Ari got that sensation like the teacher called on her even though she hadn’t raised her hand.
“It’s Josh’s.” Ari took care not to trip over his name, which she probably hadn’t said out loud for a week.
Radhya assured her she’d return it to him. “It gives me flashbacks of rolling out endless batches of pappardelle,” she’d said, shuddering.
Ari said “thanks” and decided that would be the last time she mentioned Josh Kestenberg to Radhya. Or anyone.
Instead of thinking about Josh, Ari memorizes business jargon like “hard stop,” “mission critical,” and “circle back to that.” She watches Brad’s rousing informational videos, which are allset to an unlicensed version of “Where the Streets Have No Name.” She studies his A/B tested presentation script. It includes a lot of “pause for laughter.” After roughly fifteen airport drop-offs and pickups and two workshops, Ari earns the title “senior solutions enabler and core faculty member.” Brad reminds her that she’s still in the probationary period.
Several times a week, Ari and Brad enter a Hilton or a Radisson in their bright blue button-down shirts. They do an A/V check, wire themselves up with headset mics, and pull faces in front of a sea of regional sales managers and IT specialists for three to six hours.
It’s sweaty work—not like performing in front of an audience of people who voluntarily paid five or ten or sometimes zero dollars for a LaughRiot show with the goal of being entertained. The WinProv attendees need to be won over every time, whether they’re happy to be away from their open-floor-plan offices or annoyed at the forced camaraderie and high probability of trust-falls.
Once or twice, Ari asks Brad if he has any reservations about servicing a client list that includes big pharma and tech companies and the sorts of places that have members of the DeVos family on their boards. He insists that “improv is for everyone. These people build the apps and services we rely on.” He says, “Grocery delivery, ride sharing, text-message-based therapy. Front-end developers need to dare to fail, too.”
When that line of rationalization fails, there’s also Gabe’s old standby in times of crisis: “Mine it for material.” Ari imagines returning to New York with an incisive new sketch skewering the improv industrial complex.
But the idea of going back to the city is a non-starter now that New York and its hundreds of sidewalks and street cornersand bodegas have transformed into emotional land mines. There isn’t a three-block zone of Manhattan that’s not tainted with a Cass memory or a Josh anecdote.
She can’t even listen to music in the car. It’s on the long, desolate drives around the mid-Atlantic states that her thoughts drift. Waiting at red lights. Idling in drive-thrus. Passing the billboards for Jesus next to the billboards for adult superstores. When she turns on the local FM station and a woman with a twang warbles about heartache, Ari’s mind’s eye draws a perfect picture of Josh’s profile, better than any camera could capture.
She tries to remember the awful things they’d said, rekindling her anger just long enough to get past the heartsick feeling.
Occasionally, it feels like Ari is placing a rug over a gaping hole in the floor. But sometimes you can only address one crisis at a time.
After a few weeks of shadowing Brad, Ari leads a workshop on her own: a small session on a boat cruise around the D.C. harbor. After the workshop, while the employees of some awful lobbying firm enjoy the “premier dinner buffet,” Ari stands outside on the deck, shivering in her peacoat, watching the Washington Monument pass. Incredible how humans have been shamelessly building these behemoth penises for thousands of years.
She adjusts the coat to cover the hideous blue button-down, pulls her shoulders back, and snaps a series of four selfies: two silly, one semi-silly-but-still-cute, one serious/sexy. “See,” these photos say, “I’m carefree. I’m finding myself here.”
She types the caption, “Enjoying the nation’s #1 erect phallus,” then posts all four pics, rearranging the order several times.It’s probably the first time she’s taken a boat selfie since she and Cass got married. Maybe it’s fitting that there’s a monumental dildo sharing the frame in this one, too.
SCOURING THE BINSat Academy Records is Josh’s perfect time-wasting activity. It feels good to put on pants with a non-elastic waistband and join the fraternity of middle-aged men who communicate by one-upping one another with their pointless knowledge of free jazz and minimal techno. For the last few minutes, he’s made a conscious—some might sayvaliant—effort to tune out the insufferable manbun lecturing his normcore companion about the “auditory detritus” in Brian Eno’sAmbient 4: On Land.
He refreshes his email app, even though he has push notifications on, and it’s highly unlikely that his fucking embarrassing query to a chef in Sonoma he’d worked with briefly four years ago will get answered a mere two and a half hours after he’d composed it.
If it gets answered at all.
Still, the fact that he’d sent it is a tangible thing he can cross off his to-do list.I’m not, in fact,spending all my time feeling a combination of bitter and heartbroken and angry and sorry for myself.
I’m also sending emails.
Over the last three weeks, certain memories have already lodged in his brain, expanding and contracting. Walking to the train with an angry ringing in his ears from the shock of their last interaction. Waiting for her to call and apologize. Hearingnothing.
For a few days, he hadn’t spoken to another person. Hadn’t gone outside. He’d just sat on the sofa with his slowly dissipatingfury, like an inflatable mattress with the tiniest leak—every fucking thing in the apartment reminding him of some stupid thing Ari had said or done.
Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece” plays over the sound system, its two chords repeating like a meditation. Sometimes melancholy music has the inverse emotional impact. It’s a strange form of masochism.Can you take this plaintive piano melody? You can? Then how about this Miles Davis solo, bitch?
Tues, March 14, 6:03p.m.
Briar:Excited for tonight?
Remember your POSITIVE talking points.
I peeped her IG and determined that she’s like five ten.
A lot of people have that size kink thing where the woman is tiny and the man is a tree, but I think two people who are roughly the same height are VERY aesthetically pleasing.
Btw let’s talk photo filters soon.
