Break in Case of Emergency Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2016 by Jessica Winter

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Winter, Jessica.

  Break in case of emergency / by Jessica Winter.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-101-94613-8 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-1-101-94614-5 (ebook)—ISBN 978-0-451-49422-1 (open market)

  1. Single women—Fiction. 2. Businesswomen—Fiction. 3. Feminists—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.I6695B84 2016 813'.6—dc23 2015031653

  ebook ISBN 9781101946145

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Janet Hansen

  v4.1_r1

  ep+a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Spring

  Our Focus Is Focus Itself

  Looking Busy

  Real Jobs and Other Jobs

  That

  Pam

  Avoidance

  The Emergency Fund

  Meg

  Who She Is to You

  Foundations

  Indulge Me

  Solidarity

  Oof

  Special Projects

  Major Brainstorm Mode

  The Existential Question of Why We Are Here

  Zen Rand

  The Project

  Business

  This Sex Thing

  Summer

  The Garden of Earthly Delights

  If Your Skull Was a Club

  Evidence

  It’s All About the Team

  Proficiency

  Signal Problems

  Initiative

  What Is Your Excuse?

  A Teachable Moment

  Wild Gifts

  All-Media Motivational Thingy

  We Talked About Seven

  Who Is “We”?

  Lessons in Zen Rand

  Fall

  The Thing That Happened

  Causation

  A Lot Going On

  Dolly

  Who Speaks That Language?

  Judy and the Really Fabulous Guy

  Particularizing

  Financially Is the Easiest Part

  In Fact

  Asleep

  Gotta Run with the Plebes

  The Garinagu Eco Lodge

  Experience the Experience

  That’s Your Reality

  Furthermost, Farthermore, Everending

  Flaming Tonnage

  Vacation from Your Vacation

  Not a Perfect System

  Magic Carpet Ride

  Metaphors

  We Are Doing Good Here

  Winter

  Christmas Eve

  A Tousled, Effortless Cool

  The Sperm That Got Away

  Summer Camp

  Knight on a White Steed

  Like a Newborn

  What Is Charity?

  Envy

  Paid in Exposure

  Cheese Break

  Submission

  Good News

  Yes

  Let It All Hang Out

  Statement of Accounts

  We’ve Met Many Times

  Another Spring

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  For Adrian

  We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.

  —Joan Didion, “On Self-Respect”

  Everything behind those French doors is full and meaningful. The gestures, the glances, the conversation that can’t be heard. How do you get to be so full? And so full of only meaningful things?

  —Zadie Smith, NW

  Spring

  Our Focus Is Focus Itself

  “It’s hard to reproduce those kind of results if—oh, sorry,” Jen said, realizing a beat too late that the rest of the room had gone quiet.

  Leora Infinitas had already taken her place at the head of the table. For one silent-screaming moment, it looked as if she were attempting to rip her own face off, but in fact she was tugging at her eyelash extensions under the placid gaze of the members of her board, who were seated in a corner conference room at the headquarters of the Leora Infinitas Foundation, also known as LIFt.

  Jen scanned the other women around the jade-and-walnut table, festooned with crystal-and-bamboo vases filled with fresh-cut gerbera daisies and flamingo lilies, selected at Leora’s request for their air-filtering qualities and replaced every day, even on days when the conference room was not in use, which was most days. The other women sat in tranquil anticipation as Leora yanked with greater urgency at her right eyelid using the pincer of her thumb and forefinger, as if trying to thread a needle with her own flesh. The rain against LIFt’s floor-to-ceiling windows chattered like a gathering crowd, even as the white noise that pumped in from every ceiling at LIFt—an undulating whhooooossshhhhh, an airless air-conditioning—began to hush.

  Jen shivered. Even a month into her tenure at LIFt, her body still misapprehended the whhooooossshhhhh as an Arctic blast that required shuddering adjustments to her internal thermostat.

  Leora Infinitas’s lashes now lay on the tabletop before her, a squashed yet glamorous bug. Without them, Leora looked at once diminished and more beautiful. Flecks of glue balanced on her eyelids. She blinked rapidly and stared into the table, searching the lacquer for the script, the incantation, hidden below its glinting surface.

  “I don’t like the idea of limiting ourselves,” Leora finally said. “I’m a big believer in not settling for twenty-four hours in a day.”

  Rain shattered against the windows, the applause track of a sitcom. A head nodded; a pair of lips buzzed “Mmm.”

  A pen tapping on the table stilled itself.

  The flowers stood beguiled in their vases.

  The electrons in the air murmured to one another in grave consultation, then telepathically cabled the message to the rest of the room that Leora, in twenty-one words, had concluded her opening statements. It would be up to her braintrust to, to borrow Leora’s phrasing, “advance the conversation.”

