Break in Case of Emergency (24 page)

Leora's penthouse loft was miserably packed, the trebley din of hundreds of overlapping conversations pinging and echoing off the parquet floors and the Wedgwood-dome false ceiling to create gnarled gibberish waves of disorienting sound that roared around Jen and Jim as soon as they stepped off the private elevator, as if Leora's guests had been marshaled to replicate the debilitating effects of a long-range acoustic device.

“I've been here thirty seconds and I've already contracted an inner-ear infection from these people,” Jim shouted. These were the first words he'd spoken to Jen since the Deli of Death. He still hadn't made eye contact with her. On the train ride over, he'd hustled to the opposite end of the carriage with his headphones jacked up all the way. On the walk from the train stop, he'd kept ahead of her.

It took them more than ten minutes to squeeze and nudge a path toward the drinks table. The only person Jen recognized on the slow, sweaty twenty-foot surge was Karina, who, upon seeing Jen, set her features in their familiar preemptive mode—eyes bugged out and sidelong, bottom lip pulling away from clenched teeth—and held out the palm of one hand as an additional deterrent, her arm window-wiping back and forth in a deflective parody of
hello.

“Oh, hey, Karina, this is my husb—okay, hope to see you later,” Jen shouted as Karina turned away.

Toppling glass finally in hand, Jen intended to sidle back into the crowd to track down any friendly faces, but Jim had already retreated to a window at one corner of the loft, a glass of red in one hand and a glass of white in the other. Beside the window, in a heavy and intricately carved mahogany frame—plaster filigree and gold-leaf burnishing—hung a giant oil painting of Leora flanked by her daughters in a clothed reenactment of Raphael's
Three Graces
. The figure of the older daughter smirked at her apple beneath Leora's maternal beam, while the younger daughter ensorcelled her onlooker with round, dead doll eyes.

“You're just going to stand in a corner?” Jen yelled.

“You do whatever you want,” Jim yelled, staring out the window and glugging from his glass of white. “I'm not going back in that.”

“You're here!” Meg and Pam were by Jen's side, and Meg had somehow located a sound frequency at which she could pitch her voice and be heard without shouting. “Mrs. Durbin was here for exactly twelve and a half minutes and she asked after you, Jen,” Meg said.

Pam's mouth moved, but Jen couldn't discern any of the words.

“I have some questions for Mrs. Durbin,” Jim shouted, turning away from the window toward Meg.

“I'll have to continue communicating with Mrs. Durbin through the magic of the Internet,” Jen shouted over Jim's shouting.

“There's a Bluff Foundation board member here who is literally ninety-four years old,” Meg said, deftly switching subjects, “and it was so loud he started to cry, so we had to create a sort of satellite party in a back bedroom just for him.”

Pam's mouth moved some more.

“I want to go to that party!” Jim shouted. Meg's detection of an audible but discreet pitch made Jim's shouting more embarrassing to Jen.

“Another issue is that both of his ex-wives are here tonight,” Meg continued in the same miraculously low confidential tone, “so what we really need are a couple of satellite parties. I have to keep rotating between them to make sure that proper distances are kept and further tears are not shed.”

“Oh, man,” Jim yelled. “Sounds like you're really taking Tiger Canyon.”

Meg sipped from her wine, impassive. “What?”

Jen rolled her eyes and sighed. “It's an inside joke,” she said. “It's this thing about when things are difficult at work, or not going your way, you—never mind, it doesn't matter.”

“What was it?” Meg asked. “Tiger Caravan?”

Pam's mouth moved some more.

“Forget it,” Jim yelled, addressing Meg, his eyes on Jen. Two empty glasses stood on the windowsill behind him. “It's just a stupid joke. Stupid me and my stupid fucking jokes.” He was hollering loudly enough that a few people turned to look at Jim as he shoved back into the crowd.

“I'm sorry,” Jen said to Meg and Pam. “We are having a rough night.”

“Do what you need to do,” Meg said.

