by Jung Yun
Elinor scrolls back to the top of Lydia’s search results page and clicks on the images tab, curious to know what she looks like. There are almost too many photos to choose from, taken at glittering fundraisers and book parties. Elinor finds candid shots of Lydia talking with people at receptions while holding a glass of wine in her hand—always red wine, always the left hand. There are staged shots of her posing next to tuxedo- and evening gown–clad guests at various galas, all left-leaning causes like promoting literacy and protecting the environment and raising scholarship funds for inner-city kids. The image she sees most frequently is a professional headshot in which Lydia is sitting at a desk, her face turned to a three-quarters pose, reading a manuscript.
In every photo—candid or staged, casual or formal—Lydia looks the same. Neutral colors, muted makeup, tasteful clothes that flatter but don’t distract or draw too much attention. She has porcelain, almost blue-tinted skin, and a long, aquiline nose that the eye simply can’t avoid noticing. She isn’t particularly attractive, not in the usual ways. But with her silvery white hair and mannish black eyeglass frames, she exudes a quiet, cerebral confidence, a quality that makes her stand out among the sea of Plasticine socialites and trophy wives.
Toward the end of the first page of images, she finds a photo of Lydia and Richard standing next to each other at a Literacy Matters gala earlier that spring. One page later, there’s another photo of them at the American Museum of Natural History. Richard always looked his best in a tux; on some level, she thinks he must have known that. It was rare for him to turn down a black-tie invite. This also appears to be true of Lydia, who must have a closetful of evening gowns and cocktail dresses at her disposal. Elinor continues clicking until it finally dawns on her—how frequently the two of them appear at the same events, in the same photos. When she starts zooming in on the images, she notices Richard’s hand wrapped around Lydia’s waist, positioned low on her hip. It’s too intimate a pose for colleagues or even longtime friends. They’re a couple, she thinks. They have been for at least eight months, which is how far back their earliest photo together goes. Suddenly the phone conversation she’s about to have seems fraught. Does Lydia know that she and Richard used to date, or did he simply refer to her as a former student? And if he’s dating this woman, then why did he tell Elinor that he’d been thinking about her when they spoke last night?
Before she has a chance to collect her thoughts, her phone rings. It’s a FaceTime request from a number with a New York City area code. She quickly declines it, assuming someone misdialed, but twenty seconds later, another request from the same number appears. She presses the “accept” button hesitantly, not recognizing the young woman with the poppy-colored lipstick whose face now fills her screen.
“Hello?”
“Hi. I’m Ms. Griswold’s assistant. Could you hold for her, please?”
“Yes, but wasn’t this … wasn’t this just supposed to be a phone call?” Elinor touches her hair, which is still wet from the shower. The comfortable gray T-shirt she changed into is freckled with holes. She cocks her phone up at an angle so the assistant can’t see the largest of them, a fingertip-sized one on the edge of her sleeve. “I didn’t think…”
“I mentioned it was a video call in my email. She prefers this format. May I put her on with you now?”
The assistant seems convinced of her faultlessness in the matter, so Elinor simply nods. When the screen goes black during the transfer, she quickly searches for the original message on her computer, if only to prove to herself that she didn’t make a mistake. But there it is, in the very first line of the first paragraph, seemingly impossible to miss now that she knows what to look for. Your FaceTime call with Ms. Griswold is scheduled for Wednesday, 6/13, at 3 p.m. She wonders if Lydia really prefers this format, or if she’s just curious to inspect the woman who slept with Richard before she did. Elinor runs her fingers through her hair and pinches her cheeks for some color, mortified that she’s underdressed, wearing no makeup, and sitting in terrible light. She wishes she didn’t care about such things, but then Lydia appears on the screen, and it’s obvious why she should.
“Well, at last,” she says, in a voice that sounds like she’s smoked all her life. “We finally meet.”
