Breathe In, Cash Out Page 9

  From: Allegra Cobb

  To: Mark Swift

  Fri 10 Nov 10:20 p.m.

  Great!

  —AC

  Allegra Cobb, Analyst, Anderson Shaw, NYC

  (O) x4832 (C) 9175554029 (Fax) 2125559384

  My phone buzzes an hour later:

  2125552839: How is my deck?

  Mark. I press the home button again so that the message repopulates. But I’m not sure how to respond. Have fun. Have fun, dammit. Fucking do something fun. Now.

  Me: I’m on it

  “What are you doing?” Puja asks.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  I’m trying to have fun.

  “You looked like you were tweeting something clever,” she says.

  “Yes,” I say, deadpan. “You know me. Gotta get my tweets in.”

  Three I’m typing dots ripple on his side.

  Mark: Don’t get distracted

  Me: I won’t

  Mark: I’ve been meaning to ask you, why Princeton? Did you not get into Harvard or Yale?

  Me: Bad alumni at Yale

  Mark: LOL

  I cringe. LOL? Is he the strapping forty-something I thought he was or is he texting me from his mom’s couch and on his parents’ phone plan?

  Me: You disagree?

  The back-and-forth ceases and I wait. My bouncing knee rattles the desk slightly, and Tripp shoots me a stop look. I throw him a retaliatory eye roll and head a few steps away to the nearest window for some privacy.

  Now, with my back to the floor, I stare at our stalled conversation on my phone in an act of sexual window shopping. I yank my Messages app down again to refresh—the modern equivalent of opening, closing, and reopening the lid to a mailbox that you know is empty. I stand, waiting. I am always waiting for comments. My phone auto-locks.

  “Marco!” Tripp shouts. He wants me to Polo.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say.

  On my way back to the pod, I nod to the thirty-something ex-military associate with shitty technicals, a wife, and a child. You and me both, man. We each got our problems. At the pod, Tripp and Puja hunch in their office chairs, showing signs of life only in their fingertips darting across the keyboard. Tripp has left his plastic cup, with the un-slurped millimeter of bubble tea remaining on the bottom, on the invisible line between our halves of the desk. I think he’s fucking with me. The top of the straw looks chewed.

  “Are you done with this?” I ask.

  I point at the drink.

  “Maybe,” he says.

  I push it an inch right, onto his half.

  “Why are you such an only child all the time?” he asks.

  Puja sniggers, and I smirk.

  I log back into my desktop, resuscitating both of my monitors. A few minutes later, Skylar sends me a list of gentle yoga poses to perform every half hour. Half hour?

  My stomach sinks. Two days ago, I was on the phone with an MD, and he signed off to get on a plane. By the time he called me back from his hotel in London I had eaten dinner and drunk a one-liter bottle of Coke, and had not gotten up from my chair.

  I study Skylar’s instructions.

  “Amy,” Tripp says with a warning tone.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  Since when is Tripp telling me to work more?

  chapter 10

  For the rest of the weekend, I took mindfulness breaks and did a yoga pose roughly every half hour. Meanwhile, Tripp and I were on office arrest for Team Titan, so I took these in the coat closet on the HG floor.

  I tried my best. Friday night through Sunday, I crept into the closet, bushwhacked aside the Canada Geese, held a gentle pose for ten breaths, and then left. When the door shut, it was just me packed among overcoats, and I felt somewhat insane. Tripp noticed I was getting up a lot and WebMD-ed my condition as a point of amusement. He asked if I had a burning sensation when I peed.

  Meanwhile, Vivienne ran the Titan team like such a finely tuned machine that the sand grains of my breaks fucked shit up. I missed three calls from her due to mindfulness, and Tripp had to conference me in on my cell phone every time. The fact that Vivienne’s number is now in my Recent Calls is a disaster waiting to happen. One day, I’m going to ass-dial it and interrupt one of her fifteen-minute power naps on a Tempur-Pedic pillow. She’s going to lift her cooling eye mask to glare at my caller ID like, I knew it was you, Analyst.

