Chapter Text
Jamie knows very little indeed about Eddie Kaspbrak. Despite having worked alongside him for nearly four years now, Jamie’s pretty sure that he knows more about complexometric indicators, after spending one particularly fruitful lunchbreak refreshing the Random Article function on Wikipedia, than he knows about Eddie Kaspbrak. In fact, if someone were to hold him at gunpoint and order him to explain the extent of what he knows about his elusive coworker, he thinks he could probably run through it all on the fingers of one hand, which makes him feel a little sad, actually.
It’s not that he doesn’t want to know more, after all. Far from it. Eddie seems cool enough, for a dude who has seven bottles of hand sanitiser on his desk, which Tadeo in Sales calls his minibar.
Jamie has met Tadeo in Sales precisely twice, and he knows that Tadeo has a wife named Elke, who’s Dutch and has a thing about seasonal vegetables, and when they visited Tadeo’s parents in Chile last year, Elke discovered mayonnaise and hasn’t looked back since. Tadeo’s birthday is November 9th, making him a Scorpio, and Tadeo doesn’t really believe in all that Astrology stuff, but Elke is a Cancer and they’re super compatible, so maybe there’s something to it after all.
Jamie has shared an office space with Eddie Kaspbrak since the final weeks of the Obama presidency, and he still doesn’t know Eddie’s birthday.
It’s just that Eddie is an enigma wrapped in a riddle, tied with a bow of mystery. A cryptogram in human form. A one-man sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
Jamie knows, for example, that Eddie probably goes to the gym. He knows this because Eddie likes to roll his shirtsleeve up to his elbow in the afternoon, and even Jamie, who’s very happy with Nishat, thank you, can admit that Eddie has a surprising amount of muscle definition going on in the forearm region. Jamie has witnessed, on four separate occasions, someone do a double take at Eddie’s forearm. Karen from HR still bears the nickname ‘Mugbreaker’ after Eddie turned the corner near her office, coming face to face with her just as he rubbed a hand through the hair at the nape of his neck, exposing the wiry flex of muscle between wrist and elbow, and Karen famously dropped a cup of coffee all over the floor.
Ergo, either Eddie goes to the gym, or he’s on steroids.
Eddie is the kind of man who keeps a makeshift itemised medicine cabinet in his third desk drawer, with a padlock on the handle, the key for which he keeps in the inside pocket of his suit jacket, and who administers a library style check-out system of medication whenever anyone asks for a Paracetamol.
Eddie is probably not on steroids.
Jamie knows that Eddie is married, because he wears a wedding ring on his fourth finger, and sometimes, when Eddie clearly thinks no-one is around, Jamie catches him texting someone and beaming like he’s won the lottery twice. Jamie does not know the name or indeed the gender of Eddie’s spouse; the only framed photograph on Eddie’s desk is, somewhat bizarrely, a black and white photograph of a bowl of spaghetti, with the words ‘our firstborn son’ scrawled across it in awful penmanship, and a signature that looks suspiciously like an autograph.
Eddie’s computer desktop background is a photograph of the Swiss Alps. Jamie does not know if Eddie has ever been to the Swiss Alps. He’s never spoken about it if he has.
Jamie knows better than to assume that Eddie has a wife or a husband, because Jamie is an enlightened millennial who took a Gender Studies class at college entirely of his own volition, and he also knows better than to ask Eddie about his spouse, because he remembers the look on Eddie’s face when Thandi in Accounting asked him how his wife was doing, and he’s pretty sure that Thandi still has night terrors about it.
He also knows that Eddie has, at the very least, one friend or family member outside of work, and that friend or family member has very poor taste in tie. He knows this because Eddie came to work a few weeks ago wearing a white shirt with a new tie in a sort of eggplant colour, with a gold and green plaid pattern. It was, as Jamie’s mother might have said, a bold choice.
“Nice tie,” Jamie had said to Eddie, trying to make conversation at the photocopier.
Eddie, coffee in hand, had looked down at his own tie, as though he’d forgotten what he was wearing, and shrugged.
