Break in Case of Emergency

by Jessica Winter

  Zen Rand

  Jen climbed off her paint-splattered stepladder, rotating her shoulder in its socket and stifling a mewl of pain. She had been standing atop the stepladder at the back of Pam’s studio for two hours straight, the elbow of her painting arm propped in her opposite palm, doing minutely detailed blending brushwork on a head-and-shoulders portrait of an enormous happy teen: floppy, rust-colored cowlick; glinting rectangle-smile full of braces; the color of his hoodie a spectacularly verdant marriage of cadmium yellow and ultramarine. Coaxing a person out of a driver’s license photo or a magazine clipping and onto the canvas, finding the fabric of its shadows and inventing its light, was scary and exciting. She loved the loamy certitude of unmixed oils, their textures of soil and blood tissue, and the sense of unthinking command and casual mastery she felt in mixing them. She loved the unalloyed physicality of tracing the final images’ outlines in graphite, of laying down the underpainting and base coats. But once she had found the shadows and the light and the colors, and all she had left were the hours upon hours of documenting—transcribing—what she had already found, then a portrait could become at times a maddening exercise in high-level painting-by-numbers: cognitively demanding enough to forestall zoning out, but not nearly demanding enough to assuage an internal tedium that, mixed with increasing physical discomfort, began to quake in a manner not unlike that of rage.

  “We should go outside,” said Pam, pitching her voice across the room and above the shish-shish leaking out of her earbuds. She sat in silhouette against the late-spring sun shining through the studio’s front windows. She wore a coffee-colored romper and a headband festooned with miniature plastic sunflowers and a pair of stacked-heel clogs, the purpose of which was mostly ornamental. Her leg, a latticework of healing scars wrapped in a Navajo blanket, was propped on another stepladder and a stack of old Vogues as she tapped steadily away on her laptop.

  Jen had already made vague, gentle entreaties about what greater artistic good her jumbo portraits would be serving: the redheaded teen orthodontics patient, the randy-looking senior couple, the ecstatic-looking doctor draped in a hijab and a stethoscope. But Pam just as vaguely and gently rebuffed these entreaties. Through sheer proximity and osmosis, Jen had deduced that Pam’s new project had something to do with her cycling accident and her subsequent, interminable dealings with WellnessSolutions, her health insurance provider.

  Jen walked across the echoing studio and lay down on a yoga mat stranded on the floor next to Pam. She arched her back into an askew bridge pose and stared at the pert upside-down chin and the froggy upside-down legs, respectively, of a giddy mother holding her giddy infant—the portrait Jen had finished the previous weekend, propped against another wall.

  “We should go outside,” Jen agreed, her pelvis jutting crookedly into the stale studio air. “I just need to clean my brushes first.”

  “So you haven’t told me anything yet about Leora Infinitas,” Pam said, typing, earbuds still in place.

  “I haven’t actually met her. I’ve been in the same room with her.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “Top contender for hall-of-fame moment so far is when she took a lengthy call from her professional organizer during a staff meeting.”

  “That’s astonishing,” Pam said flatly, typing.

  “I think she just forgot she wasn’t alone, or whatever her version of alone is.”

  “Do you like Leora Infinitas?”

  “I guess so. I at least get the impression that she’s trying to do good.”

  “Do good for who?”

  “Her aims are—diffuse,” Jen said. “Hopefully she’ll narrow her focus down as she gets her bearings.”

  “Shouldn’t you be working for, like, Melinda Gates, or the Ford Foundation?” asked Pam, taking out her earbuds and setting her laptop on the floor. “Or maybe you don’t even have to work for anyone. You and Meg could just start your own thing.”

  “Someday we’ll all be working for Meg,” Jen said.

  “I always imagined the two of you teaming up and changing the world,” Pam said. “I still do.”

  Pam’s deadpan mien, almost monotone voice, and refined aesthetics bought her a wider margin for occasional sentimentality than Jen might have tolerated in others, particularly because Pam’s affect was so spare and inscrutable that it was difficult to reconcile it with any excess of tenderness, even for her two closest friends.

