Sad Desk Salad

by Jessica Grose

  This was atypical behavior for me. Sure, I had hooked up with guys before without a commitment, but at that point I had never had actual sex with a virtual stranger. I could barely sleep that night, though I shut my eyes and feigned slumber while he breathed deeply next to me. I figured that it was going to be a onetime thing. It was the last week of college, and anyway, he was much too good-looking and cool to want to be with me. My guess was that when we woke up, he’d make some excuse about the grad party he had to dash off to.

  But the next morning he stirred, slung his arm around my waist, pulled me to him, and said, “Mornin’.”

  “Hi.” I scooched slightly away from him, afraid he could smell my morning breath.

  “What say you and me find some grub around here?”

  “Okay,” I said, attempting to tamp down my delight.

  That morning he drove me to breakfast at Friendly’s in his vintage Mercedes, and we split a Fribble and talked about our post-graduation plans. He was moving to New York straightaway to pursue his art. He might take a part-time job at a gallery but he didn’t want anything to take away from his work. I read between the lines that work was optional for him, but I didn’t learn about the extent of his family’s wealth until much later.

  I told him my plans were up in the air and then we went back to his room and went at it again. After a few more hours of that I returned to my room and checked my e-mail. Rev had offered me an assistant gig at their new website, starting as soon as I could move to New York.

  Caleb and I were completely inseparable the last week of school, and when we moved to New York I stayed with him at the Williamsburg loft his parents were funding until I could afford a place of my own. My assistant gig paid so little, and I needed to save up so that I could afford the first month’s rent and a security deposit on my own hovel.

  The first months of our relationship were probably the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. We had sex incessantly. My job at Rev required me to go to indie rock shows almost every night of the week, so I brought Caleb along for companionship and, if I’m honest, booze money. The VIP section of the Bowery Ballroom doesn’t come with free drinks, and I always hated being the only sober person at shows. I never quite felt polished enough to be there—not only at the shows but with Caleb—and drinking and the occasional recreational coke sniff helped me feel like I belonged.

  I didn’t have to get into Rev’s offices until eleven A.M. anyway (rock ’n’ roll hours!) so having a perpetual hangover didn’t really matter. Rev was perfectly happy to have a twenty-two-year-old with no real experience write their entire website. I was closer to their target audience than the senior staffers, who had seen Pavement play in their original incarnation—not on their reunion tour. I had no deadlines and no quotas. An assistant editor would briefly glance at my posts before they went live, but that’s about the only guidance I got. The DJing gigs I was doing around town padded out my meager income, at least a little—and they were fun.

  But twenty-two turned into twenty-three, and my relationship with Caleb and my job at Rev both started to seem juvenile and unhealthy. I felt like I needed to progress in my career, and fast: My mother could only hide the health insurance cash and the winter coats she shipped me for so long. And I really wanted to show her that I could make a go of being a professional writer.

  Plus, after that raucous first year together, Caleb and I started fighting. At first I secretly thought it was sort of fun. Our love was so strong that it was violent! We couldn’t help but clash! But then it just became tedious. Our fights were almost always about his behavior; he would disappear for days and I wouldn’t know where he was. I was pretty sure he was cheating on me, specifically with this woman Stacia who ran a hot local gallery and whom Caleb always described as “really centered.” He began sharing with me, constantly, health tips that she had passed along. “Stacia says that I should really be using agave, not sugar,” he told me one morning as I poured him coffee. “That way I can avoid the jagged highs and lows of a sugar crash. It’s really going to be better for my creative process.” I pulled a face and said, “Great.”

  When he would emerge from his days-long disappearances, he would just say that he had been working on his art, and if I were a real artist, and not some blogger monkey banging out meaningless words, I would understand that.

  “Sorry I haven’t been keeping up with your writing,” he told me on one of those occasions. “I don’t really believe in the Internet.”

