Break in Case of Emergency (8 page)

Waiting for Jim during his first, mercifully brief sojourn in the Garden of Earthly Delights, Jen absentmindedly looked up from her careworn copy of the September 2008 issue of
Condé Nast Portfolio
and saw her first-floor neighbors, Nadya and Natasha, seated directly across from her. Jen locked eyes with Nadya, then Natasha, then looked down again.

Jen never would have admitted this to herself, much less to anyone else, but if an electroencephalograph had been able to translate the tickertape of mentalese launched by the Nadya-and-Natasha sighting, the Chyron caption scrolling behind Jen's eyes would have read:
They are older than you and rounder than you and they come from somewhere else and they spoke another language first You are ahead of them You were always ahead of them You will be fine It will all work out You will be fine You will be fine You will be fine

It was in moments like these that Jen found herself recoiling from her own mind.

“What's the Woody Allen line? ‘I would never want to belong to any club that would have me as a member'?” Jen asked Jim once. “Do you ever feel like that about your own brain? Like, if your skull was a club, you wouldn't try to get in?”

“Groucho Marx said that,” Jim said.

Now, months later, sitting in the same beige seat in the same freezing beige waiting room—the soothing constancy of its climate maintained by poor insulation in winter and, now, an overzealous air-conditioning unit in summer—with the same copy of
Condé Nast Portfolio
visible in the same scuffed magazine rack hanging next to the same sooty windowsill, waiting for Jim as he journeyed through the Garden of Earthly Delights in service of Project Acute Phase No. We've-Lost-Track-by-Now, Jen shivered in her sleeveless dress and sandals and checked her phone for the first time since the previous evening. Her hands trembling, she found herself scrolling through a long email thread on her apartment building's listserv, swiping past variations and permutations of “Congratulations!” and “So happy for you!” and “Mazel tov!” to the originating email from Nadya, who thought maybe people had noticed Natasha looking a little different lately and anyway she just wanted everyone officially to know their happy news and thank you so much.

Jen returned her phone to her tote bag, dropped her chin to her chest, and wrapped her bare arms tightly around herself, organizing her body in a more compact, better-calibrated, more heat-efficient form.

But this more hospitable form was itself conspicuous, so she unwrapped her arms, fished
The
New Yorker
out of her tote bag, opened it to a random page, and pretended to read, clenching her teeth, squeezing her crossed legs together in an awkward hug of goose-bumpy limbs.

Then she rolled up
The
New Yorker,
stuffed it into her tote, fished out her phone, and tapped out a “Congratulations from Jen and Jim on the fourth floor!” and stared at the screen, contemplating whether or not to add more exclamation points, whether they would enhance or belittle the enthusiasm conveyed in her joyous reply-all.

She decided on four exclamation points, then deleted one of them, then sent.

You will be fine It will all work out You will be fine You will be fine You will be

The train from the henhouse to LIFt halted without explanation two stops from the station closest to the office, so Jen speed-walked seventeen blocks to work in the hazy, sweet-sick morning heat. As she hustled into the elevator, the viscose lining of her dress clung to her with what she hoped was not an indecent moistness. In the henhouse, Jen's constricted veins had cowered from two different nurses, and so a third—older, less openly stumped by Jen's venous incompetence—had slipped a series of smaller needles just under her skin, pushing in and out in search of purchase. Jen watched blood leak and seep from her veins into the surrounding tissue as the nurse threaded and pulled, threaded and pulled, a brackish purple blooming under her skin. She imagined the needle as an anteater, flicking its spiked tongue every which way on a promising lump of tree roots. No, better: She imagined her blood as a tiny sea creature—some as-yet-undiscovered species of amniotic ray—easing through her body's channels, caressing over her capillaries, pulsing and blooming with oxygen, with messy, colorful life.

In the elevator, perspiration wallowed at the base of her spine and streaked down the backs of her thighs. Heat and sweat had begun to peel the Band-Aids away from the wilted cotton balls stuck in the crooks of her arms. As the elevator pinged into place on the thirty-eighth floor, she ripped the bandages off simultaneously in a crossed-arm choreographic move—a little private flourish visible only to Jen and the unblinking eye of the security camera—and stuffed them into her tote bag as the elevator doors
gug-flump
ed open.