  I didn’t have enough mental space for the breaks to really resonate. They just became another to-do item, like eating. Did I fucking eat dinner? Yes, check. Did I mindfulness? Check. I got frustrated with myself that Skylar’s guidance wasn’t taking. This is my dream, right? What the fuck. The angrier I got at myself, the harder it was to achieve calm detachment in the first place. It was just a downward fucking spiral. Every break worsened my mood.

  The only decent part of the whole weekend was texting Mark a few times. The texts were polite on the surface, but I was so desperate that I found them extremely hot. As a normal course of business, MDs don’t text analysts asking them how the office is—good, thank you—and are we coming along—yes, thank you. It was a release, and in our casual texts I felt freer and more present in my own body than at any other point in the day. That’s what yoga used to be for me—a foil to regular life where I connected to myself and with other people. Now Mark is my only release, and yoga is the second job.

  To make things even more pathetic, Mark didn’t respond promptly. Seven hours would pass between our messages. Mindlessly, I built small fantasies about us, about how he might touch me again or eye me as we passed in the hallway. Skylar’s voice exonerated me in my head. So I indulged the thoughts. Hey, Skylar, here’s my progress report for the weekend. Want to fucking work together? All right.

  * * *

  At 11:01 p.m. on Sunday, I reread my half of the deck. Tripp and I are on the home stretch. After I send him my slides, he will slot them into the master PowerPoint and then finally send the book to print.

  Tripp hasn’t shaved since Friday. His facial hair comes in as only a mustache, and right now, he has a faint blond ’stache that he relishes. Business casual clothes are required during the week, but we are allowed free rein on weekends. “So feel free to wear your velour tracksuits,” the HR speaker said during her overview of the rules in training. I think someone actually laughed at that. Tripp wears a WORLD SURF LEAGUE hat backward and Duke sweatpants tucked into untied Timberland boots. He looks good.

  I send him my shit.

  “Done,” I say. “You’ll check?”

  He grunts.

  I can’t wait to get out of here. Puja and Chloe showed up at around 4 p.m. full of fucking energy. Puja went to a wedding yesterday and has been going on and on about it. Tripp is riveted, because the only interesting things that happened to him this weekend was getting his arm stuck in the HG vending machine and diagnosing me with a urinary tract infection. My final, unchecked to-do is the last pose on Skylar’s list: savasana. I just have to wait for Tripp to zone out again, so I can take the break without another pee joke.

  “Apparently, the flowers cost half a million,” Puja says. “The flowers. Those things are going to die in an hour.”

  “Where was it?” Chloe asks.

  “Southampton.”

  “Half a million,” Chloe says. “That’s like, two nice cars.”

  “It’s like a house,” Puja says.

  “Or like a big donation to charity,” I say, just to be subversive.

  Pause. The pod exchanges glances.

  “Is she fucking with us?” Puja whispers to Chloe.

  “Were you guys here all weekend?” Chloe asks.

  Tripp makes a yes grunt.

  I put my earbuds in and open Spotify. On a whim, I search for Mark Swift on the app and check out the playlists he’s made. The most recent are labeled “Spa,” “Chest Day,” and “Leg Day.” Jesus Christ. This dude is at war with aging and he is here to fucking slay. Out of curiosity, I look up Tripp’s. His last three are labeled “Feeling ’90s,�
�� “Country Boozin’ Y’all,” and “TGISummer.” I smirk.

  “How’s Titan?” Puja asks.

  “It’s a mushroom cloud,” Tripp says. He makes an explosion noise.

  “I see the ’stache is back,” Puja says.

  “Thank you for noticing,” Tripp says, turning to me as he emphasizes the thank you to Puja. He pats his upper lip. “Someone cares. Amy over here barely looks at me anymore.”

  “That thing is so gross,” I mutter.

  “Pfft,” he says. “You love it.”

  “No, I do not,” I say.

  “Girls like hair,” Tripp says.

  “Girls, huh?” Puja asks.

  “Pfft,” Tripp says. With a small show of melodrama, he adds dejectedly, “And yet the only woman fucking me is Vivienne DeVille.”

  “Hey,” Chloe snaps.

  “What?” Tripp asks.

  “I said, Hey,” Chloe snaps.

  “What was wrong with what I said?” Tripp asks.

