How to Be a Grown-up (32 page)

I hung up. I couldn’t—I just couldn’t—not one more word of it. I pressed for the elevator and we shoved the overflowing bags inside.

“Oh my God.” I put my hand to my forehead as the door slid shut. “I married the wrong guy.” It was humiliatingly official. “Blake is just a shitty, shitty human being. That I
chose
.”

“I’m the parenting expert with no time to parent,” Jessica offered, patting my shoulder. “My kids are probably going to grow up to write memoirs about how much I suck.”

“I gave up on myself and took a soul-deadening job flattering rich people,” Claire joined us.

“Being forty-one sucks,” I added.

The door opened in the lobby, but nobody moved, we were stuck.

“Okay, now
this
is pathetic.” Claire pushed herself to unload the bags.

“I thought we were just getting rolling,” Jessica said brightly. “I haven’t even started in on my body and my sex drive and my eyesight.”

“Look,” Claire said, slicing the air with her hand. “You’ll stay with me. We’ll get online tonight. It’s almost the first of the month. We’ll find you a place to live and you’ll be reunited with the kids inside ten days. I’ll loan you the money for the broker’s fee and security deposit.”

“But how will I pay you back?” I asked.

“We don’t get to choose if we get older or not,” she cut me off. “We don’t get to choose if we have to start holding menus out to read them, or if our knees make a sound like a coffin lid every time we go down stairs. We don’t get to.” She was whipping the bags out of the elevator. “When it comes to life, we are offered one choice. One: stay in or get out. And I choose to stay in. Without the right guy, or the right job, or the right expression of my talents, and I was fucking talented.” Her voice caught. “And I miss it.” She looked from Jessica’s face to mine. “I thought if I spent my time raising money to house other people’s art, while I talked about other people’s art, with other people who like art, it would be the same. But it’s not. I need to paint. I’ll move to Bay Ridge and give up my health insurance. I’ll dog walk, I’ll cat sit, but my life has to have meaning.”

I actually started clapping.

“Sorry, sorry,” Claire said, coming back to herself. “We’re supposed to be focused on killing Blake.”

“No. No, we’re not,” I said.

“You’re not going to fuck him again, are you?” Jessica asked, alarmed.

“Oh God, no, not if we ended up at the last old age home on earth.” I shuddered.

“Then,” she asked, “where are you going to get $80,000?”

Not from JeuneBug, but I was obligated to show up there the next morning anyway. Sitting at my desk, rolling out the cricks in my back from sleeping on Claire’s couch, and waiting for $80,000 to walk through the door felt like being stuck at the wrong party when I was single—
the first time
. One of those cocktail-party-rapidly-devolving-into-a-gay-orgy things thrown by a colleague where, inevitably, no one wanted to talk to me. And all I could think was that my soulmate was not about to come out of that fuchsia bathroom wearing a mesh T-shirt.

Now I silently chanted
eighty thousand, eighty thousand, eighty thousand
. I Googled,
price for a kidney
and
oldest living porn star
.

“Rory!”

I jumped up, winced, and dropped back down again. “Yes?”

Ginger pointed to the conference room, where the other editors were already assembled. “Staff meeting,” she said.

By the time I limped in, Taylor was already standing at the head of the table, arms crossed. “I want everyone to tell me where we are with graduation,” she instructed.

Clark spoke first. “This year we’re pushing classics. We’re seeing the graduate in seersucker, pinstripes. The story for girls is about a crinolined 1950s Sally Draper thing.”

I leaned in and whispered to Merrill, “Graduation from . . . ?”

The travel editor jumped in. “He wants to take the summer off. He’s looking for less structured time. Starting kindergarten can be stressful, so we’re telling a beach story rather than being enrichment focused.” She tapped her stylus against her tablet. “We killed the piece on India.”

“Gifts?” Kimmy rasped. She was objectively gray. And had a crust around her eyes.

“A Koons balloon puppy is evergreen,” Merrill answered. “Kwiat is doing a diamond Peppa Pig that’s kind of fabulous. Apple stock.”

“Love,” Kimmy mouthed.

“And Be?” Taylor asked, glaring at me, full-well knowing I had nothing prepared.
Oh, you want to play, Taylor?

“Our graduate,” I began, taking a breath, buying time, shrinking Aerin Lauder to three-feet high, “wants a fresh start. She’s left behind a key stage in life, and redecorating is first and foremost on her mind. My shoot is focused on what she’ll need for fall. Shagreen desk, Louis Vuitton iPad dock, DSM wall unit. For him, I’m seeing a stitched pigskin beanbag for reading and a vintage meat hook for his backpack.”

“That’s sounds fine,” Taylor answered tightly. “And, Clark, where are we with the lobster shoes?”

“McQueen sent them over. We uploaded the video and the photos onto the site this morning.”

I coughed up my tea. “You didn’t actually photograph toddlers walking on jewel-encrusted claw heels, did you?”

“He’s launching a kid’s line,” Taylor said, like that was the last word on that.

“Lady Gaga could barely walk in them! Kids will twist their ankles and break their arms,” said the lady who had twisted her ankle in flats. I don’t know why, of every insane thing that had been discussed in this room, this was the thing I had to push back on, but I couldn’t stop seeing Wynn in his cast. “We can’t endorse that.”

