Pam’s appetite, more or less, and after a month of exercising four times a week Pam stops losing weight.
She still feels like she’s wasting her life. She started the design program and left Scranton to try to get some sense of accomplishment back, but it seems like all she’s gotten for her trouble is a slightly better-paying dead end job and nobody to talk to.
Every night before she goes to sleep, she counts down the days until Jim’s wedding, and when she runs out of days, she wishes Dana the very best wedding anyone’s ever spent all her husband’s savings on.
***
“What happened to you last night?” Karen huffs. The hair that’s escaped her ponytail is already plastered to her forehead; obviously she’s been on the elliptical for a while.
“Huh?” says Pam, dropping her iPod into her own elliptical’s water bottle holder.
“I texted you like three times. There was this perfect storm of awesome, shitty movies. It was Zoolander, then Turner and Hooch, and then, uh, oh! Robocop. It was great.”
“Oh, sorry. My phone was off,” she says, climbing onto the exercise machine without making eye contact.
“Yeah, I guessed that.” She squints, taking in Pam’s bloodshot eyes and unwashed hair. “Are you okay?”
“Sort of. I - the guy I’m in love with got married yesterday. To not me. Obviously.”
Pam thinks it might be a little bit too early in their friendship for this kind of self-revelation, but instead of looking repulsed by Pam’s forthrightness, Karen just looks surprised and sympathetic and says, “Oh, my God. What happened?”
So Pam relates to Karen the whole ugly story, even the parts her mother doesn’t know, without eye contact and stumbling over her words. About how she met this guy at work who was supportive, but in a long-term relationship, so he made no demands of her; about how he was just there for her when she realized she needed leave her fiancé and start a graphic design program; about how she fell completely in love with his sense of humor and his good looks and his generosity of spirit. And just when she thought she was going to be able to tell him so, how his girlfriend had a pregnancy scare that turned out not to be real but Jim was already in love with the idea of domestic life, so he’d proposed.
And then things had been really bad, because Pam couldn’t ever seem to escape the image of Dana on her infrequent office visits, laughing half a second too late at Jim’s jokes and always finding a way to turn the subject back to herself: How she’d be a really amazing handbag designer and how she’s changing the community by changing community theater. The more she thought about it, the more hopelessly she longed for Jim, and the more bitterly she resented him and his stupid choices, and Dana, and herself. How it got so poisonous she begged Jan for the first available transfer, but she couldn’t go without one last, stupid, desperate attempt. How she’d known it was hopeless, and she’d run away, and hadn’t heard from him since. She makes it through the narrative without crying, which is an accomplishment, and as she talks Karen slows down on the elliptical until they’re both just standing there on the machines. One of the personal trainers keeps giving them dirty looks.
It takes Karen a few moments to think of something to say. “That’s about the saddest goddamn story I ever heard,” she finally says, patting Pam awkwardly on the wrist. Pam shrugs. “Do you want to come back to my place and get drunk and watch movies about exploding things?”
The mere fact that someone feels as bad for Pam as she feels for herself makes everything seem about a thousand times harder to deal with, so Pam nods miserably and says “Yes please.”
Pam gets a ride in Karen’s unnecessarily huge car to Karen’s unnecessarily huge apartment. She has three bedrooms, and her kitchen is about the same size as Pam’s living room. Karen vanishes into the kitchen to make complicated drinks of her own invention, something called a Sunday Surprise, and Pam flips through Karen’s DVD folders until she finds National Treasure, a movie so ridiculous and complicated that there’s no way watching it can make her feel worse. Karen takes one look at Pam’s pick and laughs, then sets a huge glass of something pink in front of her. They spend an hour mocking Nicolas Cage’s acting, and then Pam discovers that she can’t remember or pronounce any of the characters’ names. “And I don’t even understand what the point of that girl is. What’s her name?”
“Abigail?” Karen ventures.
“Oh, yeah, like Abigail Adams. Clever, jerks. God, this movie is so lame.”
“You don’t have to tell me about it, I’m sitting here watching it with you. I know it’s lame.”
“And yet you have it on thingy. DVD.”
Karen laughs. “Be drunker, Pam.”
She thinks about it. “Wow, I am drunk, aren’t I? I only had two of your things! Good Lord, Filipelli, what do you put in those?”
“Oh, lots of stuff. It is about twenty percent Everclear, though. Should I have mentioned that, do you think?”
“Sunday Surprise.”
“Because you’re too hung over to go to work on Monday. Surprise!”
Pam laughs. “I can’t believe I thought it was a good idea to drink something with ‘surprise’ in the name.”
“Yeah, you definitely should have seen that coming,” Karen says smugly.
Pam struggles gracelessly back into a sitting position, propping her back up on the foot of Karen’s couch. “Can we quit watching this now?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” She sounds sober, but when Karen goes to use the remote control, her brow furrows deeply. She prods at it twice before the cheesy exposition stops, and slumps lower into the couch cushions.
