Everybody Has Everything - By Katrina Onstad Page 0,13
who delivers dry cleaning, emergency nanny agencies, car services that drive children to music lessons. At one point, one of them looked up from typing into her phone and said: “Okay, who do I hire to screw my husband?” Everybody laughed.
One statistic lodged in Ana’s head from that afternoon: for every ten male lawyers at her firm, there was one-half a woman. Ana pictured that half-woman lawyer, sliming along the hallway on her stumpy armless torso.
The girl looked straight ahead, put her cigarette between her lips a little defiantly. “I don’t know. It’s okay. It’s not really what I want to do. I guess I’m not supposed to admit that to the boss.”
“I’m not the boss,” said Ana, so quickly that they both knew it to be false. “So what do you want to do, then?”
“I want to make movies. Maybe documentaries. About bands, maybe.” Before she even finished the statement, her defiance drained away, as if this were the most unrealistic dream a person could hold. Her voice turned into a mumble. “I don’t know.”
It struck Ana as unlikely that this limp girl had some affinity for rhythm in her, that she liked back rooms, electric guitars. Maybe she was one of those girls who gets used. Maybe she stood at the front of the stage and stared upwards, inserted herself in the band’s stopover, became a joke between a drummer and a bassist the next morning.
“My husband makes documentaries,” said Ana. “For TV.”
“Really?” Ruth looked at Ana sideways. Ana felt something: They didn’t like each other. Ana tried to pull the girl back from the brink of this mutual realization, to distract her with kindness.
“He works in public television. You should meet him. Maybe he could help you out.” Why had she said this? The thought of Ruth, in Ana’s house in her mis-buttoned sweater, mumbling at James’s feet. This was the type of girl who would love James, and James would be kind to her, would perform for her, tap-dancing through his latest thought. It would be both excruciating and sweet, a combination that exhausted Ana.
She could not imagine this evening happening, and knew they had entered a conversation that had no conclusion. Ruth would be checking in with her again and again, for months to come.
Inside the building, outside the door to her office, Ana did it first: “I’ll throw some dates at James and get back to you.”
Ruth looked up at her, and something surprising happened: her face thawed. The blandness, the boredom, slid away. She was smiling, a huge, unyielding smile that revealed a heap of crooked teeth. The teeth made Ana remember the child’s game with the hands piling up, each person pulling the one from the bottom, slapping it down on the other.
TWO MONTHS BEFORE LABOUR DAY
The day James got fired was not the worst day of his life. He was as still as a man tasered to the ground and he contemplated this calmness as Sly – his old friend, his boss – sat across from him, slick with sweat, panting, saying what they both knew was coming. “This kind of television isn’t resonating in our research … It’s not you, we think the world of you, it’s the genre … the demographic … the economy … the Internet …”
James’s mind was a jumble of all the things that made this moment not so bad: The unwritten novel, the untapped potential, the upcoming summer.
He thought suddenly of a parlour game he and Ana had played in the early years of their marriage. “Who are you? Four things only.” James, when he read aloud his own list, was always: “Husband, journalist, hockey player, future novelist.” He thought that listing his marital status first would flatter Ana, but Ana saw through it. When she did James, she put journalist first. But now what he had written had come true: He was mostly her husband.
Ana would know what to ask. Severance package. Legal loopholes. He got into her head, a divided plastic binder, and said some things, and Sly gave answers. Sly even lowered his accent to something kind of Cockney for the occasion, like they were a couple of British coal miners at a union meeting in the Thatcher years. Then, when Sly had wrung out every cliché, he leaned in, as if about to go for a hug: “I’m so sorry, mate.” He reached out a hand. James thought: I’ve never heard him use the word “mate” in my life. He noticed