“Declined.” She held the card out as though she might flick it in Sabrina’s face and glanced behind them. There wasn’t anyone else in line, but Leticia acted like she had expended the allotted amount of time and energy on the two of them and was now eager to move on. “You got anything else? We take cash.”
“Goddamn it,” Sabrina said softly. She took the card back from Leticia and put it in her wallet. She turned to Katya. “Sorry. This is so embarrassing. I actually don’t have any cash on me. Would you mind…” Katya took out the American Express Corporate card that TechScene gave its reporters and handed it to Leticia. She swiped it and gave Katya the receipt.
“See, you should always come to lunch with a friend,” Leticia said, grinning at Sabrina, who looked like she wanted to both punch Leticia in the face and burst into tears.
Katya and Sabrina made their way to a table in the middle of the room. Katya glanced around the nearly empty restaurant. There was a guy in khakis and a plaid button-down shirt sitting by himself at a table, a half-eaten salad in front of him, scrolling through his phone, and two women at a table near the window, both in yoga pants. The situation at the cash register had happened so quickly, Katya hadn’t really processed it yet, but now that they were sitting down and Sabrina had taken the lid off her plastic bowl and was picking at the kale in front of her, Katya realized that, yes, it was pretty fucking weird that Sabrina’s card had been declined. In the moment that Sabrina opened her wallet to put her card back, Katya saw at least four or five other credit cards in her wallet too. Strange that she wouldn’t try to use any of those, but maybe she was just embarrassed that the one card had been declined so she didn’t want to try with the others?
“Thanks for buying me lunch.” Sabrina didn’t quite meet Katya’s eyes as she said this. “I guess it’s good I ran into you. I’ll have to call the credit card company, I don’t know why that would have happened.”
“It’s fine, really. Not a problem. I was planning on buying you lunch anyway.”
Sabrina nodded and took another bite of kale and chicken. “Can you not mention this to Dan? It’ll just get him upset and I know he’s under a lot of stress at work.”
“Oh. Yeah, sure. Listen—so, I did want to talk to you about something else.” Sabrina raised her eyebrows at Katya. “That party. Andrew’s party. The thing we both saw on Isabel’s phone.”
“Yeah.” Again, Sabrina just seemed tired. Or resigned. Or…something. She didn’t seem surprised that Katya was bringing this up, at least. “It’s been weird. At work, I mean.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” Sabrina got a water bottle out of her bag and took a sip. “Can we talk just, like, casually? I don’t want my name associated with anything, and also, I feel like it’s already awkward that you work with Dan, and I don’t want him to know that I talked to you.” Weird, Katya thought. Sabrina was more concerned about Dan finding out than she was about Mack finding out?
“Yeah, of course. But do you mind if I take some notes? I just want to be able to remember what you say.”
Sabrina scrunched up her face. “Actually, I’d rather you didn’t. Just…I don’t know. Being a little paranoid, I guess.”
Being a reporter was like a delicate dance with a stranger where you were never quite sure whether you were leading or not, and if you stepped on someone’s toes, that person might run off the dance floor crying. Katya knew she had to tread carefully. She looked into Sabrina’s eyes—they were dark and revealed little. She noticed the fine lines around them, amplified by the fluorescent lighting. She wondered what it was like living with Dan.
“Right, sure, I get that. Well, let me ask you this—did you know that anything was going on between Isabel and Mack?”
Sabrina shook her head. “No way. They were very discreet. Now that I think about it, maybe he came over to our desk area a tiny bit more than he did to other people’s, but honestly, I’m kind of in my own world over there. Especially those first few months when I was just trying to, like, pretend I knew what I was doing. I had barely been on Twitter, you know? It was a miracle I even got that job.” Katya thought back to the day a few months ago when Dan had told her—during a smoke break, of course—that his wife (“of all people”) had gotten a job at TakeOff (“of all places”). Katya was surprised that he was so surprised, but now, having met Sabrina, she kind of understood. Sabrina exuded a world-weariness that would have seemed out of place at TechScene, let alone at TakeOff.
