“Do you remember Reepicheep?” Susan asked suddenly. She was lying back on her elbows on our tattered blanket, facing the river.
“The mouse from Narnia?” She nodded. I was sitting up, and curled my knees into my chest. “Yeah. What about him?”
“Remember what happens to him at the end?”
“He goes sailing off on his own, I think. From the Dawn Treader to the edge of the world? I can’t remember why.”
“Because he had to,” Susan said. A cargo ship lurched through the muddy waters, belching smoke in the air. Somewhere birds had to be chirping, but I couldn’t hear them yet.
“I know you’re out at the edge of the world right now,” she continued, still looking out at the river. She was using a twig to dig into the dirt beneath the long grass. “And I might not always be able to go there with you. But whenever I can I’ll try to drop down into your boat.” With this she turned to look at me. “Paddle with you for a while.”
I couldn’t look at her. It was so embarrassing, being a person. Being loved and seen without any disguising contraptions. Eventually I managed to say, “You will?”
“Of course I will,” she said. And she squeezed my arm.
So I guess I learned that, too.
* * *
—
Life, turns out, is chock full of learning opportunities. We learn from life like a nail learns from the hammer that keeps clocking it on the head. If I had the choice, frankly, I might choose to learn a little less, even if it allegedly makes me a better person, because listen, it hurts to get whomped on all the time.
Luckily some learning doesn’t hurt as bad as, for example, death, not to mention the imminent loss of your best friend to a retiring nemesis named Gina. Like the learning I did for Celeste! After signing Ben on with Nanü, I threw myself into Celeste’s new enterprise with renewed gusto. In addition to performing my regular duties as creative director at PR by day, I devoured books by MBA types at night and impressed Celeste in the mornings by casually dropping terms like anti-structuralist strategic thinking while we waited for the Keurig machine to finish its wheezing drip. “I am just, like, all about innovating value right now!” I said to her the day after I finished reading a book called Playing to Win. “Would love to ideate with you when you get a chance.”
It took a couple weeks for her to finally pull me into her office, but when she did, her email said that she had exciting news. When I arrived in her doorway, Celeste was pacing around in her tall-tall heels, her black cocoon cardigan billowing around her like a cape, her face narrowed and intent and gazing at something invisible in front of her. She looked surprised to see me, even though she herself had beckoned.
Perched at the edge of her desk, and tapping one foot insistently on the cement, Celeste explained that she had just heard back from Waterman Quartz. Ben’s official start date as their social media guy was, Olé!, Cinco de Mayo, still a week away, but he had done as I suggested and was scheduling out tweets and posts and photos on a social media dashboard. The CEO himself had been so impressed that he’d immediately called Celeste. As soon as she had gotten off the phone with them, she emailed me.
I don’t know exactly what that CEO guy told her, but it was substantial enough that Celeste was acting pretty intense. Which was saying something, because Celeste wasn’t exactly a casual person. Over the years I’d tried to imagine Celeste as the party girl she claimed she once was, but the only way I could parse it was that when she was in her twenties, she hadn’t yet figured out a way to aim that intensity, and the energy had spun out everywhere. But she’d trained herself out of that. She’d become the skilled practitioner her intensity required. Seeing her direct it with such overwhelming focus toward her goals was one of the things I admired most about her.
Anyway, she mentioned something about venture capitalists now being interested in Nanü’s concept. I didn’t know anything about venture capitalists except what I’d learned from an hour-long drama on premium cable, but I had enough context and imagination to guess that there might be some money on the table now, maybe even big money, and that since I was already a part of Nanü, some of this big money might end up trickling down to me. I remembered what Celeste said when we’d first started talking about this stuff: that people were willing to do surprising things once they were offered the right dollar amount. I did not think of myself as greedy, and yet I could not stop images of well-designed homes and tropical locations from flitting like a slideshow through my head.
Celeste was vague on the details of these potential investors, what an investment by VCs would actually mean on the daily, but she did tell me that she would be needing me over the next several months to help establish what she called Nanü’s “portfolio.” Having a proof of concept, a.k.a. POC, a.k.a. Ben, was one thing. But what Celeste really wanted, and what I assumed the VCs were asking for, was a total of ten partnerships brokered between authors and corporations. This would establish enough precedent that Nanü appeared to be truly a blue ocean, and not just some one-off success with a local company’s social media accounts and an up-and-coming writer like Ben Dickinson.
Ben. I hadn’t heard from him since our lunch, though I’d thought of him often. More than often. I’d thought about him all the time. In the shower, walking down the street, before I went to bed, when I woke up. How embarrassing, since we’d only spent a few hours together. Though it would have been possible to get his number from Celeste and text him myself, I was too proud for that sort of business.
Luckily Celeste didn’t notice how I started when she mentioned Ben’s name. She was intent, rather, on explaining to me that she had gotten in touch with the important people she knew, who in turn had gotten in touch with the important people they knew, who had dug up a number of names and contact information of authors who might be interested for whatever reason in Nanü’s version of “creative engagement.” The first name she mentioned was Wolf Prana.
