Startup

by Doree Shafrir

  “I don’t wanna cry,” she said.

  “You and Mariah,” he said.

  “Who’s Mariah?”

  “Carey. You know, like the song.” She didn’t, actually, know the song; she was aware of Mariah Carey’s existence, but she was slightly embarrassed by the huge gaps in her pop-culture knowledge, gaps that included music and movies that people her age were familiar with. She blamed growing up with Russian parents but also the fact that she had trouble caring.

  “Right.” She took a sip of her drink. “Anyway. I dunno. I went up to Isabel at this party I was just at, and she kind of flipped out on me and then her boyfriend got involved and basically told Victor to tell me to fuck off, and then Victor got pissed, and we maybe broke up? I actually don’t even know.”

  “Whoa,” Dan said. “That’s a lot. No wonder you needed a drink.”

  “See? And it’s just like, I need to get this story. I feel like I’m so close.”

  “You’ll get it,” Dan said. “I know you will. You…have a way of getting what you want.” That sentence hung in the air between them. She traced the edge of her glass with her finger and stared at it; she didn’t want to, couldn’t, make eye contact with Dan. Why had she texted him tonight? There was more hanging in the air that she didn’t want to confront. Or did she? She was feeling buzzed, warm. “Do I?” she said. She still wasn’t looking at Dan, but she smiled.

  When she finally looked up, he was staring at her. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Take a walk. It’ll clear your head.” A walk would be a good idea, but when she opened her mouth to respond, Dan pulled her to him and kissed her, fully and unapologetically. She didn’t resist, exactly, but she also wasn’t a completely willing participant. “Sorry,” he said when he finally pulled away. “I just…I’ve been wanting to do that for a while.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. Did she mean that? She wasn’t sure.

  “Do you want to get out of here?” Dan said softly. He put his hand on her knee. “We could go for a walk or something.”

  “I should get home,” she said. “I’m going to get in an Uber, okay?”

  “It’s so early!” Dan said, almost whining. He picked up his phone and showed her. “See? Only ten thirty. You probably don’t even go to bed until what, like, one?”

  “It’s been a long day,” she said. She wriggled away from him, so his hand had to drop off her knee. “I really should go.”

  “I came all the way back into the city to meet you,” he said quietly.

  “What’s that supposed to mean, exactly?” she said. She was daring him to say what she knew he was close to saying. What he wanted to say. What he thought he deserved from her.

  “Oh—nothing,” he said. “Nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  18

  Age of Innocence

  SABRINA HAD SEEN the subject line of the email pop up on her phone when she emerged from the subway, but she couldn’t bring herself to open it until she was safely sitting down at her desk because what it said was: Pole-dancing workshop **tomorrow** at 7 p.m.!

  It was from Mackenzie Alvarez in sales. The rest of the email said:

  Heyyyy, everyone! Just a reminder that we’re having a pole dancing workshop tomorrow at 7 p.m. down the street at Pole Position NYC. All are welcome but especially Oliver Brandt. ;) Wear comfortable but fitted clothes—leggings are recommended!

  Underneath the text was a GIF of a woman repeatedly spinning on a pole. Sabrina stared at it for a moment, watching the woman’s body twist around and around, and then noticed that there were already seventeen replies to Mackenzie’s email, which had just gone out five minutes ago.

  From Chelsea in product: best day evarrrrrrrrrrrrr!!

  From Jenny in marketing: a GIF of Kristen Wiig on Saturday Night Live saying, “I’m so excited!”

  From Oliver Brandt: in your dreams, Alvarez.

  Sabrina sighed. If there was anything that perfectly encapsulated the daily sense of alienation that she felt from her colleagues, it was this email and the responses. People didn’t used to take pole-dancing classes with their coworkers; they maybe got drunk with their coworkers, and that was the extent of it. But now you were expected to engage in forced, organized fun with people you worked with, and it seemed to her that the definition of fun had been majorly stretched. When she was in her twenties, people were way too jaded to think that something like a pole-dancing class, with colleagues, was even remotely cool.

