6/21/12

Manhattan

“Michaels.” Matt practically jumped into my path.

I blinked at the sudden obstacle standing between my lunch hour and my desk. This day had been going so well. The sun was shining, and the air felt about as clear as it ever had in late June. The ferry ride had never felt so much like the beginning of Working Girl. The pizza place downstairs had slices half-off today. I was even having a rather good hair day. Best of all, my editor, Matt Taibbi, whose voice made me want to punch a cat, who thought he was Hunter S. Thompson’s heir but really wasn’t fit to be Dr. Thompson’s shoe-shine boy, hadn’t shown up in the newsroom. Until now. His sudden appearance, his broad, swarthy, unnaturally young-looking face looming before mine, was a literal and metaphorical cloud over the day.

He jerked his head toward a conference room on the other side of the newsroom. “Got a minute?”

“Sure.” My voice came out a little too high, and I cleared my throat and held up the Styrofoam cup of Diet Coke in my hand. “Let me put this down, grab a notepad.”

“You won’t need it,” he tossed over his shoulder as he walked in the direction he had just pointed me.

I narrowed my eyes after him. I took one more fortifying gulp of soda, dropped my purse into my desk chair and headed for the small conference room, notepad and pen in hand.

I was two steps from the door when I noticed a woman in an electric blue blazer sitting at the conference table. I didn’t know her name off the top of my head, but I’d seen her a few times, and the sight of her today froze me in place. I knew this much: She was from HR.

Matt had stopped to talk to someone. I glanced around. It seemed awfully quiet. On the other side of the newsroom, I could see a guy my age I didn’t know well standing over his desk, filling a cardboard box. A sniffle closer to me seemed to echo off the walls. I walked into the room on legs that suddenly felt like rubber, and Matt closed the door behind him as I settled into my seat.

I waited for someone to speak. The HR lady tapped a thin stack of papers on the round tabletop. She had a pinched face and a severe red bob. There was, I noticed, a small box of cheap tissues sitting in front of her as well. Matt folded his hands in front of him on the table, tapped his thumbs together, then quickly put his hands in his lap. He looked like a frat boy in a police interrogation room.

“Meg, have you met Sheryl from HR?” he said, his voice tight.

I shook my head. Sheryl extended a hand across the table, her fingers clenching mine in the sort of no-nonsense handshake I imagined she expected from applicants. Her voice was a touch nasal. “Pleasure to meet you.” I had a sick feeling the pleasure wasn’t going to be mine.

Matt seemed to force himself to look at me. “I’m gonna have to rip the Band-Aid off here. We gotta let you go.”

I could hear the whoosh of my own blood in my ears, the sound of my own heart in free-fall.

“This has nothing to do with your performance,” Matt went on, blurring before my eyes. “I’ve been told from up above that things aren’t getting better for us financially. I might as well tell you there are a number of people leaving today.” He looked down at his hands. “They…wanted staff’s direct editors to break it to them.”

Sheryl pushed some of the papers across the table toward me. I stared at them, my jaw slack. She spoke briskly, as if from a script, but her voice seemed to be coming from the end of a tunnel. “You’re entitled to one week of severance pay for each year of service. We’re rounding to the closest year, so that means you’ll receive four weeks of severance. Your medical and dental coverage will end at that time as well. That’ll be…” She consulted one of the papers she’d kept in front of her. “July 19.”

Four weeks from today. I did hasty math in my head. “So today’s my last day,” I finally croaked.

“Yes.” She tapped the top sheet of paper. “We have some other business to address.”

Every journalist in America had dreaded this day for the last three or four years. No one, it was now painfully clear, was immune. Some greeted it with tears, some with anger, some with a flash of their lives before their eyes. I felt like I was watching the room through a microscope, clinical, far removed. This was not my life. It was someone else’s. And I burned with anger, a sudden explosion of anger, at the people who would do this to the stranger I was watching.

My throat tightened, and I cleared it. “Could I have a moment with Matt first?”

“Of course.” Sheryl stood up from the table and parked herself outside the conference room. I could feel her studying me through the window, like a gorilla in the zoo.

