How Could She Page 6

  “I haven’t been reading much,” Rachel admitted. “I’m in the throes of a project.”

  Rachel had recently dragged “Gypsy Girl” from her desktop to her “Dormant” folder and started a new document called “Monsters!” It was unlike anything she’d ever written. She’d banged out nearly sixty pages in less than a month. Assuming Cassie Burkheim was right and the market for “realistic mythical-creature” stories was hot, she just might get another lunch with her agent.

  “Throes,” Jeremy repeated. “I like the sound of that. Usually when somebody says ‘throes,’ they’re talking about desperation. You’re so good with words.”

  Rachel said nothing. Desperation had something to do with it, too. She was determined to finish before Cleo grew old enough to see her mother wrapped up in worry and defeat.

  “Oh—there’s something I wanted to show you.” Jeremy rose from his seat and beckoned to Rachel.

  Not wanting to be alone with Jeremy, Rachel motioned for Geraldine to get up and join her.

  “Where are we?” Geraldine asked as Jeremy guided his visitors into a darkened room.

  “The guest suite,” he said. “It’s got its own bathroom and everything. I store my toys in here.”

  He flicked on the light. The queen-size bed in the corner was dwarfed by all manner of expensive junk, some of which was inspired by the design pages of the very magazine where Rachel worked.

  “What happened to the surfboard?” Rachel asked of the hand-painted piece he’d shown her last time she’d been here.

  “Renata gave it to a friend of hers who actually surfs.”

  “I thought you said you wanted Matt to teach you,” Rachel said with a laugh. Matt had all but given up trying to convert her into a surfer.

  “You think Matt has time to hang out with me? You should know better, Rachel. I have nothing on his beloved zebra fish.”

  Rachel was touched that Jeremy remembered what type of fish Matt worked on. His love for her husband was genuine. Rachel could tell that Geraldine was reevaluating Jeremy, too. He’d been goofier at dinner than he usually was around Geraldine. Perhaps it was the girlfriend effect.

  “You don’t see the new thing I got? Turn around.”

  Rachel did as instructed and squinted at a painting that was hanging over a love seat. Though her face was obscured by a bush of red hair, the waifish girl was indisputably Boo Mierke, a fashion editor–turned–jewelry designer who was a fixture on the smug-people circuit.

  “I know her!” Geraldine exclaimed. “We had a really nice conversation about Mexico. She’s friends with Sunny. I thought she’d be there at the library show. . . .”

  Now Rachel recognized more than the painting’s subject. “You bought a Sunny MacLeod?”

  “Indeed,” Jeremy said. “They had me over for dinner in December, and she showed me her studio. She was working on this at the time, and I was like, Want. Need.”

  “You should hang it out where everyone can see it,” Geraldine said. Rachel looked at her friend and felt a jolt of protectiveness. Her unrelenting adulation of Sunny was ridiculous. Jeremy, too. Did he really think his studio tour had been spur-of-the-moment?

  “Sunny might be our generation’s greatest genius,” Jeremy said.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Rachel said with an effortful laugh. “Don’t get me wrong, she’s incredibly talented. . . .” Rachel trailed off, not wanting to sound churlish and definitely not wanting to provoke Geraldine.

  “Anyhow, she’s way cheaper than Elizabeth Peyton, and the girl in the picture is cuter-looking, too. Sorry—the woman,” he said.

  Geraldine wasn’t listening. She’d moved over to the window and was gazing outside. The rain had let up, and the Hudson River ran dark and luminous, framed by a staggering of rooftops that overlapped like Matisse cutouts. “I can’t believe nobody uses this room,” she marveled.

  6

  Sunny hated the subway. She knew that this was an unpopular stance, and she did her best not to advertise it. Her unease at being trapped underground was too easy to mistake for snobbery. Usually she walked or biked, or she asked people to come to her corner of the world. Today she took a taxi. Traffic was worse than she’d accounted for; ten minutes after takeoff the vehicle was barely two blocks from where she’d hailed it. She was not going to be on time for her meeting at Cassette. This, too, would be mistaken for snobbery.

