Can I Get An Amen? (10 page)

I uncrossed and recrossed my legs, my foot bouncing spastically, without rhythm. “So there is nothing for me?”

She pursed her lips in thought, then drummed her nails loudly on the desk. “There might be one option.” Turning to her computer, she pulled up a listing for the position she had in mind. “Yeah, see,” she said, pointing at her screen. “We’ve got a picky one here. A lawyer. His assistant left a few weeks ago and we’ve sent over four girls for trial periods, but none of them has worked out.”

“A lawyer?” I asked, suddenly hit by a painful pang. I apparently sounded less than enthused, because Dana gave me a look. I was clearly in no position to be choosy.

She gave me another appraising inspection. “He might like you, though.”

“Why is he rejecting all the other candidates?”

“You know,” she said dismissively, “he wants the right fit for his office.” She reached for my résumé. “I’ll fax this over to him. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”

“And if this doesn’t work out, are there any other options that I might be able to pursue?”

She shook her head as if to say
sorry, sister
. “I’ll keep your name on file.”

. . .

Four hours later, my cell phone rang. It was Dana. “Good news,” she said in a flat tone that didn’t seem to register any
news, good or bad. “Mr. Kent would like to meet you tomorrow morning.”

Dana gave me his address and instructed me not to be late. “Nine a.m. sharp,” she said. “Wear a suit and bring a clean copy of your résumé.” Her phone gave a telltale dead silence of a call waiting. “Oh, I gotta take this. Let me know how it goes.” Then she hung up.

“P
leased to meet you,” said the smooth, well-groomed man standing behind the enormous wood desk. “I’m Philip Kent.” He gave my hand a shake that I imagined would be much more robust if I were a man. Philip Kent. It was a name that I could see on campaign lawn signs: classic, powerful, easy to pronounce.

“Ellen Carlisle,” I said. “Thank you for taking the time to meet me.”

“So,” he said. “Why don’t I start by telling you a bit about this position?”

Philip Kent was an attractive man in his late thirties with an appealing smile and a tall, thin frame. He had thick, floppy, Hugh Grant hair, though his features were less quirky than Hugh’s and more traditionally handsome. I could tell from his desk, which was scattered with sterling silver picture frames, that he was a family man. They were all turned away from me, but I imagined the posed Christmas portraits next to the candid beach
shots, where sandy, smiling children peered around the legs of a beautiful wife.

“I’m sure Dana mentioned that we’ve had trouble filling this position,” he said, almost apologetically.

“She did indicate that there were a few other candidates that didn’t work out.”

“I’m not sure how to say this in a way that won’t sound terrible,” he said, searching for the right tone and words, “but polish and discretion are very important to me in an assistant. In some cases, you may be speaking with my clients more often than I do. And you will be privy to sensitive information.”

“Well, I was in account management for several years, where I was often trusted with confidential client information,” I said confidently. “And the nature of that work also requires that you are detail oriented and organized.” I was in interview mode, which meant that I was pulling out all the stops. I sat up straight, smiled, and spoke with crisp enunciation. I didn’t have the luxury of being picky.

He asked me a few more questions about my work in Boston, my schooling. “I see you went to Horton,” he said, glancing at my résumé with an inscrutable smile. “I was a Delbarton boy. I’m sure we have several mutual acquaintances.”

I smiled and agreed.

“Well, now that you know all about my unrealistic expectations and ridiculously high standards”—he gave a self-conscious smile—“are you still interested in the position?” He seemed more candid and prudent than unnecessarily picky.

“Absolutely,” I said with a polite laugh. “I hope I meet your expectations.”

He straightened a pen on his desk, placing it parallel with the edge of his notepad. “Oh, I’m sure you will.”

I was to start the next day and would be trained by Brenda, his partner’s assistant, who had been absorbing the excess workload. “Brenda will be delighted to have you on board. I think she’s had it with me.”

. . .

