Break in Case of Emergency

by Jessica Winter

  “Are you dictating a grant proposal?” Jim asked.

  “I didn’t even know that at the time, but Pam did,” Jen said. She tried again to lower herself into the cane-back chair.

  “You could look at it this way: It’s not really your business whether Mrs. Flossie Durbin gets it or not,” Jim said. “Arguably it’s not even your business to define what there is for Mrs. Flossie Durbin to get.”

  “Do you think there are surveillance cameras in here?” Jen asked.

  “Your job is to make the stuff, and then it belongs to the world and it’s out of your hands,” Jim said.

  “You’re right,” Jen said. “And it’s not like Mrs. Durbin’s portrait is going to have that same feeling of—”

  “—of delirious happiness that you’ve been impaled on an electric fence,” Jim said.

  “This will be a pleasant and benign portrait of a benign and pleasant woman. It’s just weird to think that a happy false façade was just what we needed after the financial apocalypse. If we’re all openly unhappy, then at least we know what we’re dealing with.”

  “That part of your grant proposal might hold up if we weren’t all pretty openly unhappy already,” Jim said. “Also, Jen.”

  “What?”

  “Look around you for a second.”

  Jen laughed again and shaded her eyes with her hand. “I know.”

  “No, seriously. Look around you.”

  Jen lowered her hand, rolled her eyes, then rolled them around the room.

  “Look at where you are. Look at what you’re doing, and who you’re doing it for.”

  “I know. I don’t understand how this happened,” Jen said.

  “Let’s go have some towel sex,” Jim said.

  “Okay,” Jen said. “But not here.”

  Jim bolted up from the armchair and Jen winced. As she grabbed her things, she saw a new email on her phone.

  Pam

  Thursday, Dec 24 6:31 PM

  To: Jen

  Subject: Please fwd to Franny

  Dear Jen,

  Do you want to get lunch sometime after the holidays? Paulo and I are back from Colombia on the 2nd. Also, I’m attaching a photo of a new friend for Franny. She should arrive in the spring.

  Love,

  Pam

  Jen opened the attached image and at first she thought she was looking at the sonar footage of the wreckage of the flight that had disappeared without a trace the previous summer. Then she realized her mistake, and she yelped with honest and unguarded delight even as a narrow seam of dread began to open up inside her.

  A Tousled, Effortless Cool

  “Have you looked at our website today?” Daisy asked Jen over the cubicle wall in lieu of a morning salutation. It was their second day back at work after the New Year.

  “Let me guess,” Jen said, peeling off her coat. “Donna wasn’t happy with the pictures of the girls from the São Paulo self-defense project, so we ran a slide show of Gisele Bündchen-Brady’s workout regimen instead.”

  “I turned your computer on already so that you could waste no time looking at our website today,” Daisy said.

  Jen nudged her mouse to wake up her monitor. “Did Leora commission her makeup artist from Father of Invention to give the Nigerian scholars Seven-Minute Magic Makeovers featuring the LeoraDiance skin-care line?” Jen asked as she typed in her password.

  “I think you’re giving your immediate future short shrift,” Daisy said. “Your immediate future is bright and full of possibility and available to you on our website today.”

  Jen opened the LIFt home page. She blinked hard, once, then rapidly in succession.

  “Take all the time you need,” Daisy said. “Live in the moment.”

  Jen clicked on the top-right link, which took her to a page topped with a full-column horizon shot of a man in a baseball cap and tight polo shirt, standing knee-deep in a lush field of greens against a verdant backdrop and grinning hard at some rhapsodic vision just past the camera’s sight line.

  Meet Our New Board Member: Travis Paddock

  Travis Paddock is the entrepreneur behind the barnstorming fitness and nutrition startup BodMod™ International, and he smiles a lot, as if to offset the deep, dark recesses of pure concentration he brings to every endeavor. He’d be intimidating—if it weren’t for that mischievous flash in his eyes.

