“You should have this. It goes perfectly with the suit.”
“Oh Kelsey, I can’t accept that.”
“Why not?”
“Well, the company policy...”
“So you’d rather steal stuff?”
“I don’t steal!”
Kelsey gave her a wry look. “Jane, we’re old friends by now. Let’s be real.”
“Well, thank you, Kelsey, but I can’t, it’s too generous.”
“It really isn’t,” Kelsey assured her. “It was another gift from my mother. Actually, it was one she regifted to me, I could tell. I never use it, and Prudence hates it. You have to accept it.”
“Okay, if you insist,” Jane said as she took the purse from Kelsey, and then they hugged.
Jane sat in the kitchen nook with a glass of wine, her laptop, and her diary. She had neglected to write in it this morning, and now was trying to muster the energy. But rather than writing, her thoughts turned to getting a dog. Seeing Mr. Cuddles harnessed in that wheelchair had been heart-wrenching. Part of her questioned how humane it was, while part of her appreciated that the malformed little beast inspired such undying ardor. However, if she was going to travel, it was obviously not the time to get a dog.
Still unsure what to write in her diary, Jane started surfing the web. Humankind had left behind the Information Age and gone right into the Age of Too Much Information. Factoids and opinions proliferated, without a reliable interpreter or intermediary. It was clutter of the most pernicious kind. It needed someone to organize it all.
The presidential primaries were underway, and they were being covered with the same breathless frenzy as the Academy Awards. All journalism, it seemed, had devolved into entertainment journalism. The very idea of what constituted a fact was somehow up for debate. There were copious amounts of shrill invective: everything was good or evil, everything was a matter of life or death. Jane was working so hard on becoming less binary, but the increasingly polarized world she lived in was not helping matters.
Jane thought about Kelsey, whose news sources were Instagram andPeoplemagazine and perhaps now TikTok. She was, if nothing else, relentlessly optimistic, with the exception of her preparations for “this bird flu.” That anomaly was a bit jarring, but Jane could not dismiss it as complete lunacy. A plane coming from China had been diverted to a military base in California and then everyone on board had been quarantined. That was factual and definitely unsettling. In any case, Jane admired how Kelsey framed the possibility of a pandemic as an adventure, as if she and her family might be going on an extendedSwiss Family Robinsonsort of idyll.
Positivity was a wonderful coping mechanism.
Jane had judged Kelsey so harshly when they first met. In fact, there was a lot to admire. She was so freely and naturally open-hearted. She lived—rather happily, it seemed—in her bubble of minor celebrity, worrying about micro things rather than macro things, and maybe that was wise. Maybe better to skim along the surface of things, rather than forever trying to drill down to the core and uncover some essential truth. After all, underneath the plates of crust that form the continents we live on, what was at the core of Earth? Molten magma, a sulfurous, scorching, liquid hell that you really wouldn’t want to bring to the surface.
Jane pushed away from the kitchen table and walked out to the garage. After judicious culling, it was populated only by objects dear to her. She reached up to the highest shelf and took down a container labeledFOR LATER.
Inside, there were only two things.
The first was the stuffed dog that her brother had rejected when she gave it to him all those years ago. It smelled musty, but otherwise had held up well over the years. She held it to hercheek—it was soft like a blanket. Why had she clung to it all these years? Maybe it was a reminder that even if she felt like she was completely inadequate, failing hopelessly when it came to her brother, she had done the best she could. She had been a little girl herself, fragile and wayward and starved for love. She did always care for him; she did always try to help. She did love him.
When she got a dog, she’d ask John if he wanted to pick the name. Maybe she would be living back in Chicago. Or maybe John would be in her care in LA. You never knew. And then it dawned on her—why had she not seen this before? The dog was a symbol of the unconditional love she had for her brother, and she hoped—no, really, she knew—he had for her. If she could embrace that love without fear, without wondering where it would lead her, what it would demand of her, she would no longer need a reminder. Jane felt like she finally could.
She picked up the other object in the box: the copy ofVillettefrom her Nineteenth-Century English Novel class in college. The incident with the director and her horrible boss Peter Miller, now five years in the past, had tainted it, reminding her how her excitement and joy had been summarily trampled. Running into Peter Miller at Lauren Baker’s house last month had brought it all flooding back. What would Lucy Snowe, who endured so much in the course ofVillette, think of how little it took to make Jane scupper her dreams?
Jane needed to reread the book, to reclaim it. Maybe she should even take the plunge and try to see if there was a way to get a miniseries made. She still had friends and contacts in the business. Maybe she could try to write a teleplay herself. Why not? She was passionate, and that meant something. Perhaps it meant she could enjoy the process without worrying about the result.
A little later in the evening, her phone pinged. Teddy texted:
TEDDY:Great job offer @ Warner sound mixing. Super stoked.
JANE:Congrats!
TEDDY:Want to tell you about it. Let’s hang soon.
JANE:Sure. Let me know when.
TEDDY:k
Ending the text thread with the generickwas such a cop-out. There it dangled, one letter laden with so much ambiguity and ambivalence. When did Teddy want to meet up, and why?
Jane wouldn’t dwell on it. She had said her piece. She had exposed herself, she had done all she could do. She might feel vulnerable, but she was not helpless. Whatever Teddy had to say, she could live with it. She had Jake in her contacts, and her dormant Bumble profile was out there, lurking on servers all over the world.
