Sociable

by Rebecca Harrington

  “What year are you?” asked Mike.

  “I’m a senior.”

  “Me too! How come I don’t know you?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Mike chuckled.

  “I like your honesty. Everyone else I have ever met would have acted like they didn’t actually know me but secretly they would have known me? I love that you didn’t do that. It’s so fucking shitty.”

  “Oh thanks,” said Elinor. She became red. “Yeah, that’s so dumb.”

  “Where do you think you have seen me?” he asked her, looking at her in an unblinking way. “I want to know.”

  “I don’t know—around, I guess,” said Elinor, feeling a little uncomfortable. “We take this class together so maybe that’s it.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Mike, looking, Elinor thought, slightly disappointed. He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. He had sweat into the front of the hat slightly, but Elinor still thought he was handsome. He had small, determined features and well-cut clothing. Plus, she thought writing things on legal pads was kind of cool. Elinor just took notes on her laptop. “Do you like the class?”

  “It’s okay. Do you?”

  “The professor’s a fucking idiot.”

  “Yeah,” Elinor agreed. When she thought about it, she didn’t like him much either. He spat when he talked. There were so many lectures about the female reporter who had dressed up like a mental patient and hid in a mental hospital and won a prize. Elinor had forgotten her name. She knew she was right about thinking this class was so boring. Elinor’s father said she often said things were boring when she didn’t understand them enough. That was why he made her go on the high school debate team, the biggest disaster of her life.

  “I’m so glad you said that! I thought I was going nuts. Everyone likes him, even though he’s fucking crazy. There was this amazing infographic on Think Lab the other day that completely rebutted his lecture on Tuesday. I’ll send it to you, but essentially, it just traces the way freedom of the press evolved throughout history and how it’s contracting. It’s truly scary.”

  “Wow,” said Elinor. Mike seemed very serious, and Elinor was rather impressed. She wished she sounded like that—finding granular information on Think Lab, a site she had only vaguely heard of, and then recalling it, as if it had somehow become part of her marrow. She studied and got good grades, but that was mere application. This guy sounded like he was really brilliant. “That’s so cool.”

  “I kind of hate the Internet too,” said Mike. “Like, I go on and off Facebook. I’m not on Instagram. But I do read Think Lab.”

  “I’ve totally heard of Think Lab.”

  “I bet you love the Internet. I bet you’re always on Instagram. Hashtagging your pumpkin spice latte or something?”

  “Ha-ha,” said Elinor, stung. Did she look really lame? Was that so lame to do, anyway? Because she had actually Instagrammed a latte, but like, two years ago, before it was a thing. And so many people she knew still did it. At least she wasn’t still doing it! “No way. I mean, I have an Instagram, but everyone does.”

  “I bet it’s all lattes. Let me look at your Instagram.”

  “No,” said Elinor. “Besides, you don’t even know my name. And I’m private. Maybe I won’t confirm you.”

  “I’ll figure it out,” said Mike, smiling at her.

  It was at this point that Elinor realized Mike was really different from any guy she had known before. For example, in her sophomore year, she’d dated one of the guys who lived below her in her apartment building. He was small and wore large shirts. He was friends with all the guys downstairs, but in the particular way men have, his roommates always treated him with a benign tolerance and no real affinity, sort of like he had always been invited at the last minute to fill in for someone else. He laughed very eagerly at most jokes and loved to play video games. They dated for only three months and they didn’t even break up. They just stopped hooking up one day like they had forgotten about each other. Mike could feel a surging, moralistic passion without humiliation. He could rescue her from her most potent fears about herself—the banality that she sometimes worried didn’t even have the virtue of a particular visual idiom. This is what Elinor desperately craved even though she wouldn’t have put it quite like that.

  Mike and Elinor studied next to each other for the next two hours. At the end of it, Mike stood up and yawned.

  “Well, I need to go to a meeting at the Quill,” he said. The Quill was the alternative magazine on campus. Mike, she vaguely remembered, was an editor there or something? She had tried to get on it her freshman year and they had rejected her. It wasn’t a big deal though; it was a very competitive process.

