Sociable

by Rebecca Harrington

  “As for Andrea sitting on my lap, she was just telling me this story about how a guy said she couldn’t sit on his lap because she was too heavy. And I was like, ‘That’s crazy,’ because you know how skinny she is, I mean, she’s tiny. So she just sat on my lap, and I was like, ‘That guy is crazy.’ I was trying to be nice, okay? And you just took that completely out of context. Oh my god, Elinor,” said Mike.

  Elinor could see he had tears in his eyes—pinpricks of shininess in his overlarge corneas. Soon, they would plop onto his peacoat. Elinor was not shocked—as she had seen Mike cry many times in their relationship. He was probably quite drunk, but at the same time, it was possible he wasn’t.

  “Why are you crying?” whispered Elinor.

  “I don’t want you to feel bad, okay?” said Mike. He took Elinor’s hand and made her look at him. Tears were all over the collar of his peacoat now. “But you’re twisting everything around! I literally didn’t do anything. I can’t believe you’re attacking me like this.”

  “Stop,” said Elinor. Maybe she was attacking him? She didn’t know what she was doing. “Don’t cry, okay? I don’t feel that bad. It’s actually okay.”

  “I was not at all flirting with Andrea. I wasn’t!”

  “Okay. I know you weren’t. But it’s just really hard for me to go to a party like that. I was literally attacked by like, this crazed animal?”

  “Come here,” said Mike, pulling Elinor close to him so that her shoulder was jutting into the button of his peacoat. “I love you. You have to trust that I didn’t mean it and I didn’t do anything.”

  Elinor put her head on Mike’s peacoat. The wool scratched her ear. Maybe the party had put her in a bad mood. Everyone was talking about getting a job or having a job and there was nothing worse.

  Elinor had been in New York City for two years and four months and had not had a journalism job the entire time. She was nannying for a family. One of the children spoke only in short, high screams. Fraunces was his name. This was not what she had pictured herself doing. For as long as she could remember she had wanted to be a writer. She was actually trying to do that! It was just hard. Writing was very hard and soul crushing. Literally anyone would tell you that.

  When she went to parties like these—journalism networking parties, which Mike somehow always knew about and took her to even though she wasn’t invited—she felt a curious sense of impermanence, a feeling that she could dissolve into the floor. When she heard Mike say things like he wanted to write long-form reported pieces even though he was a fact-checker in his daily life, it sounded so real, such a normal thing for him to say. She didn’t doubt that he would eventually do it, even. But when she tried to describe herself (a freelancer, she said), she sounded like a grifter who exaggerates her background as part of a long con. She always wished she had something better to say—a story about herself that would inspire a quick, sly look of admiration or a small uptick of respect at the end of an inquiry. So yes, parties were stressful. It would make anyone fight with anyone.

  “That will be twenty-six dollars,” said the cabdriver. Elinor took out a wad of bills she’d made babysitting and paid. The cabdriver was happy because it was cash.

  * * *

  · · ·

  A mere two days before this, an emergency meeting was taking place at a journalism start-up in New York City. The office was on the seventh floor of a warehouse in Soho. A hundred years ago, perhaps, this was a building where people routinely got their hair caught in a loom machine. Now there was blond wood on the floor and a bunch of temporary-looking tables with laptops on them.

  Two men were sitting around one of the tables. One of them was in his early twenties. One was nearer to middle age. His hair was ash colored and long in the back. There was a web of broken capillaries covering his nose. He rubbed his temple.

  “I can’t believe she quit,” he said. He stood up from his chair and stared at the street. “Especially in the wake of what happened.”

  “I know,” said the twenty-something. He had an unsightly tattoo on the inside of his wrist. Otherwise, he was dressed in an oxford shirt that was buttoned all the way up to the collar. He looked both morbid and handsome, like a Victorian scientist. His name was Peter. “She said it wasn’t personal.”

  “I know that,” snapped the middle-aged man, whose name was John Wallace Thurgood. Most people called him J.W. That was his byline at his old paper. “I don’t really care whether it was personal or not.”

