“Isabel.” Jason sounded as though he were speaking to a small child. “We didn’t say that your role will shift, just that it could shift.”
Isabel’s eyes went from Mack to Jason and then back again. “I just…I don’t understand. Is this all because of the meeting yesterday?”
Mack tilted his head to the side, as though considering this. “Look, the meeting yesterday didn’t help, certainly, but we’ve been taking a hard look at all of our teams and we’re going to be making some changes. Casper’s last day is Friday and it just seemed like a good time to try to shake things up a bit. This is a startup, Isabel—things are always going to be changing and evolving and iterating. If one thing doesn’t work, we need to be able to pivot and start something new. You get it, right? It’s nothing personal.”
“Of course,” Isabel said. Mack stood up, and then Jason and Isabel did too. Isabel was avoiding making eye contact with him. “Why would it be.” Was she…about to cry? Mack had never seen Isabel cry, now that he thought about it. He suddenly remembered when he’d hooked up with a woman who’d cried when they had sex a couple years ago. After the third or fourth time, he told her, while they were still both naked, that he didn’t really think this was going to work out and then she’d just started crying harder, and he’d rubbed her shoulders for a minute and then whispered into her ear, “I’m gonna head out,” and gotten dressed and left.
Now he was feeling the same level of discomfort, and all he could think was Isabel needs to get out of my office. “Okay, then, we’ll talk. Thanks.” No one moved and he saw tears starting to well up in Isabel’s eyes. Why wasn’t Jason doing anything? He needed both of them out of his office. “Jason, would you and Isabel mind just…”
Jason understood immediately what was happening. “Yes, of course. Come on, Isabel, let’s leave Mack alone.” Isabel sniffled and turned around and walked out of his office, Jason behind her. Right before Jason walked through the door he turned around and rolled his eyes at Mack. Women, he mouthed, and Mack had to stare very intently at the floor to keep from laughing.
17
No Children
AS KATYA WAS about to leave work, her phone vibrated with a text from Victor: hey come meet me & nilay & some other ppl @ tippler? The Tippler was a bar in the basement of Chelsea Market popular with people who worked at Google, which had office space upstairs in addition to the company’s block-long building across the street. Nilay had worked at Google before he and Victor had started their company, and he was still friends with his former coworkers. Katya sighed. She didn’t particularly feel like spending her evening around a bunch of Googlers. They were a cultish, secretive group, always working on some new product within Google that they were sure was going to change the world, and yet she found them strangely risk-averse. If they really wanted to be revolutionaries, Katya reasoned, they wouldn’t be working for a gajillion-dollar multinational corporation; they’d be striking out on their own. But once you got used to in-house chefs and massage rooms, it was hard to give them up, and so there was also an edge to Googlers, a resentment that they were trapped by golden handcuffs. They all thought they had the potential to be the next Sergey Brin or Larry Page themselves, and that their genius had not yet been fully recognized. So even though she didn’t have a ton of respect for Nilay, this was one aspect of him that she did admire: he had walked away from Google and taken a leap into the unknown. It had failed, sure, but at least he had tried.
She could already picture the scene at the Tippler: it would be crowded, and it would take forever to get a drink, and Victor would be off trying to network, and when she’d finally found a quiet corner she’d get hit on by a junior software engineer with bad breath. But it was eight p.m., the TechScene office was deserted, and she didn’t have anywhere else to be. yeah ok i’ll head over there, she texted back. He responded with the fist-bump emoji.
It was about a twenty-minute walk from the TechScene office over to the bar, and Katya took the opportunity to smoke two cigarettes. She had a Google doc going with her notes about Mack and Isabel, but she’d read them over that afternoon and it felt like she didn’t have much to work with. She was starting to worry—not panic, but worry, just a little bit—that she wasn’t going to be able to get everything she needed to actually publish the article. Or at least, not the article that it seemed like Dan wanted her to write, which was essentially a takedown of Mack McAllister that would expose the hypocrisy of the tech world once and for all.
She stubbed out her cigarette at the corner of Fifteenth Street and Ninth Avenue and put on some bright red lipstick. She rubbed her lips together and picked up her phone and turned the camera toward her so she could see herself. “Okay,” she said out loud. One block down, the Apple Store emitted a warm glow. She crossed Ninth, and halfway down Fifteenth Street, at the bottom of some stairs, there was a nondescript door that looked like the entrance to a store. There was a bored-looking guy guarding it.
“Private party tonight,” he said, looking her up and down. She was in one of her standard outfits—black jeans, black Docs, leather jacket. Her nails had chipped black polish on them. Was this inspection supposed to make her feel self-conscious? It made her feel defiant. Hey, fuck you, bouncer guy. This was uncharitable, she knew, but private party? Since when did the Tippler have bouncers and private parties?