Break in Case of Emergency (6 page)

Daisy was on Facebook playing Socialist Revolution, where she'd just been appointed the mayor of the Politburo Standing Commission on Internal Affairs. Jen had her earbuds in to watch a video of Leora's recent interview with British socialite and “roving entertainment correspondent” Suzy Coxswain, who had made recurring appearances on
Father of Invention
as Fiona, Trudy's ribald Cockney friend.

“Daisy,” Jen said without removing her earbuds.

“Hang on, I've been denounced as a Trotskyite,” Daisy said.

“I think you need to see this,” Jen said.

“Am I bothering you ladies?”

Jen turned in her seat to see Karina standing inches away, shrugging emphatically into a lightweight trench coat. “Karina, hi!” Jen exclaimed at a high pitch. She pawed at the buds in her ears, swatting them to the floor. As she reached over to pick them up, the wheels of her chair rolled over the cord, trapping the earbuds on the carpet. Jen paused for a second, doubled over, then hoisted her ass off the seat, pushed up at the bottom of the seat with her left hand until the wheels left the carpet, and grabbed the buds with her right hand. Jen moved to sit up again, but again the cord went taut before she was fully upright, this time because it had wound itself around the stem of the chair. Jen folded the buds in her lap and looked up at Karina from this slightly hunched position.

“How many kulaks do you think are left in that village, Comrade Daisy?” Karina was asking in the tone of a saucy conspirator, leaning jauntily against the stack of empty filing cabinets that loomed behind Jen's desk.

Daisy looked over her shoulder, nodded at Karina, and turned back to her computer screen.

Karina winked at Jen and mouthed
Love her!,
rolling her eyes and lashing her tongue across her front teeth on
Love.
Jen wondered if Karina was being sarcastic or sincere, and also if Karina herself knew.

“Sorry for stalking you with all the emails!” Jen said. She hoped her temporary hunchback scanned as warm, inviting body language—a plant leaning toward light.

Karina cocked her head and clucked neutrally. “Hey, can't knock persistence.”

“So, what I was thinking—” Jen started.

“All I can tell you is that we—the board, the staff, the whole team—we are in major brainstorm-and-research mode right now,” Karina said. “Lightning and thunder, fire and brimstone, category-five brainstorms. And research. And I've gotta say”—Karina pulled her bottom lip down from clenched teeth and looked sidelong with bugged-out eyes, as if she were being groped against her will—“Leora does
naahht
seem too happy with how we've been stormin' her brain so far.”

“Oh, wow, okay, we can fix that,” Jen said, nodding rapidly, bugging out her eyes in mirroring solidarity. Karina looked over Jen's stooped shoulder, and Jen wondered if Leora and Suzy were still bantering silently on the screen behind her. “Any specifics on what Leora isn't happy with?” Jen asked, maneuvering her chair slightly with the aim of using her own bent head to block her computer screen from Karina's view. “Does she want ideas about messaging for our programs, or messaging ideas for the website itself—should I prioritize one over the other?”

“I really don't see why we need to
exclude,
” said Karina, her gaze still trained over Jen's shoulder. “She just wants more ideas, more research. The more the merrier.”

“Right, of course, but what about all the ideas and research I've—we've submitted so far?” Jen asked, bobbing and weaving her head slightly in an attempt to cover more of the screen space behind her.

“Nobody's knocking your work, Jen,” Karina said. “It's
not
about that, okay?”

“Oh, no, I wasn't saying that—sorry, I'm not being clear. I guess if I knew which ideas and research Leora liked and disliked so far—whether or not the research and ideas were mine!—then I would know how to proceed from here,” Jen said. “I mean, she's so busy, maybe she hasn't even gotten to them yet, which would be totally understandable, obviously—”

“Your work is
good,
” Karina said. “Like anything else, there's stuff that really sparkles and stuff that could be better.”

“Right, okay, thanks, that's good to hear,” Jen said. “What could be better?”

“Well, I'm not a mind reader—you'd have to ask Leora,” Karina said.

“That would be great, actually—I can ask Sunny to set up some time.”

“
Naahht
too sure she'd have the bandwidth for something like that right now,” Karina said. “Though I can certainly
try
to bring it up with her.”

“You know,” Jen said, “it's crazy, but Leora and I still haven't even met!” The second this fell out, Jen realized the error she had made.