Dana Sacco congratulated me. “I thought you might be right up Kent’s alley,” she said in a way that I found slightly disconcerting, though I ignored it. The trial period was to last two weeks, at which point I might be offered a permanent position, and the pay was better than I had hoped. However, I wasn’t ignorant of the fact that I was now utterly on my own. With Gary, I had always assumed that at some point I would no longer work; consequently I never directed my ambition toward my career, focusing it instead on the increasingly problematic task of starting a family. Without a husband, I had to make my own way, and I knew that I didn’t want to work for Philip Kent forever.

“It’s just a bridge,” I told Luke.

“To what?” he asked.

“Exactly.” To what? I had no idea.

Nevertheless, I felt optimistic about the job; it was a step forward. I would answer his phone and schedule his meetings and proof his letters, all the while riding out the recession and doing what all the books called “renewing my sense of self.”

“Oh, praise the Lord,” said my mother when I told her that I had found a job. “That’s answered prayer!”

And I thought that maybe it was. I felt the strongest I had in months.
Maybe I really can do this,
I told myself.
Maybe I can start over.
It was a sentiment that stayed with me all through the evening, as my parents congratulated me, as I left another message for Kat, and it continued the next day on my way into the
office that bore the Kent name. It stayed with me through my cup of coffee, the introductions and handshakes, and my training with Brenda, right until the moment when I stepped behind Philip’s desk to grab a stack of file folders and got a glimpse of the beautiful wife in the framed photos. It was my high school nemesis, Parker Collins.

Philip saw me staring. “Do you know my wife, Parker?” he asked. “She went to Horton as well.”

“Yes,” I said. I tried to summon a smile to mask my shock as my face burned. “She and I were in the same class.” And, thanks to a cruel alphabetic coincidence, always seated right next to each other in assembly. Parker Collins and Ellen Carlisle, even then a juxtaposition.

“I thought she might have been,” he said amicably. “Well, she comes in often, so I am sure you will have a chance to catch up.” And with that, he disappeared for the rest of the day.

I was left to acquaint myself with the office, so I sat at my desk and stared blankly into my computer screen, all the while thinking of Parker. She had the life I was supposed to have: married to a handsome lawyer, with three beautiful children and a house in the suburbs. She attended parent-teacher conferences and scheduled doctor appointments. She planned dinner parties and booked their vacations. A few times a year, Philip would send her away for spa weekends. “Poor Parks really needs a break,” he would tell his friends. I knew her life. I knew it inside and out because it was the life I had imagined, the life that had made me keep
trying
, the life that I now tried desperately to dismiss as dated and bourgeois.

My desk was outside Philip’s office. It was slightly smaller and had less prime real estate than Brenda’s, which I was glad about. Brenda was older, probably in her mid-fifties, and had an
apple-shaped figure and dark brown hair that she pulled back into a tiny ponytail. Though her face showed her age, I was sure she was once considered quite a beauty. She didn’t wear a wedding ring but displayed a series of old, faded school photos of two children, a boy and a girl, at her workstation. There were no pictures of a husband, and there was something about the quiet way she ate her salad at her desk during lunch that made me think she was on her own, too. She was used to meals by herself.

I asked about lunch protocol, if I could step out of the office. She graciously told me that lunch was usually half an hour and suggested a deli a block away, where I ordered a cup of corn chowder and ate at a small table with my back to the window. I hadn’t expected a typical new-hire all-office lunch for a temp and was relieved to find out that I was right.

After I finished my soup, I sat back in my chair, recalling the photos of Parker. She looked much the same as she had in high school, with long, straight blond hair that she had highlighted every four weeks, a slightly upturned nose that gave even her most neutral expression an air of arrogance, and a petite frame that boasted D cups.

Unless Parker was an entirely different person than she had been in high school, I knew that she would come sniffing around the office the minute she found out that I was in her husband’s, and by extension her, employ. And what could I do? I wasn’t going to quit. I could only hope that Parker would be too busy chasing three kids around to stop by much. But Parker had beaten me, again. I was a thirty-one-year-old divorcée with no kids and a dead-end temp job, and soon she would know it. As I listened to the street traffic outside, the rushing cars and occasional horns, for the first time I questioned whether home was really the best place to run.