  Right now, those striking eyes—as cerulean blue as the brilliant Belizean sky creating a picture-postcard backdrop behind Paddock—are trained on, of all things, a mealy clump of whiteish pulp from a calabash tree. He has traveled thousands of miles to Belize’s Cayo District for what might seem like a sad and soggy reward, until you remember that this is the man who also answers to the name “the Healthy Huntsman,” who searches high and low for the purest, most nutritiously dense “superfoods” the world has to offer. Whether he’s on or off the field of discovery, Paddock radiates a tousled, effortless cool—a “Look Ma, No Hands” persona that has jazzed his business from the get-go.

  He palms the pulp from hand to hand and laughs, his perfect piano-key teeth flashing…

  “Are you looking at our website today?” Daisy asked from behind the cubicle wall.

  Jen half-stood up and craned her neck around to make sure Karina wasn’t in the vicinity.

  “His body parts sure do flash a lot,” Daisy said. “Good communications work there, Jen.”

  Jen sat down again.

  jenski1848: Switching to chat. This is like an infomercial.

  whatDaisyknew: LOOK MA NO HANDS

  jenski1848: How is this in service of “empowering women”?? Honestly, is this where we are in this organization right now?

  whatDaisyknew: I THINK OF IT AS A PLACE WHERE I CAN DEVELOP MY TOUSLED, EFFORTLESS COOL

  Jen closed the instant-message window and broke off half an Animexa tablet that she’d stashed in her wallet. Three hours had to elapse before she could leave the office to meet Pam for lunch, and if she didn’t assign a powerful central-nervous-system stimulant to monitor her thoughts and actions vigilantly during those three hours, she risked dissipating each of the 180 minutes with righteous IMing, idle brooding, and mindless Internet browsing, when in fact the best and most efficient available use of her time would be to line-edit Hedge Fund Judy 2’s newly filed essay for LIFe Lines on resolving not to make New Year’s resolutions:

  The word resolution. It’s a funny one. My thesaurus offers synonyms such as firmness, immovability, and staunchness. And yet my dictionary tells me, paradoxically, that the word itself is pliable. Flexible. Resolution could mean “a firm decision to do or not do something,” of course. That’s the way we mean it when we make New Year’s resolutions. It could mean “the action of solving a problem,” which also sounds like a New Year’s resolution to me. It could mean “the degree of detail visible in a photographic or television image.” That likewise feels of a piece with our New Year’s resolutions, since the beginning of a New Year prompts us to look at ourselves in finer detail and helps bring our lives into sharper focus.

  But my favorite version of resolution is “in music, the passing of a discord into a concord during the course of changing harmony.” Now, that’s exactly the kind of New Year’s Resolution I resolve to make this year. Not necessarily the firm, immovable, or staunch kind of resolution. Instead, I urge us all to make resolutions that acknowledge the push-and-pull messiness of everyday life. Resolutions that find pliable, flexible solutions to problems we face all the time. Resolutions that honor and cherish the fact that every single day represents “a passing of a discord into a concord.” A search not for one resolved melody, but an ever-changing harmony.

  Jen scrolled down on the file to confirm that the essay continued for about 1,100 more words on this theme. She then pasted Hedge Fund Judy 2’s untouched text into the content management system, found and uploaded a stock image of revelers at a New Year’s Eve party, published the essay to the LIFe Lines blog
, and sent a congratulatory email to Hedge Fund Judy 2. Then Jen spent the next two hours and forty-five minutes reading the Nastygram Ladyparts archives and trying not to eavesdrop on Daisy.

  “I dream of the day that this board hears the parable of the sex worker and the cow,” Daisy was saying into the phone. “You know that one? There’s a sex worker in a developing country, and some well-intentioned charitable organization comes along and gives her a cow. ‘Hey, look, aren’t you excited about your cow, now you don’t have to be a sex worker anymore!’ Right? But it turns out she has to take on double the number of clients as she did before, because she needs more money to support the cow.” Daisy paused, listening to her caller. “No, I don’t know that this actually happened. The story may be apocryphal. The sex worker may or may not exist, and she may or may not have acquired a cow. But I do know for a fact that we are the cow.”