“Hey, can I ask you a something?” Pam says.
“Only if you phrase it in the form of a question,” Karen says, then laughs at herself.
“How come you hate Josh so much?”
“Oh, that’s - kind of a story.”
“Please,” Pam says. “I’ve seriously been wondering for a month.”
“Well, all right. But you’ve really got to keep this to yourself.”
Pam snorts. “Who am I going to tell, Jocelyn?”
“If you want to, you’d better email her. She watched another segment about bird flu on Tuesday, and now she won’t let anybody within fifteen feet of her unless they wash their hands first.”
“Come on,” Pam says, and pokes Karen in the hip with her elbow. “Just tell me.”
“Ugh, fine. Okay, so you remember I told you about Nina, the girl who had your desk before you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, she and I were friends. And she was having an affair with Josh, which was - you know, ick, but whatever.”
“What happened?”
“Josh just decided, one day, that he wasn’t interested anymore. He dumped her, uh, in a staff meeting, if you can believe it, and she was so embarrassed she quit.”
“Do you guys still talk?”
“No, not really. I mean, a couple of emails a month.”
Pam is obviously missing a piece of this puzzle, and she scratches her chin trying to figure it out. “Um, not that that’s not an asshole move or anything, but I don’t really get how that became such a…lasting problem.”
“No, it’s kind of gotten all out of proportion, hasn’t it?” Karen looks as sad as Pam’s ever seen her. “It’s just that I miss her.”
“So…why don’t you just call her?”
“It’s not really that kind of friendship.” She twists her fingers in her necklace. “I am really going to regret - I think I’m kind of in love with her. I was kind of in love with her.”
Pam’s eyes go huge and round. “Oh.”
“Please don’t -“ Karen says, and then, “I’m not gay.”
“Okay,” says Pam.
“I just - one time I fell in love with a girl.”
“Oh.”
“It’s not that big of a deal.”
“No, I get that.”
“Uh.” Karen rubs her eyes. “Things are going to be irretrievably awkward now, aren’t they.”
“No,” says Pam. “No. I promise. I was just startled.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
“But now I’m not startled, and things are not going to be weird. Promise.”
Karen gives Pam a lopsided smile.
“My hand to God. I tell you what: You distract Josh tomorrow, and I’ll hide his bike in the service elevator.”
She laughs. “Okay.”
***
“Okay, so, you know how we decided not to be petty and horrible to Josh anymore?”
“Yeah,” Karen answers. When the word came down that either Stamford or Scranton was going to get the axe, Pam and Karen decided that the time for pranks was over, and the time for not getting fired and having to eat cat food had begun. That was almost two weeks ago, and it hasn’t stuck that well; just this morning, Karen resorted to the unimaginative pettiness of switching the contents of brown-bagged lunch with the contents of Andy’s nylon “Hot and Cold Lunch Sac.” Pam is leaning against her desk and not doing a very good job of concealing her grin. She’s waited until Andy went on a sales call, so there’s nobody in earshot, but she keeps her tone low anyway.
She presses her lips together in glee and sets a manila folder on Karen’s keyboard. “Old times’ sake?”
Karen opens the folder and frowns at it. “What is this?”
“Josh’s phone records. Elizabeth installed the new records system this week -because God forbid anybody make a long distance call with a company phone - and she needed to run a diagnostic, so…I convinced her to run Josh’s records. Come on, don’t tell me you don’t want to know if he’s calling Indonesia on the company dime.”
“I knew you were going to go places,” laughs Karen. “Let’s see. These are all clients; that and that is Jan in New York; that’s your extension…huh. Why do you think he called Staples corporate headquarters three times on Friday?”
“I don’t know, but right after he got off the phone with them the third time, he called somebody at Corporate, than somebody at Sloane Auto Sales, that’s weird.”
“That’s where he used to work, I think.”
“Oh. My God,” said Pam.
“What?”
“Those are references. That fifty minute conference call, to Staples headquarters? That’s an interview.”
“You think so?”
“Don’t you?”
She nods silently, not looking up from the folder. “The real question is what we do with this.”
“What? Nothing!” Pam cranes her head at Karen. “Are you crazy? We’re just about to get rid of him.”
“You think it’s a coincidence that Josh is jumping ship right when a branch is about to get closed? Would you rather be unemployed, or move again?”
“Oh, ugh. Ugh. I kind of wish we hadn’t figured this out now.”
Karen’s got kind of a feral smile sometimes, Pam thinks. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of this one.”
***
Pam doesn’t really bother knocking at Karen’s apartment anymore. She just taps on the door and opens it; if it’s unlocked, she’s obviously invited in.
“Pizza’s here,” she hollers as she walks in.
“Pizza,” Karen answers from the kitchen. “Always a popular and half-assed choice for half-ass potluck night.”
