Chapter Twelve #3
At four o’clock he opens his drawer and pulls out a pack of candy.
The rustling of the plastic bag is especially loud, and just when I’m about to snap at him to take it somewhere else I realize he’s only doing it to get a rise out of me.
I give him a stern look—his face is a portrait of innocence.
He tips the open pack toward me in offering. I decline.
Connor is adamant he wasn’t on a lunch date, but so what? He wasn’t the one who initiated it, so technically he has no idea. Nor did he deny being interested in Carrie. What I need to find out now is if she’s interested in him. Dancing around the subject will get me nowhere. I decide to go bold.
—
“Knock, knock,” I say, inviting myself into Carrie’s office.
She’s not alone. Andy is here, perched on the edge of the desk.
Perfect, would you look at that. Another man who likes my best friend more than me.
“Two seconds,” Carrie says without looking up. “If I don’t send this email before six my boss will freak.”
She hammers out the rest of her email, sends it off with a little woosh, then spins her chair toward Andy and me.
“What’s up?” It’s unclear whether she’s addressing this to me, or Andy, or both of us. He and I exchange wary glances. I motion to him like, after you.
Andy straightens up off the desk, clearing his throat.
“I thought we might go for a drink after work,” he says. He looks pointedly away from me as he says this, lest I get the impression he is including me in this invitation.
“Oh,” Carrie says. I can practically hear the cogs of her mind turning. Her eyes dart toward me and then away again—a silent plea to supply her with an excuse. Fortunately, I have one.
“Sorry, Andy. Carrie’s spoken for. My roommate invited her to a gallery opening tonight.”
“Yeah, cool,” he says. “I love art stuff.”
I scoff at this. “No you don’t, you’ve told me a million times you hate—”
Carrie cuts me off. “Did she actually?”
“Hmm? Did who actually,” I ask, our last topic of conversation already forgotten.
“Sam. Did she actually invite me.”
“Oh,” I say. “Yeah. She told me to bring you.”
What she actually said was: bring that rude blonde you’re friends with.
Carrie retrieves her bag from under her desk. “Give me a minute to freshen up. Then we’ll go.”
—
Carrie locks us out of her office, so Andy and I loiter around by the elevators, trading gossip while we wait. He tells me about the conspiracy theory that has riveted the product department this week: people are convinced Brad doesn’t own a computer.
“It was a joke at first but seriously, Annie, no one has ever seen him use one.”
“Do you know what,” I say, picturing all the times I’ve seen Brad hovering around the space between Ben and Connor’s desks, thumbing notes into his iPhone, “now that you mention it, I’ve never seen him with a computer either.”
“We’ve got a Slack channel going. Every time someone sees him in the wild without a computer you send NC in the chat.” At my puzzled look he adds, “No computer.”
I crack up. “That’s funny.”
“We’ve clocked up over forty sightings of Brad NC.”
“Wow,” I say. “Does he really hang around that much?”
“Oh god yeah. He’s like the phantom of the product department.”
“What’s he doing?”
Andy shrugs. “Poking around, crashing meetings. Being a general pain in the ass.”
Sounds very similar to his dealings with Data Strategy, frankly.
“You know what has to happen, don’t you?” I tell him. “Someone’s going to have to break into his office and check once and for all. That’s the only way to end this.”
“If we did, I’m convinced the only thing we’d find is a phone charger and a box of protein bars. You know he has no tech background at all? He’s from McKinsey or something.”
“Really?” This surprises me. Though maybe it doesn’t. He’s exactly like another consultant I dated briefly. “How did he end up here?”
“Classic Taskio whimsy. They’re always putting people in roles they’re not qualified for.” The corners of his mouth tip up. “You, for example.”
I gasp. “Why, you little—”
“Ready?” Carrie materializes looking noticeably hotter than she did ten minutes ago.
Andy, it’s clear, takes this transformation as an invitation to put the moves on her. Within seconds I’m relegated to third wheel status, his attention now wholly focused elsewhere.
—
Sam’s gallery, Le Nal, is on the Lower East Side, its name an anagram of its address on Allen Street—Anell felt too on the nose.
It’s a small, run-down space with shitty lighting and white stippled walls that Sam and her collective of fellow artists use to stage immersive art experiences.
The last one caused a bit of a stir, actually; a performance artist who goes by the moniker Chewy invited all his exes, then stood at the front of the room, held out his arms, and invited them to scream.
—
We find Sam passing out glasses at a makeshift wine bar, set up directly beside the door. Her black hair has been teased high, bombshell-style, and she’s decked out in a scoop neck and pinstripe cigarette pants, a mix between Beetlejuice and a goth Brigitte Bardot.
Her lip curls when she sees Carrie and Andy locked in conversation behind me. He is not on the approved guest list.
“Oh, look. You brought a man.”
“Er—Sam, this is Andy. And you know Carrie already.”
“Do I?” she says cryptically, turning away without handing either of them a glass.
I do the honors instead, shrugging at them like, that’s Sam for you.
“That’s your roommate?” Andy asks, mystified.
“She’s unexpected, I know.”
“Don’t mess with her,” Carrie warns him. “She bites.”
