Jane Actually

the changes to Document2?”
    She didn’t know how to answer the question. Her earlier thought of writing a story about the WAAF she’d followed had somehow become a story about a woman novelist trying to write about the Great War. She blamed Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Stein and all those other American expatriates who had flocked to Paris and whose writing she had at first detested and then embraced. She had met Hemingway in Paris, or rather looked over his shoulder while he wrote, and had admired the passion that drove his work, but she could not understand his spare prose that laid bare the world under a harsh and unforgiving sun. With time, though, she came to accept it as a new style for a new world and had experimented with it again and again.
    She clicked “Save” after naming the document.
    “Hi Jane, still at it?” Tamara asked as suddenly as the fictional flatmate she’d discarded.
    “Oh, hello Tamara. I’m sorry, I didn’t see you enter.”
    Tamara threw off her coat, which missed her target, the couch, and it landed on the floor. Then she indecorously flopped onto the couch.
    “How’s that even possible? I thought you saw in 360.”
    “I’m afraid it’s still possible to be unaware even then,” Jane replied. She looked at the clock on the terminal and saw that Tamara had returned early from her job and that it would still be some time before Melody might return.
    Her calculations made her feel guilty. There was no real disagreement between Jane and Tamara but simply no real agreement on tastes or interests other than their mutual association with Melody. Tamara worked for the city of New York as a planner, a job Jane still found incomprehensible whenever she contemplated the vast insanity of the city. How could anything so chaotic and beautiful be planned?
    They were very cordial, however, and whenever Melody was present they would have no difficulty, but without her they simply had no idea what to say.
    “You look as if you’ve had a difficult day,” Jane observed.
    “But not a bad day. I got approval for a project I’ve been working on. It should let us get by with 15 fewer street cleaning crews just by being a little more flexible with scheduling, which is useful because they removed 18 street cleaning crews from next year’s budget.”
    “I know next to nothing of these matters, but I imagine both numbers are significant.”
    “You’re right. And the really amazing thing is that if other departments could apply this same kind of thinking … hey, let me get some wine and I’ll tell you about it.”
    Tamara got off the couch and went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass, talking loudly enough for the terminal to recognize her. She related to Jane the new schedule she’d devised, that involved 12-hour shifts with rotating days off and bemoaned the resistance that the union had mounted to her plans. But other concessions had finally won over the last resistance and the plan would be implemented in a few months time. To Jane, the plan seemed as if it might cause a major disruption in the lives of the employees, but she refrained from any negative comments, happy to have found some rapport with the lover of her agent and good friend.
    Jane did her best to engage Tamara, congratulating her and asking questions where appropriate. Tamara was only too happy to talk, glad to have an audience and to hear Jane’s congratulations. She was very animated in her descriptions of the various opponents of her plans. They were mostly men, of course, and Tamara offered impressions of them that emphasized their pompousness and intractability.
    “Thanks very much for hearing me out, Jane. I don’t usually get to go on about my victories in the planning department. Melody tends to glaze over when I talk about work; it’s not very glamorous.”
    “But it is important. And I can understand your need to celebrate. I used to dance about the room when I had found the solution to a plot complication.”
    “Yeah, that’s what it’s like. I needed to dance about the room. So, were you working when I came in? I’m sorry if I interrupted you.”
    “No, the interruption was welcome. It wasn’t going very well, I’m afraid.”
    “Oh, if you don’t want to talk about it …”
    “I would love to talk about it, if you don’t mind.”
    Jane explained to Tamara her need to write something new and her attempts to write something of a little more import.
    “So what are you