David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

He stood up too quickly, and the chair he had been sitting in tipped back and fell over. Sharon jumped in her seat. Leo enjoyed her discomfort. Was she actually afraid of him? Good. Let her be. Puffed with anger and gutted with grief, he opened Sharon’s office door to leave.

“I don’t want you upsetting the children, Leo,” Sharon said to his back. “You understand? I just want you to leave now. Don’t worry about the take-home notes. I can write those.”

Sharon would write the daily journal sheets? She’d fuck up a shopping list. His hand found a beanbag frog. He turned and hucked it at her. The frog whizzed through the close air of the office. It thunked squarely into Sharon’s eye and landed flat on her desk.

They were both shocked. Only the thrown frog was unfazed. It was still smiling the way frogs certainly do not smile. Then that moment broke, and Leo, proud of the first violent act of his adult life, skedaddled.

“That’s assault! You assaulted me, you little prick,” Sharon yelled after him. She was picking up her phone.

But he was moving now. Toward the exit. He stopped to face the big room once. The grown-ups were brittle, the children oblivious. He raised a clenched fist high. “Give ’em hell,” he shouted.

At the far end of the room, Samuel raised his small fist in return.

Right this way, Mr. Deveraux.”

The assistant led Mark down low-ceilinged corridors to a greenroom and held the door open without entering himself. Mark peered in. Leather couches; an expansive array of granola bars and iced bottles of juice and water and bagels and tea bags in foil envelopes; Margo! magazines on a hyperabundance of end tables; an attractive man stirring coffee daintily and looking engrossed in the sheaf of papers before him. Mark didn’t enter the room either.

“Yeah, listen,” he said to the PA, “I believe that my representative told the person that she liaised with here that I would be needing a private room to prepare? With a window? For meditational purposes? Do you think you could see about that?”

The PA nodded slowly and blinked twice. He looked at his clipboard. “Ah, sure.” He exhaled. The microphone part of the headset he wore looked like a big fat fly hovering before his mouth. “Would you like to wait in there and I’ll see about that?”

“That’s okay. I’ll wait right here.” Mark watched the PA retreat and he considered the possibility that he would have to go on TV in his current too-sober state. Other than this potential crimp, though, everything was pretty much as he had hoped it would be: the black car sent for him; the attractive assistant who sat primly in the backseat with him (she wore a gray skirt and a pristine mountaineering parka that kept Mark from scoping her northern hemisphere, and she worked the thumb wheel on her BlackBerry as though it were a rosary); the way that, once he got to the studio, there was a sort of event horizon that preceded him by fifty yards within which everyone appeared to be aware of him and of who he was.

He realized that he recognized the good-looking man in the greenroom — a celebrity chef who claimed his name was Nicholas Rugby. Mark had received a copy of his book from three different people last Christmas. It was called Eat for the Real You and featured shallow-depth-of-field photography of noodles, and breezy instructions rich in kinetic verbs. He could go in there now and introduce himself and they’d probably both pretend to respect each other’s work and maybe become celebrity friends and Mark could have Nicholas to dinner and Nicholas could make his famous noodles, famously, in the open-plan kitchen Mark was going to install in the apartment he’d just bought in Brooklyn. But no — Mark was getting more nervous by the moment. Maybe after the taping there’d be time for that. He would wait in the hallway now, wait to be shown the private room that these days was his due.

In the year or so since he had begun his steep ascent through the strata of this particular type of fame, Mark had found that those charged with his comfort actually liked him to express specific wishes. A seat number less than ten and on the right side of the airplane. A lectern no taller than forty inches. Idiosyncrasies were also appreciated. He kept about ten pens on his person and had notepads jammed into every pocket. The jamming-in part was important. Mark pre-rumpled the notepads — bent the cardboard backing and curled the pages — so that when he pulled out a pad, it looked positively fizzling with ideas. Marjorie Blinc, his cunning consigliera, encouraged the behavior, especially the pre-appearance requests. “Don’t be a jerk about it, but be firm,” she said. “Let me be a jerk about it.” There were a few stipulations she had written into his standard contract that Mark had balked at: lemon rounds, not wedges; hypoallergenic makeup; fair-trade green tea. These, she explained, were gives — items that he was not to insist upon, which lack of insistence would make him seem like a much more reasonable person than his contract made him out to be.

“If it comes up, go ahead and say you had no idea that the agency wrote lemon rounds into your contract,” she told him, “and that you find such a requirement ridiculous.” At first, these machinations had embarrassed him. Then he saw how well they worked. And soon he ceased to think of them as machinations. The fact that he accepted, graciously, either a lemon wedge or a lemon round in his sparkling water he took as evidence of his own lack of attachment. He knew that there were people who actually did care about such things; he was not one of them.

But this need to be alone in a room with a window was not a give. In a few minutes he would be talking to ten million people. Come off well here, and his name and work would bloom like ink in water. There were people waiting around to see if the success of his book was repeatable, if his philosophy was scalable. Blinc’s agency had already gotten him more money than his mother had spent on his upbringing. But Mark was no fool. Someone else would come along with something new and knock the charm right off him. Before the magazine-reading classes tired of him, he needed to leverage his fluke fame into something more bankable. He needed to pluck from this tempest the idea he still believed in and carry it to safety. Do that, and he wouldn’t need Marjorie Blinc or her squads of editors and forecasters. He wouldn’t need the craven SineCo squillionaire James Straw, whose early devotion to Mark’s book — he’d decreed that it should serve as management doctrine for his tech empire and bought a copy for every one of his employees — was the reason that Mark now had an agent and publicists and an accountant and (ever since he’d begun to receive scrawl-penned letters from one particularly enthusiastic and unhinged fan) a security consultant.

Gray Skirt was coming toward him now at a brisk clip. Her boots made a tack-tack sound that preceded her.

“Is there a problem with the greenroom?” she asked, appearing to care.

“Oh, no. No problem. It’s just that I’ll need a few minutes of solitude before I go on. To meditate. To get centered. A room with a window, if at all possible.”

“I think we can accommodate you,” said Gray Skirt, smiling in a tight-lipped way.

Yes, I think you can too, thought Mark, giddy with the sense, as he was so often these days, that the world would and could accommodate him. Was it zero-sum? A pretty girl was going to lead him to a private room in a TV studio; did that mean that someone else, somewhere else, was not receiving such treatment? He thought not. Although there were probably not enough private jets for everyone. Mark had now spent tens of hours aloft in a few of these — he had slept on a couch in a tube going five hundred miles an hour high above the blue earth. But for that matter, even being able to fly coach represents an unearned economic advantage, doesn’t it? Or, hell, just driving a car. Who among us deserves all he has? Mark recognized that there was hypocrisy at the center of his current life (“A young wise man without pretensions,” Time magazine had called him, although last week, he had been hunting wild boar, drunk, on Straw’s Carmel ranch), but he was doing nothing more than asking for the things he wanted. Which was what his book, Bringing the Inside Out, had turned out to be about. Still, when he remarked to Gray Skirt that the studio was a bit nippy, he did this by way of flirtation, not in anticipation of being handed a cashmere sweater from a closet stocked with them.