two posts in one hour does not bode well.
I can't sit on this fic any longer, so here goes! Posted because cercaluna wanted me to. :"> Fic for the movie In Good Company. Carter is played by Topher Grace, the cutest thing ever. Alex is played by Scarlett Johansson.
Five Things That Never Happened to Carter Duryea (But They Could Have).
1.
When you fire Dan, the way he looks at you is something like a betrayal, something that says: I thought you would be better than this, I thought you could be better than this. What you don't think he understands is that there's nothing for you to be better for - there's no reason for you to change, there's nothing for you once you leave the glass doors of the building. This job is your life. This is all you have, and you would be a better man if only you had the guarantee of something other than these four walls. It's selfish, maybe, to think that you ought to get something in return, but you've learned to keep your cards close. You're not going to give up the only thing you have for a man that you barely know. You don't want to go back to that old life, you'll do anything not to; there's no family and no kids and no house waiting for you to change into something good. There's nothing.
You'll miss having a wingman. You miss a lot of things, though; you have missed a lot of things. You wish you could've missed this, the way he stands up and shakes your hand and looks you in the eye, the way he closes the door quietly, the way everyone's face gets tight as he walks towards the elevators. The way they pat him on the back and hug him, and what it says is that he's one of them. He'll always be one of them. You put your face in your hands and feel your fingers shake.
The next day, you walk into the office and you know they hate you. You can see it on their faces. They hate you and they're scared of you, but they know they're better than you. That's what counts. Teddy K. comes in and he gives his speech and no one does anything other than applaud. The acquisitions keep on coming, the ad pages increase. You're still being groomed, you're still tracing the steps. You call Kim, one day, for old time's sake, and you tell her that they're getting you ready. That you'll be the next Teddy. There's a pause before she laughs at you, soft but sharp. "When was the last time he saw his family?" You can almost hear the cigarette smoke seeping through the phone, the sound of voices and a faucet in the background, and you stare at the smooth glass of your coffee table. You've never had a family. She didn't understand that about you. It's not so bad, you tell yourself, it's not so bad, being you. It wouldn't be so bad to be like Teddy. He has everything he wants.
2.
You read comic books and you're good at math, decent at track. You could even have a girlfriend, the nice sort, if you want, but you don't. It would be too awkward. There are too many things to explain. You don't bring friends home because you don't want them to see your mother, the old furniture, the unpaid bills that you have to fish out of the trash can every week. Distantly, you know that you love her, but you've been living for so long like this that all you feel is pity. You feel bad for her, and it never occurs to you to be ashamed of being ashamed, of the kind of offhand contempt that drove people in movies crazy.
The boys in your class work at country clubs and the Gap to save money for cars and alcohol, you work everyday serving fries and Big Macs to pay the electricity bill. You're smarter than that, you know it, but everything in this town is about connections, about whose uncle owns what, which friend lives where. You go to sleep and you wake up and all you can think about is how you'll leave one day, how you'll go to the city and make a life for yourself. The one thing you never do, though, is feel sorry for yourself; you haven't cried since you were six, when it was your birthday and you mother didn't come home until midnight, wild and laughing and she didn't even look at you. What you feel is anger, later. You never cry and you never pity yourself, and what would be poured into that coalesces into a fist of determination somewhere deep in you; desperate and hungry and pounding, a constant kind of pain.
You work the midnight shifts at McDonald's so you won't have to deal with your mother, so you won't have to go to school the next day smelling like drugs. You dream of days when you won't have to save for weeks to buy a graphing calculator and use coupons and get the supermarket brand of peanut butter. Years pass and when you get your first real job, your first real suit, your first real leather shoes, you'll tell yourself: I'm fine now. I'll be fine now, I've made it. You won't realize until much later how wrong you are.
