The Assistants (14 page)

I
T WAS PRETTY CRAZY
, how everyone hopped on the Tina Fontana train. How there was a Tina Fontana train. Emily and I (and sometimes Ginger, Wendi, and Lily, too) started going to Bar Nine after work, taking over the back room to make plans, talk things over. And each night that we went, more Titan assistants showed up. They'd linger for a while near our table before making a move, but then it would be:
Hi, I'm so-and-so, assistant to so-and-so.
Hi, Tina! You probably don't know me, but I'm so-and-so's assistant. Hey there, my name is so-and-so and I assist so-and-so.

I need help
, each of them said.

These were the assistants to some of the most influential men in the world. They ran their boss's high-powered lives with formidable efficiency. And so, so many of them wept.

I've been perma-lance with no health insurance for four years, and he
spends my year's salary on a jaunt into Prada on the way back from lunch.

I live with two roommates in a one-bedroom just to get by, while my boss takes a cab to the Hamptons every weekend. Do you know how much a cab to the Hamptons costs?

Most of them addressed me, not Emily, even though she was prettier. I had a hunch it was because I was the Big Boss's assistant, so by proxy I was the big boss of whatever this was. We were all defined by whom we assisted. On e-mail chains among us with bosses of the same name it was:
My Jeremy can do Tuesday at ten a.m. Does that work for your Jeremy?
But Robert was always just Robert. I was queen bee assistant.

All of the women who came to us had their own story, but it was the same story, and not so different from Emily's or mine. Student-loan debt coupled with shit pay had driven them all to desperation—okay,
desperation
might be an overstatement. We were assistants, not coal miners, not janitors at a nuclear power plant—but I'm talking serious frustration here.

After two straight weeks of this, I finally took Emily aside in a quiet corner of the room, pushed a fresh mojito into her hands to keep her calm, and said, “What the hell is going on? Why are all of our lives so utterly fucked up? We're college-educated white women, for fuck's sake.”

She didn't have a ready answer, for once. She only suckled her mojito.

“Do you even realize what this has become?” I gestured toward the flock of women converged at our table, awaiting our return. “This started as a means to an end, but it's not anymore. We should be preparing.”

Emily got serious then. “You're right, we should get facials. And you definitely need to get your teeth whitened. They do it with a glow-light now, it only takes an hour.” She moved past me to return to our table, but I caught her by her bracelet.

“We might have to make a statement,” I said. “Like publicly. These girls are already looking to us for—”

“They're looking to us for money, Fontana. That's it.” Emily freed her wrist from my grasp and rubbed at it dramatically. “Don't flatter yourself.”

I took a pause. Was I flattering myself? Was I putting myself at the center of this, egocentrically?

I thought back to my years at NYU's Women's Center.
Egocentrically
was a term used ad nauseam there, along with
gaze
(e.g., “the male gaze”) and
voice
.
Voice
was huge. There was one girl who sang to herself all the time—like, constantly—and if anyone asked her to please be quiet, we're trying to plan a Take Back the Night rally here, she would scream out, “Don't try to silence me! This is my voice!” And the room would concur, because the Women's Center, if nothing else, was a place where everyone had a right to their voice no matter how annoying and disruptive it may have been. Was that me now? Flattering myself into thinking I could sing and should be singing aloud when other people were present, and believing I had anything worth singing about?

“Can I go back to the table now?” Emily asked.

“We're probably going to have to do an interview,” I said. “What are you going to answer when a reporter asks how we got here?”

Emily aligned her posture and locked her jaw. “I'll simply tell the truth. That I didn't always know what I wanted to do, but I
always knew the woman I wanted to be.” She tipped her drink toward me. “Diane von Furstenberg said that. I think she was talking about how she invented the wrap dress, but it applies here, too.”

I gave up then and let Emily return to our table. At least she had a role model whose quotes she could bootleg, which was more than I could say for myself. I shuffled my One Stars upon the distressed wooden floor and watched Emily reclaim her seat, maintaining her perfect posture. Only Emily, Ginger, Wendi, and Lily were sitting. Everyone else fluttered around them.
Like moths to a bug light
.

