Sociable

by Rebecca Harrington

  “Jeez.” Mike held up his hands.

  She could tell Mike was pretending to be playfully offended but was, in actuality, offended. She continued in a lighter tone. “What about Sean Patterson?”

  “I thought you knew everything about it.”

  “Mike,” said Elinor. “I don’t really. I mean, obviously you know way more about that stuff.”

  “Well,” said Mike. He stretched out his arms. “Sean Patterson is like, some Silicon Valley venture capital guy! He wanted to start some fucking copycat of BuzzFeed that’s supposed to revolutionize journalism. But it’s the exact same as like, Medium. No one who matters takes it seriously. I mean, Memo Points Daily just had an amazing takedown of the whole thing on their website. I’ll send it to you.”

  “Ugh,” said Elinor. She had not heard him. In the past thirty seconds she had become engrossed in the progress of the coffeemaker. It was amazing to Elinor how one repetitive physical task could occupy almost all the space in her brain. She turned on the coffeemaker and walked to her chest of drawers. She took out the pair of pants she was going to wear today.

  “I think if this trash piece is really awesome, they just might give me this job.”

  “Absolutely,” said Elinor. “I think so too.”

  “I just have to keep working on it. I want to make it more about how structurally, America is incredibly irresponsible with all of its waste and how it’s actually endemic of a whole host of structural problems within the society—”

  “I love that. I have to go take a shower. You’re going to do great. I know it.”

  Elinor went over to the bathtub, which was in the middle of the kitchen area. She wrapped the shower curtain around the tub, pulled a chain to unplug the drain, and turned on the water. The shower curtain was woefully inadequate. Water sprayed on the coffeemaker no matter what she did.

  * * *

  · · ·

  It was hard to say when Elinor understood that Mike was actually Mike Moriarty, the son of essayist Pam Johnson and noted First Amendment scholar Eben Moriarty. Perhaps he was pointed out at a dim, hot party or she had figured it out through the type of casual Internet stalking of strangers that was embarrassing only when you really thought about it. In any case, she knew before she met Mike that he was the son of a woman who had written essays for Time magazine and a man who was always on CNBC defending people whose parades were very offensive.

  Mike’s mother was especially famous. When Elinor was growing up, her parents had subscribed to several magazines about world affairs, and though Elinor had tried to slog through the political articles, she would always eventually flip to the back page, where Mike’s mother’s essay would sit, ensconced by her sober-looking picture—a woman with a bob haircut, staring dreamily into nothing. “A Mother’s Guilt.” “What Gen X Forgot.” “Hillary’s Struggle.” When Elinor started to date Mike, she reread all of Mike’s mother’s columns online, late at night, after some stilted yet unconscionably thrilling encounter. Sometimes, during a particularly moving column about motherhood or some social problem of the nineties, she would get choked up, almost out of nerves.

  All this notoriety conferred a bit of glamour on Mike at school. It probably would have eventually faded if Mike was a dull kind of person, but he wasn’t. He was a “person of note” on campus. He was the editor of the alternative magazine. He was the class treasurer. He always wore a hat. In class he would get into arguments with professors that seemed remarkable for their inexplicable aggressiveness. He went to parties and invariably talked intently to the only other person in a hat there, man or woman. Everyone said he was extremely smart.

  Was Elinor known for anything at college? Her mother and her father could not provide any glamour to speak of. Her best friend, Sheila, was pretty average, not famous or exciting—she used to be in the communications school but she switched out sophomore year and was now a nurse. Elinor was an excellent student—the valedictorian of her high school class, the editor in chief of her school newspaper. She oscillated between thinking she was an undiscovered gem and relatively fat. And then all of a sudden, she was dating one of the most interesting, brilliant guys at school (for a certain crowd), just by sitting with him at a Starbucks. How had she done it? In the end, it really did reflect well on her.

