Break in Case of Emergency (21 page)

Jen parted from Pam with a promise to visit the work-in-progress space for the scaled-down
Break in Case of Emergency
ahead of its opening, then turned in the direction of the LIFt offices. Outside, every surface, whether material or atmospheric, seemed frozen in sooty gray stone, letting in little light and less heat. Jen turned back toward the restaurant, realizing she'd forgotten to tell Pam about her appointments with Mrs. Flossie Durbin, but Pam had already disappeared down the stairway of the closest subway entrance. Jen turned back again, corkscrewed around by dizziness. Disoriented as she was, her internal navigator pivoted her three blocks in LIFt's opposite direction instead, toward Jen's favorite library branch in the city: a modest, under-patronized brick square of Beaux Arts aspirations, its quiet courtyard garden ringed with benches.

To reach the courtyard, you first walked through the cozy, happily overstocked children's reading room and its monthly rotation of art projects. January marked a collaboration between a high-school art class and preschoolers learning the alphabet. First the preschoolers had marked bright, bold letters on oversized construction paper. Then the high-school students had interpreted each letter as a representation of an animal. One sloping leg of an
A
shape-shifted into the scaly back of a grinning alligator. The humps of a
B
revealed themselves as the ample belly and thighs of an affable bear. The attenuated bottom curve of a
C
morphed into the flicking tail of a rotund, imperious tabby cat.

The tabby began to wiggle and shimmer, and Jen continued into the courtyard. Then she turned back, because she wanted to know which animal they'd chosen to represent
X
—
Xerus inauris,
a giant African squirrel wearing a boa and a monocle—and then she spun around again toward the courtyard. She was dizzy again, or maybe she'd been dizzy since lunch, her peripheral vision streaming with muddy waters, her lower back filmed in a clammy sweat.

When Jen was in preschool, her teacher had handed out booklets intended for a week-to-week alphabet project that students could complete at home with their parents: drawing the letters of the alphabet and cutting pictures out of magazines that corresponded to each letter. Jen misunderstood the assignment, which she had taken up privately with a dull pencil in a visual language that was self-evident to her four-year-old perceptions, though she as yet lacked the fine motor skills to translate those perceptions onto the page: the wobbly pencil asterisk that meant
A for Ant,
the densely tangled pencil blob that meant
B for Bee.
At some point, though, there must have been a clarifying parent-teacher consultation at preschool drop-off or pickup, and somewhere around the
F
's or
G
's the largely interchangeable graphite splotches were supplanted by neatly scissored color photographs from the likes of
Ladies' Home Journal
and
Good Housekeeping,
which Jen's mother, sitting at their kitchen table, carefully cut and glued onto each page as Jen sat quietly beside her.

“There ya go,” Jen's mother said, handing the booklet to Jen, having finished filling it in one hurried and mostly silent afternoon session, skipping without comment over
X.

So many of Jen's childhood memories—so many of her memories, period—possessed this quality of hazy misapprehension followed by hard correction, a kind of dipping in and out of cognizance and then a stiff-legged flailing to catch up, to fill in redacted sentences and patch over skipped communications, a state of consciousness that could be measured fairly accurately in unsigned permission slips and half-finished homework assignments and hour upon hour of accumulated tardiness. Jen knew that she could have defined herself against this template, had she ever asserted the willpower to do so. But instead she had fitted herself to the template.

There would always be a room in the house, she thought, where people were gathered, murmuring pleasantly to one another, and Jen would be sure to stumble on it mere minutes before the festivities broke up, and the people inside the room would welcome her, not with hesitation but with mild regret, with kind but uncomfortable smiles, a compassion in their eyes.

Jen sat down on one of the empty benches in the empty courtyard. On her collar she could almost smell the sour breath of her own self-pity. Her self-pity subsisted in part on simple carbohydrates and on the salt mined from the sodium-rich instant soups of a drafty childhood, but it was mostly self-sustaining, feeding on itself, an apparently inescapable genetic susceptibility to self-pity being one of the major reasons Jen pitied herself. She closed her eyes against the yellowish orbital streaks ringing around her head and submitted to self-pity's embrace, tilting her face toward the slanting winter sun, inhaling and exhaling slowly.

She and her self-pity knew now, as the pleasant people gathered in the secret-seeming room must have known all along, that early adulthood for most of her college peers was a kind of summer camp, a character-building exercise in make-believe, a hope chest of nostalgia, a lakeside idyll that marked the shimmering threshold before real life began. The cramped, subsidized housing where Meg and Marc had lived for nearly two years during law school, throwing monthly four-course dinner parties at which half the guests ate in the tiny kitchen and the other half ate in the tiny bedroom, rotating guest by guest at regular intervals to hybridize conversation and interaction—that was summer camp. When Lauren Reilly, daughter of another partner at Meg's father's law firm, moved into her boyfriend's one-window studio to paper over the year between when she finished law school and her boyfriend started medical school—that was summer camp. Pam and Paulo's mildewy, transient-filled studio space was summer camp. Meg's semiannual clothing swaps were summer camp. Pam's Champion sweatshirts were summer camp.

