December 23, 2006

Pam felt kind of depressed. She felt no where near the same amount of sorrow that she had the year before. She was in a good – no, great – relationship with a wonderfully successful man, she hadn’t heard from Roy in a long time, and overall, her successes in school and at the restaurant throughout the past year made her feel accomplished and proud of herself. Unfortunately, this Christmas season, she wasn’t going home to spend the holiday with her family because of work commitments and Jim had been out of town on business for the past week and a half.

She had received a call from him late the previous night. She had almost fallen asleep and then she was shocked awake by her cell phone ringing above her head. He was stuck in Chicago for the night due to bad weather conditions. She had received another call at seven that morning – before she had even woken up – from Jim telling her that he had finally arrived in New York City again and would be home that evening sometime.

She felt sloppy at work that day. She dropped a few plates, she accidentally stepped on a child’s foot during the dinner rush and there was another child that accidentally spilled his glass of water all over the front of Pam’s shirt and skirt. She was ready for the day to be over. She was ready to see Jim. She was ready to curl up in front of a fireplace – even though neither she nor Jim had one where they lived. She just wanted the holidays – this day in particular – to be over.

They closed really late, she didn’t leave the restaurant until midnight and she was ready to just go to sleep. She searched through her purse for her phone. Finally finding it at the very bottom of her bag, she pulled it out and looked at the display. No calls. She had just finished working twelve hours and she had received no calls. Jim hadn’t even called her. Why not? She immediately flipped open the phone and dialed his number.

His phone rang, and rang, and rang and…

“Hello?” there was something not quite right about his voice, she thought.

“Hey Jim.”

“Who is this?” when was the last time he had asked her who she was on the phone?

“It’s Pam,” she said, “is this…this is Jim, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Probably.”

“Should I catch a cab?”

“Eh…”

“Jim?”

“I guess. If you want.”

“I’m coming over.”

“Okay.”

“Are you okay?”

“Not really.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Eh…”

“Jim, I’ll be there shortly, okay?”

“Okay.” She heard him clumsily hang up his phone and she practically jumped into the street at the first taxi she saw that was available.

She slipped on the sidewalk, and she almost tripped on his stairs. This day was just one bad moment after the other. As she thought about Jim’s voice on the phone though, she didn’t care that her knee was scraped and bleeding from the ice or that she had stubbed her toe on concrete. She just wanted to make sure that he was okay.

She ran the buzzer, half expecting him to be in the door waiting for her. He wasn’t waiting and he didn’t respond to the buzzer. She buzzed again. No response. A third time. Nothing. Finally, she buzzed a fourth time and started to knock on the door. She heard the lock click and she walked inside, surprised that he hadn’t just come out to let her in like usual.

She walked to his door and walked right in. The door wasn’t locked, but maybe he had unlocked it when he let her in via the buzzer. She peeled off her coat and looked at her knee in the dim light of the apartment. Her nylons were ruined and there was blood trickling down her leg.

She looked around for Jim, she couldn’t see him.

“Jim?” she called.

“Over here,” she heard a voice that was vaguely familiar to Jim’s call from over by the couch. A hand came up over the back and she nervously smiled. She took off her shoes and walked over to where he was.

“What’s wrong?” she asked as he saw him sprawled out across the couch, a nearly empty bottle of tequila sat by his head. “Are you drunk?” She had never seen him drunk before, she had never heard him drunk before now, she wasn’t even certain if she had ever seen him even a little bit inebriated. He always held his liquor so well.

“A little,” he said with a slight hiccup.

“Have you consumed this entire bottle?” she asked as she held up the bottle of tequila, the last little bits of clear liquid swishing around in the bottom.

“I don’t know,” he replied as he looked away and out his window. “Probably. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Do you feel okay?” she asked with a wrinkled nose as she put the bottle out of his reach.

“I guess,” he replied with a shrug as his head lolled back to the arm of the couch and his eyes lazily traveled from her waist to her face. “Hey! It’s Pam!” She didn’t know whether she should laugh at him or start crying.

“Yeah,” she said as she walked over to his side. “Let’s get you upstairs and into bed, shall we?” He nodded.

She knelt down next to him and allowed him to put his arm around her shoulders for support. The two of them stood slowly and she helped him towards his staircase and up the stairs, making sure that he didn’t fall or anything worse. When she rounded the stairs with him, he slumped against the wall.

“Jim,” she said forcefully, afraid that he might have passed out.

“Shh,” he said drunkenly, “I don’t like loud noises.”

“Come on, it’s just a few more steps to your bedroom,” she said as she pulled the weight of his body along with hers until they reached the doorway of his bedroom, and then his bed.