Now, though:
You have a few friends, because what you lack in status and money you make up in the way you win track meets and have nice eyes. It's not that you're anybody special, but you're not bad to look at and your thrift store clothes are just retro enough so that you scrape by. There's this guy in your business communications class that you hang out with a lot. His name's Jude, an exchange student from Britain and everybody loves him, and you talk too much and too fast but he doesn't mind, just raises his eyebrows and gives you rides once in a while. The two of you get along pretty well, and you suspect that it's because he doesn't make fun of your name, because, really, Jude? You check each other's papers and write notes in the margins about increasing profits and intrapersonal skills and you both do well. Things like that. He says that he'll be famous one day, just you wait.
There's this girl, too; she's got dark, dark hair and she's really smart, shoots down people with a twist of tongue. She calls your look decidedly vintage and you haven't got the heart to tell her that you're not trying to be cool, it's just what you can afford. She gets better grades in chemistry than you do, and that makes you work harder. Not because she's a girl, just because she's her and she'll tease you about it until you get perfect marks.
And you go to work and you ride your bike that you bought at a yard sale and you don't tell anybody, repeat, anybody about your father when they ask, you most certainly don't tell them that he's an artist because it sounds stupid and pretentious and you hate him. This is your life. You work hard and you learn to be charming, quickly, and you do your best to ignore all the empty spaces, all the things that everybody else has but you'll never get. It works most of the time. It never occurs to you that the only reason you can carry on is because you've never been anything else other than alone, in the end. It's difficult to miss something you've never had and you don't know how to want anything more, at least when it comes to that. You've never been anything other than alone and you only understand what that means when you're twenty six and at the top of your world.
3.
You sit on the edge of Alex's bed, and you're waiting for it. It's fairly safe to predict that she's probably going to rip your heart out, not in the way that Kim did, because the kind of heartbreak you had with Kim only happened because it was supposed to. You didn't sleep and you drank too many espressos and it hurt, but. But. You sit there and you're just fucking waiting for it, god, but she doesn't do anything except wrap a hand around your wrist. Leans into your shoulder in a way that says, it'll be okay, and you've never wanted anything this bad, and you've never held your breath for this long, and you've never done a lot of things. Your eye is by turns numb and throbbing, droplets of water condensing on the Pepsi can, and you are so desperately, terribly in love with her that it's like you can barely breathe. (Deep down, you wonder if it can get any better than this, and you hope so, because if this is the top, if there's nowhere to go but down --) You've never wanted anything so bad. You wonder if you're learning.
4.
The week you get promoted, you bump into Jude while waiting for a taxi, and it's so surreal that it feels like fiction. You're both famous now, in your own ways. He's an up and coming actor, getting roles with Matt Damon and Brad Pitt and all those celebrities you see on the magazine stands, the celebrities whose managers you've met at parties when they're on the east coast.
You take him out to sushi. He asks you a lot of questions, because he hasn't heard from you since graduation. You don't ask him any, because the newspapers tell you enough.
"What have you been doing?"
"Spending a lot of time at work, you know. Head of sales at Sports America now. Uh, that kind of thing."
"Congratulations, mate. But I mean, with your life? How's it going?"
You don't know what to say, look at your fingers, the chopsticks. Your wife's dumped you, you live in the office, you killed your Porsche the second it left the dealership. You probably get discounts at Starbucks for the pure bulk of coffee you drink everyday. "Want to go somewhere? This sushi's awful." You don't know why you said that. The sushi's not awful, not really, but he looks at you and says sure, so you get up and you go and you think that this kind of impulsiveness is like properly living. Jude remembers you from your high school days, and you don't know whether to be relieved or scared.
Later, when he kisses you, not clumsy at all, you curl your fingers around the edge of the table. You want to say, been doing this much?, but don't. You think, a little distantly, that this is the best and worst thing that you've ever done.
5.
You go to Dan's fifty third birthday party.
