Break in Case of Emergency Page 3

  “Arbitration,” Pam said. “If anyone asks, say this is arbitration.”

  Pam had continued in this arbitrative vein for the entirety of her postcollegiate art career, year after year producing little that was sellable and less that was sold, and occasionally running into a spot of potentially career-enhancing trouble, as when she used grant money to purchase a month’s lease on a storefront next to a real estate agent’s office, painted the storefront to appear indistinguishable from the real estate agent’s, and posted property advertisements in the window that looked identical to the real estate agent’s—that is, until you looked closer at the descriptions, which were written in Pam’s recognizably run-on polemical style:

  Panache! This dazzling new build destroyed three neoclassical buildings and a park and a dog run Now it’s a fifteen-story tower block Steps from Boutiques Bathed in Light No one making less than 500% of the median local income can afford a studio here Turnkey terrific!!!

  “It’s a commentary on gentrification,” Pam explained to Meg, whom Pam called for legal advice after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the adjoining real estate agent.

  To support herself, Pam presumably chugged along on enough one-off adjunct teaching jobs, freelance writing assignments, guest-curator gigs, and other odds and ends to get by. Pam and Jen never spoke of money, and to judge by the frigid winter temperatures in Pam’s quasi-legal abode, the smelly-damp bathroom she shared with a revolving door of lost-seeming strangers, and her static college-era wardrobe of holey leggings and faded Champion sweatshirts, Pam didn’t have any.

  “Do you want to know how I know I’m not an artist?” Jen asked Jim one night, after coming home from one of her unemployed afternoons at Pam’s. “Because I couldn’t live like Pam lives.”

  “I doubt Pam needs you feeling sorry for her,” Jim said.

  “I don’t feel sorry for her!” Jen said. “I feel sorry for me!”

  “Pam and Paulo are doing fine,” Jim said. “I liked that show they did about gentrification.”

  “That was Pam’s show,” Jen said. Paulo made large, gooey clumps of things that gelatinized in her memory. He’d tie together dolls, tree branches, and tire irons into a stakelike arrangement and then pour gallons of red paint over it, or lace stacks of 1980s-era issues of The Economist with strings of Christmas lights that were also looped around the necks of vintage lawn jockeys sourced on eBay, and then pour gallons of resin over it.

  “And I know Pam and Paulo are doing fine!” Jen continued. “That’s my whole point! I would not be fine, if I were them. But they are fine. More than fine.”

  Pam had enlisted Jen’s collaboration on her current work-in-progress, although Pam was reticent about its exact nature. All Jen could glean about the project was her own role in it: to paint a series of five-by-four-foot portraits based on the grinning, healthy specimens in the promotional materials for WellnessSolutions, a health insurance company.

  “So you just have to make sure you have a senior citizen, a new mom, and an apple-cheeked teen,” Pam told Jen, handing over the WellnessSolutions brochures, “and they should look maniacally happy.”

  In college, Jen painted larger-than-life photorealistic portraits of classmates, teachers, and celebrities: She projected a photograph onto a canvas, traced the main features in pencil, then painted in oil over the tracings. The aspirations toward extreme verisimilitude owed largely to an indelible nightmare Jen had as a freshman in which her first-year painting class was violently purged and repopulated by the blurry wraiths of Gerhard Richter’s Baader-Meinhof series. Though she would have admitted this to no one, Jen suspected that she had allowed her portraits to become so big because the ideas they contained were so small. Perhaps they didn’t even contain ideas so much as self-projections, as wobbly and coarse-grained as the mechanical projections that propped up her technique. There was an element of self-portraiture in the grinning nervousness, the anxiety of obedience, that could start creeping around her subjects’ mouths in the transition from photograph to canvas, in the obsequious gleam of the eye that might twinkle in the canvas but not in the photograph.

  In Jen’s mind, she appropriated the outside of her work from photographs and the inside of her work from herself, and others mistook this for creativity.

  “You are a fabulous copyist, Jen,” said one of her professors. For that class, Jen had painted identical twins in the Diane Arbus mode, and titled the work Biological Inheritance.

