Chapter Two Happy Hour
Chapter Two
Happy Hour
“Does it count as ironic that we spend happy hour complaining?”
Julie thought about the question, plucking a pretzel from a shallow dish. “I think it’s pretty common.” She popped it into her mouth.
Every other Tuesday, much of the staff of Palmetto slid onto stools and into booths at a bar called Ruckus, where the restroom was sometimes out of order and it smelled a little like feet, but the drinks were cheap and it was quiet. We’d dribble in whenever we were done with work, until the last stragglers sat down with the last lingerers and had the last beers. I’d made it earlier than usual, by 5:30, and Julie and I had found seats at the bar. She had a fondness for chardonnay that I didn’t understand. I preferred to nurse a cheap whiskey, particularly when I was feeling defeated, which was increasingly common.
Her phone was face down on the bar, and we both jumped when it buzzed. She turned it over and set her jaw in a way that usually meant one thing and one thing only. “Oh, no,” I said. “Chris?”
She put the phone down and nodded. Only her ex got this reaction. “We’re in this thing. Bella wants to go to science camp next summer,” she said. “Chris says a six-year-old should climb trees like he did, and climbing trees is free.”
“Wow. It takes a special kind of dad to be against science camp.”
“He’s not against science camp. He just hopes my parents are going to pay for it. He doesn’t understand that the Bank of Grandma and Grandpa is closed since my dad retired.”
Julie’s parents were both college professors who had immigrated to southern California to study and then taught there. Her father was Persian and specialized in medieval art history; her mother was Spanish and specialized in tree rings. I’d had dinner out with them and Julie a couple of times when they were in town, and they were among the kindest, loveliest, and most intellectually imposing people I had ever met. Dr. Amir Nazari had retired a year ago; Dr. Camila Nazari planned to follow soon. In the ladies’ room after a luscious dinner of tandoori lamb chops the previous fall, Camila had thanked me for looking out for Julie and Bella. It was something I would have tried to do anyway, but after that, I tried even harder. I was confident that if Julie asked, they would still pay for science camp, but I got where she was coming from.
“How much is it?” I asked.
She looked at me sideways. “You are not paying for science camp.”
“I didn’t say I was!”
“You were going to. It was going to be the play kitchen all over again.”
“That was for Christmas!”
She shook her head. “I have months to work on her father to pitch in before we have to register. That’s why I started now. Keep your wallet in your pants, Aunt Ceci.”
I put up both hands. “Fine. I don’t even like science.”
“Besides, she’s got enough distractions for now. My mom gave her a bunch of my old Barbies. Apparently, they’ve been safe in a plastic bin since I abandoned them.”
“Oh, nice,” I said. “Does Bella like them?”
“She pulls their heads off,” Julie said. “I think she’s genuinely disappointed every time there’s not gore in there.”
“Well, hopefully she will not do the same to Mickey Mouse.” In two months, Julie and Bella were heading to Walt Disney World.
“Yeah,” she said, “Unfortunately, I’m not sure if that’s happening anymore.”
“No! Why?” She just looked at me. “What?”
“I mean, Miles’s contract is up next summer.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know if you expect that job to continue, but I don’t.” She ran her finger around the top of her glass. “And there’s all this talk about layoffs. If I don’t find something else to do, I don’t know if Toby is going to keep me around.”
Talk about layoffs never really went away anymore, it just rose and fell by degrees—a little more when another shop was going through it, a little less when we were launching something we were excited about. I wanted to tell her not to worry, but I spent more time thinking about Julie losing her job than I did thinking about losing my own. I’d recommended her three years ago when Toby asked me to run a series we did about Al Capone and asked if I knew anybody who would be good for an associate producer job. The fact that she was tethered to Palmetto as it struggled was my fault.
“I don’t think that will happen,” I said, knowing that I mostly meant I could not stand to think about it happening. “He knows you’re good at your job.”
“I’m very good at my job,” she said. “Which is irrelevant.”
I wished she were wrong. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out why Toby did anything, why he green-lit this show and not that one, or kept this person and let that one go, or why he would suddenly get very passionate about video or social media and then lose interest right after everybody spent a lot of time trying to meet his curiosity with options.
“There’s no way,” I said. “I would never let that happen.”
“I love you,” she said, “but I don’t think there’s a lot you can do. We’re all going to find out together.”
“Ugh,” I said.
“Well, you’re going to be fine,” she said. “You’re his favorite.”
I was not Toby’s favorite, but I spent a lot of time cleaning out the figurative junk drawers of his business. Help with this edit, brainstorm with this team, write a presentation for him to give at this conference, smooth it over between him and this on-air douchebag he was overpaying. “Jul,” I said, “he will have to physically fight me if he wants me to work there without you. I’ll carry you out of there like An Officer and a Gentleman. We’ll make our own company. We’ll join the indies.”
Right then, a pair of arms wrapped around my neck and squeezed, and I smelled cigarettes. “Mel,” I said, putting my hands on her hands and then turning to see her face beside me.
