Break in Case of Emergency (22 page)

Karina slouched against the empty filing cabinets, one thumb hooked jauntily in a belt loop. “You guys are stretched pretty thin today, huh?” she asked Jen and Daisy's backs. “A lot of meetings, I hear?” The arc of her voice placed the word
meetings
between quotation marks.

Jen turned around to face Karina. Daisy did not. “Yes, always busy after a holiday break,” Jen said.

“See, the problem is, if both of you are out and about, who is minding the shop?” Karina asked. “This is such a critical time in the growth and development of LIFt. Think of it, if you need to, like a newborn—helpless and hungry and a little messy, even—no fault of her own—and in need of constant attention.”

“Yes, absolutely,” Jen said. “I think we're still getting back into the post-holiday groove and catching up with lots of stuff that got postponed until after the New Year. Right, Daisy?” she asked, raising her voice slightly to ensure that Daisy could hear through her headphones.

Daisy took off her headphones but did not turn around. “I went to see
Avatar,
” she said to her monitor.

Karina shrugged merrily. “Can't argue with a woman's priorities!” she said.

“We'll be more vigilant in the future,” Jen said.

“All right, ladies, let's get right back on track tomorrow, okay?” She punched the air in a spirit of convivial competition, a gesture somewhere between a clubby chuck on the shoulder and a right jab.

“And by the way,
fabulous
bouquet, Daisy,” Karina added over her shoulder as she walked away. “You girls happen to know if Daisy has a secret suitor out there somewhere?” Karina asked the cubicle maze of indeterminately occupied assistants and interns as she passed by, not pausing for an answer.

“Oh, yeah, these came for you while you were out,” Daisy said to Jen, passing an enormous crystal vase of flowers over the cubicle wall: hellebores, vanda orchids, hydrangeas, baby roses. The note affixed to the vase was from Dakota, conveying Mrs. Flossie Durbin's praise and thanks for her finished portrait.

Mrs. Durbin wanted you to know that her portrait will hang in her newly redecorated and restored study—a place of meditation and reflection, where it will remind her always to aspire to be a better version of herself. P.S. Don't forget to look for Mrs. Durbin's latest blog post—should be up by the time you receive this!

“Have you looked for Mrs. Durbin's latest blog post?” Daisy asked over the wall.

“Read it to me,” Jen said, caressing her index finger over one of the hydrangeas.

“The coolly expert technical proficiency is warmed by a sunny presentation, an antidote to trying times,” Daisy recited. “The portraits risk being unfashionable, which is exactly what makes them à la mode. Recommend.”

Jen dipped her face into the bouquet, nuzzling it with closed eyes. “Daisy,” she said into the petals, “I never really got here, but I am leaving now.”

Nastygram Ladyparts
had their editorial up the next morning.

Terrible Rich-Person Scheme Remains Terrible

Human alimony-collection agency
Leeza Infanzia
has lately been looking for fresh new orifices that can stash her
Mobro 4000
barges full of cash. She seems to have found her ideal landfill in the form of the
Leora Infinitas Foundation
, a hallucinatory potluck where the fusion menu of philanthropic contributions has ranged from
Nigerian educational grants for Cameroonian
supermodels
to domain space for the
half-transcribed Klonopin fantasias
of miscellaneous second-string Brides of Finance. Lately, it seems, Leeza has been stacking surplus bills in the shape of a pyramid scheme: One of her minions posted—and just as quickly deleted—a breathless advertorial for a board member's company, something called BodMod Nutritionals
™
(screenshots below), which we assume is the kind of ashes-and-gelatin “miracle weight-loss supplement” you might spot amid the cocaine and syringes at the margins of a Soloflex shoot. Nice that the report's writer (who is also Leeza's
“executive director”
) took a fancy Caribbean holiday to provide gripping on-the-scene reportage on BodMod, when all she really had to do was stay up for the 4:10 a.m. infomercial slot between the ad for the
wearable
towel
and the ad for the
spray-on toupee
…

Ruby Stevens-Meisel's response appeared in
DOPENHAUER
a day later.

