The Decent Proposal

For Adam

Only connect!

—E. M. FORSTER,
HOWARDS END

BEFORE GRAY HAIR,
or crow's-feet, or achy backs and fickle knees, there is one sign of aging that makes its appearance early enough to bewilder its young(ish) victims instead of alarming them, as it should. And so one morning a few weeks after his twenty-ninth birthday, Richard Baumbach awoke in a state of bewilderment:

Since when had the hangovers gotten
this
bad?

Lifting a twisted rope of bedsheet from his naked chest, Richard placed it beside him with a tenderness usually reserved for more sentient occupants of his bed, and braced himself for vertical alignment.
Here goes
, he thought.
You can do this. Come on. One, two, three . . . go!

Nothing moved other than his brain, which beat steadily against his skull.

He tried picturing the bright green Brita pitcher inside his refrigerator door: the cool, refreshing water it contained. But
the mere thought of brightness made his eyeballs retreat painfully in their sockets like hermit crabs darting inside their shells, and his stomach lurched at the suggestion of anything green. He switched to the aspirin waiting for him in his medicine cabinet: chalky-white, inoffensive, holding out the promise of an end to his misery. Two tablets was the recommended dose, but for this
Hindenburg
of a headache he would allow himself four . . . if he ever managed to get up.

Nothing to it
, he pretended.
Piece of cake, easy as pie.

Ugh, dessert-based idioms were not the way to go.

Get. Up. Now!

For one glorious moment the throbbing sensation disappeared inside the
whoosh
of upward momentum and he became a believer in miracles. His headache was gone; he was cured! Then his feet hit the floor and his head came to a stop, igniting in a series of fiery explosions that—even in the midst of his pain—he likened to the climactic sequence of one of those nineties action movies viewed routinely on his DVR. Thinking about his DVR only added to his pain, however, his wince deepening from minor toothache to full-blown lemonface as he shuffled to the bathroom. Just yesterday the cable guy had come at his request to take away everything, including his beloved DVR. He had no Wi-Fi now, and in a fit of martyrdom he'd even canceled his Netflix streaming account, which he supposed he could have used on his laptop in coffee shops. But he had decided the eight bucks a month was eight bucks he could no longer afford in the face of a credit card bill that had begun not so much accumulating as metastasizing from one month to the next.

Richard dumped six aspirin into his shaky palm and lapped up a mouthful of water directly from the tap. (Screw the Brita.) For one who supposedly worked in film and television, it was more than a little mortifying to lose the ability to watch films
and television inside his home. But this was what his life had become.

He collapsed onto his couch, facedown, like a corpse. It was thoughts like these that had led to several rounds of homemade cocktails the night before with his “business” partner, Keith. They'd only recently begun adding the quotation marks, and when Keith had pointed out halfway through the evening that they were having a
literal
pity party for themselves, Richard had pretended to be amused. He turned his head aside now and eyed the Bombay Sapphire still sitting, uncapped, on his coffee table.
Et tu, Bombay?
he asked it silently, unable, even in his dejection, to overcome his weakness for terrible puns, which was nearly as acute as his weakness for gin-and-tonics, and for madcap plans like starting his own production company with nothing to recommend him other than his (alleged) wits and youthful audacity. Three years ago, he and Keith had quit their jobs as glorified assistants for an established film producer to strike out on their own, and Richard feared that “striking out” was precisely what they'd done. Nowadays they worked out of each other's apartments with extended stints at a Coffee Bean in the Valley alongside all the other unemployed writers, actors, and producers whose irregular schedules ensured L.A.'s world-famous traffic would never be confined to a few simple “rush” hours in the day. True, they'd made some progress: Two Guys One Corp had sold a few feature screenplays, a pilot script or two. But despite considerable hustling and bustling, the much-sought-after green light to production remained elusive, a distant mirage always
just
out of reach. And until they reached it, there would be no money coming in.