  The Sperm That Got Away

  As Pam entered the vestibule of the Chinese restaurant where she and Jen were meeting for lunch, she pulled Jen into a full-body, hands-vigorously-rubbing-shoulder-blades hug. Jen felt the taut curve of Pam’s belly against her.

  “Congratulations,” Jen said into Pam’s hair. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” Pam said into Jen’s hair.

  “I missed you,” Jen said.

  “Me, too,” Pam said.

  Pam stepped back from Jen, and they gripped the crooks of each other’s arms. Pam beamed for a long moment at Jen. She blinked languidly, as if punctuating the final sentence of a silent conversation that had settled once and for all the reasons why they were sorry and the causes for their having missed each other.

  “So I’m doing this group show with Taige Hammerback,” Pam was saying after they’d sat down and ordered their food. “I’ll do a scaled-down version of Break in Case of Emergency, or whatever fits. He also let me know—regarding any inevitable press coverage of the exhibition—that he never smiles in pictures, ever, and that he strongly prefers that people not smile in pictures taken with him, if they can help it, because—he says—it’s physiologically impossible to smile during orgasm.”

  “Ordinarily,” Jen said, “Taige Hammerback’s orgasms would be our main topic of conversation, but first we need to have a serious talk about that picture you emailed me.”

  “Okay, but wait—I’m not stalling—I just wanted to make sure it was all right with you if I use some of your paintings again for the show,” Pam said.

  “Of course it is,” Jen said, “and of course you are stalling.”

  “Oh, good. Well. I haven’t even really told anyone yet—I can still get away with hiding her, all wrapped up for the winter,” Pam said, pulling absently at the midsection of her loose sweater.

  “I’m so happy for you, Pam.”

  “We told my dad and my stepmom,” Pam said, “and we told Paulo’s parents, and now I’ve told you.” Pam was turning her water glass in 30-degree rotations. She looked up at Jen. “I wanted you to be the first to know, along with immediate family, and Meg.”

  “Thank you,” Jen said. They waited silently as the waiter set down their plates. Pam held her gaze until Jen looked away, blushing.

  “So was this—something that had been on your mind for a while?” Jen asked, once their waiter had moved to another table.

  “No. Completely unplanned. The sperm that got away.”

  Jen smiled and nodded and opened her mouth to speak, but did not speak.

  “But we knew we wanted to eventually,” Pam said, “and everyone says you’re never really ready anyway…”

  “That’s wonderful,” Jen said. “I’m so, so happy for you.”

  “Part of the reason I wanted to tell you as soon as I could was because you always trusted me with everything you were going through with—with this stuff,” Pam said. “That always meant a lot to me.”

  “I don’t have any news on that front,” Jen said preemptively, smiling. “I kind of needed not to think about it for a while. Now I have to decide on next steps.”

  Jen would tell Pam someday about the Thing That Happened. Not now.

  “I want to hear more about the sperm that got away!” Jen said. “Seriously. I really do. It’s okay. I’m okay. I want to talk about it with you. If you want to.”

  “Well, so,” Pam said, taking a deep breath, “you skip over one little bit of planning and suddenly you have a mountain of planning to do, and there’s a nonnegotiable deadline attached to all of it. There’s the show, of course. We have to move apartments, obviously.”

  “You should move to Flatbush!” Jen said. “Or Not Ditmas Park. Big and biggish spaces for cheap. But I’ve given you and Paulo this speech before.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good thought,” Pam said. “Right now we’ve got our eye on this place on, uh, it’s just a block or so from Meg, actually.”

  The seam of dread began to open up inside Jen again, just below her breastplate.

  “I mean, it’s not set in stone yet,” Pam said. “And, I guess this is the other piece of news—Paulo and I are getting married.”

  “Oh my God! A baby and a new place and a wedding! This is insane, Pam! This is your year!”

  The seam of dread was notching apart, tooth by tooth, like a zipper. Jen gripped her unused chopsticks in a fist, her nails digging into her palm.