Jen pushed for ages toward points east, then north, then west through the crowd, finally locating Jim at a table of canapés and cheese. He was draining a third glass of wine—a fourth at the ready on the table beside him—and cramming cubes of cheddar into his mouth.

“Honey, that's enough.”

“Enough what?” Jim was yelling louder than he needed to.

“You were rude to Meg and Pam.”

“So what?” Jim asked, popping another cube of cheese into his mouth.

“So
stop.
”

“Stop what?”

“Stop shoving the entire cheese plate into your mouth, for starters.”

“We're at a rich people's party, Jen,” Jim said, teething another cube of cheese and sliding it off its toothpick. “They'll have more cheese in the fridge. They have a special number they can call and
wham,
look at all that new cheese spilling out of the fridge.”

“Can you just stop? Please.”

“Did you see the coffee table made out of broken china?” Jim asked through a mouthful of cheese. “Wouldn't it be so empowering to women if we broke the broken-china table and found a fair-trade women's cooperative and gave them a microloan to build a new one? Maybe you could build one for Pam's next show? Or could that be an anchoring metaphor in one of those essays you publish? Something about destroying domesticity in order to reclaim it?”

“Honey—”

“Or something about broken cups and ‘reading the tea leaves'?
From Breakdown to Breakthrough in the Time It Takes to Steep My Tea
?” Jim picked up his fourth glass of wine and chugged.

“Maybe we should go.”

“
How Decoupage Helped Heal My Shattered Heart
?” Jim said. “
How Smashing China Gave Me the Courage to Smash My Marriage
?”

Sunny and her husband were a few feet away, staring at the shouting cheese-eater. Jen turned her back to them and pretended to deliberate over the cracker selection.

Jim stabbed another cube of cheese with the used toothpick and ate it. “You know, I'm doing these people a favor, eating all their stinkin' cheese. And do I get any credit for it? Nope. All I get is more cheese.”

“I don't care,” Jen hissed, a cracker crumbling in her hand. “I don't care if they have more cheese in the fridge. I don't care if the fridge is made of cheese. I don't care if you win an award for eating the most cheese at this party and your prize is a fridge made of cheese. I want you to stop yelling and stop eating all the fucking cheese.”

“Why?” Jim asked, sliding three cubes of cheese into his mouth at once.

“Because
you are embarrassing yourself.
”

Jim ruminated. “You got your pronouns mixed up there,” he said past the cheese in his teeth. “You meant
I
am embarrassing
you.
”

“Yes, that, too!”

Jim drained his fourth glass and set it upside down on the ravaged cheese plate. “I'm leaving.” He maneuvered bluntly through the crowd toward the coat check. Meg and Pam were standing an arm's length away from Jen, studying the floor. Trickles of red wine wound and seeped around cheese ashes.

“I should go—go with him,” Jen yelled apologetically to Meg and Pam.

Pam's mouth moved some more.

“Pam, I'm sorry, but I haven't heard a word you've said the whole time,” Jen yelled, and Pam turned away.

“Okay,” Meg said, pulling Jen into a hug. “Maybe you should go. Maybe not. Let's just take a moment together to think about it. But either way, do you want me to wrap up some cheese in a go-bag for you?”

Jen laughed into Meg's shoulder. They stood quietly in the din, Meg's fingers rubbing Jen's back as they watched the crowd, until Jen felt another hand grasping hers.

Pam was pulling Jen back to the cheese plate, where she had arranged the cheddar crumbs and cracker shards into letters that spelled out
STAY WITH US
.

Pam had coaxed the trickle of Jim's wine into a little underlining flourish on her message.

One of Jen's hands was held in Meg's and the other was held in Pam's.

“You know what, I will stay a bit longer,” Jen yelled. “He needs to be alone. Meg, maybe I'll just go cry in a bedroom with your ancient charge until we fall asleep.”

“You'll wake up as somebody's new wife,” Meg said.

