Break in Case of Emergency (26 page)

“It's going to be better this time,” Daisy said to Jen's back a few moments later.

Jen twisted around to look at Daisy, hot cheek pressed against the open top of the water bottle. Daisy met her gaze. Jen knew that eye contact was hard for Daisy.

“I didn't know for a while, this time,” Jen said. “Or I did but I didn't. I wasn't hoping. I wasn't paying attention. I should have been paying attention.”

Daisy finally looked away as she arranged a stray strand of hair behind Jen's ear.

“How did you—how long have you known?” Jen asked.

Daisy shrugged. “I sit two feet away from you all day, every day,” she said to Jen's earlobe. “You are the closest person in the world to me.”

Re: Contact Jen!

My girlfriend and I were just talking about how cool it might be to have our portraits painted, but instead of from the front, they could be done from the back—head/hair/back of the neck. It would still call on your amazing technical abilities, but the viewer of the portrait could project his/her own ideas onto it.

Re: Contact Jen!

Would you ever consider a commission to paint people's dreams? Not like people would describe their dreams to you. I mean, what if we hooked up sleeping people to a brain-wave scanner that decoded their dreams? Or maybe you could make a diptych of the dream and the scan?

Re: Contact Jen!

Hi, Jen, your payment should have come through via direct deposit by now. Please do let me know if there is any issue with the transfer. As always, it has been a pleasure for Mrs. Durbin to work with you. Warm wishes, Dakota

Jen tabbed over from email and opened her online bank account. Her lungs filled themselves with a muffled shrieking effort, and she clapped her hand over her mouth, her breath wooing back again through her fingers.

She folded her hands on her 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.

Inside this space, as her amygdala dozed, as the volume and resolution of the world whirring around her faded out, Jen could not discern whether she was about to make a strong decision or was merely succumbing to impulse. What nudged her out of her seat and propelled her across the LIFt floor to Karina's office was the same prod that pinballed her back and forth across that floor hundreds of times before: a helpless sense of obligation.

In this case, though, the sense of obligation was to the idea that Mrs. Flossie Durbin had initiated a transaction and that it was up to Jen to complete it. Mrs. Flossie Durbin had rented the pocket of time for her.

Jen entered Karina's office and sat down without asking permission.

“So I just wanted to tell you, and this is such a hard thing to tell you, but that I've decided to leave the—”

“Bummer, we'll miss you,” Karina broke in.

“—the foundation—oh! Yes, it's a difficult decision, obviously, but I—”

“
Bummer,
we'll
miss
you,” Karina reiterated, raising her voice.

“Um,” Jen said. “Do you need any other information from me?”

“I'm good, I'm good,” Karina said. “Give us two weeks?”

“Right, sure.”

“Should I tell Leora?” Jen asked.

“I can tell her,” Karina said.

“Are you sure?” Jen asked

Karina blinked and beamed. “Is that all?”

“I think so,” Jen said, getting up to leave. She hesitated. “It's just that—I just wanted to tell you that I'm leaving to try to do my art full-time. I did a portrait for Mrs. Flossie Durbin, the philanthropist—”

“Ah, yes, we tried to get her for our board of directors,” Karina said. “Could the woman even
try
to return a phone call?”

“Right, yes, I'd heard that—and so, you know, that vote of confidence, it really seems to be opening some doors for me. I got a commission to do a magazine illustration of a reclusive mining heiress who's rarely photographed. I'm doing wedding portraits, baby portraits, someone even mentioned holiday cards to me, which seems so far away—”

“I think I got it!” Karina said.

Bertha Mason laughed. Bertha had rattled at the door all these years not seeking freedom from confinement or retribution. She rattled only for approval.

“Okay,” Jen said. “Okay, this is great—I mean, not great in all senses, but—”

“Jen, what can I say—you're a real pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps story,” Karina said. “A real Horatio Alger tale.”