“Wolf Prana?” I said, and wrinkled my nose.
To be honest, I didn’t know much about him, only that Susan hated his guts. He was thirty-seven, a California-born Stanford dropout who had hopped on the Twitter train early and prolifically, and, for reasons I couldn’t quite understand, had become incredibly Internet-famous. He was a poet to begin with, but his Internet fame, per Celeste, had allowed him to go on to do all sorts of different things. He founded a magazine, made a documentary short about himself, had a gallery show with his photography. In short, a capital-i Influencer and New York man-about-town. What Celeste didn’t mention, however, was that he also had a terrible reputation among women. Grabby hands, explicit DMs, or so Susan said.
“I want you to fly to New York to get him,” Celeste said matter-of-factly. There was an Italian athletic wear company, big in the nineties and now a relic. Wolf was well known for wearing tracksuits everywhere as part of his personal brand. Celeste had discovered this by scrolling through his Instagram feed and had, very cleverly, I thought, put two and two together. Wolf could not only wear this company’s apparel, Celeste explained, he could write, direct, and star in an Internet-only commercial for the company, one that could be embedded in all the social media platforms in which Wolf was already enmeshed. His level of “creative engagement” would have to be subtle, though. Prana’s “alt” fans were a touchy bunch and wouldn’t take kindly to their fearless, seemingly antiestablishment leader churning out sponsored posts for an untrendy company. But Celeste was confident that we could find a way for the company to sponsor him without looking like the company was sponsoring him.
When she used the word we, she motioned to the two of us, her and I. It made me happy. Mama!
“Here’s how I want to play this at the office,” she said, still perched on the edge of her desk. She looked like something out of Advertising Age, one of their frequent glossy spreads about a no-nonsense CEO succeeding in a tight marketplace. “I don’t want word g
etting out to any other agency about what we’re doing, so I still want to keep things relatively on the down-low. Those of you working on it—just you, plus Jack, Annie, and Lindsey, for now—I’m going to have you sign NDAs. No point in getting people excited over something that’s not real yet.”
“By ‘something’ you mean the venture capitalists?”
“I mean changing the whole face of advertising.” Celeste stood, crossed her arms. Her fingers rested elegantly on her toned triceps. “I mean changing the world. Because of what we do, because of our singular vision, artists will never go hungry again.”
I mean, yes and no. I mean, no. I mean, that was certainly untrue. But around Celeste, much like with Susan, there was no such thing as untruth. It was impressive, how much Celeste herself believed what she said, how true she could make it seem. And as I’ve said, I was very impressionable.
“Sure,” I said. I crossed my arms, too. Sometimes I found myself studying Celeste very carefully, like I used to study music videos in middle school, try to memorize the steps so I could try them out later, alone in my room. “I mean, duh! So exciting.”
Celeste flicked one wrist in a gesture of casual dismissal. “And if anyone outside of your core team asks what we’re doing, tell them they can come talk to me directly.” She knew as well as I did that no one would. Celeste was not what you’d call an approachable boss. You did not go directly to her unless you were bleeding.
“Okay.” I smoothed my pencil skirt. “Wait. Did you say my core team?”
She smiled. “Say hello to a ten percent raise and your new title. Senior Creative Director for People’s Republic, and Nanü’s Head Asset Manager.”
Somewhere in my head I heard a game show bell go off, watched as confetti fluttered through my brain. In reality, I put my hands together like a cymbal-clanging monkey and clapped. Ten percent! Ten percent! Who knew how much happiness I could buy with ten percent? Perhaps I could now even hire an assistant, outsource the boring parts of life so I could get back to important stuff, self-improvement, what lifestyle bloggers called “self-care.” We could not heal the world without first healing ourselves, they said. And healing ourselves took a whole lot of time and a lot of money, not to mention lavender oil.
“Thank you!” I said over and over, like a tearful beauty pageant winner. Though PR prided itself in theory on minimal hierarchy, we all jockeyed for better titles. Between my exhortations of gratitude I thought smugly: looks like someone’s never going to have to clean the coffeemaker again.
When I got back to my desk, I saw that Lindsey, Annie, and Jack had been waiting for me. Ellen, we’d discovered earlier that day, had penned a memoir. The book was set to launch in the summer, but she’d just gotten into a huge argument with the art department at the publishing house, whose potential covers for the book were, according to Ellen, extremely off-brand. She was asking us to work with the art and copy departments to get the cover and jacket flap more “on message.” The four of us had been scratching our heads all day, having never worked with a publishing house before, and certainly having never written a book jacket. We’d been drafting and redrafting a reply, but we didn’t know what to say. Heck, we didn’t even know that kind of interference with a publishing house was allowed.
“So sorry, you guys,” I said a little too apologetically, which could be read either as I’m as sorry as I’ve ever been or I’m not sorry at all.
“It’s okay,” Lindsey said. Those wounded eyes of hers! I’d met a lot of people in my life, most with about the average mix of goodness and badness, but Lindsey, she was a good person right down to the bottom. Not a drop of what the believers would call original sin.
