“I approved your first expense report today,” she said, changing the subject. “Ten Gs, not a bad start. I like how you got really creative in the notes section and threw all caution to the wind in terms of attaching receipts.”
Remembering the money made my stomach lurch. Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph (this was my mother’s voice in my head now, not Robert’s), how had I gotten myself into this? This was so not me. I didn’t even download music illegally. I’d never in my life ingested an illicit drug. I crossed the street only at crosswalks. And you know what else? It was true that I didn’t have many friends, as Emily so assiduously pointed out, but that was because I didn’t really like people all that much. Other people were usually more trouble than they were worth, so I preferred to be alone. Yet here I was having a slumber party with one of the stars of American Hustle. She was in my bed!
Emily pointed her cookie up at the ceiling rain bubble. “Think it’ll pop?”
Hell is other people.
In my mind I recited a whiskey-infused poem: What happens to a rain bubble deferred? Does it just sag like a heavy load? Or does it explode?
The tribulations of being a former English major.
“I kind of hope it pops,” Emily said. “Even though it’ll make a huge nasty mess.”
4
IN THE WEEKS that passed from that first night Emily Johnson knocked on my door until the morning Margie Fischer cornered us, I learned a number of things. I learned how easy it is to acquire a calculating blond girl as your roommate, especially one who doesn’t pay rent and likes to boss you around. I learned that pretty blond girls don’t always wake up so pretty, and in the evenings they often have gas. And finally, I learned that Emily Johnson, the portrait of popularity, was secretly as friendless as I was—otherwise why else would she be spending so much time with me all of a sudden?
The air mattress had just appeared on the floor one day, wedged between the radiator and my dresser, fully inflated, covered in pink sateen sheets and a white comforter. But I still woke up most mornings to find Emily sleeping beside me like a sneaky pet, her bony elbow or knee digging into my side.
I was supposed to be an island. An island unto myself, like John Donne famously said, or was it Buddha? John Donne might have said no man is an island, but whatever, either way, I was not into having somebody else around all the time—somebody who tried to ride the train with me to work every morning and who interrupted me, without fail, every time I settled in at night to catch up on the latest episode of something on HBO GO. “Who’s that?” Emily would ask, commandeering my bowl of popcorn. “Why’s he so mad?” “What’s with all the bad wigs on this show?”
“Shouldn’t we avoid showing up to work together?” I would argue. “Wouldn’t it be better to avoid being associated with each other in any way?”
I even tried: “If you start watching this show now, you’re going to get a major spoiler.”
But Emily wasn’t worried. I was the worried one.
Emily wanted to talk about it constantly—what she adoringly referred to as our scheme, like it was our love child, like we were its baby mamas. She was all uses and wes, cooing googly-eyed at her rapidly dwindling student-loan balance.
It occurred to me (probably much later than it should have) that it was highly unlikely that Emily would let me put a stop to the scheme even after the last of her debt was paid off.
But it turned out not to matter, because Margie Fischer happened.
The morning that Margie Fischer cornered us, Robert was really in a huff. Around eleven a.m. he screamed to me from his office in a tone of voice that could only be called desperate, while pantomiming a drinking motion with his hand. He pointed at red-faced Glen Wiles, who was seated across from him perched forward in his chair, poised to have a heart attack at any moment, and then at himself.
“With lime,” he mouthed through the glass walls of his office.
That meant tequila. Before noon. It was going to be a long day.
A lesser man than Glen Wiles would have crumbled beneath the stress of such a meeting, but fortunately Wiles, like Robert, thrived on pressure, ambition, and cutthroat competition. On money, basically. So much money. Glen Wiles was a blundering brute, whereas Robert was a stickler for good manners, but aside from that, they were pretty much on the same page. Politically, they were two sides of the same coin, and that coin had better be free of government regulation of any kind.
When I brought them their drinks Robert had been talking about the islands—which he abruptly stopped doing the moment I entered the room.