  “You are an astonishing technician,” said another of her professors. “But what else are you?”

  “I reproduce things,” Jen would say. “Things that already exist. I don’t even reproduce things—I reproduce reproductions of things.”

  “Jen saying her art is not art is the most Jen thing that ever happened,” Meg would say.

  “Jen, why do you make art if it’s not art?” Pam asked.

  “Pam just made you into a koan, Jen,” Meg said.

  “Why is your whole life a lie, Jen?” Pam asked.

  “Hey, Pam,” Meg said, “do you think we could get Jen to put herself down about how much she puts herself down?”

  “Hey, Meg,” Pam said, “if a snake ate its own tail, do you think Jen would apologize to the snake?”

  Avoidance

  Jen couldn’t go to Pam’s every day just because she was unemployed; or she probably could have, but she didn’t want Pam to feel responsible for finding ways to occupy her time. She needed to construct another rudder for her amorphous days, in which anxiety and sloth wrestled with each other only to reach a shaky alliance, usually culminating in a despondent, thrashing nap. Anxiety and sloth made a formidable team of antagonists because their shared goal was avoidance: avoidance of the gaping maw of job-posting sites; avoidance of other people with their helpful advice and compliments and solidarity, all of which Jen’s brain translated into prayers for the dying; avoidance of the immediate outdoor environment, which was bitterly cold and covered in the scattering stacks of uncollected trash and unidentified melting black shit that signified the liminal space between winter and spring in Not Ditmas Park.

  Jen decided that the rudder would be a daily deadline: By the time Jim returned home from school, at around five p.m., Jen would have X number of cover letters written, Y job-research tasks fulfilled, Z closets or drawers cleaned out. And she would have drawings to show to Jim, and maybe even paintings.

  Jim’s support of Jen’s dormant art career was as unconditional as it was uncorroborated, and it had maintained that sincerity ever since they’d first met, a year after college, when they both taught at the same summer enrichment program for children of low-income families in southeast Brooklyn. In the final blasting-oven days of August, Jen had presented each of their kids with a crayon-on-construction-paper portrait of him- or herself, carefully rolled into a scroll and tied with a blue silk ribbon like a diploma.

  “Maybe that was presumptuous of me,” Jen had said to Jim as they watched their students ripple and zigzag out the classroom door one last time, a few of the portraits strewn on the cracked linoleum behind them, others rolled inside clementine-sized fists and thwacking proximate shoulders. “It’s not like any of our kids were asking for the priceless gift of my artistic expression, like it’s some kind of reward. And drawing someone’s face is such an intimate act. Literally holding up a mirror to someone takes a lot of mutual trust. It’s a kind of disclosure. I mean, who am I to tell them what they look like?”

  “Do you want to go on a date with me?” Jim replied.

  His faith-based position on Jen’s real artistic calling extended itself even to casual introductions at parties: “Please meet my wife, Jen; she’s an artist!” His stance wholly lacked in passive-aggression or latent accusation. To him it was simply a statement of fact, and the factual basis of the statement had no statute of limitations.

  “You should use your free time to paint,” Jim would say during Jen’s unemployment. “Or at least do some drawing.”

  �
��I should,” Jen would say.

  “Just don’t make any art,” Jim would say.

  Sometimes Jim would come home to a new end table constructed out of stray dowels and disused neckties, two rhubarb pies cooling on the kitchen counter (one crust made with shortening, one not), and a calligraphic note—each letter written in alternating shades of glitter pen—informing him that Jen had volunteered to take the Aggression-Challenged Mixed Breeds at their local animal shelter for a walk. Upon her return, Jen would have much to download on a really interesting Guardian piece she’d read on the new patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church and his stance on female clerics, and another really interesting Guardian piece she’d read on the civil conflict in Puthukkudiyiruppu, Sri Lanka.

  Sometimes Jim would come home to the entire contents of their bookcase redistributed across the floor of the front room in short stacks, as if an inept soldier had begun fortifying his trench too late before the shelling started, and down the hall, his wife asleep on their bed—the bed itself sandbagged by half the contents of their closet—in gym socks and her bridesmaid’s dress from a cousin’s wedding.

