chapter two
Her name wasn’t even Mal! As Vic’s admin, Laurie filed the perfectly ordinary transfer request for a perfectly ordinary name—Malini Kumar—but nobody at the Unicorn used it. In tech, as in ancient times, important people only had one name, usually the one in their email handle. Vic was Vic@, and she was Mal. Although the way people said it, the woman might as well be Beyoncé.
First woman on the team, my ass.
Laurie herself had been first, but if you couldn’t code you weren’t a person. An admin might as well be furniture.
She decided to make herself some tea to shake off her mood. It had been a week since that disastrous dinner. Convention allowed her to grieve for at least three months for a year’s relationship, but that sounded both exhausting and embarrassing. She hadn’t realized she’d been administrating her relationship, anticipating Cam’s needs and preventing catastrophe for so long that its arrival was actually a relief.
Her mother had always said, “Don’t date a man prettier than you.” She’d meant for Laurie to avoid New York’s finance guys who demanded their girlfriends’ thighs not touch and had a prenup clause about weight gain, not late-bloomers who might leave her hanging at forty to fuck their way across America, but the advice was sound.
What she missed most was how responsive Cam had been to her texts, but, as Vic was fond of saying, very loudly, on many occasions, “A bot can do that!” Who knew you could get withdrawal from the sound of a phone notification? It was worse than juvenile.
Tea it would have to be. Sober up like an adult. Someone here had to be one.
She braced when she saw Mal in the office kitchen, and remembered that Will was gone too. She asked Mal about him sympathetically, only to get a blank look and, “Why would I know how he’s doing?”
“You aren’t together anymore?”
“We never were. He invited me for the night, but he’d forgotten about that dinner with you and Cam, so he asked me to come along. Probably to get him out of it sooner.”
All that effort… poor Cam.
“What’s wrong?” Mal asked.
“Cam and I broke up.” There. Said aloud for the first time.
“He wasn’t right for you.” Mal grabbed a protein bar and left her slack-jawed and stupidly holding a banana.
She didn’t talk to Mal for a week. In the meantime, she had new problems. Her roommate had just moved out, and even if he’d frequently left the bathroom smelling of onion farts he paid his share of the rent on time. She spent her evenings interviewing people. Paystubs didn’t guarantee sanity, and San Francisco’s cray-cray could be anything from You seemed stressed so I microdosed your granola, to You must have asked my other personality for the rent.
The best candidate she’d found so far was a young woman who made a living as a photographer, capturing disconcerting closeups of the slow trickle of dew on fern and the sad faces of old men. Tatiana made a face when Laurie told her she worked at the Unicorn. Laurie figured you had to judge others’ life-choices to feel better about your own. She’d resisted the urge to tell Tatiana to open a savings account.
That winter of 2007 felt precarious. Obama’s star was on the rise and his implacable white-toothed smile said everything would get better, but the Dow was flickering, and Vic reeked of sweat as he convinced investors to hold steady through conference calls where they couldn’t see the stains on his shirt.
“You should cash out,” Mal said, coming up beside her at the company all-hands. “Any stocks or bonds, especially any real estate.”
Laurie wanted to strangle her. As if she had any. Mal seemed unperturbed by the strange chaos of that year, when twenty-somethings kept private planes in swampy airfields along the Bay, while those old enough to be their parents huddled in tents that stank of urine along the Embarcadero. Beware , said their haggard, aged faces. All this is temporary , said their faux-Buddhist T-shirts. Long lines cued on either side of Valencia Street, five blocks from Laurie’s house; on the one side, waiting for their social security paycheck, and on the other to pay thirty dollars for a breakfast sandwich and a glass of orange juice at Boogaloos.
Before she could say anything, Vic came up to them, throwing an arm around each of their shoulders.
“My two favorite people,” he said, slurring slightly. “Why do you look so serious? And why aren’t there drinks in your hands?”
Mal stepped away and said, “What can I get you?”
“Not a sh—shance,” Vic said. “You’re my team. My responsibility. My family.” He snapped his fingers—who did that?—and a waiter came by with a tray of plastic wine glasses.
Mal reached for two glasses of red, and then one of her hands moved to a white, which she handed Laurie.
“How did—”
“Did you want the red?”
“No, but—”
“Mal, have you met Laurie?” Vic said. “She’s… so amazing. She’s organizing a ski trip to Tahoe for the whole team.”
