“Well, I’ll miss you.” She unlocked her vise grip.
He didn’t like the implication of “at least” in there.
“See you in there,” Nancy said, hitting her emotional wall and thumping away. “IN. A. HANDBASKET.”
“There” was the mostofit conference room.
Because a press release wasn’t quite bad enough, in the wake of his dismissal, there was an unprecedented conference room toast. This was one ceremonious firing. The conference room table was piled high with pity fruit and pity champagne and pity Perrier. Victor chomped on a dry brownie and washed it down with champagne. Then he put some melon in a napkin, went back to his desk, and forced himself to read the entire release.
It used the same font and generic template as good news, complete with the “for immediate release,” a phrase that applied to both the information in general and to Victor in specific. It spoke about “isolated restructuring of the brand moving forward” and lamented the redundancy of “a steadfast data scientist who ultimately did not improve the disambiguity and relevance of results” and, finally, hoped everyone would “wish Victor Wexler the best as he applies his skills in future endeavors, be they in the start-up realm or another platform elsewhere.”
Elsewhere? Where elsewhere? This was the only place he had ever worked. He had no other skills. He barely had these skills.
What happened was this: Victor had been skating along for a few years, nodding at meetings and avoiding his managers. And he would have kept skating if he hadn’t drawn attention to himself as a total fucking imbecile. But he knew that if he was ever going to get ahead, he was going to have to do more than compile data. So he crafted a brand-new idea: A feature that would aggregate a maximum of ten results for any search. If none of the links met the right criteria, a user scrolled down, where he or she was met with options:
• Try a Different Search (which linked back to the search field)
• Go to a Library (which found the closest public library)
• Stop Stalking Him/Her (which led to a sponsored dating site)
Victor pitched it as a search engine within a search engine, a small-batched algorithm with attitude. His pitch was good, full of acronyms of which he had only the loosest grasp but which he managed to imbue with authority for an uninterrupted five minutes.
“So it would replace what we have now?” said one of his managers, elbows leaning on the same conference table that would soon be covered in pity fruit.
“What?” Victor was caught off guard. “I didn’t say that.”
“Then what would be the point?”
Victor continued to talk, the wind knocked out of his sails but still bobbing along. Then everyone started asking him questions, probing about link metrics and sponsorship conflicts. Bright lines floated in Victor’s vision, smaller versions of the fluorescent bulbs above. Someone said something about the idea not being “sticky.”
“Victor? Did you hear what I said?” asked a loathsome kiss-ass named Chad Chapman, who knew grave concern for the weak would make him appear compassionate. “I asked how a platform such as the one you’re proposing would mesh with the company’s plans for an overhauled interface.”
Victor had his finger in the dam of ignorance for so long, his muscles gave out and he forgot to remember not to ask things like:
“We’re relaunching?”
Now Chad didn’t even have to pretend to look concerned. The question revealed a year’s worth of professional coma. Victor had not been reading the e-mails. He didn’t know how to read most of the e-mails. There were internal databases he hadn’t logged in to in so long, he’d forgotten the password. But there was no way to get the password. It would be like casually asking how to flush the toilet after six years.
“You mean the redesign?”
“Yes,” one of the voices said.
“And what did I say?”
“You said relaunch.”
Had someone cut the central air?
“Victor, how would your plans work within the site going forward?”
This voice was identifiable by rank. It belonged to Mark Epstein, the Clark Kent–ish chief operating officer and annoyingly good guy. Mark spent the equivalent of a first-year tech’s salary remodeling the kitchen in his country house, but still—good. Which is why it stung to have him put the cap on his pen and say: “It’s an idea.”
Was there a worse compliment than the one with no adjective? You have a face. It’s a sweater. He does a job.
Chad smirked. Victor nervous-burped and threw up in his mouth a little. Actually, more than a little. He could smell it. He could see everyone else smell it as he exhaled the fumes. Even Mark Epstein, frequent business school guest speaker and acceptor of minor humanitarian awards, looked grossed out.
“Excuse me,” Victor whispered, carefully parting his lips.
Mark coughed. “Maybe we should have a breakout about this postconference.”
“Great idea, Mark,” said Chad.
Victor swallowed as quietly as he could.
And that was that.
He snuck out the afternoon of his toast and never went back.
Technically, he was supposed to turn in his ID card. There was a twenty-dollar replacement fee for lost cards. He’d like to see them come after him for it. He went home and stuck the press release on his refrigerator, right next to the invitation to Caroline Markson’s wedding, a month away. It took three magnets to make the invite stay up. The press release took one.
He knew that this was the start of a new life. As homely as the old one was, this was going to be straight-up ugly. The whole company was in trouble (when your aim as a corporation is to unseat the sixth-largest version of your corporation, you’re legally working on the set of a Christopher Guest film). But being the first to be let go was humiliating. Without the alignment of lunch and commuting schedules, Victor quickly lost touch with the handful of coworkers he liked. He would do nothing all day but plan on doing other things. He trolled employment websites, took naps, and drank early. Some days he knew it was raining only because his mail was wet. He ate foods that could survive nuclear attacks. Hello, frozen burrito, old friend. How I’ve missed ignoring your suggestion that I cook you on high for three minutes, flip you over, and cook you on high for three minutes again.