My hands were starting to shake violently. Don’t cry, a voice in my head said angrily. Don’t you dare fucking let him see you cry. Keep breathing.

I stared across the table at Matt, who was studying the tabletop as though it held ancient secrets to life itself. Why in God’s name had I ever left music? Why had I chosen to spend what ended up being my last nine months at my dream job working for this clown? Thomas, my old editor, that mean and rumpled old lion, never would have let this happen to me.

When at last he looked up and spoke, his voice was quiet, penitent. “Meg, I’m sor—”

“Fuck off,” I said. The effort to keep my voice steady was exhausting enough without unleashing everything I was dying to tell him. “Just save it and fuck off.”

Matt looked back down at the table. He pressed his lips together. “Obviously, there’s nothing I can say. But don’t shoot the messenger.” There was a lethal edge to his voice.

Silence settled over the room. My heartbeat thundered in my ears. I looked out the window at Sheryl, who suddenly took an interest in her fingernails.

“I’ll be outside when you’re done with Sheryl,” Matt said finally. “It’s been nice working with you, and I’ll help you get a job wherever you want. This is really hard for me.”

He’d hit exactly the right spot, the critical chink in the armor. My eyes flooded. “Hard for you?” I echoed, my voice cracking under the weight of my incredulity.

Matt shoved back from the table abruptly, his chair groaning against the floor. He never had been one for emotion. “I’ll be outside,” he repeated hastily, his expression unreadable, as he all but fled the room, brushing past Sheryl in the doorway, who looked after him with mild surprise. I ripped a Kleenex violently from the box on the table and waved her into the room.

Sheryl was the picture of efficiency, shuffling papers, collecting shaky signatures, reciting insurance terms and severance policies, ignoring the spasming muscles in my face as I fought to keep it a composed mask. My brain was mush by the time I stumbled out. Or soup, a soup of memories and disbelief. Not working at Rolling Stone. I could not imagine a world in which that was true. It wasn’t true. Not yet.

Matt was standing next to my desk with a printer paper box. The writer who sat next to him was staring up at him in terror. Her head snapped forward to look at her screen, with the same attention Sheryl had given her fingernails, as I approached.

“You have 10 minutes,” Matt said. He avoided my eyes as he set the box on my desk.

“Until?” I prompted.

“UntilsecurityandIwalkyouout,” he mumbled in one breath.

Like a common criminal. Christ. Staring at him, I yanked my bottom desk drawer, the one half-full of mementos from the music beat, off its track and emptied it into the box. I threw in my purse, sneakers and termination paperwork. I shouldered my messenger bag and looked down at my desk phone. The entire process had taken 45 seconds. The other writer was staring openly at me now. I ignored her.

“Let’s go.” I grabbed the box, heavy with my life’s work, and stared a hole in Matt’s guilty olive face until he turned to start walking.

As we approached the reception desk, a tall man with slouching shoulders in a wrinkled blue dress shirt, a ring of gray hair sinking ever lower on the back of his head, stood with his back to us. In front of him was a woman in a bright purple sheath dress who couldn’t have been a day over 25, blonde hair in a severe asymmetrical cut, eyes pink and chin trembling. Thomas had hired her to replace me on the music beat. And today, he was escorting her to her fate. He was no better than Matt after all. My own eyes prickled again as they caught his victim’s. Thomas turned to follow her eyes to me, but in the instant his face fell, the elevator doors opened, and two tan-shirted security guards walked out to meet us.

The elevator was as silent as a library, the six of us crammed in. I shifted the box in my arms. The young music writer sniffled loudly.

Thomas cleared his throat. “Afternoon, Michaels.” His voice was scratchy, and he swam before my eyes as I looked over my shoulder at him. I was too afraid of bursting into sobs to reply. I managed a jerky nod of acknowledgement, which made the tears spill over. I saw a muscle tick in his jaw -- he had never handled crying staffers well, either -- but there was only a shockingly uncharacteristic pity in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he mouthed silently, as if it had been his doing. I nodded again and faced forward, wiping my eyes with my shoulder, leaving a faint streak of mascara on my sleeveless blue blouse.