Laurie gave him a tense smile. He hadn’t said, She’s so amazing for someone without a college degree , but she always heard it anyway.Whatever. She’d been exceeding low expectations all her life.
“Really? A ski trip?” Mal asked.
“My friend Will has a place there, so—” Vic’s eyes bulged comically—“You should stay with us! Both of you!”
“I’m booking us all rooms at the Hyatt,” Laurie said, trying not to sound stressed. Last year’s ski trip was where she’d met Cam, at Will’s Tahoe house, but the team really didn’t do well without adult supervision. The trip had meant one broken wrist, two concussions, and a bar brawl. While most drunk men overestimated their attractiveness, for some reason brilliant tech geniuses were prone to overestimating their proprioception and their bladder control, and she didn’t want any trouble.
“Oh, you can bring your fiancé!” Vic turned to Mal to explain as if Laurie wasn’t even there. “He’s a serious, sysadmin type, you’d think he was no fun at all. But he’s great once he’s had a few drinks. Will knows how to get him to open up.”
Mal grinned widely and opened her mouth. Before she could say something absolutely humiliating like I bet he does , Laurie said, “Cam’s busy, but I’m sure he’ll be thrilled you remember him.”
“Well, then you have no excuse. You have to stay at the lodge with me and Will. Can’t have two gorgeous girls moping on your own at the hotel, can we?”
He pinched her chin lightly, then stumbled away. Mal said nothing, but Laurie’s ears burned, especially as those sharp eyes fell to the fake engagement ring she always wore to work.
“It’s just…”
“Unwanted advances,” Mal said, nodding. “But you’ll need a new fake fiancé. He’ll find out the truth as soon as he gets to Tahoe.”
Just like that. No judgment, no outrage. Laurie was both relieved and unbearably exposed. As if by knowing about Vic and not doing or saying something about it she was responsible for his behavior. Complicit.
Now that Vic was gone, a few more daring young men came up to talk to them, or more accurately, to talk to Mal. Laurie understood nothing about version skew or confidence intervals, but these men were flirting, and the woman had no idea.
Mal, men don’t ask women for advice on statistical problems.
“But let’s talk about something else,” Mal said. “Have you guys met Laurie? She sits in the corner office, under the Klimt print.”
“That’s not a real Klimt,” Laurie said. “It’s just a copy I made.”
“You made that?”
“What’s a Klimt?” someone asked.
“He’s an artist,” Laurie said, “and the painting is from the cover of a book I read once.” She didn’t want them asking about Vienna, where she’d never been.
Mal inhaled sharply, the full weight of her attention suddenly landing on her like a mallet. “You—I knew it. You were at Cornell, weren’t you? In Professor H—’s class?”
Laurie hustled back to her desk without answering, feeling as if Mal’s eyes were following her on a drone camera the whole way. Every time they met, Mal saw through her, unraveled some secret she’d meticulously tucked away, forced her to face the mirror.
But she had more immediate problems. By the time of the ski trip she was a nervous wreck. She’d interviewed only three applicants for the spare room, and the full rent was more than her monthly paycheck. The last thing she wanted was to go on the ski trip, but as the admin in charge of it she had no choice.
On the bus, someone said, “Seriously? Beringer chardonnay? We must be heading into a recession.”
Laughter rolled through the seats. Tears pricked her eyes. Broke, to them, meant cheap wine and doubling up at four star hotels, not making a meal of peanut butter and onions or sharing a bathroom with a sweaty man who never cleaned the toilet.
Mal came up to the front of the bus, where Laurie sat just behind the driver. “I thought you might like some company. Aren’t we supposed to be roommates?”
She still wasn’t speaking to Mal, but they were the only two women on the team, so they had to room together. Mal seemed to take silence for acceptance, and sat down next to her.
“You and Cam,” Mal whispered, “I’ve been meaning to ask. You didn’t break up because of me, did you?”
Laurie didn’t answer.
“Was it really a big deal? Lots of people are bisexual, you know.”
God, she was so condescending. As if that was the issue.
“I just wish he’d told me,” Laurie said. “Then I wouldn’t be left wondering if I’ve been the consolation prize.”
“He clearly wanted to be with you. Does it really matter if people’s eyes wander from time to time, if they always come back to rest on you? Wouldn’t you rather be chosen, over and over, than simply taken as a default?”