Karina nodded pensively. “You know, I'm curious. If you are asked for three ideas on how to message a LIFt concept, do you come up with ten ideas, and present what you think are the best three? Or do you only come up with three ideas and just present those?”

“Oh, gosh, I don't know. It depends.”

“Interesting. So sometimes you're just presenting the first things that pop into your head? Kinda seat-of-the-pants?”

“Oh, no, I wouldn't do that. There's probably always a whittling process.”

“Interesting. But then there's the question of how you determine the best three out of ten. How do you know that you're not hiding your brightest light under a bushel? Do you trust us to see the ideas you want to hide?”

“Oh, it's not about hiding—it's always different.” Jen sat up straight, still holding the earbud cord, severing it with a muffled
pop.
“You know, I'm sorry to harp on this”—Jen laughed right here, as she often did with Karina, and Jen always imagined these laughs as having mass and taking up space, but plush mass, deferential mass, a comfy cushion to soften any demand or contradictory opinion—“but it would be so amazing, just in terms of time management, to have a little bit of feedback on all the work I've done so far. I mean, if that's possible. I completely understand if—”

“I'm giving you feedback right now,” Karina said.

“Of course, but—”

“Here's your feedback in a nutshell: More, more, more!” Karina said. “How's that for a vote of confidence? Just assume that there's an
insatiable
appetite for your ideas and your efforts right now. What you have to remember around messaging is that this is a
collaboration.
”

“Oh, sure, I know—wait, what does that mean?”

“It means that we don't hunker down in our hidey-holes guarding our turf. We're all in this together, sharing ideas, bouncing ideas off one another. Collaboration and sharing.”

“I didn't—”

“I've
gotta
run, Jen,” Karina said, turning to leave and waggling her fingers over her shoulder. “Gotta tend to the spawn.”

Jen cushion-laughed. “Oh, for sure, you've gotta do that!”

Leora Infinitas's fondness for fortuitous acronyms began but did not end with the name of her foundation, and often a LIFt initiative began and ended with the spark of an inspired abbreviation. Leora proposed a proposal for an “edu-preneurial summit” on the global rise of web-based autodidacticism, to be called Women Inspired for Self-Education (WISE). She proposed a proposal for a series of webinars “reintroducing busy women across the world to their neglected love affair with the REM cycle,” to be called Women's Initiative for Sleep Hygiene (WISH). She proposed a proposal for a Skype-enabled encounter group session covering seven continents—“McMurdo Station, we haven't forgotten you!” Sunny exclaimed—on “kicking our sex drives into top gear,” to be called Women Empowered to Love their Libido (WELL). This bounty of acronyms took a turn toward the demotic after Leora, having just served as grand marshal at a drag queen parade in Grand Rapids, Michigan, returned to the LIFt offices with an idea for a body-acceptance campaign, to be called the Women's Endeavor for Realism and Kindness! (WERK!).

“Have you ever suspected that you had a fake job at a fake organization, and you could be found out at any time?” Jen asked Jim.

“If I ever did, a ten-year-old who hasn't eaten breakfast at home in a year would kick me in the shins and snap me out of it,” Jim said.

Karina would relay Leora's ideas to Jen and Daisy, and Jen and Daisy would then spend many hours researching potential LIFt grantees doing work that overlapped with Leora's acronym du jour and writing bulleted, footnoted summaries of each potential grantee and coming up with copy and branding and infographics and focus-grouping for the proposed projects, even though they knew that the acronyms were ends in themselves—game plans for a Game Over. Daisy, much more than Jen, reacted to Leora's bounty of acronyms in a spirit of reciprocity. She ideated “a mosaic of learned spiritual responses to the existential question of why we are here” called the Women's Ontology of Nurturing Karma (WONK) as well as a pan-global crafts-and-baked-goods bazaar called the Women's Harvest of Outrageous Awesomeness (WHOA). Seizing the opportunity presented by one of Leora's ever-more-infrequent office visits, Daisy walked right up to Leora outside the ladies' room to pitch her acronyms—a bold, possibly unprecedented move by a non–board member, and one that Jen watched from across the office while gnawing on alternate thumbnails.

“She's nicer than everyone says,” Daisy later reported.

Nonetheless, Leora had rejected WONK and WHOA on the spot, calling out WHOA in particular as “jejune.” Jen and Daisy didn't know what
jejune
meant until they looked it up.