“Where were you?” Jack said in a miffed voice.
“Ohhh,” I said. “Celeste and I are working on something. She’ll tell you about it. I have to go to New York in a few days, though, so if this Ellen stuff doesn’t get wrapped up before I go, you guys’ll have to take care of it without me.”
“You’re going to New York?” said Jack. Office politics, they were tricky. Most of the time we told ourselves we were all in it together, but of course that wasn’t true. If someone got pulled off of one project to work on another, we got jealous. If someone got to travel and we didn’t, we got jealous. If someone got a promotion and we didn’t, we got jealous. It was the same as kindergarten, except as adults we were expected to know how to deal with these feelings. But the thing is, no one had ever taught us how to deal, so we had to bottle it all up: pretend to be happy and talk shit about each other and then feel bad about talking shit and get worried about our own futures. Then on the drive home we’d cry, or just honk the horn and yell at other drivers with the windows rolled up.
The healthiest of us, the best we could do was “unpack” this stuff in therapy.
“Uh-huh. She’ll fill you in, I’m sure, eventually.”
“Why can’t you just tell us?” Jack said.
“Because she wants to.”
“That makes no sense,” he muttered under his breath. He was such a snarkfish sometimes. But, look, so was I.
“Is anything wrong?” Annie wiped muffins crumbs off her lap, having not heeded one of my first and most urgent pieces of advice: that carbs were the enemy within.
“Not at all! It’s all good, really good. I’m not trying to be cagey, there’s just a lot going on right now.” It was important that whoever Celeste deemed the Chosen One did not act too chosen. As the saying goes: Jealousy, yay! Mutiny, nay.
* * *
—
The trip to New York was brief—just an overnight. I flew out in the afternoon, and that night Wolf was slated to host a party for some hipster magazine I’d never heard of. After my admittedly pushy request, Simone had booked me a room at the Ace. It would have been more convenient to stay in Brooklyn, but I believed the Ace and I were better suited.
The timing was crunched, though. By the time I’d checked in to the hotel, I barely had time to take a forty-five-minute shower under and between a hundred rain spigots, sweep the entirety of the complimentary toiletries into my suitcase, order a kale salad from room service, drink wine from the mini-fridge, dance jubilantly to my favorite female pop icons, put on my face, remove my face (the eyeliner was no good), put on a new face, try on all the outfits I’d brought, hate them, hate my body, spiral into a sad time, despair while eating a bag of corn chips, and get entirely redressed over a thick layer of Spanx.
I was just about ready to head out the door, with the suit of armor that good taste and expensive personal care products provide, when my phone chirped. I was glad it did, because I paused in my tornadic preparations enough to spot Susan’s poems on the desk. I’d brought them along in case Wolf and I had a chance to chat about them. He knew so many people, an endorsement of her work from him could mean a lot, or maybe he could even get them into a publisher’s hands. I shoved the poems into my bag and reached for my phone. The text was from a number I’d never seen before.
Want to get a drink before your thing?
I wrote back right away. Did Wolf have my phone number?
Wolf, is that you?
Pause. Three dots let me know the person was typing.
Nope.
Who is this???
Have you been waiting for this moment your whole life?
Another pause, three dots.
Or at least two weeks?
Another pause.
Celeste gave me your number.
I grinned. Oh, I grinned. I wrote back right away.
Texting, not calling? I expected more from you.
Might as well burn with Rome.
Wait, you’re in New York?
Workshop and reading thing. Do you want to get a drink or not?
I didn’t understand how I could smash up against so many people every single day and not feel a thing, and then this on
e person, all he had to do was send a few words and I was gone. A goner. Knowing he was in the same city, who knew where, but close enough it sent a rush of pleasure down my centerline. I wanted him. And it was not a light hunger.
It was hard to know what to do with that hunger, since we’d only just met. The force of my desires could be a lot, even for me. Luckily, texting turns all feeling into banality. If Paul Revere had forgone his midnight ride in favor of SMS, all the warning the colonists would have had is a shrugging british r comin :0
As a compromise, we agreed to meet for a quick drink at the bar across the street from where the party was, an establishment that distilled its own liquors and concocted craft cocktails. It had a rustic aesthetic, but it was the sort of rusticism dreamed up by urbanites who fantasized about the “simple life,” going “back to the land,” maybe had tried slaughtering their own meat once, a humbling experience they continued to bring up for years after. The long wooden tables were unfinished, the strings of Edison bulbs hanging from the high ceiling white and soft, the clientele sophisticated and good-looking. Unfair, how the median level of attractiveness in New York was so much higher than everywhere else. My outfit, which had seemed so à la mode when I’d packed—wide, high-waisted black pants, a sheerish and sleeveless white blouse over a lacy bralette, and black cutout booties with brass grommets up the sides—all of a sudden seemed too…well, how can I put it. Brooklyn women wore black T-shirts and scuffed shoes and unwashed hair and somehow looked impossibly chic. I, in contrast, felt like a Carrie impersonator from Omaha on the Sex and the City bus tour.
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