“That sounds soul-crushing. You must think I’m so bourgeois, expecting things like honesty and fidelity out of a relationship.”
“The fact that you know what it means to be bourgeois means you aren’t.”
“And what about you?” Laurie asked. “Why were you so certain you didn’t want to be with Will?”
“It’s nothing to do with Will. I don’t want to be with anyone . Why, in an age of birth-control and financial independence, would a woman compromise? No, lovers are like tapas meals, to be tasted without commitment.”
“What about…?”
“Yes?”
“Love,” she said. “What if you wanted to spend the rest of your life with someone?”
“Huh,” Mal said, as if mulling over a new technical concept. “I suppose I wouldn’t mind that, but I still wouldn’t get married or anything. If you can’t leave at any time, it’s not love.”
You don’t know what it’s like to be left.
They weren’t yet past the snow line, and the pines outside the window looked just like the ones Laurie had left behind in the Adirondacks. She wondered if her mother and Jim were still getting along. She hadn’t called in a while.
“So you think it’s impossible to be in a relationship with someone without compromising?” she asked Mal.
“Not for very long.”
“Huh,” she said, just as Mal had. But who are we outside of our relationships with other people?
Ah—that was the true reason she was angry. Not at Mal, for exposing the truth. Not even at Cam, for hiding himself. Hadn’t she done the same? To protect herself from Vic, to endear herself to Cam, to make herself comprehensible and competent. Where was the Laurie she’d once been, who walked against the current to feel the skin of the waterfall?
They arrived in Tahoe, and the crisp, cold air stirred her from a long, quiet wallow in thought. While talking to Mal felt like being in The Matrix and contorting to dodge bullets, in the silence afterwards she’d been combing through the debris and found no cartridges, no signs of the attack. She thanked the driver, directed people to the check-in desk, and made sure nobody had left anything on the bus.
“I can take your bags to our room,” Mal said, holding out a hand.
Laurie hesitated.
“Or not,” Mal said with a shrug. She didn’t seem offended, but part of Laurie wanted to bring her up short, slow her down somehow. She was always moving forward into the next space, the next thought, without letting anyone prepare first.
“Wait.” She passed Mal her suitcase. “Thank you.”
Mal headed off.
It wasn’t fair to keep holding Mal responsible for the end of her relationship. Laurie had hidden from the truth, made assumptions that Mal blasted with her roving, unpredictable gaze, like a park ranger clearing away squatters with a flashlight.
Night fell abruptly, within what felt like the span of an exhale. The hot tubs, teeming with techies now, glistened like bioluminescence against the darkness. Nothing could compel Laurie to wear a bathing suit in front of her coworkers, but she wandered among them nursing a glass of champagne.
“… And then he just goes off to lunch, like he didn’t just drop the damned database!”
Laughter. How strange, to hear words in her own language and not particularly understand them. To feel so visible, as a woman, and so invisible all at once.
When the cold burrowed through her flimsy coat, Laurie went inside to the card tables, and found Mal in the hotel’s white robe, thumbing through a wad of bills. She rolled her eyes. Could she look more ridiculous, gambling in a bathing suit?
“There you are,” Mal said, as if she’d been waiting for her. “Can you hold this? I don’t have any pockets.” She stuffed the money into Laurie’s hand, letting a twenty-dollar bill float to the ground. Then she stumbled off, muttering, “Bathroom, wine, hot tub.”
Laurie picked up the fallen twenty. She wanted to throw the money after her. Did Mal even know how much she’d given? Would she notice if Laurie kept it? She went upstairs to their room, annoyed that the hotel door wasn’t built for slamming. She counted the bills. Nearly seven hundred dollars. Breathing hard, she stuffed it into Mal’s backpack and sat down on the bed.
She should have gone after her, but had no idea what to say. She didn’t even tell waiters when they brought her the wrong order, never mind how she’d articulate the strange, wandering anger that seemed to crawl beneath her skin now.
The ringing of a phone startled her so much she jumped out of the bed. Ah, Mal’s phone. She ignored it and sat back down.
It rang again.
The phone was unlocked, so she answered in case it was Mal, lost and trying to call her phone to sort herself out.
“Hello?”
“Who’s this?” demanded a woman’s voice. “Where’s Malini?”