  “What do you mean, you ‘don’t believe in the Internet’?” I snapped. “I remember you spending a whole lotta time posting to your blog and watching YouTube videos of dancing babies just last month.”

  “That was then. Now I’ve evolved beyond it. I’m at the point in my work where I really need to focus on my process, and the little things that go on in real time just don’t affect me anymore. No offense.”

  I rolled my eyes and fired back something about how some of us didn’t have the luxury of disappearing for days to make “art” and that some of us liked being blogger monkeys, so fuck off.

  The last straw was when my dad died and Caleb refused to attend the funeral with me. That’s not quite accurate: I didn’t know where he was that week, so I couldn’t tell him the sad news in the first place. When he resurfaced a week later, I wouldn’t answer the phone. I made Jane tell him what had happened, and though he tried sending flowers and writing soppy love notes, I stopped speaking to him entirely.

  So, Caleb: definitively the worse half. In her relationship with Ali, Jane says they trade off being the better half. Maybe this is why Peter isn’t telling me about the Omnitown deal: He wants to remain the better half forever.

  As the tepid water sluices down the sides of my face, the high of Moira’s praise for the page views and my pioneering spirit wash off. I can’t shake the upset I feel over Peter’s sin of omission. From everything he’s shown me over the past year and a half, he’s a genuinely good person, which is one of the things I love best about him. When we moved in together, but before I started working at Chick Habit, we had fallen into what I remember as a blissful weekday routine. If it was really nice out we’d walk several miles home over the Brooklyn Bridge. I would stop by his office at lunch and bring him treats that I had snagged from Rev: a signed Spoon CD or a few tickets to a show his friends might like. Work was just work—someplace I spent eight hours a day so I could pay my rent.

  I was still piecing my inner self back together after Dad died, but I knew I could always count on Peter. He wasn’t overbearing about his support; he just made himself available whenever I wanted to talk. If I went silent and wet-eyed, he’d reach out and hold my hand.

  My schedule got more stressful almost immediately once I started working at Chick Habit—but at least it gave me something other than worrying about my mom to obsess about. It wasn’t just the punishing pace, Moira’s IM tantrums, or the early morning hours that got to me. I was totally unprepared for the sheer number of commenters—Chick Habit has four hundred thousand daily readers and about 10 percent of them are frequent commenters—and how vicious they’d be. Within the first thirty-six hours of being a Chickie, I’d been called “bitch,” “idiot,” “moron,” “retard,” and “bloody fool” (we have a lot of British commenters).

  After my first week I spent the entire weekend curled up in a ball, wondering if I had made a huge mistake. Peter convinced me that I hadn’t. Despite the frequent emotional thunderstorms that I’ve been having since that first week, his support for me and my work is unflagging. At the end of a long day he always wraps me in his arms and says some version of the same thing: “You know how much I believe in you, and how talented and smart I think you are. This is a stepping-stone to someplace else, eventually. You will survive this.”

  I decide I will call Peter the second I get out of the shower. I’ve been keeping my phone off on purpose so that I could avoid speaking to him, and just surfacing thoughts of my deception and his potential betrayal ma
kes me so anxious that I start shifting my weight from foot to foot. We need to have a real conversation—rather than a series of near misses—so that we can clear everything up.

  Even though the Rebecca West video is going viral right now, it’s unlikely that Peter will have seen it. Any site that’s remotely entertaining is blocked by Polydrafter’s notoriously tough IT guys. I’ve never met them, but I’ve heard enough about them that the picture in my head is of an army of movie-ready dorks with pocket protectors, wire-rimmed glasses, and ill-fitting pants. If they found him watching a video of some barely legal girl snorting drugs and going shirtless, he’d probably get fired. So there’s still time to unburden myself without seeming too squirrely.