“Not one I’d pick myself,” he’d replied, and that had been that.
Jamie also knows that Eddie Kaspbrak does not have a left arm. Jamie knows this because he has eyes, and despite being the sort of person who once took over a week to notice that Nishat had shaved half their head, even Jamie can’t miss the fact that Eddie pins the left arm of his shirt and suit jacket up around the residual limb.
Eddie never wears a short-sleeved shirt, even though Jamie’s pretty sure it would be a lot easier than having to pin the long sleeve up, because Eddie has a thing about the lines of a suit.
Jamie also knows that Eddie has a very fancy prosthetic that he never uses. The last time Jamie saw the prosthetic, he was in Eddie’s office, asking him for the details on the Vortex Solutions file so that he could set the metadata up properly, and he noticed that Eddie had procured an oddly small new hatstand, propped up against the wall in the far corner of the office, all chrome and odd joints with a deep red beanie pulled over the top.
“Nice hatstand,” Jamie said, nodding at the hatstand.
“Thanks,” Eddie said. “It’s my arm.”
Jamie does not know how Eddie lost his actual arm, and he doesn’t want to know, because that’s incredibly personal information and Jamie, who was not raised in a barn, thank you very much, knows that there are certain things you just don’t ask people.
“What’s that disgusting boil on your face, and how did you muster up the courage to come to work today?” is one of them. “How did you lose your left arm?” is another.
Brad from Marketing once asked Eddie how he lost his arm while the two of them were standing in line for the coffee machine at 7.30 in the morning. Eddie had turned a shade of red hitherto unseen outside of a paint warehouse, and replied that he’d left it inside Brad’s mom’s asshole.
Brad had reported it to Karen in HR, Eddie had reported Brad’s question right back, and, torn between a lawsuit for ableism or a lawsuit for a crude joke about Brad’s mother, Karen had gently advised Brad to be more sensitive of his differently abled colleagues in the workplace.
Brad had then sent an email to a friend in Sales, complaining about Mugbreaker’s bias because she wanted to fuck Eddie’s forearm vein, and had mistakenly copied in everyone in the entire building. Jamie had sent back a gif of a panda rolling down a hill and landing in a garbage can. Eddie had not replied to the email thread. Brad had packed up his belongings a week later.
When Jamie went into Eddie’s office the day of Brad’s departure to fetch the paperwork on Essensecurity, the hat was no longer pulled over Eddie’s prosthetic arm in the corner, and the middle finger of the hand was extended in a surreptitious salute.
Probably an accident, thought Jamie.
He also knows that, according to Susan Cooper, who sits three cubicles down and eats a single boiled egg for lunch every day, Eddie Kaspbrak looks exactly like the kind of man who knows his way around a clitoris. Although on balance, Jamie thinks, that probably says more about Susan than it does about Eddie.
All of which is to say that Jamie is really at a point where he’d pretty much do anything just to find out Eddie Kaspbrak’s middle name, because there comes a point at which it’s honestly just super awkward to work with someone for four years and never exchange anything beyond meaningless pleasantries at the coffee machine.
Because here’s the thing: Jamie totally wants to be Eddie’s friend. Sure, he’s, like, fifteen years older than Jamie, and if he isn’t frowning then he’s muttering something darkly under his breath, and he drinks his coffee completely black, which points to something being deeply amiss with his psyche, but there’s something else, too; something about him that shows through the edifice occasionally, something wry and unexpected that makes Jamie think, yes, you’re interesting, let’s be best buddies.
It shows in the weird framed photo of spaghetti on Eddie’s desk, and the way he uses his prosthetic arm as a hatstand, and the fact that Susan Cooper once walked in on him doing yoga on the floor of his office, and it shows, too, in all the times Jamie has watched Eddie wipe tears of laughter from his eyes after reading a text, and the fact that Jamie is pretty sure he owns at least three Beverly Marsh suits, two of which he definitely got before they were actually available to buy.
