When dessert came, the flourless chocolate cake we ordered had walnuts hidden inside it. I wasn’t allergic—but, come on, walnuts?
“The flourless chocolate cake is a classic,” I shouted, loud enough for the entire airship to hear. “Why do this?”
Maybe our waiter had mentioned the walnuts during our chat and we’d missed it, but still.
Kevin called for the check.
We didn’t talk the entire walk back to my apartment, which was only about twelve minutes, yet a lot of time for silence. And when we reached my front door, I didn’t invite him inside. Instead I just stood there like a moron.
“Listen, Kevin,” I started to say—fully prepared to let him off the hook and break up with him right there—before he leaned in and kissed me.
I drifted backward, momentarily dazed. In spite of my hysteria, of behaving suspiciously and dodgily all night, of refusing to eat my dessert on principle—he still wanted to kiss me good night.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Everything’s going to be okay.” And he kissed me again.
The sensation of his lips on mine made the taut muscles of my jaw relax. My shoulders settled and the knot in my gut loosened just so. But I knew I had to go inside alone.
You’re likely to be wearing an orange jumpsuit by next week, Emily had said. What if she turned out to be right? And what if starting over in Mexico with a new identity, subsisting on empanadas or whatever, was better than finding out?
“Thank you for dinner.” I closed the door in Kevin’s sweet face, and it felt like I was closing the door on my entire life.
If you love someone set them free, I told myself. Before they’re brought in on accessory charges.
24
THE NEXT DAY, I didn’t have a job to go to. When was the last time I was just hanging around my apartment alone on a Tuesday morning? Couldn’t tell you. I might have immediately lapsed into boredom, ambling around, opening the fridge, closing it, opening it again—had the future of my entire adult life not been pushed to the edge of a cliff the day before. So I made coffee and checked the website.
Overnight, Wendi had apparently gone into full-on fixer mode (à la Olivia Pope from Scandal). Wendi was a gladiator when it came to manipulating the Internet. She’d somehow managed to turn a clear negative (me, fired) into a positive (me, class hero). Wendi posted photos of me being hauled out of the Titan building onto the “News” section of our website, beneath buzz-worthy headlines like: Tina Fontana Quits Titan Corp., Escorted Out. And: Fontana to Barlow: I Quit! The subtext here, if you hadn’t caught it, was that I left my job of my own accord.
Thankfully, no one had yet struck upon the terms embezzlement, forgery, or grand larceny.
For now, Wendi’s posts and the resulting online chatter only gained traction for the site. Our donations spiked. Such is the justice of the digital age.
Robert understood this sort of justice better than anyone—he’d been its master for years, using his vast media empire to control the layman’s chatter. How many times had I sat in the conference room, taking the editorial-meeting minutes, and jotted down a variation on the same statement: We don’t have to win this argument. We only have to muddy this argument enough so they don’t win. Robert may as well have had those words tattooed across his bare chest (which, to be clear, I had never seen). So it was surprising—and perhaps fitting?—that this was exactly what we accomplished in the hours following my firing. Wendi stirred up enough mud to make a clear winner impossible to decipher.
Only yesterday Emily had wanted to run away, and I was on the brink of setting Kevin free into the wilderness, the way John Lithgow and the Henderson family had to do back in the eighties with their beloved bigfoot, Harry. But as far as I was concerned, that plan was officially off the table. How could I run away from this? Google Tina Fontana now, and it was me who came up first, not those other Italians and Spaniards of lesser notoriety who shared my name. Such success came with responsibility, didn’t it? I couldn’t just bolt.
Besides, in the light of a new morning, with a fresh pot of coffee in front of me, I reevaluated my situation more favorably. If Robert had actually figured anything out, wouldn’t he have pressed charges immediately? He could have had me airlifted straight to Guantánamo if he wanted to. So maybe he really was just kicking me out of the nest. Because deep down he loved me like a daughter (maybe even more than he loved his one daughter who wrecked his Mercedes that one time). And maybe it finally occurred to him, like it had only recently occurred to me—and to these total strangers on the Internet—that I was capable of doing more with my life than just filing papers, keeping a calendar, and mixing drinks.
So I brought my coffee and my laptop into bed with me, to more comfortably explore all the new features Wendi had added to the site—and there were many. She’d created tabs where people could submit short essays, so they could tell us how they would pay it forward if we paid off their debt. And she’d added a place for users who’d just had their debt paid off to tell us how their lives had already changed for the better.
She’d added a few banners, too. One read: Did paying off your student-loan debt free you up to get married? Buy your first home? Start a family? We want to see photos!
There were links to my speech from the launch party. And, of course, user comments: The problem is that nobody talks about what they make. It’s shame disguised as humility. Screw that. I’m a thirty-two-year-old assistant and I make $30,000 a year.
I clicked around some more and discovered a place where users could upload videos.
Great, I thought. This was all we needed. DIY porno and homemade cat movies. But when I began scrolling through the thumbnails, I quickly got sucked in. First I chose a video posted by Lisa in Detroit (former debt: $78 K). Then one from Su-Yung in Philadelphia (former debt: $103 K). Then one from Joanna in New Orleans (former debt: $91 K). All the women looked to be somewhere around my age. Thank you, each of them said. This changes everything for me.
