“Hit me,” Teddy said.
“So at their good-bye drinks on Friday night for Casper Kim—”
“Wait. Did you say good-bye drinks?”
“Yeah,” Katya said. “His last day was Friday.”
“Well, that’s interesting,” Teddy said. He sounded not exactly thrilled to learn this information.
“Why?” She wasn’t intending for the conversation to go this way, but that was sometimes how you got your best stuff—by just letting your sources talk and then subtly guiding them back on track.
“We’re off the record, right?”
“Always,” Katya said. She wasn’t about to burn one of her best sources.
“So…when Mack came in and did his presentation, we really grilled him about the product, because they had a release that was a little buggy, and he was going on and on about the new release and how great it was going to be, so we were asking him who he had in charge of product and he just starts talking about this guy Casper Kim who’s some kind of genius product wunderkind, and honestly that made a big difference for us. We want to know that people have a strong team behind them, you know?”
“Totally,” Katya said.
“So if Casper left, and Mack didn’t feel the need to reveal this information to us…that’s—well, that’s problematic.”
“Right,” Katya said. “Do you think this will change anything for you guys?”
Teddy paused. “I mean, I want to say no? I want to say that we have faith in Mack and his vision for TakeOff and that we’re impressed with the work he’s done so far and have total confidence in him for the future.” He paused again. “I want to say that.”
“Ha,” Katya said. “Well, let me ask you something else. Have you heard anything about what happened at the drinks the other night?”
“Is this about that invisibletechman tweet?” Teddy sounded annoyed. “James sent it to me and asked if I knew anything about it. I told him I didn’t. But now you’re saying…well, what are you saying?”
“What if I told you that Mack’s biggest problem right now probably isn’t Casper Kim leaving?”
“I’m almost afraid to ask you what you mean by that,” Teddy said. “Should I be afraid to ask you what you mean by that?”
Katya laughed. “I’m not sure. Are you afraid of sexual harassment?”
Teddy emitted a low whistle. “You’re shitting me,” he said. “You’re fucking shitting me right now.”
“I am not, in fact, shitting you,” Katya said. “I’m sorry to say.”
“Fuck,” Teddy said. “Sexual harassment? Are you sure? Do you have proof? Who? I need to know everything.”
“I actually can’t go into too much detail,” Katya said. “I just wanted to know…well, theoretically, would this have an impact on your investment?”
“Katya, you need to fucking tell me if this is something real,” Teddy said. His voice was tight. “We are literally like a day away from signing this deal and I am personally fucked if this comes out after the deal is signed. Okay? So, like, as a friend, just tell me what the problem is.”
“I’ll tell you if I can get a quote I can attribute to a Gramercy employee,” Katya said.
“Everyone will fucking know it’s me!” Teddy said. His voice was high-pitched now. “I can’t give you a quote!”
“Well, it’s your call,” Katya said.
There was silence on the other end of the line. “What kind of quote do you want?” he said finally.
“I’d like a quote about whether this news, combined with the news of Casper Kim leaving, will in any way affect Gramercy’s potential funding of TakeOff.”
Teddy sighed audibly. “You’re killing me here, Pasternack.”
“Just doing my job, Rosen,” she said.
“Your job kind of sucks right now,” he said. “No offense.”
“None taken.” There was another pause. “So…a quote?”
“How about this,” Teddy said. “I give you a quote and you can attribute it to ‘someone with knowledge of the situation at Gramercy.’ Okay?”
“I can live with that,” she said. People who paid attention would know that it was obviously someone at Gramercy who had spoken to her, and if putting it that way was what tipped the scales to make Teddy talk to her, then so be it. Life was a series of tradeoffs. “So, hit me. What’s your quote?”
“Okay. Gimme a sec.” Katya waited. There was something about being able to have Teddy Rosen by the balls, even briefly, that she liked. He would probably become a partner at Gramercy soon, start pulling in millions of dollars a year, buy a condo in Tribeca, marry a beautiful blond publicist named Lauren or Whitney who would quit her job and have three perfect babies, and live happily ever after. This whole TakeOff incident would end up being a tiny blip, if he even remembered it at all after, like, a week. Maybe Gramercy would pull their investment in TakeOff, maybe they wouldn’t. Either way, life as he knew it would go on for Teddy Rosen.
