Chapter Twenty-Eight I Want
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I Want
I somehow made it through the next day at the office, listening to the finale over and over, taking final signoffs from legal and partnerships and marketing and publicity, reading comments online speculating about where I was going to end up. “She’ll find someone,” one person said. “Spoiler alert: She’s staying single forever,” another countered. I wanted to feel some kind of victory that we were so close, that the show was about to complete its run, and that it was, in fact, a hit by many standards. We had listeners. They liked it. Advertisers were satisfied. We had opinionated people online expressing thoughts both sensible and not so sensible. There were a couple of good reviews from the regrettably small world of audio criticism, and I read them and reread them. I wished I felt as successful as I could demonstrate on paper that we’d been.
The minute I got home, I changed into leggings and a very old T-shirt with an unraveling hem that was soft from being washed a hundred times. I flopped down to lie on the couch with my hand over my eyes. It was February 13. Tomorrow they were dropping the finale, which left me at my third date with Michael #2, happily in the early stages of something good, and made Eliza look very skilled at what she did. Toby had made us cut out anything about the tip, anything about Will. I had sleepwalked through the interviews. Even Julie didn’t know what had happened.
I want.
I had not started out wanting, when it came to almost anything. All I wanted was to be capable of things not everyone was capable of. Ten percent better at the regular things, willing to take on the extraordinary things.
I had started working when I was fifteen, helping out at my uncle’s office. When I was done with my classes for the day, I would take the bus to the accounting firm of Reynolds it wasn’t like I could help it.
When I went to college, I worked in the dining hall where I ate, setting up and breaking down lunch three days a week. I was a crew leader, which meant that it was my problem if somebody didn’t show up, and it was my gloved hand that always ended up grabbing whatever gross thing got stuck somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be. I suppose I might have been better off at the college radio station, but I was years away from the bloom of that interest, and even later, I wouldn’t have aspired to spin records at 4:00 in the morning for two hours on Wednesdays. And honestly? We had iPods already. Radio? Really?
I went home for the summer and went back to the mall store, where I got another promotion, because now I could close.
I was an English major, and my first job out of college was answering phones that rarely rang at a dying publishing company. It got very boring and very lonely, and I was six months into that job when I first heard That One Podcast that everyone thinks invented podcasts. I had already started listening to a motley collection of public radio stuff and comedy stuff and things created by internet weirdos, but all of a sudden I didn’t have to tell everybody what a podcast was when I said I was listening to one. I perked up like a beagle with a sausage under my nose.
My father’s college roommate worked in public radio in New York, and he told me I should apply for an internship. I have a feeling that what clinched it was my recommendation from my mall store boss, because when I got there for the first day of my internship, my boss said, “I have heard you are the greatest retail employee who has ever lived.” I also wrote a very good cover letter, let’s be serious.
I did all these things because they seemed to be next, and smart, and yes, eventually, without realizing it, I had begun doing something I loved. I had begun to do what I wanted, even if I felt at times like I’d just stumbled into it. I hadn’t, of course—the people I knew from high school hadn’t gone off to become radio interns or audio producers, they were doing what they wanted, in insurance offices and real estate brokerages and car dealerships and in homes full of kids. But wasn’t this what I wanted? Wasn’t that how I got here?
Maybe Eliza was right. Maybe “I want” was the key to everything.
So I sat there, and I did what she asked. I tried to just want things besides my job. I wanted someone to understand that I was distressed and hurt and I felt betrayed because Julie was leaving, but also I felt proud of her and guilty that I hadn’t given her the reaction she deserved. I wanted someone who would distract me, who would have his own problems, who would rattle around an apartment with me and make dinner and have sex and tell me a joke and watch a movie with me and tell me I did not have to do everything right. I wanted company, and I wanted a hand on the back of my head, tangled in my hair, while someone said I was fine the way I was.
I did not want to protect anyone’s job—maybe not even mine. I did not want to sit in Toby’s office and beg him, just beg and plead with him, to take me seriously instead of sending me out over and over again like a dishwasher technician, tinkering with other people’s dreams until they worked, until they hummed and performed and met standards. I did not want to be alone. I did not want to hurt Julie. I did not want to pretend that going out with Michael #2 felt anything like being with Will. I did not want to have made a show that was a lie. I still, somehow, despite everything, did not want to disappoint Eliza. I did not want to disappoint my sister. I did not want Justin to defeat me. I did not want anyone to feel sorry for me. I wanted to tell the truth.
I want.
I looked at my phone. It was 9:45. I texted Julie. Are you free?
Yes. Just finished a marathon game of Ticket to Ride with my parents and Simon. Bella is in bed.
Can I call you?
Of course.
She picked up on the first ring. “Hey.”
“Okay,” I said, “I’m going to say something that’s going to sound…I don’t know how it’s going to sound. Is there any way you can meet me at Palmetto?”
“You want to meet right now?”
“…Yes?”
“Okay.”
“I do have an explanation.”
“Don’t need it. I’ll see you there in about thirty.”
I didn’t even get dressed. I just put shoes on, got my phone and my bag and my coat, and walked out the door.
I want.
