Sociable

by Rebecca Harrington

  “Do you two know each other?” said John Wallace Thurgood.

  “Peter and I went to school together,” said Elinor. “I was going to email you that I was interviewing here, but I didn’t have your address.” She smiled at Peter. “I was going to Facebook message you I mean. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh?” said Peter. He looked blank. “Really? Maybe. I’m sorry. I don’t—”

  “I was in a class with you. I went to college with you. You know—Mike Moriarty?” Was it possible that Peter didn’t remember her? They had run into each other what seemed to have been millions of times. They’d taken a class together. They had had a boring and terrible dinner in a small group. She was pretty sure she was his Facebook friend. Maybe she wasn’t—she would check when she left. And yet, maybe he legitimately had forgotten her? It could explain how many times he had spoken to Mike and not to her even though she was also there, just smiling at both of them.

  “Oh,” said Peter, looking at the wall behind Elinor. “Mike Moriarty. I definitely know him. Well, cool, good to see you again.” He gave Elinor a wan smile. “I’m just stepping in because J.W. and I had talked earlier about me sitting in on all of the interviews because it’s important for my job as managing editor, so I was worried this interview had started without me.”

  “We’re just getting started now,” said J.W. He remembered when Peter had said that he wanted to sit in on interviews. He just hated it. J.W. crossed his leg in Elinor’s direction in order to signal the end of the conversation. “How did you like school?”

  “I liked it a lot!” said Elinor. She shook her head a little to try to clear it. “It was really interesting to be at school during the rise of social media and how it changed journalism. Now journalism is so much more interactive. We’re reporting stories in a totally new way. I’m really interested in the intersection between more user-generated content and reporter-driven content.”

  Elinor was trying to keep her mind on what she was saying, but she was distracted by increasingly incensed internal questions that had no answers. How dare Peter pretend not to know her! Did he make her look like she was making up the fact that she knew him in front of J.W.? What if someone told Mike’s mother that she had pretended to know someone? Did Peter know Mike’s mom?

  “You know, I was in newspapers before,” said J.W. “And what I like about Journalism.ly is that we really care about journalism. We’re reporters.”

  “Oh yes,” said Elinor. “That’s really great.”

  “It says here,” said J.W., looking at her résumé again, “that you took an investigative reporting seminar with James Fennimore. How was that?”

  “Yes!” said Elinor. “Well, it was actually really interest—”

  “I think we need to qualify what we mean by ‘reporting,’ ” said Peter, who seemed to have expanded somehow, like a plastic toy you put in water overnight. His elbows were spread two feet apart. J.W. barely had any space anymore. “Especially in the context of this election! The job of viral trends editor is a lot. It means we are going to need someone who has a revolutionary understanding of how things go viral, and also how to stay true to the Journalism.ly mission. Your job would be really important to that.”

  “Definitely,” said Elinor. “I actually once wrote a piece in college that—”

  “Because I think another thing that we stand for is fairness and accuracy,” said Peter. “We don’t put up stuff just because it’s viral, like Memo Points Daily said we did.”

  “I was just going to say that,” said J.W. quickly. He didn’t know where these kids got their fucking confidence. “You can’t report something just because it’s on Twitter.”

  “Exactly,” said Elinor. “I believe that too!”

  “This is a good example. Our politics editor, Josh?” Peter thrust one of his elbows in the direction of the newsroom, perhaps at Josh. “Josh just put together something that I thought was so impactful. ‘The Nine Greatest Insults from the Republican Debate.’ He went on CNN about it.”

  “Oh good,” said Elinor.

  Elinor wondered if anyone in the newsroom could hear her through these glass walls. Sometimes people in the main room would occasionally fixate on her like they were watching her progress and hating what she was saying. How much did glass insulate one from sound?