What is charity? In simplest terms, it is the act of helping those in need. It is not necessarily unreasonable to imagine that an inspiring portrait of good health and a globe-trotting entrepreneurial lifestyle might be an act of helping others to imagine themselves beyond themselves. We could call it a gift of possibility, a gift of motivation. Or we might imagine the odds that the adventurers themselves were in need of charity—perhaps the formidable Travis Paddock, the Healthy Huntsman, had somehow become the hunted, financially or emotionally or spiritually? Perhaps his enthralled observer was herself in thrall to some unseen crisis of health or judgment or vocation? Or a crisis of love, of devotion? This is pure speculation, of course—and if charity begins at home, so privacy needs to be preserved there as well. And perhaps the one who needs our charity the most right now is Leora Infinitas herself: Our gift to her can be the benefit of the doubt.

For Jen, the act of hitting send on the incriminating message should have broken the trance of reckless spiteful petty impulse—the trance of self-pity—that had created the message in the first place. And yet in the days and weeks that followed, Jen had remained safely inside the still pocket of time that had formed around her the instant that DanBrownsTheLostSymbol had logged off his local library computer terminal.

Part of the sustained calm may have been attributed to the neurochemical effects of the recent withdrawal of Sermoxal and equally sudden reintroduction of Animexa, the combination of which manufactured a soundproofing foam around Jen's central-nervous-system neurotransmitters and added a metallic sheen to her self-presentation as subtly but surely as it dilated her pupils.

Part of the sustained calm may have been attributed to the radio silence of the media at large—no other sites or publications picked up on the substance of
Nastygram Ladyparts
's umbrage or
DOPENHAUER
's muted disappointment—and of the LIFt executive braintrust, who remained hunkered down in the semi-isolated southern corridor in Leora's increasingly normalized absence. Jen and Daisy went nearly a week without sustaining a silent Karina ambush, nearly a week without serving as the audience for one of Sunny's impromptu rounds of jollity, which were always edged with Sunny's indignation at a perceived lack of jolly reciprocation—although Jen did recognize, even in her post-Sermoxal and High Animexa period of stainless-steel serenity, that the radio silence in itself could be cause for alarm.

And part of the sustained calm was induced by mere distraction: Following the publication of Mrs. Durbin's “Recommend,” Jen's inbox had absorbed a steadily rising tide of requests for commissions via her website.

Re: Contact Jen!

Can you paint my baby in a kind of late-Renoir style? He's kind of rosy and lumpy like a late Renoir, like a living, drooling, pooping rejection of Impressionism (jpg attached).

Re: Contact Jen!

My boyfriend and I are pre-engaged and we're trying to take a “whimsical,” “irreverent” approach to this whole wedding-industrial-complex thing. So we were thinking: Instead of doing the usual boring engagement-photo session, wouldn't it be awesome to have our portraits painted instead? We liked how you paint people to look PSYCHO because PSYCHO is how we feel when we think about all the wedding planning and mother-in-law managing we'll have to do over the next 14 months LOL!

Re: Contact Jen!

Do you do pet portraits? I would like you to paint my greyhound, Camelot. He is a happy soul, but he lacks the artistry to externalize it. However, I do not wish to anthropomorphize him.

“Jen?”

Jen looked up from a photograph of Camelot lounging in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles to see Jules the social-media intern standing in front of her.

“I'm sorry to bother you, but we were all just wondering—is there anything we can do? To help out?”

Jules was wearing a baby-pink woolen dickey over a herringbone sixties-style woolen minidress. Pinned to her dickey was a gigantic brooch made of multicolored semiprecious stones in the shape of a peacock.

“Help?” Jen asked.

“We just got the impression that morale is kind of low around here, and nobody's really talking about how they're feeling,” Jules said.

Jen kept staring at the peacock. The peacock's tail feathers contained yet concealed the image of a ballerina, slender arms raised over her head, each delicate hand cupping one of the peacock's eye-spots.

“And you know, maybe there's something we all can do,” Jules said. “Or we can all just make a time to talk to one another, clear the air.”

“I'm sorry, Jules,” Jen said, clearing her throat primly, “but I'm not sure what we're talking about.”

