He did push-ups again until his arms failed. He did sit-ups until his tailbone was sore. He had the taste of stale butter and chocolate and steamed milk in his mouth. He finished a set and burped and felt like throwing up. He had a buzz in his extremities, a healthy strain. But he had a new surge in his blood as well, the new anxiety that no battery of body-weight exercises could neutralize: Would he get what he needed at another law firm? Would he get it anywhere in New York? Who hadn’t he thought of yet that could use a lawyer, or at least someone with a law degree? He could serve a startup, a place with equity, a place where his long hours meant skin in the game. He’d rest and vest. He’d cash out. He’d be tethered to the new economy rather than the old, dying one. He wrote an email to the producer asking if there was any news. He sent the email and regretted it instantly. The stink of desperation. He’d broken his own code. Maybe it was time for the nuclear option. Maybe it was time to ask Whitney for help. To hand over the secret project to the wife-to-be who knew more than anyone else about what worked and what didn’t. She had her things. She had her things that made him crazy. But she was going to be one of the best there was at the thing she’d chosen to do. He knew it. It made him impossibly proud. It made him corrosively envious. It was like his father had bored into him: It didn’t really matter what work you did, so long as you were great. Talent above all else. God, Whitney. It made his heart beat faster. He couldn’t hand her a draft and sit there through her polite defanged criticism, her pulled punches, her encouraging nudges. He didn’t have any business touching those rails. He’d been good at law school. He was good at the rules, the regulations, the statutes, even the interpretation. But he’d had no business writing the script. He was a lawyer. He could at least do something with it. He could work trials. He could clerk for a judge. He was smart enough, he believed. He could be a judge someday. But first he needed to get back to basics. He needed to remember how to read emails and documents and finish the job he still had. He couldn’t walk away cold. Not yet. They were to get married soon. They might even try to buy an apartment someday, if anyone their generation was able to do that still. He must contribute half, no matter what. He must finish his work the right way before blowing things up. Maybe he could get fired. Downsized. Severance and all, he’d been there almost three years now. He knew it was important to tune in to the frequency of the universe—to listen to where it said he should go. He thought of the rules of growing up in the ocean, of swimming in riptides: Let it pull you, don’t fight it, don’t tire yourself out paddling against the insurmountable currents. Let the forces push you to the better place you’re meant to be. God, he loved California. Maybe that was what was next. He went to the fridge and cracked the last beer. It would soften things. The fuzz would make him focus. He halved it. He opened another counterproposal from an agent. He read two pages. He opened a new browser. NYTimes. ESPN. SCOTUSblog. He googled Jenna Leonard, but weirdly nothing on their Jenna Leonard came up. He opened a different browser and went to one of his porn sites. The videos streamed slowly. It would never load all the way on the weak Wi-Fi. He toggled back to the marked-up contract, made it another couple pages. He did some more sit-ups. He started the shower. He brought his beer in with him, finished it while the water heated up. He jerked off in the shower, imagining the girl from the Young Lawyers Night slowly turning herself around without his asking; imagining Kelly Kyle making eye contact from between his legs; imagining Whitney in the body-slackened haze of her Santa Monica hotel room and, in a surge of useful jealousy, knowing that he needed to work harder from here on out or else he might lose her for good—to world-famous actors or Euroleague basketball stars or whoever else might turn her head. He toweled off and went to the fridge and found zero beers remaining. He looked outside and it was raining harder. He couldn’t even cross the street to the supermercat without getting soaked. He found some ice and a bottle of whiskey hidden in an otherwise-empty cabinet, and made himself a mixed drink with a 250ml Coca Lite. He texted Whitney an emoji of a raincloud. And then he sat back down with his work.
Whitney texted back three emojis of lightning. She’d ordered a second drink. She googled Jenna Leonard and still couldn’t find a picture of her online. Jenna reminded her so much of the girls she’d encountered her freshman year of college, the girls she couldn’t have fathomed before arriving on campus—girls, in particular from those cities from the show that she’d admired so feverishly as a teenager. Girls from Los Angeles (season 2) and San Francisco (season 3) and New York (seasons 1 and 10). Girls who’d lived entire lives already, it seemed, by the time they arrived on campus. Girls who’d had so much to drink in high school that they were already practicing moderation on behalf of their bodies. Girls who’d done all the drugs there were to do, and were already over most of them. Girls who’d had so much sex that they were more focused now on their relationships with one another than on any boy in a Polo shirt or
