Matthew Maser and the Holiday Ball

Within days of starting my first job working as a civilian for the Army, I began hearing stories about Matthew Maser.* Tales of the young officer’s drinking prowess, his fearless personality, his blunt humor, and his escapades with certain young women bordered on epic.

Doing most of the story-telling was elegant, meticulous Jodie.* As statuesque as if she’d stepped out of the high-fashion ads from which she dressed herself, Jodie’s keen features were those of a hawk circling ever tighter and lower over its prey.

Jodie’s talk was how she marked her territory, letting other women know that Maser belonged to her. He was deployed to South America now, she liked to remind us, but he’d be coming back to work soon.

“Soon,” she stressed, as though only she rated the precise date of Maser’s return.

As I plowed through the drab gray halls of my office building, I heard a familiar, musical voice.

“He-ey!” Jodie called, her willowy arm waving an ornate gold pen. She sat at dead center of a six-foot table hung with posters enthusiastically urging passersby to, “Buy Holiday Ball Tickets!” Though surrounded by a gaggle of female civilians, Jodie alone presided over a cash box, a thin sheaf of papers, and a large seating plan diagram.

“Hi,” I replied. “Still selling tickets?”

“It’s the last day to buy them. Tell all your coworkers!”

“Sure thing,” I replied.

“You’ll get to meet Maser on Friday,” she gushed. “He’s coming as my date.”

“Not your boyfriend?” I asked.

Instantly, the collective of women at Jodie’s sides narrowed their eyes in disapproval. I had done the unthinkable, questioning their queen.

Jodie flicked her gaze to her flawless manicure. “I bought the ticket for Maser a long time ago, before Scott and I started dating. He’ll just have to relax.” She rolled her eyes and gave a coy little smile that affirmed my suspicion that Jodie enjoyed the thrill of juggling men.

“Oh,” I stammered. “We can’t change the names on the tickets? My boyfriend has a field exercise this weekend. I was going to bring a girlfriend instead, but — ”

Icy and abrupt, Jodie’s voice cut through my blustering. “You can change it. What’s her name?” she asked. She was all business now, her eyebrows hovering by her hairline. The golden tip of her pen had sliced through my boyfriend’s name. It was poised to strike at his replacement, another woman for Jodie to compete against.

In our best formal dresses, Emily and I were sure we had arrived at some enchanted wonderland. The holiday ball was being held at a well-known hotel thick with colonial charm. Its historic brick facades were draped with heavy evergreen boughs, festooned with ribbons and bows in holly red, and layered in chains of round, frosted Christmas bulbs.

The grandiose reception space glowed a warm gold. I held my breath as I walked inside.

Far too early to be fashionable, Emily and I were among the first to arrive. We sought out our table, where we located the thick white place cards with our script-written names, and disposed of jackets and dainty clutches. Of the remaining twelve seats, I only recognized Jodie’s name, beside which was a tented card which read, “Captain Matthew Maser”.

“So, should we hit the bar?” Emily asked.

I watched with envy as Emily downed the better part of her first bourbon and ginger. It wasn’t long before her shoulders and neck relaxed, and the tight-lipped grimace on her face loosened to reveal an easy smile.

As the begrudgingly sober designated driver, my Diet Coke didn’t blunt my sharp edges, but pulled my nerves and muscles into tighter, more tangled balls. My heart started to pound as people with familiar faces and unfamiliar names trickled in pairs through the front door.

I stumbled through anxious and overly-enthusiastic conversations, until a cloud of white fluttered into the ballroom, drawing universal attention.

Jodie’s gown clung to the hollows and slight curves of her slender frame. Just past her knees, the silk ballooned out in a circle of such dizzying fullness that she appeared to be gliding atop the golden parquet floor.

Around the office, people spoke about Jodie’s recently-ended engagement to a man in the Navy. Before I could search for evidence of clever tailoring that may hide a train, Jodie swooped into my stalled conversation and extracted me from it with inimitable grace.

“I want you to meet Maser,” she said, pulling me close as if we shared a secret.

She led me back into the reception room, where she beckoned to one of the three men standing door-side in dress uniform.

With a hollow clunk-clunk-clunk, Jodie stomped her invisible heel against the waxed wood floor in a bid to get her date to move faster. “Come on,” she growled as her impatience mounted. Finally, as a wide-eyed, tan-faced man began to cross the room, Jodie applied a smile, big and fake.

“Beth, this is Maser,” she said. “Maser, this is Beth.”

While we shook hands, Maser’s blue eyes narrowed and a playful grin broke over his face. “I’ve heard about you — the new girl.”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head. Thoroughly sick of the moniker, I couldn’t wait for it to wear off.

“You do know everyone is talking about you, right?” he continued. “I must have gotten a dozen different e-mails about you while I was in South America.”

