Chapter Nine
Nine
MCA Chicago Atrium
Three years ago
“So, he’s the one who got the Slater job.”
Dexter raises his eyebrows at me to confirm.
We’re standing under the skylights at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where they’ve peppered the atrium with cocktail tables.
Campbell Porter is at the far end of the room with one hand in the pocket of his trousers.
With the other, he gestures at the people he’s speaking to: a cluster of creatives who seem fully rapt at whatever’s coming out of his mouth.
“He’s the one,” I confirm. I haven’t seen Campbell in almost six months, but the leadership teams at Slater Faust and the Art Room must be subscribed to identical mailing lists, because our bosses always send us to the same networking events.
Today it’s a panel on innovation in digital media that got Dexter and me out of an all-day client meeting.
A win, I’d thought, until Campbell Porter caught my eye from the front row of the theater where they hosted the panel.
He’d cut his hair to nearly a buzz, and it didn’t suit him at all; last I’d seen Campbell, at a networking event in the winter, it had been long enough he kept raking a hand through it to get it off his forehead.
Now it was July, and he looked like a dog shorn for summer.
“Should we say hi?” Dexter asks.
I’d kept my distance from Campbell as we filed out to the atrium after the panel for requisite mingling.
Almost two years into my career at the Art Room, I’ve got my feet planted firmly beneath me.
Dexter and I have become real partners. There isn’t much that throws me off my game, anymore—that makes me feel incapable—but one thing still does.
“I’d rather not,” I say.
Dexter gusts a laugh through his nose. “Too late, I think.”
Dexter nudges his chin toward Campbell, and when I glance across the atrium, he’s looking right at me.
His posture is relaxed, like he isn’t anticipating me in the same, unbearable ways I’m anticipating him.
He’s wearing a salmon-colored button-down made from some sort of Swiss dot fabric; it would be more at home in a country club than a modern art museum.
“Fuck,” I mutter, and from the other end of the hall Campbell grins in reply. He lifts one hand and waves.
“What’s the worst that happens?” Dexter asks.
He knows the full story, by now: it only took a few months of working together to unload our pasts.
His terrible in-house job at a start-up in San Francisco, my summer being bested by Campbell.
“You have a great job that he can’t take from you. His power’s gone, right?”
“Right,” I say, but even to me it sounds hollow. I do have a great job. Campbell can’t take it from me. But there’s still this ache, where Slater Faust used to be. There’s still something I wanted so badly and fell short of. And Campbell’s power isn’t gone.
I feel it expanding between us as Dexter and I cross the atrium. I feel it with every shift of Campbell’s gaze as it tracks me moving toward him. I feel it when I see his name tag: Campbell Porter | Copywriter | Slater Faust.
And I feel it most of all when he says, “Mattie French. My almost-intern.”
Everything about the sentence thrums with his power over me. The familiarity with which he uses my full name; the possessive my; the word intern. That now intern is the title all these strangers at the table know me by first.
“Campbell,” I say. He’s smiling; when his lips pull wide like that, I can see the freckles at their edges. I don’t want to let these people—not even Dexter—see the way his words bruise. So I make myself add, “It’s nice to see you. Great shirt.”
Campbell’s eyebrows tick. With the short hair, his face is somehow even more expressive. “Wow.” He blinks rapidly, like I’ve just performed a magic trick and he can’t believe his eyes. “Thank you.”
I have to grit my teeth to fight an eye roll. When I saw him at that event in January, I’d been alone and ignored him as icily as I wish I could now.
“This is Dexter,” I say to the group, gesturing at him beside me. “My art director partner. And I’m Mattie.”
“Hey,” Dexter says with a little wave. “Good to meet you all. Campbell, I’ve heard a lot.”
Campbell laughs. “That sounds ominous.”
I wish Dexter hadn’t said it. The implication that I’ve mentioned Campbell to him even once feels catastrophically embarrassing. I don’t want Campbell to know I think about him at all.
“Sounds like there’s a story here,” someone says. A woman in a blue dress, her curly hair piled high on her head. Her name tag reads: Cecily Wright | Strategist | OverComm. When she points between Campbell and me, I smile tightly.
“Not one worth telling.” I turn to Cecily so I don’t have to see Campbell’s reaction to this. “You’re at OverComm? We work with Greg Latham at the Art Room.”
“Oh, sure,” Cecily says. “Greg was there before my time, but I hear the name around. How long have you been at the Art Room?”
“Little over a year,” Dexter tells her. “I came on after Mattie.”
I nod. “Almost two, for me.”
The guy standing next to Cecily points his coffee cup at Campbell. He’s smiling, good-natured, when he says, “That where you went so you didn’t have to be Campbell’s intern at Slater?”
It undercuts my entire career, making everything I’ve built with Dexter sound like a consolation prize. This is the ache, and the power Campbell has to press on it. All because he can’t help but twist the knife every stupid time he sees me.
“Oh, Mattie’s pretty much the Art Room’s wunderkind,” Dexter says before I can form a reply. “We all feel lucky she isn’t at Slater.”
It’s so generous, and when Dexter looks at me he nods almost imperceptibly. You’re good, he’s saying. But I don’t feel good; I feel bone-deep humiliation, like the shame of all this sleeps inside of me, just waiting to be nudged awake by Campbell Porter.