I let my head fall back onto my pillow and allowed my eyes to go soft on the ceiling rain bubble. Robert had tie clips that cost as much as those debts. One man’s private-jet ride to Key West was another woman’s second chance at life. I know, this isn’t news to anyone—and it sure as hell wasn’t news to me.
What can you do?
Gratitude is so much more dignified than ungratefulness, than speaking out about a subject as frowned-upon as an “unlevel playing field,” so these women simply said thank you. They promised to pay it forward. They went back to their jobs as office assistants and teachers and X-ray technicians and worked extra hard. I got it. That’s just the way it was. But if one wasn’t careful, it was enough to turn a girl like me into a girl like Wendi Chan, at least in the privacy of her own collapsing, overpriced bedroom.
That’s where I was, and what I was thinking, when I received Kevin’s text.
—
KEVIN ASKED ME to come over, to meet him at his apartment after he got home from work, which should have been my first clue that something was amiss. In spite of what New Yorky television shows have misled non–New Yorkers to believe, city dwellers, especially those who reside in different boroughs, never just say come over. In truth, we usually don’t meet face-to-face without scheduling a week ahead of time and confirming the day of. Our LA counterparts who come to visit and want to hang out may be frustrated by this, but they just have to learn to deal. We’re busy here. Also, when we do meet, it will probably be at a bar, coffee shop, or restaurant located halfway between our starting points, because unless you’re very rich or lucky enough to have a dead grandmother who left you her rent-controlled mansion, you live in a cramped one-bedroom.
Yet I refused to question Kevin’s ominous text requesting that I take the forty-five-minute subway ride from my apartment in Williamsburg to his on the Upper East Side. Nope, nothing weird about that at all.
Li
ke attracts like, I told myself on the way there, which was obviously something I’d read in The Oprah Magazine. It was a New Agey way of saying: Think positive, dear one, because if you think bad thoughts, really fucking awful things will happen to you and it’ll be your own goddamn fault. But in spite of this positive self-talk, my heart began to race while I rode the train to Kevin’s apartment and then waited on his doorstep to be buzzed in. The blue-black night sky took on an eerie prescient glow, the way the light changes in a movie flashback, or when you’ve had too much Red Bull and vodka.
Kevin opened his apartment door and I went right for him, wrapping my arms around his torso, burying my face into his neck. “I missed you today,” I said.
He held himself rigid, then carefully detached me and took a step back. He was wearing a Hanes T-shirt and loose jeans. I wasn’t used to seeing him dressed so casually, and the first thought to run through my mind was, This is what he’d look like around the house all the time if we got married. Clearly I was not feeling like myself.
“Can we sit down for a minute?” Kevin said. “I want to talk to you.”
I followed him across his minuscule apartment, to the couch, with an impending doom coagulating in my gut.
“I had a meeting today,” he said. “With Glen Wiles.”
I stared down at the area rug, which was still vaguely discolored with chocolate and strawberry stains.
“Tina, can you look at me?”
I did, though it took effort, and I noticed then that Kevin’s wholesome eyes were tinged with red. His mop of dark hair looked Beethoven wild, as though he’d been tugging on it nervously.
“There were some very important people at this meeting, Tina. Lawyers, and they were talking about your website. Specifically, how it’s funded.”
It’s interesting, how long I’d dreaded exactly this, the hours of night sweats I’d devoted to foreseeing my reaction, the first-thing-in-the-morning anxiety attacks I’d offered up to foretelling my response—but now that it had actually happened, now that the words had been spoken, all I could do was not hear them. I wasn’t pretending. I literally did not hear the words because how could I, when I wasn’t even there in that room? When I wasn’t even present in mind or body within the suffocating confines of that coffin-size apartment?
“Why is the Titan legal department looking into the funding of your website?” Kevin asked.
I swallowed hard, willing myself to pass out or succumb to an attack of angina, anything that would keep me from having to give him an explanation. I returned my attention to the area rug, wishing to collapse onto its hand-tufted surface, to roll myself up into a New Zealand–wool burrito.
“Tina.”
The funny thing was, technically all of the official website’s funding was legitimate. But if they started digging, they would probably uncover how Emily and I got it started.
“What exactly were the lawyers saying?” I asked.
“So it’s true,” Kevin said.
“What is?”
“Tina, is there a part of this nonprofit thing that you’re not telling me? I’m giving you a chance here, to come clean. To trust me. With the truth.”
“The truth,” I said, “is . . . complicated.”
“I don’t believe this.” Kevin brought his fingers up to his temples. “Why did Robert really fire you, Tina?”
“I don’t know. I swear.”
He ran his hands through his maniac hair. “I hope you realize that I’m associated with you now.”
“You’re associated with me?”
“I’m just saying I’m part of this whole thing, so if there’s something illegal going on, I need to know about it.”
I had no idea what to tell him, or what to leave out. I felt like I needed a lawyer present, but he was the only lawyer I knew.
“Tina, do you understand I don’t want to be—”
“Disbarred,” I said.