  Whhooooossshhhhh

  “Whhooo is to say,” intoned Donna, the board chair and one of Leora’s closest friends, “that there are not twenty-five hours in a day?”

  “Ha, right, who decided that, anyway?” asked board member Sunny, who was also Leora’s personal assistant.

  “We always said we’d have a start-up mentality,” Leora said. She peered down at the squashed eyelash bug. Soundlessly, Sunny materialized at her side, palmed it into a cupped tissue, and evanesced back into her seat.

  “Start-ups never sleep,” Leora continued. “Metaphorically speaking.”

  “Totally,” Sunny said, nodding with her entire head and neck, the tissue of squashed eyelash bug clasped in her hand. Totally was something Sunny said a lot whenever Leora spoke. Sunny’s totally was so total that it became two words. Toe tally.

  “But at the sam
e time, why bother doing everything if you’re not doing everything in. The right. Way,” Leora asked.

  “Mmmmm,” Sunny moaned.

  Donna squared her shoulders. “I think that, right now, at this moment in the young history of LIFt—and especially at this perilous moment in our global economy—our focus is focus itself,” she said. Her voice was deep and stern, the vowels round and sonorous as church bells. Her hands sculpted the air. Multiple bangles on each of her wrists clinked together in a wind chime of assent. “But shining a light on certain ideas now doesn’t mean that other worthy ideas are left to languish and wilt in the dark forever.”

  Sunny was slow-motion headbanging.

  “We must focus on those projects that feel most immediate to us,” Donna continued. “This sensation of the year two thousand and nine leaping bravely into spring after such a bitter winter—what does that feel like? Let’s capture it; let’s hold that moment and transform it. We can return to other, more timeless ideas later—a wellspring of creativity that will nourish us when we feel depleted from giving birth to our first idea-children. And we cannot be afraid.”

  “I love it!” Sunny said, clenching a fist to her sternum. “Donna, you are amazing.”

  “Karina,” Leora said imperiously to LIFt’s executive director, seated to her right. “What would you prioritize?”

  Karina, who had been raking her fingers through her hair and then twisting the strands, raking and twisting, tossed her hair over her shoulder and widened her eyes, as if absorbing the shock and import of a happy epiphany. “I’m going to second what you’re saying, Leora: focus, focus, focus,” she said. “The only way we can possibly limit ourselves is by taking on too much at once. We’re empowering ourselves by making the choice to make choices. The newness of the foundation and the uncertainty of the historical moment—we can see them as dares. Dares to be bold, dares to make decisions and own those decisions.”

  Jen stifled a smile and looked down at her open notebook, where she’d written BOARD MEETING NOTES with her fountain pen and gradually added serifs and flourishes until the letters became a row of gerbera daisies and flamingo lilies. From the first time they’d met, Jen recognized Karina as a master of the filibuster, but she hadn’t yet seen Karina cast the spell on Leora—the gift of shrouding any and every topic in a fluffy word cloud of reiterative agreement until the original query was swallowed up in the woozy vapor of resounding enthusiasm for an unstated but sublime goal.

  Karina shook her head wonderingly and peered into a dazzling middle distance, taking in a new horizon line. “I’m really jazzed about this,” she said. “I can’t wait.”

  Forty-five minutes later, as the meeting did not adjourn but rather transitioned into a discussion of Leora’s daughter’s Bikram instructor’s ayahuasca retreats in Oaxaca, Jen’s line of gerbera daisies and flamingo lilies had sprouted into a garden of vines and ivy that plumed across both open pages of her notebook, speckled with topiary animals and actual bounding cats. The stippled-sketch form of Jen’s toddler goddaughter, Millie, peeked around a flowering espalier with a little fistful of poppies, a wreath of gardenias and eucalyptus atop her black curls.

  Jen closed the notebook, rose, and began to leave the room, but hovered at the head of the table beside Leora. She had resolved to hover in awkward mid-stride, resulting in a slight lurching motion that stirred up a gruesomely intact memory of balking on the pitcher’s mound in Little League, with the bases loaded, on ball four. Jen had not yet been introduced to Leora, and keenly wanted to introduce herself now, but just as keenly wanted not to disrupt Leora’s Oaxaca anecdote, which involved a surreally vivid dream—induced by a midnight snack of chapulines and chocolate mole—wherein a mercado stall reassembled itself as an animatronic giant and began clank-clanking toward Leora, embroidered tunics and colorful straw handbags winging down from its bionic shoulders in a confetti of symbolism.

  “You know, mercado, machines, merchandise, mechanical reproduction—the moment was just so rich in meaning,” Leora was saying. “I don’t have the machinery to deconstruct it.”