Once they had reached the foot of his bed, she slowly laid him down on top of his comforter. She looked down at him, sprawled out like a drunken child. She hoped that he wouldn’t succumb to alcohol poisoning; she didn’t know what she would do. He seemed really drunk, but she had never been around a drunken Jim before. Maybe he had just finished off a couple of shots that had been remaining in the bottle.

Pam knelt down at his feet and slowly took off his socks, then followed his pant legs and undid the button and zipper on his jeans.

“Are we going to have sex?” he asked as she started to roll the denim off of his legs.

“Not tonight,” she replied quickly as she threw the jeans over to a clothes hamper in the corner of the room.

“Why not?” he asked, grabbing her hands and pulling her down on top of him.

“Because you’re drunk,” she replied. “And I don’t have sex with drunken men.”

She decided to leave his shirt on, and she rolled off of him, and propped herself up next to him and watched him as his eyes swept back and forth, looking at the ceiling.

“Do you feel sick?” she asked.

“No,” he replied as he shook his head.

“So you’re not going to throw up all over your expensive sheets?” she asked with a smile.

“No, I never get sick when I’m drunk,” he replied, and she could swear she detected a hint of pride in his statement.

“I’m going to go get you some water,” she said quickly as she began to stand up.

“No, don’t leave,” he sat up quickly and grabbed the back of her shirt, keeping her from going any farther. “Please don’t leave me.” She turned her head to look at him and he was biting his lip, he looked like he might cry.

“I’ll be right back,” she said pointing towards the door. “I don’t want you to get dehydrated.”

“You promise that you’ll be back?” he asked.

“I promise,” she replied with a generous nod. He let go of her shirt and she took another step forward, but Jim quickly grabbed her hand and pulled her back towards him. “I’ll be right back.” She nodded again; he nodded back and reluctantly let her go.

As she walked down the stairs to get him a glass of water, she wondered what could make him turn into that kind of a person. There had been occasions in the past – in her previous life – where Roy had gotten extremely drunk. He drank fairly frequently, but whenever he went out with his teammates, or his brother, he could become downright dangerous. She had only seen him cry on one or two occasions. It was usually after he thought that he had done something wrong to screw up their relationship, or if she had done something mean to him. She wondered if Jim was like that too, but why would he be so upset? What would bring him to near tears? What would will him to drink an entire bottle of tequila?

Pam rounded the stairs again; glass of ice water in her hand and the sudden realization hit her hard, like a slap in the face. She walked into Jim’s bedroom; he was sitting up now – swaying a little, but at least sitting. She handed him the glass of ice water and he took it graciously.

“So what has she done?” Pam asked.

“Who?” Jim asked after he took a long drink of the water. Pam stared him in the eyes.

“You know who,” she replied. He bent over and set the glass of water on the floor with a heavy sigh.

“Fuck.”

“You don’t have to hide her from me,” she said quietly. “You can tell me about what happened.” She sat down next to him on the bed and looked at him intently. He sighed again.

“Will you rub my back?” he asked. She smiled a little and nodded.

“So what’s wrong?” she asked as she rubbed small circles into his back.

“How long do you have?” he asked wearily.

“All night,” she replied. He fell back onto the mattress and she scooted towards his head and brushed the hair off of his forehead.

“She’s so fucking greedy!” he exclaimed as he punched the mattress with his fist. “She never used to be that way.”

“You want to tell me about her?” she asked.

“You really want to know?” he asked. Pam shrugged.

“If it makes you feel better in the end…” she replied. “I mean, you’re the one who listened to me when I talked all about my ex-fiancé.”

“Yeah…”

“So tell me, where did you two meet?”

“Right after I graduated and got a job where I work now,” he said quietly, “she wasn’t the vice president of her company yet, but she was working on it.”

“She’s a vice president of a company and she wants your money?”

“Crazy, isn’t it?” Pam nodded. “Anyway, I met her at the spring dinner gala that year; it was right after I had been hired. I saw her and it was one of those scenarios where you think, ‘Mm, yeah, I’ll take her home tonight’.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” he said. “Anyway, I thought it was just going to be kind of a one-night deal, but the more that I was around her and the more that I got to know her…I kind of became smitten with her. We dated briefly and I decided that I wanted to marry her.”

“How long was that?”

“What?”

“How long did you date her before you decided you would marry her?”

“Two months I think,” he said thoughtfully. “Horribly drastic of me – I have no idea what I was thinking. I bought her a really cheap engagement ring since I hadn’t been working for very long. She said yes, though, I don’t think she really wanted to looking back on things.”

