Back After This

Chapter Twenty-Five The Fury

Chapter Twenty-Five

The Fury

Sometimes, the only good thing about knowing the truth is that you can do all the things you would have done all along if only you had known the truth.

Part of me wanted to hang on to this level of poisonous rage, just chew it and chew it and keep on enjoying it, like it was a never-fading stick of fiery cinnamon gum. But my head was pounding, and I didn’t yet have a next move, and the only way to think was to let a little bit of it come hissing out of me until I could think. I walked the rest of the way to the office. When I got there, I let myself into the building and headed for the elevator. I punched the up button with my knuckle so hard I thought it might crack in half, and I was almost surprised when it just lit up, oblivious to the blow it had taken. After I got off at our floor, I walked straight to Toby’s office, where the door was closed and I could see through the glass wall that he was at his standing desk with his back to me. When I was about to reach for the door, I realized I had no plan, and I was dealing with people who had nothing but plans. So all I did was whisper harshly at the door, “You suck,” and walk away. As a bonus, I walked by Brick’s office, where the door was open, and I whispered, “You too.” I heard him say, “Huh?”

When I got to my desk, I told a lie, as a tribute to the many lies that had been told to me. I sent around an email saying I was going home sick. I never went home sick. My sick days had piled up, multiplied, and become an abstract number I looked up from time to time, congratulating myself on never ever being sick at sea, as Gilbert and Sullivan had written once, and Aaron Sorkin had written more than once. Especially once I mastered editing remotely, the need to exhale on other people and the need to work had decoupled. The guilt of being present and infectious was gone, so I would sit on my couch cutting tape and coughing. I’d had pneumonia when I cut the last episode of the first show I ever did at Palmetto, and I held my breath so I could get the feel of a particular silence over the sound of my own lungs crackling.

Besides, in this case, my illness wasn’t entirely fictional. My stomach hadn’t stopped flopping in my belly since I saw that email, and it turned over every time I pulled out my phone and looked at it again. And I was, to be sure, very sick of my desk, that building, Toby, Eliza, everyone who had been patting me on the head every day while they made plans behind my back.

What I craved, I knew instantly, was Will—his apartment, his smile, his shoulder and jaw and neck, and the sound of his voice and the feel of him. And maybe his bed instead of mine, where I could live inside the irony of being annoyingly happy, in a way insufferable even to myself, when there was meant to be a whole thing, a whole narrative project, about the idea that I was miserable without a program, unfixable without help, unsalvageable without intervention. But I had ruined it.

When I got home, I didn’t even want the clothes of the day to be hanging on my shoulders. I peeled them off and added them to the laundry, shoving them into the middle of the pile until they were gone. I opened the dresser drawer and picked out new pants, a new thin sweater—I even shoved the Beast in the back of the hall closet, refusing to look at my five pounds of solutions to every possible problem.

—

I did nothing right away. I fantasized about bursting into Toby’s office and throwing my ID at him, trying to get the lanyard clip to land in his eye and leave him a Halloween pirate for the rest of his natural life. I considered erasing all the files from the server—my interviews with Eliza, my dates, everything I had left. But the producers were working on turning the third date into the final episode—a sunny glimpse at the promise of Eliza’s method—and that would throw off everything they were doing.

I thought about going to some other publication and offering an exposé of Eliza and her skulduggery at the expense of someone she was supposedly trying to help, but I was not spoiling for an impetuous war with her team of extremely online aspirational-quote devotees quite yet.

I called in sick the next day. And the day after that. I didn’t answer when Eliza texted, and called, and messaged me on Instagram. I didn’t get out of bed. I spent the weekend watching movies, and for once, I didn’t do any work at all. I thought about dragging myself into the office on Monday, but the finale was almost finished, ready to go out the door Friday, so I stayed home and listened to it over and over, suggesting tiny tweaks—the tiniest—just to distract myself.

But when I stayed home again on Tuesday, my sister texted me. Are you okay? I heard you’re calling in sick and nobody has talked to you. This had to be Julie. I had told her once that if she ever thought I was in trouble, she had my permission to alert my sister.