  Each of the three of them had always paired off the other two as a dyad, a clean deuce—spiritual twins who had accepted a false triplet into their orbit out of the very qualities of magnanimity and open-mindedness that they shared as eternal monozygotic double-souls. To Meg, Pam and Jen were the artists, the creatives; to Pam, Meg and Jen were the Samaritan wonks, advocating with serene forcefulness on behalf of the less fortunate.

  But to Jen, Meg and Pam were the competents. Their stores of education and know-how took shape in Jen’s mind like a rambling country estate, forever revealing new trapdoors and hidden parlors and Escherlike staircases descending toward a secret bookcase wall behind which lay another library, another music room. In college, both of them could whip up a borderline delicious four a.m. dinner from whatever scraps and remnants happened to be in the pantry of wherever they were smoking pot and watching a VHS marathon of Twin Peaks that particular Saturday night. Both of them could repair a torn hem with some thread and a safety pin; both could tie a man’s tie and play “Love Will Tear Us Apart” on the piano and knew how to finagle the connection on a blown fuse by wrapping tin foil around it. They remembered the names of birds and plants and rock formations. They had read everything. It was teenaged Meg who taught Jen the basics of how a charitable foundation should be run. It was teenaged Pam who taught Jen how to scale a skillful small portrait onto a giant canvas.

  And both of them, it seemed to Jen, somehow cultivated entire other galaxies of social ties—not just a smattering of a few other close friends and a larger group of fond acquaintances, as Jen had maintained in the decade after college, but discrete worlds unto themselves. Pam pursued email-and-coffee-date relationships with any artist, writer, or random person at a party she found interesting, with no fear of her interest going unreciprocated or being misinterpreted as a romantic overture; before her accident, she seemed to make the time to attend every opening, every reading, every event relevant to her ambitions. Meg arranged her regular reunions with her friends from boarding school and closely manned her complex circuit board of professional contacts, all of whom seemed to invite Meg to their weddings and their children’s weddings.

  Jen’s guiding image of Meg and Pam, though the passage of years had faded and likely altered it, was of the two of them platonically entwined on a sofa at a crowded off-campus house party, heads pressed together, murmuring to each other as they people-watched, as if they were invisible to everyone else who was surreptitiously watching them back, including then-current boyfriends—nervously hovering, faintly aroused—and Jen.

  “JEN!” Meg called as she noticed Jen opening a beer at the drinks table. Meg unwrapped herself from Pam and reached her arms out. “Salt of my earth, fire of my loins.” Her voice was softened, not quite slurred, by beer and fatigue.

  “Jeennnniieeeee,” Pam called, clapping her palms on her knees as Jen moved to settle herself at their feet. “I want to braid your hair.”

  Her fingers, like Meg’s voice, were thickened with alcohol, but she managed a hairline braid that rolled along the back of Jen’s neck and finished in a loose yet intricate knot. Jen slept facedown for two nights to keep it.

  Jen sat up on the mat in Pam’s studio, stretched her legs flat, and reached out to touch her toes. “I think Meg could change the world,” she said. “I don’t know that Leora will. She could, if she wanted to. She has the money and the contacts. She means well.” Jen pulled her knees up to her chest and dropped her head against them. “And that could have, you know,” she said, her voice muffled in her thighs, “a good effect on
lots of things.”

  “I watched Leora’s World a lot when I was laid up,” Pam said. “I even read her autobiography.”

  “Why in the world did you do that?”

  “I couldn’t watch TV all day and I needed easy things to read. It was entertaining. It was quite something, actually.”

  “I have to admit, her worldview is this weird jumble of Buddhism and libertarianism.”

  “It’s like a yoga teacher rewriting The Fountainhead.”

  “Yes! My colleague Daisy calls it ‘Zen Rand.’ Like, ‘Let me help you discover that the government shouldn’t help you and neither should I because nobody helped me, but I’m starting a foundation to help people anyway. Namaste.’ ”

  “Right,” Pam said. “But lots of people helped her.”

  “Yeah,” Jen said, “but maybe charisma is measured in contradictions.”

  “Whatever, I’m happy for you,” Pam said. “I am.”