By this point, you haven't worn a suit in months. You used to keep count of the days it had been since you slipped out of that last Armani jacket, three weeks 4 days three weeks 5 days three weeks 6 days, because that was the only thing stopping you from getting out of your bed in the mornings and choosing a tie out of reflex. A lot of things have changed - the fact that you haven't had more than one cup of coffee per day in two weeks being one of them. You've learned how to cook, and it's nice, even if the saleswoman at Crate&Barrel had laughed at you when you asked her what the point of having more than one pan was. You're still not sure that you get it, but you can make a mean stir fry and boil pasta without incident. Well, most of the time. Baked ziti had been the first thing you tried before you realized you were being overly ambitious, and it's new in a good way to do something that you're crap at.
This time, you don't bring champagne. You don't really buy extravagant things anymore. You thought of getting him a lifelong subscription to Sports America, as a joke, but didn't. When you ring the doorbell and walk in, you see the surprised looks, but it's a good sort of surprise, and it's nice to know that they don't resent you after it's all been done and said. You shake hands with Morty, compliment Alicia's hair. Dan doesn't show up until a few minutes later, and there's no nudity this year, thank god. The cake's cut and the candles are blown and everything's warm, comfortable. You wonder if this is what it feels like. Belonging somewhere. Dan smiles at you and the wrinkles crinkle up at the corner of his eyes. They only make him look nicer, not old. He tries to get you to hold the baby, but you're nervous around them; you're always scared shitless that you're going to drop the baby by accident and get sued by its parents, because the only times you've held a baby before was visiting fellow businessmen and their pretty, sharp-nailed wives.
You see Alex and she's as gorgeous as she ever was. There's this little pocket of hurt deep in your chest, but it's okay; you think that just talking to her is enough, asking her about her short stories and classes. You hope she dropped that business major. Thing is, you're a good man, but she'll get a great one. You keep that thought in the back of your mind, it's something you're going to reach for.
When you get ready to leave that night, Ann smiles and says that you're welcome to come back anytime, to finally taste that baked pasta. Dan nods, but he's also a little drunk. You say, yeah, of course, but you're not sure that you will - they're not your family and it's not your place. Still, it's nice to have an offer that's actually meant. You're still alone, really, but it's not the same sort as before. You're not there yet but you think that, maybe, maybe you'll be alright. You can get there, at least. It's not so bad.
HELLO, FANDOM OF ONE.
Five Things That Never Happened to Carter Duryea (But They Could Have).
1.
When you fire Dan, the way he looks at you is something like a betrayal, something that says: I thought you would be better than this, I thought you could be better than this. What you don't think he understands is that there's nothing for you to be better for - there's no reason for you to change, there's nothing for you once you leave the glass doors of the building. This job is your life. This is all you have, and you would be a better man if only you had the guarantee of something other than these four walls. It's selfish, maybe, to think that you ought to get something in return, but you've learned to keep your cards close. You're not going to give up the only thing you have for a man that you barely know. You don't want to go back to that old life, you'll do anything not to; there's no family and no kids and no house waiting for you to change into something good. There's nothing.
You'll miss having a wingman. You miss a lot of things, though; you have missed a lot of things. You wish you could've missed this, the way he stands up and shakes your hand and looks you in the eye, the way he closes the door quietly, the way everyone's face gets tight as he walks towards the elevators. The way they pat him on the back and hug him, and what it says is that he's one of them. He'll always be one of them. You put your face in your hands and feel your fingers shake.
The next day, you walk into the office and you know they hate you. You can see it on their faces. They hate you and they're scared of you, but they know they're better than you. That's what counts. Teddy K. comes in and he gives his speech and no one does anything other than applaud. The acquisitions keep on coming, the ad pages increase. You're still being groomed, you're still tracing the steps. You call Kim, one day, for old time's sake, and you tell her that they're getting you ready. That you'll be the next Teddy. There's a pause before she laughs at you, soft but sharp. "When was the last time he saw his family?" You can almost hear the cigarette smoke seeping through the phone, the sound of voices and a faucet in the background, and you stare at the smooth glass of your coffee table. You've never had a family. She didn't understand that about you. It's not so bad, you tell yourself, it's not so bad, being you. It wouldn't be so bad to be like Teddy. He has everything he wants.
