Babe, are you okay? I texted Evan. If you don’t feel like talking, that’s okay. I set the phone to vibrate with his response.
Jen’s playlist was basic. I didn’t know anything about her story or what she’d overcome. It was just four minutes of alternating pistol squats with no purpose or meaning behind them. “Let the feeling show you how strong you are,” she said. O rly?
The last thing I would ever want to do is hurt someone, Evan texted. I had Kimberly Hartsong’s enthusiastic consent but you wouldn’t know that from what she said on Richual. It’s so isolating. No one cares what I have to say.
I do, I wrote back, in plank pose, making a game of it, holding it even after Jen said we were done.
Sometimes I fantasized about quitting Richual. I know this amazing team will continue its mission of healing work without me! I would write in my goodbye post. I would have been with Evan if I could. It wasn’t as though I needed the salary. The company was standing between us and what our relationship could be if we had more time to work on it. I could rehabilitate his image in the press. We could volunteer to plant an organic vegetable garden with students in Harlem. We could sit next to each other at a silent vipassana retreat in Myanmar, eating oatmeal without speaking, watching our thoughts come and go without speaking, having sex without speaking. I pictured us in black tie at a gala to raise money to treat obstetric fistulas in Africa. There was so much more you could do if you didn’t have to work. I never told Maren how much I hated working because I knew she would say that was unfeminist and it was super important to her that I be a feminist with her.
I was twenty-nine years old and I’d never really had a boyfriend. I dated men who begged me to eat a bacon cheeseburger so they could watch, who wanted to give me a good dicking while I alternated between three-legged dog pose and plow pose and happy baby pose like I was an ensemble member of Cirque du Soleil, who told me to just “relax” and have a beer even after I told them I was gluten free. All the work I put into my body—who was it even for? For guys who got off on the idea of fitting something big inside something small? It wasn’t for other women. They didn’t like me. Pictures of my face and body stood in for everything they hated about privileged white women whose lives were so easy.
The way that Evan touched me, stroked me, licked me, looked at me, denied me, tied me up, made the rules, made me wait, made me think This is what my body is for. I couldn’t imagine ever meeting anyone else I’d have the same chemistry with. I didn’t understand why Evan even needed to go after these other women who didn’t want to submit the way I did.
* * *
...
At the Halloween party in 2015, Maren went as Furiosa, and in her boots, my head only came up to her boobs. I was Margot Tenenbaum, but I got too hot in my mink coat from the RealReal and had to drape it over an ottoman and then no one recognized who I was, even with the red barrette and the perfect raccoon eyes. “Lolita?” someone guessed. I gestured with my unlit cigarette. “Gwyneth Paltrow?” someone dressed like a judge with a frilly neck ruffle said and I said yes, and we talked about an article I’d read that said G.P. smoked one cigarette a week and whether or not that was a better form of balance than total abstinence because at least you’re not depriving yourself.
The mixer was at a WeWork on Park Avenue South, in a common space adorned with crystal chandeliers. The ginormous gourmet cheese platters from Murray’s on the coffee tables remained mostly untouched.
“We should separate,” Maren said, folding an entire sheet of prosciutto into her mouth. “And network.” She wanted us to try out our idea—a time management app that would help you find more minutes in your day for self-care and schedule it—on other female entrepreneurs, the busiest people of all.
I asked for a glass of sauv blanc with a splash of sparkling water from the bartender and tried the pitch I’d practiced with Maren on a girl in a sexy tampon costume. “And our revenue would come from partnering with barre studios or Drybar or spin studios or those salons where the fish eat the dead skin on your feet, like as a referral fee, for users booking directly through the app.” I couldn’t tell if she was really listening to me because she was trying to adjust the cup padding in her white leotard.
“Have you considered gamifying?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like you get points for how much you do to take care of yourself and you can compete with your friends!”
“Would you use that?”
“You can tell this is blood, right?” She was wearing a pair of red boy shorts on top of the leotard, and red tights.
“Yeah, it’s super cute,” I said. “So if we made a game where you and your friends tried to see who was the best at taking care of themselves, that’s something you would play?”
“That’s not exactly what I meant,” the tampon said. “Excuse me, but I have to go say hi to this person I haven’t seen in forever!”
I felt like I had messed something up—I should have asked what she was working on first and then shown active listening by saying mmm and repeating back what she said, before I started talking about myself. I needed to find the ladies’ room so I could do some mindfulness exercises in private, but then I noticed Snow White sitting down at the edge of the ottoman where I’d left my coat, running her hands up and down, and mouthing It’s real to a friend dressed as a pumpkin spice latte with “Britni” written across her midriff. Then Snow White reclined all the way, treating my mink like a bedspread on Game of Thrones. I felt hot all over again, and the place in my brain where I should have been able to find the words to ask her to stop doing that, please, was empty. It reminded me of high school, when I’d walked into English class to find a new transfer student sitting in my desk and instead of saying something, I spent the rest of the year sitting in the back of the room with the drug addicts, who convinced the teacher to take us on a field trip to a local mental hospital where famous poets were once detained. I needed to find a bathroom.
“Is that Margot Tenenbaum?”
At first I didn’t recognize him. I hadn’t seen Evan in three years and he had more facial hair now.
“Oh my god, hi!” I said and gave him a hug. He held onto me a little longer than I expected and we were so close that I could smell the lemony bergamot and salty sea spray of his Acqua Di Gio cologne.
“Hey, I’m sorry about your dad,” Evan said.
“It’s okay,” I said. I put the cigarette to my lips, forgetting it was unlit. Felt like an idiot. Rolled my eyes at myself so he would know I felt like an idiot. Replayed the hug my arms still remembered.
“No, I should have been there at the funeral. I’m sorry. I went down to Nicaragua for an immersive language program and ended up staying to redesign their website and set up their social accounts and teach them how to target Facebook ads to assholes like me. Lo siento.”