Chapter Twenty-Six The Ex
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Ex
The next morning, I decided I was ready to face the office again, and I was about a block away from Palmetto when I heard it. “Cecily!”
For a minute I thought it was Will, but it made no sense that it would be, and for once, when I didn’t expect him, he didn’t appear. I turned around. And I saw who it was. “Oh, for the love of…what are you doing here?”
“Well, I’m glad to see you, too,” Justin said.
“I am so much too tired to talk to you, you have no idea.”
Justin was wearing his business uniform, which was a blue wool blazer over a T-shirt, jeans, and boots. He took out a pair of earbuds I was sure were worth at least $500 and tucked them, loose, into his pocket. “It’s good to see you,” he said, ignoring what I’d just said. “I’ve been getting a kick out of your show.” The smirk made me want to dunk his head in a vat of glue.
“I’m so glad,” I said. “What brings you to D.C.?”
“A work thing,” he said. He smiled. “It’s been a long time since I saw you.”
“I guess it has, yeah.” I looked at his hand, half expecting him to be wearing a diamond ring, because that’s just how scrambled my brain had gotten. “Congratulations on everything, by the way.”
Just then, Julie walked up to us and stopped. “Oh,” she said.
“Julie. This is Justin Dash. Justin, this is Julie Nazari, she’s one of the great producers here at Palmetto. She makes Twenty Dates with me.”
Justin did this thing when he heard himself introduced; it was funny to realize I’d forgotten all about it. He was cursed by the fact that he was modestly well-known inside a particular part of the world (the part that listened to podcasts), and from time to time, someone recognized his name and said, Oh yeah, big fan! or something like that.
But usually, they didn’t. I was lucky, because at least until recently, nobody ever recognized my name, so I didn’t expect them to. But Justin was chronically afflicted by this tiny flame of hope, and now, in the right settings, all he could do was wait and see. Of course, it didn’t help that the kinds of people who recognized his name often hoped to be too cool for him to be able to tell, so they would pretend they had no idea who he was. They’d end up in a standoff, looking at each other, one person too cool to give validation to a celebrity and one person dying to be more famous than he was, neither of them getting what they wanted.
Julie knew exactly who he was, for several different reasons. But she gave him nothing that would qualify as a reaction, not even a cold glare. I adored her. After all, Justin particularly would expect a producer I worked with to recognize his name and to be impressed. He would assume that surely, I would have told everyone I worked with that I had dated oh-my-God Justin Dash, and that I had even worked with him. To Justin, our association was by far the most interesting thing about me, and he assumed everyone else would think so, too.
Julie’s face was as nonreactive as a mannequin. “Oh sure, hi,” she said.
“Hey,” Justin said back, and he shook Julie’s hand, because what else could he do?
“Nice to meet you, I have a lot of work to get to.” Julie stepped back and gave a little wave, and then disappeared into the building. I took a breath. There’s something about a really good producer that makes you feel, just briefly, like everything truly will be all right. I couldn’t believe we weren’t going to be working together anymore.
“How’ve you been?” Justin finally said.
“I’ve been great,” I lied effortlessly, as only this encounter could motivate me to do. “Work’s good, family’s good. You? Besides Clarissa?”
“Great,” he said. “Lots of irons in the fire. I’m consulting, working on more Scanners. ” He smiled at me and made a little gesture, almost like a bow. “You know how much work that is, of course.”
That smug little bastard. “I sure do.” I suddenly turned and looked over my shoulder at our building, then I looked harder at him. “What’s your work thing?” I asked. There were only a handful of places he could be in D.C. to visit if he was, indeed, here for work. What was he doing in this neighborhood?
He smiled. “It’s nothing definite yet.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
He smiled again, and this time, he added a calming hand gesture, as if steadying a goat. “It’s nothing definite yet.”
“Cecily?”
I turned. It was Eliza.
Justin turned to her, too. “Hi.”
And she turned back to him. “Oh,” she said. “Have we met?”
“Wait, you two know each other?” I said to Eliza.
