Break in Case of Emergency (4 page)

Jen couldn't go to Pam's every day just because she was unemployed; or she probably could have, but she didn't want Pam to feel responsible for finding ways to occupy her time. She needed to construct another rudder for her amorphous days, in which anxiety and sloth wrestled with each other only to reach a shaky alliance, usually culminating in a despondent, thrashing nap. Anxiety and sloth made a formidable team of antagonists because their shared goal was avoidance: avoidance of the gaping maw of job-posting sites; avoidance of other people with their helpful advice and compliments and solidarity, all of which Jen's brain translated into prayers for the dying; avoidance of the immediate outdoor environment, which was bitterly cold and covered in the scattering stacks of uncollected trash and unidentified melting black shit that signified the liminal space between winter and spring in Not Ditmas Park.

Jen decided that the rudder would be a daily deadline: By the time Jim returned home from school, at around five p.m., Jen would have X number of cover letters written, Y job-research tasks fulfilled, Z closets or drawers cleaned out. And she would have drawings to show to Jim, and maybe even paintings.

Jim's support of Jen's dormant art career was as unconditional as it was uncorroborated, and it had maintained that sincerity ever since they'd first met, a year after college, when they both taught at the same summer enrichment program for children of low-income families in southeast Brooklyn. In the final blasting-oven days of August, Jen had presented each of their kids with a crayon-on-construction-paper portrait of him- or herself, carefully rolled into a scroll and tied with a blue silk ribbon like a diploma.

“Maybe that was presumptuous of me,” Jen had said to Jim as they watched their students ripple and zigzag out the classroom door one last time, a few of the portraits strewn on the cracked linoleum behind them, others rolled inside clementine-sized fists and
thwack
ing proximate shoulders. “It's not like any of our kids were asking for the priceless gift of my artistic expression, like it's some kind of reward. And drawing someone's face is such an intimate act. Literally holding up a mirror to someone takes a lot of mutual trust. It's a kind of disclosure. I mean, who am I to tell them what they look like?”

“Do you want to go on a date with me?” Jim replied.

His faith-based position on Jen's real artistic calling extended itself even to casual introductions at parties: “Please meet my wife, Jen; she's an artist!” His stance wholly lacked in passive-aggression or latent accusation. To him it was simply a statement of fact, and the factual basis of the statement had no statute of limitations.

“You should use your free time to paint,” Jim would say during Jen's unemployment. “Or at least do some drawing.”

“I should,” Jen would say.

“Just don't
make any art,
” Jim would say.

Sometimes Jim would come home to a new end table constructed out of stray dowels and disused neckties, two rhubarb pies cooling on the kitchen counter (one crust made with shortening, one not), and a calligraphic note—each letter written in alternating shades of glitter pen—informing him that Jen had volunteered to take the Aggression-Challenged Mixed Breeds at their local animal shelter for a walk. Upon her return, Jen would have much to download on a really interesting
Guardian
piece she'd read on the new patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church and his stance on female clerics, and another really interesting
Guardian
piece she'd read on the civil conflict in Puthukkudiyiruppu, Sri Lanka.

Sometimes Jim would come home to the entire contents of their bookcase redistributed across the floor of the front room in short stacks, as if an inept soldier had begun fortifying his trench too late before the shelling started, and down the hall, his wife asleep on their bed—the bed itself sandbagged by half the contents of their closet—in gym socks and her bridesmaid's dress from a cousin's wedding.

“Are you home?” she asked, stirring from her nap in a flutter of tulle as Jim sat down gently on the edge of the bed. “Are you sick? Is it dark?”

There did exist what Jen and Jim called an “emergency fund,” parked in a liquid savings account that currently held $12,771.43, the amount that Jim's mother had left him when she died after taxes plus several years of accrued interest at a median rate of 1.25 percent. They had always intended to add more than interest to it, as the fund was meant to provide extra feathering for the nest of the hypothetical tiny future boarder.

“There's always the emergency fund,” Jim would say whenever Jen fretted about money.

“No, there isn't,” Jen would say.

“There's no emergency fund?” Jim asked the first time.

“There's no emergency,” Jen said the first time.

They might have considered asking Jen's parents for help, which Jen had done once before, as a twenty-three-year-old museum assistant facing a surprise tax bill. She had marked down the maximum number of exemptions on her W-4, mistaking “exemptions” for “deductions,” and thus assuming she would be paying her tax bill as she went. That mistake, combined with the fact that it hadn't occurred to her that she'd have to pay taxes on the $5,000 art fellowship she'd won on graduation, meant that she found herself, on the second tax return of her postcollegiate life, owing the IRS $8,000.