“Half plain and half tomato.”
“Perfect. We also have bad red wine for me and bad white wine for you, and for dessert, Oreo pie, straight from the freezer section at Acme.”
“Oooh, liquor store and grocery store - two stops. I think it’s clear who wins at this half-ass potluck.”
“Not so fast,” Karen says, emerging from the kitchen with two paper cups. “I stole both bottles of wine from the cabinet Josh’s office - it’s not like Josh is going to be using them to romance any more clients, right? - and the cups are disposable. Which is plus five points to me, and yet another victory.”
“That is amazingly lazy. Although I don’t think you set a new record; this is still not quite as lazy as the time when you got the guy downstairs to call the Chinese restaurant for us.”
Pam takes her cup of wine, which is, as promised, terrible, and abandons it in favor of pizza. Karen picks at a slice but doesn’t eat much, and they sit in slightly uncomfortable silence until Pam can’t take it anymore.
“So, Assistant Regional Manager, huh?”
“I’m not a stickler for formality, Pam, you can just call me ‘Your Highness’ or ‘Your Worship.’”
She snorts. “Yeah, I’m probably going to do that.”
“What’d Jan tell you?” Karen asks mirthlessly.
“She said there’s a job for me in Scranton, if I want it, or there’s a three month temporary job in Nashua, if I want to do that and then see what happens.”
“Please come to Scranton,” Karen says. She says it without any artifice or irony, looking Pam straight in the eye. “I know there’s, uh, bad associations, there, and you’re worried about it, but it’ll be okay. That guy - he’s an asshole if he can turn you down.” Karen’s expression is naked pleading, and something about it stirs a familiar discomfort in Pam. “Please?”
“Oh, my God.” The penny drops, and Pam knows exactly where she’s seen that expression before. She knows exactly why Karen’s obvious distress feels both familiar and strange. “What are you - how do you think of this?”
“Think of what?” She’s obviously confused by the apparent non-sequitur, but taking Pam’s tone seriously.
“You, and me. How do you think of this, Karen?” The bottom is dropping out of Pam’s stomach; she can’t think about this. Now or ever. “Are we friends, or are we…something else?” God, she feels so stupid. Everything she’s been trying to convince herself to hate about Jim and resent about his behavior - the over-attentiveness, the sympathy, trench warfare against an endlessly annoying rival - everything he did that led her on, and here she’s doing the very same thing. She’s disgusted with her own lack of insight, but also faintly angry, as though this has been an elaborate prank.
“Pam, I - don’t know what to tell you.”
“Honesty would be okay?”
“Come on, don’t.” Karen looks like she might cry. “Do we really need to do this? Can’t you let sleeping dogs lie? I’m not - operating under any illusions, here, Pam. I know how this goes.”
Karen’s tone of complete hopelessness is wounding. “I think I should go.” Tears are streaming down her face, but this isn’t something she do right now.
“Please, Pam, don’t leave it like this. I’m sorry - I didn’t mean. For things to be like this.”
Pam leaves as quickly as she can manage, hyperventilating in the elevator and sitting in her car for ten long minutes until she’s collected enough to drive home. It isn’t so much that she failed to understand her relationship with Karen or that she’s faced with the prospect of moving back to Scranton. Mostly, she can’t stand the idea that Karen might now be sitting at home, slumped against the refrigerator with a fallen Domino’s magnet on the ground next to her, crying harder than she thought it was possible for anyone to cry.
Word count: 5,021
Prompt: Pam/Karen: Pam transfers to Stamford instead of Jim.
A/N: It's on time! ...if you live in Hawaii, and have a flexible notion of the date shift. Thanks to paper_jam11 for her speedy and very helpful beta, and for her willingness to tolerate inane grammar questions, and also to persnickety_er for her helpful but somewhat less speedy beta, and also for being inspiring.
Congratulations to the Scranton Times, the only news source that I don't physically assault newsies for selling.
It’s weird that they’re still at work, still in the parking lot; it’s weird that they can faintly hear Michael’s announcement to the casino crowd and see the tarp-covered boxes they moved out of the warehouse. But Pam is totally certain that if she hadn’t blurted out her announcement at the exact moment she did, she would never have mustered the courage to try again.
“I’m sorry if this is…not the right thing to say, but I couldn’t - couldn’t leave without you knowing. So, um.”
Jim looks as though she’d thrown a brick at him. His features are slack and almost expressionless, but he looks her straight in the eye.
“I don’t - Pam, I’m sorry -“
“I know,” she says. His eyes are glassy and watering and she hates that she’s the one that did it. This moment, she thinks, has been inevitable for years; she standing here in her very best dress and he in the same sweater he’d worn to his engagement party, with night air and (for once) honesty between them. “It’s okay.”
