Page 13

13 | Let Me Take You On an Escapade SASHA

Derek at Escapade Magazine makes spreadsheets about spreadsheets. That’s something I learn in the first five minutes of our meeting. It’s also something I should have guessed after he sent a calendar event, a backup calendar invite, a confirmation email the day before and another this morning. The man is organized.

I can respect that.

After I hustled my kids back to our apartment post pick-up and my parents arrived to babysit at 3:00 p.m. sharp, I made my own premeeting confirmations: I checked my bag for lip gloss, earbuds, antianxiety meds.

As I gathered my belongings, my mother began banging around in the white kitchen cabinets. Bart watched from the table, already knee-deep in his packet of rainbow Goldfish. Nettie was in her room reading.

“Mom,” I said, holding the front door open as I grabbed my shoes from the charcoal-gray mat in the hall and readied to leave.

“Yes, sweetie?” she asked.

“What are you looking for?”

“You moved your glasses!” she said, rummaging through a selection of ceramic vases.

“No. Nope. I haven’t,” I said.

“Really?” she said, now rummaging through my tea selection, which had been neatly stacked against the teal backsplash—probably my favorite detail of the whole place. “I could have sworn the cups were right here!”

My glasses—short, squat tumblers with ribbed edges—have been in the same cabinet since Cliff and I first moved to this apartment four years ago. They remained there through our arguments—over his constant travel, over prioritizing his career over mine, over his phone addiction, over the way he opted out of watching our children, over the way he would lie down on the couch and, without guilt or irony, just watch me clean while he critiqued some movie he thought he could have made better. Over the fact that he was not who he had seemed. Or maybe he was.

Cliff moved. The glasses did not.

“Well, then, where are they?” my mother asked, now cross. As if the glasses and I were colluding against her.

They are most certainly not on the counter.

“Over there!” I pointed.

“Here?”

“No, the next one.”

“Here?”

“No. Up.”

“Up where?” she snapped, exasperated.

“Two cabinets to the left,” said Bart, surprising us both. He picked up a Goldfish and swam it through the air, making a fish face.

My mother had forgotten where the glasses are kept. There was a drop in my stomach that I didn’t enjoy. An uneasy flutter in my chest. I brought a hand to my heart to still it.

She finally located two glasses and pulled them down. I watched her take them to the sink and rinse them. This habit of my mother’s drives me insane. They’re already clean! That’s why they’re in the cabinet! Where they always are!

At least she could find the sink.

“What’s this meeting again?” she asks.

“Just a possible gig—a shoot on a tight deadline,” I said, as if I wasn’t nervous. “I’m not sure of the details yet.”

“So, not a hot date?” she asked, swallowing multiple pills.

“Not a date,” I answered.

“What’s a date?” asked Bart.

“A stone fruit,” said my dad from the couch, looking up from the same New Yorker issue my mom had been reading the other day.

Larry, our giant gray cat who looks like a cross between Jerry Orbach and my late grandfather, grunted in his sleep as if to confirm this fact. I’d almost forgotten he and my father were sitting there.

“I gotta go,” I said.

I really did. For all the reasons.

In addition to keeping my eye out for any homicidal maniacs boarding my subway car, I spent the train ride trying not to panic about my mother’s sudden dottiness—the repeated calls about the 3:00 p.m. arrival time, the disorientation over the standard arrangement of my kitchen. The clear confusion.

I also tried to block out her insinuation about my love life. Or, I should say, lack thereof. Lately, she has been trying to convince me to join some dating app called Grattitude, where, instead of swiping a certain direction, you “bless” people. She says it’s more positive.

And I am positive I don’t want anything to do with it.

I hate first dates. And it turns out you usually have to go on one in order to have a second date. So, I will remain celibate for the rest of my life. Easy solve.

I met Cliff in college, so I didn’t have to confront that barrier. We went to class together, lived in the same dorm, had mutual friends, watched pretentious movies, went out and binge drank in groups and eventually—after due persistence on his part—found ourselves making out against the refrigerator in the communal kitchen one night instead of watching a pivotal scene in Revenge of the Nerds .

Cliff always insists we were watching Hitchcock’s Rear Window . Revisionist history.

He hadn’t been my type. In high school, I’d dated DJs and basketball players, one hot brooding musician who turned boring quickly. My long-term boyfriend, Josh, had been a social beast, everyone’s favorite… everything. But he’d broken my heart again and again, and I was still licking my wounds in college. In an ironic twist, Cliff seemed just nerdy enough to be safe. Not. So. Much.

Now, I’m sitting in a stark conference room around a glass table with sharp edges. Out the window, we are blinded by the reflection of sunlight from other windowed skyscrapers. Derek, who is Escapade ’s managing editor and clearly the engine behind the operation, is sitting across from me.