The stakes were just higher for her. She couldn’t afford to lose this story. She couldn’t afford to lose this job. People like Teddy, people like Mack—they could afford to make mistakes. They were forgiven. Young women with immigrant parents who went to college on scholarship and were one paycheck away from not being able to pay rent—they couldn’t.
“Okay,” Teddy said finally. “So you have to tell me first, because I can’t really come up with a quote about something that I don’t know about.”
“Fine,” Katya said. “Okay. So the other night at Casper’s drinks, Mack was giving a toast to Casper and Isabel interrupted him and was like, ‘You’re full of shit, why don’t you tell everyone how you fucked me over and sent me sexts and you suck.’”
“Whoa,” Teddy said. “Is that, uh, a direct quote?”
“Not exactly, but that was the gist,” Katya said.
“I see,” Teddy said. “What happened after that?”
“Apparently Isabel ran out of the bar—they were at Flatiron Social—and everyone continued on like nothing had happened?”
“Whew,” Teddy said. “That’s…that’s intense. I mean, she’s crazy, right?”
“Who? Isabel?”
“Yeah.”
“I dunno,” Katya said. “Is she? She doesn’t seem crazy to me.”
“Well, you have to be a little crazy to do something like that, don’t you?”
Do you? Katya thought. There was a time when maybe, maybe she would have conceded this point. But not now. Now it seemed like these guys had all gone to the same school of “call women crazy whenever they do something that makes you uncomfortable.” But she didn’t want to get into a fight with Teddy over this. The idea was to get him to say more, not hang up on her. So she just said, “Hm, maybe.”
“Does Andrew know that she did this?”
“I have no idea,” Katya said. “Does Andrew really have anything to do with this?” Andrew. If fucking Andrew hadn’t confronted Victor, then Victor would still be speaking to her!
“I guess not,” Teddy said. He sighed. “Okay. Here’s my quote. ‘They’re figuring out what to do—they had been prepared to make a substantial investment, and now they’re getting cold feet. It’s not off the table, but they’re reexamining everything.’ How’s that?”
“Perfect,” Katya said.
“Wait,” Teddy said. “Change it to ‘They had been prepared to make a substantial investment, but now they’re reexamining everything.’ Okay? Take out the cold feet and the off the table.”
“Fine,” Katya said. “Anything else?”
“No,” Teddy said. “Nothing else.”
She had one more person to talk to. As she dialed Isabel’s number she thought about everything that had led up to this phone call. What if she had skipped Andrew’s party and just gone home? What if she hadn’t started talking to Isabel and Sabrina at the party, or what if Isabel hadn’t left her phone on the table? What would have ended up happening between Isabel and Mack? she wondered. Maybe things would have
just petered out between them. By pursuing the story, had she actually influenced its outcome? She shivered involuntarily. She couldn’t deny that it gave her a rush to know that she possibly had.
She didn’t have time to contemplate this anymore, because Isabel picked up. “I’ve been waiting for your call,” she said.
“You have?” Katya was genuinely surprised about this.
“Mm-hmm,” Isabel said. She sounded almost giddy.
“Why is that?”
“Why don’t you tell me why you’re calling, and then I can tell you why I thought you were going to call me.”
Katya felt thrown off. Her whole modus operandi was to take people by surprise. Maybe she had underestimated Isabel. “Well…” At this point, she might as well tell her everything. “I’m going to write that story about you and Mack that I’ve been working on for a while. Even though Andrew tried to get me not to write it.”
“I know,” Isabel said. “Wasn’t that weird? I guess he thinks I can’t take care of myself.”
“Well, I think Victor and I broke up because of that.”
“You did? No way. Wait. Seriously? Andrew didn’t really mean anything by that.”