“She’s not here right now. Can I tell her who called?” (Admin reflexes).
“Where is she?”
“I can take a message.”
“A message… a message, she says. Aditi’s worried out of her mind, and Ashwin’s called the police but they won’t do anything. Listen, you tell my daughter to come home immediately. This isn’t funny. If she doesn’t call me back in twenty minutes, I’ll—”
Laurie waited, holding the phone away from her ear, as if the woman’s spittle could reach her from the other side. When there was nothing further, she said, “I’ll let her know.”
The call ended. She dropped the phone back into its nest of clothes like a snake. Unable to stand the thought of staying in the room, she headed back out to the hot tubs to find Mal.
From the balcony, she saw her sprawled against the edge of a tub, arms out to the sides. Mal’s head lay back against the stone; her eyes were closed, and her long curly hair bounced gently on the bubbles by her chest. An empty plastic wine glass sat beside her outstretched hand.
By the time Laurie reached her, two men were helping Mal out of the tub. With her eyes half-closed, she leaned into them and muttered something Laurie couldn’t make out.
“She’s my roommate,” Laurie said, heart pounding. “I can take her from here.”
The men looked at each other. If they were part of Vic’s team, she didn’t recognize them in their bathing suits.
“You can’t possibly carry her all the way.”
Maybe she was paranoid. She really couldn’t carry Mal, not even for a little while. But she couldn’t leave her with them either.
“You can leave her here,” she said. “She’ll walk… eventually.”
The men looked at each other again, then nodded and went away, leaving Mal sitting against the metal rung of the hot tub. Laurie breathed in and out slowly, letting the sounds of the men move away, until all she heard was the hot tub jets and her own breathing.
“Mal, wake up. Your mother called.”
An annoyed groan was her only response.
Laurie placed her arm underneath Mal’s and lifted her to her feet. It was slow going, but she did start walking, the cold air sobering her up a little.
“Two glasses of wine don’t usually hit me this hard.”
“How often have you had drinks at altitude?”
“First time,” she said. “It’s glorious.”
Glorious wasn’t the word Laurie would’ve used. Her nerves were pinched, and her mind tumbled out a rolling litany of worst-case scenarios. What if she falls down and breaks her head against the stone, what if she slips down the stairs, or has alcohol poisoning, or what if those men come back, what if this was her fault—
“Laurie, look.” Mal came to a stop. Here, far from the steam and light of the hot tubs, she pointed to a clear sky over snowcapped mountains.
“Where’s your robe?” Laurie asked, suddenly aware Mal was wearing just her bathing suit, a simple, sporty black piece that fitted her well without reaching or flattering, like an unvarnished truth.
“I’m not cold.”
“That’s because you’re drunk.”
“You tell my mother that?”
“Of course not. She wanted to know where you were, said someone had tried calling the police, but I didn’t—Mal? Why are you laughing?”
“Because I did it. I really did it. I left. It’s over, and I’m finally free.”
Laurie swallowed. “Why don’t you come inside and drink some water?”
Mal stopped laughing immediately. Her hand came up to pat Laurie on the head, nearly poking her eye out. “Sorry, I don’t mean to scare you. I wasn’t… being self-destructive. I was celebrating .” With that, she turned to the mountains and gave a loud whoop.
Laurie gaped. She’d never heard a woman make a sound that loud. Certainly not like this, under the open, amplifying, public-use sky.
“What’s the matter? Never heard a barb—barbaric yawp across the roofs of the world?”
Laurie burst into laughter. “You gave yourself hiccups. Okay, come in already, you can be just as untamed and untranslatable inside. Also, I’m freezing, even if you aren’t.”
Mal stumbled along and then came to a sudden stop. “Untranslatable,” she whispered. “That’s it, exactly. That’s how I feel, all the time.”
“I was just—”
“I know what you were doing,” Mal said, her eyes skewering Laurie as if she were a butterfly on the head of a pin. “You’re extremely well-read. Most people would have thought I was quoting Dead Poets Society , and that’s if they’d thought anything at all.”
All Laurie’s worry and irritation left her in a dizzying swoop, as she had the unfamiliar sensation of allowing herself to hear praise as praise. Not as reproach, or as the opening to ask a favor. After years of the tech equivalent of ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about it’ from the Unicorn’s engineers, being truly seen felt like the prickle of hot water after being out too long in the numbing cold.
