Break in Case of Emergency (11 page)

There was a young rabbi who had rediscovered her dormant faith after the death of her father. There was a medical resident whose elective mastectomy at age thirty-two had turned her into a health-food nut and ultramarathoner. There was a successful real estate agent whose house burned down and sent her into a surprising state of quasi-Buddhist bliss at the loss of her material possessions. There was a young electronics heiress whose brief, DUI-related jail sentence brought her into contact with women serving harsh sentences for minor drug offenses, which led the electronics heiress to enroll in law school to become an advocate for such women. There was an event planner who found her fiancé in bed with a circus performer she had hired for a four-year-old's birthday party, which inspired her to start a popular new dating site.

And there was, to Jen's profound sorrow and regret, a wealthy retired friend of Leora's who had outsourced her favorite horse's daily exercise to a groom because she was so busy with her garden and memoirs, and shortly thereafter the horse had died of colic, which taught Leora's friend an important lesson, as she wrote in an email to Leora, “about the value of remembering to take a breath and look around you so you don't miss anything.”

“We're so hard on ourselves. And that's what makes us women great. But it also hurts us sometimes. What doesn't kill us only makes us stronger, and vice versa,” Leora once said.

“What kills our horses only makes us stronger,” Daisy once said.

For the video project, they had, in Jen's assessment, a decent if not excellent spread of ages, ethnicities, and cultural backgrounds. Geographical diversity among the interviewees wasn't as good, but Donna wanted to do all the interviews and did not wish to travel. Jen had presented photos of each woman to Karina, who often said, “Even if it's weird to talk about it, we always need to think about
optics.
It's just a reality.”

They'd booked a video crew and blocked out studio time. Donna had a script for all six interviews that she wouldn't share with anyone else. “It is down on paper,” she said, “but it's not yet in the air. The conversation needs to breathe and fly on its own. Ink and tree mulch can't contain it.”

For weeks, Jen had been trying to get the roster and budget in front of Karina for her approval. But whenever Jen caught her in person, Karina would ask her to put her questions in an email, which Karina would then ignore, no matter how many times Jen forwarded and forward-forwarded the email to her.

Then Karina had gone on vacation; on her return, she was perpetually “slammed” with other work. In the last few days running up to the shoot, Jen had given up, assuming Karina had given her tacit approval, or her approval-by-forfeit.

Karina—LIFt

Monday, Sept 14 11:14 AM

To: Jen

Subject: Shoot tomorrow

Priority: High!

Jen, as discussed, do not proceed with tomorrow's shoot until you have my sign-off.

Jen—LIFt

Monday, Sept 14 11:56 AM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Re: FW: Shoot tomorrow

Priority: High!

Of course—just switching this conversation to my work email. (I don't see messages as quickly on the other email!) I'll be right over with lots of cool stuff for you to check out. I'm excited for you to see what we've cooked up—be there in five.

Karina—LIFt

Monday, Sept 14 11:59 AM

To: Jen—LIFt

Subject: Re: FW: Shoot tomorrow

Priority: High!

Come by in an hour or so instead—I'm swamped right now

“We talked about seven,” Karina was saying, head shots and biographical sketches fanned out on her desk before her. It was four-fifty-five p.m., the day before the shoot.

“That's true,” Jen said, who wasn't actually sure it was true, “but we have a very strong crop of six.”

Karina continued to scowl at a head shot of the crusading socialite. Jen's face burned and itched. She wished she'd remembered to bring her can of ginger ale to Karina's office, imagined pressing the cold, damp metal to her cheek.

“So Petra has dummy screen shots from the six videos in a grid on the landing page for the whole package—I can show you on my computer, if you want.”

“Is Petra the one who's always carrying the bag around?” Karina asked.

“Petra is—”

“—I don't know how to make this clearer to you,” Karina said. “We talked about seven.”

“And we have six,” Jen said.

“Seven is Leora's number, and last I checked, I'm pretty sure this is Leora's foundation.”

“We shoot tomorrow and we have six.”

“Look, Jen, it's up to you whether you see this as a collaboration or not, but that's what it is. Collaboration. Communication. Give-and-take.”