“Why do you think you got the job?” Katya asked this out of genuine curiosity, not because she felt like it was germane in any way to her story.
Sabrina shrugged. “There had just been an article somewhere, maybe it was in the Times, about how tech companies have such a horrible record when it comes to diversity, especially with older women of color.” She paused. “And by older I mean, like, over thirty. And I’d just had an article go viral. And I’m sure I was the only person over twenty-five who walked through the door who was interested in a coordinator-level job that paid fifty-two thousand a year. I mean, that’s a salary I would have been thrilled to make when I was your age, but to be thirty-six in New York City making fifty-two thousand is kind of sad.” Sabrina took another bite of salad. It was kind of sad, Katya thought. She herself was making forty-eight thousand, but like Sabrina said, she was twenty-four years old and happy to live in a crappy apartment with a roommate. “I mean, I know people who do it, and I’m not saying I’m not grateful to have this job, but it’s just…” She trailed off.
Katya decided to try to move on. “Do you like Mack?”
“He’s fine. It’s hard to know how to feel about him after all this, to be honest.”
Sabrina took another bite of salad and pushed it away. “I’m finished with this, I think. At some point it all just starts tasting like rabbit food, you know?” Katya nodded. “So, wait. Are you writing a story?”
Katya shrugged. “Thinking about it,” she said. “Trying to figure out if there’s a there there. Gathering string, as they say.”
“Got it,” Sabrina said. “Well…I should get back to the office. And if you are working on a story…let’s not do this again, okay? I can’t help you with it. There’s just too much”—she gestured in the air—“stuff. You know?” She gathered up her salad bowl and utensils and stood. “I’m going to walk back, but I think we probably shouldn’t walk together, so would you mind just waiting a few minutes before you leave?”
Katya wasn’t sure what she had been hoping to get out of this conversation—maybe some big revelation like “I always knew Mack was an ass, he sent me dick pics too!”—but whatever it was, she hadn’t gotten it. “Yeah, sure. Hey, listen—do you think you could give me your number?”
Sabrina looked at her, head tilted, as though contemplating what it would mean for Katya to have her number. She sighed. “Okay. Here, let me find a pen.” She started digging around in her bag.
“I’ll just text you right now, and that way you’ll have my number too.”
“Oh—right. Of course.” She took out her phone and told Katya her number. Five seconds later, there was a message notification that just said Katya. Sabrina nodded. “Okay. Got it. I guess I’ll see you?”
As soon as Sabrina left, Katya got out her phone. Didn’t know abt Mack/Isabel, Katya typed into her Notes app. But didn’t seem to think it was that big a deal? Or didn’t want me to think she thought it was a big deal. Sabrina might be a tougher nut to crack than she’d expected.
15
Living on the Edge
THE CASHIER HAD handed her declined card back to her with a barely disguised smirk, a smirk that said, You are just pretending to be a person who has it together, and Sabrina didn’t blame Leticia, really, because she probably would have done the same thing in her position. But—fuck! This was the card that she had continued to pay on time…hadn’t she? Now safely far enough away from Chop’t that she was in no danger of Katya coming after her, Sabrina took out her phone and w
ent to the Capital One website and typed in her username (sabrinablum) and password (amelia!owen!). Password incorrect, the site spat back at her, and she realized she was shaking and had mistyped her children’s names. She turned down Twenty-Second Street, a block away from the office, ducked into the foyer of a building, and typed in her password again. Immediately a screen came up that said, Your account has been locked. Please call us immediately. “Shit,” she said at a volume that she thought was under her breath, but the security guard, an older, heavyset man whose pockmarked face could have been the Before photo in a Proactiv commercial, glanced up from his copy of the Post. “You looking for someone in this building?” he said in an accent that evoked the guys behind the counter at the pizza place in Coney Island that she and Dan used to go to when they’d first started dating. It seemed ironically exotic to take the D train all the way to the end of the line and ride the rickety roller coaster, and they always ended their dates at Totonno’s. But they hadn’t been to Coney Island in years, and last she’d heard, Totonno’s had been destroyed by Hurricane Sandy.