“Actually—and most people don't know this—but Horatio Alger stories weren't really about pulling oneself up,” Jen said. “They're more about being in the right place at the right time, about earnest young people happening to cross paths with a wealthy benefactor in a generous frame of mind.”

“Aren't you Miss Smartypants,” Karina said, grinning widely and crinkling her nose impishly. “I
will
miss all the ways you educate me. The foundation will, too.”

“Also,” Jen said as she turned to leave, “just FYI, Horatio Alger was a pedophile.”

“Julie.”

Jen was standing in line at the coat check in the red-carpeted, red-walled arcade outside the ballroom where the annual Bluff Foundation Revel was winding down. Meg, her date, was in the ladies' room. Jen pulled her spangled black-cashmere wrap a bit tighter around her midsection and turned toward the voice to see Leora Infinitas. Structured mosaic-print dress and gladiator spikes. Smoky eye. Caramel-butter extensions. Shoulders thrown back, one hand on waist, hip turned and corresponding leg stepped out. Anxious handler—not Sunny, but Sunny-like in her force field of high-strung cheer, her flat-footed quickness—levitating nearby, BlackBerry in one palm and two handbags in the other.

“Oh, wow, Leora—Ms. Infinitas! Yes—it's Jen—but that's okay—what an amazing dress—it's so nice to finally meet you,” Jen said, holding out her hand.

Leora Infinitas turned both palms upward, the cuffs and clatches encircling her wrists winking with light, in a gesture that Jen couldn't instantly decode as either a proposal for a hug, an invitation for a double hand grasp, or a dispensation with all tactile formalities. After a second's hesitation, Jen reached out her hand, knuckles to ceiling, and wrapped her fingers around Leora's limp right palm in a 90-degrees-turned handshake. The Sunny-like handler checked her watch.

“But we've met many times,” Leora Infinitas said, extracting her hand and aiming her head in a quizzical tilt.

“We have?” Jen's voice squeaked. She felt as if she'd been caught committing a crime, but didn't know which one.

“Through our work,” Leora said. Her eyes were black and bottomless, a sea seen churning through the pinholes of a painted porcelain mask. “Through the work that we do. Through the work we have done.”

“Oh, of course, but we've never spoken—directly—I mean, with each other.”

“But we have.” Leora Infinitas did not break eye contact. She beamed like a hologram. “You have heard me. And I have heard you. I
see
what you do.”

“Oh, of course. It's funny, isn't it? I totally feel that way, too, about you, and it's so cool to know that it goes both ways, Leora.”

“We've got—the thing—” the Sunny-like handler said.

“We have always known each other,” Leora Infinitas said. “We always will. I will always be with you. And you will always be with me.” She turned and glided away, handler scurrying beside her, forever attended to and somehow alone.

Jen came home and sat down on the couch next to Jim and Franny.

“So. I think we can officially start talking about it now,” Jen said.

“Yeah?”

“It's time,” she said, rubbing her knuckles against Franny's brow. “We're out of the woods. The anatomy stuff. Testing. And it's becoming obvious. A lady gave me her seat on the train today. Although that happened once before.”

“When it happened before, was it the yellow dress with the sailboats on it?”

“Yeah, good call. The waist kind of billows out.”

“I love that dress. I wondered why you never wore it anymore.”

“I guess now I can wear it again.”

“How do you feel?”

“You have to be more specific.”

“How do you feel about starting to talk about it?”

“I don't know. One time I blurted out to someone that we were ‘trying,' and I felt like I was saying, ‘We are having sex.' Now I'd be saying, ‘We have had successful sex.' ”

“But you don't have to say that. Your body will say it for you.”

“Well, my body will start a conversation that I won't want to finish.”

“Do people still say ‘bump'?”

“Never under any circumstances ever say that again.”

“Does starting to talk about it involve talking about all the unsuccessful sex-having?”

“When Genevieve from my old book club had her twins, everyone asked her if they were science babies.”

“Did Genevieve make science babies?”

“I never asked her.”

They sat silently for a moment.

“We should call some people in the morning,” she said. “We should call my parents.”