Melissa was only twenty-four, and she’d just finished helping produce an eight-episode season about sharks. She grinned, her spider clavicle tattoo peeking out of her shirt. “Hey, Mom; hey, Jul.” She leaned in toward the bartender and ordered a Blue Moon.
I rolled my eyes as she wedged in between me and Julie. I was only ten years older than she was—I was a disconcerting number of years older than a disconcerting number of our producers—but I could not shake the nickname. “Yeah, yeah.”
“You know I love you,” she said, knocking me with her shoulder. “I have to give you shit because I love you.”
“How are things?” I asked.
“Oh, fabulous, ” she said. “My whole table over there is trying to game out who’s going to get canned.” She gestured at a corner booth where a little knot of young producers huddled around their drinks, looking somber.
“See?” Julie said to me. “Everybody knows it’s coming.”
“It’s just this feeling,” Melissa said. “You know, the astronomy show didn’t go, and then Toby was trying to land that YouTuber for the gaming thing, and that didn’t go, and then they changed the toilet paper.”
I put my drink down. “They did what?”
She nodded. “I was talking to Izzy, and she asked me if I’d noticed that we used to have great toilet paper in the bathrooms, and now it’s this stuff that’s like, all scratchy. I think it’s one-ply. And I realized—I hadn’t thought about it, but my ass knows it’s true. The toilet paper sucks now. Benji says the first sign that a company is really in trouble is when they switch to cheaper TP.”
“I’m not sure that’s an ironclad rule,” I said, even as I realized that my ass also knew it was true. “A lot can happen. The industry is just sort of chaotic at the moment.”
Melissa leaned in toward us conspiratorially. “Speaking of which, I assume you heard the Justin thing?”
I looked over at Julie and knew instantly that, unlike me, she had already heard the Justin thing. “I didn’t,” I said. I didn’t really want to hear industry news about my ex, but it was better to hear it from Melissa than from one of the several guys in dress sneakers I knew were in this bar somewhere at this very moment, probably gossiping about this same thing.
“He’s making a new show with Paul Casper,” Mel said. “Fancy, huh?”
My heart seized inside my chest. “What?”
The world of audio was a pyramid of nerds who were moderately famous only to other people within that pyramid, and Paul Casper was one of the few at the tip-top who poked up high enough to pass into the realm of being famous to regular people. He’d been profiled on 60 Minutes, and about half the white guys I knew who were hosting podcasts sounded suspiciously like they went to the Paul Casper School of Minimal Enunciation. Even for Justin, who was already doing annoyingly well, this would be a leap.
Melissa nodded. “I don’t know exactly what it is, but it sounds like there’s going to be an announcement within the next few weeks. They’re recruiting. They tried to poach Abby, that’s how we found out.” The network of producers was a smart, benevolent mafia. What they lacked in official power, they made up in the practical capacity to complicate the lives of their enemies.
“Well, that’s great for him.” I pulled a good swallow of my drink and felt it burn my throat.
Melissa looked at me. “I’ve only met him a couple of times, but I’ve always thought he seemed like a jackass, for the record.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Tell me if you need me to say it again,” she said.
“If I do, are you going to call me Mom again?”
“It’s affectionate!” She took in my squint. “Okay, fine. Fine. I won’t call you Mom.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” The bartender slid her beer across the bar and she nodded at him. “Hey, before I go back to those guys, do you have two Advil?”
“Sure,” I said. I took my big black tote from the hook under the bar—my sister called it the Beast—and dug through it. I shook two pills into my hand and offered them to her.
“While you’re in there, we’re going to do trivia, do you have a pen?”
I handed her a blue fine-point.
“Can I have five dollars?”
I got my wallet out. I had it unzipped before I froze. I looked up at her. “You are such an asshole.”
She was laughing, and she threw her arms around me again. “Love you, Moooom, ” she said. “Bye, Jul.” And she was gone.
“Boy, you walked into that,” Julie said.
“Yeah, no kidding.” I went back to my glass, tapping at the edges restlessly. “Paul Casper,” I muttered.
Julie looked over at me. “I know. I didn’t want to say anything. But I mean, truly, who cares what he’s working on? He already has a show. He makes a new show, what’s the difference?”
“Nothing,” I said weakly. “I just don’t understand why he gets to be cool.”
“He is not cool,” she declared. “He tattooed his own voice on his arm. So he will be very uncool forever.”
This was, regrettably, a true story. Justin had a tattoo that ran down the inside of his forearm. A jagged soundwave copied from a recording of his own voice saying, Hi, this is Justin Dash. I should have broken up with him the day he got it, because there is a very particular kind of guy who would do that, and although I told myself at the time he didn’t seem like that type, it turned out he was exactly that type.
Still. Still. His was a name you heard at the beginnings of shows; mine was a name you heard at the end. Or, more likely, mine was one you didn’t hear at all, because you had turned it off when the credits started. And now this? Of everybody, Paul Casper? I knew where it would probably go from here: Justin would expand his little production company. It would grow until he could sell it to a giant conglomerate, suck out the value, and retire. He’d probably devote the rest of his life to collecting his goddamn whimsical boxes of defunct breakfast cereal. Urkel-Os and Sir Grapefellow stacked up next to his awards cabinet.
