Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

Jen

Monday, April 6 4:55 PM

To: Karina — LIFt

Subject: Re: Happiness!

No worries! John does actually need a signature, but it can totally wait until tomorrow. For lunch, how about tomorrow, Wednesday, or Thursday? Have a great evening! Thanks, Jen

Jen

Tuesday, April 7 9:22 AM

To: Karina — LIFt

Subject: Re: Happiness!

Hey Karina, great to chat with you in person, even if briefly! Will definitely get that memo to Sunny about responding to the board’s latest brainstorms — really excited to dig in there. You asked me again to send you days for lunch — how about Wednesday? Also, not sure if your original proposal of “steak and wine” was intended as a literal menu or not, but I’ve never been to Staley’s Steakhouse, and I’d be tickled to experience it for the first time. The buttery leather booths, the all-star mural of celebrity caricatures on the walls, the presence of octogenarian talent agents — it all screams old-school cheeseball glamour, at least to me. If we want something lighter, there’s a really good vegan place — and by that I do mean “really good,” not just “really good for a vegan place”—one block up from Staley’s where the un-burger is better than the un-un thing and the cashew ice cream rivals the hard stuff. Or, if this lovely weather holds, we could just grab-and-go from the dumpling truck and sit in the plaza! Looking forward — Jen

Jen

Wednesday, April 8 11:38 AM

To: Karina — LIFt

Subject: Re: Happiness!

Hey Karina, are we still on for lunch today?

Karina — LIFt

Wednesday, April 8 12:59 PM

To: Jen

Subject: Re: Happiness!

Oof, today is tough — Friday better

Jen

Wednesday, April 8 1:02 PM

To: Karina — LIFt

Subject: Re: Happiness!

Sure thing.

Jen — LIFt

Thursday, April 9 4:45 PM

To: Karina — LIFt

Subject: Hello!

Hey Karina, just wanted to let you know that I’m now the proud owner of an in-house email handle. We still on for lunch tomorrow?

Karina — LIFt

Thursday, April 9 8:58 PM

To: Jen — LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

Sure. I’m not a big lunch eater — coffee instead?

Jen — LIFt

Thursday, April 9 9:03 PM

To: Karina — LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

Of course. Let’s see…Baccalá has one of those patented stir-brewer machines for minimum acidity — I’m not much of a coffee snob, but drinking that stuff makes me feel like I’m in Monti, about to hop on a Vespa. Q.E.D. is a six-block hike but worth it for the cantuccios, and for the adorable ancient lady who makes the cantuccios. And last time I grabbed a latte at Cake Walk I saw Natalie Portman filming a movie nearby, which is an endorsement unto itself!

Karina — LIFt

Thursday, April 9 10:07 PM

To: Jen — LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

There’s a Starbucks half a block from the office

Jen — LIFt

Thursday, April 9 10:10 PM

To: Karina — LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

Easy enough! Around 3 or 4? That’s when I usually need a caffeine infusion.

Karina — LIFt

Thursday, April 9 10:12 PM

To: Jen — LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

Let’s say 9.30, I have a call at 10

Jen — LIFt

Thursday, April 9 10:14 PM

To: Karina — LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

Perfect.

Jen — LIFt

Friday, April 10 9:45 AM

To: Karina — LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

Hey, Karina, just wanted to make sure you remembered our coffee date!

Jen — LIFt

Thursday, April 10 10:07 AM

To: Karina — LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

Hey, Karina, it’s just after 10 and I know you had an important call, so I’m going to head over to the office — see you soon!

LIFt leased part of an upper floor of a midcentury skyscraper, one whose date of completion coincided with the apotheosis of America’s postwar white-man’s utopia, an industrial ecstasy synonymous with its Midtown Manhattan location and expressed in the vast and echoing lobby — one that strived for timelessness in its haphazard signifiers, in its Art Deco — ish brassy trims and flourishes, and in the Works Progress Administration swagger of the Diego Rivera — manqué mural behind the elevator bank, in which bulbous-muscled iron workers bore aloft a boyish-looking potentate: yellow forelock, three-piece suit. Once upon a time, salons and way stations and anterooms had hugged the lobby like a golden horseshoe. There was the dining room with the glass chandelier supposedly custom-crafted for Mamie Eisenhower and, mounted on a wall like a stag’s head, the jewel-encrusted suit of armor supposedly stolen from the Kremlin, each of which came with bottomless permutations of tales about the past-resident banker, broker, or blueblood newspaper editor who had acquired the items and how. There was the carpeted, split-level commissary, with its subsidized prime rib and its free booze after six p.m. and all day Friday. There were the oddly apportioned conference rooms, dotted with alcoves and tiny partitions. By some historical accounts, these vaults and bowers provided randy executives and their conquests with points of rendezvous that promised both a necessary sense of discretion and a frisson of sex-in-public excitement.

But Jen only knew all this from pictures. The dining room was now a mobile-phone storefront. The dim, sex-soaked recesses of the conference rooms were now the fluorescent-lit dressing rooms of a T.J.Maxx. Nobody knew where the mural had gone. The lobby had shrunk radically in size over the last decade, as the building’s owners partitioned it first for a Japanese steakhouse, then an American steakhouse, and then an Outback Steakhouse.

“Are you ever in the lobby,” Daisy once asked Jen, “when you stop and think you can smell the burning flesh of end-stage capitalism?”

“No,” Jen replied, “but are you ever in the lobby when you hold up your keycard to the sensor on the turnstile, and instead of a beep, you hear the bleating of a little lost lamb being led to slaughter?”

“Yes,” Daisy replied.

Jen and Daisy worked at the geographic center of LIFt’s operations, in what Jen estimated to be the precise spot on the entire office floor that was simultaneously farthest away from the women’s bathroom, farthest from the main exit, and farthest from the nearest unobstructed window. They shared a cubicle wall, which Daisy interpreted as a canvas for her rotating collages of Shetland ponies wearing Shetland-wool sweaters, baby sloths in tiny macramé hats, and root vegetables that resembled religious icons. Sometimes Daisy would engage the baby sloths in a visual dialogue with photos cut out of gossip magazines of disheveled starlets exiting various nightclubs.

Jen’s title at LIFt was Communications Manager and Co-Director, Special Projects. Daisy’s title at LIFt was Senior Program Officer and Co-Director, Special Projects. Neither of them could have always stated with certainty which projects they were intended to manage, officiate, or codirect, or which qualities made any particular project special. LIFt convened sporadic meetings, wherein Karina condensed her cumuli of verbiage while finger-combing her hair and Donna riffed on vision and intentionality and passion and Sunny headbanged and Jen, always by last-minute request, took notes as well as tried to think of something to say to introduce whatever new memo that Karina or Sunny had most recently asked her to draw up, whether it was the “Old Programs” memo or the “New Programs” memo or the “Building on Past Success” memo or the “International Applications of the ‘LIFt Yourself’ Concept” memo or the “Programs to ‘LIFt Yourself’ ” memo — until Leora had another appointment or, occasionally, when it became clear that Leora would not be attending at all or, on one occasion, when Sunny realized ten minutes after the scheduled start of the meeting that at that very moment Leora was in Dubai, presiding at the opening of a jewelry store as part of the promotional tour for her skin-care line, LeoraDiance™.