She had gotten up so early, and she was late.

She had gotten up so early, again, and she was late, again. Weeks, months, had gone like this.

“Jen, look, the last thing we want is for people to feel as though they're punching in and out on a clock,” Karina was saying. “On the other hand, a team can't start out on the field a man down, can they?”

The atmosphere at LIFt rumbled with agitation in triplicate. So far as Jen could tell, Leora Infinitas was 1) not satisfied with the pace of progress at LIFt; 2) not frequently available to communicate with her staff at LIFt about her unhappiness with the pace of progress at LIFt; and 3) not forthcoming about the projects on which her staff were meant to be making progress. Leora's discontent had not filtered from her board down to the rest of the staff by any direct means. Instead it had faded in slowly, like a hissing ambient static.

Whhooooossshhhhh

You could hear it even when Leora wasn't in the office, which was most days. Today, Leora was with Sunny in San Diego, giving a talk titled “The Work-Love Balance.”

“Leora Infinitas and her new-ish foundation have been exhorting women worldwide to ‘LIFt Yourself,' which in their view requires the usual menu of charity and volunteer work as well as savvy career choices:
If you love what you do, you never have to work,
” wrote
DOPENHAUER
's Ruby Stevens-Meisel, who often made note even of Leora's most mundane public appearances. “The ‘work-love balance' is therefore a zero-sum game—an aggressive reformulation of Karl Marx's zero-sum theory of wealth, labor, and power, although one that Leora, the people's polemicist, would never put in such academic terms.”

“I know, I
was
late, I'm sorry,” Jen was saying to Karina. She was finding her breath and her hands were shivering and she was smiling so hard her face hurt. “I had a—”

“A team can't start out with a
woman
down on the field, I should say.” Draped across the empty filing cabinet behind Jen's desk, Karina rested her chin thoughtfully on her fist.

Amid other Pavlovian conditioned responses that Jen had acquired since joining LIFt, the sight of Karina leaning against the empty filing cabinets triggered cravings for an Animexa tablet. Karina leaning against the empty filing cabinets conveyed that a memo would have to be conceived and researched and written, or a meeting would have to be convened at which a memo would be formulated or discussed or autopsied or, most likely, ignored. An Animexa tablet replicated and improved on the effects intended by the
whhooooossshhhhh
and by Daisy's noise-canceling headphones. The physical side effects of Animexa were diverse, inconsistent, and, most important, minor—the slightly dilated pupils, the cottonmouth, the clams-on-ice fingers—but to Jen its main pharmacological effects were aural. The drug seemed to create its own sound waves, which were 180 degrees out of phase with any interfering waves signaling boredom, embarrassment, and existential futility.

As Jen reminded herself even now, Animexa's sound waves were also out of phase with the Project, although at that moment it could not have mattered less.

“Right, right, I'm sorry,” Jen said. The smile on her face was genuine and absentminded, a smile acknowledging and addressing someone across the room whom only Jen could see. “I had a doctor's appointment. I did email you about it last night. I always—”

“But you would have known about a doctor's appointment before
last night.
”

“Well, it's—”

“It has not escaped my attention that all your many, many doctor's appointments are in the morning.” Karina's face twitched. Jen's frequent albeit slight tardiness had never, to Jen's knowledge, even remotely impacted a single item of business at LIFt—and indeed she lacked clarity on what, if any, business LIFt had to itemize and her own role in achieving those items of business. And yet Karina's face had just unmistakably twitched, and for a second Jen feared that her tardiness had driven Karina past some critical physiological threshold, that her belated arrival times could somehow jam Karina's feedback nerves, drain her electrolyte supply, jab her myofascial trigger points.

But actually, Karina had winked at her.

“Yes, yes, the morning,” Jen said. She remembered her needle marks and bruises, and placed her hands in piano-player position on her knees, elbows pulled in, aiming to hide her wounds or at least cast them in shadow.