  “Well, I figured you might want to know that. Because she did say that.” Peter pushed his tongue against the inside of his cheek and then blew air out of his mouth. For a fundamentally serious man, he had a penchant for the theatrical, old-fashioned gesture.

  J.W. returned to staring out the window. He felt panicky, which was not uncommon in his new life as the executive editor of news partnerships and media strategy at Journalism.ly. Elizabeth, a twenty-four-year-old idiot, somehow had a very important job for reasons he was unclear about. He had worked here for only six months, but even so, he had yet to understand why some jobs here were more important than other jobs. Everyone seemed like they did the same thing. They just found videos of cats rolling around on the ground or compiled lists about being an introvert. Only J.W. had to cold-call Andrew Cuomo and ask him for sponsored content (he refused).

  What he did know was that Sean seemed mad that Elizabeth had quit, especially in the wake of an article called “What Journalism.ly Needs to Do to Compete in the Online World (And What It’s Not Doing),” which had been published on another website called Memo Points Daily. Sean was either defiantly truculent or unaccountably wounded in the face of any online attacks, and this time, he had been very wounded. He had already written J.W. asking for a meeting to “come up with a game plan for a coordinated response to the article.” Sean might even blame J.W. for what Journalism.ly needed to do and was not doing! J.W. himself had been hired in response to an article on Business Insider called “How Journalism.ly Can Live Up to Its Name (By Hiring Actual Journalists!).” He never did figure that out, however.

  “Personally, I think we dodged a bullet,” said Peter. “She never hacked participation. You have to hack participation. It’s the currency of the Internet. I sat down with her so many times, trying to explain things.”

  Sometimes, J.W. would look up from his computer and stare at an unfixed point on a temporary wall, and feel like he didn’t know how or why he’d ended up working at Journalism.ly. For five years he had worked at The Village Voice, and for fourteen normal years, he had worked at the New Jersey Star-Ledger. After years of being a stringer, a copy editor, a beat reporter, and a reporting editor, he finally got a job as a political reporter nine years ago. He thought he was going to do that for the rest of his life. It was a great job. The mayor called him Johnny Boy. At cocktail parties, he would regale people with stories of uncorroborated extramarital affairs between low-level staffers. At the end of his time at the Ledger, he was even writing a political column called “Thoughts and Musings.” They gave stuff like that only to people who had really paid their dues.

  Then, out of nowhere (well, out of somewhere—ads had been dwindling at the paper for years), he got laid off. He had just finished a “Thoughts and Musings” column called “Get a Life, Chris Christie.” It was the last one he ever did for the paper. This was followed by twenty-two months of terrifying unemployment, in which J.W. freelanced and went to networking coffees, meet ups, and journalism conferences to try to make people remember him and offer him a job. He had the occasional conversation with an employed peer that would stanch his panic—and then his follow-up emails, though studiously casual (“Hi! Just following up on our conversation the other day”) would remain ignored, and what could he do about it? Despite the fact that this era of unemployment had ostensibly ended, memories of it would sometimes engulf him while he was doing ordinary tasks, like taking dishes out of the dishwasher.

  “Well, I guess we have to replace her,” said J.W.
wearily. “Sean apparently got a name from Pam Johnson of a girl to interview.”

  J.W. had gotten an email from Sean to this effect this morning—it consisted of a very long subject line with a phone number in it. Sean had a lot of very famous journalism friends, of which Pam Johnson, polemical essayist, was one. They always seemed to have more weight and influence than people who actually worked at the company, like J.W.

  “We don’t have very much time. Sean wants this taken care of in the next couple of weeks. Especially with the election gearing up? He’s pretty upset about this,” said Peter.

  J.W. gave Peter a filthy look, which Peter didn’t acknowledge or even seem to understand. Before this job, Peter had never written a story professionally and instead had simply impressed Sean at a student journalism conference. Very soon after that, Peter was installed as managing editor, even though usually, at the New Jersey Star-Ledger, for example, that took forty years. Apparently, Sean liked his “vibe” and the way he “got” social media. It wasn’t, perhaps, the most stringent editing role (because no one edited anything that ever went on the site), but Peter basically oversaw operations and sometimes wrote think pieces—his own thoughts and musings! Was being a managing editor better than being an executive editor of news partnerships and media strategy? Maybe? Probably. The thought of this filled J.W. with bitterness, especially while he was doing something like asking the president of Quaker Oats to write a blog about oatmeal (he said no).