Lydia looks as polished as she did in her pictures. A crisp white button-down shirt. A gold choker peeking out from beneath the pressed collar. Shoulder-length hair that must have been blown out by a stylist just that morning. And the way she sits—so elegant and upright.
“Yes. Hello.” Elinor straightens up as she tries to smile. She was always good at posing in front of a camera, but her default sitting posture is terrible, with her shoulders tipped low toward the ground.
“How are you settling in?”
“Fine, thanks.”
Lydia pauses, as if she expects more. When nothing else follows, she leans back in her chair, an expensive-looking modern one made of black leather and thick tubes of chrome. “I’m sorry it’s taken us so long to connect. I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve assigned a piece to someone without talking to them first, but Richard had so many wonderful things to say about you. It feels like we know each other already.”
“Oh?” Elinor’s voice cracks at the mention of him. She can’t imagine Richard actually doing this and wonders if Lydia is just being polite. “That’s nice.” If she wasn’t on a screen, she’d be tempted to roll her eyes. Even she feels impatient listening to her terse, inane answers, but she’s too rattled to think on her feet.
“Well, alright then. Maybe we should just get started.” Lydia picks up a black fountain pen that she spins between her forefinger and thumb with a graceful whirl. “Why don’t you tell me how it’s going, what you’ve been up to, how your first few interviews have gone.”
It’s obvious that Lydia just asked several different questions in a row, probably in an effort to elicit something that resembles a conversation. Elinor starts slowly, trying to work through a wall of nerves that almost feels too high to climb. One by one, she runs through her conversations with the town manager, Steve from the bar, Harry Bergum, and Mrs. Mueller. She thinks she summarizes the takeaways well, but she feels increasingly unnerved by the sight of Lydia’s pen, which continues to whirl, faster and faster. When she finishes speaking, Lydia just nods and puts the pen down without making a single note.
“Were you … were you able to hear all of that?”
“I could hear you just fine.” Lydia’s expression has shifted from contemplative to slightly amused. “It sounded a bit like you were giving a book report, though.”
Elinor has no idea how to respond to this. The rush of embarrassment she feels transports her back to grad school when Kathryn would lob criticisms at her across the seminar table. Usually, she did so in a tone similar to Lydia’s, with a hint of airy condescension that made the words sting even harder.
“I was just telling you what I’ve learned so far.”
“I understand, but you’re writing a feature story, not a news article, and all you gave me was information. Why should people care about what’s happening there? Also…” She pauses, as if to think through what she wants to say next, a sign that something very bad is coming. “Where’s your sense of personal investment, or rediscovery? I don’t feel like I’m talking to a writer who’s from North Dakota and returning there after a long absence with new insights. That’s the whole reason I agreed to reassign this piece to you in the first place. I mean, who better to write about insiders and outsiders than someone who grew up in the area and was probably a little bit of both at some point?”
Elinor focuses on the bookshelves behind Lydia’s head to avoid looking her in the eye. She doesn’t know if it’s wise to tell her that she thinks Richard’s concept is too reductive, smaller than the place that Avery has become. Who is she to question him, after all? To question either of them?
Lydia seems to misinterpret her silence as hesitation, or perhaps even inarticulateness. “Alrig
ht, let’s try this another way. Why don’t you tell me the thing that’s struck you most about being back in North Dakota?”
Elinor stares at her lap, going over the events of the past three days, but the answer is already there on the tip of her tongue. “It’s the men.”
“How so?”
“I’ve never been in a place where there are so many men. Where I feel completely outnumbered.”
“Okay.” Lydia nods encouragingly. “That’s interesting. The male-to-female ratio must be quite high there with all the oil workers in town, right?”