For tonight’s exhibition, dozens of iPhones have been installed in various corners of the room like security cameras, live-streaming footage of the gallery onto other phone screens also mounted around the space. She’s called it WATCHED/WATCHING.
At any given time, the gallery can accommodate about a dozen people—our living room is honestly bigger—so Sam is keeping a strict watch on who gets to go in when.
Optics are key. I’ve learned over the years that there must always be more people milling around the sidewalk than there are inside the gallery. How else will you attract passersby to stop and ask what the fuck we’re doing in there?
To that end, she taps Andy on the shoulder and tells him bluntly to go inside, and when he hesitates, drags him by the arm.
It’s a warm evening—sunny, pleasant, humidity still bearable. Traffic is the backing track to everything you do in New York City, and tonight is no different. Everyone chats against the sound of bikes whizzing past and the occasional blaring horn.
“Sooo,” I say to Carrie, once Sam has shoved Andy through the gallery door, “how was your lunch with Connor?”
“HA,” she says, pointing a finger at me. “I knew it. I fucking knew it!”
“Knew what?”
“That you’re hot for your boss.”
“I’m not—”
“Save it,” Carrie says. “I could just tell when you got all weird at the Lunch and Learn. Why didn’t you say anything, you dumb freak?”
I stutter, trying in vain to deny the allegations against me: that I like Connor, and that I withheld this information from Carrie.
“So, you—it wasn’t a date?”
“It was a trap,” she tells me. “I wanted to see if you’d react.”
“By asking him out?”
Carrie ignores this. “I say this as your friend, and also as an officer of the HR department. It’s absolutely against company policy to go out with your boss.”
“I’m not—”
“That said,” she continues, cutting me off, “I got the impression there’s more than a professional interest there. He asked a lot of questions about you.”
“He did?” My voice goes so squeaky that she laughs. I cough, then say again, in a tone that I hope conveys my nonchalance, “I mean—he did?”
“Yes, you loser. But of course, none of that matters, right? Because you’re not interested.”
“Absolutely,” I say, taking a sip of warm white wine. “Not interested.”
“Mmm,” she says. “Convincing.”
Sam returns, inserting herself neatly into the space between Carrie and me. Andy, I notice, is now being entertained—or held against his will—by one of the other gallery staff.
“Your turn,” she says to Carrie.
“You could start with hello,” she replies.
Sam smirks. “Oh, were you waiting for me to acknowledge you?”
I jump in quickly before the two of them can come to blows. “So—inside?”
Sam casts me a dismissive glance. “Not you. Go and say your hellos to Ari.”
“Oh, is she here?” I ask, scanning behind me for signs of Sam’s…Actually, I don’t know how to describe Ari. It feels rude to call her a fuck buddy.
“Come,” Sam orders, leading Carrie away. “You’ll need it explained to you.”
Carrie looks at me and rolls her eyes.
While Sam tours her through the gallery—with absolutely no regard for her personal space, I might add—I catch up with Ari, then say hello to the few other people I recognize milling around. I’m refilling my wine glass a few minutes later when Andy stumbles back out into the fading sunlight.
“Your roommate is crazily intense.”
“Yeah, sorry about her. She’s mostly harmless.”
“I tried to say something to Carrie and she said if I didn’t leave, she’d hex me.” He has the look of a man trying to decipher the most confusing interaction of his life. “What is that?”
“Um, I think it’s a curse,” I say. “She’s kidding, obviously.”
Probably.
“I’m not sure I want to take any chances,” he mutters, pausing to pull out his phone. Even from here I can see he’s texting someone on an app—now that Carrie is a nonstarter, he’s assessing his other options.
“You heading off?” I ask him eventually.
“Yeah, going to meet a friend,” he says, still staring down at his screen. “Tell Carrie I said bye?”
Totally unnecessary, as it turns out, because Carrie doesn’t ask. She returns to my side looking flustered, her cheeks flushed.
“Sorry,” I say. “Was Sam on one in there?”
“Just her usual,” Carrie says, taking a deep swig of wine. Sam is back outside too, now holding court in the middle of a group of friends, telling an animated story we’re too far out of earshot to properly hear.
Carrie and I look on for a minute, then lose interest.
“Hungry?” I ask her.
“Starving. Let’s get out of here.”
“I’ll just tell Sam we’re leaving.”
“Don’t,” Carrie says over her shoulder, already walking in the opposite direction. “Let her wonder.”
—
I’m so mollified by Carrie’s extended report of her lunch with Connor that evening that I decide to say no more about it at work the next day, and for the second morning in a row greet Connor as if nothing untoward has happened.
He makes no mention of it either, and when he doesn’t reference anything of that nature for the rest of the morning, I consider our disagreement—if you can even call it that—totally over.
Today I’m working with John on some data inputting and spend most of the morning with my chair rolled over to his side of the table so we can work off the same screen.
The other guys are deeply immersed in some task that needs to be presented to management later this afternoon, so there’s no time for the usual pointless joking around.
Around lunchtime, Ben pops up from his chair and says to Connor: “Should we get food before we run out of time?”
“Sorry, I can’t,” Connor says mournfully. “Annie doesn’t like it when I eat lunch with other people.”
I try and punch him on the arm, but he jumps out of the way. “OK, OK,” he says, laughing. “You can come with us.”