I disagreed with Emily. These girls were looking to us for something more than just money. But I wasn't sure that we could actually give it to them. I wanted to, I really did. I wanted the Tina Fontana train to be real.

—

I
T WAS
the Friday morning before our launch party when Robert snuck up behind me. “I hear you're hosting some kind of charity shindig.”

I jumped at the sound of his voice before the literal threat of his statement could set in.

“Did you?” I swiveled my chair around.

“I'm surprised you didn't come to me,” he said.

Pause.

“We are the media, you know.” He was polite enough not to say
“I
am the media,” but that's what he meant.

“Oh, it's just a little thing,” I said. “Something I got roped into helping out with.”

“It doesn't sound little.”

I started to sweat.

Instead of heading into his office like I'd hoped he would, Robert brought one of his brogues up on top of my drawer stand and leaned in.

“I never knew you were such an activist,” he said.

“I'm not.” I laughed nervously. “I'm really not.”

Robert stared deep into my eyes, still with his leg up. “I wish you would have come to me, Tina. Before you went ahead with all this. You're a representation of this company, you know. And of me.”

“Oh,” I said. “I'm sorry, I didn't realize.” I looked around aimlessly—at the silent screens flashing today's news in Robert's office, at a quartet of fresh-faced interns being trained on the coffeemaker, at Dillinger across the way trying to listen in on our conversation.

Robert leaned in closer. “If you're unhappy here, or with your salary . . . Or if you think things are unfair . . .”

“I'm not. It's not. It isn't even about me.”

“But you started it,” Robert said in a tone reminiscent of a sandbox argument. He shot a forbidding glance around the office to divert anyone from staring.

It occurred to me just then—Robert's tone. It wasn't challenging or aggressive or even belligerent. He was making this out to be about the company's image, or his reputation, but that wasn't it at all. It was far simpler than that: I'd hurt his feelings.

If there was one thing I understood about Robert, it was how important it was to him that you mind your manners.
Think before you speak,
he'd always say.
Think before you do. And if you make a mistake, be a man and own up to it. Make it right.

I didn't think about how it would make Robert feel to hear about the launch from some website or, worse, one of his employees—but I should have. It was a matter of pride and a matter of respect.

I should have told him first.

So I adjusted my tone accordingly. “Shoot,” I said. “I really screwed up. I didn't intend for this whole thing to become what it has, you've got to believe that. Other people got involved, and—”

“It'll be fine.” Robert waved his hand dismissively. He stepped back and took his balls out of my face. “I just wish you would have come to me and talked to me about it. After all we've been through together.”

After all we've been through together.
I could literally feel my heart breaking.

I stood up then, which was a massive gesture on my behalf.

“Robert.” I shocked us both by taking his hand. “What can I do to fix this? Tell me. I'll do anything.”

“Forget it.” He tugged his hand away, embarrassed—I'd gone too far.

“But I'm sorry,” I said, and I truly was. “I'll do everything I can, to make sure this doesn't . . .”

What? Get any
more
out of hand? Who was I kidding?

“Good.” Robert's dark eyebrows settled. And it seemed like he was about to say more when Glen Wiles arrived like a whirlwind for their daily meeting.

“Tina,” Wiles said. “I hear you're the mastermind behind this new socialist website that's about to launch. That true?”

“Leave her alone,” Robert said, protective in a fatherly way that made me silently swear an oath to somehow, someday, pay
him back every cent. “When you have a free moment, Tina, would you fix us a cocktail?” Robert led Wiles into his office and closed the door.

In the meantime, I'd do the only thing I could do—fix him the best tequila with lime this side of Texas.

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE
the launch party felt to me like what I imagined most girls feel the night before their wedding: terrorizing helplessness. There's nothing more to do, nothing more that can be done but go to sleep knowing the very next time you lay your head down, all this crazy shit will have already happened. So you can't stop imagining exactly how it'll all go, the getting from here to there, what will go wrong. There's also, of course, the enduring dread that this whole thing might turn out to be the biggest mistake of your life. It was enough to give a girl dry heaves, if that girl was me.

So I decided to drink, and Emily helped.

One glass of wine, two glasses of wine, and then Emily said, “We should probably go over your speech one more time.”