  She also felt like there was something slightly more insidious going on, about how you were now supposed to feel like your work was your everything: where you got your paycheck, yes, but also where you got fed and where you found your social circle. Everything had started bleeding into everything else. These kids—she felt no compunction about calling them kids—expected that their workplaces would provide all this for them, as if work were an extension of college, with its own clubs and student organizations. Even more disconcerting was that many TakeOff employees lived together or had roommates who were in some way connected to other TakeOff employees, and now there were even apartment buildings that were actual dorms for grown-ups, where you lived in a suite with a few other people and had common areas and nightly activities. It was almost like a return to the days of Henry Ford, when a company provided you with housing and meals and social events. What had happened to having to figure out life on your own?

  God, she was starting to sound like Dan. She read the email again. Really, what was wrong with a little pole dancing if that was what made people happy? Just because she didn’t want to participate didn’t mean that other people couldn’t. But people noticed when you didn’t sign up for their pole-dancing classes and softball leagues and weekend dumpling crawls, and it made them think, again, about how you were old. To most of them, thirty-six might as well have been eighty-six in terms of how abstract it felt; they lumped her in with the rest of the “people who don’t matter” population. The funny thing was, they thought they wanted to get married and have kids, but that was all far off in some nebulous future, and in the few conversations she’d ever had with any of them about it, they were almost adorably vague about how all that was going to happen.

  Most of them also had this notion that they needed to get everything out of their systems by the time they were thirty, which was some kind of arbitrary witching hour, after which life suddenly Got Serious. Once, she’d overheard Chelsea lamenting, almost to the point of tears, the fact that she was about to turn twenty-eight, which meant she was only two years away from thirty, and that was when she was going to have to start figuring everything out—did she want to get married? Have kids? What about her career? Should she stay in New York or move back to Chicago? How would she ever save money?—and she just wasn’t ready for that life, but then as soon as she noticed Sabrina walking by, she fell silent.

  Maybe there was a part of Sabrina that was jealous of this version of their twenties that they were all getting to experience. Her twenties had been filled with such pathos. New York was different then too. She didn’t want to say grittier, exactly; maybe less sanitized was a better way to put it. And it felt more mysterious. Your life wasn’t documented on Instagram for the world to see.

  “So Mack just told me the good news.” Sabrina jumped; she hadn’t noticed Isabel standing behind her. Usually Isabel didn’t get in until at least ten thirty. Why was she here so early today? It was barely ten. This was the time that Sabrina got to have to herself. Not today. Sabrina took off her headphones and swiveled around in her chair. “Do you have time to get coffee?” Isabel said. “Or are you doing some hard strategy work already.”

  “Ha-ha-ha,” Sabrina said. “You mean in the eighteen hours since Mack told me he wants to change my job? Yeah. I’ve actually rethought our entire social strategy.”

  Isabel squinted at her. Maybe this wasn’t the time for jokes. “Anything’s possible. So you want to get that coffee?” Sabrina didn’t, not really, but there was something so pathetic about the w
ay that Isabel—was she already her former boss?—was standing there that she felt like she had to. She got up, laying her headphones carefully on her desk. They were the big, over-the-ear kind that she usually saw teenagers wearing on the subway. She had been self-conscious about getting a pair but finally caved after she realized that if she just had earbuds in, people didn’t notice them and kept trying to talk to her, and she needed the Do Not Disturb that the bigger ones telegraphed. If you looked out over the office at any given moment, approximately 80 percent of people had headphones on and were staring intently at their screens; 10 percent were walking around, either going to a meeting or getting something from the snack room; and probably only 10 percent were working without headphones or engaged in conversations. It gave the office an almost tomblike quality, despite the light streaming in from the windows and the slogans on the walls.

  “Actually, can we just sit in the park?” Isabel said when they got out of the building. “Unless it’s too cold for you.”