Paulo's working-class artist's uniform—the overalls, the boots, the grooming—was not summer camp, Jen decided, nor was it a costume or a smoke screen. It wasn't even a disavowal of his inheritance. It instead bespoke a rich man who could work with his hands and knew the language of tools and machinery, who had not allowed wealth to insulate him from the mechanical or chemical world. Like Meg in The Dress, Paulo appeared more aristocratic in his proletariat garb because the uniform was a choice made possible by privilege, and by the confidence borne of privilege.

Meg's wedding—Chapelle Expiatoire, Hôtel de Crillon, Prada bridesmaid's dress that Jen had sometimes worn around the house during her enforced sabbatical—was the end of summer camp. Pam's wedding would be the end of summer camp.

Meeting your best friends in college was dangerous, if only because college was the great leveler. Everyone in college lives like a college student. Nobody necessarily knows who's on financial aid and who's not and how much. Nobody would ever ask such things. The stratifications are hidden so well as to be forgotten. Marriage and childbearing and the ceremonies attendant upon them also commemorated the reemergence of those stratifications for those who'd ignored or discounted them.

Sometimes all Jen wanted was a record of accounts. A ledger. A schedule of incomings and outgoings. Receipts. She wanted to know what her and Jim's combined salary would be as expressed as a percentage of Meg and Marc's total income (salary + bonus if applicable + income from inter vivos trust + return on investments + incidental monetizable gifts from family). She wanted to know the difference between the gross and the net. She wanted to know how many months (years?) she and Jim would have to work to earn the money that Meg and Marc spent in a month. She wanted to attach a number to what Meg would define as a “splurge,” and then calculate her own definition of a “splurge” as a percentage of a Meg splurge, and then calculate the respective impacts of their splurges on their respective monthly outgoings. She wanted to know how much Meg's wedding and apartment and apartment renovation had cost and how much Pam's wedding and apartment and apartment renovation would cost, every last line item, and the source of funds for each line item, and if the source was interest or a dividend, she wanted to know the source of that interest or dividend.

She wanted to know, once and for all, how the math broke down on what Baz Angler would call
real life.

Meg, Pam, and Jen used to know everything about Meg, Pam, and Jen. The three of them used to know each day the other bled. They used to know—it was possible they still remembered—the exact anatomical proportions and halitosis risk factors of each of the other's pantheon of sexual partners. Two of them had once assisted in the removal of the third's sanitary product, temporarily misplaced inside her body cavity during finals week. And yet the statement of accounts was full of clean pages, bright and blank as the faces awaiting entry to the Garden of Earthly Delights. The statement of accounts was in a ledger kept in an unlocked drawer in the secret-seeming room. If you were already in the room, you had no cause to ask to see it.

Jen hadn't looked at her phone in hours.

Karina—LIFt

Tuesday, Jan 5 2:35 PM

To: Jen—LIFt

Subject: WHERE ARE YOU?

Priority: High!

And where is Daisy?!? You've both been gone forEVER—we have an emergency here!

Karina generally took a minimalist approach to her toilette, but today telltale streaks of foundation and concealer swiped around her eyes and mascara mottled under her pinkish lower lashes. The tip of Karina's nose burned bright red, as if the inflammation had singed the concealer. She smiled at Jen with her teeth bared, unusually. Jen's mind automatically mapped a large-scale portrait of Karina, ready to be added to the walls of
Break in Case of Emergency.

“My allergies are kicking in ridiculously early this year,” Karina said, sniffling. “The nerve, huh?” She touched the back of one finger to her nose.

“Oh, man, that's tough,” Jen said. “I'm so sorry I was gone so long; I had back-to-back meetings, and then—”

“It's just one order of business,” Karina interrupted, “but it
is
quite urgent—we
are
going to have to take that Travis Paddock introduction down.”

“Pardon?”

Karina cocked her head to one side and shrugged. “Yeah, afraid so.”

“I don't understand.”

Karina made the face Jen had seen before: bottom lip pulling away from clenched teeth, bugged-out sidelong glance appealing to a sympathetic invisible authority. “What can I say?” Karina asked. “One of those things.”

“Hmm, well, we've already shared it with all of LIFt's followers on social media, all the BodMod, um, affiliates have already been linking to the introduction and quoting from it—”

“It's a—a pyramid scheme.” Karina flinched at the phrase, as if she were trying to fling her mouth off her face. Her eyes shone. “BodMod Nutritionals is a pyramid scheme. Mr. Paddock is”—Karina rubbed her nose again—“not the knight on a white steed that you and I thought he was.”