  “Can I get your number though?”

  “My number?” said Elinor.

  “If you want to go over any of this stuff.”

  “Okay,” said Elinor. She tried to hide her shock. He wanted to talk to her more about what stuff? She told him her number.

  “I’ll text you,” said Mike. He put his hat back on his head, stuffed his notepads back into his rucksack, and walked out of the Starbucks.

  * * *

  · · ·

  “What did you end up doing on Friday?” asked Sheila. They were sitting in Sheila’s apartment watching some version of the Housewives franchise on a laptop with a plastic keyboard protector on top of it. Elinor had a fleece blanket wrapped in a complicated fashion around her legs. Sheila sat to the side of her in a hooded sweatshirt. There was a dark gray cast in the apartment, despite the fact that it was only 3:00 p.m. Pustules of water were clinging to the oblong windows of Sheila’s living room.

  “Friday sucked. Well, it was sort of okay,” said Elinor. “Mike and I got in a kind of a fight.”

  “Oh no!” Sheila plucked at her scrubs pants. On Tuesdays, Sheila worked mornings. This Tuesday, Elinor had gotten the afternoon off because Ramona was sick and her mother had decided to stay home with her.

  “Yeah, we went to that party in Greenpoint.”

  “I would’ve gone to that but I was fucking exhausted. What did you wear?”

  “That green shirt thing.”

  “I love that.”

  “Do you think it’s cute? I feel like it makes me look fat.”

  “No, it’s so cute.”

  “Anyway,” said Elinor. She never really trusted Sheila’s sense of style. “I felt like Mike was ignoring me and I kind of yelled at him on the way home in the cab.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I could have overreacted? A girl sat on his lap.”

  “What the fuck? Were you pissed? I would have been so pissed.”

  “It wasn’t that big of a deal,” said Elinor, irritated, though Sheila was agreeing with her. “He didn’t mean it. It was a joke or something.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “I think I just misinterpreted it. He actually cried he felt so bad.”

  “He cried?” said Sheila. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Ralph cry, like ever.” Ralph was a guy Sheila had been in love with since they were eighteen years old. She had sex with him approximately six times a year and yet they still managed to have a dramatic relationship. Sheila was always yelling at Ralph in a large party full of strangers. Ralph was always texting Sheila at 3:00 a.m. with the word “Hey” but nothing else. He would date other women occasionally, and Sheila would look at those women on Facebook and Instagram and generate virulent insults about them that still managed to shock Elinor when she thought about them later.

  “But I don’t know, I think I just felt bad because I didn’t know anyone at the party,” said Elinor. “I probably shouldn’t have yelled at him.”

  “I think Mike’s just so sensitive,” said Sheila. “It’s kind of adorable.” When Sheila was in the communications school, she, at some point, had had a class with Mike. Ever since Elinor and Mike had started dating, in Elinor’s opinion, Sheila had seemed to appoint herself some kind of Mike expert, and El
inor had to work, constantly and without rest, to disabuse her of this notion.

  “I don’t want to be a nagging girlfriend,” said Elinor, to close the subject with some finality.

  “You’re not,” said Sheila. “I bet he’s just stressed out because of his job situation.”

  “Well, Memo Points Daily called him in for an interview on Monday.”

  “Oh my god! That’s cool. What will he do?”

  “It’s a good job, I think? Mike says they will let him write. He has that fact-checking job but he hates it.”

  “That’s cool,” said Sheila. They started watching Housewives in silence.

  “Lisa Rinna is such a bitch,” said Sheila.

  “I like her,” said Elinor. “It’s Kim that’s the bitch.”

  “Kim’s more crazy.”

  “But she’s also super bitchy.”

  Kim was acting very drunk at a brunch and telling everyone they weren’t being supportive. Elinor and Sheila watched the scene together for a while.

  “Did I tell you that Ralph just told me that he’s not coming to the party I’m having, and it’s my fucking birthday. You’re so lucky Mike’s not doing shit like that.”

  “That’s true,” said Elinor. And she really was. “I wish I was less of a bitch.”

  “You’re not a bitch.”

