Break in Case of Emergency

by Jessica Winter

  On the night of the LIFt party, the train was all messed up again. On the long, blustery-cold walk to the closest working station in her highest heels and translucent hose, Jen tried to talk enough to drown out her own discomfort.

  “Twice as strong,” Jim replied, “because it had twice as many of your paintings.”

  Jen rubbed Jim’s arm rapidly, as if to file down the edge in his voice. “Pam will be there tonight, by the way,” she said brightly.

  “Even though doing an interview with your boss destroyed her reputation?” Jim asked.

  “No, it turns out that Paulo’s mom knows Leora somehow, overlapping social circles—anyway, Pam could not have been nicer about Mrs. Durbin’s, um, endorsement of me,” Jen said.

  “You were in some suspense about that?”

  “Well, it was Pam’s show, but I—I ended up with some of the attention. That could have been awkward for both of us.”

  Jim pffted.

  “She was really sweet about it, seriously. And sweet doesn’t come easily to Pam. It was funny—Taige Hammerback told Pam that a Flossie Durbin endorsement is actually a kiss of death, and Pam told him no, it’s the jaws of life, and then Taige said—”

  “Pam will have to get in line and become a paying customer now,” Jim interrupted. “You’re going to get so many commissions. By the way, how much did you get for the Flossie Durbin painting? I want to get Franny a new Cat Scratch Mountain and I’m hoping Mrs. Durbin can foot the bill.”

  Jen was quiet.

  “This is suspenseful,” Jim said. “It’s a number so large that we need a new language to express it.”

  “I didn’t—there wasn’t—nothing,” Jen stammered.

  Jim was quiet.

  “Nothing will come of nothing, child, speak again,” he said evenly.

  “I never negotiated a fee with Mrs. Durbin,” Jen said, almost defiantly.

  Jim was quiet.

  “I meant to,” Jen plowed on, her defiance receding as abruptly as it had broken in, as if she were speaking over Jim’s protests. “But it just never came up, and she never asked, and it seemed so awkward to broach it, and—”

  Jen swallowed some air, and Jim still said nothing.

  “And you know, I’ll get paid in exposure, you know? Like you said, I’m already getting so many commissions, word of mouth—”

  “You are unbelievable,” Jim said into his collar, as Jen pulled her arm away from his. “The way you let people take advantage of you.”

  “That’s not fair—”

  “Why was it her show?” Jim asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why was it billed just as Pam’s show?”

  “Honey, I can’t even keep track of what we’re talking about from moment to moment—”

  “Seriously, listen to me. You did a bunch of fucking giant paintings for her show. At least one of which Taige Hammerback is probably masturbating on right now. You worked forever on those fucking things, and they were awesome, and they were the only evidence of any technical aptitude whatsoever in her entire fucking show, and your name was in tiny fine print in the program.”

  “It wasn’t tiny and I don’t care, honestly.”

  “And now it’s going to happen again. Are you even mentioned in the new show? Do you exist?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “It’s stupid that you don’t care.”

  Jim’s voice was spiking in volume as they neared the block of the Deli of Death. Hundreds of feet away, Jen could already hear the dogs barking halfheartedly.

  “Don’t call me stupid,” Jen said.

  “I did not call you stupid. I do not think you are stupid. I do think it’s stupid not to care that a rich woman steals your work.”

  “Pam did not steal my work,” Jen murmured. Then she realized that Jim was referring to Mrs. Durbin. She hadn’t told Jim about Paulo’s family yet. Pam’s family, now.

  “And I do think it’s stupid not to care that Pam took credit for your shit.”

  “She did not! It was work-for-hire, or—”

  “It was hundreds of hours of work not for hire. She didn’t pay you a fucking penny. And need I remind you, you were unemployed at the time.”

  “Right! It’s not like I had anything else going on. Jesus! She’s my friend.”

  “And need I remind you that at the time you were—you were—”

  “Don’t, don’t—”

  “Surrounded by paint fumes, inhaling that stuff, for all you know that could have caused you to—”

  “Stop it,” Jen said, halting in her tracks and clapping her hands over her temples. “Stop it, please, stop it. I can’t talk about this. I can’t.”

  “She could have helped you.” Jim was pacing in a semicircle in front of Jen. His eyes were round and dark. “Your friend. And you ask her for one fucking favor and she puts you in friend jail and you’re supposed to be so grateful that you’ve been pardoned for your crimes. After all you did for her for free.”