  Elinor had been to Mike’s parents’ place on the Upper West Side four or five times, usually for dinner parties. Mike’s dad didn’t really talk, he was always “doing something on a computer” in another room, but Mike’s mother was just as amazing as Elinor had thought she would be. She talked about interesting things—like abortion rights. She always served an oily, lemon-flavored roasted chicken. Elinor thought eventually they would really get along, but she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she was especially boring when she talked to Mike’s mother, and that Mike’s mother had noticed it. It was just that Elinor got so nervous when there was pressure on her to say something smart. And sometimes, when she had actually prepared something smart to say, as she was saying it, Mike’s mother would blink and veer suddenly into unrelated conversational mores, as if she wanted Elinor to stop talking. Their relationship was simply going to take time.

  At first glance, this dinner party seemed much like all the other dinner parties. There were women swaddled in knit shawls and standing in a clump next to a hulking mahogany armoire in the dining room. Mike’s mother was among them. The men were in the living room, which was a separate room. Elinor was always struck by the size of Mike’s parents’ apartment. It was the biggest she had ever seen in New York—a living room, a dining room with a mahogany armoire and a table, plus two bedrooms. There was a kitchen with a prodigious amount of built-in storage that you were able to pull out of the wall using only a handlebar. Mike said it had been designed by an architect.

  “Mike!” said his mother when she saw him. “You’re late. Come here.”

  “You know I had that job thing to do,” said Mike. He sounded annoyed, which was his usual tone with his mother, although when Elinor would ask about it obliquely, he never remarked on any particular grievance. Elinor filtered in behind the two of them. She tried to make a motion toward Mike’s mother to greet her, but Mike’s mother didn’t see her because Mike’s back was blocking her, so she waved unseen.

  “How did it go? Mike’s applying for this job at Memo Points Daily,” she told the group. The group made various gestures of understanding (nodding, blinking, smiling).

  “I think my daughter has a friend who works there,” said one of the women. She was wearing red glasses.

  “Did you end up redoing the waste treatment piece?” asked Mike’s mother.

  “Of course I did,” said Mike.

  “Did you add the part I wanted you to add?”

  “I don’t know. I added a lot to the second section.”

  “What did you add?”

  “Well, I ended up cutting the thing about the mayor’s role.”

  “Did you at least call that woman? Cathy Presoni? She could have helped you with that. I told her you were going to call her.”

  “Yes, I called her. But she wasn’t that helpful.”

  “What did you ask her?”

  “Mom, what the fuck is wrong with you? I just got here. Where’s the wine?”

  “There’s wine in the living room with your father.”

  “Okay,” said Mike. He wriggled out of his mother’s grasp and stomped toward the living room. Elinor didn’t know what to do. Should she follow him? Or would that seem antisocial, because she was also a woman and should stay with the women? She decided to stay where she was.

  “That’s great about the job, Pam. Ethan is still an intern. Even though he’s been working there for like, five months for free,” said one of the other women.

  “It’s horrible,” said the woman with red glasses. “I mean, we didn’t even have internships when I was coming up. It’s robbery. And it’s robbery of us. Because we’re the ones that have to pay for it.”

  “I m
ean, look at Mike. He’s such a gifted writer and he’s just such a hard worker,” said Mike’s mother. “He was the most like me of any of the kids. His sister I have to beg to do anything. I told him, don’t settle. Don’t get a reporting job until it’s really a reporting job. I mean, he has a job now, but you know, a real job, where he gets to write. And honestly, even for him it has been harder than I think it should be. Things really need to change in this country. Now.”

  “We need a revolution. I’ve been saying that.”

  “Can you call anyone?” said the woman with red glasses. She was drinking red wine and some of it had settled on her upper two teeth, like fog over a pond.

  “I have a friend, Maureen O’Donnaugh. She worked with me at the magazine. I was going to call her on Monday.”

  Mike’s mother had been fired during the financial crisis and now enjoyed a successful freelance career. She had recently written a column called “Marriage Is Marriage” for The New York Times’s “Modern Love” column. Elinor had put it on her Facebook wall. Mike’s mother was her friend. But Mike’s mother didn’t like it or anything.