“Uh-huh,” Jen said.

Karina shrugged. “I don't know what to tell you,” she said. “You have work to do. Close the door behind you as you leave.”

Jen was sitting at her desk. She couldn't remember how she had gotten from Karina's office to her cubicle. Daisy was on the phone.

“They don't want any of the money to go toward salaries,” Daisy was saying into the phone. “Only toward the programs. Yes, I've explained that the salaries are part of the programs. If you want Leora's money, you have to take it for free.”

Jen's immediate visual ken had narrowed; the periphery was a retching taupe spatter of molding mushrooms and crusted-over oatmeal and curdling cream. A
wheee
of tinnitus rang in her ears and struggled to harmonize with the background
whhooooossshhhhh.
She sipped from her can of ginger ale, held the soda in her mouth for a moment before working up the courage to swallow it.

She took a saltine from its package, wetted and worried one corner of the saltine with her teeth, returned the saltine to its package.

She watched her hand pick up the phone. She watched her fingers dial Pam. She knew three numbers by heart: Jim, Meg, Pam.

“You sound upset,” Pam was saying.

Jen touched back into the conversation. She'd missed the ringing sound, the exchange of salutations. What had she said beyond hello?

“No, not at all,” Jen said.

“I'm sorry that I kind of closed the drapes on the world after the show,” Pam said. “I mean, you know this—I always get kind of depressed after an opening. Not depressed, just low. Like, the comedown.”

“I know,” Jen said. “You just need your space after something so big like that. It's understandable.”
Unstanbull.
Jen had to concentrate not to slur her words.

In fact, Pam had scarcely crossed Jen's mind lately. Jen felt a momentary gratitude that her carelessness happened to have synched with Pam's customary spell of post-opening hibernation.

Thanks for no one

Thanks for nothing

“I think it was especially intense this time, maybe because the show was kind of personal?” Pam said. “I haven't really come around to how I feel about that.”

“Well, you should feel
great
about the show,” Jen said. She placed her elbows on her desk and her face in her palms, phone jammed between her ear and shoulder. Inside her palms, Jen's vision pulsed red and brown, with flickers of narrow bluish-yellow light.

“Is everything okay?” Pam was asking.

Jen had fallen into her palms and crawled out again. “Totally fine, sorry, I'm just being a space cadet,” she said. “I haven't been feeling so well.”
Feesowull.

“I'm sorry, lady. That sucks.”

“Thanks, I'm okay,” Jen said. “I—um—I meant to tell you—I'm—”

“I think there's some weird bug going around,” Pam interrupted. “People who usually get colds in winter are getting them now.”

“I—” Jen stopped. Not now.

Say nothing thanks for nothing

“Maybe that's it,” Jen said. “I'm getting a jump on flu season.”

She tried to remember a time she had ever lied to Pam before, and couldn't.

“Yeah, makes me glad I'm a shut-in,” Pam said.

“You're not a shut-in. Hey, I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

“I can try.”

“So we're doing this video series about women who have overcome adversity—”

“Who is ‘we'?” Pam asked.

“Oh, sorry, ‘we' is the foundation. LIFt.”

“Right, okay.”

“So, first of all, I want to be totally honest with you: I'm asking you not just because you're awesome and amazing and I think you'd be perfect for this, but because I'm in a bind. I need to find one more person to participate in the video series by tomorrow—long story, the deadlines got all messed up. I didn't ask you in the first place because I was hesitant about mixing up our friendship with my stuff at work. But even though I'm in a spot now, I promise that I
wouldn't
be asking you now if I didn't think you'd be really,
really
great for this.”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Pam said. Jen could hear both affection and irritation in her voice. “What exactly do you need from me?”

“Well, so you'd be on camera talking about—about the accident—your accident—and your recovery from it,” Jen said. “So that would be the adversity you had overcome. You could say a lot of the things we've talked about in the last year or so, about how too many healthy people in their twenties and thirties don't have health insurance, how bike safety in the city is atrocious, how the cops don't follow up on drivers who hurt cyclists—all that stuff. You've always wanted people to be more aware of all these things.”

