Chapter Twenty-Four The Errant Email
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Errant Email
Eliza didn’t use email that much. She texted, she called, she posted on Instagram. But her team sent a lot of email. Marcela, in particular, created long, agonizing threads from which I was mercifully omitted most of the time, since they had to do with Eliza’s collabs, subscriber numbers, media coverage, and, of course, gobs of money. Occasionally, someone wanted us to be interviewed together about the show, and sometimes those requests came through Marcela. But usually, I was separated from Eliza’s email by way of my lack of interest and her habits.
So it was surprising when, walking to work one morning, standing on the corner and waiting to cross the street, I looked at my phone and found an email from Eliza with the subject line “Re: Progress report.” All she wrote was:
Glad we’re on track for #12!
Episode 12 was the finale, and we were almost finished with it. It was scheduled to go out to our listeners in nine days. It included a sunnier take on my third date with Michael, and on the future of that relationship, than I actually felt.
Julie was, quite understandably, in the process of unclenching her teeth over the whole project and over Palmetto in particular, and I had made a chaotic mess out of my personal life, so all I wanted was for the show to end as smoothly as possible, so that at least that could be a success. Toby had called me into his office a couple of days after Madeline’s and told me, as he had in his note on the day of the layoffs, that he was counting on me to “give it a great close.” He talked about Marcela, and Fitness West, and Brick, and the advertisers, and how important it was to everybody that the finale be “satisfying.” The current draft of the finale ended with me saying that it was hard to know the future, but I’d keep seeing Michael and see where it led. It also included a fair amount of philosophizing from Eliza, and her praising me about what a good job I’d done.
Trying to follow where this email thread had begun, I started reading down the screen.
Right under this lovely little note she had written, on which I was cc’d, there was an email from Toby almost two weeks old, and it just said, “Ha, exactly.” And below that was another note from Eliza that I’d certainly never seen before. The one that “Ha, exactly” had been in response to. It was dated right after my last dinner with Michael.
LOL yes I am trying my hardest! I am pushing the doctor! Def trying to get to the perfect ending. thx for the backup, T. Last night worked, I think. Seeing them in the same place helped. (Doesn’t hurt that the waiter didn’t like it lol. I think he’s out of her way!) When the season is over, she can do whatever she wants. Until then, she’s mine! xoxo E
I was obviously “she,” which meant this was not intended forme.
The light changed. People pushed by me. I looked around and spotted a bench next to the sidewalk, and I sank down to read.
I have been working in journalism for a long time. And so, while it took me a minute to piece it together, I eventually figured out what had happened. The key was that Eliza had two phones and four or five email addresses. The addresses were supposedly for different things (business/personal/fans/whatever), but she used them interchangeably a lot of the time, just multiple addresses she would be signed into on her laptop, her tablet, her work phone, or her personal phone. So she was forever forwarding things to herself from one address to another so she could deal with them later when she was on a different device.
Some kind of very innocuous note had gone out to some combination of Palmetto people and people on Eliza’s team. It was called “Progress report.” This was the one she had intended to respond to and cc me, saying she was glad to hear the finale was on track.
But for a couple of weeks, Eliza had also been part of a long, gossipy thread about the show (and about me) with Marcela, Toby, Brick, and some other people, some with addresses I didn’t recognize. I assumed they were from somewhere in her orbit. This thread also had the subject line “Progress report.” This was bad luck for her. And so, between all the forwarding and the replying and the fact that she was trying to handle her email on her phone (probably while simultaneously eating a protein bar and taking a phone call), she had ended up hopelessly confused.
I read what she had written again.
I am pushing the doctor. When the season is over, she can do whatever she wants. And the thing about Madeline’s. Last night worked.
I read the entire thread. I scrolled down, down, down until I found the beginning, and then I scrolled back up, bit by bit, watching a story unfold that I could not, in my most frustrated moments, have imagined. My stomach started out queasy and got to a miserable roil, and then I actually thought I might throw up.
The headline was that Eliza had immediately told all of them about catching me with Will on the day it happened, before Christmas. Toby knew, Marcela knew, freaking Brick the ad guy knew, and the brand manager from Fitness West knew. They didn’t all need to know, not really, but she had told them anyway, letting it out with a gush, reminding them not to say anything to me, or Julie, or Abby, or Charlie.
She lamented that I had gotten off-track with this “man-child,” as she put it to them, which was perhaps supposed to sound concerned for me. But she spent many more words on the idea that this was a potential business problem, for all the reasons Marcela had laid out to Toby way back when we dropped the preview episode and the fans got their little voice crushes on Will. It would not do for me to meet someone on my own. It would not do for me to end up with someone Eliza had so confidently sat down in front of her ring light and told everyone was wrong for me.
Ever since she told them that I had been “sloppy-kissing the waiter,” there had been an ongoing discussion, sometimes quite serious and sometimes just ruthlessly bitchy, about how to make sure the season ended “smoothly” and “successfully” and with “a satisfying narrative,” which meant I continued to see Michael #2, and Will was not a distraction, and I ultimately agreed that she had given me the right advice all along.
There was also a lot of Eliza and Marcela griping about the fact that I’d only wanted a second date with one guy out of twenty. We can make that romantic, though, Toby had said. It only takes one, etc. etc.
Marcela had said, Honestly, no wonder she can’t meet anybody.
Eliza had quoted this line and added, Seriously!
It was Marcela who had come up with the idea of changing the reservation from the Italian place in Adams Morgan to Madeline’s. She made noises about how this would be “clarifying” for me, seeing the stark difference between the doctor and the waiter, but Eliza got the real point of it immediately: It’s going to make things clear to the waiter, too. She likes Michael. He won’t hang around.
I read Eliza’s words over and over. I read these notes where all these people were making fun of me. Her team, Toby, these guys I barely knew, they were all talking about it, yammering about what to do about the fact that I had (okay, fine) fallen for Will all by myself when I was supposed to be following a plan that Eliza wanted to charge people money for. They’d set up that disaster at Madeline’s. For all I knew, maybe they’d told Michael #2 to treat Will like that. Maybe somebody had told him, Whatever you do, make sure you tip like a piece of crap.