Startup

by Doree Shafrir

  “What the fuck, Katya,” he said.

  “What am I supposed to say?” she said. She was finding herself, lately, having less patience for Victor’s self-pity, because it was highlighting an uncomfortable truth about their relationship. Before StrollUp imploded, there had been an unspoken understanding that what he was doing was more important than what she was doing, that the pressure he was under dwarfed hers. But then their roles had shifted and now she was the only one with a job, and Victor couldn’t handle the new dynamic. And, truth be told, maybe she couldn’t either. She didn’t even want to mention what Dan had said to her at work or that she too was under a lot of pressure. “So your company didn’t work out. It happens every day! I write about it every single day. Most startups fail. That’s just a fact. And it’s better that it failed now, when you only put twelve people out of work, than later, when you’d have to fire hundreds of people.”

  Victor rolled back over and stared at her. “Okay, but not every startup that fails is your boyfriend’s startup. I’m not one of those lame startup guys you’re always writing about.” Katya had no retort to that and in fact began to feel a little bad about what she had said. After all, Victor wasn’t one of those lame startup guys, even though at first she had thought he was—well, not necessarily a lame startup guy, but one of those dudes who just ate, breathed, slept their companies. Which Victor did, but he was different. He talked to his mom every week, slipping into a Spanglish that Katya found endearing and familiar—even though it was in a different language, it was the same way she spoke to her parents in Russian. He played a weekly touch football game on Saturday mornings in McCarren Park with his college friends, guys who were lawyers and writers and teachers and bankers and doctors, and one Sunday, a couple months after they had started seeing each other, he cooked carnitas—his grandmother’s recipe, he said—all day on the dingy, tiny stove she had never used but that he said was superior to his brand-new one because it was gas. She took his word for it and even though pork wasn’t usually something she ate, she ate Victor’s carnitas tacos until she felt more full than she ever had in her life, and that was when she knew that her stubborn (some, including most of her ex-boyfriends, might say cold) heart was beginning to open itself up.

  That night, they slept deliberately not touching, but in the morning Katya got up at seven thirty and walked down the street to Brooklyn Label and got two black coffees and a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich for Victor and woke him up by waving it in front of his face. He sat up and smiled and ate the sandwich in her bed, which normally she would have forbidden, the covers pulled up over his naked legs, and she sat up in bed next to him and drank her coffee and then when he finished the sandwich, she leaned over and kissed him. Then he was taking off her T-shirt and leggings and they were rolling around on her bed. Katya loved Victor’s tight, smooth muscles; she loved the way he threw her down and kissed her everywhere. Then her phone trilled insistently. A text message. They ignored it and continued kissing, but then it went off again, and Victor stopped and groaned, and Katya, too, was distracted, and then again it went off and she realized that they both had the Pavlovian instinct to look at a phone when it buzzed—not even necessarily to respond, but to look, to find out who or what was so insistently trying to contact them—and so Victor rolled off her and she groped for her phone on the nightstand. She was now, in the light of day and the lingering smell of the bacon, egg, and cheese, feeling a little bad about how she had reacted the night before. She found her phone and turned it over to find three texts from Dan. The first one: hey. The second one: Been thinking about what we could get you going on. The third: Hope it’s not weird that I’m texting you this early, just thought of it and was excited.

  “What is it?” Victor propped himself up on his elbow.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just a work thing.”

  6

  Keeping Up Appearances

  IT WAS A week later, and Sabrina still hadn’t completely forgiven Dan for not picking up the kids that day. In the hierarchy of Dan’s transgressions—which over the years had ranged from really significant things (like coming home drunk on her thirty-second birthday and flaking on their dinner plans) to everyday annoyances (like never putting the cap back on the toothpaste so it got all cakey and gross at the top of the tube)—it ranked fairly low, so she couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t been able to forget it. Maybe it was because she had finally realized that all the talk about her generation being so enlightened was bullshit. Men were supposed to be (magically!) more willing to shoulder their share of household responsibilities, and yet if Dan disappeared, Sabrina would be able to take care of the kids without him, while the reverse was definitely not true. He probably didn’t even have the nanny’s number in his phone. (Although maybe that was a good thing.) She coped not by confronting him, but by taking refuge in the snack room, which was unlike anything Sabrina had ever seen—certainly not like the pantry at her parents’, which was usually bare because her mother was always on a diet, or the break rooms anywhere else Sabrina had worked. But TakeOff seemed devoted to spending a significant amount of its latest round of funding on making sure its employees never, ever went hungry, as though the key to happy employees were bottomless bags of Baked Lay’s. There were healthy snacks, like Greek yogurt and baby carrots and hummus, but most people went straight for the Sun Chips, Snickers, Pop-Tarts, and Oreos. There was a candy dispenser that had every kind of M&M in it and a make-your-own-sundae bar on Thursday afternoons, and there was always a special snack of the week, like Magnolia Bakery cupcakes. There was also a selection of shakes made with Soylent, the meal-replacement powder that the engineers liked to eat instead of food but that Sabrina thought was pretty disgusting. She reached for a bag of trail mix, willing herself not to look at the nutritional information—trail mix was usually a bad-for-you snack masquerading as a healthy snack—and went back to her desk, where Isabel was holding a piece of paper in her hand and beaming.