“Are you a night owl, Jen?” Karina asked, cocking her head and approximating a tone of friendly conspiracy. “Lot of
late ones
? Not a morning person?”

“Sorry?” Jen hoped that Karina wouldn't wink again.

Karina wriggled her nose, as if jesting with a toddler. “I get it, I get it,” she said, bucking her chin at Jen. “
Believe
me, I get it, because I'm pretty nocturnal myself. Or I used to be. Kids are an alarm clock you really can't hit
snooze
on.”

“Oh, no, I'm not—I'm not lying—not that I'm accusing you of—sorry—”

“You are so
smiley
this morning,” Karina said. “I kind of love it.”

“Well—”

“So these
doctor's appointments,
” Karina said, enunciating each syllable as if for an audience of lip-readers. She paused and sighed. “Okay, problem-solving time: Maybe you could stagger them out—sneak out early once in a while instead of coming in late.”

“This doctor—these—I need to go in the morning. I can always stay at the office late.”

Karina shrugged. “Again, it's about the team. Do you expect the rest of the team to stay at the office late?”

“Oh, no, of course not, I just meant—”

“Look, don't even worry about it,” Karina said. “It's just something to keep in mind.” She tapped her index and middle fingers to her brow. “Nine, ay, em!”

“Got it! Thanks.”

“And
oof,
look at those bruises,” Karina said. She furrowed her brow in an effort of concern. “You okay? Need some ice?”

Jen didn't look down. “It's nothing. Thanks, though.”

“All right, well, I don't mean to pry. But if you ever need to talk about anything, anything at all, I'm always here for you,” Karina said, her hands clasped in a prayerful position as she backed away and turned around. “And
stay happy
—look at that smile,” Karina added, her back to Jen.

“Thanks very much, Karina,” Jen called after her.

“And see ya later, Daisy,” Karina said over her shoulder. Daisy, concealed behind the cubicle wall, had been sitting two feet away from them the whole time.

“I think she thinks I'm a drug addict,” Jen said, once Karina was out of earshot.

“Uppers or downers?” asked Daisy, from behind the cubicle wall.

“Downers would make you sleep in, right?”

“It depends. Uppers could keep you up all night, so maybe you're a speed freak or on an all-night coke binge, fall asleep around sunrise, and then you get a late start on the day. Or maybe you're zonked on oxycodone all the time, so it's Sunday morning every morning all day.”

“Which drugs would make you bruise easily?”

“Heroin. Steroids. Aspirin.”

“Maybe I should go public about my struggle with intravenous aspirin addiction.”

“You could write an open-letter confession to Karina.”

“Dear Karina, I am sorry I was twelve minutes late to work today…”

“…I apologize that my Aspirin Anonymous meeting went late…”

“…Because my sponsor had a slip and raided her kids' bathroom for chewables…”

“…Last week I sneaked an Advil and all I could think was ‘I'm whoring around on my one true bride…' ”

“…so then I emptied all my aspirin bottles into the ocean, and when the tablets washed up onto the shore they spelled out K-A-R-I-N-A…”

“I'm really sorry, but—” Daisy interrupted Jen, but then Jen realized that Daisy was on the phone now, talking to someone else.

“—but I have board members voting against that grant because one of them was over there and his taxi driver said he had three wives, and therefore they don't think gender equality is going to happen there anytime soon,” Daisy was saying.

Jen drummed her fingers on her desktop and bounced a little in her seat before she picked up her phone to leave Jim a voicemail. “I'm sorry, I would have called you from the henhouse, but my cell was dead,” she said to the voicemail. “I'm also sorry that I didn't go for the test right away. I am
also
also sorry that I am leaving this as a message. But anyway the answer is yes. We did it. Finally. Swish. Back of the net.”

“There is some serious motherfucking arbitration going down tonight,” Meg said.

