Range Anxiety

by

Dan Rivas

JENNY SAID SOMETHING THE OTHER DAY at Elena’s soccer game that I’ve been thinking about a lot. Jenny’s my ex-wife. We get along, not just for Elena. It’s in our natures to keep the peace no matter what’s roiling inside us. I was telling her about my consulting business, StoryTeam, which has branched into internal communications – messaging and programs that help companies boost morale so that everyone pulls in the same direction. I think I wanted her to be proud of me, to see that I was doing better.

“That makes sense for you. You always did need a story to tell,” she said, shrugging apologetically. I didn’t know exactly what she meant, but was afraid of what else she might say if I asked. We never talked about what happened all the way through. She was right not to want to hear my explanations.

It was my week with Elena, but I craved more of the intimacy I’d felt sitting next to Jenny as Elena bounded across the field like a gazelle. “Come have pizza with us,” I offered after the game.

“It’s your night. You two have fun,” she said, shaking her head as if she knew me better than I knew myself.

IN THE YEARS BEFORE and just after Elena was born, I was a copywriter. I’d given up on the idea of becoming a novelist, but still wanted to call myself a writer. Every day at LaunchPad, a B2B marketing agency with a rocket logo, the other copywriters and I laboured on the ground, yeomen cutting rows into well-worked soil for financial institutions, medical brands, and trade associations. I was determined to be useful. The years I spent making almost no money as a fiction writer while Jenny supported us both had been like slowly tumbling into a pit. With a job, I was able to climb my way back up the slope and every bag of groceries or box of diapers I bought was a step closer to level ground.

Then Nicole arrived.

It wasn’t only that she was beautiful, petite and shapely with dark hair and luminescent skin. She was better than us. She’d come from New York, was a designer at one of the big agencies that did Super Bowl commercials and magazine ads. Most of the designers at LaunchPad came from downsized newspapers, refugees from scarred landscapes. No one who had options ever came here.

It seems stupid to say it now, but I was in love. The first time I saw her she was standing in a circle of colleagues in a blue dress, her legs crossed like a dancer ready to twirl, smiling as if she had a joke to tell but was saving it. I’d had other work crushes. I sometimes fantasized about Cindy in finance pulling me into the server closet while hot machines whirred around us, but this was different. Nicole burned in my mind like a campfire down the beach, bright and inviting but far away. I didn’t know how to talk to her, so I watched her from a medium distance, observing how she nodded seriously when someone spoke to her and squinted into space when she was thinking. She sometimes hit a key hard on her keyboard with one finger as if to tame her computer and often laughed with her mouth wide open at the stupid things our colleagues said.

Before starting LaunchPad, my boss Gary was a designer, a “creative” like Nicole and me. He’d been an athlete, a high school football player and a skier who missed the Olympics twice. He seemed to think of himself as an old school football coach, a Knute Rockne type, stomping down the rows between cubicles as if they were sidelines, growling and slapping papers against his thigh. He got passionately exasperated when someone made a mistake, but also jumped and cheered when one of us found our way through a scrum of words and images. I think he saw me as a fullback who tended to fumble the ball and couldn’t be trusted with a lead.

One day Gary called me into his office and said, “Rodriguez, damn it. I have a job for you. But you can’t do that thing you always do.”

“What do I always do?”

He sat down in his chair and smoothed his salt and pepper hair, his hand stopping at the top of his head as if he were trying to keep himself from standing up and walking out of the room.

“You mess with shit too much. You scribble over good ideas until nobody can see anything. I would have put Eric on this, but he’s got the dairy farmers and Amanda is going on maternity next month.” He put both hands on the desk and looked me in the eyes. “You’re all I got.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He grunted and shook his head slightly before continuing. “There’s an electric car startup that’s going to let us pitch them. Full branding and a launch campaign. I’m pairing you with Nicole. She’ll know what to do. Whatever she says, you do it. Hear me?”

