You, Again(93)

Ari plasters a broad smile over her face and begins making shit up. “We’re going to kick things off with a bang, okay? Really get ourselves out of our comfort zones with a game I call ‘No, You’re the Asshole.’?” This is the closest she’s come to actual improvising in a year. Feels good, feels organic. “I want half the group to form a line to my right and the other half in a line on my left.” The leadership team is perfectly obedient, lining up as directed. “The two people at the front of the line are going to face off. You each have ten seconds to convince the group that the person in front of you is a huge, fucking asshole. For example, I might say, ‘Derek, you’re the asshole because you’ve been looking me in the breasts instead of the eyes all morning.”

Derek’s smile wavers. The eighteen other executive leaders glance around, unsure if this is a joke. Ari can feel herself teetering on the edge of losing their blind cooperation.

“I’ll be honest with you all.” She leans forward, speaking in a soft conspiratorial voice. “I did this activity with a team from Grubhub last week and…they couldn’t hack it. They didn’t have the balls. I have a really good feeling about this group, though. I suspect there are some huge assholes in this room today.”

A generic white guy pumps his fist. “Fuck Grubhub, let’s do this!”





Brad Hoenig [SFW ]:

It has come to my attention that you invented unapproved and inappropriate activities during a recent client engagement, in which participants were instructed to call each other “assholes” for forty-five minutes, while leveling personal insults at one another.

In addition, I’ve reviewed your social media accounts.

Mimicking fellatio on a United States monument during one of your contracted workshops is unacceptable and additional grounds for dissolving this professional relationship.

Good luck in your future endeavors,

Brad Hoenig

Founder/CEO/Head Improveneur/Agent of Fun #1





26


ARI PACES OUTSIDE THE OLD Brodsky’s space, which now features a hand-painted shaak + schmaltz sign. She vapes and occasionally glances through the window, nervous. Sweaty but cold. A sad bodega flower bouquet and bag of Sour Patch Kids are safely tucked under her arm.

If the city has become a sort of ghostly memory palace, this location feels particularly haunted, even if it’s barely recognizable as the place where she met with Abby nine months ago. Would Abby be proud of the scorched-earth manner of her exit from WinProv? Or disappointed?

Like Gabe. And Radhya.

For the past few weeks, she’s lived like a person out on probation: subletting a windowless room from a cousin-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, cautiously cobbling together a roster of odd jobs with an “on-demand nanny service” along with two of her old catering companies. She takes circuitous routes around the city to avoid ending up on blocks such as this one—places pockmarked with awkward memories and unresolved conversations—only to pass by Brodsky’s every Thursday evening around eight-thirty when Radhya’s pop-up is in full swing. There’s always a line of people snaking around the corner, enduring hour-long waits for tables.

Her best friend and her…well, whatever Josh is…are bustling around the open kitchen. Together. She’s not going in. This is just reconnaissance. Curiosity. Ari’s instinctive need to support any of Radhya’s endeavors, even if it’s from the other side of a thick pane of glass.



* * *





COOKING FOR ONLY fifty customers is playing a game on the EASY setting, but it feels good to fucking nail it. Briar had posted some photos of Josh’s mise en place because it looked that good. He’s still shaking off the rust—and will be for a while. But after more than a year of depriving himself of his primary source of confidence, it’s some kind of triumph, even if he’s the supporting actor instead of the star.

While not exactly akin to working at Eleven Madison Park, standing behind the prep tables his dad purchased secondhand back in the seventies doesn’t feel as miserable as he’d anticipated. At least his dad’s old equipment is no longer cluttering his apartment, thanks to his mother and her movers.

Josh plates the last of the desserts, hands tired but steady. Placing them on the pass, he glances up at the nearly empty dining room. But what catches his attention is on the other side of the front window. That plaid peacoat. That face peering nervously inside. He forces his gaze back down to the counter, knowing he’ll be useless for the next few minutes, spiraling. Perhaps in his concerted effort not to contemplate the possibility of Ari showing up at these pop-up dinners, he’d manifested her arrival.

He has a million other things to think about: breaking down their two-person line, closing procedures, scrubbing down every surface until it’s gleaming. There are twenty-three items on his highlighted task list and they’re all wiped away by that nagging combination of fantasy and memory that supplies Ari imagery at inopportune moments.

In Josh’s fifteen-ish years of seeing women naked, he’s forgotten the specifics of most of them. They all blur together into a hazy amalgamation, the way you can’t quite remember the details of a dream once you awaken.

But his mind won’t let go of its tiny observations about Ari. The pointed shape of her chin. The little wispy baby hairs at the back of her neck. Her back muscles in that black dress and also out of it. Really, don’t most women have those things?