“Maybe not knowing what
jejune
means is a symptom of being
jejune,
” Daisy said.

Daisy later turned her attentions from acronyms to anagrams—spending the better part of one weekend crossing out the letters of
LEORA INFINITAS FOUNDATION
to create
ADROIT FELON IS IN A FOUNTAIN
—but not before designing and silkscreening T-shirts advertising Women in Crisis Constructing Acronyms (WICCA), illustrated with a kitten in a witch's hat scrambling the letters on a Scrabble board.

Jen climbed off her paint-splattered stepladder, rotating her shoulder in its socket and stifling a mewl of pain. She had been standing atop the stepladder at the back of Pam's studio for two hours straight, the elbow of her painting arm propped in her opposite palm, doing minutely detailed blending brushwork on a head-and-shoulders portrait of an enormous happy teen: floppy, rust-colored cowlick; glinting rectangle-smile full of braces; the color of his hoodie a spectacularly verdant marriage of cadmium yellow and ultramarine. Coaxing a person out of a driver's license photo or a magazine clipping and onto the canvas, finding the fabric of its shadows and inventing its light, was scary and exciting. She loved the loamy certitude of unmixed oils, their textures of soil and blood tissue, and the sense of unthinking command and casual mastery she felt in mixing them. She loved the unalloyed physicality of tracing the final images' outlines in graphite, of laying down the underpainting and base coats. But once she had found the shadows and the light and the colors, and all she had left were the hours upon hours of documenting—transcribing—what she had already found, then a portrait could become at times a maddening exercise in high-level painting-by-numbers: cognitively demanding enough to forestall zoning out, but not nearly demanding enough to assuage an internal tedium that, mixed with increasing physical discomfort, began to quake in a manner not unlike that of rage.

“We should go outside,” said Pam, pitching her voice across the room and above the
shish-shish
leaking out of her earbuds. She sat in silhouette against the late-spring sun shining through the studio's front windows. She wore a coffee-colored romper and a headband festooned with miniature plastic sunflowers and a pair of stacked-heel clogs, the purpose of which was mostly ornamental. Her leg, a latticework of healing scars wrapped in a Navajo blanket, was propped on another stepladder and a stack of old
Vogue
s as she tapped steadily away on her laptop.

Jen had already made vague, gentle entreaties about what greater artistic good her jumbo portraits would be serving: the redheaded teen orthodontics patient, the randy-looking senior couple, the ecstatic-looking doctor draped in a hijab and a stethoscope. But Pam just as vaguely and gently rebuffed these entreaties. Through sheer proximity and osmosis, Jen had deduced that Pam's new project had something to do with her cycling accident and her subsequent, interminable dealings with WellnessSolutions, her health insurance provider.

Jen walked across the echoing studio and lay down on a yoga mat stranded on the floor next to Pam. She arched her back into an askew bridge pose and stared at the pert upside-down chin and the froggy upside-down legs, respectively, of a giddy mother holding her giddy infant—the portrait Jen had finished the previous weekend, propped against another wall.

“We should go outside,” Jen agreed, her pelvis jutting crookedly into the stale studio air. “I just need to clean my brushes first.”

“So you haven't told me anything yet about Leora Infinitas,” Pam said, typing, earbuds still in place.

“I haven't actually met her. I've been in the same room with her.”

“Tell me about that.”

“Top contender for hall-of-fame moment so far is when she took a lengthy call from her professional organizer during a staff meeting.”

“That's astonishing,” Pam said flatly, typing.

“I think she just forgot she wasn't alone, or whatever her version of alone is.”

“Do you like Leora Infinitas?”

“I guess so. I at least get the impression that she's trying to do good.”

“Do good for who?”

“Her aims are—diffuse,” Jen said. “Hopefully she'll narrow her focus down as she gets her bearings.”

“Shouldn't you be working for, like, Melinda Gates, or the Ford Foundation?” asked Pam, taking out her earbuds and setting her laptop on the floor. “Or maybe you don't even have to work for anyone. You and Meg could just start your own thing.”

“Someday we'll all be working for Meg,” Jen said.

“I always imagined the two of you teaming up and changing the world,” Pam said. “I still do.”

Pam's deadpan mien, almost monotone voice, and refined aesthetics bought her a wider margin for occasional sentimentality than Jen might have tolerated in others, particularly because Pam's affect was so spare and inscrutable that it was difficult to reconcile it with any excess of tenderness, even for her two closest friends.