Keith's parents had been supporting him for a while now, but Richard couldn't ask his parents for money they didn't have, mainly for fear they'd try to give it to him anyway. He'd finally exhausted the last of his savings from his previous job; he'd even
depleted his pathetic little IRA. The time had come to be a cog in someone else's wheel again, but the Great Recession had affected Hollywood as much as any other industry, and he wasn't even sure he could land a job as solid as the one he'd left three years ago. Was he going to have to
work
at the Coffee Bean in the Valley? Maybe move there too, abandon the fashionable Silver Lake neighborhood he loved so much?
First-world problems
, he reminded himself. And yet they were real problems; they were his problems, because he wasn't ready to give up on the dream he'd dreamt beneath his
Star Wars
sheets twenty years ago in the suburbs of Boston.

Richard sat up, buoyed somewhat by the aspirin beginning to work its way through his system, but also by the blessings of a native sanguinity. So what if he had to work a soul-sucking job for a while? He'd do what needed to be done; he'd get back on his feet. Every time he contemplated his ongoing struggle to become a successful Hollywood producer, it wasn't long before that struggle began resembling the training montage from
Rocky
(any of them, though if pushed, he preferred the one from
Rocky IV
). Now he imagined himself toiling away at some sort of backbreaking manual labor involving lumber, or slabs of concrete, and copious smudges of grease across his face. He pictured himself waking up before dawn (it didn't matter that this had never happened in his life, not even once), putting in a hard day's work and then conferring with his faithful business partner late into the night, too virtuous and exhausted to spend the money that accumulated—slowly, but surely—in his ravaged bank account. Each week he'd check his balance online—no, forget that, he'd be paid in cash—and every Friday he'd watch the dollar bills rise, the pile growing steadily as the weeks went by, slowly at first, then faster, until the pile became a
tower
, so tall that down it came, bills swirling in a seamless smashcut to the confetti at the premiere party for his and Keith's first movie,
to which he would invite all his brothers in arms from the . . . lumberyard/drilling place. And as he entered the banquet hall they'd cheer, clapping their red and calloused hands, and there might even be a few man-tears as they hoisted him on their shoulders and he looked down upon the astonished world, and beamed.

If, just then, a supernatural creature with powers of teleportation and prophecy had wiggled into view and announced that by the end of the week Richard's money woes would be over, first, he would have put on some pants, because at the moment he was wearing only boxers and they were by no means fit for company. Second, he would have feigned disbelief, but only, third, while secretly believing that
of course
it was true, it
had
to be true. Because he was still innocent enough to believe only good things would come his way, in a life that had every appearance of stretching endlessly before him.

Richard jumped up from the couch and this time the miracle stuck: headache gone, stomach settled. He retrieved his phone from underneath a pile of yesterday's clothes, yelping when he saw the time. 12:45,
yikes.
He had a meeting in less than two hours. Time to start his day.

“LA MÁQUINA!”

Elizabeth Santiago looked up from her desk, suppressing with great difficulty an intense urge to roll her eyes. From the hallway outside, a muscular man in suspenders was pointing at her. She stared at his perfectly manicured fingernail.

“Time to get yo lunch on!”

Oh, hell no.
She tilted her head in the direction of a thermal lunch bag sitting on one of the chairs opposite her desk.

“La Máquina strikes again!” the man bellowed, shaking his head and grinning. Elizabeth grinned back, trying not to focus on the gelled rhino-horn of hair glistening atop his head. He
was a fourth-year, wasn't he? What was his name? Jake? Jack? Jock? Why was she so terrible with names?

But it didn't matter, because he was already on the move again:

“La Máquina, La Máquina, La Máquina!”

He sounded like Speedy Gonzalez shouting
arriba arriba, ándale ándale!
As his voice faded down the hallway, Elizabeth unleashed the eye-roll she'd been suppressing. She glanced at the bottom of her screen: 2 hours, 26 minutes, and 41 seconds had elapsed since she'd begun reviewing the inch-thick document lying in pieces on her desk, and she hadn't looked up once. It was no mystery why everyone called her La Máquina (Spanish for “the Machine”). At first it was a nickname her colleagues used behind her back when she billed the most hours of any first-year associate at the firm, worldwide. (For the record: 3,352. Which was insane. And unsustainable.) At some point in her second year an accidental cc had clued her in, and it had required only a few seconds of calculation to craft a good-natured reply and sign it, “La Máquina.” No harm done. But from there, the moniker had exploded till every lawyer in every department, and even a few of her clients, were using it.

