Sociable

by Rebecca Harrington

  * * *

  · · ·

  Elinor got to work with some underwear she’d purchased at the local Gapbody stuffed into her handbag (two dollars on sale). She had cried only once during the cab ride and once in Gapbody.

  As Elinor sat down, Nicole waved to her, palm open.

  “Hi,” said Elinor.

  Nicole took off her headphones. She was wearing a sweater knit with a thick blue yarn and long black jeans that bagged at the knees.

  “How was your party?” said Nicole.

  “It was kind of weird,” said Elinor, swallowing. She almost blurted everything out about Mike, but thought against it. What if it was like Sheila said, and it wasn’t really that big of a deal? Then it would be stupid to say, “Mike and I broke up,” when that didn’t actually happen.

  “Oh, too bad,” said Nicole.

  Elinor sighed and took her computer out of her bag. Work and its particular stresses poked through the haze of her misery. She waited for her computer to start.

  “You must be happy this morning though.”

  “Why?” said Elinor in a dazed way.

  “Because your coffee slide show did really well! Didn’t you check?”

  “Uh, no.” Elinor rubbed her eyes.

  “Yeah, it’s like, a really big win for you! It got like, two hundred thousand page views or something last night.”

  “Really?” said Elinor, almost mustering up some interest. She turned her computer on and looked at the coffee story. It had actually done extremely well. There were twenty-eight comments! Someone with a blank face icon on Facebook had said, “I don’t drink coffee that much. Sometimes I do. I don’t like the bitter taste.”

  “Wow, it’s up to three hundred thousand views now,” said Elinor. “That’s pretty good, right?”

  “That’s great,” said Nicole, staring at her computer.

  Feeling burnished by this slightly better news, Elinor decided to text Mike. Even though it was midmorning, Elinor theoretically thought that if you felt something, you should be able to text it.

  Hey I miss you. Last night was weird. Can we talk today?

  While Elinor was agonizing about whether to explicitly say sorry or to merely imply it, Peter stopped beside her. Elinor smashed her phone onto the table facedown.

  “I saw your thing on coffee,” he said.

  “Yeah! I was happy because it actually did really well. Did you see that? Twenty-eight comments.”

  “Yes. I did.” Peter looked at his foot, and Elinor waited for him to finish looking at it. Then he said, “Maybe you can pitch me your ideas two or three times a week.”

  “I have to run my ideas by you now? Why? Do you hate my ideas?”

  “No,” said Peter. “I’m just trying to have us be organized and work on a schedule.”

  “Well, okay?” said Elinor. “Are you my boss?”

  “Not exactly. I just think my expertise in these matters could really help you. I’m really familiar with the tone here—”

  “What does that mean? Do you think I screwed up the tone?”

  “No,” said Peter. “You need to listen to what I’m saying. Think of me more as a mentor.”

  “A mentor? But you’re the same age as me.”

  “But I have more institutional memory here, like a mentor.”

  “You’ve been here four months longer than me!”

  “You know, a lot of women are never mentored by anyone, especially men. It’s really sad. That’s all I’m trying to do here. I’m trying to help.” Peter’s face twisted into some kind of sad expression, and Elinor felt guilty.

  “Okay,” said Elinor. “I guess I’ll run things by you now. Thanks.”

  “I’m really busy this week because Sean wants me to think about how we’re going to incorporate tweetstorms into our coverage—did you see my tweetstorm about the debate?—but keep me in the loop and I’ll try to get back to you when I can.”

  Elinor nodded at Peter, and he walked back to his desk. Elinor felt a new, sharper guilt on top of the enveloping guilt she was already feeling. Why did she have to snap at Peter? Still, at the same time, she was just having a shitty fucking day. Shouldn’t she be allowed to have a shitty fucking day? For once?

  She put her phone in her bag on the floor next to her leg so she wouldn’t have to keep staring at it, but she put it on vibrate so if Mike did text her she would know and her phone would vibrate into her leg.