  “Sean’s upset?”

  “Yes,” said Peter, peremptorily. Peter’s tenure at the company was slightly longer than J.W’s, so sometimes he would get very strident when telling a story about an event that had happened several months previous—like only he was the keeper of history. “She was the daughter of a good friend of his. Plus she did our tweetstorms. So, it’s pretty problematic.”

  Elizabeth was very thin and mean. She had pointy ears, a triangular chin, and a butt that looked like two tennis balls. She might have been the child of a minorly famous person, if J.W. remembered correctly. That was why she didn’t care about being paid so little.

  “Okay,” said J.W. He had protested Twitter at first. “How can you express yourself in 140 characters?” he said in a “Thoughts and Musings” column in 2009. “ ‘I’m eating.’ Does everyone need to know that?” In 2010, he got a Twitter account. Now he tweeted all the time. He thought he was pretty good at it. Sometimes he would make jokes. Or he would weigh in on New Jersey politics, but not too much, since that wasn’t his thing anymore. Very rarely, if ever, did he get in squabbles with other journalists, but he certainly watched fights with glee and avidity.

  “Well, let’s get on the stick with the hiring,” said J.W. “I’ve got a lot of work to do.” He left then, even though he didn’t really have anyplace to go.

  * * *

  · · ·

  A hazy light flitted through the prison bars affixed to all the windows in Elinor and Mike’s apartment. It was the morning.

  “El,” Mike said. They were in bed together and Mike was propped up on his cylindrical arm, checking his phone. Elinor was lying on her side and staring blankly at the table where they kept their toaster and a dirty, mustard-colored vial of salt. That was their kitchen. “You are never going to believe this.”

  “What?” said Elinor. Mike absentmindedly tightened his arm around her waist. Elinor felt hollow. She had been up since 4:00 a.m. thinking about how unattractive it was that she had focused much of her spooling, rather incoherent invective on Andrea, a fellow woman. It made her seem jealous when she wasn’t at all. She didn’t even care about Andrea. She was just drunk and stressed out about the party because they were talking about jobs there. No wonder Mike had reacted the way he had reacted. She resolved to be docile and sweet-tempered for the rest of the time.

  “Andrea emailed me this morning. Apparently, she emailed her bosses and now they want me to come in for that position at Memo Points Daily?”

  “Mike, what? Really?” said Elinor, who felt a strum of anxiety that Andrea had emailed Mike, and blinked very hard. She tried to blot this feeling out by turning around and burrowing her head into Mike’s shoulder. Mike hugged her back while at the same time looking over her shoulder, his eyes on the harsh whiteness of his screen, which was the most piercing light source in the room (they had no lamps).

  “I knew she really liked my think piece about where America’s trash goes. She told me last night she always liked my writing.”

  “That’s so great.”

  “I have to go in Monday. Do you think I will have time to polish up my piece this weekend?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “But we have dinner with my parents tonight. Fuck.”

  “We can’t cancel that. They scheduled it two weeks ago.”

  “Well, fuck, Elinor, I want to do a good job?”

  “You will do a good job,” said Elinor, from Mike’s shoulder. “You always do.”

  “Fuck,” said Mike. “I can’t fucking believe this. Richard Cooley works at Memo Points Daily. Fuck.” Richard Cooley was a former New Yorker reporter who’d recently left the magazine after Memo Points Daily offered him half a million dollars. He was appointed their executive supervising editor. His Twitter icon was a cartoon version of his face. In that image, he had square glasses. Elinor didn’t know what he looked like in real life.

  “What’s the job?” she asked.

  “They want a new politics guy? For the election? I think it’s more of a writing position or else why would they want to see all my clips and stuff?”