So when the email lands in his inbox at lunchtime on Friday, resplendent with Karen’s laissez-faire attitude towards capitalisation, he can practically feel the cogs in his brain start to whir. This is what he’s been waiting for. His golden ticket. A one way trip to Best Friendsville.
From: Karen Marquez
To: all
Subject: There will Be a party on Wednesday 4th march.
Hello everyone,
As you may or may not know Andrei is leaving us next month to go onto pastures new at Gold & Brown Solutions. This is of course a very sad Loss for us all as a company and we will all miss you Andrei! Especially the excellent egg salad you bring in for us every Monday. Your Wife’s cooking talents will be missed almost as much as you!
To mark Andrei’s excellent new job we will be celebrating his golden opportunity the evening of Wednesday 4th march with a party to be held at Studio 52 on Lexington avenue at 7.30PM. All are welcome to Attend and you are also welcome to bring a plus one provided you email me first so I can make sure I know the right Numbers of attendees.
Please RSVP to this email and let me know if you will be bringing Someone by 12pm on Monday 2nd march.
Thank you all and once again good luck Andrei!
Kind regards,
Karen Marquez
PS please remember that if someone has put their name on the tupperware in the Fridge then it is probably their lunch
Screw Andrei’s golden opportunity, thinks Jamie, gleefully marking the email as ‘important’ and closing the tab. This is his golden opportunity to finally get to know Eddie Kaspbrak.
He has no idea how he’s going to play this, but by God, he’s playing to win.
When he walks into the office kitchen to grab a necessary caffeine hit before starting on Susan Cooper’s truly eldritch filing system, Eddie is already there, getting himself one of his disgusting black coffees. The office coffee machine is an unwieldy beast, with about 700 buttons that all profess to have different functions, and Jamie’s fairly certain that only Eddie can use it. Which makes sense, seeing as it might as well be Eddie’s personal coffee machine. As Jamie remembers it, Eddie had made some vague allusions to it being relatively easy to use one-handed, and Corporate, who were still stinging from the Brad Incident, had almost immediately put in an order for one. Jamie looked it up online the day it came. It costs nearly $8,000.
Jamie’s pretty sure that Eddie was bullshitting about it being easy to use under any circumstances whatsoever, but it does make a pretty neat Americano.
He sidles up to Eddie, who then realises that he’s there, and fixes him with a tight smile.
“I’ll be done in a minute,” says Eddie. “Want me to get you anything?”
“Uh, no, that’s OK,” says Jamie. “I can… I can use the machine.”
He absolutely can’t, but Eddie doesn’t need to know that.
Eddie snorts. “That makes just two of us, then. I think it made Karen cry the other week.”
Jamie distinctly recalls that Eddie also once made Karen cry, after she signed off an email with a ‘Best’ and he responded with a ‘Regards’, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Cool,” says Jamie, feeling anything but. “Cool, cool. Hey, uh. Speaking of Karen,” he continues, grateful for the natural segue, “did you get the email? About the party?”
“I did,” affirms Eddie, one eyebrow raised in that way that Jamie definitely hasn’t practised, unsuccessfully, in the mirror. “I think she copied in everyone. Probably invited the janitors, too.”
“Do the janitors even have company email accounts?” Jamie wisecracks.
Eddie shrugs, unsmiling. “They should. Might help them unionise.”
Jamie says a quick prayer for his joke, and looks briefly past Eddie’s left shoulder and out of the floor-to-ceiling window behind him. The city of New York spreads out, vast and silver and stinking, like a topographical map of capitalism itself. Jamie wonders if anyone out there knows any more about Eddie Kaspbrak than him. He thinks, for one brief second, that they probably all do.
Still. He presses on. He’s on a mission, after all.
“So, the party,” he continues. “Looks like they’ve roped Olwen and Theo into planning it, and Olwen might be approaching 60, but I don’t think Theo’s much older than 12, so their average age is a decent 35 or so. Bodes well for it not being the crapshow it was last year.” He mentally applauds himself on not swearing—he doesn’t know what Eddie’s opinion on foul language is, after all, and he doesn’t want to ruin their fledgling bond—and leans forward in what he hopes is a friendly rather than conspiratorial manner. “I heard rumours of cake. I’m hoping for chocolate.”