I didn’t usually buy into Gary’s fake-macho, testosterone-fuelled approach to marketing. I was the one who put up the postcard by the copier that said: NO ONE EVER DIED FROM A MARKETING EMERGENCY. But that day, my heart swelled and my head felt as light as if I’d done twenty pushups. Every copywriter at every agency in the world wanted a car account. I was determined to make this one mine. “On it,” I grunted back at Gary.

“Good man,” he said.

That afternoon, I dropped everything and got to work on a branding concept. What’s a car? I asked myself, leaning back in my chair, feet on my desk. It’s a vehicle of hope. Of possibility. Of connection. People go places in cars. They’re transported. They think, sing, tell stories, admit secrets, make love, get free.

That afternoon, an idea took shape. We could film odd couples on road trips speeding across a desert, summiting mountains, gliding along the plains of middle America. People who never would have met otherwise would be thrown together to drive coast to coast: a famous actor and an ER nurse, a welder and an English professor, an insurance CEO and an acupuncturist. They’d be too wrapped up in each other, too fully in the present to feel “range anxiety” – the worry that they’d be stranded somewhere unable to recharge their electric car. They’d have adventures, share stories, discover the real America and their real selves. People would follow their travels live on social feeds and streaming services. It would be reality TV, but with more reality. Decent people being together, being themselves.

When I told my idea to Nicole, it was the second time I’d ever talked to her. The first was when Gary brought her around for introductions and I hit my knee when I stood to shake her hand. “They shrunk your desk,” she’d said and I didn’t get it at first. She just shrugged and added, “Office pranks.” Gary guffawed, but she only smiled and went to the next cubicle, waving as if through the tiny window of an airplane.

This time, I decided I wasn’t going to fumble my chance. I talked to her about cars, the beauty and hope they represent, the idea that you can be more like the person you want to be with a nice car. When I finished, I was sweating and nearly out of breath.

“Rich, I really like it. I mean, it’s great actually,” she said. She grabbed a sketch pad and began drawing cars and landscapes, people in those cars contemplating the great world beyond their windows, people sitting close and talking animatedly, people walking back to the car with their arms loaded with snacks and souvenirs. It was so easy for her to give shape and colour to everything I felt and could almost describe, but couldn’t quite see.

“AN ELECTRIC CAR?” Jenny said when I told her. “That’s amazing!”

“It’s not a-may-zing,” I said.

“That’s not what I meant. They’re lucky to have you.”

I shrugged and went to do the dishes.

Why was it so hard to accept her encouragement? I think I was embarrassed by these small victories. She knew me when I thought I was going to be a real writer. Her supportive cheers were like t-ball trophies. At every game I swung, hit the tee, and watched the ball fall at my feet, but there she was anyway telling me I was a winner. The thing was, I did want to be a winner. Even at a game I didn’t really want to play.

Over the next few days, Nicole and I stayed late at the office, plugging away at our concept. I’d never known anyone who worked so hard and it felt good to try to match her focus and intensity. We debated meanings – “fast,” “spacious,” “range,” “intimate.” She let me look over her shoulder and critique shapes, composition, and colours. I usually came home after Elena was in bed, sometimes Jenny too. I’d be exhausted, but too electrified to sleep, so I’d stay up and stream TV shows from the 90s until I passed out on the couch.

The night before we flew to San Francisco to deliver our pitch, Gary was in a Union Square hotel room waiting for Nicole and me to Slack him our latest revisions. There was nothing to do in the fifteen or so minutes between sending the file and receiving Gary’s feedback, so we talked, really for the first time.

I asked if she grew up in New York and she laughed. “Sort of the opposite.”

She grew up in Traverse City, Michigan, where she trained to compete in the Olympics as a gymnast. Unfortunately, she tore her ACL at fourteen and her gymnastics career ended. “The scar is gnarly,” she said and pulled her skirt up a few inches to show me the long, thin welt over her knee cap. I held my breath and made fists to keep from running my fingers along that river of exposed skin. “That’s when I got moody and wanted to become an artist,” she laughed and smoothed her skirt back into place.