  “Well, the wedding is whatever. It’s mostly to please Paulo’s parents. They’re traditional that way. Luckily, they’re fine with waiting until after the baby is born, or at least they’re pretending to be okay with the baby being a bastard for a little while. We’ll probably do it in Bogotá next winter.”

  “Oh, cool, a destination wedding! I haven’t been to one of those since Meg and Marc’s rendezvous in Paris.”

  The seam of dread was tearing itself open as Jen’s throat was closing shut.

  “Who has The Dress, you or Meg?” Pam asked.

  Jen swigged her hot tea. “I do.” “Vacuum-sealed in my bedroom closet. Although Meg probably should have received sole custody of The Dress. With Meg it probably would’ve gotten its own cryogenic chamber and rotating team of attendants.”

  The Dress was the exquisitely simple off-white silk gown—bias-cut, slender straps, what Jim called “the enchanted nightgown of the faerie world”—that Meg’s mother had worn to elope with Meg’s father nearly four decades previously. Jen had worn it to her own City Hall wedding, accessorized with strappy sandals, flea-market bangles, and honeysuckle twisted into a loose French knot, devised by Pam’s hands. Meg had worn The Dress to her own wedding, of course, barefoot, bare-necked, and bare-armed, face and nails unpainted, uncombed hair grazing her collarbone. No one—not Meg’s mother, not Jen or Pam—saw Meg in The Dress until minutes before she took her vows. Meg’s beauty on that day was flabbergasting, not least for its nakedness, and yet also for its aura of privacy maintained even in front of hundreds of people. Only a girl with unlimited resources for embellishment could decide to forgo all adornments with such transcendent results, Jen thought. That refusal was instrumental to the overall effect—but only if it were a true refusal, borne out of choice, not of necessity.

  “It’s very important to me that I wear The Dress,” Pam was saying. “Paulo’s mother is already trying to talk us into this venue that’s just bananas and a wedding party the size of an armada, and I’m going to let her have her way on pretty much everything because they’re paying for it—I’m already getting emails about the bridal registry—but The Dress is not up for discussion.”

  “You know,” Jen said, “I feel silly that I don’t know anything about Paulo’s family. I knew they were in Colombia, but not much more than that. What are they like?”

  “They’re nice,” Pam said, twisting her napkin. “They’re nice. Paulo doesn’t like to talk about them much—I mean, he talks about them with me, but even that took a long time.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…” Pam trailed off. “He doesn’t want people to get any preconceived notions about
him because of who his parents are.”

  “Why? They’re in real estate or something?”

  “Paulo’s father is a property developer. I guess you could call him a—a tycoon. A real estate baron. Paulo’s brother and sister are very much embedded in the family business, and meanwhile Paulo just flounced off to the States and started throwing pails of paint on things, or at least that’s how his father sees it.”

  Jen piled an entire frond of sautéed spicy soy bok choy between her teeth, folding it in half with an artful curl of her tongue—two tiny droplets of sauce swan-diving out of her mouth and onto the tablecloth as the frond flipped back—and pulsing her head rhythmically as she chomped.

  “His parents aren’t judgmental so much as they’re just—confused. About Paulo’s choices, what he wants out of life. Meanwhile, Paulo is concerned about being seen as some rich-kid dilettante. And he’s honestly never taken much—if anything—from them, at least not since he left school. He always wanted to prove that he could make it on his own—and that is something he does have in common with his father, that work ethic. But now that there’s a third party involved, and she is currently taking up the priceless and heretofore undeveloped North American real estate that is my womb…”

  Pam trailed off again, looking startled.

  Jen shoveled more bok choy and gulped from her water glass. The Animexa tablet had increased the wattage on the restaurant’s surgery-ward lights. Her fingers were numb. She hoped all the food-shoveling had opened the vessels in her face and prevented the blood from draining from her cheeks.

  “I never would have guessed that about Paulo,” Jen said. “Not that any of what you’ve told me is some guilty secret. But he seems so down-to-earth.”

  “He is,” Pam said, staring at her plate.

  “And you never—you guys never—”

  “We’ve never lived in anything but shithole apartments?” Pam asked her plate, deadpan.