I blushed a deep red at Maser’s unabashedly honest statement. While the flow of gossip in the workplace over the past few months still involved my appearance, I was too naive to understand my alleged allure. It would be another eight months, when the next young college graduate arrived on the scene, before I saw the phenomenon with new eyes. In my male-dominated workplace, the arrival of every new young female employee would be heralded with the same aggressively enthusiastic fanfare.

Jodie’s radiant face pinched together. As the previous “new girl,” she had not appreciated losing the attention of the fawning masses.

“Well,” I said, looking pointedly at Jodie, “You’re also a subject of interest around the office. I’m sure everyone is thrilled to have you back home.”

“I just wanted to make sure you two were introduced,” Jodie said, snapping out a quick exit speech. Snatching Maser’s hand, she escorted her pedigreed show dog toward center ring to put him through his paces.

Alone in the reception space, I loitered a moment before following them into the dining room.

Not much later, I met Maser in a short, quiet hallway. I was coming back from a brief escape to the plush solitude of the Ladies’ Lounge. Maser was on his way to retrieve another drink. After a few moments of casual small talk, Maser’s mouth went straight. Without preamble, he told a dark joke about dead babies.

Wrinkling my forehead, I forced a laugh.

“You think that’s funny?” he challenged. “How do you make a little girl cry twice?”

“I don’t know,” I said, half-brightly.

This punchline, delivered like a solid one-two thrust, was worse than the last. I cringed, and Maser just shrugged.

We stood at a verbal crossroads, when a decidedly inebriated captain plodded up beside us.

Staring hard at my face, the captain informed me through a cloud of bourbon, “You have a cousin in the Army.”

“Yes,” I responded, “I do.”

“Did you know I was her commanding officer on her first tour in Iraq?”

“No, I didn’t,” I replied. What I knew about my cousin’s first Iraq tour would fit, uncompressed, in the subject line of an e-mail: she was there. “What a small world,” I offered, throwing him a tight-lipped smile.

The captain stepped closer. “Your cousin, she was real self-assured. Probably because she graduated from West Point, thought she was hot shit…”

I took a step backwards and turned towards Maser, prepared to beg him to tell another of his disgusting jokes. He was gone. I cleared my throat. “You know, I always looked up to her — ”

“So, you, see, she really screwed the pooch on her first few assignments. I mean, everybody does. It’s part of the cycle, it’s how you learn. So it was my job to teach her a lesson.”

Not sure quite what to say, and figuring that none of my responses would be heard, regardless, I stood by with the most painful of stretched smiles as the intoxicated captain unwound a tangled string of vainglorious stories about himself, the hero, and my cousin, the trainee. Every few minutes, he pushed in closer. I matched each advance with my own retreat until I was backed into the tight triangular space behind a half-closed door. The captain had me boxed in as he talked at me with breath that smelled flammable, sharing unwanted and oftentimes mixed-up details about the various occasions on which he’d chewed my cousin’s ass.

He repeated the phrase a dozen times, intoning the words with a special brand of drunkard’s innuendo. It was clear he thought himself inescapably clever; the first person to make chewing someone’s ass sound like a sex act rather than what it truly was: a one-sided deluge of commingled reprimand and instruction, usually issued at a high decibel.

If his intention was to shock, he wouldn’t succeed; I was raised by a naval aviator, and I’d heard far worse. All he could do — all he did — was disgust.

It seemed like hours before I could make up a successful excuse, and bolt to the only place I knew I’d be safe. Settled atop a pouf in the Ladies’ Lounge, I made a plan to leave the ball and try to salvage what was left of the night.

When I returned to the table to execute the plan, I found Emily laughing and conversing animatedly with several sets of couples. Sucking up my discontent, I sat ramrod straight, bracing myself for more forced, awkward conversations with a room full of people I was no longer sure I wanted to know.

My table mates and I tucked in to excellent fare on our rented bone china plates. Directly across from my seat, having surely been set up by Jodie as a painfully unattainable tableau, Maser made conversation. No longer talking about dead babies, he commanded the admiration, or at least the attention, of all around the crowded table.

Jodie basked in Maser’s presence. Not once did the wide smile leave her face, though its character wavered — sometimes vindictive or testy, but mostly radiant with happiness. More than once, I caught her staring at Maser in a way that made me forget Jodie wasn’t single.

Jodie’s boyfriend was a reservist she’d taken up with directly after leaving her former fiancé. I’d seen them together at work — her largely indifferent and him charmingly earnest, with doting eyes and a sloppy, endearing smile. I hated to imagine how that look would contort itself if Scott could see the way Jodie was looking at Maser now, as if there was no one else in the world who could hope to possess an ounce of her attention.

After solemn military formalities were concluded, a full band took to the stage and filled the room with joyful music.