“No, it’s - I’ve always thought of you as, as a friend; I’m sorry if I, uh, gave you the wrong impression, but -“
“You didn’t,” she lies, but as a prophylaxis against his emotional pain, it sucks: a tear is actually running down his cheek. “So, um, now you know, I guess.” She really can’t look at him any more and turns towards her car, brown taffeta hissing around her so loud that she doesn’t hear him take a step until he’s grabbed her hand. She has a moment to think about what’s happening as Jim looms closer, but she doesn’t take advantage of it, and then he’s kissing her while she stands stiff and shocked.
Numbly she thinks that he tastes like the ocean - salty and inexorable and overwhelming. But she can’t let things happen like this, so she’s already insinuating a hand between them. Then he pulls away, says “I’m sorry,” again, and she lets his hand fall, and that’s the end of that.
***
But not the end, either, because when she gets home she’s crying harder than she knew a person could cry, hard enough that and she goes into the kitchen to call her mom but ends up slumping against her refrigerator and sliding down the side of it. And then she’s crying on the kitchen floor next to a fallen Domino’s Pizza magnet, with her skirt bunched up around her hips and nothing between her bare thighs and the linoleum, and thinking about that makes her cry even harder.
***
She’s mostly herself again in the morning, when Roy and Cal and McEvoy come to pick up her old furniture. She tries to avoid being alone with Roy, because he’s giving her that look like he’s going to ask her to get back together with him again, but instead he just congratulates her for the thousandth time and reminds her to invite him to Stamford when she’s settled. Pam promises she will, and then Cal comes in and asks if she’s leaving the conch-shell lamp, and if she is, can McEvoy give it to his mom for her birthday?
Pam grins a little, because for just a second, she remembers that she’s glad to be moving to Connecticut. Somewhere where she won’t hang out with the same lame gang of guys that have been mooching off of her cooking and birthday-remembering skills since high school. Somewhere with more than one museum, with a train to New York, with more restaurants than just pizza or sandwiches or bad Chinese.
But then the reality sets in again, constricting her chest and making her miss a breath. She’s moving to Connecticut because Jim and Dana are getting married, because they love each other and they’re always going to love each other, and there’s no two ways about it.
Fuck it. She’s never coming back. McEvoy can have the lamp.
***
The worst part of it is the humiliation. During the long drive east she thinks about Jim’s reaction, which is already fuzzy in her memory, and she tries different stagings in her mind to tease out every bit of nuance. Did that “I’m sorry” carry regret, or was it more of a horrified pity? When she stops to pee and pick at a flavorless pretzel, it occurs to her that he wasn’t sorry that she loved him, he was sorry that she’d worked up the nerve to say so. And that triggers a little spark of resentment that feels better than anything has in two days.
In her schedule for the drive, she allowed one half-hour crying jag. She takes the time, but not the crying; she stares steel-eyed at the McDonald’s logo on the building and tries to muster cold fury at Jim.
What can you do with someone who brings you a tomato plant on Valentines Day just because you said that you hate that you can’t get good winter produce in Scranton? The guy who slept on his own couch for a week so you could have a bed the night you left your fiancé. The guy who leaves you (used to leave you) such thoughtful, funny voicemails on the days that you call in sick that food poisoning seemed worthwhile.
And she can’t believe that he’d pretend that he didn’t know what she was thinking that whole time. Jesus Christ, the worst part of it is the humiliation.
No, it isn’t either. She’s making a valiant effort to convince herself, but that’s not the worst part and it never will be. The very worst part of it is that he doesn’t love her back.
***
She doesn’t like her new boss on first sight, but after Michael, that barely matters. She’s only nominally reporting to Josh anyway; her real supervisors are Jan at Corporate and Anissa Vaziri, the vice-president of marketing. Josh drones so long about how the new marketing projects she’s going to be art-designing are going to affect Dunder-Mifflin Stamford’s business plan, and how his clever plan for new design strategies is going to revolutionize the way Dunder-Mifflin does business, that by the time he’s done she’s wondering about lunch. He leads her around the office, introducing her to her new coworkers. They’re mostly unremarkable, but a guy named Martin seems pretty nice, and a woman named Jocelyn refuses to shake her hand because it’s cold season.
Josh shows her the break room, where there’s a woman digging through the crisper in the fridge and making slightly disgusted sounds. Josh introduces her as Karen, a member of the sales team, and Karen gives her a disinterested once-over. Her handshake is cool and loose. “Oh, I guess Pam is going to be on your team,” Josh says, with obviously feigned casualness.
“What? How is that fair! Nina was our best player, and you’re replacing her with her?” And then she obviously remembers that Josh is her boss, and continues in a more moderate tone. “Andy’s out today; we’re going to get killed.”
“We took Martin; it’s your turn to get the new person.” Karen looks almost mutinous, but Josh precludes any further argument by answering his Sidekick (pretending to answer his Sidekick? Pam didn’t hear it ring. Also, what grown man has a Sidekick?). “Can you show Pam her desk? I’ve got to…” he gestures vaguely at the sales floor.