In college at NYU, she said she sometimes spent whole days at MoMA, forgetting to eat because she was so enraptured by what she saw. She made art, but after college she needed money, so she learned graphic design and worked her way up through a couple of New York agencies. After a breakup, she started hiking and the city began to feel like a well she’d fallen into where all she could see of the world was a little circle of sky. “I want to be somewhere nobody’s been in a long time. Maybe never. Not boxed in by anything, you know?”

I did know. Or I thought I knew. I wanted to be free too, free from whomever I’d become by accident, free from grieving the fact that I wasn’t who I thought I’d be.

I described a version of me that was almost me and that I thought might be more interesting to someone like her. I said I grew up working in the fields, graduated high school first in my class, and was writing a novel. In fact, it wasn’t me who worked under the hot sun. It was my father. He hoed beets, cut asparagus, dug potatoes, and picked raspberries. My mother was white and also grew up poor. But by the time I was born, they were solidly middle class. She was a retail store manager and my dad owned his own trucking business. I was a good student, but Marianne Odegaard was valedictorian. And the novel? I’d abandoned it years ago after talking to an agent who was a friend of a friend and who ghosted me once I sent my draft.

Telling Nicole about the better version of me was like eating ice cream. At first it was a rush. Every “wow” or “cool” or “interesting” made me hungry for more. But at some point, I started to feel soul-sick. I wanted to stop, but I kept spooning the sticky stuff in.

After four or five rounds of oblique questions and comments from Gary, he messaged, It’s good. And that was it. We were done.

I watched her pack up her sketchpad and laptop and tried not to panic. After tomorrow, our work would again fall into its regular patterns and we would return to being collegial strangers, especially if we didn’t get the account.

“Let’s have dinner,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said, smiling and grimacing in a stagey way.

A tube of Chapstick fell out of her bag and rolled toward the window. I chased after it, picked it up, and held it out for her. She walked over and took it from me, and we both looked out the window at the electric city below. It was dusk. Headlights on the bridges skittered like welding sparks.

“You know somewhere good?” she asked. “I haven’t been anywhere good yet. I tried to go out for my birthday, but I don’t really know anyone.”

“It was your birthday?”

“Last week. I don’t know how to feel about turning thirty.”

“I know the perfect place. It’ll be fun, but not too much fun – exactly what you need when you turn thirty.”

She laughed. “Okay, let’s do it,” she said.

We went to a loud, lively restaurant where the food was warm and herby and everyone seemed to talk with their hands. We got more drinks and I acted out a pep talk I’d gotten from Gary my first week, shoulders pressed against my ears, eyebrows bouncing, knuckles grinding on the table. “That’s it! That’s him!” she shouted, clapping at my party trick. She did her own Gary impersonation, grunting rhythmically as if performing a Captain Beefheart song. We laughed and traded stories about agency life, although hers were much wilder. A creative director she once caught having sex with a writer in a conference room used to fly in food from Italy every few months and the whole office would crowd around the counter like jackals and eat with their hands until everything was gone. For my part, I told her to watch what she put on her desk because Amanda had a habit of taking things. “Is she a klepto?” she asked. “I think so!” I said and we both laughed so hard my elbow landed in the hummus. A few times I thought that she looked at me with a question in her eyes, but at the end of the night she took a Lyft and I rode the bus, bouncing in the back like a heartsick eighth grader.

Jenny was on the couch when I came home.

“Ricardo, it’s late. I was worried because you have to fly tomorrow.” She was the only one who called me by the name my father gave me and the only one of us who spoke Spanish, which she learned studying abroad in Chile.

“Sí se puede,” I said and laughed.

She tilted her round head and frowned at me, her eyes like two moonlit pools.

“Just go to bed, will you?” I said.

The next morning, I got up early, drove to the airport, and found Nicole by the gate squinting at her laptop. She greeted me with pleasant professionalism and I sunk into a seat in front of the window trying not to look hungover. Airplanes rolled by one after another, but I didn’t see a single one in the air. Where did they take off from and where did they land? Both were somewhere out of sight.

