Chapter Twenty-One The Resignation
Chapter Twenty-One
The Resignation
The week between holidays is always quiet anyway, and it was even quieter because the layoffs had everybody so skittish, so I mostly worked at home. By the time I got back to the office after New Year’s, I had decided it was fine. Everything was fine. Will was mad, and he didn’t want to date me anyway. He’d probably be living in France or Oregon or the farthest corners of Australia in six months. Don’t cry over spilled photographers. Time to work.
The last thing I wanted to do was talk about all of this with Eliza, but we were going to have to deal with each other sooner or later, and inevitably, once she was back home from her trip, she called. I’d known she would. As much as I knew Will wasn’t going to talk to me, that’s how much Eliza was going to talk to me, with or without my agreement. When I saw her name on my phone, I answered it with the same dread I always felt in Toby’s office. “Hey,” I said.
“Wow,” she said. “You sound terrible.”
“Thank you,” I said, trying not to bite my words off too hard. “How was Hawaii?”
“So good,” she said. “I didn’t want to come back.”
“But here we are, right?”
I could hear her trying to figure out how to handle me. “I’m sorry it’s been so long since we talked,” she said. “I wanted to give you a chance to cool off. But now I’m checking on you.” She sounded a bit less like an ad for herself than usual. “Last time I saw you, you weren’t very happy, and I’m wondering how you’re doing.” Her voice was sympathetic, but I had a hard time not thinking there was a measure of gloating in it, too. It wasn’t her fault, the mess I’d made, and it wasn’t her fault that she’d been there to watch the meltdown…melt down, but had she not told me this was a bad idea? Had it not turned out to be a bad idea?
“I’m fine,” I said. “I told you it wasn’t a big deal, and it wasn’t. I told you I wasn’t dating him, and I’m not.” There was a long pause. “If you need to say ‘I told you so’ so you don’t explode, you can just go ahead and do it now.” I struggled to listen as she assured me she wasn’t going to say that, she just wanted to talk about Michael #2 and the delayed third date, which would eventually be at an Italian place in Adams Morgan once he was back in the northern hemisphere. At the moment, as she understood it, he was enjoying the hospitality of one of Sydney’s finest hotels.
“I’m not going to say I told you so,” she said soothingly. “Don’t get discouraged, this is still going fine. I’m right here. We’re on the same team. We’re on track.”
“I’m ready,” I said.
Eliza and I got off the phone, and Julie almost immediately appeared next to my chair. “Hey, can you take a walk with me?” she said. “I just want to talk to you about something for a minute.”
“And we need to leave the building?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Walk with me.”
“Wow, sounds serious. You’re not abandoning me, are you?” I said as I stood up.
The pause was a tiny bit too long. No no no no no no, it was too long, why was it so long? “Just come walk with me,” she said.
I felt it in my stomach, a clench, a pinch. I got up and grabbed my coat and followed her, and we walked without speaking to the elevator and rode it down. I was afraid to look at her, because I knew it could only be one thing. When we were out on the sidewalk, we got about half a block before she said it.
“So, yeah,” she said.
“You’re leaving.”
“I got a job at Tappan.” I could see her breath, could see these words leave her body and hang in the air, then vanish. Tappan Square Audio was the big shop, the shop that had gotten in before all the other ones, gotten in before the floods of stuff made it so hard to get people to subscribe to anything new. It had been written up under funny little illustrations and pictures of its founders in huge pieces in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker. It didn’t have a reputation for voracious growth-chasing or budget-slashing. It won awards. It paid people well. They even had a union. How could Julie do this to me?
“Oh, God,” I said. “Okay.” I could hear myself giving prompts inside my own head— Say that’s great, say that’s great, say that’s great —and so I said, “That’s great,” but I knew that I said it like I was being poked in the back with a stick.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, no, don’t apologize,” I said. “It’s great. ” I felt a hint of Eliza, of her babbling hooray-for-everything energy creeping into my own voice. “You’re going to have so much fun, tell me what it is.”
I heard little bits of what followed. I heard names I knew. I heard a job title that was better than the one she had now, and probably better than anything she could get by going to Toby with this offer in her hand. It was unqualifiedly good news, such good and happy news, and I was trying to handle it the way I should, and all I could feel was frustrated. I kept saying “uh-huh, uh-huh,” and then it appeared, unbidden, the thought in the back of my head, with perfect clarity: Oh, great, now you tell me.