In the lobby, the click of the music writer’s heels echoed on the marble floor, cold, jarring. A security guy held the door open. His expression was blank.

This was where it ended. A horrible heat began way back by my ears and seemed to fill my head. My blood was whooshing in my ears again, and I could not quite get a breath in.

Matt looked at the floor, lips pressed together. Thomas extended a hand to the music writer, who by now looked dazed. The gesture, though, seemed to snap her out of it, and a half-wheeze, half-sob escaped her as she looked at his hand in horror. I focused on a spot above her head so the sight of her tears wouldn’t break my fragile, hard-won composure as she turned to storm out.

And now it was just me. Thomas’ jaw was clenched again. Matt opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. These were the last faces I’d see here, probably the last time I’d see them, the man who’d hired me for my dream beat, the man who’d fired me from what had come to feel like my consolation beat.

“Thomas,” I said hoarsely, nodding at him again. “Thank you.” There was nothing else I could say, but I willed my eyes to show him that I was thankful beyond any measure those two words could convey, that I’d never hated him at all, that there was no one else I could nearly call a father figure.

He nodded back, and I knew he’d gotten it by the too-gruff way he said, as he so rarely did, “Meg.”

I turned to Matt. “Taibbi.” There were volumes I could say to him, but none of it would get me another job. None of it would take this day back. But there was one thing I simply had to say. He had told me not to shoot the messenger. Tough shit.

I held up a middle finger as I inched backward toward the door. “Give my regards to Wenner.”

Matt exhaled sharply through his nose. Thomas couldn’t quite stifle a smirk. And then I turned my back on both of them and walked out the door, the box growing heavier in my arms by the moment as I stumbled into the bright afternoon, the unforgiving future, sun sneaking between buildings that no longer welcomed me.

Only then, on the street, did I finally burst into tears.

Staten Island

“I can’t believe Village Voice never called you back. Those bitches.” Alicia twirled the bottom of her half-empty PBR bottle on the bar.

I stared into my pint of Yuengling, watching the foam evaporate. “I can. I sent them a cold résumé. What did you expect them to say?” I looked up at an unseen colleague. “‘Oh, look, one of the 17 newly laid-off Rolling Stone writers! We’ve never, ever seen one of these before! Let’s invent a position for her posthaste!’ Yes. That will absolutely happen never.”

“You’d think getting your name on Romenesko would be a better reference.” Alicia set her bottle on the bar with a little thunk. The brown glass glinted red, reflecting the vintage neon Coors Light sign behind the bar, light that gleamed off Alicia’s carefully gelled black fauxhawk.

We’d been nursing cheap beers all night in an intentionally divey little place across from the ferry terminal, a few blocks from my apartment. Springsteen came from the touch-screen jukebox on the wood-paneled wall, and the top-shelf liquor bottles all looked a little dusty. The late Yankees game was on; the guido at the other end of the bar watched intently, interjecting the occasional curse.

“So Village Voice was a no.” She shrugged. “What else?”

“Got 20 minutes?” I sighed into my glass, sending ripples across the surface of the beer. “I’ve sent out at least 50 résumés. Ten of them were cold. Every single writing job in the tri-state area on J-Jobs, plus a bunch of shitty marketing jobs on Indeed. I’ve gotten a handful of form-letter no’s and that’s it.” I took a drink to distract myself.

“Maybe it’s time to go freelance.” Alicia signaled the bartender for the check, scribbling on an invisible pad.

“Yeah, I don’t really have the time it took you to make it work,” I said. “I sat down and did the math. Financially, I can survive six months here without a job, and that’s if I really push it.”

“Financially?” Alicia echoed.

“Emotionally, I’ll be in a hug-myself jacket in another three weeks. You know this is the longest I’ve been out of work since we graduated?”

“That makes you luckier than about 90% of our contemporaries.”

I sighed. “You know what I mean. I don’t do boredom. And I never liked ramen.”

I fell silent, taking another long drink of beer, as the bartender brought the check and Alicia pulled out her credit card. It was generous to say Alicia had made it work. It was easy to be cavalier about unemployment when her credit card statement went to a split-level house in White Plains with two Volvos in the driveway and two bankers asleep upstairs, instead of her concrete-floored studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn, that cost twice as much as my little Staten Island nest. I’d never been able to take Alicia to the bar during her lean times, and the realization made me feel as bitter as it did guilty.