  Jen lowered her hands and began walking again, faster. “So this is all about money,” she said, as Jim fell into step next to her.

  “No!” Jim said. “You’ve totally missed the fucking point as usual! This isn’t about money. This is about you having some self-respect and not letting people walk all over you, whether it’s your friends or people at work or Flossie fucking Durbin.”

  “So if I had taken money from my friends that would mean I have self-respect,” Jen said. Walking faster, faster. “It’s all so simple!”

  “No,” Jim said, “what would mean having real self-respect was if you stopped laying yourself at people’s feet all the time, trying to earn their approval. It’s like, if you could write somebody a check to like you, you would.”

  Jen stopped again, a dead stop, arms hanging limp at her sides, mouth agape. Jim walked a few more steps and then stopped, too, covering his face with his hands. Now the dogs had spotted them approaching, whereupon they began barking with renewed vigor, purpose, and focus.

  “I’m sorry,” Jim said into his palms, then turned to look at Jen, one hand reaching for her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t touch me,” Jen said. His face back in his palms.

  Jen watched him and waited.

  She saw herself at the edge of a diving board hanging over an empty pool. She could feel the tingle in her toes, the last effervescent vertiginous moment before her feet pushed off, the board rippling.

  “It’s all about money,” Jen said. “We can pretend like it’s not, but it is. Always. And it always will be.”

  Jim said nothing.

  “Maybe if I had real self-respect,” Jen said slowly, champagne burbling inside her stomach, “I wouldn’t have married a man who doesn’t earn a decent living.”

  Jim put his hands behind his head and stared at the pavement.

  “Maybe if I had real self-respect,” Jen said, “I wouldn’t have married a man who makes nothing nine months a year and then sits on his ass all summer.”

  Jim smiled grimly at the pavement.

  The vertiginous feeling was gone. All Jen could see was the concrete bottom hurtling toward her. The champagne bubbles distended and popped.

  “Maybe if I had real self-respect,” Jen said, her voice choking, “I would have been more pragmatic. I wouldn’t have married someone just because I loved him.”

  Jim’s head laughed mirthlessly, loud and yawping. “Nice try,” he said. “I’m going home.” He turned and loped back in the direction of their apartment, the dogs now behind him.

  Jen walked quickly after him, struggling to keep up, her heels almost slipping out from beneath her footfalls. “No, no, you can’t—you have to come with me.”

  “Fuck you, Jennifer,” he said, one middle finger raised in salute over his shoulder, his strides growing longer and quicker.

  Jen stopped and watched him for half a block. She turned and looked at the snarling dogs, and at two tall men who had emerged from Brancato�
��s to watch the show, and turned back again to Jim’s retreating figure. What happened next happened without her permission.

  “You can’t just leave me here!” she screamed. Her voice shattered. An animal sound, primal and desperate, naked. “You can’t just leave me here!”

  She watched as Jim turned 180 degrees and speed-walked toward her. Rage contorted his face. He stalked past her toward the train station. She tried to keep up, her heels scratching and scrabbling after him; the side of her right foot touched the ground just as her left foot caught her fall with a hard momentary plant. Jim and then Jen passed the men and the dogs, who were baying and snarling, leashes taut, choking on their own aggression. Hurrying along behind her husband, toes scuffing and heels listing, Jen didn’t feel frightened of the dogs anymore. The dogs were choosing sides in a playground battle. If not for their leashes, they still wouldn’t have attacked. They would have formed a circle around the couple, rooting on the combatant of their choice.

  Cheese Break

  Leora’s penthouse loft was miserably packed, the trebley din of hundreds of overlapping conversations pinging and echoing off the parquet floors and the Wedgwood-dome false ceiling to create gnarled gibberish waves of disorienting sound that roared around Jen and Jim as soon as they stepped off the private elevator, as if Leora’s guests had been marshaled to replicate the debilitating effects of a long-range acoustic device.

  “I’ve been here thirty seconds and I’ve already contracted an inner-ear infection from these people,” Jim shouted. These were the first words he’d spoken to Jen since the Deli of Death. He still hadn’t made eye contact with her. On the train ride over, he’d hustled to the opposite end of the carriage with his headphones jacked up all the way. On the walk from the train stop, he’d kept ahead of her.