On the way back to my parents’ that night, I left a message for Kat. My voice was tired and short when I said, “I really hope you call me back this time. I need to talk to you. I found a temp job… It’s working for Parker Collins’s husband… I’m
not joking
.”

Jill, of course, answered right away. “Oh my God, how
was
it?”

“Philip Kent,” I said. “I’m working for Philip Kent.” I had never told Jill the name of the man I had interviewed with, saying only that it was some lawyer.

“Noooo!!!” gasped Jill. Of course she knew he was Parker’s husband, but in all of our conversations, his name had never come up. I had known that Parker was married to a wealthy, successful man; Jill may have even mentioned that he was a lawyer. But that was it. “Oh my God, what are you going to do?”

“What do you mean, what am I going to do?” I said, slightly antagonistically, feeling, for the first time, spiteful of Jill’s easy life. She had the luxury of not working, of being taken care of. She spent her mornings at the gym and her afternoons at the mall.

“I mean, are you going to quit?”

“Jill, I know that you don’t concern yourself with such things, but the economy sucks. There is double-digit unemployment and people are losing their homes.” I knew I was being overly dramatic and more than a little mean-spirited, but I was angry and Jill happened to be at the other end of the phone. “So no, I am not going to quit. I am going to keep this job and work for Parker Fucking Collins’s husband.”

Jill indulged me in my rant and neither defended herself nor retaliated. “All right. Well, I just hope you don’t have to see
Mrs. Kent
too often.” I was sure that Parker did go by Parker Kent
now, but in my mind, all the legends from my Horton days would eternally carry their maiden names. Parker Collins, Elizabeth Holland, and Gretchen Daimler: they were the triumvirate.

I remembered the first time Jill and I were invited to hang out with them. It was a slumber party at Gretchen’s house during our sophomore year. Parker convinced us all to take off our bras and shirts so we could see who had the biggest boobs, even though she was clearly the winner, shirt or no shirt.

“It’s not a big deal, Jill,” said Parker dismissively when Jill, always painfully self-conscious about her body, expressed reticence. “We’re all girls. Why are you being so weird about it? I’m beginning to think your boobs are, like, deformed,” she said with a giggle. She instructed Jill to go first, then me; Parker had a way of dictating orders so that they were followed without question. After Jill and I were standing topless in Gretchen’s well-lit Laura Ashley bathroom, looking at Parker and Gretchen expectantly, Parker gave her cruel, sugarcoated laugh. “Oh my God, stop staring at us! You guys are, like, lesbians!” She moved behind her sidekick, as if trying to get away from us. “Gretchen, can you have them sleep in the guest room?” Jill shifted uncomfortably and crossed her arms over her chest. I reached for my shirt.

But Jill and I always went back for more. Parker had that kind of pull, that kind of power. And Jill and I were desperate to be accepted by the popular, well-bred Parker Collins. It continued that way until senior year, when Jamie Lawrence asked me to the homecoming dance. Parker had high school’s version of a serious boyfriend and had no claim on Jamie, other than the fact that he was decidedly in her league, a male member of Horton’s elite. That was when Parker went from my sometimes friend to quite the opposite; she was with Jamie by the time we graduated in June. They both ended up going to the same
just-shy-of-Ivy-League college and, from what I understood, dated throughout their freshman year.

“Did you hear about
Mr. Collins
?” asked Jill, and I knew that Mr. Collins meant Parker’s father, who was the CEO of a major investment bank in New York.

“No—what about him?” I asked, immediately sucked back into the Parker drama, almost as if she were a vortex that became more powerful with geographic proximity.

“He retired from Fishman Bach last year and totally cashed out everything, went entirely liquid.” Jill spoke with the authority of a seasoned financier. Presenting herself as an unequivocal expert on topics she knew next to nothing about was one of her many charms. “Now the word on the street is that the firm is in serious financial trouble and might totally fold.”

“Of course. No Collins would ever go down with the ship.”

There was a moment of dead silence on the line before Jill said, with genuine sympathy, “Shit, Ellen. I can’t believe you have to work for Philip Kent.”

I apologized to Jill for being so short and got off the phone, promising to call her tomorrow. “It’s just been kind of a heinous day.”