“It is.” In the line outside the Halliburton interviews, she counted well over thirty men before she saw a single woman. “And the way they behave when there are so many of them in one place … It’s like walking past a construction crew when you’re alone, and you just have to brace yourself for whatever they’re going to say to you because who’s going to stop them…” She trails off, thinking about her mother, how men sometimes used to call out to her when Ed wasn’t around. If they were friendly, she’d let them approach and make conversation under the guise of practicing her English. Elinor and Maren always tugged on her hands, trying to lead her away until she snapped at them to be patient, be polite. “Anyway, I’m not sure if things like that have ever happened to you, but that’s what this place feels like. It’s just nonstop.”
Lydia, she guesses, is in her late fifties. Possibly her early sixties, at most. Yet her face registers a brief flicker of recognition, as if she too has experienced this before. She writes something down on her notepad finally. “That sounds awful,” she says, but for the first time since their conversation started, she actually seems pleased. Intrigued, almost. The sudden shift in her demeanor encourages Elinor to bring up something that she wasn’t planning to mention.
“As long as we’re talking about what kind of insights I could offer, I was wondering if you’d consider letting me change the focus of the article a little. I don’t mean change it entirely or anything, but instead of writing about insiders and outsiders, I thought it might be interesting to examine more specific issues, like gender and race, maybe even class too, and how they’re all interconnected here.” She sees Lydia’s eyebrows and mouth turn downward in the shape of protest. Before she has a chance to respond, Elinor continues. “There was a local woman who went missing a couple of years ago. It’s an unsolved case, but it’s not hard to imagine a roughneck was involved somehow—that’s what the locals think, anyway.”
“Oh God,” Lydia says morosely. “Please don’t tell me you’re thinking about writing some sort of dead girl story.”
Elinor pauses, unfamiliar with the term. “Dead girl story?”
“You know what I mean. Those stories about missing or murdered women that magazines and news shows can’t get enough of lately. They’re lurid, I think. Sickening, really.” She waves her hand dismissively. “Of course nothing ever changes afterward. The underlying conditions that result in these women turning up dead always stay the same. We just feed the public’s appetite for female suffering to sell magazines and bump up our Nielsen ratings.”
Elinor doesn’t appreciate what she’s being accused of. Lydia hasn’t listened long enough to even understand what she’s trying to do. “But I don’t want the story to be about the missing woman, specifically. It’s just, these kinds of things—they never happened in this area before the boom, and then afterward, there were these attacks on men of color … I’m still working it all out in my head, but I think I could use this woman’s disappearance … mention it, I mean, as a way of framing some of the issues I’ve been thinking about since I’ve been here.”
“For three days,” Lydia says, and then nothing more follows.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“You’ve been thinking about these issues since you’ve been there—for three days. But Richard researched this story for nearly three months before he handed it off to you. And I’m guessing—correct me if I’m wrong—that you haven’t talked to him about the changes you want to make.”
Elinor wonders if she misinterpreted the photos she saw online. If they were really dating, Lydia would know the impossibility of what she’s asking.
“Look, I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t add your own spin to what he originally proposed. In fact, I think you’ll need to in order to bring some value and connection to the piece. But what you’re suggesting right now is a completely different story. It’s also kind of a maelstrom of big ideas that would probably be too much for even the most seasoned writer…”
She leaves the sentence unfinished, but Elinor knows what she meant to imply.
Lydia smiles at her, conveying both warmth and sympathy at the same time. “Richard opened a door for you. So why in the world are you trying to run through a wall?”
18
Elinor spends the rest of the evening and the next morning transcribing. It’s difficult to concentrate; she finds herself starting but never quite finishing anything. Whenever her phone vibrates, she assumes it’s Richard. She plays out their entire conversation in her head. He’ll call her ungrateful or disrespectful, possibly both. He’ll go on and on about how he gave her such an amazing opportunity. He handed the whole thing to her on a plate, for Christ’s sake, and then what did she do? She embarrassed him behind his back, trying to turn his pitch into something unrecognizable. She’ll apologize, as she usually does, and offer an innocent observation about how stories can evolve over time. Then she’ll point out that she didn’t argue when Lydia told her to do it his way. This is when he’ll really lose it. Who the hell are you to tell me what stories do? he’ll shout. Or Why did you ever think you had a choice?