  It took them more than ten minutes to squeeze and nudge a path toward the drinks table. The only person Jen recognized on the slow, sweaty twenty-foot surge was Karina, who, upon seeing Jen, set her features in their familiar preemptive mode—eyes bugged out and sidelong, bottom lip pulling away from clenched teeth—and held out the palm of one hand as an additional deterrent, her arm window-wiping back and forth in a deflective parody of hello.

  “Oh, hey, Karina, this is my husb—okay, hope to see you later,” Jen shouted as Karina turned away.

  Toppling glass finally in hand, Jen intended to sidle back into the crowd to track down any friendly faces, but Jim had already retreated to a window at one corner of the loft, a glass of red in one hand and a glass of white in the other. Beside the window, in a heavy and intricately carved mahogany frame—plaster filigree and gold-leaf burnishing—hung a giant oil painting of Leora flanked by her daughters in a clothed reenactment of Raphael’s Three Graces. The figure of the older daughter smirked at her apple beneath Leora’s maternal beam, while the younger daughter ensorcelled her onlooker with round, dead doll eyes.

  “You’re just going to stand in a corner?” Jen yelled.

  “You do whatever you want,” Jim yelled, staring out the window and glugging from his glass of white. “I’m not going back in that.”

  “You’re here!” Meg and Pam were by Jen’s side, and Meg had somehow located a sound frequency at which she could pitch her voice and be heard without shouting. “Mrs. Durbin was here for exactly twelve and a half minutes and she asked after you, Jen,” Meg said.

  Pam’s mouth moved, but Jen couldn’t discern any of the words.

  “I have some questions for Mrs. Durbin,” Jim shouted, turning away from the window toward Meg.

  “I’ll have to continue communicating with Mrs. Durbin through the magic of the Internet,” Jen shouted over Jim’s shouting.

  “There’s a Bluff Foundation board member here who is literally ninety-four years old,” Meg said, deftly switching subjects, “and it was so loud he started to cry, so we had to create a sort of satellite party in a back bedroom just for him.”

  Pam’s mouth moved some more.

  “I want to go to that party!” Jim shouted. Meg’s detection of an audible but discreet pitch made Jim’s shouting more embarrassing to Jen.

  “Another issue is that both of his ex-wives are here tonight,” Meg continued in the same miraculously low confidential tone, “so what we really need are a couple of satellite parties. I have to keep rotating between them to make sure that proper distances are kept and further tears are not shed.”

  “Oh, man,” Jim yelled. “Sounds like you’re really taking Tiger Canyon.”

  Meg sipped from her wine, impassive. “What?”

  Jen rolled her eyes and sighed. “It’s an inside joke,” she said. “It’s this thing about when things are difficult at work, or not going your way, you—never mind, it doesn’t matter.”

  “What was it?” Meg asked. “Tiger Caravan?”

  Pam’s mouth moved some more.

  “Forget it,” Jim yelled, addressing Meg, his eyes on Jen. Two empty glasses stood on the windowsill behind him. “It’s just a stupid joke. Stupid me and my stupid fucking jokes.” He was hollering loudly enough that a few people turned to look at Jim as he shoved back into the crowd.

  “I’m sorry,” Jen said to Meg and Pam. “We are having a rough night.”

  “Do what you need to do,” Meg said.

  Jen pushed for ages toward points east, then north, then west through the crowd, finally locating Jim at a table of canapés and cheese. He was draining a third glass of wine—a fourth at the ready on the table beside him—and cramming cubes of cheddar into his mouth.

  “Honey, that’s enough.”

  “Enough what?” Jim was yelling louder than he needed to.

  “You were rude to Meg and Pam.”

  “So what?” Jim asked, popping another cube of cheese into his mouth.

  “So stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop shoving the entire cheese plate into your mouth, for starters.”

  “We’re at a rich people’s party, Jen,” Jim said, teething another cube of cheese and sliding it off its toothpick. “They’ll have more cheese in the fridge. They have a special number they can call and wham, look at all that new cheese spilling out of the fridge.”

  “Can you just stop? Please.”

  “Did you see the coffee table made out of broken china?” Jim asked through a mouthful of cheese. “Wouldn’t it be so empowering to women if we broke the broken-china table and found a fair-trade women’s cooperative and gave them a microloan to build a new one? Maybe you could build one for Pam’s next show? Or could that be an anchoring metaphor in one of those essays you publish? Something about destroying domesticity in order to reclaim it?”

  “Honey—”

  “Or something about broken cups and ‘reading the tea leaves’? From Breakdown to Breakthrough in the Time It Takes to Steep My Tea?” Jim picked up his fourth glass of wine and chugged.