She went to fill a cup with water from the tap when they got to the room, but when she came out Mal was already drinking from the water bottle by the minibar. Laurie bit down on the itch to tell her it wasn’t covered by the corporate card.Everything in the Unicorn’s office kitchens was free, including the soy milk and the vitamin water that were supposed to regulate stress and boost brain function. There were times Will had walked out of restaurants without paying, unused to waiting for a bill.
Maybe a day would come when Laurie’s eyes saw an item before its price tag, but it wasn’t today.
“I’ve been trying to move out of my sister’s house for a year,” Mal said. “Each time I tried, something got in my way. When I started looking for apartments, my mother asked me if I hated my family so much I’d waste money on my own place. I tried to keep my evenings for myself, but my sister begged me to spend time with my niece. When I wanted to buy a car, my brother-in-law insisted on driving me everywhere. At some point, I couldn’t take it. I went home after work with Will, and didn’t come back until the next evening.”
“I take it that ended badly.”
“You could say that. They blindsided me. Invited over a family friend whose son might make me a good husband.”
“I didn’t think people still did that,” Laurie said. “I’m assuming you refused.”
“If only it was that simple. They don’t just make you feel bad about refusing, they make you feel wrong . Do you have any idea how humiliating it is for the girl’s family to refuse an alliance like that? How could you possibly want to live alone, when you could be surrounded by love? Why would you drive on the 101 yourself when you have a brother-in-law so devoted he’d drop anything to take you where you needed to go and it would be faster in the carpool lane?”
“Why do they think you’ve run away?”
“Because I have.” Mal got up and spread her arms to encompass the backpack and its spilled contents. “Passport, credit cards, phone, laptop and three sets of clothes. Oh, and a bathing suit. What more does anyone really need?”
Laurie frowned. “But where will you live? When we head back, I mean.”
“I’ll check into a hotel near the office. I’m sure I’ll find an apartment in a few days.”
The phone rang again.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?”
“Why?”
She opened her mouth to respond, but had no ready answer. It was unfathomable to Laurie to not pick up a ringing phone, or to leave one place without having another to spend the night. She ought to tell Mal she was looking for a roommate, that all this felt like some goofy, overdone footwork by the fates. But the thought of Mal walking through her apartment felt too intimate. Mal would know even more about her than she already did, and she wouldn’t be silent about it either. Laurie needed a roommate who was stupider, more self-absorbed.
Then again, what if Mal found out from someone else that she’d been looking for a roommate? Laurie had posted pictures in the work chatrooms. Maybe Mal already knew. Maybe Mal had mentioned the hotel to spare Laurie the sting of rejecting her shitty place.
Before she could make sense of her thoughts, Mal had slipped into the shower. Steam seeped out from underneath the door.
The phone rang two more times before Mal came out, and each time Laurie’s fingers itched to answer. The sound was like a baby’s cry, wrenching and urgent, short-circuiting every other thought. It was always her mother at the other end, sobbing as she told Laurie her father was dead.
“I should change my number,” Mal said, coming out wrapped in a towel. She turned off the phone so it would stop ringing, and sat down on the bed. “Shall I order us a pizza?”
Laurie hadn’t noticed she was ravenous. “Don’t worry about it.”
“If I order a veggie pizza, will you eat some?”
“Maybe a slice.”
When Mal didn’t say anything, Laurie turned to look. She was dialing room service from the hotel phone. Mal put in the order and then said, as if there had been no break in the conversation, “We’re not so different, you know. Neither of us wants to be helped by other people. Too many strings attached.”
It wasn’t exactly the same. She doubted Mal had ever had a sibling call her from jail after being caught selling marijuana. Or that she’d ever had to listen politely to the dangers of the gay agenda to get cheap furniture at a garage sale. But maybe they did both know what it was to be disappointed by those they loved.
Tatiana might make a great roommate, plastering the walls with enormous prints of her photographs. One day, she’d get a proposal from a curator interested either in her or her art, and she’d leave Laurie with a pitying look and a deep sense of the life she could’ve lived. Or she might be a terrible roommate, scattered artist mind and rent never paid on time and the faint scent of mold concealed by the stronger smell of turpentine.
“You could stay with me,” Laurie said, “until you find another place.”