Chapter 39
39
Thursday 15 September
5:15 a.m.
What’s the point of trying to sleep when I have a knife in my back? Can’t believe Mong wasn’t going to propose me for partnership this year, just because of VizWare. After everything I worked for. As for Suresh . . . hiding the fact that his future father-in-law is Inderjit Singh.
Nest of vipers, I tell you. Nest of vipers. Thank God I no longer have to share an office with Suresh.
Well, there’s still a chance I can get Mong’s and everyone else’s vote, if I salvage VizWare.
8:12 p.m.
Suresh had dropped a new strip on
TLTS
. Water and Rhean had moved past killing for “good” but were now killing to satisfy their own needs for each other.
It’s not looking good for our murderous couple.
Wednesday 21 September
8:00 p.m.
Left work earlier than usual. Couldn’t concentrate. What’s the point?
9:15 p.m.
Home. Launched Angry Birds. Opened bottle of wine and bag of off-brand Cheetos.
9:35 p.m.
Opened second bag of off-brand Cheetos. Dejection apparently increases my appetite.
11:45 p.m.
Put phone away. Eyes blurry. Another thing my law firm has taken away from me.
1:15 a.m.
Couldn’t sleep again. I decided to go to my safe place: the twenty-four-hour supermarket.
I love supermarkets. I go to supermarkets to calm down when I think of making a break from society. I enter feeling lost, but after an hour I come out calm, soothed, just a little fluorescent-light blind and drugged, but with my sense of self and worth restored. There is something so deeply meditative about walking along in the supermarket aisles: all that choice—that illusion of choice.
Let me explain. Most of the brands you see in the consumer goods section, even those fancy, seemingly independent, hippie ones, are owned by oligopolies, the same few faceless multinational corporations. So while you’re boasting that you’re a “made-by-Amish-virgins-in-Kentucky” kind of granola girl or in the “monk-blessed-and-French-mountain-filtered-piss” bottled water camp, you’re all eating the same GMOs, absorbing the same chemicals, drinking the same microplastics.
Oh yeah, what was I talking about again? Loving supermarkets. Right.
So here I was, leaving the toilet paper aisle and about to shuffle along to the cereal aisle to grab myself the latest sugar GMO bombs when I saw something that made my blood run cold:
Ivan. In the flesh.
In a T-shirt and
cargo
shorts, walking hand-in-hand with a familiar figure wearing a long, sleeveless white cotton dress.
And they were heading my way.
I was just about to turn around and flee the supermarket when Ivan looked up and our eyes locked.
Goddammit. Why did I have to run into Ivan when I’m buying toilet paper? Not even the fancy embossed kind, just two-ply,
basic
toilet paper, dear Diary, the kind you find in second-rate communal working spaces, in an economy pack. WHY COULDN’T IT HAVE BEEN THE FANCY QUILTED FOUR-PLY BLACK TP? WHY? WHY? WHY?
AND WHY WAS I WEARING JHORTS?
He began walking toward me with the woman. I steeled myself by doing a Kegel. I looked her over as discreetly as I could: Chinese, my height (who am I kidding: she’s taller), younger, longer-haired, but overall, she looked a lot like me (maybe slightly more snaggletoothed—and hunched). It was the same girl I had seen in the bar with Ivan, ages ago. The night I got entrapped by Orson.
“Hello, Andrea,” Ivan said tersely.
I smiled my most professional smile. “Ivan,” I said, as though we were distant relations instead of people who had once smushed uglies on his mahogany desk in his super luxe Hong Kong office one morning in plain view of office grunts in the opposite tower, if they had binoculars or time to look up.
He did a head twitch in the girl’s direction. “This is, ah, my girlfriend, Nessadalyn.”
I did a double take. “I’m sorry, Ness—?” I genuinely didn’t catch her, erm, name.
There was a flash of anger in his face. “Nessadalyn,” he repeated. He glanced pointedly at my toes, which were a little grubby, because #AllWorkNoLife. “Going somewhere?” he said, rather nastily.
I’d forgotten he could do that, cut me with a snide throwaway comment. “Yes,” I said. For some reason, the lie popped into my head. “I’m going on a staycation with my boyfriend, Eric.”
