Break in Case of Emergency (19 page)

The train was all messed up again. Jen was bundled for the cold, but per usual it took Jim a month or so to habituate to dressing for wintry weather, and so he had equipped himself for the long walk home from the last stop in merely a light jacket, no scarf or gloves or hat. This seasonal sartorial pattern never varied, and neither did Jen's annoyance with it. Jen would have testified under oath that her irritation was an expression of empathy for her partner's comfort and of concern for any undue stress on his immune system at the start of flu season. She guessed that Jim would have testified under oath that his partner's irritation was in fact a form of judgment—a judgment that he lacked in basic adult competencies, that he was short on commonsensical foresight, that he could not project himself into a predictable future, such as, for example, the cold, windy future located just outside their chronically overheated apartment whenever he left it to report to work or visit friends, and that this shortcoming was somehow symbolic—microcosmic—of Jen's Jen-like grasp of Jim's Jim-ness.

“Aren't you cold?” Jen asked.

“I'm fine,” Jim said.

Jen rubbed one mittened hand against Jim's hunched back and hustled to keep up with his brisk pace.

“I love watching you with Millie,” Jen said.

“I love watching
you
with Millie,” Jim replied, blowing air into his cupped palms and then covering his red ears with his hands. “You're awesome with her.”

“Do you want my scarf? You could kind of wrap it around your ears.”

“No,” Jim said quickly, taking his hands away from his ears.

Jen linked her arm in his and they walked silently for a while.

“You know, this is going to sound weird, but—you know that I love Millie for herself, right?” Jen asked.

“Of course you do.”

“But do you know what I mean?”

“Not really.”

“Then why did you say you know something when you don't know?”

“Why don't you just tell me what you mean?”

“I mean that I love her not as—not as a metaphor for something I want for myself. She's not a symbol of what I long for and don't have.”

“You don't have to convince me of that,” Jim said.

“She's not a substitution,” Jen said, more insistently. “Millie is Millie.”

“Honey, don't take this the wrong way,” Jim said, “but when you're trying to talk yourself into something, or out of something, you don't have to pretend like you're really having a conversation with me. You can just talk to yourself. I don't need to be involved.”

“It's like she's not
useful,
” Jen said.

“What?” Jim asked.

“Nothing,” Jen said. “I'm just blathering.”

“No, you're not,” Jim said, and pulled one arm tightly around her. They walked past the uncharacteristically mellow dogs of Brancato's Grocery, shoulder pressed to shoulder.

What Jen tried and failed to articulate was that her relationship with Millie stood as the purest one in her life, because Millie had no precise or measurable utility. For the first years that Jen and Jim were together, Jen could not have said that Jim had a precise or measurable utility, either. In more recent years, though, and especially since their marriage, she had assigned to Jim empirical values: the numerical amount of his contribution to their shared rent and household expenses and his projected monetary contribution in years to come; his contributions to household chores as measured in time; his ability to provide speed-trial results of regularly assessed and reliably consistent high quality in the Garden of Earthly Delights; etc. Conversely, Jen was painfully aware of her lack of any precise, measurable utility to Meg: Jen would never find herself in a position to line up gainful employment for Meg if she needed it, or a cost-free vacation rental house for Meg if she so desired it.

Ironically, if anyone could have placed a high value on Jen's precise and measurable utility at the moment, it might have been Pam, for the hours and hours that Jen couldn't bear to calculate, the spine-wrenching, muscle-torching weeks that Jen had sunk into those paintings—in a spirit of friendship, in a spirit of creative collaboration for the pure sake of it, but not, as Jen knew now, in a spirit that could be reciprocated by deploying Pam as a means to a different, arguably more mercenary end.

“Hey, did you ever get your paintings back from Pam?” Jim asked.

“I was just sort of thinking about that,” Jen replied.

That night, Jen opened the Total Transformation Challenge submission page on her laptop. She considered the instructions for the fifth category and typed a response.

TTC CATEGORY 5: SPACE

How can you challenge yourself to make sure that your home is a reflection of your best self—your creativity, your capacity for forging loving relationships, your inner peace?

Your response here:

I challenge myself to finally find some nice frames for Millie's drawings and hang them up.

Jen, Karina, and Sunny stood around Donna's desk looking at photographs. Jen had commissioned an award-winning young photographer and current Agence France-Presse stringer to take no-fee pictures of the teenaged recipients of a higher-education scholarship program in Nigeria that LIFt had helped to fund. Jen had been delighted with the photographs of the five Nigerian scholars, who would be featured in a print and brochure campaign and on the LIFt website; the girls looked at ease in front of Françoise's camera, smiling in almost every shot—carefree smiles and shy smiles and breaking-into-laughter smiles—against a matte black background.