Most of my colleagues were well-lubricated. They hit the dance floor with gusto. The drunken captain who had cornered me earlier swooped down on Emily. His pudgy face now pink and shiny as an early strawberry, he dragged her to the dance floor, where he swung her around like a rag doll.

Sitting back, I looked on at the swirling masses, the shifting partners. I thought of my boyfriend. I’d been working all night to put him out of my mind, but now that he was in it, there was no removing him.

Jealousy struck first. Had the ball been held just one weekend in either direction, we would be clasping one another on that golden floor.

In a matter of seconds, jealousy was trumped by empathy. My misery aside, I was well-fed, well-dressed, and warm. More than likely, my boyfriend was bitterly cold, and in serious pain; he’d not quite broken in his new combat boots, and long rucks still wore the skin on his feet raw. As I sat on my padded chair, he was winding through the crisp, frosty undergrowth of a forest in Quantico, searching through the dark and fog for enemy targets with his night vision goggles and the laser tracer on his M-16. Though the consequences were negligible, I still said a prayer that he found his pretend enemy before his pretend enemy found him.

As they often did, thoughts of the future began to gnaw at my mind. Soon, my boyfriend’s sporadic and too-short weekend visits would be a thing of the past. In just a few weeks, he would be moving clear across the country to his first duty station in California. Back on the east coast, I would be forced to accustom myself to longer stretches of opulent loneliness. And as I did my paltry part behind a computer monitor, he would eventually deploy, probably to Afghanistan, that razor-toothed, bloodthirsty monster that lurked behind each dark fold of my brain.

A hand tapped at my shoulder. A sweet and well-liked soldier interrupted my sullen thoughts. “Would you like to dance?” he asked.

I obliged, and rigidly shuffled back and forth, keeping him at arm’s length for the duration of one mercifully short song.

Afterwards, I returned to my seat and my contemplations. Too soon, there was another unexpected interruption as a heavy rustling of silk preceded the acerbic demand: “Maser, you should dance with Beth.”

Jodie was flushed after spending the last half hour clinging to her date on the dance floor. Her voice trilled so as to smooth the harshness of her previous statement. “Don’t let her sit there alone!” With overplayed exhaustion, Jodie collapsed against her chair and swiped a bony hand across her forehead. Every ounce of her was the typical Junior League southern belle; even in her repose, she displayed her utter, cool control of the situation.

“Oh, no…I’m okay, really,” I urged. “I don’t want to steal your date.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” With her eyelids tightening together, Jodie pushed Maser toward me. This was not an offer, but a show of force.

Obligingly, Maser offered a forearm. I rose mechanically and followed him to a spot offset of center on the dance floor, where he and I shuffled around a small square of dimly lit parquet.

“I hear you have a boyfriend,” Maser prodded.

The young men at work exchanged the pertinent details of my life through a highly evolved information grapevine, so it didn’t surprise me that Maser knew about my boyfriend. I was surprised that he brought him up so openly. The cube flies, as I referred to the admirers who loitered so often beside my desk, liked to pretend that he didn’t exist; that his name tape and picture weren’t stuck against my wall.

“I do.”

“Why?”

Startled, I let out a burst of air that was cousin to a laugh. “What kind of a question is that?”

“You have all these guys after you. What’s so great about this one?”

I thought about this for a few beats. The answers that came to mind seemed either pedestrian or too intimate. “We have a lot in common.”

“Such as?” Maser prodded.

Shaking my head, I wavered a moment. “I, well…we like the same music…and we both like to read — “

Maser stared at me with slanted brows and a smirk, as if wondering whether this was the best I could do.

“What?”

“Nothing. Please, continue. What does this guy — he’s a Marine, right?”

I nodded.

“What does he like to read? Chesty Puller stuff?” he asked sarcastically.

“Hemingway. We both love Hemingway.”

“Who would want to read something written by a guy who ate the business end of a shotgun?”

I wrinkled my face together as I looked up at Maser. He wasn’t joking.

“Okay, so Hemingway killed himself, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t an amazing writer. I mean, he was incredible — the way he captured war, love, and life so succinctly…His work is beautiful.”

“Fair enough,” Maser said. “So, what else do you read?”

“A little bit of everything. Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Rumi…”

“Who’s that?”

While Maser and I moved slowly around in the tight square, I told him about my favorite poet. We soon moved on to other topics— Jodie and her boyfriend, the bloated ego of the inebriated captain who was still steering and spinning and dipping Emily all over the dance floor.

As we talked, I started to see why people told stories about Maser. His was a big and painfully genuine presence. Without pretense or innuendo, he spoke whatever was on his mind. I may not have liked all that he had to say, but his unapologetic honesty was refreshing, and I was happy to return it.

Maser and I meandered slowly through another upbeat song before Jodie’s face became strained with impatience and concern from where she sat in her banquet chair throne.