2.
You read comic books and you're good at math, decent at track. You could even have a girlfriend, the nice sort, if you want, but you don't. It would be too awkward. There are too many things to explain. You don't bring friends home because you don't want them to see your mother, the old furniture, the unpaid bills that you have to fish out of the trash can every week. Distantly, you know that you love her, but you've been living for so long like this that all you feel is pity. You feel bad for her, and it never occurs to you to be ashamed of being ashamed, of the kind of offhand contempt that drove people in movies crazy.
The boys in your class work at country clubs and the Gap to save money for cars and alcohol, you work everyday serving fries and Big Macs to pay the electricity bill. You're smarter than that, you know it, but everything in this town is about connections, about whose uncle owns what, which friend lives where. You go to sleep and you wake up and all you can think about is how you'll leave one day, how you'll go to the city and make a life for yourself. The one thing you never do, though, is feel sorry for yourself; you haven't cried since you were six, when it was your birthday and you mother didn't come home until midnight, wild and laughing and she didn't even look at you. What you feel is anger, later. You never cry and you never pity yourself, and what would be poured into that coalesces into a fist of determination somewhere deep in you; desperate and hungry and pounding, a constant kind of pain.
You work the midnight shifts at McDonald's so you won't have to deal with your mother, so you won't have to go to school the next day smelling like drugs. You dream of days when you won't have to save for weeks to buy a graphing calculator and use coupons and get the supermarket brand of peanut butter. Years pass and when you get your first real job, your first real suit, your first real leather shoes, you'll tell yourself: I'm fine now. I'll be fine now, I've made it. You won't realize until much later how wrong you are.
Now, though:
You have a few friends, because what you lack in status and money you make up in the way you win track meets and have nice eyes. It's not that you're anybody special, but you're not bad to look at and your thrift store clothes are just retro enough so that you scrape by. There's this guy in your business communications class that you hang out with a lot. His name's Jude, an exchange student from Britain and everybody loves him, and you talk too much and too fast but he doesn't mind, just raises his eyebrows and gives you rides once in a while. The two of you get along pretty well, and you suspect that it's because he doesn't make fun of your name, because, really, Jude? You check each other's papers and write notes in the margins about increasing profits and intrapersonal skills and you both do well. Things like that. He says that he'll be famous one day, just you wait.
There's this girl, too; she's got dark, dark hair and she's really smart, shoots down people with a twist of tongue. She calls your look decidedly vintage and you haven't got the heart to tell her that you're not trying to be cool, it's just what you can afford. She gets better grades in chemistry than you do, and that makes you work harder. Not because she's a girl, just because she's her and she'll tease you about it until you get perfect marks.
And you go to work and you ride your bike that you bought at a yard sale and you don't tell anybody, repeat, anybody about your father when they ask, you most certainly don't tell them that he's an artist because it sounds stupid and pretentious and you hate him. This is your life. You work hard and you learn to be charming, quickly, and you do your best to ignore all the empty spaces, all the things that everybody else has but you'll never get. It works most of the time. It never occurs to you that the only reason you can carry on is because you've never been anything else other than alone, in the end. It's difficult to miss something you've never had and you don't know how to want anything more, at least when it comes to that. You've never been anything other than alone and you only understand what that means when you're twenty six and at the top of your world.
3.
You sit on the edge of Alex's bed, and you're waiting for it. It's fairly safe to predict that she's probably going to rip your heart out, not in the way that Kim did, because the kind of heartbreak you had with Kim only happened because it was supposed to. You didn't sleep and you drank too many espressos and it hurt, but. But. You sit there and you're just fucking waiting for it, god, but she doesn't do anything except wrap a hand around your wrist. Leans into your shoulder in a way that says, it'll be okay, and you've never wanted anything this bad, and you've never held your breath for this long, and you've never done a lot of things. Your eye is by turns numb and throbbing, droplets of water condensing on the Pepsi can, and you are so desperately, terribly in love with her that it's like you can barely breathe. (Deep down, you wonder if it can get any better than this, and you hope so, because if this is the top, if there's nowhere to go but down --) You've never wanted anything so bad. You wonder if you're learning.
