Chapter 2 Humiliation Is a State of Mind #2
Somehow curmudgeonly, misanthropic Jack Branksome knew people. He had to, or he couldn’t have written a book like In Time, which was full of compelling, nuanced characters of all ages and backgrounds who knew exactly how to wound each other.
Jack: You’re too well-read to be “Not the kind of person who reads The New Yorker.”
She was flattered, though she probably shouldn’t be. There was bound to be a catch.
Blair: How do you know I’m well-read?
Blair: Do you think because I read your book that equals “well-read”?
Jack: No, I watched The Swallows.
The Swallows was a limited series Blair had produced, based on the novel of the same name. She was exceedingly proud of it.
Blair did not know what to say.
Jack: That was a tough book, and even tougher, I’d imagine, to adapt. All that interior monologue, and you did it without any voice-over.
Maybe there wasn’t a catch. Maybe Jack wasn’t a jerk so much as he was socially awkward. In her experience, many writers were.
She thought back to that terrible Zoom. Nah, he was a jerk. A preternaturally talented jerk, but a jerk nonetheless.
Blair: My grandmother once told me that life is finite and that therefore a person can either read magazines—mind you, this was ages ago when magazines were more of a going concern—or books, but not both. You have to choose your horse, she said.
Jack: So you’re a book person.
Blair: I try to keep up with magazines, but yes, books win.
Jack: I will accept that as a reason that you don’t read The New Yorker.
Blair: Didn’t know I needed your permission to not read The New Yorker, but thanks.
Jack: My pleasure. Anyway, you can’t believe everything you read.
Didn’t she know it? She thought back to that People article implying that she, the “actress-turned-producer,” and not Gerhard, the “auteur,” had been the problem with Green Light.
Blair didn’t know how to end this conversation, but since Esme was always telling her—and demonstrating to her in real time—that a person didn’t have to formally close off a text conversation, she left it alone.
She should have felt vindicated after that exchange.
Instead, the cyclone was starting up. Some people got a feeling in their bones when literal storms were coming.
Blair’s bones told her when figurative storms were coming.
Panic attacks, she was pretty sure, given that they were heralded by a racing heart, sweating, chest pain, and a weird sense that she could hear her own blood pumping through her veins.
But it always started with this amorphous “feeling in her bones.” A tingly sensation—but not the good kind of tingly.
“The cyclone.” She wasn’t sure why she used the definite article—the the.
Maybe because the storms all felt like they came from the same place, the same source, as if the ingredients for them were always there, hovering in the background, an amorphous soup that could spill over at any moment.
And unlike in The Wizard of Oz, where she was pretty sure she’d gotten the concept of a cyclone—didn’t most people call them tornadoes these days?
—she wasn’t going to wake up in a land of color and whimsy when the storm was over.
She was just going to be in her same life, her neck hurting from pulling her head down to her chest, which was something she did by instinct.
Protecting her head, covering her ears: it wasn’t logical, but it felt like it helped get her through the storm.
But she sometimes did it so vehemently, and for so long, that her neck ached afterward.
She breathed in and counted to three. Sometimes, if she caught the tingly-bones feeling soon enough, she could head things off.
There was no reason to go buy a New Yorker, she told herself while she breathed out to a count of four.
Her copy would come. Maybe even later today.
She inhaled for five. Whatever Jack Branksome had said about her wasn’t going to change anything about her life.
She exhaled for six. Whatever he’d said about her would still be there for her to read later today, or tomorrow.
The breathing wasn’t working. The cyclone was stronger than her ability to defend against it. All she could do was sit down, protect her head, and tell herself she wasn’t dying. That there was no need to call 911 for a panic attack.
She would survive. She always did.
The first time Reggie had come over unannounced, Blair invited him in for a drink.
She was lonely.
At least she was self-aware about it. She liked to believe that self-awareness had an inoculating effect.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t have friends. Tiff would be here the moment she was summoned. But Tiff was busy—with running their joint empire but also with a newish relationship with a guy who had a six-year-old she was trying to charm.