  “Are you home?” she asked, stirring from her nap in a flutter of tulle as Jim sat down gently on the edge of the bed. “Are you sick? Is it dark?”

  The Emergency Fund

  There did exist what Jen and Jim called an “emergency fund,” parked in a liquid savings account that currently held $12,771.43, the amount that Jim’s mother had left him when she died after taxes plus several years of accrued interest at a median rate of 1.25 percent. They had always intended to add more than interest to it, as the fund was meant to provide extra feathering for the nest of the hypothetical tiny future boarder.

  “There’s always the emergency fund,” Jim would say whenever Jen fretted about money.

  “No, there isn’t,” Jen would say.

  “There’s no emergency fund?” Jim asked the first time.

  “There’s no emergency,” Jen said the first time.

  They might have considered asking Jen’s parents for help, which Jen had done once before, as a twenty-three-year-old museum assistant facing a surprise tax bill. She had marked down the maximum number of exemptions on her W-4, mistaking “exemptions” for “deductions,” and thus assuming she would be paying her tax bill as she went. That mistake, combined with the fact that it hadn’t occurred to her that she’d have to pay taxes on the $5,000 art fellowship she’d won on graduation, meant that she found herself, on the second tax return of her postcollegiate life, owing the IRS $8,000.

  “Which is incidentally still less than what Lily Bart owes Gus Trenor at the end of The House of Mirth,” Pam pointed out to Jen at the time. “And that’s not even adjusting for inflation.”

  Jen did not mention her tax bill to Meg.

  When Jen asked her father for help, he offered to loan her the money at the current median rate for mortgage loans, which at that time hung around 7.5 percent. Two years, fixed rate. But first, Jen’s dad said, he needed to get sign-offs from Jen’s two brothers, because they might want a matching gift, which would only be fair.

  “A matching loan, you mean,” Pam said. “You would all get matching loans.”

  “I asked him that—my dad sees it as a gift,” Jen said. “He thinks he could do better than 7.5 percent in the markets, you see. So he would be coming out behind even with the interest.”

  “Wait, he’s an investor?”

  “He’s an associate district sales manager for a regional chain of sporting-goods stores.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Pam’s dad was an auto mechanic. On a road trip their senior year, after the stick on their borrowed manual-transmission heap fell slack and flailing on the freeway, Jen and Meg had watched Pam crawl under the car and pop the gear linkage into place.

  “I’m sure he could get you a great deal on Champion sweatshirts, so long as you make your purchase somewhere in southern Ohio,” Jen said.

  “What is his deal, though?” Pam asked.

  “He’s into self-sufficiency,” Jen said. “That’s his deal. He grew up poor in a tough home. Both my parents, they just didn’t know things; they didn’t grow up with things. They used to keep the books in our house in a closet because they thought that was where they go. They didn’t know about fruit. Did you know that I was in college the first time I ever had an orange? Meg offered me an orange and I asked for a knife to cut it with.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Pam said. Jen thought it was sweet that Pam assumed she would have been there.

  There were things that Jen could say to Pam that she couldn’t say to Meg.

  “Could you ask your mom for help?” Pam asked.

  “Well, you know my mom,” Jen said. “I mean, you don’t, and that’s kind of the point—she’s in the picture, but she’s sort of blurred in the background, like you flap the Polaroid around and that patch just never comes into focus. It’s always felt like she’s been in another room. Talking to her is like pressing your ear to a wall.”

  There was more Jen wanted to say, but she didn’t, because Pam’s own mother had died of cancer when Pam was a child.

  “You should paint your mom,” Pam said.

  “Anyway,” Jen said. “So my dad always comes back to ‘No one gave me anything and I turned out fine’—that kind of thing. Standing alone in the world. I respect that. Fairness is important to him.”

  “Fairness isn’t necessarily incompatible with generosity,” Pam said.

  “It is if you decide that fairness is the same as math.”

  “Yeah. Or chemistry. Right? If you’re balancing a chemical equation, a little generosity is the same as cheating. Faking.”