4.
The week you get promoted, you bump into Jude while waiting for a taxi, and it's so surreal that it feels like fiction. You're both famous now, in your own ways. He's an up and coming actor, getting roles with Matt Damon and Brad Pitt and all those celebrities you see on the magazine stands, the celebrities whose managers you've met at parties when they're on the east coast.
You take him out to sushi. He asks you a lot of questions, because he hasn't heard from you since graduation. You don't ask him any, because the newspapers tell you enough.
"What have you been doing?"
"Spending a lot of time at work, you know. Head of sales at Sports America now. Uh, that kind of thing."
"Congratulations, mate. But I mean, with your life? How's it going?"
You don't know what to say, look at your fingers, the chopsticks. Your wife's dumped you, you live in the office, you killed your Porsche the second it left the dealership. You probably get discounts at Starbucks for the pure bulk of coffee you drink everyday. "Want to go somewhere? This sushi's awful." You don't know why you said that. The sushi's not awful, not really, but he looks at you and says sure, so you get up and you go and you think that this kind of impulsiveness is like properly living. Jude remembers you from your high school days, and you don't know whether to be relieved or scared.
Later, when he kisses you, not clumsy at all, you curl your fingers around the edge of the table. You want to say, been doing this much?, but don't. You think, a little distantly, that this is the best and worst thing that you've ever done.
5.
You go to Dan's fifty third birthday party.
By this point, you haven't worn a suit in months. You used to keep count of the days it had been since you slipped out of that last Armani jacket, three weeks 4 days three weeks 5 days three weeks 6 days, because that was the only thing stopping you from getting out of your bed in the mornings and choosing a tie out of reflex. A lot of things have changed - the fact that you haven't had more than one cup of coffee per day in two weeks being one of them. You've learned how to cook, and it's nice, even if the saleswoman at Crate&Barrel had laughed at you when you asked her what the point of having more than one pan was. You're still not sure that you get it, but you can make a mean stir fry and boil pasta without incident. Well, most of the time. Baked ziti had been the first thing you tried before you realized you were being overly ambitious, and it's new in a good way to do something that you're crap at.
This time, you don't bring champagne. You don't really buy extravagant things anymore. You thought of getting him a lifelong subscription to Sports America, as a joke, but didn't. When you ring the doorbell and walk in, you see the surprised looks, but it's a good sort of surprise, and it's nice to know that they don't resent you after it's all been done and said. You shake hands with Morty, compliment Alicia's hair. Dan doesn't show up until a few minutes later, and there's no nudity this year, thank god. The cake's cut and the candles are blown and everything's warm, comfortable. You wonder if this is what it feels like. Belonging somewhere. Dan smiles at you and the wrinkles crinkle up at the corner of his eyes. They only make him look nicer, not old. He tries to get you to hold the baby, but you're nervous around them; you're always scared shitless that you're going to drop the baby by accident and get sued by its parents, because the only times you've held a baby before was visiting fellow businessmen and their pretty, sharp-nailed wives.
You see Alex and she's as gorgeous as she ever was. There's this little pocket of hurt deep in your chest, but it's okay; you think that just talking to her is enough, asking her about her short stories and classes. You hope she dropped that business major. Thing is, you're a good man, but she'll get a great one. You keep that thought in the back of your mind, it's something you're going to reach for.
When you get ready to leave that night, Ann smiles and says that you're welcome to come back anytime, to finally taste that baked pasta. Dan nods, but he's also a little drunk. You say, yeah, of course, but you're not sure that you will - they're not your family and it's not your place. Still, it's nice to have an offer that's actually meant. You're still alone, really, but it's not the same sort as before. You're not there yet but you think that, maybe, maybe you'll be alright. You can get there, at least. It's not so bad.
HELLO, FANDOM OF ONE.