I'm So Happy for You

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  Hi sweets. I just wanted to see if you were feeling any better?? Call any time and/or if you need ANYTHING. At the office all day. I know you’re going to get through this. Thinking of u, W.

  Wendy addressed her second message to her and Daphne’s mutual friend—or, really, Daphne’s friend and Wendy’s longtime nemesis—Paige Ryan, a six-feet-tall senior analyst for a Manhattan-based hedge fund, where she researched overvalued stocks that the fund then sold short with the aim of making a killing when the price subsequently fell. (At the moment, she was concentrating on the retail sector.) But Paige made a great show of giving a large percentage of her salary to worthy causes, thereby making herself beyond reproach. She was also always mailing Wendy and Adam invitations to benefit parties they couldn’t afford to attend, then calling attention to their absence.

  Paige had been a college classmate of Wendy’s, as well. Back then, she’d been best known for launching SAD, a nationwide advocacy group for college students suffering from depression and anxiety. Despite her lifelong commitment to battling mental illness, however—and while there was every reason to believe that Paige herself was perpetually despondent—she’d never admitted to feeling anything less than peachy. What’s more, those who made the mistake of suggesting otherwise risked being subjected to a fusillade of vituperation—those, for instance, who expressed sympathy over Paige’s recent divorce, as Wendy had. (“What do you mean you’re sorry?” Paige had snapped at her. “Sorry for what? Antoine and I came to a mutual decision we were both happy with. Case closed. Maybe you’re sorry about your own marriage. But I’m not about mine.”)

  Wendy essentially loathed the woman. But she was Daphne’s “other best friend.” In some bizarre way, Wendy felt sorry for her. It was also common knowledge that Paige was an excellent point person to have during a crisis, if only because grappling with other people’s distress and dysfunction was as close as she came to having a hobby. Not that Daphne’s phone call from the night before necessarily constituted a crisis. Even so, Wendy felt compelled to keep Paige abreast of the situation:

  P. Not to be alarmist—I think/hope she was just being dramatic—but Daphne called late last night and threatened to kill herself again. (Mitch, of course.) She promised me she’d call Carol in the morning, but it probably wouldn’t hurt if her friends checked up on her, too—hence, my email to you. Anyway, hope things are well on your end. (I’m sure they are.) Yrs, W.

  Both emails sent, Wendy turned her attention to her editorial assignment for the day: an opinion piece arguing that the Medicare prescription drug benefit had been a cynical giveaway to “Big Pharm,” with the secret purpose of bankrupting the federal government, thus leading to a permanent down-sizing of the social safety net. Barricade had published a nearly identical piece just the month before. But it was rhetoric, not repetition, that concerned the magazine’s top brass. Wendy’s initial editorial move was to cross out the first sentence, which referred to the Republicans as “avaricious profiteers.” (The phrase seemed redundant, not to mention a little heavy-handed.) “Let’s start here,” she wrote in the margin next to sentence two. She’d only just begun to get her head around sentence three—“While the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex siphons billions off the slumped backs of the elderly and the incapacitated…”—when Paige’s name came blinking into her in-box.

  To Wendy’s secret shame, the sight of it filled her chest cavity with what felt like a fresh burst of oxygen. Though she mostly believed she’d reached out to Paige on Daphne’s behalf, Wendy was also aware of being a horrible gossip. Moreover, gossip didn’t fully exist for her in all of its nuance-laden splendor until she’d shared and parsed it with someone else, preferably someone who knew all the parties implicated. Abandoning her editorial assignment, Wendy opened Paige’s message and began to read:

  Wendy,

  Please understand that I am AT WORK RIGHT NOW—and therefore NOT AT LIBERTY TO DISCUSS THESE SORTS OF PRIVATE MATTERS IN DETAIL. That said, the news is indeed distressing, and I will of course call Daphne at the first opportunity that presents itself. In the meantime, I think it would be prudent for one of us to contact Richard and Claire (Daphne’s parents) and let them know what has transpired. In the bigger picture, I think it may also be time to confront Mitchell himself—not my first choice, obviously. But, then, Carol seems to be of limited help, and, quite frankly, I’ve run out of other ideas.