“Why are they wearing these Western mall clothes?” Donna had asked. “Did we put them in these clothes?”

“No, of course not,” Jen had replied. “They are wearing their own clothes.”

“Who are they laughing at?” Sunny had asked.

“Have these been, uh, airbrushed yet?” Karina had asked.

“Oof, orthodontics, am I right, Karina?” Sunny had asked.

“Françoise can definitely touch them up, but the vibe we're going for is newsy, casual—a flattering but representative snapshot,” Jen had said. She had anticipated some version of this very conversation, and had rehearsed for it.

“I just can't get past the jeans and T-shirts,” Donna had said. “It's confusing.”

“Look, I know it's awkward, but it just keeps on coming up, so I'll just keep on saying it—with all of our communications efforts, we always need to think about
optics,
Jen,” Karina had said, tapping the image of the scholar with the highest body mass index.

Since then, Jules the social-media intern had pointed the team toward a fashion photographer's black-and-white studio portraits of teenaged girls from Cameroon, uniformly smooth-skinned and high-cheekboned and dressed in traditional garb, and all of whom held the camera with bottomlessly somber, unsmiling expressions. Petra mocked up new print and web pages using these pictures, with inspirational quotes in an italicized script overlaying the edges of the images. Printouts of the pictures from Cameroon now lay side by side with the pictures from Nigeria, fanned across Donna's desk.

“God, these are just gorgeous,” Karina said.

“Mmmm,” Sunny groaned. Jen imagined Sunny in a terry-cloth robe and towel turban, draping the printouts over her face like a hot, fragrant towel.

“This isn't even worth discussing,” Donna said.

“Wait, but this quote, ‘I have known since I was a little girl that my future was in my education'—I'd have to check the transcript, but I'm pretty sure that Promise said that,” Jen said, pointing to a quotation overlaying a close-up of a Cameroonian girl, her hands clasped and pressed to her jawline, her giant startled eyes piercing the lens. “Promise, the Nigerian scholar. That's not Promise.”

“Which one is Promise?” Karina asked. “The one in the Beyoncé crop top?”

“They're wearing
jeans,
” Donna reiterated, her bangles clattering in shared frustration. “Have we forgotten this?”

“Françoise is in Lagos for a few more days—we could ask her for something in a more low-key style, if that's what we're going for,” Jen said.

“I would hardly call these images low-key,” Sunny said. “They are
arresting.
Stunning.
You can't tear your eyes away from them.”

“If anything, they're
high
-key,” Donna said.

“No, sorry,” Jen said, “what I meant is that
low-key
is the technical term for this style of portraiture—that kind of high-contrast, moody, shadowy, brooding effect that you all are responding to so strongly—”

“I know you're an artist, Jen, but this isn't a studio visit,” Karina said.

“Don't get me wrong, the photos from Cameroon
are
absolutely stunning, and they were a good choice,” Jen said. Jen knew this to be false. Instead of properly lighting the set, the photographer responsible for the Cameroon shoot had illuminated it after the fact using the dodging tool in Photoshop. In one profile shot, a girl's jawline was lost in darkness, yet somehow light pooled in her collarbone. “It would be
so great
if we could use these photos, honestly, and I'm grateful to Jules for finding them,” Jen continued. “She has an eye! But the fact of the matter is that we
can't
use them, because they don't represent the story we're telling, which is about our Nigerian scholars. These girls from Cameroon aren't the girls from Nigeria. It's simple?”

Donna stared at her phone. Karina shrugged. “I just don't see the problem here,” Karina said, glancing around at Donna and Sunny with eyebrows raised. “We've never wrung our hands and gnashed our teeth about stock photos in any other cases.”

“And they'll never know,” Donna and her bangles said to her phone.

“They have the Internet in Nigeria,” Jen said.

“Well, we'll use these just in the print brochures, then,” Donna said, her voice cresting with frustration. “What is the harm?”

“But to Karina's point, these aren't stock photos,” Jen said. “We use stock photos to illustrate ideas, concepts. These girls, these scholars, aren't ideas or concepts. The image should represent the—the thing it's supposed to represent.”

“The
thing
?” Sunny asked.

“These are all
beeeyoooteeeful
girls,” Donna intoned.

“They are not things!” Sunny said.

“I'm not disputing any of that,” Jen said.

“We are doing
good
here,” said Sunny, tearing up.

Jen returned to her desk.

jenski1848: I imagine you can guess how that went.

whatDaisyknew: ON IT

Jen heard Daisy's grammatically perfect but comically American-accented French over the cubicle wall. “Françoise, do you remember if any of the girls was wearing a head wrap or anything?” Daisy was inquiring. “Something in, like, I don't know, a batik print or something? Why do you ask? Oh, just because here at LIFt we ascribe a philanthropic value to prejudice and stereotypes about the ‘deserving' poor and they're bound up in a specific kind of aesthetics. Which involves head wraps. And flowy garments.”
Des vêtements fluides.