Hah! Game on, Ivan.
He didn’t respond, but he looked like someone had run a cheese
grater against his Virus Cradle. Nessadalyn, perhaps sensing that all was not well, decided to speak up. “Pleased to meet you, Andrea. I’ve heard many good things.”
“Of course,” I said, knowing that she was lying. “And what do you do for a living, Nessadalyn?” Straight to the point.
Nessadalyn smiled. “I’m—”
(A catalog model! An escort!)
“—working at a hedge fund.”
“Oh,” I said. “As?” (Hoping she would say PA.)
Serene smile. “Quant.” She patted Ivan on his head. “I’m gonna be his sugar mama.”
Ivan smirked at me. “We’re going to have incredibly intelligent and cute babies.”
“Oh, who said anything about babies?” Nessadalyn said with a twinkly laugh. “I’m barely twenty-seven, you old dog.”
Ivan was thirty-eight.
“What about you?” she purred, clearly winning.
“I’m a senior associate in a top law firm.” Said out loud in this manner I sounded so sad. I didn’t ski in Val-d’Isère; I was past my peak hotness; I was just a senior associate.
“That’s so impressive,” Nessadalyn said, looking pointedly at my giant pack of toilet paper.
“Well,” I said, confidence at an all-time low. “I should really get going to my boyfriend’s. He, ah, wants me to, ah”—a flash of inspiration—“take a look at some of his firm’s legal documents because he’s got this huge launch of eco-hotels coming up, the first one being in Vietnam—maybe you’ve heard of it, I don’t know, no biggie—the Dulit Group?”
Nessadalyn nodded, impressed. “Beautiful properties, superb branding. You’re so lucky to be part of this deal.”
“Thanks,” I said, bemused. “Well, Eric, the group CEO and majority shareholder, is a lovely guy, too.”
“Who?” Nessadalyn said, confused.
Ivan cleared his throat. “Nessie, do you mind if I speak in private with Andrea?”
“Not at all. You take as long as you want.” Intelligent and desirable, Nessadalyn was not threatened by the likes of me.
“Really?” Ivan said, when she was gone. “Still?”
“What?” I said, gearing up for a fight that should have come a long time ago.
“I know you, Andrea. You wanted to make her feel small in the beginning, didn’t you? But unluckily for you, I don’t date stupid girls—or do you still think so little of me?”
“I never thought little of you,” I said, stung.
“Please. You never respected me because I was part of the system and I was cool with it, and you thought you were somehow special because you wanted out ‘someday.’ But guess what, Andrea, you’re still in it, you still measure yourself against it, and maybe you just need to swallow your pride and realize that it’s too late, you’re part of the Matrix, you’re no better than me or Nessie. Tell me: how’s your crusade to save the world going? Saved any disenfranchised people lately?”
I had nothing pithy to say.
“You either accept what you’ve become or reject it, then maybe you’ll make peace with it and learn to be happy.”
“I
am
happy,” I retorted, affronted.
He laughed. “You don’t have to convince me. And your new paramour—Eric, is it?—I hope he knows what he’s gotten himself into: a woman in her mid-thirties who still doesn’t know her own mind but thinks she does.”
“At least I don’t have a made-up name,” was all I could come up with.
“Grow up, Andrea. Or at least get your priorities right.” Then he walked away.
I spun around on my heel and headed toward the cashier. “I’ll show you,” I said, through gritted teeth, as the cashier eyeballed
me warily while she rang up my purchases. “I’ll show all of you.” Ivan was wrong: I was decisive, I knew what I wanted, who I wanted, and I was going to be happy.
Thursday 22 September
Showed Eric, who’d just touched down from Indonesia, where he was scouting for the perfect island for his new boutique hotel, just how much he meant to me, several times.
When he’d caught his breath, he asked me what that was about.
“Can’t I shower my boyfriend with appreciation?”
“Sure, if it involves that kind of literal back bending.”
“I missed you,” I said.
He kissed me. “Almost makes being away from you for so long worth it.”
“You should be around more often,” I said, meaning it.
“All right,” he said, looking meditative, his left hand tousling my hair. “All right.”