The news moved to updates on the fresh American crisis. The removal of the FBI director, the appointment of the Special Counsel—those flashed by as old headlines. But now, here was a potential exit from the global climate accord. Things had escalated all over again in twenty-four hours. The press secretary had been marched out to defend the tweets. Will couldn’t follow entirely. He didn’t have his daily dose of podcasts, the river of news that had made his commutes up to Grand Central assume a little more consequence since the election. According to the images on TV, the republic looked ready to implode at any moment. But he knew there was nothing he could do from this couch or this city. There was hardly anything he could do from home, either. He opened his laptop and donated twenty bucks to a congressional candidate who’d said something smart last week. They were all captives of the same machine. It had been a bad year. He panicked and then he calmed. He knew his body didn’t dictate world events the way Whitney’s apparently could. He just hoped there was an America to return to when his hiatus from American news was through.
The next story on the television was about a murder in Paris. The way the images cycled and the way the newscasters’ faces spoke the facts, it looked like a breaking story. It seemed a young German woman had been killed by her boyfriend. They were students and the boyfriend was being questioned. Like an Amanda Knox thing, Will intuited. The days abroad were helping—he had a thimbleful of comprehension. Will was proud of what he understood to be true.
The windows of the apartment were unobstructed, waist to ceiling, but the light was pitiful and the rain outside gave everything inside the apartment the blue-gray hues of napping. He read another page of Orwell, about his training with the socialists, then fell asleep with the paperback bookmarked by his knee. He was drunk and stuck in Barcelona. He dreamed of the volcano and of the world spinning uncertainly around the fixed point of Will.
Whitney was put on hold and so snuck into the bathroom to pee and then hazarded to flush the toilet and wash her hands before the line clicked back over to the conference-call audience of six. She ran her wet fingers over her crown and threw her mass of hair over her shoulder. She put the phone on speaker and massaged the skin of her face, tightening, turning back the clock to two and then four and then seven years ago. She stretched the skin around her eyes, she frosted over her forehead like a Zamboni. She thought about her friends and colleagues at work who spent an hour a day with products, who were already getting injections. She’d always had good skin. But they were doing so much now, earlier than ever, the first leg of the long race. They avoided the beach, they avoided the sun. She shuddered to think of the afternoons of her youth out on her father’s boat, the long lazy summers on man-made lakes, baking like a hooked trout. They all wore SPF 50 now. They bought machines for needling and sonic shocks. They worked out their bodies once or even twice a day. They rotated through eating trends. There was so much to know about and execute on. There was so much to do in addition to everything else. Whitney had assumed that they’d draw the line at anything involving a scalpel, just as they’d refrain from any food philosophy ending in an ism. But when just last month they told her about their injections, it had panicked her. She’d figured she might have another ten years before she’d have to wade into those waters. But now it was just another thing to stuff cash away for, another secret expense to add to the series of secret expenses that promised to eat up every incremental gain in income she’d make as a successful young woman in a growth industry.
During the years Will had been in law school, Whitney had found herself floating up to ceilings but failing to break through. She had, however, at least survived the gauntlet of the earliest days. There were so many assistants who’d been at the cable network when she started—each feeling lucky to have merely gained entry in the wake of the crash, and each to a number inevitably squeezed out. But she’d stayed aloft. Because of her brain, because of her conviction, because of her taste.
Also: the red dots she placed on her calendar. Three weeks was the max it ever was between red dots, and anyone could survive three weeks. Red dots meant a party. Red, as in carpet. Up-fronts in the spring, with the creators and cast. A celebration for the premiere of a season and a celebration for the finale. A celebration for the Emmys, a celebration for the Globes. Often in L.A., occasionally in New York. They were the carrots at the end of a long, hard stick. She stayed organized because of them; she never dropped a spinning plate. She took good notes. She gave good notes. But most of all—most essential to her survival—she just relished occasional proximity to a mid-list star. And a red dot on the calendar was never so far out that it was worth walking away.
Eventually, the gamble paid off. She’d been headhunted by a startup streaming service of an online marketplace that was suddenly in the business of developing new shows. She’d been recommended by one of her bosses, a woman who’d been helpful to Whitney for years but who had, Whitney knew, begun to resent Whitney’s ideas, Whitney’s ambition. The