Alicia blew a hollow glass note across the top of her bottle, then drained it. “Well, it’s not like you have a rich boyfriend or anything.” I was sure it was meant to sound cheerfully sarcastic, but it came across a tad spiteful.

I studied my glass again. “Well…that’s the other side of it.”

“Other…” Alicia set down her bottle with a louder thunk this time. Her voice was firm. “You are NOT thinking of leaving New York on his account.”

“We’ve had some…” I paused, searching for the right word to sugarcoat the increasingly frequent sniping remarks and frosty silences. “Spirited discussions.”

A shitty grin stretched across Alicia’s face. “And here I thought all you did was have phone sex.” I jabbed an elbow into her ribs, and she snickered. “Fine. Go on.”

I sighed and swigged my beer again. “I’d really rather not. Suffice it to say paying for me to remain his long-distance girlfriend is not his ideal.”

“You probably wouldn’t have to worry about a job hunt with him around.” Alicia winked. “You’d finally have that sugar daddy you always dreamed of.”

I glared at her. “I don’t recall saying that was ever my dream.”

“You’re right. I dreamed that for you.” Alicia played another note on the rim of her bottle. “So you could have a big house I could come and visit you in. Free vacation. I could almost be convinced not to care that it’s in Kentucky.”

We both stared absently at the TV as the Yankees pitcher narrowed his eyes at home plate, then wound up with an elaborate kick of one leg.

“You’d still be alone a good chunk of the time,” she said quietly.

I nodded. “He’s not changing jobs anytime soon. He leaves for London Friday. For the new album.”

“And he’s coming here first?” Alicia said.

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

She tapped her bottle on the bar. “And he wants you in Kentucky. And I want you in New York.”

“And my mother would just as soon I move back to Illinois.” I chugged the rest of my beer and snorted. “She said I could just live at home, work at the Daily Dem. I think I’d rather chew glass.”

Alicia was silent again, twirling her bottle on the bar. On TV, I watched the pitcher curl his body up nervously again. The Yankees were down by a run. Whatever move he made next was probably the ballgame. I didn’t know baseball well, but I knew he had options, knew he had to make the best call he could on the spur of the moment, with only so much time for deliberation.

“Maybe it’s the shitty beer talking, but I think you guys have some things to talk about,” she finally said, and I could tell she was trying hard not to sound sad.

We walked out when the game ended. Alicia pointed down the street, toward her 20-year-old Toyota. “You sure you don’t need a ride home?”

I waved a dismissive hand. “I’m fine. The fresh air will do me good.”

“OK.” Alicia hugged me hard. Her voice was thick with maternal concern. “You take care of yourself, Peggy Jo.”

She walked away, but I lingered where I stood. Even on my now-daily runs, I’d been trying to avoid the ferry terminal for just this reason. Lower Manhattan stared back at me from across the bay, sparkling with promise in the late-night cool. The Big Apple. The naked city of eight million stories. My city. My New Jerusalem. “Let the River Run” popped into my head, unbidden, and my eyes protested, shedding what must have been the millionth tear since my firing.

How could I love anything more than this view, than being a cell in that beating urban heart? How could I leave this?

I ran a hand through my hair. “What the hell am I gonna do?” I asked the city, but it just blinked back at me.

I stifled a sigh. We’d made it almost the entire meal, dammit. I’d begun to hope that we could make it through his whole brief visit.

I finished chewing an especially spicy piece of General Tso’s chicken and gave equal focus to picking up another, one of the last pieces of meat in the bowl, the vegetables already gone. I kept my voice just as casual. “Yeah, I saw your emails. Both of them.”

“Couldn’t remember if I sent it the first time,” he mumbled. I didn’t need to look at him to know his ears were red. He was a comically bad liar. He wiped his mouth, still not looking at me. “What do you think?”