“Which is incidentally still less than what Lily Bart owes Gus Trenor at the end of
The House of Mirth,
” Pam pointed out to Jen at the time. “And that's not even adjusting for inflation.”

Jen did not mention her tax bill to Meg.

When Jen asked her father for help, he offered to loan her the money at the current median rate for mortgage loans, which at that time hung around 7.5 percent. Two years, fixed rate. But first, Jen's dad said, he needed to get sign-offs from Jen's two brothers, because they might want a matching gift, which would only be fair.

“A matching
loan,
you mean,” Pam said. “You would all get matching loans.”

“I asked him that—my dad sees it as a gift,” Jen said. “He thinks he could do better than 7.5 percent in the markets, you see. So he would be coming out behind even with the interest.”

“Wait, he's an investor?”

“He's an associate district sales manager for a regional chain of sporting-goods stores.”

“Oh, right.”

Pam's dad was an auto mechanic. On a road trip their senior year, after the stick on their borrowed manual-transmission heap fell slack and flailing on the freeway, Jen and Meg had watched Pam crawl under the car and pop the gear linkage into place.

“I'm sure he could get you a great deal on Champion sweatshirts, so long as you make your purchase somewhere in southern Ohio,” Jen said.

“What is his deal, though?” Pam asked.

“He's into self-sufficiency,” Jen said. “That's his deal. He grew up poor in a tough home. Both my parents, they just didn't know things; they didn't grow up with things. They used to keep the books in our house in a closet because they thought that was where they go. They didn't know about fruit. Did you know that I was in college the first time I ever had an orange? Meg offered me an orange and I asked for a knife to cut it with.”

“I don't remember that,” Pam said. Jen thought it was sweet that Pam assumed she would have been there.

There were things that Jen could say to Pam that she couldn't say to Meg.

“Could you ask your mom for help?” Pam asked.

“Well, you know my mom,” Jen said. “I mean, you don't, and that's kind of the point—she's in the picture, but she's sort of blurred in the background, like you flap the Polaroid around and that patch just never comes into focus. It's always felt like she's been in another room. Talking to her is like pressing your ear to a wall.”

There was more Jen wanted to say, but she didn't, because Pam's own mother had died of cancer when Pam was a child.

“You should paint your mom,” Pam said.

“Anyway,” Jen said. “So my dad always comes back to ‘No one gave me anything and I turned out fine'—that kind of thing. Standing alone in the world. I respect that. Fairness is important to him.”

“Fairness isn't necessarily incompatible with generosity,” Pam said.

“It is if you decide that fairness is the same as math.”

“Yeah. Or chemistry. Right? If you're balancing a chemical equation, a little generosity is the same as cheating. Faking.”

“A rectangle doesn't just shave a bit off two sides and loan the extra to a triangle so that the triangle can achieve her dream of becoming a square.” Jen semaphored the shapes with her hands.

“The rectangle must stay a rectangle,” Pam said.

Many weeks into her unemployment, Jen had a single-scene dream in which she opened the front door to her apartment to the sight of Franny, shaved to the skin, sitting startled at their doorstep upon a mat woven of her own downy calico fur. Instead of
WELCOME
, the mat read
FEATHER YOUR NEST
.

Around Valentine's Day, Meg and Jen met for an early-evening drink at Tommy's Bar in Midtown. The bartender was also the owner, and was also Tommy. Generations of Magic Marker graffiti covered the walls above the ripped, sticky leather booths. Supertramp was the most recent addition to the jukebox.

“So I don't know whether this counts as a
REAL JOB
or an
OTHER JOB
,” Meg said, “but I'll let you decide.”

In her nubby wool suit—black velvet collar, pencil skirt—and her glossy sweep of hair and her subliminal makeup (cheekbones dusted pink by an eternal cosmetic winter, liner applied so subtly that it simply supplanted the real curve of her upper lids), Meg personified brisk and frictionless glamour. She had always projected this, even in college, even during finals week—the undergraduate uniform of jeans, sweatpants, and puffer jackets on Meg became a form of drag. And Meg almost always seemed to have an egg timer ticking behind her eyes, long before gainful employment or law school or marriage or motherhood had placed any real-world requisitions on her time-management protocols. Even during the first carefree week of term or at Friday-night house parties, it was there: a buzz of impatience, palpable and exquisitely controlled. At eighteen and nineteen, Jen had found the buzz annoying, even egocentric. At twenty and beyond, she had learned to envy it—the way that Meg could apportion units of time like the facets of a jewel that she was coolly and constantly appraising. Jen saw it as a true measure of self-respect.