“Wow…”

“So we got married after six months of being together,” he explained. “Really haphazardly thrown together wedding. We didn’t even invite anyone. It was just me, her and the guy that married us. I didn’t tell my mom, I don’t think that she told hers either. We just…got married. And then we went to Paris for our honeymoon.”

“You went to Paris with her?” Jim nodded.

“Anyway, the marriage basically progressed like any normal relationship that you would ever be in. Around 8 months since we were first together we started running into problems. She claimed to me that she didn’t want any children and I did…which I later learned probably just meant she didn’t want children with me. And you know, she was so business-oriented. She was always out of town on business and basically leaving me behind all the time. Six months into the marriage we called it quits.”

“Just like that? You didn’t even get a chance to work things out?” Pam asked, unsure why she was asking him the question. He looked up at her, stared her right in the eyes and there was something about the look that frightened her.

“Just like that,” he stated flatly.

“What did she do?” she asked, a little afraid to ask the question.

“She cheated on me,” he replied quietly, angrily even, “President of the company’s headquarters in London.”

“What?” Pam’s mouth dropped open and her eyes widened.

“Five months into the marriage, she went on a business trip to London for the company,” he said calmly. “She had been with the guy for two months already…” She opened her mouth to say something – anything – but nothing came. Her lips blindly fumbled for words that she couldn’t even comprehend.

“Wow…”

“That’s not all.”

“There’s more?” she asked incredulously.

“She was pregnant,” he replied.

“You have a kid?” Pam asked, her mind reeling.

“No, no,” he replied. “That was the first set of things that I had to set straight…last spring. The night of the dinner gala, we had a big argument about the paternity of the child and…I immediately took the test and it immediately proved that her current husband was the father.”

“Who’s her current husband?”

“The British guy,” he stated flatly. “So anyway, we immediately divorced because…well…I didn’t want my wife cheating on me with some guy in London. She moved to England, got a job as vice president with the advertising company there and just last spring she moved back to the States. I guess that her husband was demoted and she was offered the vice president position at the American company.” He shrugged.

“And now she’s asking you for money,” Pam said.

“Pretty much,” he said. “Her husband keeps getting demoted because he has a horrible work ethic, and she wants all the money she can possibly get.” He sat up a little. “At least we were able to easily and quickly prove that her son isn’t mine because I don’t even want to know how much I would owe her given that situation.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah,” he said with sarcastic laugh. “Be glad that you didn’t get married.”

“I guess so…” she said dumbly, trying to absorb all of the information that he had just laid out in front of her. “So when do you think it will all be over?”

“All of what?”

“The…legal…money stuff.”

“Hopefully soon,” he explained. “I’m trying to get it settled out of court still. Our lawyers are constantly talking with one another. Right now her goal is to take my place here because I bought it while we were married so she thinks that part of it belongs to her…of course, she hasn’t been listed so much as living here in the past two and a half years.” He sighed. “She’s really good at catching me when I’m out of town too, so she sets up mandatory legal meetings as soon as I return, knowing I’ll be too tired to put up a fight and she’ll get what she wants.”

“What a bitch.”

“No kidding,” he said with a slight smile. He looked over at Pam, her face looking significantly more worn than when she had first arrived. “I’m sorry…I just dumped like…everything on you.”

“No…” she shook her head. “It’s okay.”

He stood up, a little shaky still, but some of the alcohol seemed to have worn off quite quickly. He walked around to the side of the bed and peeled back his sheets.

“Are you going to spend the night?” he asked as he lay down against his pillows.

“Sure,” she replied without even thinking twice. She peeled off her skirt and her ruined nylons. “Do you have a shirt that I can wear to sleep?”

“Yeah, look on the right side of my closet,” he said as he pointed over towards his large closet doors. She stood up, walked over to his closet doors and pulled them open. She grabbed the first t-shirt and she could find and quickly peeled off her work shirt and replaced it with one of Jim’s worn tees.

She returned to his bed and crawled next to him.

“Do you feel any better now than you did earlier?” she asked as she rubbed her chin against his shoulder.

“A little,” he replied with a nod. She kissed his softly on his cheek and wrapped her arm around his stomach.

“Please don’t vomit on me in the middle of the night,” she said with a small laugh.

“I promise I won’t,” he said with a chuckle. He turned off the light next to him and the two of them burrowed their way under the covers of his bed.

“Hey Jim?” Pam said quietly, as she curled up next to his body.

“Yeah?”

“I promise I will never hurt you,” she said quietly. He didn’t say anything, but she knew that she had chosen the right words because his arm wrapped around her shoulders and he pulled her tightly against his chest. “I’m really sorry this is happening,” she finished before she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.