“We should definitely call your parents.”

“They will be so happy,” she said.

They sat silently some more.

“We are starting to talk about it,” he said. “That's true. Does starting to talk about it involve you starting to talk about it with me?”

“Of course it does. I feel like I've been talking about it with you all along. I know I haven't—it's odd; something would happen and I'd just assume you would know, because if it happened to me it meant it was happening to you, too.”

“Maybe someday we'll become so close that we won't have to talk to each other at all.”

“I'm sorry, sweetie. It's weird that something can be so private and so public at the same time. It's like, inside and outside—I get confused about which is which.”

“You're inside now.”

“I know. I'm inside now.”

They sat silently for a long time.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

She couldn't answer right away.

“Honey, look at me,” he said. “Look at me. Come on. Look at those tears, so heavy with nutrients and minerals. They heal the sick and awaken sleeping princesses. They slake the thirsts and nourish the soil and moisturize the pores of Tiger Canyon.”

“Stop,” she said. “I appreciate what you're doing, honey, but stop.”

They sat silently some more.

“I'm fine,” she finally said. “I'm
fine.
I'm a little panicked. I'm extremely happy. I'm tired. I'm a moist, leaking grocery bag of wilted clichés and adjectives full of empty calories. I'm hungry.”

“Do you want me to make some dinner?”

“Yes, that would be great. Thank you.”

“While I make dinner, should we think about how everything is about to change, and soon we won't even remember the people that we are right now?”

“Yes, that would be great, too.”

“Because we'll have amnesia associated with extreme sleep deprivation?”

“Yes.”

“Which is, when you think about it, a kind of
psychic death
?”

“Yes!”

“Are you ready to stage a household coup d'état and then fall victim to it, and all the screaming mayhem and poverty and squalor that will follow?”

“Yes!”

“Are you ready to destroy your life?”

She climbed on top of her husband, wrapped her arms around his neck, and buried her face in him. “Yes. I am ready to destroy my life.”

Thanks to Jynne Dilling Martin, this book's first reader and first champion, and to Katie Arnold-Ratliff, who dug through an early draft and made every line of it better. I am preposterously lucky to have such dear and brilliant and beautiful friends. I love you both with all my heart.

Thanks to Claudia Ballard, whose blazing intelligence, compassion, and generosity never cease to amaze me.

Thanks to Jordan Pavlin, for her keen editorial eye and boundless support and kindness. Thanks to Jordan, Josie Kals, Nicholas Thomson, and everyone at Knopf for believing in this book.

Thanks to Andrea Lynch, who schooled me in how charitable foundations work (and don't work). Thanks to Scott Indrisek, Ava Lubell, Dushko Petrovich, and John Swansburg for bringing their technical expertise to bear on specific sections of the manuscript. Thanks to Jesse Dorris, Dan Kellum, Josh Levin, Farah Miller, and Chandra Speeth for talking me through dilemmas and moments of doubt. Thanks to Julia Turner, David Plotz, and all of my colleagues at
Slate
for fostering a workplace that is as creative, congenial, and dissimilar to LIFt as an office can possibly be.

Most of all, thanks to Adrian Kinloch, without whom I never would have started writing this book, and to Devon Kinloch, without whom I never would have finished it.

Jessica Winter is features editor at
Slate
and formerly the culture editor at
Time.
Her writing has appeared in
The New York Times, The Guardian,
Bookforum, The Believer,
and many other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.

An Alfred A. Knopf Reading Guide

Break in Case of Emergency
by Jessica Winter

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group's conversation about
Break in Case of Emergency
, Jessica Winter's sharp and compelling novel about the inner politics of a feminist start-up helmed by a washed-up celebrity, and how one employee struggles to integrate into its culture.

Discussion Questions

Further Reading

Jennifer Close,
Girls in White Dresses

Joshua Ferris,
Then We Came to the End

Jessica Grose,
Sad Desk Salad

Sam Lipsyte,
The Ask

Camille Perry,
The Assistants