  Elinor got on top of Mike and kissed him on the lips. She could feel the hairs on his legs jutting into the hairs on her legs. Her legs sprouted hairs, it seemed, in the middle of the night. “Do you want to get something to eat?”

  “Oh, El,” said Mike. He adjusted her face downward and kissed her forehead. Elinor swallowed some of her own spit and realized it tasted like sour milk mixed with something almost chemical, like glue. She fastened her lips together in a line. She hoped Mike wouldn’t be able to smell it. “I really have to get that piece in good shape. I want it to be in the best shape possible for Monday. Especially if we have to go to a dinner party at my parents’ tonight.”

  “Okay,” said Elinor. Mike had a diligence about work that intimidated her. Before they dated, she used to always see him in the library, writing on a yellow pad with a ballpoint pen, even though everyone else just used computers. “I understand.”

  “I love you, baby. You’re so cute. You’re such a cutie,” said Mike in the babyish voice he sometimes used with her.

  “I love you too,” said Elinor. She knew this was a conclusion of their time in bed together. Mike made certain rote overtures in the prelude to hooking up (he touched her breasts, he breathed into her neck, he put his erection into her leg), and he was doing none of those things now. He was still holding his phone tightly in the other hand. Elinor kissed his neck with her pursed lips.

  “I don’t think she would email unless there was a very good chance, do you?”

  “I don’t.” Mike applied a slight pressure to the left side of her body, and she dismounted to the right of him. “Do you know what the salary is?”

  “I mean, I’m sure it’s fine enough or else she wouldn’t have emailed me,” said Mike. He sounded annoyed. It didn’t really matter how well it paid anyway. It was a stupid question. Mike’s parents were still kind of supporting him, he made way more money than Elinor right now, and he was much better about money than she was anyway. For example, he hadn’t wanted to take a cab last night. She had made them. Despite her actual lack of money, there was something in her that inexorably pushed to the mildest extravagances, like Madame Bovary. “I think it’s just good experience no matter what. Wow, I’ve got to get going.” His narrow, jointless body sat up.

  Mike and Elinor lived in a basement apartment on Ninety-fourth Street and First Avenue. It didn’t have a stove. They slept on a foam pad that they kept on the floor. Th
e sheets always came off the sides of the pad, but when they’d moved here, they couldn’t afford a bed and eventually it just seemed like too much of a hassle to buy one. Sometimes the pad would fold in half, almost magically, if a pillow wasn’t on it.

  Mike walked over to his computer, which he kept on the oblong wooden desk next to the biggest of the barred windows. He took out a stack of legal pads from a drawer underneath the desk and slammed them authoritatively on the desktop.

  Elinor got up from the foam pad. She pulled the sheets over the pad in a lump and tried to make them neat in some way, but they just bunched together like pieces of lint stuck to a coat. Then she went to the table to make herself a cup of coffee. If she didn’t like coffee so much, she would have thrown the coffeemaker out. It took up a lot of space.

  “I heard Peter has a job,” said Mike. He plopped down on his desk chair, pajama pants sagging, and started to peruse his legal pads, which were mostly blank.

  “Really?” said Elinor, as she scooped coffee into the coffeemaker. Peter was Mike’s sort-of friend. They had been the two top students at communications school. Elinor remembered a particular long group dinner where they had both discussed the inner workings of the communications school with a kind of byzantine shorthand that Elinor, even though she was also a student there, was at a loss to understand. Elinor didn’t say much at that dinner. She remembered looking at the paper place mat on her table, which was advertising a two-for-one margarita night. That image sometimes resurfaced in her dreams. “Who told you that?”

  “One of the people at the party, I forget who— Get this, he’s working for Journalism.ly.”

  “Oh,” said Elinor. “I’ve heard of that.”

  “Yeah. It’s Sean Patterson’s company. Tim Patterson’s son?”

  “I know who Tim Patterson is,” said Elinor. Mike sometimes acted as if Elinor had no knowledge of journalism, which was funny because they had met in communications school, so obviously she did. “He was on 20/20 for, like, fifty years. My dad likes him.”