Thanks for Waiting

by Doree Shafrir

  “Doree!” he said. Louis seemed genuinely pleased to see me. “How are you?” We started talking, and as the night wore on, we retreated to a nook by the window, and then we looked up and we were the only ones left from the party.

  “So…do you live around here?” he asked. I nodded. “Do you want to get out of here?”

  I did. I felt like this was the culmination of my ugly-duckling-turning-into-a-swan moment—I was going to hook up with Louis Foster. This was really happening. I thought back to college, when I was a sophomore and he was a senior, and whenever I’d see him at a party, usually with his messenger bag and wool crewneck sweater, I would literally swoon. I resisted the urge to text Daniel, to give him an update in real time. He was going to die when I told him.

  We got back to my place and immediately made our way to the bedroom, and very quickly, before I really knew what was happening, we were naked. “Um,” I said, hesitating, “I don’t want to have sex.” It would have been so easy to just have sex with Louis, but something was holding me back. It was almost as if now, ten years after college, I still couldn’t totally believe it was happening, and if I slept with him, then my crush-from-afar would turn into an obsession.

  He scoffed. “What, are you afraid I’m not going to be nice to you if we have sex?” He practically spat it out.

  I was so taken aback, I didn’t know how to respond. So this was who he was? “I…don’t know,” I said, faltering. The air in the room changed, and suddenly I didn’t even want to make out with him anymore. “But I just don’t.” He seemed put out, like he had had a very specific vision of how the night was going to go, and then it didn’t go that way, and he was going to make sure I knew it. He didn’t press it, though, and we eventually fell asleep. In the morning, it seemed like he’d forgotten the conversation. We made out a little bit more, and as he left, he said he’d call me.

  He didn’t call me the next day, or the day after, and after a week I realized he was never going to call, and then I felt pathetic that even after he had been so mean I still wanted him to call. I no longer felt like a swan; I felt like an ugly duckling who had grown up into a marginally more attractive duck, like a duck who had gotten her braces off but would always be a duck. And ducks are cute, but they’re not swans.

  “I can’t believe you hooked up with Louis Foster, oh my god,” Daniel said when I told him that Louis and I had gone home together. “So what was he like?”

  “Honestly?” I said. “He was kind of an asshole.”

  * * *

  —

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I got an email from Karen’s boyfriend, who lived with her in Washington, D.C., asking if he could call me the next day to discuss something. “Of course,” I responded.

  “Hey, so, I’ve decided to propose to your sister,” he said when we got on the phone. I had just left the gym and was walking down the street in the West Village. I stopped in a doorway. “And I wanted to let you know.”

  “Congratulations!” I said. “That’s so exciting. When are you going to do it?”

  I was happy for her, but it also just cemented for me how upside down I felt about my place in my family. My sister was twenty-six, a full seven years younger than me, and she was already getting engaged. Meanwhile, I was sleeping with Breathalyzer salesmen, not sleeping with college crushes, and inventing elaborate fantasies centered around a leather jacket. It was clear which one of us had grown up first. How much longer could I tell myself I was just taking time to figure things out?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  My love life wasn’t the only aspect of my life that felt like it was in purgatory. I was also spinning my wheels work-wise; freelancing was a grind, with no real end in sight. I’d taken a part-time job working at the New York Daily News, one of the city’s tabloid newspapers, to make sure I could pay my rent. As I biked up the Hudson River Greenway to the paper’s office on a warm September morning, I felt myself starting to sweat—first just a trickle down my face, then under my arms and in my crotch. “Crap,” I thought as I passed the Chelsea Piers complex in the west twenties. I still had ten more blocks to go before I would peel off at West Thirty-third Street and ride half a block up to the Daily News building, and I’d have to quickly wipe myself down before I went inside.

  The building was a drab, hulking, sand-colored brutalist pyramid on possibly the least attractive block in all Manhattan, adjacent to a parking lot and across from a weedy vacant lot and busy Lincoln Tunnel ramp. The lobby was dark and run-down; everyone who went in and out looked like they would rather be literally anywhere else. The Daily News office itself wasn’t much better—it was brighter, but only because of the harsh fluorescent lights; the carpet was worn; it had a general air of melancholy. The men wore khakis and the women all had office cardigans. I was working for the features editor, a skinny Irish woman named Dearbhla with dyed blond hair. She was a classic tabloid editor in the UK mold. She smoked cigarettes in her office, barely ate, and seemed to drink a lot. She had reporters who were her favorites and others who seemed to always be on her shit list. Dearbhla put entire emails into subject lines, as though she was so busy that she couldn’t be bothered to click through to the “compose” box (“Any chance you know where the booze cake book is? Txs D”). But because I was part-time, floating in and out of the office, she treated me kindly, and it was steady, if not particularly stimulating, work. I needed the money, since my only other source of income was freelance writing, which was a constant hustle that paid inconsistently.