In San Francisco, Gary made the pitch and Nicole described the artistic elements – metallic colours, dusky skies, space and closeness. I nodded along, unsure why I was there. After the meeting, the executives shook my hand vigorously and talked excitedly about the story, already wanting to write it themselves.

Gary stayed in San Francisco an extra day, but he called Nicole at the airport as soon as he heard. “We got it?” she said into the phone, looking at me with big, can-you-believe-it eyes. He told her the clients loved the concept. They called it “inspiring,” said it would be a “gamechanger.” She shook her head and shoved me. “You’re something special, you know that?”

People say things are “special” all the time: sale items, meals at restaurants, network TV shows. “Special” is not all that special. But I needed it. It was why in college I took creative writing classes and joined the drama club. Just one time I wanted to be told I was somebody worth paying attention to. Now, here was this beautiful woman, an artist who made ads seen by millions of people, telling me that all those shrugging assholes had been wrong. It was everything I’d ever wanted.

I took Nicole in my arms and kissed her right there in line to board the plane. She surprised me by kissing me back.

IN COLLEGE, I lived in a tilting, weathered house with six other students. The carpets were mouldy and the walls insulated with newspaper, but it was cheap, and just as important to me then, it felt authentic. We were Top Ramen intellectuals dressed in cargo pants and natty t-shirts. We drank PBR and stayed up late discussing Islamophobia, capitalism, techno futurism, and climate change until the beers ran out.

I met Jenny that year. She didn’t like the house or my housemates. She refused to stay over or even eat dinner with us. She pointed out that they all referenced the same three writers and never let women speak, no matter how stupid the point they were making. One afternoon, after studying at the library with Jenny most of the day, we swung by the house to drop off my books and found all of my housemates on the front lawn draped across the living room furniture. They’d done this once before in the fall. They called it “The People’s Parlor.”

“I don’t get it,” Jenny said later at the campus dining hall. “They spend so much energy being lazy.” This was 2002. People our age had built websites and become millionaires. “Hustle” was beginning to mean something. I hadn’t thought of my roommates as lazy before, but she was right. How could I have missed it? I felt stupid and urgently wanted to see other truths through her. About a month later I moved in with Jenny and felt strangely unburdened. I’d been chosen. Saved. Suddenly, I had everything. Two years after we graduated, we got married on an old farm that grew picturesque sunflowers.

People think cheaters cheat because they want the relationship to end, a kind of self-sabotage. That’s what Dr. Phil or someone like that would say. But I never wanted to lose Jenny. She was kind and helpful and made more money than me. We still had sex once or twice a week, which was close to enough. If anything, I wanted more of what I had. I wanted that new feeling – what I felt standing on the sloped grass on our wedding day, watching her walk up the hill as if she were sprouting from the earth, her hair and gown glowing in the late summer light, our lives changing and changing and changing every step she took.

AFTER NICOLE AND I LANDED AT PDX, I offered to drive her home. She told me to park a few blocks from her apartment and we had sex in my car, pulling at clothes and bumping into seatbacks. She smelled like a coastal forest – stormy, lush, and slightly salty. I wanted to kiss and lick and press my face against every part of her like a lost animal, to climb into her canopy and stay there, high above the world.

Later, parked outside her apartment building, I asked, “When can I see you again?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her head rested on the seatback, her eyes looking out her side window.

“I think I can get away Sunday.”

“Are you sure?”

“Do you have plans?”

“I guess not,” she said.

We only met up three times after that night and she never once invited me to her apartment. Instead, I took her to a field by a barn I’d found a couple of years earlier while driving around looking for somewhere to be alone. Nicole liked bourbon, so I always made sure to bring a bottle and a blanket. We’d lie half naked in the sun, not caring about where we were supposed to be. She’d tell me everything she wanted to do in Portland and I’d listen and tell her how much she was going to like living here. We often talked about going places together, as if we might be able to share a life someday. Of course, we never went anywhere.