Ever since the commencement of the Project, Jen had mostly steered clear of drinking—even in small social doses, even just after a Monthly Adverse Development and at other times when she could be empirically certain that a bottle of beer after work or a glass of wine at a party could not possibly flood and scurry the nascent brain-cell choreography of a hypothetical tiny future boarder. Jen recognized the irony of this aversion, given how many Projects that alcohol must have rushed into production over the millennia. But the inflammatory effects of the Sermoxal—the bloating of face and midsection, the reddening of nose and cheeks, the attachment of an amplifier and rumbling-bass effects to her Monthly Adverse Developments—had led Jen to suspect that her body had been swarmed by volatile yeast metabolites, her flesh rising and folding into a ruddy, sluggish dough, distressing to the eye and bitter to the taste. Sermoxal was at least a kind of useful poison, Jen thought, while ethanol was a useless one. Her reproductive system—her body in its entirety—seemed already beleaguered and broken enough without the proximate demolition effects of alcohol as it took a power-sander to the stomach lining or the beveled teeth of a wrecking bar to the liver or a jackhammer to the bony labyrinth of the inner ear. Tonight it had smashed and crowbarred the barriers around the Thing That Happened, which Jen had disclosed to Meg and Pam as they'd sat together on the edge of the bed in Leora Infinitas's guest room: eggshells and sea greens, princess-and-the-pea stacks of linens, hotel-anonymous. Meg's ninety-four-year-old guest of honor slept beside them, emitting turtle-dove coos and snores. Jen's disclosure had come apropos of nothing but the liquefying effects of the wine, which had dissolved the border between Jen's public and private selves and poured out her inner life in a cascade of sloppy disinhibition. Fragments of this episode spotted her line of vision hours later; her body still felt warm from the four arms wrapped around her.

Soon, of course, Jen would feel embarrassed, and she would probably apologize to Meg and Pam. She knew that even now. For the moment, though, she enjoyed this period of reprieve from the symptoms of congenital shame. Her friends were supposed to know these things. And yet, Jen thought, if she were a better friend she wouldn't burden them. What, after all, were they supposed to do with such information?

As Jen tumbled out of the cab and into her building's lobby, as she slapped meatily at the elevator button a few times before noticing the
OUT OF SERVICE
sign, and as she galumphed up five flights of stairs, then down one flight, a matter-of-fact voice cutting in and out amid the jagged smear of her consciousness was asking Jen a familiar question.

Here is the swimmer.

Where is the shore?

“She drowned,” Jen murmured wetly to her key as she stabbed it in the vicinity of the lock on the door to her apartment. “She
der-ow-ooooned.
”

Inside the apartment, both the door to Jen and Jim's bedroom and the door to the nest for the hypothetical tiny future boarder were closed, and Jen wasn't sure which room Jim had chosen to fall asleep in. There were cinders in her mouth. Her legs were licorice. She bandied in her heels to the refrigerator, grabbed a pint of ice cream out of the freezer, and flopped down on the couch next to Franny, who leaped down and took up residence instead on the kitchen counter, five feet away, establishing that she would not take sides in any domestic conflict. Jen jumped at the sound of an admonishing voice. Her downstairs neighbor was scolding her for walking across the floor in heels, tapping her broomstick of judgment against her own ceiling. Without thinking, Jen yanked off her heels and threw one and then the other across the narrow room, where they left scuff marks on the lumpy-sealed fireplace and ejected a cry of infuriation from the downstairs neighbor, her broomstick-rapping now more insistent.

Jen had forgotten a bowl and spoon for her ice cream, but instead of risking the further wrath of her neighbor, she popped the lid on the container, licked off some butterscotch-and-chocolate-chunk swirls, and opened her laptop, clicking over to the Total Transformation Challenge submission page. She teethed and sucked more ice cream from the pint and sloppily wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She considered the instructions for the seventh category and typed a response.

TTC CATEGORY 7: HEART

How can you challenge your heart to open itself to every possibility and spread its love and charity far and wide? How can you make your heart beat in perfect rhythm with that of your world, your friends, your partner, your children?