“Yeah,” Karen’s tone is not gracious.
“Teams for what?” Pam asks Karen as she walks through a row of desks.
“Just…this team building game we play. It doesn’t matter.” Karen inclines her head at the second desk in the trio, the one without knick-knacks, and - hey, her desk has an ocean view, how about that? It’s in the middle of everything, which is not so great; she kind of got used to the privacy of nobody being able to see her monitor. “Is this the sales floor?” Pam asks Karen as she takes the desk immediately behind her own.
“Yeah. We’ve been short a salesman for two months and Josh decided to hire an artist.”
Ouch. Obviously she and Karen aren’t going to be best friends. Still, it’s kind of nice to get called an artist.
Pam spends most of her first day making appointments to look at apartments and waiting for Anissa to call her back. Josh sends her four emails; one to set up a meeting to discuss Dunder-Mifflin’s design strategy, and three more to reschedule that meeting. She and Martin discover that they have nothing to say to each other over sandwiches. Pam’s only just getting settled after lunch when Josh comes out of his office to turn off the lights. Karen leaps out of her seat to close the blinds.
“What’s going on?”
“We’re playing Call of Duty. It’s, um, team building.”
“Teams,” Pam says, figuring it out.
“Yeah, we’re the Allies. There’s an icon on your desktop, CODII?”
“Thanks.”
Pam follows Karen’s terse directions for how to log into the team server, clicks fast through the introductory screens. Pam doesn’t like Karen much, so she doesn’t see any reason to correct Karen’s assumption that she doesn’t know how to play - actually, she and Roy and McEvoy used to have long tournaments on McEvoy’s Playstation, back when she thought the road to reconciling with Roy involved forcing herself to be interested in his interests.
She gets sniped by Josh while she’s figuring out how the controls work on the computer. Karen snorts behind her. She respawns in a building with a shitty Desert Eagle, which hits pretty hard but doesn’t have the fire rate or long accuracy she prefers. Jocelyn has an MP44; Pam kills her and takes it.
Karen stops tapping the keys for a second when the Allied kill message shows up on the screen. And then she picks off Josh, and Pam gets Martin and then Josh again. It feels natural to high-five when they get to the seven kill lead and call in an airstrike, winning the game. Josh actually comes out of his office long enough to congratulate Pam, and promise that they won’t go easy on her next time; for the rest of the day, everyone treats her like a minor celebrity, which is weird. She does her best to be uninteresting.
Pam has an email from Anissa when she closes the program. Anissa wants her to design a logo for marketing specifically to elementary schools. It’s a project that Pam and some of her colleagues were talking about while they were in the design training program, and Pam is happy to have gotten it; it’s a prestige project, and there’s a little more leeway for creativity here than rote package designs. Plus, it gives her a chance to do some hand drafting. She’s still working at a quarter past five, when Josh wheels his expensive-looking bike past, and five minutes later, when Karen drags her knuckles across her desk.
Pam looks up expectantly. “Can I buy you a drink?” Karen asks, looking uncomfortable and maybe sheepish.
Pam really just wants to go back to the motel and watch some free HBO, but this probably isn’t a great time to be turning down olive branches. “Yeah, that sounds great. Is there someplace we can walk?”
Karen leads her to a Mexican restaurant that she says is mediocre, but which has the essential virtues of $3 happy hour margaritas and a fried Oaxacan cheese appetizer. Pam holds the table until Karen can get the bartender’s attention; when she comes back to the table with drinks, she sits heavily in her seat.
“So, I owe you an apology.”
Pam would have liked to start out a little slower, but Karen obviously has an agenda. “Oh, no, please don’t…you don’t have to do that.”
“It’s just….Josh. It’s personal. There used to be another woman on the sales team, and she was a friend of mine, and Josh kind of hounded her out. And he’s been pissed since she left that we aren’t making our sales quotas, and it’s kind of a boys’ club now. And now he wants to hire, uh, you, actually. And that’s a little frustrating. But that’s him being an ass, and I shouldn’t have been rude to you.”
“Thanks.” It occurs to Pam right then that Karen didn’t actually apologize. She kind of appreciates that.
“So, apology margarita,” Karen says, and nudges the drink closer to Pam. Her smile is a friendly, pretty v, and Pam decides not to hold a grudge.
“Apology margarita,” Pam answers, and clicks her plastic hurricane glass against Karen’s.
***
She feels faintly disconnected from her real life most of the time, punctuated by brief periods of intense yearning. She finds an apartment that’s a little bit smaller and a little bit more expensive than she wanted, and turns the walk-in closet into a studio. That’s mostly a pointless exercise; she’s not painting much lately, and when she does it’s usually an inchoate mess. She buys a cheap wardrobe on Craigslist. It’s ugly and takes up almost a third of her bedroom, but it does look artistic.