“I think we met at a thing,” she said. She pointed back and forth between me and Justin. “ You know each other?”
“Justin is my ex,” I said.
“Not the shitty ex,” she said. I didn’t budge. “Oh!” She turned to him. “You are the shitty ex!”
“I’m not the shitty ex,” he said, and it was somewhere around this point that I began to find it very funny.
“Wait,” I said, “where did you two meet?”
“We met at Podcast Pow!” he said. Freaking Podcast Pow! “We had drinks.”
Eliza leaned toward me. “With a lot of people,” she said. “We didn’t have drinks .” She breezily waved a hand at him, saying, “I just never put it together that you were that guy.” She turned her attention back to me. “I haven’t been able to get you on the phone. Are you ready to do some work?”
I glared at her. “Not really. I need to talk to you. Justin, I don’t even know what you’re doing here, but I would really appreciate it if you’d go away. Anywhere you want is fine except in my direct line of sight.”
Justin looked back and forth between the two of us. “Okay,” he said. “I need a cup of coffee anyway.” He raised one hand and walked off. I wanted to say something cutting to him, but I couldn’t summon the energy, not if I was going to save enough for everybody else I had to yell at today. Instead, as he walked off toward the coffee shop down the block, I just muttered, “How does this keep happening? Why can I not walk down the street in peace?”
Eliza had her green tea latte in her hand, and with the other one, she reached over and touched my arm. “Hey, I’m glad I ran into you. Michael told me you’re not answering him either. What is going on?”
“I’m glad I ran into you, too,” I said. “You can give him my regrets. He deserves to go out with somebody who wants to be there, and I deserve to go out with somebody who knows how to tip at a restaurant. And more to the point, I think I need to figure out my next step without you and Toby and Marcela and half the staff of Fitness West scheming behind my back about how to keep me from accidentally becoming happy without your approval.”
I hadn’t ever seen her look guilty until that very second. As far as I’d known until this moment, Eliza Cassidy simply didn’t do regret. She didn’t question herself. But as soon as that look had landed on her face, she pushed it away again. “What are you talking about?” she said.
“I know that you told all those people that you saw me with Will that day. I know you’ve been gossiping about it, and I know you set up that mess at Madeline’s. I know you’ve been whispering in my ear to get me to do what you want this entire time, and you don’t actually give a damn if I’m happy.”
“That is not true,” she said, affecting a wounded expression. “I give a lot of damns.” Now she paused. “Toby couldn’t keep his mouth shut, huh?”
“Oh, you did this on your own,” I said. “You really need to stop forwarding your emails to yourself. Look, all I want to do right now is finish this show and forget it ever existed. Fortunately, I think every interview we need with you, we already have, and if we don’t, Julie can come and find you, because I really don’t want to talk to you. We’re going to finish this project and get it pushed out of here, and then we don’t ever have to see each other again.”
“Cecily,” she said, “don’t say that, that’s horrible.”
“What did you think was going to happen?” I said. “You were making fun of me. You and my boss, you and your manager. How did you think I was going to feel if I found out you were giving me all this advice and you were just being mean about it the whole time?”
“I already told you, I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to settle, I don’t want you to doubt yourself, I want you to—”
“Stop it,” I said. “Stop reading me bullet points. This is my life. It’s my life, my real life, are you listening?”
“Do you think you’re the only person with a ‘real life’?” she asked, putting furious finger-quotes around the last two words. “Do you think I’d have done all this if I didn’t genuinely want it to work?” I didn’t flinch, and this was where I could have said something about knowing they’d sold their apartment, but I decided not to. “Every time I turn around, everything about my business gets thrown out the window because somebody changes some rule or some way you can or can’t make money. Or they hide you from your fans, or they charge your fans to see you. Or they stop letting you do what they told you yesterday you absolutely had to do. Somebody makes a new app, or somebody decides the old app isn’t cool anymore, or the old app violates everybody’s privacy or it gets sold to a monstrous creep. I hustle because I have to hustle. I put months into this, and I told my partners it was happening, and I don’t apologize for trying to make it work out for myself while also trying to get a nice doctor for you. While, let me add, you resisted the entire time.”