Your response here:

I challenge my heart to be a better, more understanding, less judgmental partner.

But can I vent for a second? It drives me crazy when Jim drops inside jokes in conversation with other people, and it drives both of us crazy that it drives me crazy. It's a stupid little thing that doesn't matter, but marriage has a way of magnifying those stupid little things—I know it's a cliché, but it's also like, if it's such a little thing, then it must be easy to fix—so why not just fix it? Whenever he drops the inside jokes without any sense of his audience, I feel this compulsion to explain what he's talking about, translate for him, not make the other person feel left out and awkward, even though the other person is by definition left out of a marriage and it just makes things more awkward to linger over it—oh, and also, just by the way, it makes Jim feel like shit, which seems relevant. Why do I fixate so much on stupid little things when he is (generally speaking in most respects not tonight but almost all the time) so great?

Anyway, this is how I would have explained the inside joke to Meg tonight. On our first date, we were in this wine bar, and it was too bright and too loud and too first-date-y, but then this song came on, “Burning Airlines,” which is the first song on
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy),
the Brian Eno record. It was so random—the soundtrack to the date was, like, a Springsteen song and then the kind of lite bossa nova you'd hear in Starbucks and then boom ENO ART ROCK. And Jim and I started talking about that record title,
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy),
how it's the best title of a record ever, and we didn't know at the time that Tiger Mountain is an actual place with an actual mythology, we thought maybe it was the name of Brian Eno's estate and it had tigers having pool parties in a moat and operating trebuchets and stuff, and we just started riffing about how tall Tiger Mountain might have been, and the weather conditions on Tiger Mountain, and the types of tigers populating Tiger Mountain, and different strategies for taking Tiger Mountain and winning the hearts and minds of native Tiger Mountainers—Mountaineers? Mountainites? Mountainians?—whom we'd assume would battle fiercely and to the death with any marauding infidels with plans for taking Tiger Mountain by strategy or otherwise. It was just the dumb, half-drunken bullshitting you do with someone when you're figuring out that you really, really like them and part of the reason you like them is that you like the same stuff.

That following Monday, Jim mailed to me a beautiful replica of the illuminated manuscript of William Blake's “The Tyger,” with this hilariously laconic note about “enjoying our time together,” and I felt out of breath to be looking at this gift and thinking about what the gift meant and thinking about the thought that had been poured into the gift. So then I mailed to him a print of a lithograph by Paul Ranson, a French painter who died young, called “Tiger dans les jungles.” And tigers and Tiger Mountain, however we were defining it, became the central metaphor or inside joke or whatever of our relationship. That was our courtship—trading postcards of tigers through the mail, like we were exchanging handwritten love letters on parchment bundled in ribbon via furtive horseback messenger. I mean, that wasn't all of our courtship—we also had sex all the time, in fact, we had sex the night of our first date, and we had all three kinds of sex on our second date (or all four, depending on how you're counting)—which was a Saturday, so we also had breakfast the next day, eventually, around four p.m.—and by the third date we were skipping the date part and just having sex. I had it in my head that it wasn't going anywhere, that he was this wayward grad student with a shitty apartment and an impressive comic-book collection who couldn't possibly present a viable long-term “practical” option, and pretty soon the physical attraction would fade and I could go back to the real world and Meg could set me up with a banker-who-doesn't-act-like-a-banker and for now I could just enjoy this sex-and-tigers bubble before it burst. In fact, I remember our friend Lauren saying to me something like “Get out of the bubble, make sure to spend time outside the bubble”—like a warning, like she could see what was happening, like if I kept fucking this guy eventually the bubble would seal itself over with bodily fluids and force of habit. But I never did that thing that would happen sometimes with friends in college, where they'd become infatuated with someone and just fall off the grid for a while. I introduced Jim to Meg and Pam and Lauren right away. We did stuff together, even though sometimes we were late to whatever we were doing, because we were having sex. Everyone liked him a lot, except Lauren. Lauren thought Jim was “sketchy.” I never see her anymore.