You and I

“But—”

“Live and learn, right? Let's not be afraid to admit our mistakes, and learn from them.”

Our mistakes

“Of course, but we can't just take it down,” Jen said.

Karina's face tightened; the faint swelling around her eyes and nose made it more difficult for her to keep a poker face. “Look, nobody's more pained by this than I am,” Karina said. “I mean, I hate to see all our work—”

Our work

“—go down the drain. But it's for the best. Let's not give this guy's sleazy little scheme any more oxygen, and we can just move on.”

“Travis is still on the board, right?”

Though sitting still at her desk, Karina seemed breathless.

“We are taking it down,” Karina said evenly.

“But he's still a board member—right?—and anyway, that's not how the Internet works.” Jen's mouth set itself in a hooting formation, as if she could suck the words back from the air.

Karina's nose was now red from bridge to tip. “Oh, is that so?” she said. “How
does
the Internet work? Educate this old-timer.”

“I don't mean to be condescending, but it lives in cache forever. The train has left the station.”

“Be that as it may,” Karina said, “let's get the train back into the station. Thanks.” Karina turned back to her computer.

“We
can't,
” Jen said.

“Leora made this request herself,” Karina said, too quickly. “She asked that we take it down.” Karina's eyes darted around before regaining steady, angry eye contact with Jen.

Her eyes flashed

“And last I checked,” Karina said, “this is Leora's foundation, not mine, not yours.” Karina turned back to her computer again and began composing an email, or pretended to. “That's all, thanks.” She drawled the
thanks
ironically as she typed.

Jen walked back to her cubicle, where Daisy was unsnapping her puffer coat.

whatDaisyknew: I GOT BORED SO I WENT TO SEE AVATAR HOPE THAT'S OK

jenski1848: Good work today, D.

Jen logged out of her computer and logged back in under the generic logon that LIFt interns used. She opened Karina's Travis Paddock summary in a browser, took screenshots, and exported the entire file as a PDF, then attached the file as a draft in a disused Hotmail account that she had opened under Franny's name years ago. She wiped the browser history, cleared the cache, and logged back in as herself.

whatDaisyknew: WHAT DID I MISS

jenski1848: I just took down the Travis Paddock advertisement per Karina and Leora's request. It never happened.

Daisy Kilroyed over the cubicle wall, watching as Jen pulled on her coat.

“They know that's not how the Internet works, right?” Daisy asked Jen's desk surface.

Jen silently buttoned her coat.

“And that you can't treat a board member like that?” Daisy asked.

Jen swung her tote bag over her shoulder.

“Did Karina get dumped?” Daisy asked. “She looks like somebody who just got dumped.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Jen could make out Jules the social-media intern's head rotating 90 degrees right, one ear trained on Daisy like a motion-sensor camera.

“She has the puffy eyes and shell-shocked comportment of a textbook dumpee,” Daisy said.

“I'll be back in an hour or so,” Jen said.

“The smell of the dump site still clings to her, though she may have crawled from its wreckage hours ago,” Daisy said. “Evidence remains. A candy wrapper stuck to her shoe. A foam packing peanut clinging tenderly to her hair.”

“I have an appointment with Judy Smith,” Jen added, invoking the code Daisy and Jen used whenever they had to leave the office and didn't wish to explain why they were leaving.

Jen returned to the library, heading straight for the nearest open cubby in the computer cluster. She forwarded the PDF to a newly made account, which she opened under a user name borrowed from the top item on the library's nearby “New and Hot Titles!” kiosk. She attached the PDF to a new message and began to type.

FROM:
[email protected]

TO: info@dopenhauer; tips@nastygramladyparts

How does a certain much-publicized foundation and its infinity streams of family money “work tirelessly to empower women, here at home and in the developing world,” according to its mission statement? Well, one way to do that is to spend thousands of dollars on advertorials for some rich white American guy's snake-oil pyramid scheme. Screenshots attached. Enjoy!

She hit send. She logged out of the two accounts, cleared the browser, emptied the cache, and switched off the computer.

She folded her hands on the desk. She was comfortably seated in a still pocket of time, no turbulence, 70 degrees Fahrenheit, pH balance of seven. She had no idea when this pocket of time would expire.

As Jen reached the bottom of the steps to the library, the corkscrew of dizziness spun her around again, and she vomited into a conveniently positioned trash basket. She did so almost casually, as if she were tossing an empty soda can. She fished a camouflaging stick of gum out of her tote bag as sparks of light trailed around the cold stone embankments of her peripheral vision.