Eddie takes a sip of coffee. “I’m gluten intolerant,” he says, swallowing.
Jamie briefly imagines a spreadsheet with two columns labelled ‘Personal Facts About Eddie: Best Friends Mission’ and ‘Making a Dick of Myself In Front of My Future Bestie’, and puts a checkmark in both columns.
“So’s Derren in Accounts,” says Jamie, thinking on his feet. “Maybe he’ll bring, like, flapjacks or something.”
Eddie frowns minutely. “Sounds good,” he says, after a beat, and makes to leave.
Jamie resists the urge to grab him by the shoulder. “Are you coming?” he asks, feeling the words spill off his tongue like lemmings leaping from a cliff to their deaths into a quagmire of humiliation. He’s aware that he may be coming off a little desperate, and he tries to reign it in, leaning in a very casual manner against the counter. He’s pretty sure his elbow is resting in a pool of spilt orange juice, but what Eddie doesn’t know can’t be used as blackmail material later. “I mean, I was kind of in two minds about going, because I never actually spoke to Andrei or anything, but, you know, a party’s a party, right?”
“Sure is,” says Eddie. “In the very literal sense that a party is a party.” He raises his coffee in a salute. “I’m just gonna head—”
“I’m definitely going,” says Jamie, totally spitballing now, no more aware of whatever’s about to come out of his mouth than Eddie is, and absolutely hating every second, but knowing that this is it; this is his chance to finally socialise with Eddie Kaspbrak, the only interesting person in the entire office, and he’s not letting go of it that easily. “Probably going to try and convince Nishat to go, too. I told you about them before, right?”
Frowning slightly, Eddie lowers his coffee and nods. “You think they’ll come?”
And that’s one other thing Jamie knows about Eddie, now he comes to think of it. Eddie’s never asked Jamie about his boyfriend or his girlfriend. He’s never frowned at the pronouns or asked him why he’s being cagey about it, even though he isn’t. Which, if Jamie thinks about it, is actually pretty progressive for someone who otherwise embodies such stellar boomer energy.
“What, you want to meet them?” asks Jamie.
Eddie doesn’t answer, just maintains an unnerving level of eye contact and takes a sip of coffee, even though it’s fresh from the machine and must be absolutely scalding, and Jamie cringes.
“I don’t know if they’ll come,” says Jamie, honestly. He shrugs. “They’re an artist, and everyone here is, uh, not. I’m not sure how much they’d have in common with anyone. I don’t want them to come and just be, like, bored out of their skull. You know?”
Eddie nods, slowly. He takes a long sip of his coffee, considering something, and Jamie digs his fingernails into the palm of his left hand. He dare not hope that Eddie is about to share something personal.
This is Eddie Kaspbrak. The word ‘personal’ is not in his dictionary.
“My husband—” Eddie pauses, clearly aware that he’s just given something away that he didn’t mean to, and Jamie mentally runs around the entire office, doing a victory dance. He focuses all of his energy on not reacting at all. Eddie has a husband. Not a spouse. A husband. That’s new information. Another fact to add to his mental spreadsheet. Eddie inhales sharply, breathes out slowly. “He probably wouldn’t have much in common with anyone else, either.” He pauses. “What am I saying? He definitely doesn’t. He has more in common with, like, wildebeest.”
Eddie taps the fingernail of his index finger along the handle of his coffee cup arrhythmically, and Jamie stands up straighter, stops leaning against the counter. They’re getting somewhere. Eddie just shared something with Jamie. Now, Jamie realises, it’s his turn. This is how you make friends, after all. You share things. Burdens and secrets and coffee cups, after you rinse them out.
“I think that Nishat secretly hates the entire thing,” he confesses. “The whole corporate shtick. Not in, uh, an elitist way. Like, I don’t think that they see themself as being too good for it. Just…” He shrugs, tries to find the right word in the miasma of corporate jargon that’s perpetually floating around in his brain. “Not shiny enough, I guess.”