“Endorse it?” Taylor asked incredulously as Clark spun his iPad to the table and pressed play.

“This is the raw footage,” he said, “just to give you a sense.”

There they were, four-year-olds in leotards with spikes launching from them like porcupine quills trying to balance on shoes nearly as big as they were.

“Elody, stand up straight,” her mother chided, shifting her lime green Michael Kors bag to her other elbow. But poor Elody was just trying not to keel over.

“Okay, let’s go!” The director clapped, startling the girls, who fell over in one unit like a tipped cow.

“This is inhumane,” I said, looking at all the other directors. “You have to take it down.”

“Oh, but they’re balancing in the final cut,” Clark tried to assure me.

“I don’t care. Suri’s one-inch heels were controversial. We’re about to launch a nursery line; we don’t need controversy. New mothers think everything is out to strangle, smother, and suffocate as it is. Let’s not seem to be blasé about safety. Discretionary income, yes; safety, no.”

Taylor just looked at me like if she could have pulled a Taser out of her purse she would have. “Do you think the beauty mags cared when they told everyone to get formaldehyde blow-outs?” Taylor asked. “Shut up, Rory.”

I spent the day doing what adults sometimes have to do: their jobs—to a quiet inner mantra of,
Go me, making money, doing something I’m qualified to do, that I can find the upside in, because I like food and shelter
. I was just looking at the clock to see when I could break away to check out some rentals in outer boroughs that cost more than I made in a month when Tim, the tech guy, called out in the quietest way you can call out, “Guys? Guys? Something’s happening?”

“Yeah,” another director echoed. “Something is definitely happening!”

Ginger came running past and flung herself into the doorway of Taylor’s office, catching her elbows on the frame so she bowed like a sail. “Our numbers are going through the roof.”

“Victoria Beckham finally retweeted me!” Taylor gasped.

“This feels bigger than that,” Merrill muttered, looking at her iPad.

“Bigger than that?” I whispered to Clark.

Taylor came out to the bullpen clapping her palms, her fingers splayed away from each other. “It’s happening! It’s happening!”

Everyone looked at her, no one daring to ask what “it” was.

“Check sales!” Taylor shouted. “Sales are going to put us in the black today!”

We manned our screens, waiting, watching, the plants leaning toward us, hoping someone might exhale some carbon dioxide.
Was this it? Was the site going viral? Were we going to go public? Would I be the next Sean Parker? Could I hire Blake to live in the linen closet and perform “Beowulf” on command?

Across the floor one of the editors sprang up and away from her iMac like she’d just found anthrax on it. Kimmy touched Taylor’s shoulder and pointed at their troops, clustered in shock.

The headline on Jezebel read, “
WHY JEUNEBUG IS ONE OF THE SIGNS OF THE APOCALYPSE.
”

“It’s been shared over ten thousand times,” Merrill warbled from the back.

“#PetiteAssh*les is trending,” someone else added.

“The Onion just mocked up our home page.”

“Look,” Taylor cut in, “it’s a day. A cycle of haha at our expense. Goop went through it. It’s just jealousy. Ignore it.”

“But shouldn’t we—”

“Ignore it!”

I got her impulse. If Taylor’s future husband ever sued her for alimony and custody of her enamel baby shoe charm collection, ignoring would go a long way toward Zen. But this felt a tad more ostrich than Buddha.

“For every ten Target shoppers laughing at us, we’ll pick up a new client who’s been craving for someone to aggregate this marketplace. You’ll see. Our numbers are going to climb. Think Goop!”

They went home, thinking
Goop
, thinking
fuck
, thinking a lot of things. I took two Advil and went to see a beautiful two-bedroom in Park Slope, which was only in my price range because, I discovered, the previous tenants had let their cats use it as a litter box. The entire twelve hundred square feet of floors would have to be ripped out. And the landlord was looking for someone who would shoulder the expense themselves, which was another seven grand I didn’t have. From there I hoofed it back to Columbus Circle and the kids. I had two hours with them while Blake and Val were at a movie.

I made them dinner in the kitchen she was single-handedly wrecking one melted spatula at a time and reassured them this was only temporary until I signed a lease on someplace they would love.

Oh God,
I wondered as I took the bus up to Claire’s.
Would I not find anything that I could pay for on my own? Would I end up having to leave the kids with Blake?
I got back online and looked for one bedrooms.
I could take the couch and they could share for a couple more years, right? When did boys start masturbating constantly? Twelve? Thirteen?
I’d get Wynn his own iPad with a waterproof cover and a lock on the bathroom.

Assuming I still had a job.

After midnight I powered down Claire’s laptop, pulled the covers over me, and took stock. I was forty-one years old. I was sleeping on a friend’s couch with a sprained ankle. I had momentarily lost, if not legal custody, then custodial duties of my children. My job, which had been the rope out of the quicksand of my industry, was fraying. And my soon-to-be-ex-husband, whom I was apparently
never
going to be able to read right, had decided to have good-bye sex with me in a hospital bathroom.