“Yeah, I've just never known how to do it,” Pam said. “I don't have any community-organizer skills.”

“Okay, but you'd be doing that just by talking about it in a public forum like this.” Jen could hear a hectoring impatience hardening her voice, and tried to knead it into something softer. A column of sweat streamed across her hairline past her ear on one side, then the other. “You could talk about your art, too.”

“I could,” Pam said.

“Your story is just so compelling because it really happened to you, and it could happen to anyone,” Jen said. A vise was tightening around her skull. “Almost like—like this was a bad thing that happened, but look at the good that could come out of it because you can take control of the situation and make meaning out of it. I mean,
not
that, but something like that.”

“That sounds a little Zen Rand to me,” Pam said.

“No, no, more matter-of-fact than that,” Jen said, without knowing what she meant.

“No, I get it,” Pam said, kindly. “So it's a bunch of videos of women overcoming adversity. Who else is being interviewed?”

“Let's see,” Jen said. “There's a woman who spent some time in jail for substance-related charges, and now she's in law school because she wants to become an advocate for women in prison on nonviolent drug-related offenses.”

“Oh, that's cool,” Pam said. “So the adversity she overcame was addiction?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Jen said. Gray baubles of sweat were dropping soundlessly onto her desk. Invisible crystals of freezing rain stung her eyes. Her stomach lurched up and over. Her internal organs were calcifying into jagged rocks.

“Jen?”

“Sorry, we cut out for a second. You know, I don't have the exact details on all of the interviewees, but I can get them for you if it's helpful.”

“No, that's okay, sounds like a good story,” Pam said. “Do you have just the basic info on a couple of the others?”

“Um, there's a woman whose house burned down, and she sort of learned how to let go of her possessions, stop being so materialist.”

“That one isn't as good,” Pam said.

“Yeah, honestly, I think yours would be the best one, by far,” Jen said. She imagined the cord on the phone as the lifeline in her grip as she disappeared into a quicksand of sewage. Revulsion flattened and stretched her facial muscles. “You know, it's obnoxious for me to say this,” she said to Pam, “but it could be a really good platform for you. We'll have someone do your hair and makeup, and my colleague Donna will be interviewing you, and she's amazing—”

“Wait, Donna? The life coach?”

Jen's stomach grumbled and reared up again, this time in dire warning. Pam had an excellent memory. She listened to what you said and remembered it. It was one of the reasons Jen loved her.

“Yeah, I know,” Jen said, “but she's great, she really is.”

“What will the series be called?” Pam asked.

Jen rested her forehead on her desk, two hands pressing the phone to her ear. The sweat on her brow and on her desk caused her to slide forward, mashing her nose against the particleboard. “We're not sure yet,” she said.

Jen could hear Pam thinking.

“Can I sleep on it?”

“I—I—I guess you could—but—” Jen stammered. She rested her head across from the phone receiver in a pantomime of sickbed pillow talk.

“You need to know now, I get it,” Pam said.

“Well, it's just that we're shooting the interviews tomorrow,” Jen said.

“I'll do it,” Pam said. “Why not? I'll do it.”

Behind the phone, the package of saltines swam into view, and Jen squeezed her eyes shut to make them disappear. Just palpable amid the gusts of nausea that pinned her tightly to her desk surface, Jen discerned a serene and lilting fatalism. She had willed herself to catch a disease, and then she gave it to her friend, as if it were a gift.

Jen could not account for the next twenty-four hours, not even directly after they'd elapsed. She knew there had to have been two legs of a commute, and seven or so hours of sleep, and sweaty, messy attempts at dinner and then breakfast and lunch; there had to have been conference calls and emails; there had to have been bolts to the bathroom; there had to have been some kind of frantic pitch session in Karina's office wherein Jen marketed her friend Pam as a LIFt-worthy package of strength, vulnerability, creativity, tragedy, and good
optics.
She knew she had welcomed Pam into the LIFt offices, ushered her into the soundproof video studio, introduced her to Donna, and coaxed her to submit to the makeup artist's entreaties, “just for a touch-up.” But Jen could never have sourced a single specific freeze-frame or intertitle from these twenty-four hours. In her memory's telling, she hung up the phone with Pam and looked up and Pam was standing in front of her desk.