  “All right,” I say. “Pipe down.”

  Chloe’s whip is apparently good for something. Tripp dons his own earbuds and chin-bops to a beat I can’t hear. He seems to be settling back into the zone. When he is finally absorbed, I creep away.

  At the far end of the empty hallway, the door to the closet looms. Sunday is Anderson’s equivalent of Monday, so the room is more packed than it was yesterday. Chloe’s thin Burberry trench coat hangs pancaked between two thick parkas. Maybe she taxis everywhere and is never actually outside. I shut the door, lie on the carpet, and position myself correctly.

  I imagine recounting this to Skylar and cringe. How did my life get so out of control?

  When I started doing yoga, it was nurturing and fun. Now it’s scheduled, approval-seeking yoga that my dream life depends on doing successfully, while I thread the needle of also working nonstop. You can’t make everyone happy. Stand up for yourself. I forget what breath I’m on and start over. Earnestly in corpse pose, I inhale and exhale. My mind drifts to the slides I just sent Tripp. Does he realize I sent him my half?

  I lose track again.

  Fuck.

  I give it one last try.

  One breath. Two.

  A mantra I learned in the Princeton studio comes back to me now: “Are you breathing or are you being breathed?” It floats through my mind like the wind-tossed plastic bag from American Beauty. Gradually, my sense that I am breathing fades into the sense that I am being breathed. I guess you don’t realize how tired you are until you’re forced to imitate the act of sleeping.

  * * *

  Suddenly, light shatters my view. I come to.

  I am lying flat on my stomach. The patch of carpet beside my open mouth is damp. In the doorway, Tripp’s Timberlands are haloed by bright yellow light radiating from the hallway. Can he see me? Metal hangers screech from side to side. I consider playing dead to save face. Too late: our eyes lock.

  “What the—?”

  I scramble to my feet and blink ferociously. Tripp’s ’stache is now an inch away in a disorienting close-up. We both tilt backward, and I slink into the plush safety net of tens of thousands of dollars’ of winter coats.

  “Are you in here sleeping while I’m out there working?” he demands. He rips his camel coat from the rack.

  “This is next-level freeloading, A,” he says. “Not fucking bueno. You know I went looking for you? Like, outside? It’s cold as shit. You left your phone at your desk. I thought you died.” He shakes his head as he shoves his arms into his sleeves. “You used to be such a perfectionist and now you’re a fucking narcotic.”

  “Narcoleptic,” I whisper.

  “Excuse me?” he asks. “The shit I deal with.”

  “What time is it?” I ask.

  “Two,” he says. “Anyway, here is the update on our fucking team. Vivienne called and asked for new shit, so I did that, and then I had to look for your shit, which took me half an hour, and I’m still waiting for stuff back from Bang and Prez.”

  “Bang” is what we call the branch office in Bangalore, filled with analysts I’ve never met. They churn out any charts and tables that we request, but they require a four-hour minimum turnaround time. “Prez” is short for the Presentations team of middle-aged people skilled in Excel and PowerPoint who sit on our floor and put together flowcharts and other unusual graphics when asked. The shitty part about that shortcut is it involves giving your work to a fifty-five-year-old on their graveyard shift. Prez takes at least four hours as well.

  “That shit is due back at five,” he says.

  “So one of us needs to stick around,” I think aloud.

  “Yeah, I fucking know,” he says.

  Mark needs the books before he leaves for the airport at 7 a.m. After the materials get back from Bang and Prez, someone will still need to look at them, send them to Anderson’s Print and Ship team, and then “flip” the final, printed copies. Flipping means the analyst looks at every printed page to make sure there were no printing errors—i.e., that the printer did not run out of toner and print the last five slides pink. Then the books can be sent.

  “And when Viv is like, ‘Why the fuck did this take so long?’ tomorrow, I am not taking the fall for you.”

  He leaves. I head back to the desk, feeling bewildered and shitty that Tripp had to do all of that. At the pod, Puja and Chloe pack their Tory Burch totes for home. Puja is going on about her latest online shopping spree and how much everything cost. Her monologue is so detailed that she may verbalize the silent decimal places in this extremely boring, itemized receipt. Chloe is totally thinking about her own M&A deal.