  As for Daphne just being “melodramatic”—until the veracity of that statement is proven, Wendy, I don’t think this is the time for us to be closing our eyes and hoping for the best.

  As for me, I’m quite well, thank you—just sorry to have missed you at my multiple sclerosis benefit last night! We raised 325K, a record for the organization. I guess you’ve been busy. Perhaps there’s reproductive news of which I’m unaware?

  Paige

  “Wendy,” someone was saying behind her head in a gravelly voice. “Do you have Leslie’s copy yet?” (Leslie, whose full name was Leslie Fletcher—and who, for the record, was a man—was the writer of the Medicare piece.) Quickly down-sizing Paige’s email, Wendy swiveled around in her desk chair, only to find herself staring into the pockmarked face of Barricade’s executive editor, Lincoln Goldstein.

  Ordinarily, Wendy would have felt compassion for someone who had such a glaring cosmetic defect as Lincoln’s. But “Missing Linc”—as Adam had nicknamed him—had a way of squinting as he spoke, one side of his mouth raised in a half smile, as if he were “in” on the fact that she spent a good portion of her workday emailing friends, playing solitaire, shopping online for furniture and clothes, perusing soul-deadening celebrity gossip Web sites, and generally pursuing cheap thrills that had nothing to do with fighting the forces of fascism in Washington and elsewhere.

  But then, considering the paltry salary she was paid, Wendy didn’t see how she wasn’t entitled to a certain amount of personal time. Not to mention the occasional white lie. “I just got the piece this morning,” she told Lincoln. (In fact, it had come in on Friday.) “I should have something for you to look at by this afternoon.” With that, she straightened her spine against the back of her chair, the better to block her computer screen, which was currently blank.

  She watched Lincoln’s eyes case her cubicle and linger on the Duane Reade pharmacy shopping bag that sat on her desktop, as if it surely contained goatskin condoms for her lunchtime pleasure, when, in fact, it contained an ovulation predictor kit, an antiperspirant, and a three-pack of Hanes Her Way cotton briefs, because wearing nice underwear had come to seem as superfluous as having sex during the “wrong” time of the month. (It was rare for Wendy to buy new underwear at all; she tended to wear hers until their crotch panels were discolored and their waistbands had begun to sprout threads in the manner of carrots and potatoes left too long in the bin. It wasn’t clear if Adam noticed, or minded.)

  “Please forward it to me as soon as you finish,” said Lincoln.

  “Will do,” said Wendy with a perky smile intended to combat his mocking and mistrustful one.

  He probably stood there for only forty seconds. To Wendy, it felt like an eternity. Finally, he disappeared. Then Wendy reopened Paige’s email, her anger metastasizing with each sentence she reread.

  She found the opening one, with its gratuitous caps and simultaneously self-aggrandizing and punitive tone, possibly the most egregious. (While Paige was essentially adding zeros to the stock portfolios of rich guys in Connecticut, she apparently imagined herself to be running the World Bank.) Though Wendy’s blood boiled with near-equal vigor as she reviewed the fifth: I’ve run out of other ideas? As if it were Paige’s problem to solve! (And as if Daphne had called her the night before.) It was so typical of Paige to claim Daphne’s unhappiness for herself, Wendy thought. She was further enraged by the parenthesis containing the words Daphne’s parents. (As if, after sixteen years of friendship, Wendy didn’t know the first names of Daphne’s family members.) Clearly, Paige was trying to prove that she wa
s better friends with Daphne than Wendy was. Never mind the chastising tone of “I don’t think this is the time…”

  As for the implication that Wendy had been too busy having sex with her husband to attend Paige’s MS benefit, the charge was so risible that Wendy had trouble feeling offended.

  The real question, Wendy thought as she closed Paige’s email, was why she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She knew this was what Adam would say if she told him what had happened. She could already hear him going off: Paige Ryan is a shrew and a control freak. Why can’t you accept that? Just because Daphne is friends with her doesn’t mean you have to be. Also, why are you going around talking to other people about Daphne’s private business? She called you—not the New York Post.