I have been offered filtered tap water, bottled water, spring water, sparkling water, Hint water, coconut water, collagen water, Vitaminwater and coffee.

“Hmm. I could really go for some Smartwater,” I deadpan.

My joke is met with uncomfortable grunts and fake laughs from the members of the staff sitting around the table, in addition to Derek. Stephanie (deputy editor, like a bustier Blake Lively), Peter (a burly, white, lumberjack-looking cameraman in a flannel shirt) and Jackie (a graceful, dark-complected set stylist wearing a black jumpsuit and necklaces layered in a way I can never get right).

Derek shoots me a compulsory smile. I give it a 6.3. The technical skills are there, but there’s no passion behind it.

Even though I cyberstalked him, he looks different in person than I expected. He’s smaller, lither, with shiny black hair. He’s wearing nerd glasses, a denim-on-denim ensemble and oxfords. And he has the tightly wound energy of an ostrich but with kind eyes. I like him right away. I vow silently to win him over.

“So, as I was explaining, we don’t usually outsource our content, but the previous HP—”

“That’s head producer!” Stephanie chimes in. Her neon pink lipstick is aggressive, and maybe so is she.

“Yes. That’s head producer. Anyway, he just left us suddenly to produce interstitials for a streamer. I won’t say which one—”

“Netflix!” Stephanie winks meaningfully.

Derek clears his throat. “So we’re in kind of a spot. There have been a lot of changes here lately and things are a bit in flux. The bad news is that we only have a few weeks to pull this all together. The good news is that—”

“We’re going to have the best time!”

Derek turns to Stephanie and looks at her long and hard. She shrugs at him. Deal with it .

“I was going to say, the good news is, if you’re interested, we are looking to fill that full-time position too. Should this go well and should our new editor in chief and you both feel this is a fit, there’s a potential permanent producer role on the team for you.”

“I see,” I say mildly. “So great to know.”

But I am only playing it cool. Suddenly, this meeting has taken on extra significance. My heart is pounding.

As it turns out, freelance video production work isn’t the best job for a single parent. It demands long hours, networking drinks, days spent pitching just to get a job in the first place. But then a lot of things that seemed like good ideas in film school in the late nineties and early aughts really don’t now. Cliff. The arts. Low-rise jeans. In those days, Cliff and I both figured we’d skyrocket to fame as multihyphenate writer-director-producers. Make our own hours; be rolling in cash. We certainly weren’t thinking about insurance benefits. We knew most people had to claw their way to the top, but we were already at the top of our class. Obviously, those challenges wouldn’t apply to us.

We would stay in New York, not sell out in Hollywood, and be acclaimed for our commercial and artistic success!

In retrospect, if I had only looked for equivalent examples—filmmakers in a romantic couple who rose to great heights together—I would have realized that both members of the duo rarely build equal careers. The reason why seems pretty clear: someone becomes the ritual sacrifice at the altar of finances, children, and real life. Someone has to pay for health insurance.

Nine times out of ten, who do you think that person is?

Cliff wasn’t the most talented filmmaker in our class. He wasn’t top five. I knew that even then. But he was the best operator. He overflowed with entitlement, which turned out to matter more. As time went on, and we had babies who someone needed to actually raise, I realized he’d happily throw me under the bus for the chance to direct a lowly Chevrolet ad, let alone write a studio movie. That realization didn’t endear him to me.

I thought he was enamored of me, had my back, but really he was enamored of winning—which, when we were young enough, he thought he could do with me standing slightly behind him. My work became producing corporate videos for fast cash—and he went off to LA more and more often to try to drum up screenwriting work. The rest wrote itself.

Well, actually, the Golden Globes incident was his to own. A truly astounding show of indiscretion, disrespect and grossness that I cannot attribute to fate. By that time, I couldn’t have cared less who he felt up. But I could have done without the public humiliation.

Maybe some people in our film program at college were surprised that Cliff was the highest achiever of us all—with success that came, by the way, largely after our divorce two and half years ago. I got to be his shoulder to cry on for decades of struggle and insecurity, during which he often turned red-faced and ugly, blaming me for holding him back. Then, just as we broke up, he was subsumed into some sugary-sweet movie-industry dreamscape. Only then did the money roll in. And it didn’t roll my way since we were already broken up. The terms of the divorce were settled before his financial success was full-fledged, and maybe I should have revisited the arrangement once he was so flush—but I preferred not to need him. Either way, it should have been obvious to everyone that he’d get ahead. For one thing, he wanted it most. For another, he had no pesky ethics to get in the way.