  That day, as soon as I got upstairs to the features floor, I headed straight to the bathroom to wipe myself off and apply some makeup. It was one of those bathrooms with a distinct public bathroom smell, single-ply toilet paper, and rough paper towels dispensed from a metal dispenser. I dabbed concealer under my eyes, but it didn’t stay because I was still too sweaty. I stared at my reflection and sighed. Get me out of here, I thought. I needed a job—a real job, one that didn’t depress me every time I walked into the office, where I could feel like I was actually working toward something that mattered.

  A few weeks later, I saw a job posting on the industry job board Mediabistro for a senior editor for Rolling Stone’s website. I wouldn’t have described myself as a music editor, but I’d written about music, and, I realized, I sort of knew the editor in chief of the website from Twitter. I sent him a direct message saying that I was considering applying for the job, and did he have any thoughts or advice?

  After I sent in my résumé, he asked me to come in for an interview. The magazine was in one of those Midtown buildings that I pictured when I thought about Powerful New York Media, like the Time-Life Building or the Seagram Building. It was a block from Radio City Music Hall, and the magazine’s office was on the second floor, so the editors all had offices with big windows directly overlooking Fifty-second Street. It felt fancy—a far cry from a SoHo storefront or a drab building next to the West Side Highway—and I found myself drawn in by this fanciness. There was a hallway of every Rolling Stone cover ever published, and original artwork everywhere. Rolling Stone had started in the late sixties by tweaking the establishment, and now they were the establishment. They had grown up. Maybe it was time for me to do that, too. A few days later they offered me the job. It felt like things were finally getting back on track.

  One night, not long after I was offered the Rolling Stone job, I came home and when my dog, Lee, came to greet me, her back half buckled and collapsed. I didn’t know what to do, so I called Jon. I’d run into him a few weeks earlier and promised to let him see Lee if I thought she was getting close to the end, and this seemed like if it wasn’t the end, then it was at the very least not good. I got his voicemail. I called Emily, my former Gawker co-worker who’d become a close friend. She came over, and then Jon called back, and then the three of us were in my apartment with Lee, waiting for a pet ambulance to take us to the twenty-four-hour emergency hospital.

&nb
sp; I picked her up a couple of days later. She had had a stroke, the vet told me, and showed me some exercises I could do with Lee’s hind legs. The vet said if Lee was going to get better, she’d show progress soon. In the meantime, at home, I tried to make her as comfortable and happy as possible. She was still eating and seemed in good spirits; I gave her lots of salami; we sat on the couch and I rubbed her muzzle. She was going to be okay, I told myself. We were going to be okay.

  * * *

  —

  EVERY MORNING AT Rolling Stone, there was a meeting with the magazine’s editors, where we discussed what was going on in the music world and what we should be covering. My job was to assign and edit posts about the day’s music news, but after I’d been there a few days, I realized that there were only a few staff writers, mostly the younger ones, who would agree to write anything for the website. The editors and the more experienced staff writers would say, “Oh, that’s good for the web,” but not volunteer to write it themselves. There was also a shared vocabulary among the mostly male staff that I was frantically trying to become familiar with. They’d say things like, “Marilyn’s supposed to be getting us the new album tomorrow” and everyone would nod sagely, as I racked my brain to try to remember which musician Marilyn was a publicist for.

  The hierarchy at the magazine was clear: On top were the people who worked on the print magazine (again, almost all men), who went to lunch together, gathered in the managing editor’s office to loudly debate things like who really was the best guitarist of all time, and were asked to listening sessions where publicists would come to the office to play advance copies of sought-after albums. Those who had been invited would gather in the managing editor’s office—ten feet from my desk—to listen on his state-of-the-art sound system, blasting the music and talking loudly enough that it was hard to concentrate.

  I went back and forth with myself about whether these were deliberate snubs, or if it just literally did not occur to them to invite me, and then I debated with myself about which was worse. Better to be thought of and dismissed, or not thought of at all?

  Whether deliberate or not, it was clear that those of us who worked for the magazine’s website were at the bottom of the hierarchy, the junior varsity squad. We were allowed to come to the morning meetings, but we were excluded from pretty much everything else. This was a common arrangement at print magazines and newspapers. The print publications were considered prestigious, their writers and editors paid better, and the websites were for their scraps. Big stories would be “saved” for the print edition, and there was barely any recognition if something resonated online. I’d experienced some of this when I worked at the Observer and my story about the so-called Hipster Grifter—who had scammed boyfriends and roommates out of money, faked pregnancies and cancer diagnoses, and hustled her way into a job at Vice while being wanted in Utah on fraud charges—had gone viral, and the top editors at the paper had barely noticed, even though the story was the most popular one to ever run on the website. Most print editors and writers saw it as an insult if their story got cut from the print edition and only ran online, but they all assumed that their stories would go viral when they did get posted online. There was no understanding of what it took to write a good story for the web, or that it actually took skill to write a story online that people wanted to read. To me, it was bonkers that you could write a story and not know exactly how many people had read it. I loved the feedback loop of online writing; I thought most print-only writers were dinosaurs who also acted as gatekeepers. The web was a much more democratic place, and they didn’t like that.