  About two hours later, after many false alarms, her phone actually did vibrate into her leg. It was Mike.

  Hey, I’m staying with friends for the time being. I got to go by the apartment to pick up the rest of my stuff so why don’t we talk then? See you tonight?

  Elinor walked quickly toward the bathroom—a single room with a toilet, a urinal, and no mirror. She locked the door behind her and sat on the floor near the paper towel dispenser. She closed her eyes and laid her head back on the wall.

  * * *

  · · ·

  When she finally got home, Elinor realized that Mike had not been exaggerating about moving his stuff out of the apartment. Everything of his was gone. His legal pads, the “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” T-shirt. His drawers were just wood.

  She wondered if she should have ever moved in with him at all. At the time it had seemed only natural. She couldn’t have afforded the rent by herself and she knew Mike the best of anyone in New York besides Sheila, and Sheila was living with five other nurses. Plus, she and Mike practically lived together in college and they lived really close to each other in Chicago for two years after college, so it didn’t even seem like that big of a deal. During senior year, they shared a twin bed.

  Mike said he was going to be at the apartment “tonight,” but Elinor didn’t know what time that meant and didn’t want to text him to find out because perhaps that could be perceived as “putting pressure on things.” She tried to distract herself. She watched an episode of Frasier on her computer. She cleaned all the dishes in the sink and saw that Mike and Andrea had been drinking beers the night before—one of the glasses in the sink had beer scum clinging to it. She squirted a mass of soap into the cup and tried to wash it out.

  At 10:57, Mike arrived at the apartment. It was obviously raining out (it was hard to tell from the interior of their apartment what the weather was), as there was rain clinging to his collar and in his hair. Everything looked different about him somehow, even though the last time she saw him was yesterday.

  “Hey,” said Mike. “I just came back to get some of my stuff.”

  Elinor got up quickly from the foam pad and stood in the corner.

  “You don’t need to help me,” said Mike. “It’s okay. I barely have anything.”

  “Okay,” said Elinor. She sat back down on the foam pad.

  “I’m just coming back to get a couple of books,” said Mike. He went over to an IKEA shelf they had installed right near the window and starting taking all of their books and putting them into a small canvas tote bag.

  “Yeah,” said Elinor. “I saw that you took most of your clothes.”

  “I was here earlier today,” said Mike brusquely.

  “Oh, okay,” said Elinor. He must have moved all of his stuff out when he woke up. Did he take a day off? “Where are you staying?”

  “I’m with Tomas for a couple of days. And then I think I’ll head to my parents’ for the rest of the month.”

  “Tomas? That guy from the bar?”

  “Yeah. He’s an intern at Harper’s? Such a funny guy.”

  “I didn’t realize you guys were such good friends,” said Elinor. And she hadn’t! When had they gotten so close to each other?

  “Well, we are,” said Mike. He had finished with the books and opened the refrigerator and started taking items out of it, like the Gatorade. He was the only one who actually drank the Gatorade. “He lives in Crown Heights right near the Nostrand stop.”

  “So, I don’t know. Is that what you’re saying? That it’s over?” Elinor
started crying then. She couldn’t help it. But Mike just looked at her, squatting down in front of the refrigerator, with the Gatorade in his hand.

  “E,” said Mike. “Listen, I really really need to concentrate on my work right now.”

  Elinor started sobbing harder.

  “I do!” said Mike. He put the Gatorade on the floor. “I want us to take some time apart. We may end up back together. But I just need some time to think.”

  “You do?” Elinor wiped the tears off her face with a heavy hand.

  “Of course I do!” said Mike, sitting next to her on the foam pad.

  “But I don’t understand,” said Elinor.

  “Listen,” said Mike. “We talked this through last night. I’m really really busy with work and I know that you care about your job too. And we have so many of these really long-standing problems, which I’ve really identified. But I still want to be friends.”

  “I thought we were on a break,” said Elinor.

  “I thought about it more,” he said, annoyed. “And I just think it’s too hard.”

  “What?” said Elinor. “But last night you said we were on a break.”