“Uh, no, sorry, I had the wrong address,” she said, and he made an indecipherable grunt-like noise and went back to his newspaper. She hadn’t seen anyone actually reading a newspaper in a while, come to think of it. When she first started working in magazines, it seemed as though every other person on the subway was holding a New York Times carefully folded so exactly one-quarter of the page could be read at a time, and she would try to subtly peer over people’s shoulders to read. Now she looked over people’s shoulders to see what game they were playing or what article they had saved for later or what totally casual just wanted to say last night was fun–type texts they were composing.
She walked out of the building slowly. Why had Katya wanted to talk to her so badly? She seemed really interested in Isabel and Mack’s relationship, that was for sure. But…what business was it of Katya’s? Sabrina was the one who should have been scandalized, seeing a dick pic from the founder of her company sent to her manager, but she felt strangely calm about it—almost as though, on some level, she’d been expecting it. Wasn’t this how people behaved now? Everyone was always talking about “hookup culture”—well, here it was, in the flesh. So to speak.
But now, the memory of the party had been eclipsed by a thousand other piddling annoyances of daily life, of finding Owen’s shoes and Amelia’s hair ties and trying to figure out what the hell she was going to make for snack day at Owen’s school, which, fuck, was coming up next week, and she had to come up with something that was nut-free and low in sugar. Ugh. And now, if the Capital One card really was turned off, she was officially out of credit cards to use. She ran through a mental list of bills that would come out of their joint checking account on the first of the month: mortgage, Amelia’s school tuition, her grad school loans. They would have enough to cover those as soon as Dan’s paycheck went in. And then she could quietly siphon off a few hundred dollars to pay a couple of the cards, maybe get them turned back on.
Last night, after Owen and Amelia went to sleep and Dan still wasn’t home, she’d sent off a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of old underwear. Jim from Florida got the pair that she’d actually been wearing that day. He was a repeat customer, and he was willing to pay extra for the guarantee that “Skye,” the college student, had actually been wearing them while she went about her day. There was no way for him to confirm this, of course, save for her note that she had been thinking about him while she wrote a paper in the library at school, but she felt she needed to be strangely scrupulous about this particular detail. She might have a fake identity, but she couldn’t bring herself to lie about whether she’d actually worn the panties or not all day. And she made him pay extra for this privilege: eighty dollars for one pair of pink lace boy shorts from the Gap. She took them off, sealed them in a plastic bag, and wrote on the bag in permanent marker: xoxo, Skye. Sabrina put the bag in a padded envelope, wrote Jim’s address on it in what she imagined was a college student’s handwriting, and put the return address as the PO box in Manhattan she’d opened last week. And there was a new customer in St. Louis who had requested that she send him a pair of underwear that she’d worn during hot yoga. Gross, but she wasn’t in a position to argue.
It wasn’t fair, really, that it had come to this. The underwear sales were steady, but they weren’t netting as much money as she needed them to—she somehow had only seventy-six dollars in her PayPal account. If only her useless job paid more…if only Dan made more money…if only she wasn’t such a sucker who had a closetful of clothes she didn’t wear. People at TakeOff were always talking about their side hustles—selling their hand-knit scarves on Etsy, DJ’ing, hosting pop-up dinner parties—but she had a feeling that if she told any of them about her side hustle, they’d be horrified. And besides, she was feeling too old for a side hustle. A side hustle, when you were thirty-six, was just a second job.