  An outdated sign that somebody had forgotten to take down from the window of her local pizzeria advertised heart-shaped pies. Sunny used to love Valentine’s Day. Now that she was thirty-seven, the holiday had lost its kitschy charm and become little more than a painful reminder of her predicament. For years she was unbothered by the prenup that Nick’s lawyer insisted upon. It had even given her a feeling of hard-won independence. At the rate her career was going, she was the one who should be making him agree to terms, she’d told Nick over their post-signing lunch. The baby thing wasn’t much of an issue. Sunny had never harbored fantasies of pushing a stroller or attending Mommy and Me music classes. She knew herself well enough to understand that caretaking was not her strength. When Nick was recovering from knee surgery last winter, Sunny had filled his hospital room with poppies and snuck in his favorite cabernet franc in a thermos. But she was secretly, awfully grateful when her editor, Miriam, had written to say there was a last-minute change in page count and they would have more space than they’d accounted for. Sunny had offered to run to her studio to bang out an additional item.

  Nick was in no shape to become a father again, and at least he was self-aware enough not to be trying to spread his seed. His separation from Zoya had hardly done wonders for Agnes, who’d landed in therapy before she even learned to read. He felt terrible about the girl and had a funny way of dealing. Unless you counted picking stupid fights with Sunny over things like her disappointing grasp of current affairs, as he’d done last night. Sunny had resisted pointing out that Nick was too busy traipsing around the world to raise his daughter. He’d missed the bulk of Agnes’s most recent visits, owing to work crises. The last time he and Agnes had been together, Nick had challenged her to a game of Scrabble. When he called her out for consulting her iPad on a word, she swept all the pieces off the board and said the game was boring and so was he. Nick handled the incident admirably, showing his daughter how to make a malted-peanut-butter milk shake. Soon after Agnes left, Sunny found him staring out at the garden and not just tearing up but fully crying. He had enough on his hands. But recently Sunny had found herself, if not wanting, then certainly wondering about having something tiny and warm and entirely her own.

  The cab suddenly broke through traffic and sped up Sixth Avenue, and Sunny leaned her head back against the pleather seat. She needed to save her energy for the performance she would have to put on at the office. All the staffers had gone to Ivy League schools and had the social skills of staplers. They stared at her from their workstations and waited for her to talk, and she had to fill the air with references to her quirky travels and friends and obsessions. There was something profoundly sad about these once-brilliant people who clung to their perches in corporate media as if there were a chance in hell the industry would take care of them. Get out while you still can, Sunny wanted to tell them all, but she had to pretend to be operating under the same misapprehension as the rest of them. How else to justify the silly rate she charged for her column? The world certainly thought she was worth something. Sunny did, too. But, just lately, not with the same vehemence. She wondered if this new insecurity had come with age and if she should address it directly in her work—but no, she was still too young for that. She’d save it for once she turned forty.

  Sunny walked out from the elevator bank to find Miriam waiting for her star columnist. Miriam had on a navy blazer that enhanced her gargantuan shoulders. She was really into rock climbing, Sunny remembered.

  “They’ve just begun,” Miriam
whispered, ushering Sunny through a pair of ID-protected double doors. “Everyone’s in there.” Before Sunny could apologize for being late, Miriam said, “I’m so sorry for this nonsense. Thank you for coming.”

  All forty or so people assembled in the Luce Room looked up when Miriam entered with Sunny. The woman at the head of the table shot the latecomers a disapproving look, while Ceri, the editor in chief, appeared to melt in ecstasy at the sight of Sunny, who had cupped her hand over her mouth in a pantomime of embarrassment. Ceri had been a star fashion editor in the nineties and still wore wispy bangs and gold hoop earrings the size of bracelets.

  Sporting slightly smaller hoops, Miriam pointed out a free chair at the table, near Ceri. Sunny instead chose to head to the back of the room and clambered up onto a spot on top of a massive filing cabinet that was serving as an overflow bench. As far as she could tell, the talk was about expenses and the need to clearly itemize them. Sunny felt herself zoning out; she just sent her receipts to an assistant at the magazine. The woman to Sunny’s left pulled her phone out from under her notebook and looked down at a text from a sender named Mom: Cleo just made a beautiful poopie.