Worse than the anticipation of Richard’s anger is the embarrassment that eventually settles in. She imagines Lydia telling him about their conversation, describing Elinor as naive and presumptuous. A familiar feeling of regret sweeps over her, replaying the things she said, followed by all the things she wishes she would have said. When Lydia suggested that Elinor had only been thinking about the story for three days, while Richard had been thinking about it for three months, she should have corrected her immediately. She’s been thinking about these issues her entire life, in ways that Richard never had to.
The worst thought of all, the one that makes her blister from the inside out, is how Lydia and Richard will probably share a good laugh at her expense. The words “in over her head” will be repeated in tones both mocking and concerned. Then they’ll discuss taking the assignment away, a scenario that Elinor can hardly stand to think about because what else does she have if she doesn’t have this?
Freelance work is hard for her to get back in New York. It’s not like modeling, when she had an agency pushing her portfolio at photographers and casting directors. So much happens through word of mouth, through friends of friends. Elinor didn’t leave grad school with that kind of network. Despite being a capable writer, dedicated to improving her craft, most of Elinor’s professors and classmates regarded her with skepticism because of her relationship with Richard, a poorly kept secret that no one ever discussed but everyone seemed to know about. On the rare occasions when a faculty member told her about an assignment that was up for grabs, it was always something fashion or beauty related, which she wanted no part of. She’d had enough of that world and people thinking it was all she could do. Richard had been a difficult person to be with, and dating him had probably cost her things that she can’t even estimate the value of now, but she’s grateful to him in a way that she isn’t toward the others. At least he finally gave her a chance to prove herself capable of more. Who else can she say that about?
Elinor confirms the details of a ride-along with the Avery Police Department—a minor coup given the runaround she encountered while trying to schedule it. She suspects that Alan Denny, who agreed to make some calls on her behalf, helped nudge the process forward. She sends a grateful email telling him so before leaving the hotel.
Her two o’clock meeting is a
tour of one of the big man camps located outside town. The farther north she drives, the weaker her cell phone signal gets. Eventually, she has no bars of service left, just strange roaming symbols at the top of her screen that she’s never seen before. She wonders if not being able to receive a call when she’s expecting a bad one is a form of torture or reprieve. It’s unsettling that Richard hasn’t contacted her yet, although it’s possible that he’s holding off because he knows the wait will make her anxious. Like an actress running her lines, she rehearses all the things she’ll have to say in order to calm him down: I understand what a good opportunity this is. I appreciate and respect the work you’ve already done. I’m sticking to the plan now; I really am. When he asks whether she intends to use his questions from now on, she’ll tell him yes. Yes. She absolutely will.
Elinor tosses her phone on the passenger seat and stares at the long, dry stretch of road ahead of her. Avery doesn’t allow man camps within the town limits, so housing for oil workers is exiled to the no-man’s-lands in between towns, just off the main roads. The camps on either side of Highway 19 resemble sprawling fields of crops, with identical buildings spaced out in long, even rows. She can tell how much it costs to stay in them, give or take, based on the size and style of their housing units. She spots a budget version comprised of dozens of modest white trailers, each probably no more than a hundred square feet with a single porthole-shaped window. Across the road is a pricier-looking version with an outdoor recreation area and modern silver trailers big enough for three or four people to share. Elinor’s childhood dream was to travel from state to state with her family, seeing the sights and living out of a trailer not unlike the ones she’s passing now. She wished this could be her father’s job instead of fixing rockets, which was how she understood his work as a missile silo engineer. In her daydreams, however, she imagined her family alone, with no one around to bother them. It was always the people who were the problem. When it was just the four of them, Ed didn’t pick at the way Nami dressed or behaved so often. He didn’t constantly compare her to other women, other types of wives.