  “Ha-ha,” said Elinor, not really laughing. She left fifteen minutes later. Both parties felt traumatized in a vague way. That was how they usually felt after a long, aimless period hanging out together. Still, they were best friends.

  * * *

  · · ·

  On the way back home, Elinor texted Mike about dinner. Mike took a full fifteen minutes to respond. “I was just going to get a piece of pizza. I’m at a coffee shop now #werking on my thing.” Then he sent an emoji of a pizza slice.

  Elinor texted back that that was fine, although for some reason she couldn’t name, Mike’s tone in this missive made her nervous. Sometimes, she would sense imperceptible swings in Mike’s mood from very mundane-seeming text messages. This one, for example, included no particular endearments or invitation to get pizza with him. She could invite herself, of course, but would that make him think she wasn’t letting him work?

  This was when she realized she had a missed call and a voice mail from a nonspecific Manhattan number. She wondered if it was her student loan, who was always calling her from different areas of the country like a well-traveled spy.

  “Hello,” an older man’s voice said doubtfully into the phone. “It’s J. W. Thurgood, um, John Wallace Thurgood from the Journalism.ly. We got your name from Pam Johnson. Anyway, we want to interview you for an exciting new position at the Journalism.ly. Can you send your résumé, clips, et cetera to JW@journalismly.com and we can set you up for an interview in the next few weeks? Thanks for your time and we look forward to hearing from you.”

  Chapter 3

  Facebook: 1 post: “Congratulations to Mike Moriarty [hyperlinked] who just got a job at Memo Points Daily!!!!!! I’m so proud of my brilliant, supportive, creative boyfriend. You are such an inspiration to me. I can’t wait to see what you are going to write! ;)” Ninety likes. They had a lot of overlapping friends, and Mike was off Facebook again.

  Twitter: 20 tweets. Lots of quotes again. Sample: “Nothing worth doing doesn’t cause anxiety and pain in equal measure. —Anonymous.” Favorited two times, both times by eggs.

  Instagram: 1 picture. Of the former factory building in Soho that now houses Journalism.ly. The edifice is late Victorian and decorated by imposing filagree rendered in stone. The photographer (Elinor) must have been across the street while taking the picture as a taxicab sped in front of the building. It gives the whole thing a rather romantic, metropolitan effect. Caption: “Today’s the day! Wish me luck!” Twenty-two likes. Two comments. One from Sheila—“Good luck gurrrrl! You are going to kill it!!!” Another from Elinor’s brother’s wife, a spiritual woman who often posts unflattering pictures of her child: “Wishing you all good things!!”

  · · ·

  Elinor was sitting on a white fiberglass chair in a windowless reception area that did not seem to contain a receptionist. She was wearing a navy-blue pencil skirt. The skirt was a shade too tight. It kept bunching up around Elinor’s hips whenever she sat down, like the skin of a snake.

  Five minutes beforehand, Elinor had rung a plastic doorbell that was delicately mounted next to a pair of frosted-glass double doors. The doors had the words “The Journalism.ly” written on them in New York Times lettering. After a certain amount of time, a pudgy man wearing eyeliner had answered the door and told her to sit on this fiberglass chair. So now she was sitting on it.

  One nerve-racking aspect of this whole affair was that she still didn’t quite know what she was interviewing for. On the phone to set up an interview time, that guy who called her, a man named J.W., hadn’t offered too much about the position except she had to “know Twitter and be on the forefront of technology and reporting and have innovative ideas about it.” Elinor thought she could handle that. She even had her résumé printed out.

  In a room just beyond the reception area, J.W. was pouring himself a cup of coffee. The coffee looked like oil and had tiny grounds floating in it. The coffeemaker had been broken for months. Sometimes, it would just spit grounds into a cup and not even coffee. He sipped it gingerly.

  “A girl is here!” an employee yelled at J.W., who spilled his coffee a little.

  “Who?” said J.W. He patted his tie. He was happy to note he had not spilled any coffee on it.