Another customer last night, Paul, had asked for a white lace thong from Skye “with a strong scent.” Sabrina had thought she would find her customers disgusting, or at the very least pathetic, but in fact, there was something hot about these guys who knew exactly what turned them on and were willing to go to great lengths to get it. These were guys who knew what they wanted—so what if it was smelly women’s underwear from strangers? It wasn’t harming anybody. And even though she knew it was fake—she was selling a fantasy; these guys were buying one—she had to admit that it was flattering to be so blatantly wanted by all of these men, even if they had no idea who she was or even really what she looked like.
She put on the thong and lay down on the bed and took the vibrator out of her nightstand drawer. Did Dan even know she still had a vibrator? True, she’d barely used it in the past couple of years, but it was still there, and the batteries were still working. She turned it on and held it on top of her vagina for a minute or so; even though she wasn’t exactly in the mood, she still felt herself getting wet. As she masturbated, she found herself thinking not of Dan, but of her friend Natalie. They had hooked up one night in grad school; one of the other first-year students, a poet, was having a party in her parents’ brownstone on the Upper West Side. It felt like high school that night, everyone getting drunk on boxed wine and making out in bedrooms, the parents at their country house upstate, the poet making a show of doing coke off their coffee table but freaking out when somebody broke a wineglass.
Sabrina thought about how Natalie’s hair smelled like Clinique Happy perfume and how they’d been smoking in the garden when Natalie turned to her and kissed her and whispered, “I’ve wanted to do that since the first day of workshop,” and now Sabrina moaned (quietly; Amelia had been getting up in the middle of the night lately and coming into their bed). It was a memory she rarely allowed herself to access, but one she remembered every detail of; they ended up in what seemed to be the poet’s little brother’s bedroom, with a poster of Yankee Stadium on the wall and a dresser topped with soccer trophies. She remembered the way that she and Natalie had tumbled onto the twin bed and then Natalie had unbuttoned and unzipped Sabrina’s low-rise jeans—that was when her stomach had been flat enough to wear low-rise jeans—and slowly kissed her everywhere, and just when she thought she couldn’t hold out any longer, Natalie had finally gone down on her and she came, hard, and moaned loudly.
She and Natalie had hooked up one other time after that, and even though she’d never dated women before, it seemed, for a minute, like maybe they would actually be a thing. But then she had met Dan and even though there was a part of her that wanted to keep hooking up with Natalie—the part that wanted to believe that hooking up with a woman wasn’t exactly cheating—there was another part of her that felt like this had just been a fluke, and besides, Natalie started dating a guy not long after that too. But every so often—like now—she let herself wonder how things might have turned out differently.
16
Second That Promotion
THE NEXT MORNING, Mack looked
up from his computer to see Jason standing in the doorway of his office. “Hey, man,” Jason said. “Got a sec?”
“Of course, what’s up.”
Jason came into his office and sat down. Mack hadn’t talked to him since the meeting yesterday. “I think we gotta make a general announcement about Casper leaving—I think people are starting to pick up on something being up and it’s just gonna look weird if we act like we’re not cool about it.”
“Right.” Mack drummed his fingers on his desk. People leaving TakeOff voluntarily was a relatively new phenomenon. He’d had to fire a few employees who were underperforming; the important thing was to subtly impart to people that they had brought this on themselves by demonstrating how unhappy they were at the company and that they owed it to themselves to find an environment that would be a better fit for their talents. It was a line, of course, but a line that Mack actually believed to be true. He kept a password-protected spreadsheet on his computer of all the employees at the company, and every three months he asked managers to rank everyone in their departments. People who were consistently at the bottom he put in a special column. Since the company was still small, some departments were only two or three people, so he wasn’t about to fire everyone who was always at the bottom. But he noted it for later. “So we have to convey that we’re really sad to see him go, and we’re thrilled with all of his contributions, but also that life will go on without him? Is that the gist?”
Jason grinned. “Exactly. I can help you compose the email if you want. It should be like, you know, talking about how TakeOff has evolved and how instrumental Casper was at building this thing. But also making it clear that we will be fine, even though we’re sad. That kind of thing.”
Startup Page 15