Meg, Jen, and Jim clinked their glasses together as the crowd at Pam's opening-night party swirled and heaved around them. Pam had called her show
Break in Case of Emergency,
and as Jen had guessed, it was an elaborate riff on the medical and bureaucratic tribulations Pam had endured after her cycling accident. Pam had had the presence of mind to record virtually every second of more than twenty hours' worth of phone calls with WellnessSolutions and then transcribed them. She had sliced and diced both the recordings and the transcripts to make crazy quilts of health-insurance-provider jargon, stonewalling, who's-on-first bureaucratic script, and mindless pleasantries. She'd then given the edited transcripts to a local drama student with a honeyed baritone to provide the voice-overs for parody WellnessSolutions commercials, which now played on a loop at opposite ends of Pam's studio space. Shot on a borrowed Flip camera, they featured every trope of a WellnessSolutions TV ad campaign: silver-haired retirees dancing in slow motion at their daughter's wedding, a dog running in slow motion across a field, a toddler toddling in slow motion at the seaside. Pam had also hired actors to perform live lip-synchs of the audio edits at three spots around the studio. The actors wore white shirts, black slacks, and headsets, and they paced and smiled and gesticulated, like hosts of a motivational webinar.

The different edits of audio and video mixed and overlapped across space, though not aggressively enough to discourage conversation among the guests, which enhanced the show's feeling of disorientation and information overload. Adding to the sense of claustrophobia were Jen's portraits, which were mounted around the perimeter of the studio. As she'd been working on them one by one, they'd seemed friendly, albeit overbearing; in their final resting place, they were unsettling, menacing.

“Happiness zombies of the uncanny valley,” Meg said, approvingly.

“It's like if they smiled any harder, their faces would smash apart, like glass under pressure, to reveal the sputtering robot viscera underneath,” Jim said.

“Thanks so much, guys,” Jen said.

“You need to contact the billing department to obtain the preauthorization approval code, then contact the billing authorization department to request the preauthorization,” a woman just behind them mouthed into her headset.

Toward the back of the gallery was a chuppah constructed of hospital-bed components and wheelchair parts, with a canopy sewn out of hospital gowns; guests were invited to wrap lightbulbs in gauze pads and athletic tape and crush them underfoot. Smack in the center of the exhibit was what looked to be a cross-section of a grocery-store shelf, sliced clean out of a supermarket aisle. It displayed an enigmatic hodgepodge of items: canned beets, canned artichokes, a wine-bottle opener, slabs of vacuum-packed mozzarella, a honeycomb of bone marrow. Each item carried a unit price, a retail price, and a bar code.

“Oh, God,” Meg whispered to Jen, “the bone marrow looks like rugelach.”

“You would use the Medical Claim Form for out-of-pocket expenses before meeting the deductible, but once you've met the deductible you'd switch to the Medical Benefits Request,” a man's voice said behind them.

“Ladies, good evening.” Paulo leaned in to Meg and then Jen for a two-cheek kiss. In his standard uniform of rabbinical beard, viscerally splattered overalls, weathered steel-toed boots, and gruff, laconic affect, Paulo usually brought to Jen's mind a muzhik with a graduate degree in philosophy, or a philosophy graduate student dressed as a muzhik for Halloween. In any context—even tonight, with his beard close-trimmed, his overalls swapped for a slouchy blazer and jeans, and his features plumped in a sociable arrangement—Jen always pictured Paulo perched stone-faced atop a Belarus tractor, smoking an ironic pipe.

“You clean up real pretty,” Meg said to Paulo.

“I'm a pretty, pretty boy,” Paulo replied, showing his teeth and patting his flat belly.

“You're even prettier since the last time we saw you, which I think was at the Turbuleers group show,” Jen said.

“I fucking hated that show,” Paulo said. “Did you fucking hate that show?”

“I met a rockabilly cowboy,” Meg said.

“That cowboy you met, his name is Taige Hammerback, he's from San Jose but he twangs like he's from Texas, and he's in character
all the time,
” Paulo said. “He does studio visits like that. He got married like that.”

“I remember him well,” Meg said. “He finds lots of reasons to take off his cowboy hat to show you his cowboy pompadour.”

“He probably has sex with that hat on,” Paulo said. “He goes to the grocery store with that hat on. Well, he probably doesn't have to go to the grocery store anymore, because now Taffy French reps him.”

“He still has to eat, though,” Meg said.