It’s obvious now that she wasn’t that into me, that she needed something, or someone, and I happened to be there. It didn’t help that we worked together. Or that I was too infatuated to actually see or hear her. All day every day at the office, I looked for reasons to interrupt her and she shooed me away. I often settled for standing next to the kitchen where I could watch her and daydream about her hair tickling my nose or the toothsome softness of her skin. She avoided me, made plans for lunch with other people, declined a few meetings we were supposed to be in together. It was a small office. She couldn’t get away from me completely. I’d try to catch her eye, but when I did her face would darken with worry.

Once, when no one was around, I reached for her in the hallway and she slapped my hand.

“Someone will see,” she said.

“Let them.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying. I worked with a woman . . .” She stopped herself and shook her head. “Just stop, okay?”

But I couldn’t stop. And I couldn’t get any work done. Whatever had kept me pushing at the plow to write white papers and corporate emails and even electric car ads was gone. I missed deadlines. Clients threatened to pull their accounts. I’d seen dozens of people get fired at LaunchPad in the seven years I worked there. Finally, it was my turn. “You’re off the team,” Gary said. “We have to let you go.”

That day, I tried to find Nicole but Laurie at the front desk said she’d already gone for the day. It meant she knew what was coming. That hurt more than losing my job.

FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, I pretended to go to work. I’d sit in parks across town, a cup of coffee in my lap while young mothers at the playground nervously glanced in my direction.

Jenny noticed something was wrong. “Pobrecito, don’t go to work today,” she said. “You need rest.” I didn’t know how to explain how badly I’d messed up. I shrugged helplessly as if to say I didn’t have a choice.

I should have looked for a new job. Instead, I tried to win Nicole back with text messages. I sent her poems and YouTube clips of love songs. When those didn’t work, I sent her art from MoMA. Amazingly, that did seem to work.

Lovely, she replied to a Rothko that looked like two kinds of mustard smeared into rectangles. Perfect, she texted in response to Picasso’s smudgy bulls in a field. I wish, she tapped to a David Hockney lithograph of a pool and a diving board.

With every image, I asked her to meet me, and finally she texted back, OK.

In an hour?

Sure.

The young mothers must have clutched their children extra tight that day as I ran across the grass in my chinos. I drove in a kind of panic, speeding through the winding hills, the broad trees ablaze with red and orange leaves, the late afternoon sun blinding as I tipped over the ridge and dove down the slope toward our little patch of stolen earth. I always kept a bottle and blanket in my car in the hope that I would see her again. I imagined the pleasure we would both feel when she pulled the cork – pop! – the spirits again released.

LIFE GOT VERY SMALL after Elena was born. I wasn’t prepared for that. Even the simplest outing was difficult. We could never get in the car and just drive. Jenny kept a packing list by the front door: diapers, wipes, diaper cream, changing pad, extra clothes for when the diapers leaked, nursing cover, sunhat, pacifier, toys. If it was just Elena and me, I’d have to pack bottles and milk that Jenny had pumped and frozen. I didn’t always check the list, which made Jenny angry. “I don’t ask for much!” she’d say.

It was true. She asked very little of me. Even when I tried to lean in, she’d tell me, “That’s okay,” or, “I got it.” Jenny and Elena were inseparable in those early years, as I guess breastfed babies are with their mothers, but I didn’t know how to fit in except to go to work and do the grocery shopping (another list) and make sure the grass was trimmed and the sinks were unclogged. Jenny and Elena would play on the living room floor and I’d pretend to read while I watched them from my chair as if through a window.

I told Jenny how I was feeling once, but didn’t explain it right and she thought I was accusing her. “You need to make more of an effort,” she said and she was right. But trying got harder and harder.

I PARKED NEXT TO THE FALLING DOWN BARN and tromped through the tall, rippling grass to our usual spot. My chest quivered as I lay on my blanket and imagined her appearing through the rachis and finding me on one elbow, a knee up, the bottle in front of me.