When the occasional probing ex-coworker e-mail floated into his in-box, like a dandelion seed, he would answer it with an upbeat “All good in my world. Hope the office is treating you well!” and ignore whatever response he got. He had so little to discuss with these people when not trying to shove algorithms down their throats.
After the alienation of his coworkers came the alienation of his friends. He hadn’t told anyone that he’d been fired. It was the one piece of control he had, the one weight-bearing pole in his life. He was easily dissuaded from plans. He would force himself to write a few “you out tonight?” texts and if he didn’t hear back before 10 p.m., that was that. He was in for the night. And yet, as much as he hated leaving the house, he also refused to have people over. Here was Victor’s suddenly sacred space where so many hours were spent alone, plowing through toilet paper because his prime toilet hours were on his own dime now.
After his friends came his family. He e-mailed them just often enough to present a heartbeat. His parents asked him insidious questions like “How’s work, kiddo?” or “When are we seeing you next?” The sound of his mother dismissing her complaints about substitute teaching because her days “couldn’t possibly be as stressful as yours, honey,” killed him. The sound of his father saying he put a new mostofit.com bumper sticker on the car? That dug up his fresh grave and killed him again.
Finally came all of humanity. He was becoming an old man— oversensitive to street traffic, muttering snide comments to people who were not self-aware enough for his liking. Office workers were champion public walkers, but the middle of the day was for brand consultants, tourists, and nannies. Though . . . the Hassidim he liked. Be it out of
religion or common sense, they moved quickly, never touched anyone, and made sure that no one ever touched them. When Victor did leave the house, he would watch Hassidic couples in their wigs and their hats and their sensible footwear and he would be jealous. Not only were they conscientious walkers, he bet they were never bored with their lives. There was always something they could glean from the Old Testament, some kind of meaning. They could be repressed homosexuals or misogynist assholes or run-of-the-mill nose-pickers, but at least they had a reason to wake up in the morning.
TWO
Kezia
Paranoid about traffic as usual, she found herself at the airport gate at 7 a.m. with an hour to kill. She took little adventures away from the waiting area: bathroom run, magazine purchase, futile inquiries about a business-class upgrade she couldn’t afford. Victor was on a later flight but she wondered if she might run into Olivia Arellano or Sam Stein. She wasn’t close enough with either of them anymore to know. When she texted Olivia, a stranger replied with a “wrong # sorry.” Kezia wasn’t much tighter with the bride. She and Caroline hovered in distant-friend brackets, conscious of their past (they were freshman-year roommates) but strangers in the present. And whose fault was that? Kezia’s, probably. She had shed college like a snake.
Once in Miami, she followed her driver as he pushed an empty cart toward the parking garage, using a folded paper sign like an oven mitt. The sign was impressively misspelled. Moytrin instead of Morton. He pushed the hooded crosswalk button. It was hard to believe these buttons were affiliated with actual change.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to get that?” Her driver gestured at her bag.
The bag dug into her shoulder but she knew she would expend more energy removing it than holding on to it for another minute. She also clutched a garment bag with multiple dress options hooked to the plastic hanger inside.
“I’m fine, thank you.”
Her company’s car service was so abused by her boss, every Rachel Simone employee fudged this little luxury. The same obliviousness that caused Rachel to look quizzically at completed tasks, as if she herself had not assigned them, caused her to gloss over charges from cities she hadn’t been to.
“What brings you to Miami?” The driver tossed her luggage into the trunk.
“Just fun.”
She hated being asked about her plans by strangers. The worst were hairstylists who yammered as they yanked at her curls, asking her about her “big plans” for the evening. Who had taught them to do this? Usually she was getting her hair done for a first date and the question embarrassed her. Sometimes she tried to teach them a lesson by replying with: “Funeral.”
“What’s Kezia?”
“Huh?”
“What’s your name, Key-zee-ah?”
“It’s Kezia, with a soft ‘e’ like a fez, not a key.”
“Yeah, but what is it?”
“Oh,” she sighed. “It’s from the Bible. After God takes everything away from Job, he gets his family back and one of the new daughters is called Kezia.”
The driver nodded solemnly. She knew what he was thinking. But she didn’t hail from religious stock. Her parents just liked the name. The closest she had come to hearing the Bible mentioned in their house was when another object was like a Bible. A phone book or a diner menu.
“You eat pork?” he asked, once they were ensconced in air-conditioning.
“Umm, yeah.”
She may have been the least Jewish-looking person streaming out of the terminal. As a human demographic, she looked like she had just come from a Celtic sprite convention. But there was something about her appearance—wan, maybe, a curly blond Wednesday Addams—people were always offering her gluten-free vegetarian options when she didn’t ask for them.
“I know a place that has the best Cuban sandwiches in Miami. The best. And reasonable prices, too. If you like good food, you can go.”