“Thanks, Dexter,” I say on a smile. I don’t want any of these people to see the cracks as I point to the intern guy’s coffee and say, “I’m going to grab one of those. I’ll be right back.”
I cast my eyes over Dexter, Cecily, finally Campbell. His eyebrows are drawn together, but I only drop his gaze and turn toward the coffee station along the room’s far wall.
I wish Campbell wasn’t someone I needed to escape from, that this feeling wasn’t one he could coax from me at all. But he is, and it is, and I can’t be next to him any longer. When I start across the tile floor, I think Dexter might follow—but it isn’t his voice that rises through the atrium.
“French,” Campbell calls. I hear the rhythm of his footsteps coming after me. My heart is wild in my chest. “Hey, come on—”
“I’m fine,” I say, whirling toward him. Both of us stop short, a few feet of space separating us. We’re squared off, two finite points in a churning sea of chattering people and clustered cocktail tables.
Campbell holds my gaze. Then he swallows, his throat bobbing above the pressed collar of that horrible shirt. “Really?” he says, finally.
It’s intolerable, that he can always tell when I’m upset. That I’m still this fragile over it.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I say, lightly. I don’t think he’ll articulate it: if he admits what happened back there was embarrassing for me, he admits he orchestrated that conversation to make me feel bad. Campbell’s always joking, and this doesn’t feel funny.
“I don’t know,” he says. I think, Coward. “But you don’t seem fine.”
It burns, being read by him. “You don’t know anything about me,” I snap. When I turn and make for the coffee bar this time, he doesn’t follow.
I only hear his voice, rising above the roil of conversation.
“Keep telling yourself that, French.”
Once upon a time, my mother was a writer.
When she talked about it, which was rarely, it was always in a tone of dismissive, fantastical illusion. Like it was all a fairy tale she’d been a part of once and never would be again.
I found the box of her poems in my parents’ bedroom closet when I was in elementary school.
It was Halloween and I was in a mummy costume, my limbs wrapped in enough toilet paper to clog every bathroom in our neighborhood.
She’d told me there was a lion-shaped pendant necklace in the jewelry box in her closet, which was close enough in my mind to an Egyptian sphinx to add the final je ne sais quoi to my costume.
Mrs. Zimmerman was picking me up in ten minutes to go trick-or-treating with Ava and her brothers.
The box was stuffed with yellowed paper and flush-cut literary magazines.
I was so confused by its contents—pages and pages of poetry with Mom’s maiden name there beneath the titles—that I was still staring into the box, dumbfounded, when Mrs. Zimmerman arrived and my mother came upstairs to find me.
“Matilda,” she’d said, sounding tired. “Put that back.”
“What is it?” Staring up at her from the floor, she looked ten feet tall.
“A different life.” She took the box from my arms and settled its lid back in place. “The musings of a young, foolish girl.”
She kept her hand on my elbow as she guided me down the staircase, like she worried I might break free and make a run for the box. She felt like a stranger beside me, an alien who’d inhabited my mother’s body. “You write poems?”
“Wrote,” she corrected. “Before you were born.”
That was all she’d say about it, but even as I followed the Zimmermans through our darkening neighborhood, I didn’t stop thinking about all those sheets of paper. On a night like Halloween, especially, it felt like I’d opened a portal to something secret and magic and maybe a little bit sad.
I spent years sneaking in to look at them.
As my parents’ hatred grew and expanded like humidity in our house, the poems felt like a reprieve: a window into the woman my mother had been before this family hardened her.
Every time I asked her about them, I got one piece of information: that she’d studied poetry in college, that she’d had a grant to travel and write afterward, that she’d won an award.
That she’d won two, five. She meted these things out like breadcrumbs that left me starving to know more.
Starving to know, most of all, why she sounded so angry about her writing, and why she’d stopped doing it at all.
It wasn’t until I was older that it came into focus: she was angry with me.
I’d been at fault the entire time, not knowing it.
At fifteen I pushed off a school newspaper deadline to go to prom with a boy I’d met watching Ava’s brothers play soccer, and my mother saw me to the door with a solemn warning not to let a man take my creativity from me.
I was in a blue silk gown and more makeup than I’d ever worn in my life, trembly with excitement.
It was the last thing I expected from her.
“You hold on to your talent, Mattie,” she’d said as a car pulled up to our front walk.
I glanced at it: the white hatchback I knew belonged to Wesley, who was seventeen and the first boy I’d ever kissed.
Then I looked back at my mother, who never spoke to me with anything close to this level of intimacy.
“When my life as a single woman ended, my creativity went with it.”
She looked at Wesley, now standing in the street. Then back at me. “Marrying your father and becoming a mother ruined my life, in that way.” She started to close the door between us. “I sacrificed all of it, for the two of you. You be careful what you start sacrificing now.”
I carried that with me. Not just to prom, where her words lingered like a dark cloud, but through every turn of my childhood and into my adult life. The knowledge that I’d robbed my mother of her creativity, stolen some truer version of the person she was meant to be.
When I started seriously dedicating myself to writing in the latter half of high school, it was always with the sense that Mom was watching me, hoping I’d make better choices than she had.
The only times she praised me, the only times I really heard her voice at all, were when I excelled at writing in visible, graspable ways.
With everything I did, every word I wrote, I was making up for something. Making something up to someone.
She’d taught me that I owed it to myself—and that I owed it as much to her—to be the best at this.