“No, Taffy French can hire people to eat for him,” Paulo said.

“Pam worked for Taffy French one summer,” Meg said.

“She spent most of it choosing and presenting fabric swatches and wood grains for Taffy French's baby daughter's new high chair,” Jen said.

“Wait, was Taige Hammerback the same guy who takes Polaroids of landscapes, and then he glues them into little hand-stitched books, and the books are kind of dirty and dusty, like they've been out cattle ranching?” Meg asked.

“But then he did a thing where he attached Polaroids of Western landscapes to actual cattle, who wandered around in the sun until the Polaroids were totally sunbleached and blank, and then he exhibited the destroyed Polaroids,” Jen said.

“It doesn't even matter what Taige Hammerback makes,” Paulo said, “because it's all personality-driven. You just come up with a persona and you're more than halfway there.”

“So, okay, easy, you just need a persona, Paulo,” Jen said.

“Hairy drunkard,” Paulo said.

“Hirsute oenophile,” Meg said.

“I'm afraid that authorization code has expired, ma'am,” a woman's voice behind Jen said.

Over Paulo's shoulder, Jen spotted Jim, who had wandered away to a table labeled “Instructions for Breakage” that was scattered with peanuts, Christmas crackers, and several still-intact piggy banks. He was methodically snapping every bubble on a sheet of bubble wrap.

“Let's go see Pam,” Jen said.

Pam was resplendent in a loose topknot and a ruffled, emerald-colored shift, the shortest dress she owned. (“I am going to wear the shortest dress I own,” she had told Jen on the phone the night before, “but I can't remember what it is.”) The dress—tight and structured when Pam first purchased it, now hanging fashionably loose from her frame—indicated that she'd lost a great deal of weight during her recovery, and what little she'd put back on was lean muscle from physical therapy. Her naturally round face was thinner but not gaunt; now she had more prominent cheekbones and a more severe jawline and, as Leora would say when hawking LeoraLash
™
, “eyes that pop.” A wild, ghastly thought careened into Jen's head: that the accident had been—in some cosmic sense beyond Pam's control but inextricably knit into her destiny—intentional, karmic, a net positive. It had given Pam a compelling backstory and a wellspring of creative fodder, and somewhat improbably, it had raised her conventional-beauty quotient. Even the scars on Pam's model-skinny leg, flat and faded, looked art-directed, geometric. The lines of her legs and the lines on her legs signaled pathos and sex and dangerous youth and discipline and a hard-earned beauty. A glamour of tragedy and luck. Liabilities had shape-shifted into assets. Into a persona.

Jen blinked hard and shook her head almost imperceptibly, as if a drop of water bobbled in her ear canal. Sometimes she felt on the verge of apologizing to others for the faux pas her brain regularly committed.

“You've always been a genius of reappropriation, Pam,” Sue Kittredge, one of Pam and Jen's college professors, was saying. “But this time what you are reappropriating is
you.
It's such an act of empowerment. And it's so generous of you to share it with us.”

Pam shrugged and smiled. “What can I say—I ran out of other material.”

“I think it's a breakthrough,” Sue Kittredge said. “So bold. So brave.”

“Hi, girls!” Pam exclaimed to Meg and Jen, putting one arm around each of them in a three-way hug. “Thanks for coming, and Jen, thanks for making sure there was some actual art at the art show.”

“And
you,
Jen.” Sue Kittredge turned to embrace her former student. “These portraits brought back such wonderful memories for me.”

“Aw, thanks. It was fun. I don't think you've met my husband, Jim—that's him over there, the guy who just dropped the peanuts, and he seems to be trying to start a conversation with one of the lip-synchers.”

“I can certainly understand your frustration, ma'am,” a woman's voice said behind them.

“Okay, so Mrs. Flossie Durbin is hovering near the exit,” Meg was saying urgently to Pam, “and she never stays at these things longer than twenty minutes. Let's pounce on her now—I can introduce you.”

“I don't know,” Pam said. “Shouldn't Mrs. Flossie Durbin be free to come and go as she pleases?”