Jen opened the Total Transformation Challenge submission page on her computer. She considered the instructions for the sixth category and typed a response.

TTC CATEGORY 6: MISSION

How can you challenge yourself in your career to make sure that your work squares with your values and is in harmonic balance with the rest of your life?

Your response here:

WE ARE DOING GOOD HERE WE ARE DOING GOOD HERE WE ARE DOING GOOD HERE WE ARE DOING

Jen's phone was ringing. The caller ID seemed familiar—a Judy, most likely.

“Hello, my name is Dakota, and I'm calling on behalf of Mrs. Flossie Durbin,” said the sweet crystalline voice on the other line. “Mrs. Durbin would like to set up a meeting with you at your earliest convenience to discuss her portrait.”

Jen excused herself and Jim from the usual Christmas festivities at her parents' house in Youngstown, and the attendant $300-per-head surcharge on said festivities, by informing her mother that she had taken “a last-minute house-sitting gig for a friend.” This statement was, at least in legalistic terms, true. The alternative arrangement could be fairly labeled as “last-minute,” as it had presented itself one week before the purported date of Jen and Jim's flight to Ohio and would have required Jen to cancel said flight, had she ever booked the flight in the first place, which she had not. The alternative arrangement could be likewise accurately described as a “house-sitting gig,” as Jen had indeed repeatedly assumed seated positions in the house as part of completing the terms of her brief employment there, and, much to her shock, had been given free rein of the house while its occupant was abroad for the holidays, though Jen had no plans to sleep or eat in the house or otherwise use it as a short-term residence.

“Who is this friend?” her mother asked on the phone, after Jen had fended off her queries about the prospects of Jen receiving a refund for the canceled flight that she had not booked. “Is it that Meg?”

“No,” Jen said. “It's an older lady—I met her recently through work—who's helping me with some of my art stuff.”

“Oh. Well,” Jen's mother replied, in the mock-sobbing tone she used when she wished both to display disappointment and to make a deflective joke about her own ostentatious display of disappointment, “we sure will miss you at Christmas.”
Kruss-muss.
Jen's mother laughed nervously.

Jen's mother made it easy for Jen to lie to her, or to lie by omission. But it was never easy for Jen to deduce if her mother knew she was lying, by omission or otherwise.

The omission, in this case, took partial form as Mrs. Flossie Durbin's limestone Renaissance Revival town house. Via her assistant Dakota, Mrs. Durbin had invited Jen and Jim to stay in the town house over the holidays while Jen finished the portrait of Mrs. Durbin, which she was mapping out and modifying from a candid snapshot she'd found on
New York Social Diary,
even though Mrs. Durbin had gently insisted on two traditional and serenely pointless “sittings.” In her previous visits to this particular Durbin residence, Jen had simply edited out her surroundings for fear of gawping at them, as if she could pretend that she and Mrs. Durbin were performing in front of a green screen for a hybrid animation/live-action film. Now there was no one but Jim to look at Jen looking, yet she was still afraid to peer too closely at any of Mrs. Durbin's furnishings or possessions, much less touch, use, discuss, or apply her body weight to any of Mrs. Durbin's furnishings or possessions. If Jen's eyes rested on any single sconce or vase or rock-crystal candleholder too long, her brain would transmit grisly flashpoint images of clattering disaster. A violent muscle spasm chucking her arm across the
faux-marbre
Florentine chimneypiece, smashing a terra-cotta vase to the floor. A blot of chocolate or grease or dog feces achieving self-awareness and smuggling itself in from the outside world on Jen's coat sleeve, dive-bombing the herringbone-tweed linen sofa or accenting cotton
toile de jouy
and trompe l'oeil
boiserie.
A sleepwalking spell ending in the bloody caterwauling death of a Regency convex mirror.

“I feel like we should lay down towels before we sit anywhere,” Jen said. Jim was taking a book down from a polished walnut bookcase in what Jen's mother would have called Mrs. Durbin's “living room” and what Jim had decided to call the “ballroom,” and Jen reflexively raised both hands, fingers fluttering, as if Jim were about to lock into a trance by which unseen forces would seize control of his body and command his arms to lob the book squarely at the chandelier overhead.

“You're going about this all wrong,” Jim said. “If there were ever a time to have towel-free sex in somebody else's bed, and then to sleep in that bed and maybe even sit down on that bed, it is now.”

“Can you put the book back?” Jen asked, chewing on her left thumbnail.