  “Maybe we should go.”

  “How Decoupage Helped Heal My Shattered Heart?” Jim said. “How Smashing China Gave Me the Courage to Smash My Marriage?”

  Sunny and her husband were a few feet away, staring at the shouting cheese-eater. Jen turned her back to them and pretended to deliberate over the cracker selection.

  Jim stabbed another cube of cheese with the used toothpick and ate it. “You know, I’m doing these people a favor, eating all their stinkin’ cheese. And do I get any credit for it? Nope. All I get is more cheese.”

  “I don’t care,” Jen hissed, a cracker crumbling in her hand. “I don’t care if they have more cheese in the fridge. I don’t care if the fridge is made of cheese. I don’t care if you win an award for eating the most cheese at this party and your prize is a fridge made of cheese. I want you to stop yelling and stop eating all the fucking cheese.”

  “Why?” Jim asked, sliding three cubes of cheese into his mouth at once.

  “Because you are embarrassing yourself.”

  Jim ruminated. “You got your pronouns mixed up there,” he said past the cheese in his t
eeth. “You meant I am embarrassing you.”

  “Yes, that, too!”

  Jim drained his fourth glass and set it upside down on the ravaged cheese plate. “I’m leaving.” He maneuvered bluntly through the crowd toward the coat check. Meg and Pam were standing an arm’s length away from Jen, studying the floor. Trickles of red wine wound and seeped around cheese ashes.

  “I should go—go with him,” Jen yelled apologetically to Meg and Pam.

  Pam’s mouth moved some more.

  “Pam, I’m sorry, but I haven’t heard a word you’ve said the whole time,” Jen yelled, and Pam turned away.

  “Okay,” Meg said, pulling Jen into a hug. “Maybe you should go. Maybe not. Let’s just take a moment together to think about it. But either way, do you want me to wrap up some cheese in a go-bag for you?”

  Jen laughed into Meg’s shoulder. They stood quietly in the din, Meg’s fingers rubbing Jen’s back as they watched the crowd, until Jen felt another hand grasping hers.

  Pam was pulling Jen back to the cheese plate, where she had arranged the cheddar crumbs and cracker shards into letters that spelled out STAY WITH US.

  Pam had coaxed the trickle of Jim’s wine into a little underlining flourish on her message.

  One of Jen’s hands was held in Meg’s and the other was held in Pam’s.

  “You know what, I will stay a bit longer,” Jen yelled. “He needs to be alone. Meg, maybe I’ll just go cry in a bedroom with your ancient charge until we fall asleep.”

  “You’ll wake up as somebody’s new wife,” Meg said.

  Submission

  Ever since the commencement of the Project, Jen had mostly steered clear of drinking—even in small social doses, even just after a Monthly Adverse Development and at other times when she could be empirically certain that a bottle of beer after work or a glass of wine at a party could not possibly flood and scurry the nascent brain-cell choreography of a hypothetical tiny future boarder. Jen recognized the irony of this aversion, given how many Projects that alcohol must have rushed into production over the millennia. But the inflammatory effects of the Sermoxal—the bloating of face and midsection, the reddening of nose and cheeks, the attachment of an amplifier and rumbling-bass effects to her Monthly Adverse Developments—had led Jen to suspect that her body had been swarmed by volatile yeast metabolites, her flesh rising and folding into a ruddy, sluggish dough, distressing to the eye and bitter to the taste. Sermoxal was at least a kind of useful poison, Jen thought, while ethanol was a useless one. Her reproductive system—her body in its entirety—seemed already beleaguered and broken enough without the proximate demolition effects of alcohol as it took a power-sander to the stomach lining or the beveled teeth of a wrecking bar to the liver or a jackhammer to the bony labyrinth of the inner ear. Tonight it had smashed and crowbarred the barriers around the Thing That Happened, which Jen had disclosed to Meg and Pam as they’d sat together on the edge of the bed in Leora Infinitas’s guest room: eggshells and sea greens, princess-and-the-pea stacks of linens, hotel-anonymous. Meg’s ninety-four-year-old guest of honor slept beside them, emitting turtle-dove coos and snores. Jen’s disclosure had come apropos of nothing but the liquefying effects of the wine, which had dissolved the border between Jen’s public and private selves and poured out her inner life in a cascade of sloppy disinhibition. Fragments of this episode spotted her line of vision hours later; her body still felt warm from the four arms wrapped around her.