“I hate this,” I said.
“Okay, well,” she said. “Then while you’re already mad about this, I’m just going to tell you the other thing I heard, because I don’t want you to hear it from anybody else.”
I turned to her very slowly. “Oh, no. What?”
“Well, Clarissa.”
Clarissa was a producer who had been at Palmetto for a while, but then Justin had hired her to help with a project he was making. She’d moved to New York, and now they were dating. I suspected she was unofficially helping him with the very same show he and I had started together years ago, which would be exactly his style. “What about her?”
“I guess they’re engaged,” she said. “My friend saw her in New York last week, she had a ring, and…I guess they’re engaged.”
“Wow,” I said, trying to ignore the feeling that my head was going to spin off my neck. “Mel kind of buried the lede, huh?”
“I’m sure she doesn’t know. I don’t think a lot of people know yet. Obviously, all these nerds are going to be a lot more interested in the fact that he’s making a show with Casper than in the fact that he’s getting married. I know you probably feel differently. Although maybe you don’t.”
“This is astonishing timing,” I said. “Because I haven’t told you yet what Toby wanted when I went to see him in his office.”
“Please tell me he doesn’t want you to report on Justin’s wedding.”
The fact that this wrung a laugh out of me was a tribute to Julie’s quickness. “No. It actually might be more mortifying than that.”
“I’m impressed.”
I stopped nursing my drink and threw the rest of it down my throat. “He wants me to host a show about self-help where I work with a dating coach who tries to find me a boyfriend.”
Her eyes widened. “You hate self-help.”
“That’s what I said! And, Jul, you should have heard the ad roster. It’s like Miss Havisham’s Amazon wish list. I told him no. Or I’m going to. Or I was going to.”
She nodded slowly. “Okay. I mean, I’m not going to lie, it sounds sort of fun to me, because I like self-help, but I’m not sure I’d expect you to do it.”
“If you were a little older, I’m sure he’d have asked you. He seems to be stuck with me,” I said. “I can’t say it wouldn’t be great to have something of my own.”
“A show or a person?”
“Both, maybe,” I admitted.
“Well, I mean, if you don’t want to do it, you shouldn’t.”
“He wants me to talk about how long I’ve been single.” I shuddered. “And I’d rather ride the Metro naked at rush hour. The red line.”
“Well,” she said, “if you say no, I’m sure he’ll offer you something better next time. And we’ll work on it together. You and me, no Miles. And Justin can hear all about our big project.” She shrugged. “Even if it sucked, it would be fun.”
—
I didn’t sleep very much that night. I worried about Julie losing her job and imagined her mother frowning at me disapprovingly in a restaurant ladies’ room. I worried about Melissa and her table going back to Ruckus on some awful day yet to come to commiserate about some terrible announcement from Toby. I even worried a little about myself. When Justin and I first broke up, I’d moved in with my sister and her husband; I didn’t think I had the strength to do it again if I lost my job and my apartment and every atom of my stability.
I turned over and lay on my other side, and I worried about Justin growing his empire until he was a dot in the distance and people wouldn’t even believe me if I said I knew him, let alone dated him. I thought about the press he would do, the profile with the photo of him sitting at his desk, staring gravely into the camera, with some of his cool-guy hair hanging in his face. They would say he was the future. They would recite some figure, some number of millions that he’d socked away to fund his beautiful life. Nothing would make it not terrible unless I became so wildly successful that someday it would be me pretending not to remember him at an industry event.
I had thought he was going to propose to me once. It wasn’t one of those slapstick sitcom things where I found a ring that wasn’t meant for me. We just went away on a trip, and we stayed at a B and B in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and he kept telling me how much he loved me. We went for a hike on the last day, even though I’m not much of a hiker, and we kept stopping to look at the sky as it turned pink, then orange, then red. And I had the overwhelming feeling he was going to ask me to marry him, which we’d talked about only in this kidding-but-not-totally way that you do when you want to marry somebody but you’re not ready to say you are. I even looked at his pockets, trying to see if he was carrying anything. But it didn’t happen. We got back, and we had dinner, and we were happy, and I forgot about it until he broke up with me six months later and went back to New York, where we’d met.
I rolled onto my back and felt the emptiness of the bed. I would have loved to be able to say I was only feeling lonely because he was engaged, or I was only feeling lonely because being offered a dating coach made me feel like a loser. But really, I had felt lonely already, and those things were just pressing down on my chest and making it seem much more urgent.
Wouldn’t it be funny if this turned out to be the right answer? Wouldn’t it be funny if a dating coach found me a guy? Really funny ? I reached out with one hand and thought about someone lying there sleeping, a chest rising and falling next to me, the sound of breathing, being awakened in the morning by someone’s breath on my neck.