They’d been doing so well and he’d been trying his best. Roy, at least lately, could be the first person to admit that he isn’t perfect, but he’d been opening doors for her and remembered her mom’s birthday and, okay sure, that doesn’t really make up for anything but it was a start.
He guesses he was shocked. Ever since high school there’d been a permanent halo suspended above Pam’s head and to hear that Halpert made a move on her, that she let him, was a bit tough to take. They were done and over the moment those words left her lips because it was only then that he realized how right Pam had been for all these months, every time she reminded him that they aren’t the same people anymore. She isn’t little Pammy Beesly whose voice shook with nervous tremors and who always had her head in one of those art books, and he’d lost the right to call her his long before he’d even realized their evolution.
Roy remembers that night (he’d say the sky fell in but he’s never been a poetic guy) when she’d woken up from a nightmare with dark circles under her eyes as if she never slept at all and climbed out of bed. He’d heard the rev of the car engine, which was odd because Pam was never the spontaneous type.
He’d found her hunched over the steering wheel, still wearing her ratty pajamas and her eyes half-closed.
“Are you happy Roy?” she’d asked him, the gaunt hollowness of her face invoking too many images of skulls in forgotten crypts.
“Of course babe.”
He’d been worried then, worried she’d snapped like one of those brides on reality TV that airs at four in the morning.
“It’s not enough” and she’d said it more to herself than to him, to the sticky summer air and the plastic dashboard and the steady hum of insects that he’d wished were loud enough to drown out her voice. Her eyes had seemed darker as she turned in her seat to face him, setting her lips into a firm line like she’d finally decided something important after a long deliberation. “I can’t marry you, Roy.”
And just like that, all of a sudden, the world had dissolved around him like that water color painting he’d accidentally spilled beer on once, his version of reality that he’d been living in for the last ten years melting away, yielding to this strange rendition of life that didn’t look anything like what he’d been used to.
He hadn’t known she’d felt like that. It was the most pathetic excuse for the ruddy rubber tire relationship they’d been thump-thumping around on for five plus years, but he’d told himself that if he’d known she wasn’t happy he’d have done something, something different; been better, funnier, warmer, more open. He‘d needed a second chance to prove that he could be everything she wanted again.
But it wasn’t like that at all. He’s been working under the false perception that he’d ever been what she wanted. He feels stupid and cheated and, okay, a little angry. It turns out it‘s more complicated than himself being an oblivious idiot because she’d had feelings for someone else. Pam had said it herself: “I guess I had feelings too.”
And then there’s Halpert. Jim Halpert. Always swooping in like fucking Robin Hood when she was pissy and upset with him, and that just wasn’t a fair fight. Judging from what he’d seen, of course she ran to him when she was feeling vulnerable. He made her feel safe, but that wasn’t his job. It was Roy’s; it was his ring on her finger, his bed she slept in. He may not have a claim to her now but back then she was his.
Roy just can’t stop picturing them together; his head bent low over her neck as she breathed out a giggle in the shape of his name, Jim – Halpert probably thought he was a good kisser.
Suddenly just sitting here in his lay-z-boy seems like he isn’t doing nearly enough to remedy the situation, so he springs up and begins to pace.
What had Pam been thinking? No, he knew what she’d been playing at, overlapping the two of them to protect her pretty little heart because she was planning on leaving Roy and didn’t want to be alone. It was like getting a new puppy when you were about to put your old dog to sleep.
And he was that old dog.
He’d been humiliated, gypped out of the life with Pam he’d paved out in front of himself by the guy who he’d known was trouble from the start. Roy grabs his keys from the dining room table and shoves them into his pockets, knowing the walk will do him good. But he doesn’t stop at the corner down the street or at the 7-11 across the highway.
Each patch of pavement beneath and behind his feet feels like a step towards a solution, and even though he knows there’s no such thing to this complicated mess, he can almost make himself believe in a resolution where everyone goes home happy. Everyone except Jim. There’s that logical part of his brain that tells himself in mathematical calculations exactly how this isn’t the guy’s fault, but that smaller voice is lost under the flex of his muscles, the ache in his legs to move him towards something to kick.
