And then, last Friday, just a week ago, with the investors finally confirmed and the acquisition papers ready to sign, Stuart had asked to meet her at the Coffee Explosion on Sunset. She knew something was wrong when he didn’t pay for her soy latte; he had
always
paid for her latte, a gesture one part noblesse oblige and one part future employer.
Stuart, sweating in his Brooks Brothers shirt, stared into the crème of his macchiato and refused to meet her eyes. “Look,” he said. “There’s no easy way to say this so I’m just going to be frank. We’re not going to be able to buy your magazine.”
Margaret could feel the blood draining from her face. She had a mental flash of the pile of bills on her desk, a stack of unopened envelopes two inches thick, waiting for Stuart’s long-promised check to finally arrive. There was a moment of silence before she was able to stammer, “Who is ‘we’? I thought ‘we’ was you?”
“The investors I brought in,” Stuart said, now gazing resolutely out the window as if fascinated by the parking lot. “They decided that
Snatch
didn’t really have a viable business model after all. You have to admit, the circulation hasn’t exactly skyrocketed this year, despite the direct-mail solicitations—”
“We have fifteen thousand subscribers,” Margaret protested, her voice strangled by the tennis ball that had seemingly lodged in her throat. “That’s still pretty good.”
“I know, I know,” said Stuart. “But the investors I brought in…well, they had a different vision. Bigger, you know? It’s a pretty limited audience you’re reaching. I mean, you know how hard it’s been to sell ads. The investors still think that I should do a women’s magazine, but just something a little more
fun.
Honestly, Margaret, you know how much I love
Snatch,
but it’s just too…fringe to be mainstream. I mean, the last issue had a ten-page spread of vibrator reviews? With how-to diagrams!”
“Forty-six percent of all women own vibrators—what’s fringe about that?” She did cringe, though, just a little, remembering the editorial she had written for the issue—an essay she’d composed in a drunken stupor one evening two weeks after Bart left—in which she’d declared vibrators the “great liberating tool of the female masses, making men totally irrelevant and putting women in charge of their own sexual destinies.”
Stuart shrugged. “Well, it’s not going to sell in Peoria.”
Margaret seethed. She took an angry swallow of her latte and looked around the café, at the screenwriters busily tapping away at their laptops, at the retirees meticulously consuming every word of their daily
Los Angeles Times,
at the bored barista jittery from stolen espressos. She felt, suddenly, more angry than upset at Stuart’s self-entitled carelessness. “You promised me,” she hissed. “Do you know how much I spent—of my own money!—to make this happen? And now you’re just walking away and leaving me holding the bill?”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’m probably going to ditch
New Sprout,
too,” he said, shrugging. “Raw food is too last year.”
She grabbed for the most hurtful thing she could say to him. “God, you’re just like your father.”
Stuart looked at the bottom of his coffee cup, as if waiting for it to refill magically. “Well, it turns out he has kind of a point. I don’t want to, like, lose money. This was supposed to be an investment. I mean, I know you hate greedy capitalists and all that, but this is a business, you know?”
And that was that.
Snatch
—her baby—was dead, murdered by Stuart Gelkind; though if Margaret was going to be honest with herself, the magazine had been on life support before Gelkind ever came around. The day of its death,
Snatch
was $92,000 in the hole. To be more specific, Margaret was $92,000 in the hole, since she had been paying all the bills out of her own pocket (or, more specifically, off her numerous credit cards) for the last year anyway. To be
really
specific, Margaret was exactly $92,548 in the hole, according to the math that she had done on Monday, a few days after Stuart dropped the bomb, as she fiddled with her pocket calculator and watched her father’s company go public on CNBC. (That was three days ago, though, so the figure is probably higher now. Which means Margaret owes $92,548 plus three days of criminal interest to MasterCard, American Express, Visa, and one or two other credit card companies, all of whom want it back. Now.)
All that Monday, the first weekday she hadn’t worked in months, maybe years, she’d sprawled on her couch in an uncharacteristic stupor, chain-smoking cigarettes and watching CNBC—the cable hijacked from an upstairs neighbor—while fanning herself with a six-month-old copy of
Granta.