The timing was unbeatable. The job at the Louisville Eccentric Observer was admittedly perfect for me and my qualifications, though I hadn’t done any fine arts writing since the first year of my first job in St. Louis. I hadn’t worked at a regular alt-weekly since that job, either, and I couldn’t deny they had a lot of charms.

But.

“I’m working on the cover letter,” I lied. The chicken in my mouth couldn’t quite take the edge off my voice.

Brian set down his chopsticks, and now an edge crept into his voice as well. “I’m just trying to help, Meg.”

The spot between my eyes started to ache, and I rubbed it. “I know. You’re doing plenty. I still have a lot to think about.”

“Like?” Brian prompted.

I sighed loudly enough that a guy a couple tables over glanced at me. “Are we really doing this here?”

We were sitting in the Chinese restaurant near my place where we’d had our first official date, the day he’d shown up here in New York and we’d agreed to give this a shot. I had known then our relationship wouldn’t be easy. There had been no sugarcoating that. But there had been no imagining that a year after we’d first laid eyes on each other in person, he’d be recording a huge new album and I’d be in sink-or-swim mode.

“I’m sorry if I’d like some resolution before I leave the country for, you know, months.” Brian tapped his chopsticks on the table irritably.

I pointed my fork at him. “But that’s exactly my point, Brian. Is now really the right time for me to move out there? I’d be as alone there as I am here.”

Brian was shaking his head. “Except there, it’d be temporary.”

A little scoff escaped me. “How temporary, exactly? How many times have you told me what a big year next year’s going to be? Do you think you can just do that remotely?”

He chewed his lip in thought for a moment, then shrugged. There was a wounded sort of look in his eyes as he gazed out at the street. “You know, I think it was you who said, the very first time you came out there, ‘It’s not always gonna be weekends, is it?’”

It was my turn to shake my head. “Sweetie, us calling the same city home isn’t going to make us any less long-distance anytime soon. Not with the album, and not with the tour.”

Brian picked up his chopsticks again, tapped them against his plate a few times. “OK. Fine. You have a point there. I guess I just want to come home to you.” He looked at me, still hurt.

Damn it all to hell. My heart turned over in my chest. I rubbed my forehead again, rested my chin in that hand and met his gaze as I reached over to pat his hand. “Oh, Brian. Don’t you think I want that someday, too?”

He sighed and turned his hand over, rubbing his thumb over my palm. “I know you do, girl. I see it in your eyes every time we’re together. I don’t know why you don’t think someday can be now.”

I pressed my lips together as I tried to marshal my thoughts. I’d been on my own most of my adult life, living for myself and my career and little else. As much as I loved Brian, loved being with him, missed him when he was gone, our long-distance relationship made it a lot easier to keep living my somewhat selfish little life.

We’d been together for close to a year, occupied each other’s thoughts for almost exactly a year. I wasn’t getting any younger. And yet, I’d never imagined these would be the circumstances under which I’d take the next step.

“Is it so bad that I wanted to make it happen on my terms?” I finally said.

Brian shook his head. “No. I don’t blame you.” He looked down at our hands. “But there are two of us here.”

“I know,” I said quietly.

He plunged on. “What’s here, Meg? I mean, I know how much you love it here, but I know how your job hunt here is going, too. That job at LEO, God’s literally dropping that in your lap.”

The next words were out before I could stop them. “Did God take my job at Rolling Stone, too?”

Brian clenched his jaw, screwed up his mouth. He looked out the window and slowly pulled his hand away. I stared down at my plate, no longer hungry, and didn’t object when a young man in a white T-shirt cleared it away with Brian’s.

“We’ll take the check, too,” Brian muttered.

Still, I didn’t sleep that night. Brian was asleep minutes after he finished, with one arm curled around my waist, but I lay awake, studying the way the orange light slanted through the window, listening to his breathing and the occasional siren outside. My mind was racing, and I had no hope it would rest. Finally, I crawled out of bed, putting on my panties and his T-shirt as quietly as I could. It hardly mattered. He wouldn’t have noticed Godzilla stepping on the building.