  Adam would be right, of course. At the same time, he clearly believed himself entitled to hear every last Daphne Update. (Apparently, he didn’t belong to the group herein identified as “other people.”) It also seemed to Wendy that Adam discounted the pleasure to be found in having an archenemy. It gave you something specific to feel indignant about when the larger injustices (murder, famine, disease, the fact that some people got pregnant without trying) were beyond your control. It made the landscape more colorful, too, like the weeds that filled in abandoned city lots. For these reasons—and also due to a lifelong need to have the last word—Wendy spent the next twenty-five minutes composing a reply that struck just the right neutral, even pleasant tone that subtly reclaimed the mantle of authority for herself while shaming Paige. She finally settled on:

  P —

  Please do let me know if you reach D and learn anything more. In the meantime, I have to admit I don’t see the point of contacting Richard and Claire right now (i.e., I don’t think it would accomplish anything more than antagonizing D). I’m afraid I feel the same way about contacting Mitch. Plus, in his case, if D found out that you or I had gone behind her back, it might have the unintended effect of bringing the two of them closer—at least in D’s mind.

  At this point, my sense is that D mainly just needs her friends around her—and also, yes, Carol. True she’s been unable so far to get D away from M. But she’s still a medical professional, which neither of us is.

  Meanwhile, very sorry to miss your benefit last night. I only wish Adam and I had the funds to go to stuff like that! But until Barricade goes “public”—and Vulcan Capital starts buying shares in it —I’m afraid it’s unlikely.

  As for baby making, I’ll keep you posted if and when it ever happens.

  W

  It was only after clicking “send” that Wendy realized her error in including the word ever in her final sentence. There was only one way to deal with Paige, Wendy had learned over the years, and it was to censor all traces of vulnerability in one’s self. (And here she’d practically lit the way to the front door of her heart.)

  Several minutes later, a new message arrived from Paige, along with a group email from the husband of Wendy’s friend Pamela. Even without the subject heading, “New Addition,” Wendy could more or less guess the news the latter message contained. The last time she’d seen Pamela—by coincidence, several Saturdays before, in Prospect Park—she’d been thirty-eight weeks pregnant (and jogging). Even so, Wendy decided to open Pamela’s husband’s email first:

  Please join us in welcoming into the world Lucas Henry Rose, born on October 2, at 8:32 PM—in a taxi stuck in traffic on the FDR, en route to New York Presbyterian Hospital—weighing 10 pounds, 11 ounces. Baby and Mommy are well, and Daddy is thrilled. (Todd.)

  Wendy was thrilled, too. She also felt envious of Pamela’s reproductive success, if not of the manner in which she’d achieved it (or the monstrosity of the child she’d been forced to deliver). But she’d already found a way to justify the news in her head, so it wasn’t as threatening as it might have been. For one thing, Wendy reminded herself, Pamela had been married six months longer. For another, she was eight months older. She was also Pamela Jane Rose. Which is to say, perfection personified: not just beautiful and successful—she was a senior producer at a critically acclaimed television news program—but a phenomenal cook, a former Rhodes Scholar, and the ex–backstroke champion of Southern California. She was also really nice and therefore unhateable. Finally, she was one of the few women Wendy knew who didn’t spend 50 percent of her waking hours complaining about her life. Not that she currently had much to complain about. But even when she had—even when she’d been single and diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma—she’d claimed to savor each living moment. Just as now that she was healthy again and married to a bestselling novelist who was also drop-dead gorgeous, independently wealthy, always home, and committed to fifty-fifty parenting, she claimed to be the luckiest woman in the world. Most of the time, Wendy found Pamela’s upbeat attitude refreshing and even inspiring. At other times, she found it deeply threatening, insofar as it threw into doubt the legitimacy of her own chronic discontent. She wrote back:

  Dear Pamela and Todd, I’m so happy for you guys!!!!! That’s wonderful news. Can’t wait to meet the little—or, I really should say, quite LARGE—fellow. Did he really come out in the cab? Insane. Only you. Congratulations and much love, Wendy

  With a sense of foreboding, Wendy then opened Paige’s reply to her reply:

  Wendy,

  I am afraid you have more faith in Carol than I do. Despite her master’s degree in social work, calling the woman a “medical professional”—it seems to me—is a bit of a stretch. But, then, I know how you people in the media business like to throw around words!