Roy can picture them now. He’d called in sick but it‘s a Friday and they’d be getting ready to leave right then, powering off their computers and scuffling towards the coat rack. Jim would lean across Pam’s desk, slinging his lips back into one of his stupid smirks and Pam would laugh. She’d laugh and her cheeks would be pink and she’d smooth out his tie and Roy just couldn’t take it.
The Dunder-Mifflin building appears around the corner in all of its square-sided geometric glory before Roy even knows that’s where he’s going, but it makes perfect sense. It’s where this whole thing started, where that floppy-haired asshole had dug his fingers between him and his Pam and pried until she came loose, and it‘s here that it will end.
He’s pacing outside of the building now, talking himself onto and down from the ledge intermittently. After this there’s no going back. Ten years of corsages and notebook paper love notes and first time fucks in the back of his brother’s truck… it’s over. But he reminds himself that it was already over, that he can never look at her again and joke himself into believing that they’re still enough for each other.
“Is this seat taken?”
Pam had glanced around, gripping her sketchbook tight across her chest as she tried to figure out who he was talking to.
“Who, me?”
He’d chuckled and nodded and she’d turned bright red, but he decided right then that she was exactly the type of girl he needed. Roy had dated cheerleaders throughout his high school career but it took a total of 0.5 seconds to figure out that if he leaned close he could hear the water slopping around inside their empty heads. He needed someone whose eyes he could stare into and see something besides adoration and lust reflected back. Someone who could like him and it would actually mean something, more than the letter on his jacket and the stats on his team’s profile.
“Do you like hockey?”
Roy takes the stairs two at a time because once he sets his mind to something it would take a bulldozer and a detonator to stop him from getting to it. He thinks briefly about the cameras, about everyone who will point an accusing finger at him, but he quickly mutters “fuck it”. Let them watch.
“I think we should get married.”
Her head had whipped around from its place on the back of the futon and her springy curls had whacked him in the face. But he didn’t really mind.
“Do you really mean it, Roy?”
He liked to make her smile like that, like her teeth could power the whole fucking planet. And it was worth it for that, to know that he could still do it to her.
“Of course.”
The door knob feels strange between his fingers, like when you still think you’re dreaming in the morning and reach out to touch something only to find it solid. This is a metaphorical flood gate he’s opening and he would have thought it would have seemed… heavier.
Pam notices him first, her chin falling down to the hollow of her neck but her eyes warn him, beg him, chastise him.
‘I knew you weren’t any more civilized than a cave man. You haven’t changed at all.’
He answers her back with a twitch of his eyebrows.
‘Did you really expect me to just sit back and do nothing?’ Her eyes narrow, but he doesn’t let her get a word in. ‘Watch this’.
Roy scaled the stairs to the office, a path barely ever trodden because he knew the boss in the office was an idiot. He chuckled to himself at the horror stories Pam would have for him on her first day, and he really didn’t have any hopes that she’d stick around for longer than a month. But they really did need the money, so he hoped she could just tough it out for long enough to bring ends around to meet each other.
The first thing he heard was her laugh. It had been years since he’d heard her laugh quite like that, as if the world is made of sunshine and she couldn’t get enough of it. He’d missed that sound. It figured she’d come to work for the most unfunny man in America and they’d have the same sense of humor. But when he came within sight of reception it wasn’t the middle-aged boss with the square face and thinning hair leaning over her station.
“Hey, hon.” He said by way of greeting, his eyes never leaving the tall guy with lanky limbs that was practically laying over the surface like he’d spread himself thin over toast.
“Oh hey Roy.” Pam visibly straightened and structured her smile into that of careful patience. So much for her good mood carrying over into tonight.
The other man had held out his hand to shake Roy’s, but there was something in his eyes, anger almost, and in the way that Pam had looked at this guy… Roy didn’t like it at all.
“I’d like you to meet Jim.”
Roy forces his eyes to leave Pam’s, knowing that this is it. A brief flicker flashes beneath his eyelids of the dream he’s had for so many years it feels like a memory.
A picket white fence. A sturdy mutt in the living room. The smell of muffins baking fresh in the kitchen. A little boy with his face and her eyes playing football in the backyard. Pam.
But the brief glint passes, as transitory as the sun reflecting into his eyes off a window in its slow crawl across the sky, and leaves him with the ache of everything he’s never had the balls or the stomach to say.
“Hey Halpert!”