  Elinor knew now that things were going terribly. She knew that she wasn’t really answering questions—but she also didn’t know what she could have said that would have made things proceed differently. The whole thing reminded her of when she was on the debate team in high school. Elinor’s father had made her try out because he wanted her to learn how to think on her feet. First they were given a topic. It was like “Should people eat as much unhealthy food as they want?” and you had to argue both sides. The whole time, Elinor felt like she had opinions about things but everything she wanted to say was so distorted yet strangely emotional she couldn’t even say it. After a while, she just wanted to scream, “Who cares? No one knows that answer!” But that was the thing about a debate. You had to actually pretend like you cared about something that had no answer.

  “I completely agree that you can’t just report things because they are on Twitter. I think the Internet has sped things up, but it has also made the tenets of investigative reporting even more important, really.”

  “I agree,” said J.W., though he didn’t seem very interested. “Well, we will definitely let you know about the job. We’ll walk you out.”

  J.W. and Peter led Elinor out to the reception area. Other employees, many in flannel shirts of varying color and quality, gawped at her as she walked down the hall. Elinor felt sick. She tried to walk as far away from Peter as possible and positioned herself all the way on the other side of J.W., even though he kept slowing down and speeding up inconveniently, as if he were riding a Segway.

  “Well, it was really nice meeting you,” said J.W.

  Peter shook her hand. He didn’t look at her face.

  “It was really nice meeting you!” said Elinor to the group of them. The fake voice had returned.

  “We’ll be in touch next week,” said J.W.

  “Okay,” said Elinor, despondently. “Well, I really had a lot of fun.” She walked sadly down the stairs, checking her phone.

  * * *

  · · ·

  “Well,” said Peter. “What did you think of her?” Peter had followed J.W. into the kitchen—a grimy cubby with neon track lighting. In many ways, it was J.W.’s favorite place in the entire office because it had walls. J.W. poured himself another cup of coffee. He didn’t speak right away.

  “I thought she was good,” said Peter. “I think she has a good understanding of the social landscape.” A salient fact about Peter that is pertinent to this story is that he had no idea J.W. hated him as much as he did. He thought they got along great. He thought J.W. probably forgot to invite him to this interview with Elinor because it happened to slip his mind.

  J.W. nodded, ruminatively, but still didn’t speak, now out of pride. To be honest, he didn’t really care either way. What did anyone do here anyway? Elinor had graduated from college. She came recommended from Pam Johnson of all people. She could probably tweet and Snapchat and Instagram and make listicles and write personal essays.

  “Peter, come here!” said a girl who had just run into the kitchen. “We tweeted about Julia Roberts’s charity and we spelled it wrong and now she’s threatening to sue us and Sean is so mad!”

  “Oh god,” said Peter. “We’ve got to set up a process that controls this! I want to automate it—if someone tries to sue us we just automatically deal with it. It’s not a good use of our time!” And he ran in the direction of the girl’s computer.

  J.W. watched Peter sprint into the open-plan office, a flurry of concern. This kid was telling J.W. who to hire? Who the fuck did he think he was? But then J.W. was reminded of something he had realized, to varying degrees, many times before—Peter technically outranked him. The situation, in all of its
disregard of time and progress, still rankled.

  J.W. finished his coffee and put the cup in the sink. Then he marched to the conference room he had just been in and prepared to work there for the rest of the day. He was going to hire her, he decided. But it annoyed him.

  * * *

  · · ·

  Elinor was buying a black and white cookie at Dean & DeLuca. She was depressed.

  “That will be three nineteen,” said the woman working behind the counter. She gave Elinor the cookie. She was wearing the chef costume they made the employees wear. She looked tired.

  “Oh, can I have a latte too? A large caramel latte,” said Elinor.

  “I’ll have to ring you up separately for that,” said the woman. “Because I already rang this up.” She pointed at the cookie.

  “I’m really sorry,” said Elinor.

  The woman didn’t say anything and proceeded to ring up the latte.

  Her phone rang, and it was Mike. Elinor picked up, and nudged the phone between her shoulder and her ear.