  Sabrina shook her head. “It’s fine.” They walked the two blocks to Madison Square Park in silence, stopping only so Isabel could get a coffee from the cart that was parked outside the Flatiron Building, and then they sat on a bench by the dog run. Isabel sipped her coffee and stared straight ahead. Was she going to say anything? Sabrina wasn’t sure what the protocol was here, so she decided to just stay silent and let Isabel take the lead. A man holding five small dogs on leashes—a shih tzu, a Pomeranian, a Boston terrier, and two who looked like Chihuahua/Jack Russell mixes—walked in front of them and the dogs started barking with excitement, pulling on the leashes, as they got closer to the entrance to the dog run. Sabrina watched as the man opened the gate and took off their leashes, and there was a tumble of fur as they entered the dog run as one swirling, yipping mass.

  “Maybe I’ll just become a dog walker,” Isabel said suddenly. “Doesn’t that look fun, just hanging out with dogs all day and bringing them to the park?”

  “I guess?” Sabrina said. “I dunno. Seems like it would be annoying in the rain and snow.”

  “You’re right.” They were quiet again. “I don’t really want to be a dog walker. I’m just like…so done with how Mack has been treating me.” She took a sip of coffee. “I mean, the thing yesterday…No offense, but it’s, like, crazy that you are going to be reporting to him now.”

  Sabrina bristled inwardly but told herself to stay calm. She’s just lashing out, she thought. Be the grown-up. “Why do you say that?”

  Isabel turned to her. “Oh, come on, Sabrina.” She sighed. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but he didn’t even want me to hire you. He said you weren’t a good cultural fit.”

  “That’s crazy. I didn’t even meet with him!” Sabrina felt her voice go up. She had a tight feeling in her chest—not exactly like she was having a heart attack, although she wouldn’t know what that felt like anyway, so maybe it was a heart attack? “What does that even mean? Cultural fit?” But even as she asked, she knew: it meant not wanting to go to pole-dancing classes with her coworkers, it meant finding Mack’s weekly inspirational speeches corny, it meant thinking that snacks were not going to save the world. It meant not wanting your work to be your life or your life to be your work.

  But Isabel didn’t respond. Instead, she burst into tears.

  “What? Wait. Why are you crying?” The tightness in Sabrina’s chest was replaced by a different feeling of panic, and she had a flashback to when she and Dan brought newborn Owen home from the hospital and he started screaming, and she’d thought: Wait, oh God, what do I do now? She rummaged in her bag—surely she had a tissue in there amid the chaos: a nearly empty tube of Kiehl’s lip balm, a few Ricola wrappers from when she had a sore throat a couple weeks ago, a flyer for one of those hair salons that tried to get you to come in for a fifty-dollar cut and highlights, an expired MetroCard, the plug (but no cord) of an iPhone charger, one of Amelia’s socks, a bottle of water, her wallet, the access card for the office, and three pens. But no tissues. “Sorry. I thought I had a Kleenex.”

  “It’s okay,” Isabel said, wiping her eyes on her jacket. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “Do what? Cry? It’s fine.” She was trying to act like it was fine, like it was totally normal for Isabel to be crying, like it was totally normal to have just gotten promoted, like it was totally normal that she had this job in the first place. “At least you’re doing it out here and not in the office. No one’s looking at us. It’s fine. Besides, crying in public in New York is, like, a thing.”

  Isabel turned to her, almost hopefully. “It is?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Sabrina said. “Crying on the subway, crying in a restaurant, crying on a street corner because your boyfriend just dumped you, crying because you just walked by your ex-boyfriend’s apartment building…Crying on the subway is probably the worst, though,” she said thoughtfully. “Because you’re, like, stuck on this car with strangers and there’s nowhere to hide, you know? And people don’t really know where to look, but there’s always that one person—sometimes it’s an old lady, sometimes it’s another woman who’s been there, sometimes it’s a guy trying to hit on you—who tries to comfort you and you’re just like, Please leave me alone in my time of sorrow.”

  Isabel laughed. “You’re funny.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Ugh, this is so gross. This is all Mack’s fault. We were hooking up, you know.”

  Sabrina tried to look surprised. “Wow. That’s…that’s intense. Do you…do you think that’s why he’s acting out now?”