Each of the three of them had always paired off the other two as a dyad, a clean deuce—spiritual twins who had accepted a false triplet into their orbit out of the very qualities of magnanimity and open-mindedness that they shared as eternal monozygotic double-souls. To Meg, Pam and Jen were the artists, the creatives; to Pam, Meg and Jen were the Samaritan wonks, advocating with serene forcefulness on behalf of the less fortunate.

But to Jen, Meg and Pam were the competents. Their stores of education and know-how took shape in Jen's mind like a rambling country estate, forever revealing new trapdoors and hidden parlors and Escherlike staircases descending toward a secret bookcase wall behind which lay another library, another music room. In college, both of them could whip up a borderline delicious four a.m. dinner from whatever scraps and remnants happened to be in the pantry of wherever they were smoking pot and watching a VHS marathon of
Twin Peaks
that particular Saturday night. Both of them could repair a torn hem with some thread and a safety pin; both could tie a man's tie and play “Love Will Tear Us Apart” on the piano and knew how to finagle the connection on a blown fuse by wrapping tin foil around it. They remembered the names of birds and plants and rock formations. They had read everything. It was teenaged Meg who taught Jen the basics of how a charitable foundation should be run. It was teenaged Pam who taught Jen how to scale a skillful small portrait onto a giant canvas.

And both of them, it seemed to Jen, somehow cultivated entire other galaxies of social ties—not just a smattering of a few other close friends and a larger group of fond acquaintances, as Jen had maintained in the decade after college, but discrete worlds unto themselves. Pam pursued email-and-coffee-date relationships with any artist, writer, or random person at a party she found interesting, with no fear of her interest going unreciprocated or being misinterpreted as a romantic overture; before her accident, she seemed to make the time to attend every opening, every reading, every event relevant to her ambitions. Meg arranged her regular reunions with her friends from boarding school and closely manned her complex circuit board of professional contacts, all of whom seemed to invite Meg to their weddings and their children's weddings.

Jen's guiding image of Meg and Pam, though the passage of years had faded and likely altered it, was of the two of them platonically entwined on a sofa at a crowded off-campus house party, heads pressed together, murmuring to each other as they people-watched, as if they were invisible to everyone else who was surreptitiously watching them back, including then-current boyfriends—nervously hovering, faintly aroused—and Jen.

“JEN!” Meg called as she noticed Jen opening a beer at the drinks table. Meg unwrapped herself from Pam and reached her arms out. “Salt of my earth, fire of my loins.” Her voice was softened, not quite slurred, by beer and fatigue.

“Jeennnniieeeee,” Pam called, clapping her palms on her knees as Jen moved to settle herself at their feet. “I want to braid your hair.”

Her fingers, like Meg's voice, were thickened with alcohol, but she managed a hairline braid that rolled along the back of Jen's neck and finished in a loose yet intricate knot. Jen slept facedown for two nights to keep it.

Jen sat up on the mat in Pam's studio, stretched her legs flat, and reached out to touch her toes. “I think Meg could change the world,” she said. “I don't know that Leora will. She could, if she wanted to. She has the money and the contacts. She means well.” Jen pulled her knees up to her chest and dropped her head against them. “And that could have, you know,” she said, her voice muffled in her thighs, “a good effect on lots of things.”

“I watched
Leora's World
a lot when I was laid up,” Pam said. “I even read her autobiography.”

“Why in the world did you do that?”

“I couldn't watch TV all day and I needed easy things to read. It was entertaining. It was quite something, actually.”

“I have to admit, her worldview is this weird jumble of Buddhism and libertarianism.”

“It's like a yoga teacher rewriting
The Fountainhead.
”

“Yes! My colleague Daisy calls it ‘Zen Rand.' Like, ‘Let me help you discover that the government shouldn't help you and neither should I because nobody helped me, but I'm starting a foundation to help people anyway. Namaste.' ”

“Right,” Pam said. “But lots of people helped her.”

“Yeah,” Jen said, “but maybe charisma is measured in contradictions.”

“Whatever, I'm happy for you,” Pam said. “I am.”

“Thanks,” Jen said, looking up at Pam.

“You know, get out of it whatever you can get out of it,” Pam said.

“Yeah.”

“So we don't have to talk about this if you don't want to talk about it, but just in case you do want to talk about it,” Pam said, “do you want to talk about the Project?”