“Hmm,” says Eddie, and that’s it. For a while. “My husband actually weirdly idolises the whole thing. He doesn’t have a clue what I actually do for a living, but I think he imagines that we all hang around talking on rotary phones and yelling about stocks. I’m pretty sure he thinks I work on Wall Street, actually.” He pauses again, staring at the dark, primordial swirl of his terrible coffee. “He’d be bored out of his skull, probably. Not sure he’d want to come.”
And then it hits Jamie, like a freight train, but the train is a fabulous, wonderful idea. It’s also a terrible one, and it totally risks torpedoing this burgeoning friendship before it even gets off the ground, but sometimes, Jamie tells himself, you just have to take a big step forward and hope that you’re not standing on the edge of a cliff.
He can feel his heart thudding an anxious tattoo against his ribcage. You can be brave, he tells himself. You can do this. He probably won’t bite.
“We could, uh. Make a pact,” he says, and the words sound almost confident as he says them, so far away from what he feels that he almost laughs hysterically. “I obviously want Nishat to come, and I think you probably want your husband to come, too, so maybe we could, like, agree to both try and get them on board. Sort of like a confidence boost thing? Like, it’ll be super awkward for me to ask Nishat, but if I know that you’re asking your husband too, then maybe it’ll be easier. Or something. I don’t know.” He pauses, gathers his scattered thoughts. “Plus, if they both come, then they’ll have someone else to talk to about, uh, not work things. So maybe that’ll help, too.”
His heart is beating a little more wildly, now. He’s pretty sure he’s massively overstepped, but then he’s always been an all-or-nothing sort of guy, and he’s pretty sick of working with nothing.
“You really want your partner to see what your work life is like, huh,” says Eddie.
“Yeah!” replies Jamie, more enthusiastically than he intends to. “It’s like, half of my life. Nishat’s the other half. It would be super cool to marry the two up. Otherwise, it’s like—like I’m one person for half the day, and someone else for the other half, and sometimes I’m not sure who the real person is, or if either one of them is actually the real one. Like, maybe the real one is the guy in between both halves, and that’s fu—weird. Just weird.”
From outside the kitchen, Jamie can hear Susan Cooper clacking one-fingered on the keyboard. Somewhere further away, a clock ticks, discordant with the sound of typing. Eddie looks at Jamie, head slightly tilted.
“Huh,” says Eddie again, and he pauses a moment before saluting Jamie with his coffee cup again. A signature move, thinks Jamie, giddily. Almost like a best friend handshake. “Deal,” Eddie says, offering a small smile to seal the promise, and when Eddie walks out of the kitchen, Jamie punches the air in jubilation so hard that he almost takes out an entire shelf of mugs.
Jamie puts his part of his plan into place on Saturday afternoon. He’s sat on the bed, wearing one of Nishat’s oversized college sweatshirts and a pair of boxers, idly pretending to read Bill Denbrough’s latest novel, which, honestly, isn’t doing much for him; it’s over 1,000 pages long and seems, from the revelation they just had on page 376, to be largely about a demon clown from outer space, which even Jamie doesn’t think is all that scary. Plus, there’s this whole weird undertow of cultural appropriation, and it’s making him feel skeezy.
On the floor of their studio apartment, Nishat, clad in a pair of old denim overalls, is working on a backdrop commission for some local theatre company. They don’t usually do theatre, but the play is ‘transcendent’, apparently.
Jamie would quite like to transcend this conversation, if he’s honest, but he knows it has to be done.
He’s made a promise to Eddie. If they’re ever going to be anything even approaching friends, it’s probably best that he doesn’t start by totally fucking Eddie over.
“So,” he begins, twisting the corner of the bedspread between his thumb and forefinger. It’s a pretty cool bedspread, decorated with lots of little embroidered seahorses. He’d picked it up at a garage sale a couple of years ago and it had taken six goes through the washer to finally remove what looked suspiciously like a bloodstain, but it was worth it. “There’s this party thing at work on Wednesday, if you wanted to come.”