  “You should call her,” said the woman who had smiled at Elinor. She had a suspiciously lineless and shiny chin. “Isabella is interning at that nonprofit theater troupe I told you about, but it’s only because I called up Carol Sargent and begged her.”

  “Oh, I’m going to,” said Mike’s mother. “But I don’t know if it will do any good.”

  “They say the economy is recovered, but honestly, I don’t know how that can be.”

  “Did you read that article in The New Yorker about real wages? It’s absolutely not recovered.”

  “And I mean, of course you can see it in all swaths of life, the disappearance of the country’s safety net. It’s absolutely systemic. And you can see it because these kids are having the toughest time finding jobs. I mean, look at Mike—look at Isabella.”

  “Look at Ethan,” said Red Glasses, in an offended way, about Ethan.

  “And if these kids can’t get jobs, I mean, who can?” said Mike’s mother. She shook her head. “Mike won every prize you could get in school when he graduated. I mean, he really is the most brilliant kid. I know I’m his mother, but I feel like I can say objectively—”

  “And what do you do, honey?” said the Chin. Elinor had no idea she was doing it, but she was making a very pained-looking face. When addressed, Elinor felt keenly the social relief of being able to say something and simultaneous pressure for it to be an utterance of quality.

  “Me?” she said. “I’m trying to be a journalist too.” She cleared her throat.

  “And guess what?” said Mike’s mother. “She’s been babysitting this whole time. And didn’t you graduate nearly the top of your class too?”

  Elinor felt a rush of gratefulness toward both Mike (in the other room still, she could see his wasted back through the doorway) and his mother. When had Mike told his mother that she had graduated at the top of her class? Maybe she had told Mike’s mother the last time she came here actually. In any case, she was glad that Mike’s mother knew that about her. And it was so nice of her to mention it!

  “You know,” said the woman in the turtleneck to Elinor. “I just ran into Jane, Jane Targson? Out to coffee the other day. She can be, well, hard is an understatement, she’s kind of a bitch, but she’d be a great person to informationally interview. I don’t even know what she’s doing now after that thing at the Times, but just to get an idea of how kind of—”

  “I’m sure I could help you,” said Mike’s mother. “Heck, I’ve worked most places in this city. You don’t even know the jobs I did. I was Gary Sassoon’s assistant and he was a total pervert.”

  “Oh my god, that would be amazing,” said Elinor.

  “It’s so different though, now,” said Red Glasses. “When I was working at Condé Nast, we took town cars home every night. We didn’t know how good we had it.”

  “We absolutely didn’t. The book leave I used to get?”

  “Don’t even talk about it,” said the Chin. “Everything is so different now.”

  “Oh, you know who’s hiring?” said Mike’s mother. “Journalism.ly. Tim Patterson was telling me about it. You know, his son runs it? Apparently his son was very upset about that takedown in Memo Points Daily, and wants to invest more in investigative journalism or something? So that could be interesting. I told him I knew people. I’ll mention you.”

  “You would do that?” squeaked Elinor.

  “I see him every Sunday at this board we’re both on. He’s the only non–hedge funder on the whole thing, so I have to talk to him. This board is so obnoxious, I don’t know why I do it. I mean, I know why I do it, it’s because I believe in the charity, but—”

  “That would be so helpful,” said Elinor.

  A thought passed through Elinor’s mind, unwanted and dreadful—did Mike’s mother share Mike’s disparagement of Journalism.ly and therefore her suggestion of Elinor for that particular job was some kind of subterranean neg? Then, however, she dismissed it. There was no way Mike’s mother could do that. It was not what she wanted to think.