Maybe if I had known she had been looking for a job, I wouldn’t have made protecting her the demand in return for which I agreed to do a project I didn’t really want to do. Maybe if I had known, I wouldn’t have stuck with that project after it started to crack my life in half.
She said, “Are you upset?”
“Oh my God, no,” I said. “Why would I be upset? Julie, this is amazing for you, it’s exactly what you want, it’s great for your career, that team is so brilliant. And no more Toby and his divorce and his…layoffs.”
“And it’s New York,” she added. “You know I love New York.”
I hadn’t even been thinking. Like practically everybody else who wasn’t Palmetto, Tappan Square had their offices in Brooklyn. She wouldn’t just be leaving, she’d be leaving. “New York,” I repeated. “That’s right.” I turned to her. “What about Bella?”
“Well,” she said, “we talked. She’s a little bit scared to be moving, she likes her room, loves her school. But I told her about the Natural History Museum, and I told her about the gigantic parks all over the city and I told her the subway is way better than the Metro and she will ride it everywhere. She’s coming around. My parents are, too. They wish I was bringing her out west, obviously, but they’re willing to be bicoastal. I think mostly they don’t want me to be dependent on Chris, because they know that’s going to be a nightmare.”
Bella really loved the Metro. It wasn’t particularly convenient to their apartment, but Julie would take her just to ride around, out to the end of the line and back. From the time she couldbabble, she’d been calling it the Mat-wo.
“It sounds all worked out,” I said.
“Cecily,” she said, “I know that we talked about making more things together. I know that you have these plans, and I was so serious when I said I wanted to make them with you, and I am going to help find you the most amazing person to make your pilot. We’re going to find somebody.”
“Stop,” I said. “You don’t owe me anything. You have been perfect. You have to do what’s right for you, Jul. It’s business.” I had made a promise to myself a long time ago that I would never become a person who said, “It is what it is,” but I felt so bitterly stung that I could almost feel it on the back of my tongue, and I had to swallow so I wouldn’t say it. “I can’t blame you for saying yes to them. It’s exciting that they came looking for you, how great is that?”
“Well,” she said, “I applied, actually.”
“Oh. You did? When?” It had felt strange to me not to tell her about Will, but here I was learning I didn’t know all her stuff, either.
“A few months ago. They were doing some hiring, and I talked to the guy, but then everything was on hold. I didn’t want to say anything, because it didn’t seem like it was going to come to anything. I didn’t hear back forever, and I was sure they forgot all about me, but then he called, and I took a day off and went up there.”
“Right.”
“Ceci, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t think anything was going to come of it, and I didn’t want to stress you out when we were in the middle of all this. I just figured I would keep it to myself. They didn’t make the offer until the end of last week. Until that happened, I was mostly obsessed with not losing this job, you know?”
Oh, I did know. “Sure,” I said, “sure. I don’t blame you for keeping it quiet.”
“Nobody knew I was talking to them. Nobody even knew I was looking except Toby.”
I turned to her. “Toby knew?”
She nodded. “Not about them specifically, not until today, but it turns out he knew I was looking. I made one too many phone calls, I guess. Everybody knows everybody, and nobody keeps their trap shut.”
“So Toby’s known you might be leaving for a while.”
“That I might be, yeah,” she said. “I don’t think he ever thought these guys would hire me, though.”
My mind was racing through the little power move I had tried in Toby’s office, where I thought I got him to save her job, when in fact he knew she probably wasn’t staying. He must have thought it was hilarious that this was one of my demands, something that cost him nothing to pretend to give in to. “I really wish I’d known you were looking,” I said, and as hard as I tried, my voice had a rough edge, and I heard it as soon as it was out of my mouth. “I don’t mean it like that, Jul, I honestly—”
“I know,” she said. “But really, I didn’t know this was going to turn into anything. Like I said, I didn’t want you to have to even think about it unless I thought it was really going to happen. And I’m not trying to put you in a spot, like I said, we’re close to the end of Twenty Dates, and we’re going to find somebody you trust to make your pilot,” she said. “It’s not like you’re going to get sent back to Miles.”
“I’m sure I won’t,” I said, though I wasn’t sure at all. I was the utility player, and especially now that we were shorthanded, I was going to be sent wherever the lineup had a hole. I envisioned myself putting in extra hours cutting out Miles’s Mountain Dew tooth-sucking, because there was no question that he would accept nothing else for the months that remained on his contract.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “I mean, new jobs are a normal thing, right?”