  “I know I said that.”

  “Fuck you, Mike!” Elinor was hysterical. “Is everything you say totally meaningless? What should I do about the apartment?”

  “Do not attack me,” said Mike. “This is hard for me too and you need to understand that. As for the apartment I don’t know, we went month to month on it. Why don’t you just move out whenever. I don’t think you can swing it for that long by yourself. Can you?”

  “No,” said Elinor. She gulped. “I just—” Moving was such an enervating ordeal. She had so much stuff and it was always multiplying. Just the other day, she’d opened a desk drawer that was filled with crumpled paper, old tights, and long hairs. How could she pack that?

  Elinor’s eyes started filling up with tears again.

  “Hey, hey,” said Mike. He put his arm around her. “Come here, what’s the matter? What’s happened?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” said Elinor.

  “Hey listen,” said Mike. “We are going to be friends. I know we are. We just need to give this time.”

  “What about the Memorial Day party?”

  “We’ll figure it out. That’s not for a while.”

  “Okay,” said Elinor, and she turned to Mike and wetly kissed him. She stuck her tongue in his mouth and felt around for Mike’s tongue. His tongue was limp. She shut her eyes so tightly that she could feel her eyelids on the bottoms of her eyes. Mike moved away from her.

  “Elinor,” he said, dry eyed, a little mad maybe.

  “Don’t go. I still need to talk.”

  “I have to, Elinor. I’m meeting Tomas.” He had gotten up from the foam pad. Elinor still sat there.

  “So you’ll let me know in a couple of weeks? When you want to talk?”

  “Yeah, definitely. I’ll be back and we’ll talk again, okay?” said Mike. He had gotten up and retrieved his bag of books and his bottle of Gatorade. He walked toward the door. Elinor followed him. She almost grabbed on to his shirt to keep him from leaving.

  “Okay,” said Elinor. She was crying now. She should have just felt sad, but her primary emotion was embarrassed. She was so ugly and fat, she couldn’t even have sex with him as he was leaving, like any woman in any story ever before. “I love you, you know?”

  “I know,” said Mike. “I love you too! Have fun, okay?”

  What did having fun mean? thought Elinor. “Okay,” she said.

  Mike shut the door behind him.

  * * *

  · · ·

  At work, Elinor could barely concentrate. Her mouth was always dry, and her thoughts looped in concentric circles. (Why did I fall asleep? But I had to fall asleep, I was tired. Can’t a woman fall asleep? But why did I do it at that exact moment? What kind of person does that? But can’t a woman fall asleep?) Occasionally, Elinor would forget what she was supposed to be thinking about. She would concentrate on an air-conditioning unit stuck moldering in a window across the way. She would wonder whether she would look good in a flannel shirt. But as quickly as this blankness came, a deeper nausea, a pattering heartbeat, a numb finger would remind her that she actually had things to think about, and she would go back to her thoughts about falling asleep.

  She took a sip of her coffee and felt several grounds come into contact with her teeth. She felt like she was going to cry.

  “Hey,” she said to Nicole. Nicole was looking at some glossy cooking blog. It had a large bowl of dry lentils photographed in perfect lighting.

  “What?” said Nicole.

  “I don’t know,” said Elinor. “I just wrote a quiz called ‘How to Tell Whether You Are a Psychotic Murderer or Not.’ And it’s doing well. But now I’m worried. How can this many people be murderers? Eleven percent of the U.S. population?”

  “That seems high.”

  “Peter did sign off on it, but I wonder if he will think it’s too inaccurate. He told me he’s really worried about accuracy. Do you have to run all your posts by Peter?”

  “No,” said Nicole.

  “Even when you first got here?”

  “Never. He just told me not to get in trouble, write three posts a day, and not libel any of Sean Patterson’s friends.”

  “Why do I have to? He’s the same age as me!” said Elinor, her voice cracking. “How can a mentor be the same age as you?”

  “What’s wrong?” said Nicole.