  “Haha wow,” Sunny said.

  Swaying on her feet, Jen tried to catch Karina’s eye to plead mutely for an assist. But in each of the rapt faces around the table, Jen recognized the temporary tunnel vision that she herself had adapted and perfected in high school as an overtaxed waitress at a casual-dining franchise. She arranged a grin on her face that was intended to convey merry diffidence and backed out of the room.

  Looking Busy

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Daisy asked when Jen returned to her desk.

  Jen flopped theatrically into the chair behind her desk. “Wait, I have no idea why I just did that,” she said. “I’ve been sitting for days.” She stood up, then sat down again, more daintily.

  “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Daisy said. “You only infiltrated a board meeting.”

  Daisy was flipping through a perfect-bound, magazinelike tome titled Fur-Lined Teacup: Animals • Fashion • Feminism. The cover depicted, against a white backdrop, an impassive Russian blue cat in a trilby.

  “I infiltrated nothing—they just needed someone to take notes,” Jen said. “And it would be my honor to talk about it. Leora broke her toe paragliding in Turks and Caicos, which her guru told her was a metaphor for a fundamental incompatibility between her jingmai and her luomai, so when the nail falls off her toe she has to wear it in a titanium locket around her neck until Mercury enters Virgo. Karina was at a party with the Russian billionaire who is building the cyborg clone of himself, and he asked her what she was going to bequeath to her brain in her will and she said ‘fish oil,’ and then he asked her out on a date. Donna bought a tapestry in Siem Reap and had it made into a pantsuit. Sunny has a new pizza stone.”

  Daisy tore out a page from Fur-Lined Teacup and handed it to Jen. It depicted a llama lounging in a square gazebo, reading a book.

  “Is that llama wearing bifocals?” Jen asked, rubbing her fingers along the creamy, textured paper stock.

  “Are they all still talking about the financial apocalypse?” Daisy asked.

  “Of course,” Jen said, handing the page back to Daisy. “All anyone ever does is talk about the financial apocalypse. Sunny is putting some money into gold. Leora said she’s still considering letting a couple of her house staff go because of the financial apocalypse.”

  “Do you think she’ll let us go because of the financial apocalypse?” Daisy asked, picking up a pair of scissors.

  “Not if we keep looking busy,” Jen said, watching as Daisy cut a careful silhouette around the bookish llama’s ears.

  Real Jobs and Other Jobs

  Before LIFt, Jen had worked as a communications officer at the revered Federloss Family Foundation, which focused on women’s reproductive health initiatives in developing countries. When the foundation was blindsided by the compound effects of the economic crisis and significant investments impaled on Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi schemes, Jen couldn’t help but admire the balletic elegance of its subsequent budgetary adjustments, which absorbed the trauma by eliminating only positions, not the future budgets of pending initiatives. Midwife training schemes and prenatal-care pilot programs would go forward untouched. Jen’s dental coverage and pretax deferred savings program would not.

  “I always thought that if I ever got laid off I would at least enjoy a degree of purgative moral outrage,” Jen said to her husband, Jim, on the day in January she was let go. She was calling him from the street just outside the foundation’s dowdy offices in the East Thirties, one unmittened hand clasping her woolen coat to her unscarfed throat, the other clasping her phone to her unhatted ear. “I always thought there would be tears and recriminations. Rending of garments. But these layoffs are judicious and correct. I would have absolutely laid me off.”

  “It kind of takes all the fun out of it,” Jim said.

  Jen turned her face into the wind and squinted at the street, naked trees
standing mournful watch over blackened geodes of day-old slush and stalled, sagging cars. “There’s no one anywhere,” she said. “Everyone’s gone home. Does anyone live here anymore?”

  Despite her statements to the contrary, Jen would have absolutely not laid herself off, because her salary was a rounding error, an irrelevant scrawl of marginalia in any organization’s bookkeeping. Just the rent on Jen and Jim’s two-bedroom apartment in Flatbush, the Brooklyn neighborhood where Jim taught fifth grade at a local public school, was equivalent to well over half of her monthly take-home pay. The apartment had been advertised as being located within the historic boundaries of Ditmas Park, home to a smorgasbord of Victorian and Queen Anne and neo-Tudor and Colonial Revival detached houses in various states of grandeur and disrepair, but you could not have found a single Spanish tile roof or Ionic column or stone lion guardsman on Jen and Jim’s block, not a balustrade nor a gabled dormer nor a single oriel window, just a hulking quadrant of hundred-unit brick boxes whose signature architectural flourishes were the air-conditioning units—replete with company logo—installed beneath each window, which gave the reiterative impression that these buildings were not family residences at all but instead warehouses-cum-marketing experiments in service of FEDDERS AIR CONDITIONING.