  An important fact about Elinor that the reader should know is that even though she often felt a lot of free-floating, nonspecific anxiety, she was actually very good at blocking out specific thoughts. Here’s how it worked: An anxiety-provoking thought would surface, unbidden, in her mind, but almost as soon as it happened, a new thought would occur in its place. The new thought usually adopted the kind of positivist, instructive, and generalized tone of the personal essays Elinor read on the Internet, which gave Elinor a feeling that the new thought was better than the old thought because it was valorized by collective wisdom. Instead of worrying about Mike’s mother, and her specific idiosyncrasies or motivations, for example, Elinor would start to think about mothers in general, and how they loved their children but needed individuality. This new thought would then compete with the latent anxiety left behind by the old thought, the content of which Elinor had almost convinced herself she had forgotten.

  Mike came back with a glass of wine then. He had one glass in each hand. Elinor beamed at him. She loved him so much all of a sudden, his lopsided hair, the virulent tone he always used with his mother. He had even gotten her a glass of wine without asking, which was such a nice thing to do.

  The rest of the dinner went on as usual. Mike talked to his mother and her friends about current events. Elinor tried to chime in—sometimes she sounded banal and sometimes she sounded slightly garbled. For once she didn’t care. She also got a bit too drunk at dinner, but everyone sort of did.

  Chapter 2

  Facebook: 1 status update: “I’ve got a big job interview this week and I have a question since I haven’t done this in a while. Do you really have to print your resume out anymore? Can’t everyone pull it up on their phones?” Four likes, two comments. Comment 1, a friend from college: “Congrats on the job interview!” Comment 2, a friend of Elinor’s mother and a heavy Facebook user: “You don’t have to print out your resume, but I do think it’s a nice gesture.”

  Twitter: 15 tweets, slightly more journalistically inflected than usual. Perhaps Elinor thought her future employers would be looking at her Twitter. Sample: “Thought-provoking article about waste treatment from @Mike_Moriarty_Journo. We need to know where our trash goes! #knowyourtrash.”

  Instagram: 2 pictures. Picture 1: Elinor’s street taken from the top of her roof. It’s not a very beautiful vista, but it is dense. There is a series of ruddy tenements and the occasional brutalist apartment building. The trees look desiccated. Caption: “First time up on my roof this year. #pretty #NYCwinter #WinterIsComing.”

  Picture 2: Mike and Elinor. It is from when they were in college, which you can tell from the lack of ostensible filter, Elinor’s American Apparel leotard, and Mike’s hat. In the picture, Elinor is kissing Mike on the cheek. He is blinking. Caption: “To my amazingly sweet, funny, kind boyfriend. Thank you for always getti
ng me pizza at 3 in the morning, just because ‘I need it.’ Thank you for helping me cope with work and for letting me complain endlessly about my stress even when you have your own shit to do. And thank you for doing the dishes last night. Here’s to another year with my best friend.”

  · · ·

  Elinor talked to Mike for the first time in October of senior year. Elinor was sitting in Starbucks, in a sweater that was always a little too wide, drinking a cinnamon sugar latte. She was studying for her History of Communications class and feeling guilty about the latte. Elinor loved food, and she was also a distracted, impulsive, and tetchy eater. While studying, she could eat an entire bag of Rold Gold pretzels like it was a pack of gum. She realized she wasn’t horribly fat, but she was in no way skinny either. At a certain point the year before, she’d realized she was developing an immutable second roll on her stomach.

  Mike walked up to her table. There was an empty seat in front of her and he put his bag on it.

  “Do you mind if I sit here?” he said. Elinor was a little surprised. She knew who Mike was, but they had never talked before.

  “Of course,” said Elinor. “I’m Elinor by the way.”

  “Mike.” Mike held out his hand. Elinor shook it, and Mike gave her a lugubrious smile. Then he went into his leather rucksack and took out a stack of legal notepads and laid them on the table. He also took out his History of Communications textbook and placed it carefully next to the notepads.

  “You’re studying for History of Communications?” said Elinor. “Me too!” She held up her book.

  “Cool,” said Mike.

  “You know, I think I’ve seen you around before.” Elinor realized then she was not going to bother anymore with the pretense that she didn’t know who he was. People did that, but personally, she always felt like it was a little bit rude, or hypocritical or something.