My coworker Nina has to give her first big presentation. She’s been staying late for weeks working on it, and she’s nervous about it, so I’ve stayed late a few nights too, helping her, because I feel for her, I know what it’s like just starting out, and also I don’t have a lot going on these days otherwise. On one of these nights she expresses her anxiety about her career, the sense that she’ll be found out as an impostor. “I feel like I have this big secret, and the secret is that I don’t know what I’m doing and it’s only a matter of time before they find out,” she says. I tell her she’s as talented and qualified as anyone else. What I don’t tell her is she probably can do better than this job and she should get out now. But actually it’s a pretty good job for someone her age, it’s just not a good job for someone my age, and maybe the conversation I should be having is with myself.
Our boss, Bryce, has been there too, a few evenings, and he’s stopped by our cube and murmured vaguely supportive yet unhelpful things. Like: “You two. Look at you two. Working.” And: “I’m impressed by your commitment to your work but don’t stay too late. Remember: life-work balance.” He has a small cottage in the Hamptons and a wife who works at another big agency and also a boat, and he has pictures of all of those things in his office, though not in the same frame. One night Bryce looks over our shoulders at the work in progress and makes Nina needlessly move a pixel. “Put it back,” I say after he leaves. “I promise you he’ll never notice.” But she keeps it where it is.
The weekend before the presentation I have an awful conversation with a man I am seeing named Matthew. It is awful for myriad reasons. Then I go home and have an equally terrible phone conversation with my mother. Must every discussion end in tears? Must every meal? Must every breath? Right now, yes. I decide I need an extra day off, so on Monday I call in sick and smoke pot all day and order pizza and Diet Coke on Seamless and consume all of these things by myself, and when I’m done I go for a walk on the waterfront. I think about death on this walk, my own mortality and that of every person to whom I’m related. I stand on the end of a pier next to a construction site. This is how people used to do it a long time ago, just throw themselves off the edge of something, quietly, a lonely death, yet a romantic one, nearly heroic or at least bold, a big leap in the air into the distance, a powerful splash waiting for you, and then great gallons of water inside of you until you can no longer breathe, until you are sunk, your last thought perhaps: Will they miss me when I’m gone? But more likely, simply: Oh.
Only this isn’t the ocean, this is the East River, and I wouldn’t die this way, this far a leap is nothing, twenty feet perhaps, and death seems unavailable to me in that moment, and anyway I only wanted to consider it as a concept. So I go home instead, drink half a bottle of wine, masturbate, pass out, wake up the next morning, and go to work, because today is Nina’s presentation and I can’t wait to see how she does.
So here is what happens: she shows up for work in a tight dress made of lavender strips that appear to be bandaged around her body. How did you get that on? is a question I want to ask but do not. She looks amazing. She is pinkie-thin and the dress is flattering, but also a little sleazy. Like there’s Nina, all of her, all the little mounds and curves of Nina, packaged in rayon. It is not office wear. It is Nina wear.
Also: full makeup, blowout, smells fantastic, diamond earrings, heels, everything.
I try to remember what I wore for my first presentation, and even though I can’t, because it was more than a decade ago, I know it was nothing like that. I skew toward black, classic dark New York mystery—or is it apathy? Nina’s a designer through and through. She understands the full package. She is also twenty-six and has been on Instagram since college and knows about angles and looks and desires in a way I can never understand or care about, or at least care about anymore.
“You look nice,” I say.
“This old thing,” she says, and she barely smiles. All that glamour and she’s still nervous. I love her for caring, I love her for trying.
“You got this, Nina,” I say.
During her presentation it is hard not to stare at her as a physical object because she is young and lovely and there are all those mounds, too. I watch the eyes of everyone else in the room to see if they are paying attention to her flesh or her words. The only ones looking consistently at Nina are Bryce and me, and he’s required to pay attention. If this presentation is for anyone, it’s him. I’ve worked with him for a long time. He’s good at maintaining focus, or at least appearing to. Everyone else is interested in their devices, looking up at her only on occasion. In my day, men would have given her all the male gaze available. I can’t decide if this is progress or an insult.
I think about when I used to dress that way, not in that dress, obviously, but in that flesh. I will never do it again. I have learned all kinds of lessons from dressing that way, great lessons, terrible lessons, boring lessons, all of them, the big one being no matter how much you own yourself and your body and your mind, there are men who will always try to seek power over your body, even if it is just with their eyes, although often it is with their words and sometimes with their hands.
Watching Nina, I feel like I am relearning all these lessons at once, a fluttering of images from my own life across her flesh. I suck in a big, loud, anxious breath and everyone looks at me. “Sorry,” I say, and pluck a small ham sandwich from the catering tray. Somebody had to take the first sandwich. Soon everyone else follows suit, and we are all eating at once while Nina talks. Apologies, Nina.