About a month into her tenure in Connecticut, Pam notices that she’s been having long bouts of what seems like highway hypnosis, where she perks up after ten minutes or a half hour of staring at her computer screen or stirring a pot of soup, with no memory of what she had been doing or thinking. It makes her nervous; makes her wonder if she’s going a little crazy. Twice she almost buys a book about the grieving process, but then stops herself at the last second before her life completely devolves into melodramatic absurdity.
Work is…interesting. Pam considers herself something of an expert on petty office conflicts, but she’s never seen a war of attrition like the one between Josh and Karen. Pam really wants to be good friends with Karen, because she’s smart and funny and odd, but there’s something a little frightening about the intensity of Karen’s anger. She takes every opportunity to mess with her boss, sabotaging him with his clients and coworkers and treating Call of Duty like it’s an actual war. In return, Josh sets her impossible tasks and embarrasses her in meetings by loudly pointing it out when she fails to accomplish them. Pam isn’t quite sure whether Josh has figured out that they’re fighting, or if he’s just an asshole.
Pam joins Karen’s gym without knowing that it’s Karen’s gym until they meet on the treadmills. They get to be workout buddies. Karen is unsurprisingly competitive, but not in an annoying way. Mostly she makes Pam try to work harder. The workouts bring back Pam’s appetite, more or less, and after a month of exercising four times a week Pam stops losing weight.
She still feels like she’s wasting her life. She started the design program and left Scranton to try to get some sense of accomplishment back, but it seems like all she’s gotten for her trouble is a slightly better-paying dead end job and nobody to talk to.
Every night before she goes to sleep, she counts down the days until Jim’s wedding, and when she runs out of days, she wishes Dana the very best wedding anyone’s ever spent all her husband’s savings on.
***
“What happened to you last night?” Karen huffs. The hair that’s escaped her ponytail is already plastered to her forehead; obviously she’s been on the elliptical for a while.
“Huh?” says Pam, dropping her iPod into her own elliptical’s water bottle holder.
“I texted you like three times. There was this perfect storm of awesome, shitty movies. It was Zoolander, then Turner and Hooch, and then, uh, oh! Robocop. It was great.”
“Oh, sorry. My phone was off,” she says, climbing onto the exercise machine without making eye contact.
“Yeah, I guessed that.” She squints, taking in Pam’s bloodshot eyes and unwashed hair. “Are you okay?”
“Sort of. I - the guy I’m in love with got married yesterday. To not me. Obviously.”
Pam thinks it might be a little bit too early in their friendship for this kind of self-revelation, but instead of looking repulsed by Pam’s forthrightness, Karen just looks surprised and sympathetic and says, “Oh, my God. What happened?”
So Pam relates to Karen the whole ugly story, even the parts her mother doesn’t know, without eye contact and stumbling over her words. About how she met this guy at work who was supportive, but in a long-term relationship, so he made no demands of her; about how he was just there for her when she realized she needed leave her fiancé and start a graphic design program; about how she fell completely in love with his sense of humor and his good looks and his generosity of spirit. And just when she thought she was going to be able to tell him so, how his girlfriend had a pregnancy scare that turned out not to be real but Jim was already in love with the idea of domestic life, so he’d proposed.
And then things had been really bad, because Pam couldn’t ever seem to escape the image of Dana on her infrequent office visits, laughing half a second too late at Jim’s jokes and always finding a way to turn the subject back to herself: How she’d be a really amazing handbag designer and how she’s changing the community by changing community theater. The more she thought about it, the more hopelessly she longed for Jim, and the more bitterly she resented him and his stupid choices, and Dana, and herself. How it got so poisonous she begged Jan for the first available transfer, but she couldn’t go without one last, stupid, desperate attempt. How she’d known it was hopeless, and she’d run away, and hadn’t heard from him since. She makes it through the narrative without crying, which is an accomplishment, and as she talks Karen slows down on the elliptical until they’re both just standing there on the machines. One of the personal trainers keeps giving them dirty looks.
It takes Karen a few moments to think of something to say. “That’s about the saddest goddamn story I ever heard,” she finally says, patting Pam awkwardly on the wrist. Pam shrugs. “Do you want to come back to my place and get drunk and watch movies about exploding things?”
The mere fact that someone feels as bad for Pam as she feels for herself makes everything seem about a thousand times harder to deal with, so Pam nods miserably and says “Yes please.”