Nishat looks up from where they’re sat on the floor, stencilling a series of perfect geometric circles onto a piece of balsa wood. “A party thing? Like a party?”
“Well, yeah,” says Jamie. He rubs his thumbnail over the bedspread, feels it catch on some of the loose threads. “Some dude’s leaving, so they’re putting on a party for him. They’re hiring out, like, an actual bar.”
“An actual bar,” repeats Nishat, raising both eyebrows. They finish drawing around one of the circles, and meet Jamie’s eye again. “Sounds fancy. An excellent choice of venue for a party thing.”
“There’ll probably be wine.”
“Wine, you say?” Nishat stands up, puts their hand on their hips and appraises their work. To Jamie, it just looks like a bit of wood with some circles on it, but Nishat seems pretty content with it, so he doesn’t say anything. “Now you’re talking. How can I pass up the opportunity to rub shoulders with your corporate bros over a glass of vintage Cab Sav?”
And Jamie gets it, he really does; these types of work events are barely even his thing, let alone Nishat’s, and he’s the one with an MBA. They’re always full of dudes in suits that cost, like, three months’ rent, and some guy always ends up making an inappropriate joke about his wife, and everyone else has to laugh along like they’re not choking down vomit, and there’s always, always some awful person who watches the barman pour him a glass of prosecco and then says that it’s not champagne, actually, unless it comes from the Champagne region of France, and you have to nod along like wow, that’s really fucking interesting, tell me more, when actually you just want to pour the prosecco over his head.
But, still. It’s Jamie’s job, and, in that depressingly capitalist way of all things, it’s also his life, and he can’t do much about it.
Eddie gets it. He’d said he got it. He’s not alone in this. He can do this.
“Eddie’s bringing his husband,” says Jamie, more to prove a point than anything else, hoping beyond measure that Eddie’s husband has, in fact, agreed to come. “He’s agreed to come, even though Eddie says he’ll probably have a shitty time. So, you know. You’d have someone else to talk to. And me, obviously. Would it be so bad?”
In response, Nishat puts their hand on their narrow hips, a smile twitching at the corner of their mouth. “Eddie?”
It’s then that, with a sinking feeling, Jamie realises his mistake. “Uh. Yes.”
“Of Kaspbrak fame?”
He wraps the end of the bedspread around his thumb, like his thumb is wearing a little helmet. “That’s him.”
“The guy you’ve been desperately trying to befriend for, like, three centuries?”
“Four years,” mumbles Jamie, ears burning something rotten.
“So you’re on first name terms now? When did that happen?”
“When I asked him if he was going, and he said he didn’t think his husband would enjoy it, so I said that my partner probably wouldn’t either, and then we bonded over both our significant others being far too cultured for the philistine mob of corporate America,” he replies.
Nishat laughs. “Aww, babe,” they say, flopping into bed alongside Jamie and poking him gently in the side. “Do you have a crush? Is he your work husband? Are you going to have lots of little work babies and argue about whether to send them to private school or let them try their lot with the unwashed public?”
Jamie prods them right back. “No,” he answers. Nishat raises their eyebrow, clearly biting back a laugh, and Jamie scrubs his hands over his eyes. “No. I do not have a work crush on Eddie Kaspbrak. If anything, he’s like—”
“Your work dad,” says Nishat, nodding sagely.
“Christ, no,” says Jamie, and almost shudders at the thought of Eddie Kaspbrak in a paternal context. God, he probably wears polo shirts and slacks and doesn’t let his kids play in the grass, on account of all the stains. Not that Jamie thinks Eddie actually has kids. Although, then again, he wouldn’t really know. “A work uncle, if anything. A very distant work uncle, by marriage, who you only see at, like, your cousins’ weddings and who only ever bothers to write ‘hb’ on your Facebook wall for your birthday.”