The tiger thing really stuck. We'd go to Prospect Park Zoo to look at the red pandas and be like “Look at all the tigers on the mountain!” Or he'd send me a text to ask me how a presentation went at work, and I'd text back TIGER MOUNTAIN I AM IN YOU, which would mean it went well. And then when I started working at LIFt, or, rather, when I realized that my job at LIFt was a total fucking farce, my job became Tiger Canyon, which was the exact opposite of the triumphant majesty of Tiger Mountain—Tiger Canyon was this arid, rocky depression with no tree shade or reliable sources of clean water, where wild animals stalked and disemboweled their prey. Jim would start getting texts from me when I was crying in the bathroom like MAULED BY TIGERS and TAKING TIGER CANYON (BY STRANGULATION).

Maybe all this sounds like precious gibberish, the language of twins. No one should ever attempt marital exegesis. It's like opening the door on a darkroom—better just to let this stuff slosh around in obscurity.

But maybe all the explaining and accommodating and apologizing I do—to my friends, to my colleagues, to this empty box—is a way of proving I'm real. I exist in three dimensions. I know that sounds weird. I can try to explain. So sometimes with Leora and Karina and people like that, I get the sense that their big problem is that they don't think of
other
people as real—not everyone, but younger people, people outside their class or income bracket, people who don't “inspire” them somehow. And even the people who “inspire” them are abstractions—they exist as boxes to be ticked on their checklist of personal growth. I have the opposite problem. My close friends, my real friends, become unknowable to me, paradoxically, because I know them well enough that
their
lives seem real and mine seems—not fake or imaginary, I don't mean it like that, but like a bluff, and that's the moment a fissure opens—and I actually don't think I've ever used the word
fissure
out loud, or
exegesis,
for that matter, which I guess means this email is a conversation I'm too embarrassed to have out loud with anyone or anything more consequential than an empty box—but anyway, a fissure opens in the friendship because I start to feel sheepish and back away from this nice person who is just being nice and everything becomes awkward.

I think that's why—stay with me here, this is connected—my heart drops into my stomach every time I find out that one of my friends has harvested from the Garden of Earthly Delights. It's never because I myself want to have a hypothetical tiny future boarder (although I do) or don't want to have a hypothetical tiny future boarder (although sometimes I think I shouldn't) or don't not want to have a hypothetical tiny future boarder (although that may be most accurate). It's because my friend has it together enough to have—to create and bake and provide for in all senses—a hypothetical tiny future boarder, and I do not. For whatever reason, I don't. It's like a metaphor, or a metonym, or symptomatic of a comprehensive incompetence: biological, psychological, financial, marital, “spiritual.” It's gotten to the point that on the way to work in the mornings I look around at all the people crammed into the train car and think,
How did all these people come to be? How did their parents time it out just right like that? How did they become alive? What do they know that I don't? Why won't anyone just tell me?
And I conclude that it's because whatever they're doing and however fucked-up their lives might be, at least they're not pretending. At least they're not faking that they're real people. That they're verified as authentic. Leora loves that word,
authentic.
Maybe if you raise the hem of their shirt you'll see a little gold seal stamped to the base of their spine, certifying their authenticity.

It's weird because the realest thing I've ever done—and I can't believe I'm saying this, but I can trust you, empty box—is fall in love with Jim. It was undeniable and more or less instantaneous and I didn't have to do anything or figure anything out or strategize or hire experts to advise or intervene. It was not a choice. I did not choose him. I don't know if that is wonderful or terrible. Maybe a stronger person—a more pragmatic person, a person who doesn't bluff and fake her way through life, who thinks ahead and whose future is as formed as her present and who keeps a ledger of accounts—would have turned away from Jim, would have turned away from that love. She would have broken the love in two, because she was strong, not weak. Or her strength would have prevented the thing from forming that she'd have to break. She never would have wanted it so badly and continued to want it so badly endlessly forever and always with every