Pam gets a ride in Karen’s unnecessarily huge car to Karen’s unnecessarily huge apartment. She has three bedrooms, and her kitchen is about the same size as Pam’s living room. Karen vanishes into the kitchen to make complicated drinks of her own invention, something called a Sunday Surprise, and Pam flips through Karen’s DVD folders until she finds National Treasure, a movie so ridiculous and complicated that there’s no way watching it can make her feel worse. Karen takes one look at Pam’s pick and laughs, then sets a huge glass of something pink in front of her. They spend an hour mocking Nicolas Cage’s acting, and then Pam discovers that she can’t remember or pronounce any of the characters’ names. “And I don’t even understand what the point of that girl is. What’s her name?”
“Abigail?” Karen ventures.
“Oh, yeah, like Abigail Adams. Clever, jerks. God, this movie is so lame.”
“You don’t have to tell me about it, I’m sitting here watching it with you. I know it’s lame.”
“And yet you have it on thingy. DVD.”
Karen laughs. “Be drunker, Pam.”
She thinks about it. “Wow, I am drunk, aren’t I? I only had two of your things! Good Lord, Filipelli, what do you put in those?”
“Oh, lots of stuff. It is about twenty percent Everclear, though. Should I have mentioned that, do you think?”
“Sunday Surprise.”
“Because you’re too hung over to go to work on Monday. Surprise!”
Pam laughs. “I can’t believe I thought it was a good idea to drink something with ‘surprise’ in the name.”
“Yeah, you definitely should have seen that coming,” Karen says smugly.
Pam struggles gracelessly back into a sitting position, propping her back up on the foot of Karen’s couch. “Can we quit watching this now?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” She sounds sober, but when Karen goes to use the remote control, her brow furrows deeply. She prods at it twice before the cheesy exposition stops, and slumps lower into the couch cushions.
“Hey, can I ask you a something?” Pam says.
“Only if you phrase it in the form of a question,” Karen says, then laughs at herself.
“How come you hate Josh so much?”
“Oh, that’s - kind of a story.”
“Please,” Pam says. “I’ve seriously been wondering for a month.”
“Well, all right. But you’ve really got to keep this to yourself.”
Pam snorts. “Who am I going to tell, Jocelyn?”
“If you want to, you’d better email her. She watched another segment about bird flu on Tuesday, and now she won’t let anybody within fifteen feet of her unless they wash their hands first.”
“Come on,” Pam says, and pokes Karen in the hip with her elbow. “Just tell me.”
“Ugh, fine. Okay, so you remember I told you about Nina, the girl who had your desk before you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, she and I were friends. And she was having an affair with Josh, which was - you know, ick, but whatever.”
“What happened?”
“Josh just decided, one day, that he wasn’t interested anymore. He dumped her, uh, in a staff meeting, if you can believe it, and she was so embarrassed she quit.”
“Do you guys still talk?”
“No, not really. I mean, a couple of emails a month.”
Pam is obviously missing a piece of this puzzle, and she scratches her chin trying to figure it out. “Um, not that that’s not an asshole move or anything, but I don’t really get how that became such a…lasting problem.”
“No, it’s kind of gotten all out of proportion, hasn’t it?” Karen looks as sad as Pam’s ever seen her. “It’s just that I miss her.”
“So…why don’t you just call her?”
“It’s not really that kind of friendship.” She twists her fingers in her necklace. “I am really going to regret - I think I’m kind of in love with her. I was kind of in love with her.”
Pam’s eyes go huge and round. “Oh.”
“Please don’t -“ Karen says, and then, “I’m not gay.”
“Okay,” says Pam.
“I just - one time I fell in love with a girl.”
“Oh.”
“It’s not that big of a deal.”
“No, I get that.”
“Uh.” Karen rubs her eyes. “Things are going to be irretrievably awkward now, aren’t they.”
“No,” says Pam. “No. I promise. I was just startled.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
“But now I’m not startled, and things are not going to be weird. Promise.”
Karen gives Pam a lopsided smile.
“My hand to God. I tell you what: You distract Josh tomorrow, and I’ll hide his bike in the service elevator.”
She laughs. “Okay.”
***
“Okay, so, you know how we decided not to be petty and horrible to Josh anymore?”
“Yeah,” Karen answers. When the word came down that either Stamford or Scranton was going to get the axe, Pam and Karen decided that the time for pranks was over, and the time for not getting fired and having to eat cat food had begun. That was almost two weeks ago, and it hasn’t stuck that well; just this morning, Karen resorted to the unimaginative pettiness of switching the contents of brown-bagged lunch with the contents of Andy’s nylon “Hot and Cold Lunch Sac.” Pam is leaning against her desk and not doing a very good job of concealing her grin. She’s waited until Andy went on a sales call, so there’s nobody in earshot, but she keeps her tone low anyway.
She presses her lips together in glee and sets a manila folder on Karen’s keyboard. “Old times’ sake?”
Karen opens the folder and frowns at it. “What is this?”
“Josh’s phone records. Elizabeth installed the new records system this week -because God forbid anybody make a long distance call with a company phone - and she needed to run a diagnostic, so…I convinced her to run Josh’s records. Come on, don’t tell me you don’t want to know if he’s calling Indonesia on the company dime.”