An exponentially more productive blogger than Flossie Durbin, the well-known economics writer Hatch Warren, once crunched the numbers and concluded that a Flossie Durbin blog post—which tended to forgo formal or analytical rigor in favor of declarative brevity—raised the valuation of an artist's work by a median of 18 percent. One past recipient of a Flossie Durbin blog post was Logan Benson, a first-year Yale MFA student who appropriated the tags of anonymous street artists in tapestries in the mille-fleur style. (“Fresh and vibrant,” Mrs. Durbin wrote. “The colors are animated but never cloying, the darker tones are haunting but never morbid. A clean balance of raw energy and highly wrought technique. Recommend.”) Another time, the recipient was Alex Katz. (“We risk forgetting the exciting audacity of the lonely figurative painter forging his own path in an Abstract Expressionist moment. Who else could have found so much roundness in flatness? Recommend.”) Years ago, Mrs. Durbin's personal assistant had sent Pam an email inquiry about staging a Wake, but despite Pam's enthusiastic replies—three emails, three voicemails, and a three-page handwritten letter—the assistant had never followed up.

This was not unusual, and was characteristic of Mrs. Durbin as a study in contrasts: Her enthusiasms seemed as fickle as her influence was glacial, axiomatic, permanent; her moneyed remoteness could pair comfortably with her penchant for turning up at minimally publicized, low-budget gallery openings in inconvenient areas of town; her rarefied provenance and withholding, near-mute public persona could somehow coexist with her enthusiasm for second-generation blogging software. Even the coolest of the cool kids among the overlapping social circles of whatever constituted the city's “underground” art scene—Pam and Paulo among them—regarded Mrs. Flossie Durbin with an amused fondness, a kind of benign condescension that would have vaporized on contact should her finger have ever fallen upon their shoulders in a tap of election.

“Eighteen percent, Pam!” Meg was saying.

“Eighteen percent of zero is still zero,” Pam said, taking Meg's arm. “But I'm happy to meet a nice lady.”

“I'm amazed that Mrs. Flossie Durbin is even in town in the summer,” Jen said to Sue Kittredge as Pam and Meg nudged their way through the crowd toward the exit. She raised her glass, tilting it so that the wine tipped against her lips and back again.

“You know, you haven't changed a bit, Jen,” Sue Kittredge said. “What else are you up to these days? Where can we see more of your work?”

“This is pretty much it! I was just a hired goon for Pam on this,” Jen said.

“That can't be true.”

“Well, you know how it is—you have the job that pays the bills, you think you'll have time to make things on the side, but over the years, it just kind of slips away,” Jen said. “Although, listening to myself, I'm probably just making excuses.”

“Do you and your husband have kids yet?”

Jen smiled big and wide. “Nope!” she said.

“In that case, you really do have no excuse. Where do you work?”

“Well, until recently I worked at the, uh, the Federloss Foundation?”

“Where do you work now?”

“I work at, um, a start-up?” Jen said. “I am so sorry, Sue, but I need to run to the ladies' room—I'll come find you later, okay?”

When Jen came out of the bathroom, Jim was jotting down notes in the narrow margins of a copy of
The Nation
in front of the giant teenaged orthodontics patient, a half-full glass of wine cradled between his forearm and ribs.

“This portrait made me realize something,” Jim said as Jen carefully extracted the glass of wine from its precarious berth. “I have this kid in my class, Stevie, who's really happy and cooperative all the time. He's great, but I kind of file him away in a drawer in my mind, like, ‘I don't have to worry about this one.' But maybe it's all a front. Maybe it's a façade of happiness masking horror and mania and giant metal weaponry.”

“I'm sorry that my picture of a kid with braces made you diagnose Stevie with mental illness,” Jen said.

“Stevie doesn't even have braces,” Jim said, taking back the glass of wine.

“My whole mouth tastes like braces,” Jen said. “Even my tongue.” She thrashed her tongue around, attempting to air out her mouth like a musty duvet.

“Oh, wait, you should hold this,” Jim said, handing back the glass of wine. “For show.”

Jen took it and teethed the rim of the glass intently. “My tongue is mighty, it is made of
iron,
” she said.