  “Thanks,” Jen said, looking up at Pam.

  “You know, get out of it whatever you can get out of it,” Pam said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So we don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to talk about it, but just in case you do want to talk about it,” Pam said, “do you want to talk about the Project?”

  The Project

  Pam was the only person not assigned to the Project who knew about its existence. Jen and Jim were the Project’s principal architects (“I prefer product managers,” Jim said). By mutual tacit agreement, Jen and Jim never spoke in explicit terms about it; the first, unspoken rule of the Project was not to call any procedure, implement, or site related to the Project by its actual name. Jen and Jim had grown fastidious about this rule without interrogating why they had ever instated it in the first place. In the beginning it was just a nervous tic, or a way of imagining themselves apart from their situation. Now the rule was like protective outer gear. A shield against inclement weather. A prophylactic.

  They embarked on the Project with some degree of ambivalence, propelled forward largely because Jen, having breached the threshold of thirty without yet crossing the Rubicon of thirty-five, thus found herself in the epoch that women’s magazines, morning talk shows, mutual acquaintances, miscellaneous cousins and sisters-in-law, and occasional prolix strangers on the subway had agreed on as the preferred window for all Project launches. Jen and Jim’s ambivalence tipped into bland relief when the Project did not launch immediately, granting them more time to adjust to the idea of a hypothetical tiny future boarder. But as month after month passed, and as months somehow metastasized into years, relief curdled into tantric panic. They had not known what they wanted, or how much they wanted it, until they discovered that it was not necessarily theirs for the taking.

  At first, Jen and Jim worked on the Project in the traditional manner: by themselves, in secret, mostly at home. After about a year, they had tapped outside consultants with medical degrees to explore methods for expediting the Project. The Project halted during Jen’s sojourn in the valley of joblessness, but gainful employment and, more to the point, gainful employer-provided health insurance had redoubled her enthusiasm for the Project. They referred to Jen’s many Project-related appointments as “trips to the henhouse” and sometimes as “black-box testing.” Jim’s significantly less frequent Project-related obligations were “swim meets” or occasionally “speed trials.”

  Gainful employment and gainful employer-provided health insurance had also redoubled Jen’s enthusiasm for her Animexa prescription, although licensed professionals had warned her that even small doses of central-nervous-system stimulants would be incompatible with Project completion. Meanwhile, Jim prepared for his swim meets by taking up a diet of sautéed spinach and lean chicken and adopting an at-home wardrobe of size-too-large boxer shorts and the occasional sarong, all the better for producing “new obsolete stock” stored at subzero temperatures in “Han Solo’s Carbonite Tomb.”

  Jen told herself that she had designated Pam as the Project’s sole outside observer because she knew all Pam would do is lend an ear, observe without judgment. She knew that Pam’s still-ongoing medical odyssey would keep in check Jen’s self-pity or irritation about the endless trips back and forth to the henhouse. Jen also knew that if she had designated the only other viable candidate, Meg, as a Project observer, that Meg probably would have urged her to take trips instead to a newer, swankier, more high-tech, probably out-of-network henhouse, and switch to a diet largely made up of kale, cranberries, almonds, and peanut butter, and do other things for which Jen had no energy such as acupuncture and cognitive behavioral therapy and not chewing gum and not occasionally breaking off half an Animexa tablet before writing a research memo for an upcoming LIFt meeting.

  But if Jen was being honest, she would admit she picked Pam, not Meg, because she doubted Pam-the-real-artist was interested in a Project of her own—and even if Pam was interested, she would be in an even worse financial position than Jen to undertake one.

  Business

  “That Sharon is having another baby,” Jen’s mom was saying. “Did you see the reveal?”

  Sharon was one of Jen’s sisters-in-law. After seven years of marriage to Jen’s brother and two children and one incubating fetus, Sharon had not yet danced into Jen’s mother’s affections with sufficient vigor to shake off the that. Betsy, Jen’s other sister-in-law, had shed the that just three and a half years and two children in. Jim theorized that Sharon lagged behind Betsy because Jen’s mother preferred what she saw as Betsy’s homespun and low-budget approach to the social-media arms race of gender-reveal cakes, a war that Sharon waged by proxy on multiple tiers with hand-piped fleur-de-lis, blowtorched meringue, and frosting carved and shaped into pink-and-blue pairs of pacifiers, partridges, and baby booties.