Beyond her number one ride-or-die, though, Blair had a circle of women she was close to, a circle she’d actively been avoiding. What if someone witnessed the cyclone? She had never had an episode at the office—the office was her happy place—but beyond that, she didn’t trust herself.
It was going to be OK, though. She needed a bit of time to get stabilized, to get her act together, then she’d be fine. Back to baseline and ready to embark on a new era.
So when her gate buzzed a week after she’d moved in and it was Reggie squinting into the camera and saying, “Have you heard from Esme?” Blair, knowing she was lonely but had to be picky about whom she allowed to get close to her, invited him in. They were co-parents, after all.
“No. Why? Have you?” she asked as she swung open the front door a minute later.
“Have I what?”
“Heard from Esme?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “I was just wondering if you had.”
“Not since lunchtime.”
“You heard from her today?”
“Sometimes she sends me pictures of what she’s eating in the cafeteria.”
Reggie turned a slow circle in the living room.
While he was examining the place, Blair seized the opportunity to examine him.
He was the same, yet not. Her husband, yet not.
Same old dark-brown textured man-bob, hairline courtesy of a trip to Turkey seven years ago.
But he was wearing a muscle shirt. The old Reggie would have changed into street clothes before leaving the gym.
But New Reggie had bigger muscles than Old Reggie, and he probably wanted to show them off.
“The place looks great,” he said as he finished his rotation. “The same but different.”
“What’s the same?” None of the furniture was. The walls were different colors than when they’d lived here.
He looked up at the beamed ceiling. “The bones of the place.” He picked up a quilt from the back of an armchair. “And the millions of blankets.”
It was true she had a lot of blankets and quilts. She liked having options for the perfect level of coziness.
“I don’t think you need this many blankets anymore. You’re the mistress of your own thermostat now.” He threw the quilt down, and now it needed to be refolded. “Can I have a beer?”
“In the fridge. Help yourself.” She made a note to stop stocking the fancy IPA from a local brewery Reggie favored. Reggie’s beer wasn’t her problem anymore, and there was only one refrigerator in this house.
She picked up the quilt. It was a tough one to fold because her grandmother hadn’t been a very careful seamstress and one of the four corners was wonky and difficult to get to lie flat.
“Why would Esme send you pictures of her food?” Reggie asked, returning from the kitchen and raising his bottle in a toast even though Blair wasn’t drinking anything.
“To gross me out.”
“What was she eating?”
“A hot dog with a slice of processed cheese melted over it, but it was melted way off-center.”
“Yeah, that would get to you, wouldn’t it?”
“No,” Blair said reflexively.
It had, though. It hadn’t been the tube of processed meat, not really, or the square of processed cheese, but something about the placement of the cheese. The lack of care shown by whoever had slapped that cheese on that tube of processed meat. It had ruined the overall composition.
Blair had merely texted Gross and Esme had replied i knew this would annoy u and then followed it with a single heart emoji that had made Blair’s actual heart swell.
She put down the quilt. The corner wasn’t right, but she would fix it later. Her hand twitched. Later.
“I’ll send Esme some more money so she doesn’t have to eat there,” Reggie said. “I asked her last weekend if she needed more cash, but she never replied.”
Blair couldn’t help but inwardly gloat. She loved that her daughter texted her pretty much every day. She loved that her daughter knew what arrangement of ultraprocessed foods would trigger her.
And even though it probably didn’t reflect well on her, she loved that Esme didn’t have that kind of relationship with her dad.
Neither did Calvin. Cal wasn’t texting Blair every day from Georgetown, but he did call when he had to register for a new term and needed an audience for his monologue about whether Political Philosophy in Historical Context was too arcane if his aim was a legislative internship.
But just because Blair was the audience for registration monologues from her serious older child and gross-out pictures from her carefree younger child—birth order was, apparently, real—didn’t mean they didn’t love their dad.
He loved them, too. Blair was pretty sure Reggie was here because he was worried about Esme because, like Blair, he was having trouble adjusting to the idea of their girl on her own a thousand miles away. He wanted the solidarity only Blair could provide.
“Don’t send Esme any money. She can ask if she needs more. She likes the gross cafeteria food.”