No, I hate good food.
Her driver presented a ticket to a woman at the garage gate. They shared a joke and she waved them through.
“You wanna write this down?”
“I would,” said Kezia, “but my phone’s broken.”
She pushed the pimple on her chin, the one with its own area code, causing a painful throbbing. She could see it in the reflection of the window. It changed her profile, that’s how big it was.
“You like live music?”
Also something I hate.
“I’m here for a wedding.”
“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “You have to stay longer than that.”
It amazed her how the people most likely to understand the concept of business travel—bellhops, drivers, waiters—seemed the most in the dark about the degree of control she had over her time in their city.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket. Her driver stiffened and Kezia feigned shock at the device’s miraculous recovery.
“Hi, Rachel.”
A voice came through the speaker hole. It was pert and flowing as if it had been going for hours and Kezia was only now tuning in.
“Where are you again? You’re in Orlando, yeah?”
“It’s my wedding weekend, remember?”
“Where are the Barney’s purchase orders? I come in here on the weekends and I can’t find anything.”
“You come in on the weekends?”
“You’re getting married?” The driver spoke into the rearview mirror. “I know the best—”
“No.” Kezia gestured at her phone, the international symbol for What is this attached to my ear?
“No, you don’t know where the spring ’14 POs are?”
Rachel’s English bulldog, Saul, barked in the background. Kezia hated the dog with that quiet seething shame-hate normally set aside for hysterical newborns.
“If they’re not in the folder, they’re in the metal drawers under Marcus’s desk.”
“Marcus the bookkeeper?”
“The very same.”
“You have a boyfriend?” asked the driver, brazenly.
“I’m sorry, what?” Kezia snapped.
“Oh, am I bothering you?” asked Rachel.
“I have a very chatty escort at the moment.”
“Tell him to fuck off. You have to ride these people like a horse if you want to get anywhere.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Oh my God, I think someone put the Barney’s ones in the Colette folder. How hard is the alphabet? And who files Bon Marché under M like it’s a person? Oh wait, I’m looking at this upside-down. This all makes sense now. Never mind.”
“You should go out in Miami,” the driver tried again, “find a boyfriend, right?”
A miniature Chinese lantern swung fitfully from the rearview mirror.
“Have you told him to fuck off yet?”
“Not in the five seconds since you asked me,” Kezia hissed.
“Sounds like you should,” said Rachel.
“Sounds like you should,” said the driver.
“Saul, no paint chips, no!” Rachel screamed and hung up the phone.
Kezia sighed and cracked open a half-pint bottle of water. She lowered the car window. The warm air collapsed on her lap.
“Miami-Dade,” the driver reported back to his dispatcher. “Code Four. Over.”
Code Four? A bitch who hates live music?
“Fifteen more minutes to your hotel.”
“Thank you,” she said, more sincerely than she had said anything else.
It was a little late to make it up to him, tonally. He was just trying to be friendly, to do his job, and she could feel herself being cold. But she couldn’t make it stop. Rachel was rubbing off on her. Too much time working for this ludicrous woman and her eponymous company had tightened the springs of Kezia’s impatience triggers. She found herself increasingly unable to downshift to the basic niceties of human contact for the same reason she didn’t want to let go of her heavy bag. She was just going to have to pick it up again.
This wedding marked th
e first time she had boarded a plane for personal reasons in years. As the people who worked for Rachel Simone Jewelry hit their respective Rachel thresholds and quit, Kezia found herself the most senior employee. She did it all. She was the one who went to the earring-back wholesalers in New Jersey, the gem shows in Tucson, the JCK trade show in Las Vegas where the air smelled of disinfectant and the steady light made it impossible to tell what time it was.
It wasn’t always this way. After college, she had taken a few classes at the Gemological Institute of America and scored a job working in the quality management department of a major fine jeweler. But at a company like that, where half one’s salary goes to an unspoken prestige tax, upward mobility was political and impossible. After three years, she left to be a bigger fish in Rachel’s independent pond. And in the muck of that pond she had stayed. It wasn’t only that Kezia missed the perks of her old company (they, too, participated in JCK, though they were part of the couture show at the Wynn, where their booth was filled with orchids), she missed working with jewelry that had actual gemstones in it.
Rachel was a resourceful designer. Allegedly inspired by the seventies and eighties, her cuffs were made from smashed milk glass and reclaimed cement pipes, her cocktail rings were lace-covered resin and petrified rat teeth. Questionably a midget, Rachel wore pants that brushed the floor and vests and the occasional skinny tie. It was a commitment to this general Annie Hall aesthetic that helped make her jewelry lines a success. Because, actually, a lot of people wanted to live in Annie Hall. They simply lacked the mental fortitude to maintain the fantasy when not within ten yards of the movie. Unfortunately, Rachel was also Rachel.
The day before Kezia left for Florida, Rachel came into the elevator after her. She had removed a dogwood branch from an urn in the lobby and began smacking Kezia on the head with it.
The Clasp Page 2