  “Elinor, you are never going to believe this,” he yelled into the phone. It sounded like he was in a bar. Elinor could hear the faint echo of Bruce Springsteen and screaming in the background. “I got it. I got the job.”

  “Mike! That’s amazing!” said Elinor. She took a bite of her cookie. Then she paid six more dollars to the cashier for her latte.

  “Andrea told me. I guess they really liked me in the interview.”

  “Who are you out celebrating with?” said Elinor. She mouthed “Thank you” to the cashier and took her latte off the coffee bar.

  “Oh, Andrea and a couple of other people. Come if you want to.”

  “Well, where are you guys?” asked Elinor.

  “We’re at Botanica.”

  Elinor had been to Botanica a couple of times—very drunk. She had a memory of hitting the corner of a table with her hip there. It was rather close by.

  “Well, I’m actually near there.”

  “Oh right!” said Mike. “The interview. Your interview. How did it go?”

  “Oh I don’t know. I couldn’t tell.”

  “I bet you did great.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “Well, even if you didn’t,” said Mike, “it’s not a big deal.”

  “Peter was there? He actually acted like he didn’t know me, which was so bizarre because I have met him a million times—”

  “El, just tell me when you get here because it’s kind of loud in here. Or text me.”

  “I’ll be there in five minutes,” said Elinor. She took a sip of her latte and left Dean & DeLuca. The latte wasn’t even good—it tasted scorched, like the coffee had calcified in the pot. Elinor threw it out on the street into a perforated metal wastebasket overflowing with trash.

  It didn’t necessarily surprise Elinor that Mike had gotten the job. He was the type of guy who always got things. At the end of college, he got like, five book awards.

  Elinor arrived at the entrance of Botanica in seven minutes. She walked down the stairs to the bar, which was very crowded, dark, and artificially cold like a cave. After a brief scan of the room, she couldn’t see Mike anywhere so she went up to the bar, ordered herself a four-dollar beer, and tried to look for him. She knew she looked stupid, wandering around with her phone in her hand, peering over the tops of heads. Eventually, she found him in the back at a table with Andrea and a couple of other people Elinor had never seen before—a disastrously pale man with glasses and a girl with sloping shoulders wearing a commodious jean jacket.

  “Hey,” said Elinor.

  “El!” said Mike. He waved from the table, but didn’t get up. He was sitting next to Andrea, so Elinor sat on his other side, near the other two people.

  “So, I just got us another round of shots,” said Andrea to the whole table, perhaps to welcome Elinor. She pointed to a collection of thimble-size plastic cups filled with what looked like jaundiced water. They were all collected in the middle of the table. Elinor didn’t think that Andrea, who looked a bit like Virginia Woolf, was the type of woman who would just buy a round of shots for a table, but Elinor was wrong. Elinor always associated high spirits with fleshy types. It was a cognitive bias that she had.

  “And I think we should all take them at the same time. Like it’s college or something.”

  “Because it kind of is,” said Mike. “You know? Even though we’re twenty-six.”

  “Hahahahaha, definitely,” said Andrea. “This is like, such a squad goals moment. Even though I hate that squad. I mean, they are so stupid. Yet, I feel like it’s appropriate. #squadgoals. LOL.”

  The shots were all pushed in various directions on the table, and each person took the one closest to them. Elinor downed hers quickly. It was tequila, and it tasted like vomit all the way down the back of her throat.

  “Have you heard you can make synthetic diamonds with tequila?” Mike said.

  “No,” said Andrea. “That’s fascinating.”

  “They can,” said Mike. “I just read an article about it.”

  “Hahahahahaha,” said Andrea. “You should tweet that, loser.” But she said it in a gamine sort of way.

  “Oh god.” Mike laughed. “Speaking of fucking Twitter. I couldn’t believe that fight that Harry Martinson got in with Richard Cooley today about the debate? It makes me want to go off Twitter. I can’t take the ridiculousness.”

  “The debate was ridiculous though,” said Andrea.

  “True,” said Mike, taking a swig of his beer. “They are all such clowns.”