  Sunny sat up straighter and glanced at her neighbor. If Rachel Ziff’s hair hadn’t been hanging over her face, Sunny would have instantly recognized her, especially considering all the thought she’d recently been giving to Peter. Rachel looked more or less the same, she now saw, with her moon face and milky blue eyes.

  Sunny’s thoughts wandered as the meeting droned on. She could recall the morning Rachel showed up for work at Province, brazenly flouting the custom of all-black office attire that every entry-level hire wore on her first day at the magazine. Rachel swooshed in wearing a cheeky nameplate necklace and a knee-length pleated skirt that took up a hell of a lot of space. Rachel was supposed to be an assistant, but Sunny never saw her ask senior staffers if she could help with anything. No, she strutted around the office as if she were its star correspondent and dropped the fact that she was from Brooklyn whenever she could. Rachel avoided putting together the sidebars that editors typically stuck on newbies. Her first piece was published two weeks after she began. It was about being the new girl at an office, written from her own point of view, with tips from career-management experts woven into her tale of feeling out of place. Sunny didn’t buy it. The new girl seemed plenty comfortable.

  A week or so after Rachel’s start date, Sunny meandered over to the kitchen, where Rachel was preparing a cup of instant noodles. But before she could think of what to say, Rachel waved. “Hi. I’m Rachel.”

  “We’ve already met,” Sunny said.

  “Right—you do layouts! Stella, right?”

  “Sunny. I’m an art director. And I do a lot of the illustrations.”

  “Sunny!” Rachel play-slapped her forehead. “Sorry, I knew it had to do with the sky. Can I ask you a favor?” She lowered her voice to a whisper and turned around. “I just got my period. Everything look okay back there?”

  Sunny was so stunned that it took her a second to understand what Rachel was asking her to do. She squinted at the seat of Rachel’s cream tuxedo pants. “You’re fine,” she managed. She’d given Françoise, her direct boss, an account of this incident, and from that point on, the art team referred to Rachel among themselves as Code Red.

  Sunny wasn’t sure what offended her more—that Rachel’s lack of consideration was a violent affront to Sunny’s Canadian sensibility or that she’d been too busy disrupting the magazine’s ecosystem to learn that Sunny did not sit at the bottom of the pyramid, as her “layouts” gaffe had implied. Sunny was a proper artist. She had a studio in Chinatown that she shared with a ceramicist, and she’d had a show of her paintings at a used-book store on Queen Street East. Everyone else knew that.

  Sunny glanced at Rachel’s hands, which now rested on top of her phone, obstructing the screen. There was something else that bothered Sunny. Of all the people in the Greater Metropolitan Area of Toronto for Rachel to zero in on, she had chosen Geraldine. Geraldine was Sunny’s closest friend at work, and given all the hours they spent in the office, sometimes staying well after everybody had stopped working and departed for rounds of whiskey sours, Geraldine was Sunny’s closest friend, period. Sunny did not appreciate Rachel’s encroachment. The three of them had ended up having drinks one night when Rachel was still new in town, after they all ran into one another at a Thai restaurant. Rachel had been so aggressive, bragging about her screenwriter boyfriend and then interrogating Sunny about the cost of her shoes, tasseled Prada loafers that Rachel recognized from a magazine. “I don’t know,” Sunny murmured. Her mother had sent them as a gift.

  A few months later, Geraldine obtained tickets to a secret Tragically Hip show at Lee’s Palace and begged Sunny to give Rachel a second chance. The three met up at a wine bar, and Rachel was at it again, yammering about a poor guy she’d run out on before the dessert course—so much for the screenwriter. Then she pivoted to how she’d never heard the Tragically Hip until a week ago, practically flaunting her ignorance. “You make her nervous,” Geraldine preemptively told Sunny when Rachel went to the washroom. “She’s cool, trust me.”