I’m just taking a couple of days, I texted Molly. Everything is a complete mess, I screwed it all up, I’m an asshole.

You are not! You have to come to dinner. Come tonight.

I can’t. I would have to take a shower and put clothes on.

Yes. That’s the point. You come over here or I’m coming over there.

So I hauled myself into the shower, where the water landed on my shoulders and ran down my body, and I scrubbed off the sweat and the stink and the lying and how tired I was, and by the time I pulled on fresh clothes, I felt like at least I could breathe again.

I went to the Metro station late that afternoon, carrying a small plant in one hand. I always took something with me to Molly’s, even though I knew she didn’t expect it. It had driven Justin crazy. Justin, who never brought anything anywhere, because he knew I would, whether we were going to my family’s house or his.

I mentioned this to him once, that he went empty-handed every time, and he said, “We’re not the three wise men, I don’t think we need to make a big production out of bearing gifts. And anyway, you like doing it, so.” Apparently he thought it was my hobby to bring candles or little packets of tea to his mother, a diversion he was allowing me to indulge for my own enrichment. I never told him that, once a year, I went to an art fair in Bethesda and bought enough gifts for everyone we visited that would last a long time: soaps, pots, dishtowels, stationery sets. I kept it all in a fabric box that sat at the top of the coat closet in our apartment, and every time we went to see anybody, stay with anybody, I’d take it down, grab something, write a little note, stick it in a little bright-blue bag from a stash in the desk, and we’d leave.

I always got the sense that Justin didn’t want to know how it happened, he just knew I materialized beside him with something in my hand, and it made everyone smile at both of us. Despite his hemp clothes and his flirtations with socialism, his deep traditionalist streak came out in strange ways, and one was that hospitality was a Me Thing, while watching me be hospitable was a Him Thing.

I knew Molly usually changed when she got home at the end of the day, just like I did, trading her work uniform of smart slim pants and a simple top for something slouchier that didn’t wrinkle, but she still had her office look on when I got there. “Hi,” I said, reaching forward to hug her.

“Tell me everything,” she said, and I just collapsed on her shoulder and sobbed, very big, embarrassing sobs, and she said “Oh no, oh no,” and she stroked my hair.

“Everything is ruined,” I said.

“Everything is not ruined,” she said. “I promise you everything is not ruined.” She stepped back. “Oh my God, did you bring me a plant?”

“Well…yeah.” Molly always complained that she loved plants but couldn’t keep them alive, and while I would have liked to argue, I didn’t. I brought her fresh ones over and over, and she rotated them through the house as long as she could, starting every one on the dining room table and moving it to the living room or the front hall or the powder room, wherever it fit, gamely watering it until the inevitable dried-out leaf appeared, and she knew her time with this one was growing short.

“You did not have to bring me a present.”

I shrugged and handed the plant to her, and she lifted her free arm and dabbed at my damp cheek with the end of her sleeve. “Well,” I said, “everything else is a disaster, but plants still work.”

“Cecily, what’s going on?” she asked.

Should I start at the beginning? Should I start with mistakenly trusting a woman who was conning me? Should I start with the guy I really liked, whom I’d given up for no good reason? I exhaled. “Can we just have dinner first? I promise I’ll tell you both all about it later.”

“Of course. Come in and eat. Food and a glass of wine will make everything feel better. Did you even eat today?”

“I had a bowl of cereal this morning.”

She sighed heavily. “Cecily.”

“I’ll eat, okay?”

Pete was where I so often found him, juggling pots and pans on every burner of their stove, little blue flames dancing while he switched from a wooden spoon to a whisk to a spatula, scraping and stirring, moving a lid onto this and off of that. “Hey,” I said, going up and squeezing his shoulder.

Pete looked over, his spoon still stirring a pot of what I was guessing was a risotto. “Hey, kiddo,” he said. “I don’t want to abandon my rice, but we’ll be eating in maybe fifteen minutes.”