“The gossip online about—this—us,” Jules said. “The rumors. Just the
vibe.
”

“There's going to be a party,” Daisy said over the cubicle wall. “A morale-boosting party. Or a benefit or something. At Leora's apartment. Sunny was talking about having a gift suite, but they ramped it back to party favors.”

Jen smiled at Jules. “Hey, a party!” Jen said.

“Do you guys want to see?” Daisy asked. Without waiting for an answer, she rose and walked toward Leora's ad-hoc dressing room–slash–Petra's breast-milk-pumping room, Jen and Jules following uncertainly after her.

Daisy opened the door just as Petra was hastily exiting, her head ducked in bashful exasperation, clutching to her chest the anonymous black handbag with miscellaneous tubes and clamps popping out of its unzipped top. Behind the door stood Leora, Donna, Karina, and Sunny around a conference table covered in a bewilderingly colorful array of handicrafts, accessories, and artfully packaged baked goods. One chair was stacked with pinhole cameras constructed from recycled sari cloth and vintage fashion magazines. Another chair almost spilled over with handwoven wallets, purses, and a single lopsided tote from a Guatemalan weavers' collective that had recently received a LIFt grant.

Leora and Donna barely looked up at the intruders as Karina dug one hand around a clattering box full of hand-blown glass statement rings. Sunny strode toward the newcomers, fists pumping at her sides with aerobic enthusiasm, wearing an electrocuted smile.

“Thank
God
you guys are here,” Sunny exclaimed. “I have
no idea
how we're going to narrow all this down to four or five party favors, so you
have
to help us.”

“So, we're throwing a party!” Jen said inanely. “That's really cool!”

“Hells yeah!” Sunny said, waggling a beaded-and-feathered keychain to the side of her face as if it were an earring. “Because why should all the great parties happen during the holiday season? When people
really
need a pick-me-up in the dead of freakin'-frackin'
winter
—am I right or am I right? I know it's what
I
need—what a
week
we've had.”

“Come closer, ladies, please,” Leora said, staring at a potted white orchid. “We were just talking about how we
launched
the site, but we never
celebrated
it.”

“Which creates a paradox,” Donna said. “If we don't celebrate our launch, have we truly launched?”

“And we need some counterprogramming to combat all that trash on the Internet,” Sunny said.

Donna made a moist disgusted sound with which her bangles agreed. “Don't even oxygenate it, Sunny,” she said. “Let it wither and die of inattention. Make choices about the kinds of influences you let into your life.”

“So true,” Sunny said.

“It's just static,” Karina said. “All you have to do is change the channel.”

“Which is
precisely
what Jules and her team are out there doing every day,” Leora said, still staring at the orchid.

“It's like a secret cave of treasures in here,” Jules said.

“Is that orchid—a
cake
?” Leora asked, stepping closer to the pot and brushing the Guatemalan tote bag with her hip.

“These
are
treasures, Jen,” Donna said to Jules, fingering a color-block cashmere scarf, “but it's all about
message.
By choosing these gifts for our invitees, what message are we sending about LIFt's mission, about our grantees?”

“I'm Jules,” Jules said.

“I'm going into insulin shock just looking at this orchid,” Leora said.

“The things that we find beautiful reflect our values,” said Karina, fluffing her hair over the scarf she'd arranged in an intricate knot. “They aren't just a, you know,
material
thing.”

The tote bag shrugged, slumped, and, in three slow, deathly flops, drifted and fell off the chair onto the carpet.

“We can't deny the material, the corporeal,” Donna said, sniffing the cashmere. “But we can make it speak to our spirit.”

Leora looked down at the crumpled tote bag, its nubby woven handle splayed over one toe of her heels.

“People should look into their gift bag at the end of a beautiful night and not only be delighted but also know—feel—
exactly
what LIFt stands for,” Karina said.

Leora daintily extracted her foot from under the tote bag's handle, her mouth twisted in confusion.

“No one can take our message away from us, our mission,” Donna said. “Certainly not some nameless online nobody.”

“Stop oxygenating, will ya!” Sunny said.

Leora, still staring at the tote bag, limply kicked at it, once. Soundlessly, Sunny materialized at her side, plucked the tote bag off the floor, and sequestered the tote bag on its own chair across the room, as if the tote bag were to be quarantined for an unnamed contagion.