Kevin closed his eyes and his head dropped. “Heartbroken. I don’t want to be heartbroken, but maybe it’s already too late.” He stood up and went to the window to look out, at anything. “You should have told me.”
“Told you what?”
“You haven’t actually denied anything, do you realize that? You haven’t said, I have no idea what you’re talking about, Kevin, nothing illegal’s going on, I never stole any money from the Titan Corporation.”
“Kevin.” I joined him at the window. “Nothing illegal’s going on.” Beat. “Anymore.”
“I don’t believe this.” He stormed to the other side of his tiny living room. “I don’t believe this!”
“Please, don’t freak out on me.” I followed after him. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but I was only trying to protect you.”
“No. No, you don’t get to rationalize any part of this. I put up with a lot, but you stole money from Robert Barlow?”
“It wasn’t stealing exactly.”
“And Emily, too?”
“It’s kind of all her fault.”
“Oh my god. What were you two thinking?”
“Kevin, listen to me . . .” My mind raced in such a way that I experienced every trauma to come in sped-up form: the getting kicked to the curb, the being left there to die, alone, forever and ever.
But I had nothing to say for myself. I had no valid excuses. What we did was wrong, it was so wrong! So I did the only thing I could do. I grabbed Kevin by the collar and shoved my tongue into his mouth.
He hurled me off him like I was a ravenous zombie. “You’re insane,” he said. “And I think you need to go.”
“You can’t kick me out,” I cried. “I love you!”
“Now? Now you decide to say that?”
I grabbed at him again. “But it’s true. It isn’t any less true just because I waited till now to tell you. Please, Kevin.”
He steered me toward the door.
“Please don’t,” I said. “I need you.”
“Tina, it’s over.” He opened the door and shuffled me out. “I’m done.”
25
OF COURSE on my way back home from Kevin’s, I got caught in a heavy, melodramatic rain that left me drenched by the time I dropped like a felled tree onto my bed. I closed my eyes and listened to the storm pounding at my windows, thinking about how my life was over. Which was something I’d thought a number of times before, to an embarrassing degree, but this time it had to be true. Because what else did I have to lose?
What else could possibly go wrong?
It was a masochist’s favorite question, and intuitively one knows the asking is a dare. It’s: Go on, nothing can bring me any lower; I have nothing left to care about.
And so the impossible and inevitable happened while I was just lying there feeling sorry for myself. I never even saw it coming.
It was a break, a cascade. Not the clean trickle of baptism, more the membrane-addled gush of the womb. Plaster. Paint chips. Crumbly gray cement. When the ceiling rain bubble finally burst, it erupted ninety years’ worth of spackle matter all over my head.
My sheets were muddled to charcoal black and brown, soaked through to the mattress. My hair, stuck wet to my face, smelled inexplicably of ashes.
I looked up and was surprised to find an opening no bigger than the circumference of a quarter—surrounded by a flailing popped balloon.
Amazing, I thought. Drop by drop, how much it grew, how much matter it collected over time.
I plugged the anticlimactic hole with a plastic I-heart-NY bag and some masking tape. I tossed my sheets into the trash. I didn’t have any clean sheets to replace them with, but I hadn’t thought that part through.
I took a shower.
Only then did I begin to cry, because, in truth, there is nothing more self-satisfying than sobbing in a steaming shower.
That’s how Emily found me, sodden an
d pruned, curled up on the shower floor. We didn’t have a bathtub, mind you, so it was a stand-up shower I was lying down in, no easy feat for a full-grown adult. Luckily I only ever got to be half-grown. Still, my thigh or elbow must have been blocking the drain because I’d managed to flood the room.
Emily was standing ankle-deep in water. “What happened?” she asked.
“The rain bubble popped,” I said.
“And it made this big of a mess?”
I shook my head. “Kevin broke up with me.”
Emily’s perfectly symmetrical Anglo-Saxon features did a thing I’d never seen them do before. They warped hideously with grief. She knelt down and lifted me up from my puddle. “Why?”
“Because I’m me,” I said. “He finally figured it out.”
To Emily’s credit she didn’t kick me while I was down, literally or metaphorically. She also didn’t try to say anything to make me feel better. She barely spoke at all. But she got me dried off, and dressed, and into bed.
As previously stated, I didn’t own a second set of sheets, so Emily made up the bed with a checkered tablecloth and a few bath towels. She fed me Girl Scout cookies from the freezer and glass after glass of Jameson. When she opened up my laptop, the Assistance site appeared.
“Let’s not worry about this now.” She clicked off the page and opened up Netflix instead. “How about something with Channing Tatum . . . ,” she said. “Or Ryan Gosling.”
“No.” I curled into the fetal position beside her. “I only want to watch ugly people tonight.”
“All right, well, that shouldn’t be too hard.” She scrolled through the new releases. “In what category would you place Jeff Goldblum? He’s sort of got an ugly-sexy thing going, don’t you think?”
“Emily?” I slurred into my pillow. “There’s something else.”
I wasn’t looking at her, but I could tell she’d stopped scrolling. “What?” she asked.
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