“What the fuck?” Pam said in a stage whisper. Her eyes, framed with heavy mascara and liner, glittered with fury; a horrified smile strained her features. She had turned a deep red, burning through the heavy pancake makeup up to her hairline. Large-eyed and large-mouthed and painted, breathless and zipped up in one of her Champion sweatshirts, her hair raked back in a makeshift knot, she summoned in Jen's addled mind a ballerina who'd been pushed offstage to a skidding stop, still spinning with emotion and adrenaline after a truncated, tumultuous performance.

“Pam, hi, what?”

“What the fuck was that?” Pam was asking. Hissing.

“What's wrong? What happened?” Jen stood, started to reach for Pam's arm, then thought better of it. She sensed Daisy to her left rising from her cubicle and slipping quietly away.

“I just got interrogated on camera about how God himself sent the angel Gabriel down to earth to personally pulverize my bones with his divine truck and teach me an important lesson about owning my power.
The fuck,
Jen?”

“The interview? Pam, I'm sorry—what—”

“You know, this is my own fault. I thought I was going to be talking about fucking health-insurance deductibles and protected bike lanes. I should have known it would be this faux-Buddhist libertarian bullshit.”

“Zen Rand,” Jen said, almost to herself.

“You
knew,
” Pam was saying. She suddenly seemed calmer, more in control of herself. Her affect was reflattening. “You work here. You knew these people. Jennifer, this woman was one step away from telling me I'd invited this into my life to give me a motherfucking
purpose.
Do you know how infuriating that is to me?”

“I can't even imagine, Pam. I'm sorry.”

“You tricked me into exploiting myself so that you could finish an assignment.”

“
No.
No, Pam, calm down, I would never—”

“I'm perfectly calm.” Pam did sound perfectly calm. The red was fading. “You're either too stupid not to know this would happen, or you did this with malice. I have never known you to be stupid, so that leaves malice.”

“Pam, no, please, I can explain—”

“I don't need you to explain. I'm leaving now. I can find my own way out.”

Jen turned and watched helplessly as Pam walked across the office floor and vanished through the glass doors to the elevator bank. Jen locked eyes with Jules the intern, who had swiveled around in her chair and was scrunching her face into a shoulder-squeeze of sympathy. Jen did not react, and turned and took her seat again. She folded her hands on her desk. She was comfortably seated in a still pocket of time, no turbulence, 70 degrees Fahrenheit, pH balance of seven. This pocket of time would expire in ten to fifteen minutes. The pocket of time walled itself off from dread about the moment of its expiration, the moment that the pocket of time would run out of oxygen; her amygdala would remain sound asleep until then, until the alarm rang. Jen could peer wonderingly at her steady hands with dry eyes and no apprehension. Even the pain in her lower abdomen, which had been building all afternoon, receded a bit. She heard Daisy reinstall herself in her cubicle.

whatDaisyknew: Didn't mean to eavesdrop but is everything ok

jenski1848: Is there someone who could send me a link to the interview Donna did with Pam, the last-minute addition?

whatDaisyknew: Sure, I've already seen it, it sort of looks like a hostage video shot in a realtor's office in Palm Springs

As the raw video began, Pam was rubbing her teeth with one finger, unaccustomed as she was to lipstick. The makeup artist had already performed a rhinoplasty of contouring. The hairdresser had straightened Pam's hair, which Jen knew must have taken at least an hour or more. Pam was wearing a ruffled tangerine blouse that Jen had never seen before—Jen assumed it was borrowed from Leora's ad-hoc clothing-storage space, which Daisy had stumbled upon one day while searching for padded envelopes and which Petra had then started using instead of the handicapped stall to pump breast milk. The ruffled tangerine blouse was further embellished by a chunky, brassy necklace that Jen recognized from Leora's Opening Statement!
™
jewelry line. Off-camera, Donna was asking Pam if she was ready to begin. Jen could hear Donna taking off her bracelets.