  My boss—the one I’d reached out to on Twitter—was a skinny guy named Alec who vaguely, if you squinted, resembled a young Al Pacino. Alec was not around very much, I started to notice. One morning around eleven, I was at my desk, working on the day’s stories; Alec, who sat in the cubicle next to me, was absent, and I hadn’t heard from him regarding his whereabouts. Suddenly, the magazine’s executive editor was standing in front of Alec’s cubicle, looking extremely annoyed.

  “Do you know where Alec is?” he asked me.

  “I don’t,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Our story’s not on the website!” he said. I was silent. It was Alec’s job to get the print stories up on the website, not mine. He stood there for a moment, as though waiting for me to come up with a solution. Finally, he said, “Just tell him to come see me when he gets in, okay?”

  “Yup,” I said. The executive editor wasn’t technically my boss, but I knew he could make things uncomfortable for me if he wanted to. I hated this feeling, of sort of having to cover for Alec, but also that this was somehow my fault that the story wasn’t on the website, or that I had the authority to fix it. It seemed like a classic trap that women in the workplace find themselves in: We are put in positions without any real power, and yet we are expected to clean up the messes of those who are.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  One night a couple of weeks after I’d started the new job, I got home and Lee had pooped in her bed in the living room and hadn’t touched her food. After her stroke, it had been getting increasingly difficult to get her to go outside. I called her vet and told her what was going on.

  “The humane thing to do, at this point, is to end her misery,” she said. “We can do it tomorrow, if you want.”

  Jon came with me to euthanize her. We sat with her on the floor as the vet inserted the medication that would kill her. It was quick, and she didn’t seem to be in pain. Tears streamed down my face as Jon and I hugged goodbye. Lee had been my last real connection to him, and now that chapter of my life was truly over.

  I got on the subway and went to my gym. I needed a distraction; I couldn’t go home. I put on my bathing suit and got in the pool. The water was chilly, and even though I had stopped crying, I was having trouble getting my goggles to stick to my face. But then I put out one arm, then the other, and swam and swam and swam for what felt like hours.

  When I got home, I opened the door and Lee’s absence hit me. I took her collar and leash out of my bag and hung it on a hook in the closet and tried not to cry again. The apartment felt depressingly empty. I kept replaying the last night of Lee’s life in my mind—how she had dragged herself into my bedroom and slept by my bed, which she had never done, and how I had cried myself to sleep. I tried not to seem too melancholy at work, but one morning, a few days after Lee had died, I looked up at work and someone was standing at my cubicle. It was my co-worker Andrew.

  “I’m really sorry about your dog,” he said gently. “If you ever want to just like, hang out with another dog, you can come hang out with my dog.”

  “I don’t think I’m ready for that, but thanks,” I said. Andrew was cute, I thought. He looked vaguely Aryan—pale and blond, with small blue eyes. He wore plaid shirts and dark jeans, like pretty much every other guy on staff, and had a softly wry voice.

  “You know, I’ve read your work,” he said. “I was excited when I heard you were coming to the magazine.”

  I was flattered. Maybe there was actually one person here who didn’t care that I didn’t know the track listings for every single one of Bruce Springsteen’s albums. “That’s really nice, thanks,” I said.

  Soon, he came by my desk again. “I thought you’d like this,” he said. It was a new book on the history of the business of hip-hop.

  “Thanks,” I said. It did look interesting, but even more than that, it felt like it was possible that Andrew really got me, or at least bothered to see me as someone who wasn’t just a website drone. Andrew started following me on Twitter, then sent me a friend request on Facebook. A few days later, he forwarded me an email to my personal email address from a Park Slope dog rescue for a dog that needed a foster home. “Just in case you felt like a few days of canine company,” he wrote. Soon, we were gossiping about co-workers and sharing jokes. He started asking me if I wanted anything every time
he went to the little coffee shop across the street. He sent me a download of the Mountain Goats album Tallahassee, just because he thought I needed to own it, and if I already did own it, he asked why I hadn’t yet brought it up in conversation. (I already owned it.) He was flirting, and I was more than happy to flirt back.

  He seemed like an appropriate workplace crush. But then someone casually mentioned Andrew’s girlfriend, one of the magazine’s fact-checkers. Girlfriend? He had very much not mentioned a girlfriend, let alone one who worked with us. Then I realized who she was, a quiet blonde named Lauren who looked like she and Andrew were distantly related. I didn’t trust people who went out of their way not to mention their significant others. It’s not that hard to just casually slip a mention into conversation, like, “Oh, my girlfriend—have you met her yet? She’s a fact-checker—really likes that album.” Just, you know, as an example.

  But he hadn’t done that, and now I was blindsided. I should probably not have a crush on someone with a girlfriend, I thought, although it was really just a harmless little work crush, so what did it matter? And it was a distraction from the loneliness I was feeling—with Lee gone, the solitude of my new life was really sinking in. But even though I kept trying to tell myself it was just a work crush, Andrew continued to bring me coffee. He walked me to the train after work; he and Lauren never seemed to be leaving at the same time, but we, somehow, did. Then he asked if I wanted to get drinks some night after work. It’s just a work crush, I said to myself, as I emailed him back: “Sure!” Keep things light and casual.