“Yeah,” Katya said, realizing that she was confiding in Isabel when she was supposed to be interviewing her. “Um. Anyway. I was just saying that I’m going to write that story. And…I need to confirm something with you, and this might be a little awkward.”
“I’m ready,” Isabel said.
“Did you interrupt Mack’s speech the other night at Casper’s going-away party?”
“I did!” Isabel said. She sounded triumphant, almost smug. “I sure did.”
“You seem…enthusiastic about this,” Katya said. This conversation was not going badly, but it also wasn’t going the way Katya had thought it would. “Can I ask why? You seemed so reluctant to talk before, let alone make a dramatic gesture like you did at Casper’s.”
“I know,” Isabel said. “It does seem like I’ve done a total one-eighty, doesn’t it.”
“Um, yeah, it does,” she said. Maybe this was some kind of trap or trick, and Isabel was just saying this to fuck with her?
“Let’s just say I had a conversation with someone I work with who made me see why I was being dumb about this,” she said. “And that Mack deserves whatever is coming to him.”
“Whoa,” Katya said. “You mean that?”
“I mean that,” Isabel said. “This person said to me, ‘Think about it this way, if you don’t speak up he will continue to get away with this stuff forever, and you owe it to, like, womanity to expose him.’”
“Wow. I mean…I think that’s true,” Katya said. “And just so you know—I will absolutely treat your story with respect.”
“Oh, I know,” Isabel said. “I’m not worried about that. So was there anything else you wanted to know?”
Katya took a deep breath. “Actually, there is,” she said. “You might have wondered why I wanted to write about this in the first place.”
“I kind of did, actually,” Isabel said. “I wondered how you even knew that Mack and I were a thing. Or had a thing. Or whatever—you know what I mean.”
“Right,” Katya said. “Remember Andrew’s dinner party a few weeks ago? You left your phone with me and Sabrina at one point, maybe you were going to the bathroom? I don’t remember. Anyway. That was when you got a…let’s say, NSFW text from Mack. And I saw it on your phone, and I took a picture of it with my phone.” As soon as she said these words—ones she’d thought she might never say—she felt lighter, freer. Even if Isabel flipped out now, at least she had said them. She hadn’t realized just how much keeping this secret from Isabel had been bothering her, and then she asked herself why she was so consumed by this. This was what she—what journalists—did; they accumulated information and gathered intelligence and put together something that resembled the truth. At the very least, it had to resemble a truth that the journalist herself believed.
“You did what? No way,” Isabel said. Katya couldn’t tell if she was angry or admiring or a little bit of both. “That is badass. I mean, it’s fucked up, but it’s also kind of badass. I can’t believe…wow. So you’ve had that this whole time, then?”
“Um, yeah,” Katya said. She squeezed her eyes shut. Please don’t stop talking to me, she thought. She was so close to getting this story.
“Fucked up, right?” Isabel said, and Katya exhaled. “Like, can you believe he’d do that?”
“Do what, exactly,” Katya said. “Send you nudes?”
“Well…it’s a little more complicated, I guess,” Isabel said. “Look—I don’t know if I want this in the story, but we used to send each other nudes all the time. But on Snapchat. It was, like, kind of a joke. Or I mean, not a joke, exactly, but like, just kind of a fun thing we’d do during the day. It helped pass the time.” Interesting way to pass the time, Katya thought but didn’t say. “But after a while, it got a little boring. I just wasn’t that into him anymore. It wasn’t like we were exclusive either—I had definitely hooked up with other guys during that whole time, but no one seriously—but then it got to the point where I was like, Am I going to be the girl who just, like, hooks up with her boss? I dunno. It just wasn’t who I wanted to be anymore.”
It wasn’t who I wanted to be anymore. Where did Isabel Taylor get the idea that identity was so malleable? Not that Katya wanted her identity to be malleable, but it was fascinating how some people thought that the world would just go along with whatever they decided their lives were like at any given moment. “Right,” Katya said. “And…Mack disagreed?”