The A/C was working overtime, and my legs broke out in goosebumps as I walked to the kitchen. In the moonlight and streetlight, I filled my teakettle in the little sink and set it on the stove, on one of the two burners that worked. The microwave clock glowed softly green on the counter: 2:26. My kitchen took up exactly one wall of the apartment and left a lot to be desired; the counter space was about the size of a college textbook, and there was a stain on the bottom of the refrigerator that would never come out, not even with so much undiluted bleach that I’d coughed all day. But it was mine. This crappy little place, which didn’t feel any nicer after all these weekends with Brian in Louisville and L.A., was still my toehold on New York at the end of the day.

I bent a blind and stared out the window. A solitary light was on in the beauty school across the street. A bro stood down on the sidewalk, one hand jammed into his pocket and the other holding his phone to his face as he glanced back and forth. He suddenly nodded down the street, said something in a melodious Middle Eastern tongue, and started walking away. I let go of the blind, wiping my grimy finger on Brian’s shirt. He’d survive. It already wasn’t the worst thing I’d done to him this visit.

I stretched out on the couch, pulling a throw off the back of the couch and over my legs. I stared at a crack in the ceiling. Brian’s suitcases sat in the corner, next to my little TV. I knew if I unzipped one, I’d smell fabric softener and his cologne, clean and spicy and wonderful enough to bury my face in. Sometimes, I still smelled those things on my clothes at the end of a visit. It was an especially beautiful kind of pain I felt whenever I realized I bore that imprint of him on my person, not just in my heart.

I knew I was hurting him every day I pushed back against moving closer to him. Hadn’t I been so sure, though, that we’d hurt each other? Wasn’t I just fulfilling my own prophecy? Except this was the first time either of us had hurt the other, really. Loving him had proven so easy so far. It was the only easy part.

I hadn’t been lying to Alicia. He’d always vowed to support me no matter what, but the degree of his support was pretty evident: He wasn’t exactly volunteering to be my long-distance sugar daddy. He didn’t mind being that, he had said once, but only if he could actually enjoy my company.

I had considered, more than once, his subtle suggestion that I didn’t actually need to work if I was with him. It wasn’t 100% clear to me whether any of the guys’ wives did, although Howie and Kevin both had kids and A.J. would have one by Christmas. What, exactly, though, would I do if I stayed home? Write on my own terms, sure, an idea that appealed to me. But I hated the idea of sitting alone in that beautiful house for weeks or months at a time. I needed a job. I wouldn’t go without one.

I could probably handle a pay cut. Louisville had to be cheaper than New York. On the other hand, I’d probably have a car payment. Ugh. I drove once a year at best. Fuck that. Editors probably made OK money, though. I didn’t know how big LEO was. I’d flipped through it once or twice. It seemed like a nice little paper.

I sat bolt upright as I realized where my train of thought had gone. Wait, what?

On the stove, the teakettle whistled, louder than I’d expected. I hopped up from the couch and shut off the burner. I opened a cabinet and pulled out a stained white mug, opened another and rummaged through until I found a box of Bedtime Tea. There was one bag left. Score. I plunked it into the mug and poured hot water over the top.

As I waited for the tea to steep, I glanced at the microwave clock again. Christ, it was late. I squeezed my eyes shut and leaned a hip against the counter, playing with the string on the teabag. I hadn’t exactly been keeping schoolgirl hours since I’d been out of work, but I hated this time of night. It was lonely and too silent, and everything felt too close to the surface, so close that sometimes I wondered if I was losing my mind. If I woke up in the morning and Louisville seemed like a dumb idea again, I could always blame that.

The floor creaked. I opened my eyes to see Brian standing in front of me in his boxers, rubbing his eyes.

“Where’d you go?” he half-said, half-yawned.

“I couldn’t sleep. I’m just making some tea.” I smiled up at him. “Don’t worry about me.”

“’Course I worry about you.” He played with my hair, twirling a curl around his finger. I straightened up and wrapped my arms around his waist, and he pulled me close, still stroking my hair. “Of course I do,” he repeated softly.

I closed my eyes and laid my head on his shoulder. There was so much I wanted to say, so many words bubbling to the surface with my disorganized thoughts. But nothing felt as important or said as much as holding each other, and so we stood in silence while my tea and plans brewed.