So, a full-time job? With benefits and regular hours and a dependable salary? At an established publishing company with a legit HR department, bonus structures and obligatory holiday parties at the end of each year? The thought of it now gets me hot and bothered. These days, this is what turns me on. For the briefest instant, my mind flits to Demon Dad in the park the other day. His crooked smile, lean abs. I shake my head clear. Who needs first dates when there’s a 401(k) and a weekly staff meeting to keep you warm at night?

Derek has synched his computer to a giant flat-screen at the front of the conference room and is walking us through dates and line items, all of which I understand like the back of my hand. This is my safe space; my happy place. A set. Production. Lighting. Coverage. A crew.

“We’re imagining the shoot will take about—”

“Three to four days!” interrupts Stephanie.

I think Derek might actually murder her.

Bristling, he moves on to his fourth spreadsheet, this one focusing on next steps, and asks Jackie to lead us through some set decoration details, when I realize I’m missing an essential piece of information:

“I’m so sorry if I missed this, but where did you say we’ll be shooting?”

“Citrine Cay!” Stephanie and Derek say in unison. Finally in agreement on something.

“Citrine Cay?” I repeat. “I’m sorry—I’m sure I’m being clueless—but I don’t think I’ve heard of that.”

“It’s an island!”

“Oh! Like Governors Island?”

They shake their heads.

“Roosevelt Island? Randall’s Island? Long Island? Staten Island?” I am out of islands in the New York area.

“No, silly,” says Stephanie. “Like a tropical island! In Turks and Caicos!”

My mouth drops open, followed by my stomach. “Oh, wow,” I say, trying to keep the deep stress out of my voice. “The Caribbean!” I will need to organize way more than supplemental babysitting and extra after-school hours. But I will make it happen. I need to make it happen. I need this gig.

Stephanie leans in. “It’s this amazing private island! No one has even been there yet. It’s not open to guests until the end of the month. We’re going to party so hard!” She throws her hands in the air and waves them like she just don’t care.

“She means work so hard.” Derek’s lips are pursed.

“Totally,” says Stephanie. When he looks away, she shakes her head at me and mimes taking a shot.

“Anyway, Stephanie is right. It’s a big-deal exclusive. We’re first to the property. And it’s exquisite! We’ve even agreed to shoot without models, though it’s somewhat unorthodox, to let the landscape speak for itself. So, this group here will be our bare-bones crew. Plus, our photographer, Charlie. Our editor in chief may join as well, if schedule permits.”

“Of course.”

“If you don’t have any additional questions for us, we’ll discuss internally and circle back ASAP on the position. But you seem like a fantastic fit. Thanks—”

“So much!” yelps Stephanie.

“For your time.”

As we shake hands and part ways, I smile big, all happy camper. Inside, my intestines are stomping a line dance. Finding childcare for four days and three nights is no piece of cake. But now that I know this could turn full-time, I am desperate for this job to work out. This would relieve so much financial stress, not to mention save me from having to hustle so hard for freelance stints.

Instead of heading straight home, I meet a high school friend for a drink at a sake bar in the East Village. I’m so nervous about jinxing the gig, I don’t even mention it although I can think of nothing else. Instead, I let her go on and on about whether cheating is still unethical if your spouse is super annoying. (It is. She will do it anyway.)

Then, at around 9:00 p.m., I head home and relieve my parents. I walk in to find them both dozing on the couch, pretending to be watching TV. Classic . They fill me in on Bart’s bowel movements and Nettie’s tween attitude, tell me how spectacular my children are in their unbiased opinion, then climb in a cab and head home.

The kids are already asleep. Quiet settles over the apartment.

Here’s how you know you’ve gotten old: you come home tipsy, dismiss the sitters, binge on the kids’ leftover roasted brussels sprouts and that’s close enough to bliss.

I take this moment alone to check in with myself. And, leaning against my kitchen island, I realize I am excited. Truly. For the first time in a long while. My heart is flipping in my chest. I know I’ll find a way to take this job because it’s essential. For years now, I have been running on empty, moving gig to gig, struggling to make ends meet despite receiving mandated checks from Cliff. Even when I’ve had enough work, there haven’t been enough hours in the day. And this job seems like it might be more interesting than what I’ve gotten to cover in the recent past too—maybe it’s a chance for some actual creativity. Maybe there won’t be cat boas involved!

I definitely haven’t gotten a shot like this since the kids were born; and I also haven’t taken a proper adult trip in years. With other grown-ups. Even the concept of sitting on the plane, alone, without any bathroom emergencies or spilled juice sounds like heaven.

For reasons I can’t explain, I have a sense that maybe things are changing, plates shifting ever so slowly beneath my feet until they lock into place. Is it possible? Dare I dream? Could things be getting easier? I exhale. Maybe I am headed for more stable ground.