  Meanwhile—f.y.i.—I just read a very interesting article about infertility among women in our age group. It turns out that most of the issues (tube blockage, lack of cervical fluid, etc.) have their origin in STDs. Which is not to say you have one. Still, it might be worth checking. Also, if it’s been six months, you really should seek help. Unfortunately, at our advanced age, the chances of conceiving plummet with every passing month. Luckily, none of this affects me, not only because I’ve never had an extended promiscuous period(!), but because I’m more committed to battling overpopulation than I am to any narcissistic need to see my cheekbones replicated in another human being. But, then, that’s just me.

  Paige

  Newly confirmed in her suspicion that Paige Ryan was a close family relation of Satan’s, Wendy hit “delete.” She was about to return to Leslie Fletcher’s overwrought Medicare editorial when she discovered that Pamela had already written back:

  wen, thanks for the sweet note. can’t wait for you to meet the babe! meanwhile, can’t believe how hysterical everyone gets about childbirth. yes, i would have preferred a hospital (vs. taxi) delivery. but, really, it was so not a big deal. like a few bad menstrual cramps. (whatever.) i’m a little sore this morning. i mostly just feel bad for the cabbie! (kind of made a mess of his backseat—whoops.) i only wish he’d accepted my check for new upholstery.…

  anyway, should be heading home from the hospital in a few hours. any chance you and adam want to come by for dinner tonight? i have this great recipe for lasagna i want to try. xxoopammy

  Pamela’s superwoman act had the occasional, paradoxical effect of making Wendy feel the need to deride herself as scum personified. She wrote back:

  P, You are a champ for making it through labor unscathed! Having zero tolerance for pain, am hoping for a high-risk pregnancy, so I can schedule a C section. Though equally possible I’ll never get pregnant and end up adopting a spina bifida baby from China. In any event, would so love to come meet Baby Luke tonight. But, tragically, being an alcoholic depressive, I already have drink plans. (Not sure what Adam’s doing. Not that he ever tells me anymore.) Maybe I/we could come by this weekend?? And, wait, I should be cooking YOU lasagna. Unfortunately, being a total failure of a woman, I don’t know how. (Amazing Adam hasn’t left me already.) XXW

  Again, Wendy clicked “send,” only to be sidetracked by yet another arriving email. This one was from her friend Sara, a strawberry-blond intellectua
l property lawyer and Houston-reared heiress whose highly effeminate men’s magazine “style editor” fiancé of four years, Dolph, was widely believed to be gay—hence his refusal to set a wedding date:

  Wendy, I heard from Paige that Daphne is threatening suicide again?? Is it true??? Sounds like you two have the situation under control, but please please please let me know if there’s anything I can do. Love, Sara

  The gossip chain had apparently just begun: Sara’s email was closely followed by one from her best friend, Gretchen Daubner, a mite-sized workaholic UNICEF executive who rarely saw her two-month-old twins, Lola and Liam, conceived on Gretchen’s third round of in vitro fertilization. (Wendy had yet to see them, either, though not for lack of trying.) Gretchen’s email arrived with a “high priority” flag, though in truth almost all of her emails did:

  wen, i heard from sara that daphne tried to kill herself? is she okay?????? please let me know what the situ is a.s.a.p. (leaving for congo in an hour.) so worried, g

  Wendy promptly replied to both women, assuring them that the situation was “under control.” Then, if only to be sure that her assessment was correct, she called Daphne. But Daphne’s cell and home phones both rang straight to voice mail. Not wanting to appear overbearing, Wendy left no messages. Instead, she called Adam to tell him about Pamela and Todd’s baby—“That’s nice for them,” he said—and also to report that she hadn’t heard anything from Daphne, and wasn’t that kind of strange?

  “She’s probably been kidnapped by aliens,” he offered.