“You could say that,” Isabel said. “I tried to just gradually taper off, and this was even before Andrew and I started seeing each other. But he just, like…didn’t take it well. First he tried to pretend that nothing had changed, like just kept texting me and trying to get me to come over and stuff, and I would try to blow him off politely, and then I met Andrew and we just, like, fell for each other so quickly. I hadn’t felt that about someone for so long.” Isabel was quiet for a moment. “So then it was just over with Mack. It shouldn’t have even been a big deal, you know? Like he was always so clear about this not being a serious thing! But of course the second Andrew shows up on my Snapchat, it’s like, he can’t handle it.”
“Men are all the same,” Katya said.
“Ugh,” Isabel said. “Anyway, honestly, I wouldn’t have even really thought it was harassment until you said something. Did I tell you how he completely humiliated me in a meeting? It was like he was waiting to embarrass me in front of people.”
“So what are you gonna do now?” Katya asked. “Have you quit TakeOff?”
“I’m about to. And then I’ll file a lawsuit.” She paused. “Look, I didn’t want to quit my job. I loved TakeOff. I even used to love working for Mack. But no one should be treated the way I’ve been treated.”
“Wow,” Katya said.
“Wait, don’t put that in the piece,” Isabel said. “That I’m going to file a lawsuit. I haven’t, like, talked to a lawyer yet or anything.”
“Can I say that you’re considering legal action?”
“Umm,” Isabel said. “Oh, fuck it, sure. Why the hell not. At this point it’s not like I have anything to lose.”
24
Catch and Release
“DON’T LET ME interrupt,” Dan said.
Sabrina’s eyes popped open and—desperately, pointlessly—she pulled the covers up over herself. “I didn’t hear you come in,” she said, even though that felt like the most clichéd and inane thing to say, and she watched him look around the room and thought: Fuck-fuck-fuck. She was still holding the vibrator. She swallowed.
“Clearly.” He smiled, a funny little smile. “But really, don’t let me interrupt. I don’t think I’ve seen you masturbate since…maybe not ever, actually. It was kind of hot.”
Her face was bright red, she could tell. “Uh…thanks.” That was when he noticed the envelopes on the
bed.
“What’re these?” he said, picking one of them up. “Jim Lowry, Daytona Beach, Florida.” He felt the envelope. “What’s in here, Sabrina?”
“It’s…” She wanted to melt into the sheets and disappear. When had her throat gotten this dry? And her palms so sweaty? “It’s underwear.”
“Underwear,” Dan said. “Your underwear?”
Sabrina nodded.
“Why is my wife sending her underwear to Jim Lowry in Daytona Beach?” His voice was soft.
“Because…” Where to even begin? If she really wanted to tell him why she was sending her underwear to Jim Lowry in Daytona Beach—one of her best customers—she would have to start way, way back, with that very first $125 perfect white cotton Acne T-shirt that she ordered from Barneys. Because when it came time to check out, a message popped up on her screen offering her 10 percent off her purchases all day if she got a Barneys credit card, which seemed like the logical thing to do, and then it seemed to only make sense to add a few more items to her cart to take advantage of the discount, and by the time she finally clicked purchase, her grand total for the afternoon was $2,617. She winced but also felt a rush of joy, and it was that rush of joy that she was trying to replicate every single time she bought something. But it was getting harder and harder to find it, and now, selling her underwear, she was getting that same charge, that same rush, that she’d felt originally.
How was Dan ever supposed to understand that?
Whatever. Dan didn’t need the backstory. Actually, Dan didn’t deserve the backstory. “I needed some cash,” she said. What are you going to say to that, she thought.
“Does this have anything to do with the credit cards?” he said. Sabrina felt sick. This was when he would piece everything together. He would piece everything together, and then—she was sure of it—he would leave her. He would just walk out the door and leave her, and their life, behind. And for all the times she had wished that she wasn’t married to him anymore, she suddenly, clearly, didn’t want him to leave. “Does this have anything to do with the credit cards,” he said, louder. “Are you doing this to pay off the credit cards? What the fuck, Sabrina?”
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