  I turn off the water and grope around for a towel, which I wrap around my hair. I pat myself dry with another towel and, in the interest of time, step back into the black muumuu of death. I scoot back into the bedroom and—in an attempt to maintain a shred of decorum—I put on a fresh pair of underwear. The dress has become something of a security blanket: Even though it’s salty and ripe smelling, it makes me more comfortable and puts me in work mode. Besides, I don’t have any other waistless pieces of clothing that are easily accessible.

  The phone is next to my computer, so I head back to the couch to do the hard but correct thing.

  Before I reach for the phone I notice a blinking instant message from Rel on my laptop screen and decide to attend to that first. I bet she’s writing to congratulate me about my big, juicy scoop. Despite my reservations about the video, I’m excited that Rel will see that I’ve finally done something truly audacious. I have spent a lot of time trying to sound like more of a badass than I actually am in order to impress her—telling her largely exaggerated tales about nights partying when I worked at Rev, about the super-hot guys, plural, I would go home with, when actually there was just one guy, singular (Adrian). I did not, of course, mention the part where my one-night wonder patted me awkwardly on the back while I sobbed in huge, gasping breaths—or the vomiting portion of the evening.

  Wienerdog (1:55:23): Dude.

  Alex182 (1:56:17): Afternoon!

  Wienerdog (1:56:54): What is the deal with that video you posted?

  Alex182 (1:57:29): The Rebecca West thing?

  Wienerdog (1:57:44): Yeah.

  Alex182 (1:58:58): What do you mean, what’s the deal? It’s pretty straightforward, no?

  Wienerdog (1:59:25): I mean, where do you get off posting something like that? I think it’s a pretty fucked-up thing to do.

  Alex182 (2:02:12): Oh come on, don’t be so uptight. You’re starting to sound like the commenters.

  She doesn’t respond to that for several minutes. I can’t believe that Rel—of all people!—is reacting this way. This from a girl who posted a video of herself getting her nipples pierced, replete with an extreme close-up of the needle going into her tender bits? Where does she get off judging me for posting something that is arguably way less graphic? Part of me is pissed that she’s not more supportive, and the other part is worried that if no-boundaries Rel thinks I messed up, I must have done something morally repugnant. I want to understand what her damage is, so I decide to ask her, flat-out.

  Alex182 (2:10:44): What’s your damage?

  Wienerdog (2:11:15): You know, I might put up a lot of intense stuff. But it’s about ME, not about other people. This is that Becky chick’s private shit and I just think putting it up is a really messed-up thing to do.

  Alex182 (2:12:09): You didn’t seem all that concerned about other peoples’ privacy when you published that jerky e-mail from your ex-boyfriend last month.

  Wienerdog (2:13:14): First of all, I didn’t use his name. Secondly, he was an abusive shit who deserved it. What did this Becky ever do to you?

  Alex182 (2:13:47): Nothing. It’s not like that. It’s not personal! But I don’t think there’s that much of a difference between what you did and what I did.

  Wienerdog (2:14:14): You’re wrong.

  My face prickles and I close my computer to get away from the heated conversation. When I think about it, Rel’s reaction shouldn’t be a surprise to me. She’s always had her own set of Internet ethics. Once she went nuts on one of our most frequent commenters, SelmaBouvier. In the comments of that post about Rel’s ex-boyfriend (“Douchebag Dearest,” pubbed on Valentine’s Day), Selma posted a photo of her ex-boyfriend with his bare ass hanging out of a pair of truly unattractive cargo shorts. The context was one of sisterly bonding: “Hey, look,” that winking bottom was saying, “I used to date a loser, too.”

  The problem was that you could see the guy’s face, which wasn’t blurred out. Rel thought that it was a violation of his privacy and messaged Selma to tell her that she’d better take the pic down or Rel would have her booted from the site. I believe her words were: “Take that fucking thing off our website or I will make sure you never get to comment again.” Selma told Rel that she was a major cunt for threatening to cut her off from Chick Habit, which she described as a “lifeline” for her. But she took the photo down anyway.