It was more like twenty, but Molly’s table was, as always, the warmest one I knew, even with her house in chaos. Her dishes were simple white ones with subtle textured dots around the rims, and she took the little plant I’d brought and put it in the middle of the table, moving the one I’d brought last time to her windowsill.

Pete brought in a mushroom risotto and a plate of chicken with crisp skin and fresh herbs, plus a salad with lace-edged curls of cheese perched on top and a bowl of charred green beans.

It was, paradoxically, one of the best dinners of my life. It was the company, it was the fact that there was nothing left in my life for me to break, and it was the fact that there was such comfort in this place where I was loved. But Pete also made a fantastic risotto. I suspected I’d never master it.

After we cleared the dishes, we went into the living room with wine. Pete sat on the couch, and Molly sat leaning against him with her feet up. I sat opposite them, envious. “Honey,” Molly said to her husband as he rested his hand on her shoulder, “remind me that I have to get somebody in to do the grout in the upstairs bathroom.”

“Roger that,” he said. “Remind me I’m meeting the kitchen guy Tuesday to get started on Operation Double Oven.” Pete looked over at me. “I won. So get ready for two Thanksgiving turkeys.”

“Why would we need two Thanksgiving turkeys?” Molly said.

“To use both ovens.”

Molly rolled her eyes. “So,” she said, holding a glass in one hand and resting the other on her husband’s thigh, “tell us what happened.”

I took a deep breath. “They conned me,” I said.

She froze. “Who did?”

“Everybody did.” It was good to let the story unwrap itself from around my neck, to explain to the person who’d been my confidante the longest how the whole show was a front for a piece of influencer content, just another outlet for a YouTube star, just another way to sell worthless lessons. I told them all of it, from the confrontation outside my apartment to Michael #2 who barely tipped, to the misdirected email and the way they’d been messing with me for weeks. Molly periodically said “good grief” or “oh no,” and waited until the end of the story and then said it again: “Oh, no. ”

“Yeah, exactly,” I said. “Fortunately, Julie is leaving anyway, so whatever happens, I don’t have to give a damn.”

“She’s leaving?” Pete asked.

“She’s going to New York for a better job,” I said. “Better than the one she has, better than the one they’d give her.”

“So what happens now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I feel like the whole thing is ridiculous. But most of it is already out there. The last episode is just about done.”

“What about Will?” Pete asked.

“That ship has sailed. By which I mean that I burned it up in the harbor and sank it.”

“You don’t know that,” Molly said. “If there’s one thing we know in this house, it’s tenacity in love, right?”

“It’s probably silly anyway,” I said. “It’s not like this is the right guy just because we kept running into each other. I got distracted by all these spectacular coincidences, you know? We saved the dog, and he was at the restaurant, and then he was the photographer, and then in the rain.”

“Those coincidences are not that spectacular,” Molly said. “You’re a couple of creative people who are about the same age who live in the same general neighborhood. It’s not exactly bumping into each other in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.”

“Believe me,” I said, “if I went to Times Square on New Year’s Eve, he’d show up. Especially if I looked like hell.” Pete laughed, and then he apologized for laughing. “My point,” I added, “is that with him, it’s just things that happened. Maybe Eliza’s right that I focus on all the wrong things.”

Molly thought about this for a minute. “Did you know that Big Brother gets people married just as often as The Bachelor ?”

“What does that have to do with anything? You want me to go on Big Brother ?”

“Obviously not,” she said. “What I’m saying is that if you lock a bunch of roughly compatible people in a house for a couple of months, some of them will start making out with each other, and some of those people will have sex with each other, and some of those people will decide they genuinely like each other, and some of those people will marry each other. And that works just as well as recruiting a bunch of people for a romantic Thunderdome where everybody is specifically hoping they’re going to find a mate. Take it from somebody who married the one groomsman who happened not to be dancing to ‘Shout.’ Logic is overrated,” Molly finished, and she took a big drink of her wine. “If you like him, you like him. That’s my best advice. And by the way, it’s free.”