“Sure, yes, of course.” I thought about Toby. And Miles. And Eliza. And Will, walking away from me. And Molly, disappointed in me. And now Julie, leaving. I nodded. “Yes, of course. It’s fine, of course.”
We were just passing a bench, and Julie stopped and sat down. “Come sit with me.” When we were settled, she said, “What are you not telling me?”
“Nothing,” I said.
She just stared. And finally, she said, “Ceci.”
“Oh, you’re going to be mad at me.”
“Well, now you really have to talk.”
I exhaled and then pulled a chest full of icy air into my lungs. “So, when I agreed to do Twenty Dates, you’ll remember I had a lot of doubts. And one thing that happened was that Toby told me that he was probably going to be looking at layoffs, and he mentioned the end of Miles’s show, and I got the impression that if we didn’t do it…”
There was a long pause. “I would lose my job.”
“He didn’t say that, in quite those words, but the point is I told him I wouldn’t do it, I wouldn’t do the project, unless both our jobs were safe. During and after.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t tell right away whether she was impressed, horrified, something else, or maybe a little bit of everything.
“I figured if I suddenly had a little bit of leverage, I might as well make the best of it.”
She squirmed a little. “Look, I don’t have a problem with Toby getting blackmailed, but I don’t know if I’m all that thrilled at the idea that I might have ended up with a job only because you blackmailed him.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I said, although it had, I suppose, been a little bit like that. “I didn’t blackmail him. I…coerced him. I pressured him. I was trying to help.”
She looked at me, and her forehead creased. “You know,” she said, “you should have talked to me. I would have told you not to do that. I would have told you I was looking. And besides, how many conversations have we had about this kind of thing, all this jumping the line and knowing the right person, how it makes everything less fair? You’ve gotten screwed by this stuff yourself so many times. I don’t want you doing it for me.”
She was right. Obviously. “Well, I didn’t do it entirely on your account,” I said. “I did it for myself, too. I was trying to keep both of us out of all the crap that was going on. It’s not like things are great for me, either.”
She sat back against the bench. “You know,” she said, “you could find another job. Other places would love to hire you if you would just pick your stuff up and go.”
“Maybe a couple of years ago,” I said. “I think things are different now.”
“They’re not that different. And this show is doing well. It’s going to give you an opening. You could try something else. You have choices.”
I cleared my throat. I was not going to cry about this. “Julie, I think I went all-in with Palmetto at some point, you know? This is the bet I made. Nobody offers me jobs anymore.”
“That’s because they think you’re too stubborn to leave.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe I am. I’ve waited a long time for Toby to give me something in return for all this work I’ve put in. And he promised to make this pilot, which is more than he’s ever done in the past, so I can’t pick up and go now, right before it actually happens.”
She reached over and put her hand on my knee. “He’s not going to give you what you want,” Julie said flatly. “He might make your pilot. But he is not going to give you what you want. This place is never going to give you what you want.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Cecily, the only reason you have to think he’s going to let you make this thing is that he said he would. How many times has he gone back on things that he told you?”
“Maybe I think he’s going to do it because I deserve it.”
She made her eyes comically wide, like a cartoon. “Cecily. Of course you deserve it, but he doesn’t think that way. You know he doesn’t think that way. Have you ever seen him think that way, about anybody ? Have you ever heard him notice that somebody has turned themselves inside out for him, and change his plans for them?” I hadn’t. “You have to think about what you’re going to do if that part doesn’t happen.”
“Well, what do you expect me to do?” I said. “Just…what, go figure out a whole new place?”
She nodded, fast, like she’d been waiting to hear me say this. “Yes, exactly. A whole new place. I think that’s exactly what you should do.”
“I don’t want to move to Brooklyn,” I muttered.
“You don’t have to move to Brooklyn,” she said. “So many things are remote now, somebody would make you a deal if you don’t want to move. You’ve been working at home your whole career, you’ve just been doing it on Saturdays and at three in the morning.”
I smiled at her. “I think I’m too stuck.”
She squeezed my hand. “You’re not. You think you’re stuck because you’re only looking in one direction. And I am begging you to look around, because you can pick up and be on the way somewhere. You are too talented to act like you live in this building, at your desk. Because you don’t.”
“I know I don’t,” I said. It was bright and cold, and I whipped a pair of sunglasses out of my bag and put them on so she couldn’t see my eyes. I reached over and squeezed her arm. “I’m being a drag. I’m so excited for you. Tell me where you’re going to live.”