  “I don’t think she makes those herself,” Jen’s mom said, her tone sniffing of conspiracy. “I think she has outside help.”

  “Mom, of course she does,” Jen said. “You can’t make your own gender-reveal cake. It defeats the purpose of having a gender reveal.”

  “Hmmpf,” Jen’s mom said.

  “You know,” Jen said, trying to keep her tone playful, “you have got to be the only mother of a married childless woman I know who doesn’t give her daughter a hard time about delivering grandchildren on schedule.”

  Jen’s mom was silent. “It’s none of my business,” she said after a moment.

  “I guess there’s no pressure on me, huh, since your boys have been so prolific.”

  “It’s none of my business,” Jen’s mom said again.

  “It can be your business if you want it to be,” Jen said. “I don’t mind if you ask me about it. It would be nice to—”

  “That’s your private business,” Jen’s mom said with finality.

  Jen had never asked her mother for her privacy, and Jen’s mother freely gave it to her nonetheless.

  This Sex Thing

  “Hey, Jen.” Karina was standing directly behind Jen, slouching against the empty filing cabinets, holding a slim folder between two fingers, as if it were sticky or flammable.

  Jen carefully took out her new earbuds, set them carefully on her desk, and turned carefully away from her computer screen, which currently showed the Grand Rapids Miss Congeniality, Lady Sally Mineola, wrapped in a roller-derby bondage ensemble—helmet estranged from the top of her wig line by a teetering Marie Antoinette pouf—and sipping champagne from a stiletto held in the teeth of a heavily muscled man wearing nothing but Y-fronts, tanning oil, and a bejeweled luchador mask.

  “Leora sure has fun friends!” Jen said brightly.

  “No idea, no idea,” Karina said. “None of my business.”

  “Oh, just so you know, this is for WERK!, the—”

  “You were a little late again getting in this morning,” Karina said. “Everything okay?”

  “Oh, yes,” Jen said. “I had a doctor’s appointment.”

  “Another one, yes, I can see that,”
Karina said, chinning toward the cotton ball plastered to the crook of Jen’s arm with a Band-Aid. “Hope all is well?”

  “Ah, this is nothing, just a bit of medieval bloodletting to balance the humors, no biggie.”

  “Phlebotomy,” Daisy said from behind the cubicle wall.

  “Phlebotomy,” Jen said.

  “Good to know,” Karina said. “In the future, though, do make sure to give the team a heads-up if you’re going to be late. Otherwise we’ll be worried about you.”

  “I did—”

  “We need to discuss this, uh, sex thing you wrote up,” Karina said. “Leora is a little, well, let’s just say she’s not happy.”

  “Sex thing?”

  “ ‘Not happy’ may be a bit of an understatement,” Karina said.

  “What sex thing?”

  “It was for”—Karina checked her notes—“Women Empowered to Love their Libido. W-E-L-L, WELL.” She set the folder down on the filing cabinet and dusted her fingers, as if some grime or grit had rubbed off.

  “Oh, that one was fun. There’s actually quite a wonderful program happening in—”

  “This is not how you should be spending your time,” Karina said. “I’m frankly surprised that you couldn’t come to that conclusion on your own.” Karina tilted her head and shook it slightly as she gazed at Jen, more in sorrow than in anger.

  “Ah, got it,” Jen said.

  “You need to remember—and gosh, this is a good reminder for me, too, and for all of us—that we need to leave ourselves a lot of room to be able to speak to a lot of different people, with different, oh, you know, standards of discourse—not to get all college-seminar-intellectual on ya.”

  “Oh, no, not at all, I got it,” Jen said.

  “You got it,” Karina said.

  “Totally got it,” Jen said.

  Karina blinked twice and folded her arms. “Is that it?” Karina asked. “Anything you want to tell me?”

  “About—women’s sexual empowerment?”