She was hypnotized by the endless loop of inscrutable symbols scrolling by on the bottom of the screen; every twenty minutes her father’s symbol—APPI—would swim by, and her pulse would quicken, and the bills would go ignored for a few minutes. The numbers crept upward, always. She wondered what each fraction represented to her father: A hundred thousand dollars? Five? A million? What had he done to
deserve
that kind of money—prey on male vanity with overpriced placebos? And then she thought of her own numbers creeping ever higher, each minute adding more interest to the bottom line of her credit card debt. Not to mention the money she owed Bart. It was incredible that her father’s portion of just one of those Nasdaq fractions—one-quarter! one-half!—was probably more than her entire debt.
The thought had flickered across her mind then—just as it did this morning when Bart e-mailed, and just as it does even now, as she gazes down at her $18 microgreens—that one call to her parents would, in all likelihood, make her financial problems go away. But she refuses to do it; she has too much pride to go groveling back to Mommy and Daddy. She just
knows
that they have been waiting for her to fail for four years now—she can just imagine the “I told you so”s she’d hear when they found out about the magazine’s demise. She can already hear the lectures about fiscal responsibility, see the disappointed faces reflecting on her “lost potential.” So why give them an excuse to judge her? (This may be, she suspects, the reason she still hasn’t summoned the strength to tell them that she and Bart broke up, either.)
And besides…just maybe…maybe there’s still a chance she could resuscitate
Snatch.
Right? Stuart could change his mind and call. Better yet, she could do it by herself: She could find funding elsewhere. Or the ad salespeople could suddenly materialize with an enormous buy (never mind the fact that on Monday she’d told them, along with her other two part-time staffers, that
Snatch
was on a publishing hiatus). Or…something. She’s just not ready to succumb to the fact that it’s over, and until it’s
really, truly
over there’s no reason to tell her parents. She can fix this.
Anyway, she hasn’t even had the opportunity to tell her parents about
Snatch
’s demise; her parents still haven’t bothered to return the message she left on Monday, congratulating her father on his IPO, and she certainly isn’t going to call them twice.
Then again, if they called her and just offered up some money of their own volition, maybe she wouldn’t say no. Like a grant. Or an investment. But no: That would be a cop-out, too. If she’d absorbed one lesson from her father it was that self-reliance was paramount to self-worth, and it was already bad enough that she’d let Bart lubricate her lifestyle for so long. It would be even worse to skim money off her father; doubly bad that she would be profiting off the morally bankrupt pharmaceutical industry. This was her responsibility. Shaking off these thoughts, she forks up a pile of microgreens and leverages it toward her mouth. Everyone is staring at her. “Hmmm?” she asks.
“I just asked how
Snatch
was doing,” says Alexis. “When’s that acquisition going to happen?”
The microgreens are quite heavenly, actually, salty and redolent of the sea. Margaret pauses, considers the pillaged mountain of oyster shells, the sweating bottle of chilled champagne, the sparkly gold chandelier earrings ($3,400 at Fred Segal—Margaret was there when Claire bought them), and makes herself smile. She doesn’t have the energy for anything else.
“Oh, very soon,” she says vaguely.
Josephine smiles widely and grips Margaret’s forearm with a broad hand. “That’s
so great,
” she says. “We are
so
proud of you, you know? You did it! With your little magazine!”
And although Margaret winces at the word “little,” she can’t help but grin back, too caught up in Josephine’s enthusiasm to feel guilty about lying to her friend yet again. For just a moment, her successes—imagined or not—are equivalent to those of her glamorous peers. She is in the race again.
Yes,
she thinks,
I will revive
Snatch.
I will make it work.
She looks around at her smiling, encouraging friends and thinks,
This is going to be okay.
“A toast!” squeaks Claire, lifting her champagne glass. “To Margaret, the magazine mogul!”
“Yay, Margaret!” echoes Alexis.
Margaret smiles shyly, letting the alcohol flush her cheeks. She is lifted too high by all the champagne bubbles and the warm and fuzzy cheer to worry about the phone calls or about Stuart or about her debt to her ex-boyfriend or even about
Snatch
anymore; and she is also too high to panic when the bill finally arrives and is an astonishing $912.