  I wish that I could take back that IM conversation with Rel, but it’s too late. Now I just need to wait until she’s cooled down a bit before I initiate any further contact, virtual or otherwise.

  But Rel’s condemnation has left me too shaken to call Peter. If she disapproves, what will he say? Instead, I decide to rub salt into the wound: I reopen my laptop and type breakingthechickhabit.com into my browser to see what my Becky exclusive has wrought.

  The site is taking forever to load, and when the severed head of that chickie finally appears, I realize that BTCH hasn’t updated yet. That post making fun of me for posting about the cat video is still right below the banner. This is mildly heartening: If the hate blogger—my harshest critic—hasn’t even commented on the Becky West post, it must not be that bad, right?

  MoiraPoira (2:30:15): Little miss, don’t let this traffic go to your head. It’s been 90 minutes since your last post and I have barely heard a peep from you! Molly has already done three posts since your last one.

  Alex182 (2:31:23): Sorry, I got distracted.

  MoiraPoira (2:32:04): I’m not interested in the excuses.

  Alex182 (2:32:44): Of course.

  MoiraPoira (2:33:02): Not much going on today. All I’ve got for you is that some Tea Party governor just confused the Civil War with the Revolutionary War while speaking at Gettysburg.

  Alex182 (2:34:11): Meh. I’m over her.

  MoiraPoira (2:35:02): Yeah, me too. Listen, since Molly’s been so on the ball, I’ve got stuff scheduled for the next 45 minutes. You’ve got some breathing room to find something else. You got lucky this time.

  Alex182 (2:36:10): OK, I’ll do some poking around.

  It’s so rare that I get forty-five minutes on anything in the middle of the day that I am determined to find something great. I head to my RSS feed and only have to scroll through about a hundred headlines before I find a gimme: an article in Ad Age about how a sanitary napkin brand is coming out with a line of printed maxi pads. There’s a contest where pad users can come up with new designs, and visitors to the manufacturer’s website can vote on their favorites—the top three of which will be created and sold in a drugstore near you. The front-runner is currently a gauzy watercolor of Twilight star Robert Pattinson. The headline is obvious: “Would You Pay to Have Robert Pattinson’s Face Between Your Legs?” I write three hundred words summarizing the Ad Age article and asking our readers what other stars they’d enjoy bleeding on.

  I file to Moira a little after three.

  MoiraPoira (3:12:11): This is terrific. You should art it with some Photoshopped magic—take R. Patz and make him look like he was painted by a swoony 15-year-old.

  Alex182 (3:13:22): Maybe even with a few artfully placed red splatters??

  MoiraPoira (3:13:50): ahahahahahaha

  Alex182 (3:14:33): I love this idea! Will do.

  MoiraPoira (3:15:06): I’ll have Molly do it. Your reward f
or the traffic that your Becky West exclusive is getting is that you can just do your gossip roundup and then take off for the day.

  Alex182 (3:15:48): Oh, OK, sounds good.

  Except that this is the one day that I don’t want to take off early. Truthfully, mocking up a red-spotted Robert Pattinson would be a welcome distraction from my fight with Rel, the hate-blogger drama, and dealing with Peter. Still, I tell myself firmly that I made my decision to run the Becky West video, and I need to stand by it no matter what the consequences are. Yet I can’t resist peeking at the comments again to see if our readers think the Becky West exposé is as scummy as Rel seems to. There are now over nine hundred comments on the post, and when I take a look at the latest ones, I realize that it’s at the point in a commenter pileup where they’re no longer even posting about the original content. Instead, they’ve turned on each other:

  VIVisection (4:45:22): @Mamacita79 I can’t believe you think you’re a good parent because you’ve read every one of Darleen West’s books. She’s a snake oil salesman and you’re a moron.

  Mamacita79 (4:46:31): @VIVisection You sound like one of those women who can’t find a man to have kids with. I feel sorry for you, but you don’t have to be so prejudiced against mothers because of your own bad luck.