  “She says she’s here for a job interview?” said the employee. J.W. didn’t know this employee’s name, but he seemed as terrible as all the others. He was wearing eyeliner and a cream-colored T-shirt advertising what looked to be a very violent band. “She’s here. She’s outside.”

  “Oh yeah?” said J.W. He had forgotten about this. He was supposed to be on a call with the Orange Growers Association of America, asking them to write a blog called “10 Reasons Why Vitamin C Is Secretly Awesome,” but that could wait until the end of the day, he supposed.

  “Do you want me to show her into the conference room?”

  “Absolutely,” said J.W.

  J.W. was sometimes embarrassed that he didn’t have an office to himself (at the New Jersey Star-Ledger he’d had an office with a brown microsuede couch in it), but to be fair, no one at the company did. It was an “open-plan” office. If you wanted to have a one-on-one meeting or something, like when Elizabeth quit because she needed “time to herself” (even though she was twenty-two fucking years old so J.W. didn’t even know what that meant), you could use a tiny conference room encased in glass. J.W. walked over and sat down at the table in the conference room. A couple of minutes later a girl came and plopped herself down at the table next to J.W. She had the globular eyes of a 1920s movie star.

  “Hi,” said J.W. He smiled. “Welcome to the Journalism.ly. I’m John Wallace Thurgood.”

  “Thanks so much for having me,” said Elinor in a very fake-sounding voice. She felt like vomiting. All week she had been paralyzed by an abject terror. When Ramona bit Fraunces at the playground on Wednesday, she had stared at both of them blankly until they started crying in unison. The worries had oscillated. Sometimes, she would wonder how embarrassed Mike’s mother would be if she didn’t actually get this job that she had put her up for, and then sometimes, she would think, Is this job good enough? And which was worse? Last night, she had made Mike run through practice interview questions with her.

  “What questions did they ask you in your interview?” she kept asking him, from a prone position on the foam pad, her arm draped over her forehead. “I doubt they will ask you the same questions,” said Mike, annoyed. “It’s a very different kind of place.” Then Elinor had cried: “Do you think Journalism.ly is worse than Memo Points Daily?” Mike had told her she was being illogical.

  “Here’s my résumé,” said Elinor. She passed it to John Wallace Thu
rgood across the table. He took it and read it.

  “You’re from Chicago?” said John Wallace Thurgood.

  “Yes,” said Elinor. “Outside it.”

  “How did you like it there?”

  “It’s great.”

  “Yeah. It’s a great place.”

  They paused and looked at each other. Elinor smiled and then pulled down her skirt.

  “I think someone’s knocking on the door.”

  Elinor saw Peter, Peter from school, knocking on the glass door in front of them very insistently. Earlier this week, Elinor had wondered whether it was more politically expedient to email Peter before her interview to kind of “touch base” with him or whether it was better to just say hi to him once she got into the building. She didn’t really know him well enough to email him (and she didn’t have his email) so she eventually decided against emailing. Now that she saw Peter’s dilated pupils through the glass wall, she wondered if she had made a mistake. Was Peter coming in to say hello to her? Was he mad she had not emailed? The last time she saw him, she was walking down the street in front of the communications building with Mike, and Peter said hello only to Mike. They talked for a long time in front of her about jobs they were going to have after school was over. Then they said their goodbyes.

  “You can meet our managing editor,” said J.W. He made some ostensibly welcoming motion to Peter, and Peter opened the door and sat down. Elinor couldn’t believe Peter was in such a position of power. Managing editor? (Everyone at the Journalism.ly had extremely august titles. If you were there for six months, you could become a vice president.)

  “Hi, Peter!” said Elinor, brightly. “Good to see you again.”

  “Uh, hi,” said Peter gruffly. Elinor noticed he had changed his style since arriving in New York City. Back at college, he used to wear only polo shirts and sweatshirts that advertised their school in white block letters. But now he was wearing a button-down shirt with the collar fastened tightly into his neck. Elinor regretted again her choice of skirt. It probably made her look too traditional, not particularly cool. She should have gone with those old-people shoes that everyone was wearing at that party. But where did they get them? Elinor hadn’t seen them in a store. Maybe they were at a thrift store.