—
Julie and I sat in a production room with two giant carafes of coffee. We were the only ones in the building, but because everybody worked all the time when they needed to, our badges worked, and the lights worked, and everything worked. All you had to do to put in overtime at Palmetto was show up, just like I always had. I’d met her at the door, and now we were settled, just the two of us. I started by telling her the entire story: Will. Eliza. Toby. The restaurant. The email. Everything. “So,” I said. “In conclusion, this finale is supposed to drop in nine hours.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Supposed to?”
“I made a lot of mistakes,” I told her. “And I’m not sure I have a career to worry about. And Will doesn’t want anything to do with me anyway. But the one thing I still want to do here in this building is tell the truth. About him. I don’t care about Eliza, I don’t care about Toby, I don’t care about Palmetto, but I want to tell the truth, which is what I said I was going to do from the beginning. And not telling the truth is why I feel like crap.”
She leaned closer. “What is the truth about Will?”
I took a breath. “We had a thing, and I might be in love with him, and I’ve never taught a guy about room tone before. It was really nice, but I think I totally blew it, and I cannot pretend the end of this story is that I’m dating a doctor who doesn’t tip well. I would settle for telling a little bit of the truth. Not the good sex part, they don’t need to know that.”
She looked around the room, then back at me. “Wow. This is a lot for me to absorb at once.”
“And I just want to acknowledge that asking you to mess with the locked episode, and asking you to mess with the feed—it’s completely unfair. And you have my word that nobody will ever know you were part of this.”
“Wait,” she said. “You’re asking me to break into the system and make Toby really mad, right before I’m done with this job forever. And we’re doing this so that you can declare your true feelings to a guy you couldn’t stop running into, who you met while saving a dog, who the audience immediately knew was the guy you should actually end up with. And all of this is going to go down on Valentine’s Day.” She took a giant slug of her coffee. “Cecily, believe me, everyone is going to know I was part of this.”
We worked, we wrote, we tracked, we cut, we recut. It made me feel better knowing the new ending we were writing was going to be good for Eliza’s business anyway, even though I suspected she might not immediately think so. This wasn’t the first story about self-help I had ever done, heard, or read, and there are no exposés in that world, even in the worst cases. You always end up spreading the gospel and it lands all over somebody. You can run a story about a guru and his green juice that’s literally called “This Guru’s Green Juice Claims It Melts Pounds, But It Actually Dissolves Bone and Leaves You as a Pile of Goo,” and you’ll get a hundred emails demanding to know where it’s sold. You can put data on a whiteboard showing that no, rubbing your toes with cardamom pods does not cure plantar warts, and every podiatrist will get new questions from patients about what kind of cardamom pods to use. Whatever I ended up saying about Eliza, plenty of women would conclude that it might not have been what I needed, but they would be different. There was no way for it not to be good for business. Even if I had wanted to torch her, I knew I couldn’t. Tell the truth, tell the truth was all.
At 1:00 in the morning, Julie called Charlie, who we both sensed had started to hate this project somewhere around my sixth date, and she told him what we were doing. She put him on speakerphone and described the final product we were going for, and she asked if he could dig into the royalty-free music libraries and find something we could use. The best thing about that call was hearing how excited he was to participate in this bizarre quest. The second-best thing was that we heard a woman’s voice in the background and briefly felt very bad about interrupting until we realized that it was Abby, which meant she could help us too, and which made the two of them the sneakiest and most discreet producers I had ever met, and I had met some brilliantly sneaky ones.
—
At 4:30 in the morning, we finally stumbled out the front doors onto the sidewalk. We stood facing each other. “I am really going to miss you,” I said. I looked up at the building. “You, and everybody, you were why I loved it here.” I heard myself talking in the past tense, without ever really deciding to.
“I miss working with you already,” Julie said. “You were the only reason I ever came here. And you were the reason I stayed. And I’m glad we got to make something together that was really ours before I left.” She laughed. “Toby is going to be so mad.”
“He is.”
“Is Eliza?”
I looked up at the dark sky, as if the answer were up there. “Eventually, no. I think deep down, some part of her really does want me to be happy. And she told me from the beginning, before this even started, that she wanted me to tell people how I really thought it went, and that’s all I’m doing. Her manager will get over it. Besides, she successfully set me up on twenty dates, at least…fifteen of which I would count as real. She does know how to get you a high volume of first dates if that’s what you want. This isn’t going to be bad for business.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to go home and sleep for about a year. I suggest you do the same.” She reached out and hugged me, and I felt her put one hand on the back of my neck. “I love you, Ceci.”
“Love you too, Jules. Thank you so much.”
She walked off toward home, and the night was chilly, and I wrapped my scarf tighter around my neck and took out my phone to call a car. The driver was a woman, and as soon as I got into the back of the car, I realized she was listening to Scanner Stories with Justin Dash. I put my headphones on and listened to music. No talking. Just music.
I jerked out of my semi-snooze when she pulled up in front of my apartment, and I thanked her and got out of the car in a hurry. Up in my own bed, I burrowed under the covers in just a big T-shirt and socks, and I fell asleep hard. And while I was asleep, the finale of Twenty Dates went out to the world.