  “Acting out,” Isabel said. “That’s one way to put it, I guess. I was going to say acting like a massive dick, but acting out works. I wish someone had told me that hooking up with the founder of your company was a bad idea.”

  “You seriously needed someone to tell you that?”

  Isabel shrugged. “I mean, no, but yeah? It’s just, you work at a place like TakeOff, everyone is hooking up with everyone—it’s, like, what you do. I just happened to be hooking up with the boss, I guess.” She paused, as though contemplating this anew. “Boss is such a funny word, isn’t it? Mack never calls himself the boss, but that’s totally what he is. I just never thought of him like that. He was just Mack, you know? Like, yeah, technically he was my boss—is my boss—but he never seemed like what I thought a boss would be like. You know, you picture a boss, like, some big fat guy chomping on a cigar.”

  Sabrina laughed. “That’s how you picture a boss? No wonder you all have fucked-up ideas about work.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I dunno. Not fucked-up, I guess—just different. Everywhere I ever worked, you knew who the boss was, for one thing. Also there was maybe like one office hookup and it was a secret and usually some big scandal, like someone was cheating on his wife, and everyone sorta knew but not really, and usually someone ended up getting fired or quitting.” Sabrina thought about this for a moment. “Although I guess it was usually the woman who left. Hm.”

  “Well, that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about,” Isabel said. “Last night at this party—I was there with Andrew, it was some Google party, I was pretty bored…but that woman Katya was there, from TechScene. I forgot she had been at Andrew’s party.”

  Sabrina stiffened. Last night, right after Dan got home, he’d gotten a text and then told her that there was an emergency with something at work, and he had to leave again. She didn’t wake up when he finally came home, sometime during the night, and in the morning he acted like nothing had happened. She hadn’t thought too much about it, but now her Spidey sense was going off. “Did you talk to her?”

  “She, like, accosted me. I was just standing there with Andrew and she asked if she could talk to me, and honestly I didn’t even remember who she was—she looked different or something. It was dark. Anyway, almost immediately she’s just like, ‘I heard that Mack’s been sexually harassing you and I’m going to write about it on TechScene whether or not you talk to me,
but it would be better if you talk to me.’”

  “Whoa. Wait. Say that again? She threatened you?”

  “Basically.” Isabel took a sip of coffee. “Do you think you could say something to your husband? To, like, get her off my back?”

  “I don’t know.” This, at least, was the truth. “Dan and I don’t really talk about work stuff.” This was also vaguely true. “Also, I mean…I’m just curious. Are you sure you don’t want her to write something? It doesn’t seem like you’re particularly happy.”

  “But that should be my decision,” Isabel said. “I shouldn’t have to quit because someone is writing an article about my private life. I didn’t sign on for this. I mean, right?”

  “No, you didn’t,” Sabrina said slowly, “but maybe you should think about, like, the big picture.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well…I mean, you were his subordinate. I’ve definitely, definitely seen more fucked-up situations than yours. Definitely. But…you know, that was a long time ago.” It actually wasn’t, not in Sabrina’s mind, but she knew that to Isabel, ten years ago was an eternity. She was in high school ten years ago. “Like, things that used to be normal aren’t normal anymore.”

  “Like what?”

  “It just used to be more blatant. And there were no consequences. Guys could kind of get away with anything.”

  “Do you really think that much has changed?”

  “I mean, yes and no. I think there’s less tolerance for just, like, blatant sexism. I really do. But maybe there’s still the same shit going on that there used to be, it’s just harder to recognize. I don’t know.” They were both quiet for a moment. “But, you know, even if it was just implied, the idea that you needed to stay in a relationship with him to keep your job is actually illegal.”

  “Right.” Isabel pondered this. “Like, I know that. But when it’s happening to you, it’s hard to be like, ‘Okay, I am being sexually harassed, now let me figure out what I should do.’ It’s more like, ‘Ugh, this guy I used to hook up with who also happens to be my boss is being a total douchebag.’”