  I wave them both goodbye. Puja waves back.

  Three more hours. I can’t even nap, because I need to be available if there are any glitches in the process. Sometimes, Bangers have the audacity to ask questions about our typo-laden, rushed, ambiguous instructions. What am I going to do in this office for three fucking hours?

  * * *

  On Instagram at 4:30 a.m.—so close—I hunch forward even more than usual. In order to stay awake, I ate everything in the HG office refrigerator without a name on it. Then I caught up with Kim Jee, who did not seem to enjoy our shit-shooting at all. Now, I feed my eyeballs Instagram content and check Skylar’s latest Story, a street view of Mala. She must have taken the picture before class. Amazing!! I respond via DM. My body language remains lifeless.

  Slow footsteps approach from behind, and I don’t have the energy to turn around. Kim Jee walks by my pod carrying a cardboard box under his arm. The plain brown box is bound with a kind of plastic strap I’ve seen used to handcuff people in movies. I know from our talk that Kim Jee has to ferry books to his MD’s Tribeca apartment before he leaves for an international flight. If deadlines are too tight, sometimes analysts become donkeys. Chloe once had to hand-deliver pitch books to her MD in London, for one of her own mega-billion-dollar deals she told everyone about. Anderson paid for her $10,000 first-class flight to bring the guy just three books at the very last minute.

  Somewhere, a text message dings. Looking down, I see it’s my phone.

  Skylar: Have a minute?

  I sit up.

  Me: Of course!

  She really does get up at 4 a.m., I think as Skylar sends me a photo of herself in wheel pose. In the picture, her backbend is front and center against the backdrop of her yellow living room. Her white leggings and sports bra glow softly under overhead lights. It’s an idyllic expression of wheel, a pose meant to energize and strengthen.

  Skylar: What do you think?

  Me: Really, really beautiful.

  Skylar: Any suggestions?

  Skylar: I want to post it today.

  I blink twice, hard. I wipe my eyes and try to focus.

  Me: None, honestly. It’s perfect!!

  Skylar: No suggestions at all?

  Skylar: In the caption I’m writing about friendship. You inspire me :)

  Oh! My! God!

  Me: Wow—I can’t wait!

&nbs
p; Skylar: But something isn’t right yet. . . . Could you make the outfit less shiny? I’m off to teach a private now.

  Me: Okay!

  What?

  Skylar: I’m using it as my morning post :) I’ll credit you! Can I tag your Instagram?

  I do not want her to flaunt the shit show that is @AllegraHandstands. My profile is a shell that I use for following yoga accounts. But two years ago, I’d taped myself training for American Yoga and posted the videos to my gallery. It was Dad’s idea, a way to track progress on specific poses. That gallery was never meant to be seen. Most of the footage is grainy, shot in gyms, and incidentally captures strangers working out. The final frame is usually a close-up of the ring of fat around my belly as I bend toward my own iPhone to turn off the camera. My only real follower is Dad.

  Me: Don’t worry about it.

  Skylar: Too modest!! Okay. Can you handle the caption too? Something on friendship, relationship meditations . . . Thanks!

  Skylar: See you tonight to hear about the breaks :) Namaste.

  I feel more awake than I have in hours. My excitement is exactly counterbalanced by fear. Edit a photo? Caption?

  Me: When do you need this by exactly?

  I scroll through Skylar’s gallery looking for guidelines or inspiration. Yes, I’m a millennial, but I’m disoriented as shit. And I don’t usually have much time to play around with the latest Instagram features. I scroll deeper until I find the photos credited to Jordan. In an emotional shot taken with him, he gives Skylar a piggyback ride on a cobblestone street in the West Village. A camera hangs from around his neck to rest on his white tee. Skylar kisses his cheek. He smiles through a thick brown beard.

  The last time I googled him, a month ago, Jordan was getting slaughtered in tabloid headlines. “Messy Split with Yoga Model Destroys Jordan Roca’s Career.” “Fans Pick Sides in Yoga Breakup.” Apparently, he lost a lot of his followers and was having a hard time finding work. It’s ironic that his attempt to use Skylar to help his career ended up doing the opposite.