  Sabrina didn’t say anything to her. She just sat down, put in her earbuds, and started looking at TweetDeck again, but Isabel soon tapped her on the shoulder. Sabrina took one earbud out. “What’s up,” she said. Isabel showed her the paper she was holding. It was a handwritten note that said, in small block letters in the middle of the sheet of paper: THINKING OF YOU TODAY. That was it.

  “Do you have a stalker?” Sabrina asked. “Isn’t that kind of creepy?”

  Isabel laughed. “Hardly. Andrew sent it to me using Errandr. I think it’s really sweet.” She positioned the note on her desk and took a picture. “You don’t think it’s weird if I put it on Snapchat, right?” Before Sabrina could answer, Isabel tapped her phone a few times and smiled.

  “What’s Errandr?” Every day there was some new app that Sabrina had never heard of. How was it possible even to keep up, let alone use them all? Sometimes Sabrina rather liked being one of the oldest people in the office (there was a guy in sales who she was pretty sure was at least forty—he gave her a nod every time he walked by her, as if to say, We’re in this together), because in most ways she was relieved not to be twenty-five anymore. But sometimes, particularly at work, it bordered on terrifying.

  “It’s one of those on-demand task apps. You pay like twenty dollars or whatever and they’ll do a small errand for you.” She paused. “Not to be cocky or anything but I think he really likes me.” Her voice dropped conspiratorially. “I mean, besides the note. Did I tell you what he did last night? I was telling him about that new juice place down the street from my apartment, and he just took out his phone and Venmo’d me ten dollars so I could get a green juice this morning on my way to work.” She gestured to an almost empty plastic cup on her desk streaked with mealy green remnants of spinach and kale.

  “How…romantic.” Isabel had gone back to staring at her phone and seemed oblivious to Sabrina’s barely disguised sarcasm. “So you and Andrew are like…a thing now?”

  She shrugged. “A ‘thing,’ I don’t know. We’re no
t, like, official or anything. What does ‘a thing’ even mean anymore?”

  “Beats me,” Sabrina said. “I’ve been married for six years and I’m still trying to figure it out.”

  “Wow.” Isabel seemed genuinely impressed. “Six years! Crazy. What’s that like?”

  “Being married? Or being married for six years?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  Sabrina wondered whether she should explain how, when she and Dan had bought their apartment right after they’d gotten engaged, she’d had visions of it being the perfect Brooklyn home—a washer/dryer, enough counter space to actually cook, a small patio off the kitchen where she planted herbs and where people could smoke when they had parties, and in a neighborhood where lots of their friends lived—but the herbs had died years ago, the counter was cluttered with toys and mail and stray pieces of fossilized organic fruit leather, and one of the reasons she’d taken this job was that she couldn’t stand to be in there for one extra second. Not to mention that most of their friends had moved to Montclair, and to top it off, they weren’t even in the really good Park Slope school district. And she hated having to think about things like being in the really good public school district. Another downside to working with people much younger than her was that Sabrina saw a vision of how her life might have turned out differently if she hadn’t met Dan when she did. This whole time, she’d smugly congratulated herself on skipping the horribleness of being a single woman in her thirties in New York, but what if the real trap was being married in your thirties in New York? Or maybe, and this was something she tried not to think about, the real trap was just being married to Dan.

  “It’s good.” She tried to keep her voice bright. “You know, we have our hiccups, like every other couple, but overall it’s just nice.” Could Isabel hear the insincerity in her voice? She hoped not. Because what she really wanted to tell her was to enjoy these years for as long as she could, before she had to worry about things like nannies and school districts and husbands who didn’t do the laundry because you were “better” at it.

  Not that her twenties had been so great, but Sabrina sometimes longed to go back to those first few dreamlike years in New York when everyone was young and attractive, and the rooftop parties and picnics in the park seemed like they would never end. She looked at Isabel and remembered those nights before grad school when she’d snort coke in the bathroom of a bar and then stumble home with whatever guy she’d been talking to all night and have exhausted sex on his mattress on the floor and then wake up in the morning and get Gatorade and bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches from the bodega. But then those nights started being fewer and farther between, and then she met Dan, and the joys of a quotidian, grown-up New York life became more apparent: An apartment that didn’t have mice or roaches but did have space for a kitchen table that sat more than two people. Taking cabs. Weekends upstate. She started to like the version of her life she’d graduated to; it was like she’d gotten a certificate that said she would now fuck only the kind of guy who had a nightstand and an actual bed, not a mattress on the floor or even one propped on the free metal frame. Dan, she had noted right away, not only had both items, but they were from West Elm. Even she hadn’t totally abandoned Ikea yet.

  But that phase was fleeting. Now she’d graduated to the I-never-have-sex-so-who-even-cares-about-nightstands phase. They hardly used the patio anymore; the last party they’d had was her baby shower for Owen. Almost six years ago! Owen and Amelia shared a bedroom that had been a dining room, so they’d put the dining-room table in the living room, which was theoretically fine, except now there was barely anywhere for the kids to play. Plus, prices everywhere had skyrocketed in the past few years, so even if they sold their apartment for a big profit, they wouldn’t be able to afford anything bigger in the neighborhood, even in the still-good-but-not-PS-321-good school district.