  “Oh god, I don’t know,” said Elinor. “I’m on a break with my boyfriend? I think?”

  “Oh.” Nicole’s face crumpled into a sympathetic grimace. “Are you okay? I hate men. I mean, some are fine. I actually love a lot of them. Like, Josh is really nice. The politics guy?”

  “I don’t know,” said Elinor. “I don’t even know if we are on a break. Like, I think we are. I don’t know. We got in a huge fight about nothing. Like, literally nothing. Like, I fell asleep a little early. And he got really pissed? And then all of a sudden he was like, ‘I just need to concentrate on my job for now.’ ”

  “Oh god,” murmured Nicole. “That’s so shitty. I bet you are feeling all the feels, ya know?” She kind of laughed.

  “It is shitty,” said Elinor.

  “Well,” said Nicole. “One time I went on a break, with the boyfriend I had before Rob? Mike?”

  “Mike’s name is Mike,” said Elinor, sadly.

  “What?” said Nicole.

  “My boyfriend’s name is Mike,” said Elinor. “The one I’m on a break with.”

  “Oh,” said Nicole. “Anyway, I went on a break with my boyfriend at the time, Mike. I loved him so much but I just couldn’t with him. He had a very degraded relationship with his own sense of himself. He was really privileged in all these ways but he couldn’t see that? He was like, so fucked up, but I was like, really attracted to that at the time.”

  “Yeah?” said Elinor.

  “Yeah,” said Nicole. “He was cheating on me?”

  “Wow. That’s terrible.”

  “Yeah,” said Nicole. “I think he was cheating on me because his dad was a nightmare and he really had trouble dealing with it.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “We’re still in touch. Like sometimes he texts me and that’s fine. I’m happy to have him as a friend. But yeah.”

  “Ugh,” said Elinor.

  “I try to stay friends with all of my exes. I think it’s very important. I mean, if they were important to you, why wouldn’t they be important to you forever? But I really didn’t know who I was at all then. I was so fucked up about my body.”

  “I feel like Mike and I will be friends at some point,” said Elinor.

  “You should write about it.”

  “Write about it?” said Elinor.

  “Yeah, you should write an essay about it. To deal with it. I mean, he sounds like a real shit show to just freak out like that. I write essays all the time ab
out what I’m going through. We can’t just silence women’s voices.”

  “For sure,” said Elinor. “I’ve always said that.”

  “We’re all single laydez now, you know? I should have T-shirts made. That would be so funny and like, pathetic.”

  “Yeah,” said Elinor. “Wow.”

  It was at precisely this moment that Peter approached her table. She could see for the first time the tattoo on the inside of his wrist. What was it of? It was immediately obscured by a shirtsleeve, so Elinor never got to find out.

  “Hey, Elinor,” said Peter. “I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “What’s up?” Was he going to fact-check her psychotic murderer quiz?

  “Can we find a place to talk?” Peter craned his neck, looking about the room. He looked into the conference room, but J.W. was sitting there, playing a game of solitaire on his computer. “Let’s go into the kitchen and get some coffee.”

  “Okay,” said Elinor. She followed Peter to the kitchen. There was no one there. “What’s up?”

  “Okay. So Sean was really pleased by your coffee thing.”

  “Really?” said Elinor. She blushed.

  “Yeah, it did very well on the site, even though it wasn’t very topical, which was surprising to me.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Yeah, it’s interesting. Sean’s been really interested in this idea of automating the success patterns—that’s what he calls them—of some of our most viral posts. For example, a couple of months back Nicole did something called ‘Animals That Look Like Feminist Icons,’ and that did well, so now she’s doing a bunch of different slide shows that are like ‘Pieces of Cheese That Look Like Gloria Steinem,’ and those have done really great. Do you get what I’m saying?”

  “Yes,” said Elinor.

  “The trick to viral content is to mimic very closely what you did before and tweak it. That’s why I just don’t get this psychotic murderer quiz, when you could have done something like ‘Fifteen Things Only Tea Lovers Know,’ which would have repeated your success pattern.”