“A distant uncle by marriage who you also want to fuck,” says Nishat, and Jamie hits them with a pillow. Nishat laughs in response, grabbing the pillow off Jamie and throwing it across the room. It’s not an impressive throw, but then it’s not a large room. “Look, it’s fine, babe. We all get little work crushes from time to time. It’s, like, the only normal part of the workplace.”
Jamie pouts, folding his arms. “Who’s your work crush, then?”
Nishat raises an eyebrow. “I work from home.”
“I know,” says Jamie. “I just wanted to hear you say it.”
Nishat rolls their eyes, but they’re still smiling. “And you also want to hear me say that I’ll go to this party thing, I guess.”
At that, Jamie props himself up on both elbows and looks down at Nishat. They have a smear of charcoal along their left cheekbone. “I mean, ideally, yes.”
“If I go, will I finally get to meet the famous Eddie Kaspbrak?”
“And his husband, apparently,” says Jamie, nodding. He reaches out and smudges the charcoal on their cheek with his thumb; it doesn’t disappear, but instead becomes something greyer, something less defined.
“Then honestly, Jamie. Of course I’ll come.” They grin at him, brilliant and blinding, and Jamie feels that little knot tighten in his chest, that knot that says I did the right thing, moving here for you. “I’m not promising to have, like, the best time ever, but if you want me there, I’ll be there. And I hope, for your sake, that his husband is an absolute troll.”
He finds Eddie in his office Monday morning. He knocks on Eddie’s door, resisting the urge to rap his knuckles in a jaunty melody. It’s not even 8am yet. He somehow feels like Eddie would be less than appreciative.
“Yeah?” comes Eddie’s reply. He sounds slightly distracted, but it’s an invitation nonetheless.
Jamie opens the door slowly, and steps inside. It doesn’t have much to differentiate it from any other office in corporate America, really. There’s four walls, one of which is made of frosted glass and also contains a door, and one of which has a large window that peers out onto Manhattan. Eddie’s desk is not beneath the window, but instead faces the far wall, presumably so he doesn’t get distracted by the view. As well as the signed photo on his desk, Eddie has a print on one wall which, Jamie knows, is a map of Maine, and a large whiteboard on the other wall, near his desk, which is almost entirely full of words like risk repository and mitigation and accumulated experience written in neat cursive. There’s a large rubber plant in a teal ceramic pot in one corner, and a balance ball and folded yoga mat next to it. And the prosthetic arm-cum-handstand, of course.
Eddie’s desk chair, much like his mouse, keyboard and mouse pad, is ergonomic. He has two computer monitors, one of which is dedicated entirely to Excel. The same coffee cup always rests just next to his mouse pad, a bright red novelty one which says I went to Maine and all I got was this lousy mug! The pen pot on the edge of his desk contains exactly ten ballpoints. Jamie has never seen that number change.
Eddie finishes typing something, pressing the keys somewhat more firmly than anyone else might, which makes Jamie think he’s probably sending a particularly blunt email. Eddie’s email mannerisms are legendary. It took him six months to stop signing everything off with ‘Regards’.
“Can I help you?” asks Eddie, turning around in his chair and fixing Jamie with a glare which, to be quite honest, is pretty much the way he looks at anybody at any given time.
“Uh,” says Jamie, folding his arms and then, thinking better of it, clasping them behind his back. He rocks forwards on his heels, and outside, through the window, he watches two pigeons fight over a squashed bit of bread on the adjacent rooftop. He can do this. He has an MBA. “It’s about the party. You know, the thing we said yesterday? About going if we could get our other halves to come along?”
Eddie blinks, and Jamie feels something sink in his gut. They’d seemed almost companionable yesterday. Like he was finally getting somewhere. The space between them feels almost frosty, now.
“Yes,” says Eddie, after a few moments. “I remember that we said that.”
“Right,” says Jamie. “OK. Good. That’s good. That you remember, that is. It’s… good.”
On the rooftop, one pigeon pecks the other very hard in the butt. Jamie empathises with the peckee more than he feels he should.