  “And if they aren’t clowns, they are so corrupt,” said Andrea, in a solemn way.

  “True,” said Mike.

  “Cheers,” said the very pale one, who was now revealed to be British. “Cheers to Mike! On this new job!”

  “Cheers,” everyone said, and they all clinked glasses together.

  At this point, Elinor decided to go to the bathroom. Once she got into the bathroom, she stood there and looked in the mirror. She looked much worse than she had at the beginning of college, she thought. She was fatter by ten pounds and she was getting a wrinkle in the middle of her forehead that seemed to be deadening into a permanent furrow. Maybe that was why Peter didn’t recognize her. She fished a mauve-colored lip gloss out of her bag and applied it carefully to her lips. The tube was covered with some kind of black goop—perhaps the residue of old gum. Then she returned to the table.

  When she got back, Andrea and Mike were deep in conversation with each other, but Elinor didn’t want to seem bothered by that and instead decided to talk to the British guy and his girlfriend. She turned her body toward them and tried valiantly to block out the insistent gurgling of the badinage behind her.

  “So how do you know Mike?”

  “We know Andrea actually,” said Tomas. “I’m an intern at Harper’s. Andrea was an intern there before she left to get a job at Memo Points Daily.”

  “How cool!” said Elinor with a sinking feeling. Harper’s was just the thing that Mike would be impressed by, and that Elinor was also impressed by.

  “It’s great. I had to call up John Cheever’s estate to fact-check something the other day.”

  “Wow. What do you do?” Elinor said to Vivian.

  “I’m an editorial intern at Harper’s,” said Vivian. “But I’m leaving soon to go to n+1.”

  “Okay,” said Elinor, miserably. She was feeling the alcohol. In this new light, Tomas seemed to have a simpatico demeanor.

  “I had an interview today,” said Elinor. “At a website.”

  “Which website?” said Tomas.

  “Journalism.ly?” said Elinor.

  “What is that even like? How was that?”

  “I bet that must have been really funny,” said Vivian. “What’s Sean like?” She seemed embarrassed for Elinor. Then Elinor worried if what she’d said was embarrassing. This often happened to her when she drank. The next morning was a day of recriminations like Yom Kippur.

  �
��Yeah, I don’t know,” said Elinor, hurriedly. “I didn’t meet him. I don’t know if I’d take it if I got it. I’m trying to freelance mostly.”

  “Did you read that article about the woman who decided not to work at all for a year? She just freelanced. But then she got really in debt,” said Tomas.

  “Yes,” said Vivian. “Amazing.”

  “She thinks the world is both far too obsessed with working, yet at the same time, underemployed,” said Tomas. “But it’s interesting, maybe we really are transitioning into a full-freelancer economy? And what does that really mean?”

  “Excuse me,” said Elinor. “I have to get another beer.”

  * * *

  · · ·

  “Hi,” said Elinor.

  “Okay, whoa,” said Mike. He was trying to lift her down the stairs and into their apartment, but it was hard because Elinor had locked her knees.

  “Did you have fun tonight?” said Elinor.

  “Not as much fun as you,” said Mike.

  “I love you,” said Elinor. “I like your haircut.” Mike had gotten an interesting new haircut recently. The top of it was flopping awkwardly around his ears even though the sides of it were very short. Elinor actually hated his haircut, but now that she was drunk she was convinced she had to tell him she liked it because otherwise he would figure out that she hated it.

  “Did Andrea give you your new haircut?” Elinor asked, and laughed. Somehow this joke had sounded funnier in her head.

  “Did Andrea tell you how she cuts her own hair?” asked Mike.

  “No,” said Elinor.

  “It looks great. I had no idea.”

  After Mike unlocked the door to their apartment, Elinor pushed it open. The apartment was so messy. All the dishes she owned were in the sink and there were only three. Mike set her down on the foam pad and went over to their kitchenette. He got Elinor a cloudy glass of water and brought it back to her.