  Rachel more or less ruined the concert for Sunny, dancing until she was shiny with sweat. Even when the band played “Wheat Kings,” the song that Sunny cried to over and over in grade nine, when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, Rachel kept spinning around with a smile on her fat face. Sunny didn’t care how funny Ed said he found Rachel’s pieces on hanging out in the Blue Jays dugout or trying a liquid diet; she didn’t care how fascinated he was by the new girl’s New York pedigree. Sunny just hoped Rachel would find whatever she’d come looking for and go away.

  But she was forever at hand, even when they both moved on to a city of eight million people. Sunny could hardly escape hearing about Rachel, whose circumstances were a sorry comedown from all she had left behind. Sunny had been in town for a couple of years when she ran into Rachel. They were at the same party, for Re-Vision, and Sunny offered to help her get published. She’d taken pity on Rachel but instantly regretted making the suggestion. Rachel had been completely ungrateful, muttering something snotty about her lack of experience with magazines that paid in prestige. If Rachel was so obsessed with money, she should have gone into private equity.

  To go by what Rachel was wearing to today’s meeting, her money troubles had yet to let up. She’d shown up in a basic striped boatneck T-shirt and Levi’s. As the woman droned on about what was and was not “appropriate,” something came over Sunny, and she elbowed Rachel in the ribs. “I didn’t realize you still worked here,” she whispered. Rachel gave her a shrug and went back to texting her mother. Sunny’s face tensed. No good deed.

  Through Geraldine, Sunny had dimly followed Rachel’s progress from hotheaded twenty-five-year-old lifestyle journalist to magazine editor–slash–teen novelist. When she was browsing at the Strand one day, Sunny had flipped through one of Rachel’s books and confirmed it was cheesy and childish. It certainly wasn’t what Sunny would have imagined Rachel would end up doing. She never would have pictured Rachel getting married under a chuppah on Long Island, the beginnings of Cleo swelling beneath her lace wedding dress. Sunny always found it odd when people acted so determined to become, before hitting forty, abjectly normal.

  She reached into her bag and found a graph-paper notebook. “Did I miss anything important?” she wrote, and slid the paper onto her neighbor’s lap.

  “HR reminded us not to fuck the interns,” Rachel wrote back, then looked up at Sunny. Her gaze was heavy-lidded, slightly cutting. Rachel definitely hated her. Maybe it was the thrill of feeling rejected, but Sunny found herself drawn to Rachel. She was still pretty, just more guarded than when they’d been young. The woman at the front of the room went from rambling about Uber receipts and workplace conduct—“If you have to ask whether it’s appropriate, you have your answer”—to the ethics of writing
about friends and taking freebies. “Do not accept a trip to GoldenEye in Jamaica unless the invitation comes from James Bond himself and you have run it by every appropriate channel and it has been deemed absolutely necessary. The only favors the magazine should be accepting are those you can offer yourselves.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” Rachel whispered, and Sunny tittered.

  “I don’t need to tell you that recent events have upended the standing of the media,” the woman went on. “Our president has declared us the enemy. You might not think this relates to glossy magazines, but it does. We can’t afford to make missteps. Our reputation is all we have.”

  Sunny stopped listening. She made art, not propaganda. Which isn’t to say she wasn’t political. She’d marched. She was angry, in a Canadian way. But Trump had had enough victory. He wasn’t going to impinge on her work.

  “And while we have everybody assembled,” Ceri said, “I’m going to add a few points. We’re not content until we have maximized content. Make videos. Take pictures. Make sure everything you work on is alive and well on social media. We need to do more with our resources.”

  “Exactly.” Miriam jumped in. “Don’t think you can get away with not meeting your web quota. You all know how many posts are expected of you. So let’s get to it.”

  “How am I supposed to write my column without accepting bribes?” Sunny murmured when the meeting was over. Rachel granted her a wearily amused nod.

  From across the room, Miriam gestured at Sunny, moving her fingers as if trying to create a safe space between Sunny and anyone else. Sunny pretended not to notice and fixed her eyes on Rachel.