I gesture at the driver to go, but instead he starts talking through a broad grin.
“Damned GPS gave me the wrong address! Led me back there to the elementary school—”
Cassandra starts talking too.
“Great. So I was looking through some of your portfolio pieces and—”
“…was there for ten minutes before I figured something was up. I guess they got the numbers on this street wrong…”
“…superb work, but some of it—I have to say—seems a little frivolous for what we produce here, if you don’t mind me saying, particularly your piece on…”
“…or the app just got it wrong—it does that sometimes—but the goddamned thing put me nearly a mile out!”
“…video creation, which is not something upon which we’re particularly invested in having our writers focus…”
“…never understood why they do that thing with the odd numbers on one side of the street and the evens on the…”
I do my best to politely get the driver to shut up, pointing at the phone and trying to get him to notice my wincing, strained expression. Eventually, after tapping his shoulder, he looks back and my combination of gritted teeth, tilted head, and a thumbs up seems to convey that I would really love to talk about town planning in the Valley Village region of L.A., but I’m a little preoccupied right now.
“…produce work that is thematically consistent?”
Cassandra’s question ends and I realize I have no idea what she’s just said. I immediately dismiss the idea of asking her to repeat it, partly because it took her five minutes to ask it, and partly because I suspect it would make her think I’m too dumb to get it.
“Well…” I say, if only to stop the silence venturing into ‘awkwardly long’ territory. “I think of eclecticism as a virtue,” I begin, piecing together the snippets of what I remember she was saying, and figuring confidence and conviction will cover for the rest. “As important for the critic as the artist—which is often dismissed in lieu of specialization. Especially as so much art continues to transgress boundaries and to…essentially cross-pollinate between the mainstream and more exploratory fringe. As a critic I believe it’s imperative to understand those reference points too, rather than simply allow oneself to be led there by the artist alone. I think modern criticism is—right now—so often dependent on a broader context.”
“Hmm,” Cassandra hums into the phone, thoughtfully, and I can almost see that high-brow lower itself ever-so-slowly. “Yes. I might agree with you on that. So you believe your work at…TrendBlend gives you some added cultural perspective?”
“Yes,” I say, almost sighing with relief once I realize I’ve scrambled onto a foothold in the conversation, “even a piece as superficially frivolous and seemingly insignificant as the one I did on expensive cakes reveals a lot about, say, attitudes of consumption and capitalist manifestations of success, at least when you step back and apply cultural—or even economics-related—subtexts to it…”
The phone interview lasts almost until we pull up outside of the TrendBlend offices. Cassandra doesn’t let the ice-cool sharpness of her questions slip, but I give about as good an account of myself as I can, and at the end, when Cassandra tells me she’ll get back to me soon, it doesn’t feel like she’s just saying it. When I hang up I realize I’m smiling, and that the adrenaline has blown away my hangover.
I tip the driver well and open the door to get out, stopping with one leg on the curb to turn back to him.
“Oh, by the way,” I say, “they do that thing with the numbers because otherwise you’d have, like, building number forty-six on one side and house number ninety-eight on the other. It would be messy. And you’d have no idea which way to go to find…I don’t know, number sixty-four, say.”
The driver looks up as he thinks about it. After a few moments he nods and smiles slightly. “Oh yeah…that kinda makes sense,” he says.
I laugh a little, thank him, and get out of the car, feeling full of good energy as I move toward the office block.
Standing outside the elevator doors I hear the unmistakable sound of Cassie’s trademark squeal. She’s one of the biggest ‘characters’ on the TrendBlend website, if only for the fact that she’s like a Disney princess on amphetamines.
“Ohhh!” she yells as she glides across the lobby with her arms already reaching out to me. “You are a kitten, honey!”
“Hey Cassi—oof!” I blurt out as she bear-hugs me so tightly that the rest of her words come across muffled by her warm embrace.
“You’re so awesome, Margo. We’ve got to have lunch this week. Let me know when.”
As soon as she lets go I manage a meek smile and a simple, “Sure,” before she wheels away and flounces down the hall toward the lobby café. I watch her with a confused look on my face, trying to figure out what prompted that kind of reaction, but then the elevator doors ding open and I decide to forget it.
At the studio floor—just a few down from the writers’ offices—one of the TrendBlend bosses, Melissa, gets in beside me. I’m not the sort of person who hero-worships, but if I was, Melissa would be one of the first names on the shortlist.
Taken as a whole, the TrendBlend site and its offices are chaotic, ever-changing, and bordering on schizophrenic. Sometimes there are so many new ideas buzzing around the offices that it’s a wonder any of them come to fruition.
That kind of madness needs someone pretty visionary to keep it in check, and Melissa’s so effortlessly cool, calm, and assured that she does it almost single-handedly. She’s a six-foot tall tower of understated designer clothing, an intimidating and vaguely Scandinavian accent, angular cheekbones, and short blonde hair. Nobody knows too much about her, but it’s clear within seconds of meeting her that she knows what she’s doing. She can edit a half-botched article about handmade stationery into one of the best think pieces you’ve ever read, and for her party trick she’ll tell you what the news is going to be next week. I’ve heard coworkers say she worked her way up in the publishing houses of NYC, while others say she was a foreign correspondent for the LA Times. Some people say she’s a lesbian. I believe none of it and all of it. All I know is that when she talks, people listen, although she doesn’t even need to open her mouth most of the time with eyes like hers.
So when she gets into the elevator, stands beside me, and says, “Good work yesterday, Margo,” as soon as the doors close, I almost freak out.
“Thanks,” I say, mentally searching for what she could be talking about.
The doors open on the offices, and Melissa marches out, pointing at people and asking for status reports as she makes a beeline for her office. I walk out a split-second later, dazed and confused.