“I didn’t even want to do this,” I said. “I didn’t want to do self-help. Do you remember sitting there over lattes and talking me into it?”
“Hey, don’t blame this on me,” she said. “You’re the one who said yes.”
“I said yes to save my job!” I said. “To save Julie’s job. Toby was threatening to lay her off.”
“Oh, bullshit, ” she said, and I realized I almost never heard Eliza swear. “You could have kept your job, you didn’t have to say yes to this. And I bet you didn’t even talk to your ‘friend’ before you did this. You didn’t ask her what she wanted. It wouldn’t have even mattered whether she wanted that job or not. Bossy bossy Cecily jumped in to run the whole thing.”
“So you think I never cared about my friend or my job, I was just dying to experience the Platinum Goddess Package?”
“You were being aggressive,” she said, “and I don’t know why it embarrasses you so much. You saw a chance to do something you’ve always wanted to do, which is host a show. This is the most like-me thing you’ve ever done, but unlike me, you make excuses for it. You have to be ‘Oh, I did it for my friend.’ You did it because you wanted a better job. You did it because you wanted to be more famous. You wanted to be a bigger deal.”
“It’s that hard for you to believe I was at least partly interested in a single mom not getting fired?”
“Did she thank you?”
“What?”
“Was she grateful when you did that? Julie, whose job you saved?”
“I didn’t tell her.”
She laughed. “Perfect. That’s absolutely perfect! You don’t have to ask her what she wants, but you get to sit there knowing she owes you. That’s why you pull Band-Aids and wet wipes and pens out of that bag you lug around, so everybody owes you. Don’t you get that this is all ego? Building your whole life around chances for people to be indebted to you? Your ex owed you, your friend owes you, your boss owes you. You set everybody up to owe you, and then you’re mad when nobody pays you back.”
“ I’m all about ego? I’m not the one with the testimonials on my website that talk about how I transformed people’s lives.”
“Listen to me,” Eliza said, leaning close to me, almost spilling her latte. “I will stand right here and tell you, person to person, ambitious bitch to ambitious bitch? That’s my job. I get paid for it, and I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t. I’m not waiting around hoping that I’m going to be so good to these women, help them so much, that they thank me so I feel good about myself. I feel good about myself when they pay me on time.”
“Well, that sucks,” I said.
“No. It doesn’t,” she said. “What sucks is wanting to be thanked instead of loved, because you can believe you deserve it. You know why I didn’t want you to be with somebody who wasn’t successful? It’s not because I’m a snob. Date whoever you want, date a waiter, date somebody who hires himself out for medical experiments. But.” She stepped closer to me. “You’re going to look at him one of these days, and you’re going to say, ‘This waiter needs my help. This man needs to chase his dreams. And whose job is it to make sure that can happen? My job.’ That’s why I wanted you to find somebody successful. You need a guy who will never have to owe you, or you will never, ever believe he can love you.”
I just looked at her. I aspired to her evident comfort with her position in the world. She never seemed nervous, even as she was stacking pronouncements about someone’s life—my life—one on top of another without slowing down. She considered herself qualified for any job she decided to pursue, attractive enough for anyone, appropriately dressed at all times. She never questioned that how she acted was the way people should act. How she reacted was the way people should react. She’d had a book on the bestseller list. People came to her for advice about the most intimate things in their lives. Companies paid her to hold a bottle of their vodka in her hand, or wear their sunglasses, or stay at their hotel. She didn’t have a boss who took advantage of her, she didn’t have a project that could be yanked out from under her at any time, and the fools she suffered were the ones she chose. She’d never subject herself to Toby the way I did.
I nodded at her, feeling how final it was. “Thank you for the very last advice I’m ever going to take from you. I’ve had enough,” I said. “I’ve just…had enough.” I took off toward my apartment, ignoring the texts she started sending almost as soon as I left.