She clicked off the timer at the bottom of the screen. There were those who suspected her of inflating her numbers, so she was especially vigilant about her timekeeping. For every two hours billed, a standard corporate lawyer spent approximately three hours in the office. This ratio accounted for regular human activities such as chatting with coworkers, surfing the Internet, eating lunch, and going to the bathroom. But in a ten- to twelve-hour workday, Elizabeth billed a staggering nine to ten hours regularly. She was always polite but never friendly; most days she brought her lunch instead of eating in the Lawyers' Dining Room with everyone else; she even made a habit of not drinking too many fluids throughout the day, thereby limiting
her bathroom breaks to two: one midmorning, one midafternoon. She never went above 3,000 hours after that first year, but she routinely hit the high 2,000s.

Elizabeth knew she ran the risk of creating enemies by committing the double sin of shunning her coworkers
and
outpacing them, which was why she endured her nickname. It helped neutralize her otherness, which didn't come so much from her Mexican descent as from her steely reserve, her robotic ability to block out the noise others found so enticing. She was simply “La Máquina,” the weird Latina who kept to herself and whose social life was a mystery, but who
more
than pulled her weight in the Mergers & Acquisitions Department of Slate Drubble & Greer, despite outweighing every female colleague in the office (stick-thin white girls, for the most part). She had become one of the family, even if she was the eccentric spinster aunt who kept to herself, an “odd duck,” as the original Drubble's great-grandson had put it to her drunkenly one holiday party while invading her personal space. And as an eighth-year associate, she was practically guaranteed at a mere thirty-three years old to become a partner sometime in the coming year. All she had to do was keep on grinning, or nodding, or pointing whenever one of her colleagues accosted her with those two magic words she could just as easily have complained about to HR. Good ol' La Máquina.

Elizabeth closed her door, grabbing her lunch on the way back to her desk. She was expected to keep her door open unless she had a meeting, but she reasoned that lunch was a sort of meeting—
food, meet mouth
—and closed it for the five minutes spent inhaling whatever it was she brought from home. Today, however, she lingered over her PB&J, staring at the hideous painting behind her desk, a cartoonishly simplistic portrait of a scowling, peach-colored career woman in an eighties-era power suit, a sleeve of which had been pulled up to flex an absurdly
oversized bicep. “We Can Do It!” the woman bellowed by means of a neon-yellow dialogue bubble above her head. It was a play on the famous World War II image often incorrectly identified as Rosie the Riveter, which was how Amber Hudson had referred to it while bestowing it on Elizabeth with great fanfare. Amber was Elizabeth's unofficial partner mentor, a woman who used phrases such as “having it all” and “you go, girl!” without a scintilla of irony, and while Elizabeth never would have chosen this ugly, distracting piece for herself (it looked like the work of an eighth grader), it had been impossible to decline. Once she made partner, her office would be hers alone to decorate. She turned away from the painting, glancing automatically at the time on her computer screen. At two thirty that afternoon she had a meeting with another lawyer, which was unremarkable except that she didn't know the lawyer, or his firm, and had been instructed the meeting was of a “personal nature.” When she had asked for more information, she'd been told that all would be revealed in the meeting. Elizabeth did not like surprises, and had taken it upon herself to discover what little she could ahead of time.

She knew that Jonathan Hertzfeld was a partner at a boutique law firm in Century City specializing in estates planning—wills and trusts and other instruments meant to stave off or at least temper the vagaries of passing through this uncertain world. The most likely scenario was that someone had died and left her property, except that she didn't know anyone who had died, or who was rich enough to leave her anything in the first place. Elizabeth had grown up less than twenty miles from her office in Beverly Hills, but it was a neighborhood she was willing to bet Jonathan Hertzfeld had never visited, or even passed through in his car. And there was no one from her adult life she could imagine wanting to make her a gift significant enough to require a lawyer. For at least the tenth time since setting the meet
ing yesterday, she wondered what it could possibly be about. A shiver might even have run up her spine in this moment if it hadn't been thwarted by the mundane business of crunching into an apple, upon which she focused for the next minute and a half.