“I’d better go dance with my date,” Maser said with a mischievous smile.

As I returned to my seat, Jodie shot me a withering glare before clasping her hands around Maser’s shoulder and waist.

During the course of the evening, the room became stiflingly hot.

Like most of the men, Maser had already removed his jacket. Between songs, he stepped to the side of the dance floor and cuffed his sleeves near the elbow, exposing large black letters tattooed up and down both his forearms.

When he returned to the floor, Maser spun Jodie in a tight circle. I only saw the billowing and rippling of her dress in the blurred outskirts of my vision; I had fixated on what encircled Maser’s right forearm — two tattooed black manacles, one of which twirled and twisted into the symbol for infinity.

While the band went for a well-deserved break, hidden speakers began to play saccharine hits from the Top-100.

Maser settled into the open chair beside mine. “You look bored,” he observed.

I shrugged. “I’d have left hours ago, except…” I said, nodding to the floor, where the sweaty, red-faced captain dipped Emily until her head almost reached the parquet. I fought back another urge to leap out and save her, and soon she was returned to an upright position with a triumphant smile.

“What do your tattoos mean?” I asked.

Maser held out his right forearm to display a short word tattooed in large black capital letters. “‘Macto’ is a Latin root word. It can mean ‘to honor,’ or ‘to slaughter,’” he said. He pushed the sleeve of his shirt up further, revealing the bottom of what looked to be an intricate portrait. “That’s the first angel of the apocalypse, who calls down fire and blood upon the world.”

His response was perfunctory, and I could tell that he’d delivered it before. He twisted his arm over and pointed at the two black bands and infinity sign etched into the soft skin of his inner forearm. “I lost eight men in Iraq,” he said, his finger on the band that morphed into a sideways eight — the infinity. He moved his finger up to one of the four red stars that surrounded the figure eight. “The stars are for the four men we had medevaced out of country.” He touched the second black manacle around his upper forearm. “This band is for a friend from high school. I was the one who convinced him to join the Army. He got killed in 2003.” Maser’s tone stayed even, deep and oddly comforting.

He turned over his left forearm to show a two-word phrase. “‘Caedite eos’ is Latin. It means, ‘Kill them all.’” Finished, he returned his hands to his thighs and looked out into the crowd.

“Oh,” I said, pushing my chin down, then back up.

“What about yours?” Maser asked, pointing to the small scribbles of black on the inside of my left wrist.

“It’s just stupid,” I mumbled.

“Now that’s not fair.”

“‘Spero’ is Italian. It means ‘I hope.’”

I sat back, fresh out of talk. I’d finally found the point where I could no longer join in; the thing that separated me, New Girl, from the active duty service members, reservists, and veterans I worked with.

Unlike Maser, I hadn’t learned to tread through the realms of death and destruction. And though I wanted to ask him to tell me more, I understood that there were boundaries of speech you didn’t cross, and questions you couldn’t ask — not without a certain level of intimacy that seemed, in my circumstances, improper.

In the ensuing silence, I examined the gorgeous ballroom through new eyes. Everyone assembled there, I realized, was pretending to be something, or at least some way. Not all the fakery was sinister; most of the guests were just masquerading as better-looking, more polished, exceptionally charming versions of themselves.

And, just like them, I had spent my night pretending, trying to seem more confident than I truly felt. Behind my brittle smile, I was working desperately hard to hide the feeling I couldn’t well explain in casual conversation: a foreboding sensation of imminent loss.

Even in the golden resplendence that surrounded me, I wanted to weep for the things that might happen to my boyfriend: things that might kill him, or wound him, or make him just as jaded as Maser. I wanted to weep for myself, for being able to get close enough to lightly skim the surface of Maser’s loss, but not being brave enough to take any of its crushing weight on myself. And as I noticed Maser’s hard-set face and the sad downward turn of his blue eyes, I especially wanted to weep for him.

Matthew Maser stood out from the rest of us. He wore the memories of those nine dead men on the surface; he wasn’t trying to conceal that pain. But there was something about all his blunt challenges and horrible honesty, which were so easy to mistake for bravery, that made me believe he, too, was hiding something, and that it was immense.

In that realization, I felt that coming here might not have been a total waste of money or time.

“You know, your jokes are horrendous,” I said.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Maser’s shoulders rise and fall. “There are more where those came from.”

“I’m sure there are. I think I’ll pass for now.”

“Jodie looks busy,” he said, pointing to the dance floor where Jodie gyrated with another man in partial dress uniform. “Want to dance?”

Finally, I felt real warmth in my smile. “Sure.”

Soon, the world of dazzling, penetrating splendor transformed to soft peripheral blurs of seamless color, and Matthew Maser and I spun alongside the rest of the pretenders.

*Names have been changed