“Wait, before you tell me, I just have to say, thank you so much for hanging out tonight,” Jen said. “Especially on a school night. Millie won't wander into traffic or anything?” Millie, Jen's goddaughter, was Meg's uncannily considerate and beatific two-year-old. Even Millie's tantrums had a tidy, meditative quality.

“She's good. Marc and I have her tethered in the back garden,” Meg said. “The neighbors toss meat over the fence if she cries.”

“And how's Marc?”

“Ask him yourself,” said Meg, gesturing toward a disheveled man in a dun trenchcoat with his head on the bar. Meg's actual Marc was at home, where, since losing his finance job, he pursued various woodworking-related hobbies involving custom picture frames for Millie's finger paintings and carved mallard ducks. His trust fund (private equity) dwarfed Meg's own sizeable one (boiler equipment, mostly, but also television production royalties). Jen had always tried to displace her envy of their bottomless security by reflecting it back on herself as an intriguing hypothetical—how her idea of labor would change if it could be alienated from capital. If ambition were the only means of appraisal.

“Okay, so Bluff Senior, Charles Bluff, Big Cheese Bluff, recently completed an amicable divorce,” Meg explained, “and one of the many consolation prizes for the Mrs. Bluff is that she's starting her own foundation. She's even borrowing a couple of our people to get started. It's unclear, but it sounds like she might be into the sensational, big-headline items in women's-rights philanthropy—sex trafficking, FGM, and also stuff like ‘women's empowerment,' micro-enterprise, self-esteem…” Meg trailed off.

“Sounds promising!” Jen said.

“It's…diffuse, at best. They're looking for a communications person. Best-case scenario, you get a blank slate and fill it in however you want. Worst-case scenario, it's a silly stopgap until the dark times are over. Either way, though, would it be weird to be employed by a divorce settlement?”

“What's actually weird is that I think last month Jim and I spent more money on cat food than people food,” Jen said, swallowing. She had once again broken a rule she'd tried to set for conversations with Meg: that talking about something being expensive was sometimes okay, but talking about
money
—actual units of currency unto themselves, as opposed to how many units of those currency might be required to make a particular purchase—was not okay.

“Well, let me get you hooked up with the hiring people,” Meg said. “And send me your résumé again—you changed the font on it, right?”

“Yes,” Jen said. Meg felt that the loops on the
g
's and
q
's on a previous iteration of Jen's résumé were too large, connoting flightiness, and that the spacing between characters was too ample, connoting standoffishness.

“And wait a second,” Meg said. “You know who the Mrs. Bluff is, right?”

“Um,” Jen said. “She's on TV?”

Leora Infinitas, aka the Mrs. Bluff, the founder of LIFt, was born Leeza Infanzia in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1960, on the same day John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States. As Ruby Stevens-Meisel—pseudonymous sole proprietor of the gossip and philosophy website
DOPENHAUER
and her generation's leading Infinitas scholar—wrote in her magnum opus, “Leora Infinitas Is the Fulcrum of the Universe,” “The fates chose an auspicious day to launch a life that would know both triumph and tragedy. One of the first tragedies—and first opportunities for triumph—was one of nomenclature.
Leeza Infanzia
was a name both bombastic and belittling—
Leeza
a bastardized diminutive, and when paired with
Infanzia
taking on the bathos of a Raphael Madonna-and-child rendered as a refrigerator magnet.”

“I was chubby. I wasn't cute,” Leora Infinitas once said of her childhood self. “I wasn't an easy child to love, visually.”

Barely out of her teens, Leeza Infanzia moved to Los Angeles, signing up for acting and dance auditions under her new name, Leora Infinitas. “Her name, its meaning, was now a speech act:
I am infinite light,
” Stevens-Meisel wrote. “She is beacon and power source; she is an illuminated manuscript. And yet this new text knowingly slant-rhymed with
Leeza Infanzia
—not leaving Leeza in the dark but rather shining a light through the palimpsest that is
Leora Infinitas,
paying tribute to the young woman who was not (yet) a mother, who first had to give (re)birth to herself.”

Leora Infinitas got bit roles in procedural television dramas and could be spotted, for three and a half seconds, two dancers behind Lionel Richie in the “All Night Long” video. Her breakthrough role arrived at the end of the 1980s: Trudy Wheeler née Gunderson, the brassy, no-nonsense wife to a nutty inventor and mother to his two sons on the sitcom
Father of Invention
née
Inventing the Wheelers
. Trudy spent the next eight years tripping over circuit boards powering cold-fusion experiments conducted on vintage Blue Comet train sets and pratfalling over domino structures that climaxed in the fusion of copper wire and silver nitrate. And each time Trudy found a fleet of white lab mice using her pantry as a buffet spread or that the boys had swapped her shampoo for disappearing ink, at the moment of recognition, she would deliver her catchphrase: “I am out; I am dunzo.”