  Sabrina had been scrolling through TweetDeck for a couple minutes, trying to find a meme that people were talking about so she could retweet it from the TakeOff account, when she realized Isabel was talking to her again. “Sorry,” she said, taking out her earbuds. “What’s up?”

  “Andrew’s having a dinner party tomorrow night,” Isabel said.

  “Cool.” Sabrina glanced back at TweetDeck. She couldn’t remember exactly, but she thought the last dinner party she’d gone to was probably sometime in the last decade.

  “You should come,” Isabel said.

  Sabrina turned away from her monitor to face Isabel completely. “Um. What? Did you just say I should come to Andrew’s dinner party? You’re kidding, right?”

  “Why is that so weird?” Isabel looked genuinely offended. “You never come out to work things, so I thought a dinner party might be more your speed.”

  “I don’t come out to work things because I have to get home to my kids.” That said, Sabrina had never actually considered whether she wanted to go out after work with her colleagues. Also, her coworkers went out almost every night. Even if she were twenty-six, she highly doubted she’d go along on every single drinks excursion. It was shocking they weren’t all in AA by now.

  “I know. Duh. But you’re, like, a cool mom.” Isabel giggled.

  “I’m not, like, a regular mom.” Sabrina smiled.

  “See!” Isabel said triumphantly. “You can quote Mean Girls. You’re not, like, old-old.”

  “Um, well, thanks.”

  “Seriously, though, you should come. Think about it?”

  “Okay,” Sabrina said. “I’ll think about it.”

  Sabrina couldn’t deny that she was curious about Andrew’s apartment, mostly because she was obsessed with seeing other people’s apartments in the way that every New Yorker was always obsessed with seeing other people’s apartments. Sometimes it was reassuring to see places smaller than hers. In those cases she was always intrigued by the concessions New Yorkers made: garment racks instead of closets, a desk under a lofted bed, a fireplace that had been retrofitted as a bookcase. But she really lived for moments when she somehow ended up inside apartments that offered a vision of a New York that seemed like it would forever be completely out of her reach. Like the time in grad school when Natalie had taken her to a book party in a huge Park Avenue apartment for an author in his sixties she’d never even heard of. The elevator opened into the apartment, the ceilings were eighteen feet high, and the bathrooms felt bigger than her entire place. Or the time she went out to lunch with one of her coworkers from the eco-crafting magazine and the woman said she just needed to pick something up at her parents’ apartment, which turned out to be a huge Tribeca loft with Christopher Wool paintings on the walls.

  She used to be perplexed by the nice apartments of people her age, but as she got older, she’d gotten more cynical about their sources of income. For every Natalie, there was a Hannah, another woman she’d gone to grad school with. A year or so after they’d graduated, Hannah was working as a freelance writer and dog walker and yet was living alone in a one-bedroom in a doorman building on Irving Place; Hannah’s father, Sabrina later learned via Natalie, was the head of a huge pharmaceutical company. Certainly, Sabrina had taken money from her parents—they’d paid her rent all through grad school, but right after it they had cut her off. Well, except for helping Sabrina and Dan out with the down payment on the apartment in Park Slope. But comparatively, she told herself, what they gave her was nothing.

  “Great,” Isabel said. “When was the last time you went to a dinner party, anyway?” Sabrina laughed, hoping Isabel wouldn’t wait for an answer. “And Andrew’s friends are cool. They’re tech guys, but they’re not like…” She dropped her voice. “Douchey tech guys.”

  “Wait. What does that mean?” Sabrina thought of something else. “Also…you’ve already met his friends?”

  Isabel ignored the second question. “You know. Just…those guys who think that, because they started a company, they’ve figured everything out.”

  “Ah,” Sabrina said. She kind of knew what I
sabel was talking about—from what she had observed working at TakeOff, these men had a confidence that translated into the arrogant belief that they knew what was right not just for themselves but for everyone else. Like the way that Mack had gotten the whole company into meditation—even if she had to admit, reluctantly, that she kind of liked it. At least the finance guys and corporate lawyers she knew had a certain degree of cynicism about what they did; they acknowledged that they were pretty much entirely focused on one thing, and that was making money, and in fact it was better if the average person stayed completely ignorant of what they did because then they could do the borderline shady stuff that would get them more money. Tech guys also loved making money but framed it in a way that suggested they were doing all this for the good of mankind, and sure, of course that was going to make them fabulously rich, but the money was just a by-product of disrupting things and improving the world, so it was okay.

  Sabrina saw Mack coming toward their desks with what appeared to be purpose. “Got a sec?” he asked Isabel, and she stood up as he started walking back to his office. He had been showing up in their area more and more with what seemed to be invented reasons to talk to Isabel. Could something have happened between them? She quickly dismissed the thought. Still, as Isabel wordlessly followed Mack back to his office, Sabrina realized she was starting to notice something that she had never before seen in Mack, and that was the barely perceptible, yet distinct, scent of desperation.