“I knew you were going to go places,” laughs Karen. “Let’s see. These are all clients; that and that is Jan in New York; that’s your extension…huh. Why do you think he called Staples corporate headquarters three times on Friday?”
“I don’t know, but right after he got off the phone with them the third time, he called somebody at Corporate, than somebody at Sloane Auto Sales, that’s weird.”
“That’s where he used to work, I think.”
“Oh. My God,” said Pam.
“What?”
“Those are references. That fifty minute conference call, to Staples headquarters? That’s an interview.”
“You think so?”
“Don’t you?”
She nods silently, not looking up from the folder. “The real question is what we do with this.”
“What? Nothing!” Pam cranes her head at Karen. “Are you crazy? We’re just about to get rid of him.”
“You think it’s a coincidence that Josh is jumping ship right when a branch is about to get closed? Would you rather be unemployed, or move again?”
“Oh, ugh. Ugh. I kind of wish we hadn’t figured this out now.”
Karen’s got kind of a feral smile sometimes, Pam thinks. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of this one.”
***
Pam doesn’t really bother knocking at Karen’s apartment anymore. She just taps on the door and opens it; if it’s unlocked, she’s obviously invited in.
“Pizza’s here,” she hollers as she walks in.
“Pizza,” Karen answers from the kitchen. “Always a popular and half-assed choice for half-ass potluck night.”
“Half plain and half tomato.”
“Perfect. We also have bad red wine for me and bad white wine for you, and for dessert, Oreo pie, straight from the freezer section at Acme.”
“Oooh, liquor store and grocery store - two stops. I think it’s clear who wins at this half-ass potluck.”
“Not so fast,” Karen says, emerging from the kitchen with two paper cups. “I stole both bottles of wine from the cabinet Josh’s office - it’s not like Josh is going to be using them to romance any more clients, right? - and the cups are disposable. Which is plus five points to me, and yet another victory.”
“That is amazingly lazy. Although I don’t think you set a new record; this is still not quite as lazy as the time when you got the guy downstairs to call the Chinese restaurant for us.”
Pam takes her cup of wine, which is, as promised, terrible, and abandons it in favor of pizza. Karen picks at a slice but doesn’t eat much, and they sit in slightly uncomfortable silence until Pam can’t take it anymore.
“So, Assistant Regional Manager, huh?”
“I’m not a stickler for formality, Pam, you can just call me ‘Your Highness’ or ‘Your Worship.’”
She snorts. “Yeah, I’m probably going to do that.”
“What’d Jan tell you?” Karen asks mirthlessly.
“She said there’s a job for me in Scranton, if I want it, or there’s a three month temporary job in Nashua, if I want to do that and then see what happens.”
“Please come to Scranton,” Karen says. She says it without any artifice or irony, looking Pam straight in the eye. “I know there’s, uh, bad associations, there, and you’re worried about it, but it’ll be okay. That guy - he’s an asshole if he can turn you down.” Karen’s expression is naked pleading, and something about it stirs a familiar discomfort in Pam. “Please?”
“Oh, my God.” The penny drops, and Pam knows exactly where she’s seen that expression before. She knows exactly why Karen’s obvious distress feels both familiar and strange. “What are you - how do you think of this?”
“Think of what?” She’s obviously confused by the apparent non-sequitur, but taking Pam’s tone seriously.
“You, and me. How do you think of this, Karen?” The bottom is dropping out of Pam’s stomach; she can’t think about this. Now or ever. “Are we friends, or are we…something else?” God, she feels so stupid. Everything she’s been trying to convince herself to hate about Jim and resent about his behavior - the over-attentiveness, the sympathy, trench warfare against an endlessly annoying rival - everything he did that led her on, and here she’s doing the very same thing. She’s disgusted with her own lack of insight, but also faintly angry, as though this has been an elaborate prank.
“Pam, I - don’t know what to tell you.”
“Honesty would be okay?”
“Come on, don’t.” Karen looks like she might cry. “Do we really need to do this? Can’t you let sleeping dogs lie? I’m not - operating under any illusions, here, Pam. I know how this goes.”
Karen’s tone of complete hopelessness is wounding. “I think I should go.” Tears are streaming down her face, but this isn’t something she do right now.
“Please, Pam, don’t leave it like this. I’m sorry - I didn’t mean. For things to be like this.”
Pam leaves as quickly as she can manage, hyperventilating in the elevator and sitting in her car for ten long minutes until she’s collected enough to drive home. It isn’t so much that she failed to understand her relationship with Karen or that she’s faced with the prospect of moving back to Scranton. Mostly, she can’t stand the idea that Karen might now be sitting at home, slumped against the refrigerator with a fallen Domino’s magnet on the ground next to her, crying harder than she thought it was possible for anyone to cry.