The genius of Leora Infinitas—or the part of her genius that helped make her a muse for drag performers, but only once
Father of Invention
had moldered in syndication for years, “only once the wine of Leora had aged,” Stevens-Meisel wrote, “only once the complex chemical equation of Leora had intensified its flavor compounds”—was in her ability to find variation upon variation in those mere seven syllables. “I am out; I am dunzo” could deliver rat-tat-tat staccato frustration. “I am out; I am dunzo” could sound a howl of despair. “I am out; I am dunzo” could be a sigh of exhaustion, or a bleat of coquettish bemusement, or a fond surrender to the ineffable lovability of her three charges, no matter how many times they exploded her oven.

Celebrity-magazine editors and talk-show bookers relished the visual contrast between Trudy-Leora (patterned sweatshirts, high-waisted jeans) and Leora-Leora, who wore lots of red: red lips, red stilettos, diaphanous bias-cut red silk, a biker jacket in artery blast. Over time, the contrast faded. In later seasons of
Father of Invention,
the viewer may have paused over why Trudy would need five-inch stilettos and a blowout to clean the always-exploding oven. By then Leora had married Brent Simons, the twenty-five-years-older creator of the show and its equally lucrative spinoff
Son of a Gunderson,
and Leora had borne his two youngest children on a schedule that mapped onto
Father of Invention
's summer hiatus. “In all things,” Stevens-Meisel wrote, “Leora had a sense of timing—or like light itself, she transcended time.”

Leora Infinitas, sitcom star, won wacky supporting parts in ensemble comedy films, voice-over roles in video games, her own jewelry and makeup lines. Her divorce from Simons was amicable, save for one spectacular conflagration over a koi pond surrounded by faux-Bernini figures depicting moments of sexual enslavement in Roman mythology, a conflict simultaneously so melodramatic, so inane, and so at odds with its otherwise affable context that Ruby Stevens-Meisel hypothesized that the whole episode was a bit of publicity-enhancing theater ahead of the premiere of her new reality show,
Leora's World,
a hypnotic chronicle of her flinty encounters with her staff and/or friends, with her sulky pair of preteen daughters, and with her would-be colleagues in her nascent quest to become a “philanthropy innovator.”

When Leora and Brent Simons split up, the tabloid headlines read
DUNZO
. When she married Charles Bluff—he of the railroad Bluffs, he of the onetime-third-largest-private-landowners-in-the-northeast–United States Bluffs, he of the impeccable Bluff Foundation Bluffs, to which all other would-be boldface philanthropy innovators aspired—the headlines read
DUNZO NO MORE
. The chasm of class was a subtext of both the marriage and
Leora's World
itself, most noticeably during the second season's sixth episode, which was built around Leora's thwarted efforts to corner the septuagenarian financier's widow, revered art patron,
Mayflower
and Mitford descendant, and noted shy person Flossie Durbin at a hospital benefit. After filming, representatives of Mrs. Durbin—a trustee of the Bluff Foundation who also happened to blog semiannually about art shows she'd seen and liked—had personally interceded with Charles Bluff to have all references to Mrs. Durbin excised from the final broadcast.

“What this strange and bowdlerized episode tells us,” Stevens-Meisel wrote in one of her exhaustive scene-by-scene recaps of
Leora's World
, “is that even a six-carat imprimatur of legal entry into a Citadel of extreme wealth and privilege cannot succeed in dazzling its true residents. Leora's world is not one and the same with that forbidding fortress—she may be
in
it, but she is not (yet)
of
it.”

Like Trudy, the Leora of
Leora's World
had her very own catchphrase, uttered spontaneously a few times to a soon-to-be-fired wedding planner, and then encouraged by producers. The catchphrase: “Who am I to you?” While “I am out; I am dunzo” was subject to endless variation, “Who am I to you?” had one correct intonation: the smallest susurrating pause on the
Who,
the
am I to you
a torrent, a rapids. The catchphrase nailed Leora's charisma—it was both narcissistic and solicitous; it demanded an account of her Leora-ness and acknowledged her need for acknowledgment. “Examined over five seasons of
Leora's World,
Who am I to you?
interrogated the erosion of a woman's identity when that identity has been built on beauty, desirability—the currency of youth,” Stevens-Meisel wrote. “By the end of the show's run, however, Leora's newfound identity as a philanthropic innovator with a sparkling new foundation had rendered the question moot. We no longer lived in
Leora's World.
Now Leora belonged to the world.”