Fine. FINE.
Fuck. All. Of. This.
She can have her wish.
He steps over the shirts strewn around the floor. Walking out to the kitchen, he picks his coat and his fucking overnight bag up off the floor, grabs his knife roll, and silently exits the apartment.
She can keep the pasta machine. Let it collect dust in storage.
He leaves their dinner in the oven to burn.
23
ARI’S OFFICIAL TITLE IS “JUNIOR solutions enabler” for the first two weeks of employment at WinProv LLC. Her duties include picking up her boss, Brad Hoenig （founder/CEO/head improveneur/agent of fun #1）， from a variety of airports. Driving Brad around is the easiest gig she’s had in years, even if she suspects she’s doing it because he has a suspended license.
Brad’s real name is Brian but he A/B tested first names five years ago and found that “Brad” is snappier. He’s A/B tested every aspect of WinProv, including the color of the shirts his “enablers” wear for each workshop （cobalt blue—green shirts are “aggressively unfunny”）。 He wears a pair of wraparound sunglasses pushed up on his forehead an inch and a half above his eyes. Ari frequently finds herself staring into the reflective black abyss of the sunglass lenses as he quotes Louis C.K. bits.
He puts Ari up in a studio apartment in one of those beige corporate housing complexes with stiff, uncomfortable furniture and a tiny coffee maker. It looks like a place a newly separated dad would occupy for a few months while he sorts out his shit.
Ari hadn’t brought much with her. The day before she took the train down to D.C., she packed a few odds and ends inside liquor store boxes and took a Lyft over to Radhya’s.
“This is ridiculous,” Radhya had said as Ari pushed the boxes into her tiny foyer with her boot. “You don’t have to leave the state because of Kestenberg.” It was probably the fifth time Rad had expressed this sentiment.
“This isn’t about him,” Ari insisted. “It’s a good opportunity for me.”
“I’m shocked I haven’t gotten another series of unhinged texts from him.” Rad leaned over to examine the remainder of Ari’s stuff—an assortment of random-but-precious shit that couldn’t fit in her suitcase （an aloe plant she’d managed not to kill, the blue-and-white bowl that she’d seriously considered leaving in the cabinet as some stupid show of poetic justice before chickening out）。 Everything else had been sold, curbed, or donated. “Since when do you have a pasta machine?”
Ari got that sensation like the teacher called on her even though she hadn’t raised her hand.
“It’s Josh’s.” Ari took care not to trip over his name, which she probably hadn’t said out loud for a week.
Radhya assured her she’d return it to him. “It gives me flashbacks of rolling out endless batches of pappardelle,” she’d said, shuddering.
Ari said “thanks” and decided that would be the last time she mentioned Josh Kestenberg to Radhya. Or anyone.
Instead of thinking about Josh, Ari memorizes business jargon like “hard stop,” “mission critical,” and “circle back to that.” She watches Brad’s rousing informational videos, which are all set to an unlicensed version of “Where the Streets Have No Name.” She studies his A/B tested presentation script. It includes a lot of “pause for laughter.” After roughly fifteen airport drop-offs and pickups and two workshops, Ari earns the title “senior solutions enabler and core faculty member.” Brad reminds her that she’s still in the probationary period.
Several times a week, Ari and Brad enter a Hilton or a Radisson in their bright blue button-down shirts. They do an A/V check, wire themselves up with headset mics, and pull faces in front of a sea of regional sales managers and IT specialists for three to six hours.
It’s sweaty work—not like performing in front of an audience of people who voluntarily paid five or ten or sometimes zero dollars for a LaughRiot show with the goal of being entertained. The WinProv attendees need to be won over every time, whether they’re happy to be away from their open-floor-plan offices or annoyed at the forced camaraderie and high probability of trust-falls.
Once or twice, Ari asks Brad if he has any reservations about servicing a client list that includes big pharma and tech companies and the sorts of places that have members of the DeVos family on their boards. He insists that “improv is for everyone. These people build the apps and services we rely on.” He says, “Grocery delivery, ride sharing, text-message-based therapy. Front-end developers need to dare to fail, too.”