The flutter turned into a pit in my stomach as time passed. My shoulder began to ache and my leg fell asleep. I lay on my back and looked into the blue and breathed the sky. I must have tried to inhale too much because I started gasping and coughing as if I were drowning under a sea of air. “You can drown anywhere,” my mom used to say. She felt she knew this from experience. When she was nine, at a picnic on a farm, her little brother fell into an irrigation ditch. She was the one who found him lifeless in the water.

What if she was right? I tapped my phone one more time, still hoping, but there were no new messages.

It was almost five o’clock. Time to go home to Jenny and Elena. I left the blanket and the bottle and walked back to the barn, grass slapping at my face. I stood next to my car, but couldn’t make myself get in.

Every time I came to this field I thought about climbing the barn and standing at the top like a mountaineer. One wall and the roof had collapsed years ago making a concave slope to the ground that looked climbable. I told Nicole about my barn climbing fantasy once. “Don’t you want to climb real mountains?” she asked. It was the last time we were together, the time she said to me, “I thought this would be more fun.” She lay in the grass looking straight up at the clouds speeding past us. We didn’t even take off our clothes.

I hoisted myself onto the barn and ascended the steep, broken slope, manoeuvring around the soft spots and staying along the rim. Halfway up, I looked down at my shabby car covered in dust. For the first time, I noticed the tilted stump and understood what had happened to the barn. I kept climbing. The pitch got steeper near the top and I found that I had to rely on my arms more for balance. Shaking and sweaty, I pulled myself up, threw one leg over the peak, and lay with my limbs dangling like a panda in a tree.

From up here, I could see that the field was a yellow patch surrounded by houses with green lawns, each one fenced off from the others. Beyond those houses were more houses. Houses in every direction as far as I could see. This was no getaway. It wasn’t even a good hiding place.

Toward the end with Jenny she often used the phrase, “you’re fooling yourself . . .” I didn’t hear it at first, but now it rings in my ears. The tingle of hope I still feel every time I see her – I know that’s just me wanting this life to be different and knowing that I don’t have it in me to change much at this point. There’s a part of me that worries I never did.

The sky had turned pink while I was on the roof. I texted Jenny.

Had to work late. Coming home now. Bringing leftover ice cream from a meeting.

Yum. Elena already ate. I’ll make something special for us.

The best part of a lie is the minute after you tell it, when you think you’ve gotten away with something and the guilt hasn’t pressed in yet. My heart ran ahead of me, my chest again quivered with the belief that I still had a chance.

I climbed down from the barn and got into my car and drove through the dark hills into the warm light of the city. At the grocery store, I stood in front of the freezer with the door open and stared at the flavours. I must have stood there too long because a tall man with a beard and a nametag that said “Orlie” asked, “Can I help you find something?”

“Which is the best ice cream? The kind important people buy?”

Orlie rubbed his face and looked into the cold wind of the freezer. “I don’t know. That one?” He pointed at a pink carton with bubbly letters.

I bought two pints, chocolate and lavender, and ate half of each in my car. At first, it was like standing in front of an air conditioner after walking miles through a desert, but then my head began to hurt – “brain freeze” we used to call it as kids. I laughed at myself thinking of those words. Brain freeze. That was exactly what I had.

Once the cartons were convincingly depleted, I drove east toward home, my stomach churning, gummed up by ice cream and a desperate instinct for self-preservation. I got as far as the bridge before I had to pull over. Cars honked at my open door as I leaned over and emptied my guts onto the deck.

I drove home clutching the steering wheel like a scared drunk, piecing together in my head a story that I hoped was strong enough to keep my life from falling apart the rest of the way. As the story took shape, I rehearsed it to the taillights in front of me. I looked them right in their red, glaring eyes and said: We have a new client with a new product. Something no one has ever seen. We’re finally figuring it out. The team needs me. I’m their guy. What’s the project? (I knew she would ask. She always took an interest.) It’s a secret, I planned to say. Top secret. I can’t tell anyone.