“What the fuck, Katya,” he said.
“What am I supposed to say?” she said. She was finding herself, lately, having less patience for Victor’s self-pity, because it was highlighting an uncomfortable truth about their relationship. Before StrollUp imploded, there had been an unspoken understanding that what he was doing was more important than what she was doing, that the pressure he was under dwarfed hers. But then their roles had shifted and now she was the only one with a job, and Victor couldn’t handle the new dynamic. And, truth be told, maybe she couldn’t either. She didn’t even want to mention what Dan had said to her at work or that she too was under a lot of pressure. “So your company didn’t work out. It happens every day! I write about it every single day. Most startups fail. That’s just a fact. And it’s better that it failed now, when you only put twelve people out of work, than later, when you’d have to fire hundreds of people.”
Victor rolled back over and stared at her. “Okay, but not every startup that fails is your boyfriend’s startup. I’m not one of those lame startup guys you’re always writing about.” Katya had no retort to that and in fact began to feel a little bad about what she had said. After all, Victor wasn’t one of those lame startup guys, even though at first she had thought he was—well, not necessarily a lame startup guy, but one of those dudes who just ate, breathed, slept their companies. Which Victor did, but he was different. He talked to his mom every week, slipping into a Spanglish that Katya found endearing and familiar—even though it was in a different language, it was the same way she spoke to her parents in Russian. He played a weekly touch football game on Saturday mornings in McCarren Park with his college friends, guys who were lawyers and writers and teachers and bankers and doctors, and one Sunday, a couple months after they had started seeing each other, he cooked carnitas—his grandmother’s recipe, he said—all day on the dingy, tiny stove she had never used but that he said was superior to his brand-new one because it was gas. She took his word for it and even though pork wasn’t usually something she ate, she ate Victor’s carnitas tacos until she felt more full than she ever had in her life, and that was when she knew that her stubborn (some, including most of her ex-boyfriends, might say cold) heart was beginning to open itself up.
That night, they slept deliberately not touching, but in the morning Katya got up at seven thirty and walked down the street to Brooklyn Label and got two black coffees and a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich for Victor and woke him up by waving it in front of his face. He sat up and smiled and ate the sandwich in her bed, which normally she would have forbidden, the covers pulled up over his naked legs, and she sat up in bed next to him and drank her coffee and then when he finished the sandwich, she leaned over and kissed him. Then he was taking off her T-shirt and leggings and they were rolling around on her bed. Katya loved Victor’s tight, smooth muscles; she loved the way he threw her down and kissed her everywhere. Then her phone trilled insistently. A text message. They ignored it and continued kissing, but then it went off again, and Victor stopped and groaned, and Katya, too, was distracted, and then again it went off and she realized that they both had the Pavlovian instinct to look at a phone when it buzzed—not even necessarily to respond, but to look, to find out who or what was so insistently trying to contact them—and so Victor rolled off her and she groped for her phone on the nightstand. She was now, in the light of day and the lingering smell of the bacon, egg, and cheese, feeling a little bad about how she had reacted the night before. She found her phone and turned it over to find three texts from Dan. The first one: hey. The second one: Been thinking about what we could get you going on. The third: Hope it’s not weird that I’m texting you this early, just thought of it and was excited.
“What is it?” Victor propped himself up on his elbow.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just a work thing.”
6
Keeping Up Appearances