“Can they not come?” asks Eddie. “Your partner. Do they have, uh, an art show?”
Jamie blinks; he hadn’t honestly expected Eddie to remember that Nishat was an artist, let alone that they were putting on shows all month. That’s a good sign, he tells himself, despite the fact that the atmosphere is more stilted than the dialogue on an episode of Keeping up With the Kardashians.
And then he realises: Eddie thinks he’s bailing. He thinks Jamie’s come here to say that the plan failed. That they won’t be going after all.
“No!” he says quickly, eyes widening. Eddie's lips quirk. “No, they’re in. They said they’re coming. That’s what I came here to tell you.”
“Well, good,” says Eddie, rubbing his chin. “Because if it turned out I was bringing my husband for no reason, I’d be pretty tempted to just seal myself in the house and never come to work again.”
House, Jamie thinks. He works in Manhattan, but he lives in a house, not an apartment. He probably doesn't even have a disgusting downstairs neighbour called Jeffrey, who only ever wears string vests. That’s new information. He files it away: either Eddie or his husband are rich as balls.
“I guess I’ll tell Karen that I’ll be taking that plus one,” says Jamie.
“You better,” says Eddie, something like a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. “If I have to deal with my own husband at a work party, I need someone else who’ll talk to him, for my own sanity.”
“So, I’ll see you on Wednesday?”
Eddie’s eyes are full of mirth. “I’ll probably see you before then, seeing as my office is about ten feet from your cubicle.”
“Right!” says Jamie, mentally cursing himself for not being a functional human being. “Yeah, no, of course. Right. I’ll see you… probably in an hour or so. Goodbye.”
Goodbye. Jesus Christ.
“See you,” says Eddie, sounding somewhat bemused, and Jamie turns on his heel and flees, fairly certain that Eddie’s never going to want to be his friend unless he can get a grip on this weird hero worship thing he has going on.
But still, he thinks later, sitting at his desk and eating a bowl of sushi that Nishat made for him, he’s going to a party. Eddie will be there. He’s going to meet Eddie’s husband.
Eddie lives in a house.
He works solidly through the rest of the afternoon, half distracted by visions of him and Nishat having dinner with Eddie Kaspbrak and his husband in their understated townhouse on West 17th Street, all hardwood floors and spot lighting and smooth, chrome lines. He wonders what Eddie’s husband is like. He imagines that he’s probably a sort of more placid version of Eddie, all neatly combed blonde hair and cashmere sweaters and pressed slacks. He and Eddie probably have the kind of picture perfect marriage where they call each other ‘sweetheart’ and ‘honey’ and eat kale even on the weekend, and if they have a dog, it’s probably a golden retriever. His husband’s name is almost certainly Steve, and they probably watch a lot of French films.
Steve probably has excellent cheekbones, has never had so much as a pimple in his entire life, and frequently gets mistaken for someone in his early 30s. They do yoga together every Sunday afternoon to a carefully curated Spotify playlist that consists solely of whalesong and Tibetan throat singing. Steve irons all of Eddie’s shirts and Eddie polishes Steve’s wingtip Oxfords until they shine brighter than the brilliant white of Steve’s teeth. They make pleasant jokes about the stock exchange and property management and climate change, and they sometimes gently discuss politics—god, what if Steve’s a Republican —but never argue. They have a glass of dry white wine every evening and talk about their work days.
Steve is, almost certainly, a banker.
And there’s Jamie, 29 and ginger and with only two suits that fit properly, the dawn of a truly impressive spot on his chin, and a small splodge of drying soy sauce on his shirt cuff, and he just wants Eddie to like him, just wants someone in this office who he can actually call a friend except for Susan Cooper, who really does need to diversify her lunch portfolio, and he’s suddenly keenly, acutely aware that he may have made a terrible mistake in attempting to ingratiate himself into Eddie Kaspbrak’s perfect life.
Eddie does yoga. Jamie gets a stitch walking to the kitchen.
By the end of the workday, Jamie is feeling somewhat less excited about Wednesday evening.