Alexis yanks the bill away from Josephine’s groping hand. “Our treat,” she says. She points a finger at Josephine and orders: “Plug your ears.” Josephine sighs, compliantly cupping her hands over her ears, and hums to herself to block out their conversation.
“Okay, so that’s $304 each, not including tip, which makes it more like $350 each,” says Alexis, digging into her purse. “Not as bad as I thought, actually.” For just a moment, Margaret feels as if an elevator inside her has lost control and plummeted into her intestines.
They’re splitting?
But she didn’t even taste the lobster! She sacrificed her entrée! She quickly steadies herself and puts her game face back on. No, it’s fine, she thinks, letting the bubbles lift her up again. It’s just
money.
She reaches for her wallet, wondering if somehow an extra $50 will have materialized in its folds during the course of her meal.
Claire leans in toward Alexis and whispers, “But Margaret only had a salad…”
“Right,” says Alexis. “Okay, then, you and I will cover, let’s say, $375 each, and Margaret can chip in $275.” She looks at Margaret and raises an eyebrow. “Fair?”
“Absolutely,” Margaret replies, hanging tenuously on to her equanimity. “It’s Josephine’s birthday.” She pulls out the wallet and extracts the three hundred-dollar bills, fanning them out. She lays them down on the table with a slap and discovers that this actually feels rather good. There is power that comes with just flinging away $300 like that, she thinks—a comfort in the bravado of a splurge. Now she can see why her friends like coming to places like this, and she feels herself an equal to them. This feels so great that when Claire reaches into her purse to get Margaret $25 in change, Margaret even waves her off.
But deep in her purse, the cell phone has started ringing again.
For a brief second, Margaret is able to hang on to her high spirits and believe, optimistically, that this call might finally be a good one, the one she’s been superstitiously waiting for, the mystery phone call that will somehow turn everything around. She sits there, frozen with indecision, torn between hoping and knowing better, between answering it and pretending that the cell phone so rudely ringing at dinner isn’t hers all.
Josephine has taken her hand away from her ears and is pointing at Margaret’s purse. “Whose phone keeps ringing?” she says. “Margaret—I think that’s yours.”
Alexis and Claire turn to stare at her, too. Margaret looks down at her purse as if she has never seen it before—but now, even without reaching in, she can see the cell phone’s illuminated display, blinking,
RESTRICTED NO.—
and freezes. The champagne bubbles rapidly pop, one by one, bringing her suddenly back down to terra firma. And with six eyes fixed on her, with the burden of her friends’ faith in her riding heavily down, she feels like she has no choice but to answer it. Even though she knows better, her hand plunges down into the satchel’s leather depths, almost as if it has a will of its own, and comes back out with the cell phone, vibrating in her palm like a fish. She flips it open—the table silent, her friends watching her expectantly—and lifts it, excruciatingly slowly, to her ear.
“Hello, is this Margaret Miller?” asks the metallic woman’s voice on the other end.
Margaret gazes at the tabletop for a long minute, trying to think of the correct answer to this question. She touches a finger to a particularly large bread crumb on the table and, when it sticks to her finger, brings it up to her mouth. She crunches the morsel between her teeth, chewing it twenty times, as if it were the last bite of food she will ever eat.
“Yes,” she finally says in a flat voice, knowing exactly who the person on the other end is—it doesn’t matter which one of them it is, there are a half dozen of them, maybe a dozen, but they are all the same. They have been torturing her for weeks now, months, disembodied robotic voices calling to collect her soul.
RESTRICTED NO.
“I’m calling from the collection agency on behalf of MasterCard,” the woman barks. “We’ve left eighteen messages for you already and sent you four notices in the mail. We would like to discuss the $22,353 debt on your credit card. Are you aware that if this is not paid expeditiously MasterCard has the right to take you to court and put…”
Margaret pulls the phone away from her ear, slowly, methodically, and shuts it so gently that it doesn’t even make a click. She puts it back in her purse and looks back up at her friends. They are studying her very strangely. Claire appears vaguely panicked, Alexis’s brow is wrinkled, and even Josephine is frowning with concern. This time, Margaret can’t muster a smile.
“Is everything okay, Margaret?” asks Claire, her voice a nervous squeak. “You look pale.”