Jim put the book back. “That's a Sterling Ruby in the gym, you know,” he said, lowering himself carefully into what Jen guessed was a hand-marbleized leather armchair.

“And that's a John Currin right behind you,” Jen said, switching to her right thumbnail. Jim reared around to see, too quickly.

Jen would have preferred it if she and Jim had confined themselves to what Mrs. Durbin called her “study,” which was presently empty on the eve of being redecorated and thus contained little that could be maimed or destroyed by an errant footfall or direct eye contact or the onset of a previously undiagnosed seizure disorder, save perhaps for the fireplace and the ebonized oak flooring and the glass of the double casement window looking out onto the park, and, of course, Jen's work-in-progress canvas. The study was where Mrs. Durbin had sat, in a since-disappeared button-backed fauteuil covered in gold silk jacquard, on two successive Sunday afternoons while Jen sketched her, backlit by the winter sunshine angling low and feeble through the window. Mrs. Durbin's hair was the color of white wine. Her eyes had the alert and well-rested result of the most advanced and subtle blepharoplasty. For their first “sitting,” Mrs. Durbin was upholstered in what Jen guessed to be a Chanel suit; on the second, a Givenchy brocade jacket and cigarette pants. Mrs. Durbin said very little. She would have been the oldest and serenest and richest of the Judys, satiny in her stillness and so astonishingly thin that her thinness seemed less the product of frenzied Judy-esque willpower and more as if Mrs. Durbin had hired a team of experts to hack into her mainframe and recalibrate it to run smoothly and silently on 30 to 35 percent less energy than other, less optimized Judys.

“What speaks to Mrs. Durbin about your work is that it is unabashedly upbeat, literally in-your-face, which goes against the grain of how we've been feeling as a culture lately, in what have been difficult and—frankly—depressing times,” Dakota had explained to Jen over the phone. “She says it's like you've taken the temperature of the culture, shrugged, and just thrown the thermometer away. And now that the economy is starting to turn a corner, it's like you were ahead of the curve all along. Two thousand ten is going to be your year!”

Jen tentatively positioned her ass on the edge of a cane-back chair near Jim, then stood again. “I still feel uncomfortable that Mrs. Durbin fundamentally misunderstands what I was trying to do,” she said to Jim. “I wasn't presenting joy. It's more about the fake ways we present ourselves to the world, the masks we put on. I was trying to dramatize that, or satirize that. The idea of the portraits in Pam's show was pretty straightforward—it was creating a maniacally happy stock-photo counterpoint to the bureaucratic horror and sadism of our health-care system.”

“Are you dictating a grant proposal?” Jim asked.

“I didn't even know that at the time, but Pam did,” Jen said. She tried again to lower herself into the cane-back chair.

“You could look at it this way: It's not really your business whether Mrs. Flossie Durbin gets it or not,” Jim said. “Arguably it's not even your business to define what there is for Mrs. Flossie Durbin to get.”

“Do you think there are surveillance cameras in here?” Jen asked.

“Your job is to make the stuff, and then it belongs to the world and it's out of your hands,” Jim said.

“You're right,” Jen said. “And it's not like Mrs. Durbin's portrait is going to have that same feeling of—”

“—of delirious happiness that you've been impaled on an electric fence,” Jim said.

“This will be a pleasant and benign portrait of a benign and pleasant woman. It's just weird to think that a happy false façade was just what we needed after the financial apocalypse. If we're all openly unhappy, then at least we know what we're dealing with.”

“That part of your grant proposal might hold up if we weren't all pretty openly unhappy already,” Jim said. “Also, Jen.”

“What?”

“Look around you for a second.”

Jen laughed again and shaded her eyes with her hand. “I know.”

“No, seriously. Look around you.”

Jen lowered her hand, rolled her eyes, then rolled them around the room.

“Look at where you are. Look at what you're doing, and who you're doing it for.”

“I know. I don't understand how this happened,” Jen said.

“Let's go have some towel sex,” Jim said.

“Okay,” Jen said. “But not here.”

Jim bolted up from the armchair and Jen winced. As she grabbed her things, she saw a new email on her phone.

Pam

Thursday, Dec 24 6:31 PM

To: Jen

Subject: Please fwd to Franny

Dear Jen,

Do you want to get lunch sometime after the holidays? Paulo and I are back from Colombia on the 2nd. Also, I'm attaching a photo of a new friend for Franny. She should arrive in the spring.

Love,

Pam

Jen opened the attached image and at first she thought she was looking at the sonar footage of the wreckage of the flight that had disappeared without a trace the previous summer. Then she realized her mistake, and she yelped with honest and unguarded delight even as a narrow seam of dread began to open up inside her.