  “A rectangle doesn’t just shave a bit off two sides and loan the extra to a triangle so that the triangle can achieve her dream of becoming a square.” Jen semaphored the shapes with her hands.

  “The rectangle must stay a rectangle,” Pam said.

  Many weeks into her unemployment, Jen had a single-scene dream in which she opened the front door to her apartment to the sight of Franny, shaved to the skin, sitting startled at their doorstep upon a mat woven of her own downy calico fur. Instead of WELCOME, the mat read FEATHER YOUR NEST.

  Meg

  Around Valentine’s Day, Meg and Jen met for an early-evening drink at Tommy’s Bar in Midtown. The bartender was also the owner, and was also Tommy. Generations of Magic Marker graffiti covered the walls above the ripped, sticky leather booths. Supertramp was the most recent addition to the jukebox.

  “So I don’t know whether this counts as a REAL JOB or an OTHER JOB,” Meg said, “but I’ll let you decide.”

  In her nubby wool suit—black velvet collar, pencil skirt—and her glossy sweep of hair and her subliminal makeup (cheekbones dusted pink by an eternal cosmetic winter, liner applied so subtly that it simply supplanted the real curve of her upper lids), Meg personified brisk and frictionless glamour. She had always projected this, even in college, even during finals week—the undergraduate uniform of jeans, sweatpants, and puffer jackets on Meg became a form of drag. And Meg almost always seemed to have an egg timer ticking behind her eyes, long before gainful employment or law school or marriage or motherhood had placed any real-world requisitions on her time-management protocols. Even during the first carefree week of term or at Friday-night house parties, it was there: a buzz of impatience, palpable and exquisitely controlled. At eighteen and nineteen, Jen had found the buzz annoying, even egocentric. At twenty and beyond, she had learned to envy it—the way that Meg could apportion units of time like the facets of a jewel that she was coolly and constantly appraising. Jen saw it as a true measure of self-respect.

  “Wait, before you tell me, I just have to say, thank you so much for hanging out tonight,” Jen said. “Especially on a school night. Millie won’t wander into traffic or anything?” Millie, Jen’s goddaughter, was Meg’s uncannily considerate and beatific two-year-old. Even Millie’s tantrums had a tidy, meditative quality
.

  “She’s good. Marc and I have her tethered in the back garden,” Meg said. “The neighbors toss meat over the fence if she cries.”

  “And how’s Marc?”

  “Ask him yourself,” said Meg, gesturing toward a disheveled man in a dun trenchcoat with his head on the bar. Meg’s actual Marc was at home, where, since losing his finance job, he pursued various woodworking-related hobbies involving custom picture frames for Millie’s finger paintings and carved mallard ducks. His trust fund (private equity) dwarfed Meg’s own sizeable one (boiler equipment, mostly, but also television production royalties). Jen had always tried to displace her envy of their bottomless security by reflecting it back on herself as an intriguing hypothetical—how her idea of labor would change if it could be alienated from capital. If ambition were the only means of appraisal.

  “Okay, so Bluff Senior, Charles Bluff, Big Cheese Bluff, recently completed an amicable divorce,” Meg explained, “and one of the many consolation prizes for the Mrs. Bluff is that she’s starting her own foundation. She’s even borrowing a couple of our people to get started. It’s unclear, but it sounds like she might be into the sensational, big-headline items in women’s-rights philanthropy—sex trafficking, FGM, and also stuff like ‘women’s empowerment,’ micro-enterprise, self-esteem…” Meg trailed off.

  “Sounds promising!” Jen said.

  “It’s…diffuse, at best. They’re looking for a communications person. Best-case scenario, you get a blank slate and fill it in however you want. Worst-case scenario, it’s a silly stopgap until the dark times are over. Either way, though, would it be weird to be employed by a divorce settlement?”

  “What’s actually weird is that I think last month Jim and I spent more money on cat food than people food,” Jen said, swallowing. She had once again broken a rule she’d tried to set for conversations with Meg: that talking about something being expensive was sometimes okay, but talking about money—actual units of currency unto themselves, as opposed to how many units of those currency might be required to make a particular purchase—was not okay.