It had been decided a week prior (by Ginger and Wendi) that I should be the one to give the speech at our launch party because I
was supposedly “more real” than Emily was. “Emily's the face and Tina's the brains,” were Ginger's exact words. Even I knew this was a stretch. Perhaps I did read as “real,” which was often just code people used to describe a woman who was willing to eat a hamburger in public, but I would never really pass for a brain. If I were a character from
Alvin and the Chipmunks
, there's not a chance in hell I would be Simon. I would be Dave, the quick-tempered, insecure songwriter whose only companions were anthropomorphic rodents.

“Now?” I said to Emily. I was just about to curl up with my laptop and call it a night.

“Let's go over it one last time for good luck.” Emily reached for the stack of frayed and food-stained index cards on my nightstand and handed them to me.

“I didn't even study for my SATs this hard,” I said, taking the cards from Emily. Then I cleared my throat and began the speech that Wendi and Lily had helped me write—most of which we lifted verbatim from a pile of library books and a couple of Elizabeth Warren YouTube videos.

Emily reclined against my bed pillows and waited for me to begin.

“Here are the facts,” I said. “Money buys less than it did a generation ago, while at the same time paychecks have dwindled.”

“Stand up,” Emily said.

“Are you serious? Come on.” But I stood even as I protested because I really did want to do a good job when I gave this speech. It's a well-known fact that public speaking is ranked up there with the death of a spouse, divorce, and Christmas when it comes to the detrimental stress it can cause, so I was willing to stand the hell up if Emily really thought it would help my performance.

“Here are the facts,” I said again. “Money buys less than it did a generation ago, while at the same time paychecks have—”

“Project your voice!” Emily shouted. “Pretend like you're confident!”

“Paychecks have dwindled!” I yelled back at her.

“Stop.” Emily scowled like the head cheerleader at bitch-squad practice. “Take a breath and try again, better this time.”

I started my speech yet again from the beginning, striving this time to exude a no-nonsense confidence, which somehow, coupled with the wine I'd ingested, resulted in my Bronx undertones rising to the surface.

“Here aw the facts,” I said with my hands. “Money buys less than it did a generation ago, while at da same time paychecks have dwindled.”

Emily muffled a laugh.

“Screw this.” I chucked the index cards onto the floor and flopped back down on my bed beside Emily. “What I don't know by now, I'll never know.” I took my wineglass back in hand, and Emily let me, both of us understanding that all there was really left to do was nothing.

—

T
HE FRONT OF CIPRIANI
looked like the Parthenon, with Greek-style monolithic columns and decorative sculptures missing limbs. Inside the ballroom were glittering lights, shimmering cocktail dresses, suits and ties—all of which were to be expected. Unexpected was the multitude of electronic cigarette tips fireflying around the room. Why were these ridiculous things actually taking off?

The crowd was a handsome mix of new-media enthusiasts and the young philanthropists who appeared every Sunday in the
Times
fashion pages—the new generation of wealthy liberals who attended parties each weekend to give away their parents' money. These venerable future donors to the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Public Library, and the Museum of Modern Art appeared at ease in their fancy clothes and trendy haircuts, and they all seemed to already know one another.

“There he is,” Emily said, referring to Kevin, who was standing at the bar.

Emily was wearing vintage Valentino (that some ex-boyfriend must have bought her) in silvery pearl. My dress was basic black with thin shoulder straps, nothing to come in your pants over, but Kevin opened his arms and dropped his jaw at the sight of me like I was Belle from
Beauty and the Beast
(the only Disney princess, mind you, who loved to read, and also the only one whose name literally meant
beauty
). He went in for a kiss that I swore made even the chandelier overhead blush.

Kevin had been the model supportive boyfriend since the announcement of the site. Partly, no doubt, because he still felt a little guilty for being the reason we had to prematurely announce it, but also because what Kevin had so Freudianly declared on our first date at Nougatine proved to be true: he was used to having a strong woman around telling him what to do. And I, against all odds, in the course of a few months, had become a strong woman who was telling a lot of people what to do. Kevin loved it. So the guy had mommy issues. Big deal. At least he'd finally stopped asking so many questions.

An hour of mingling passed, most of which involved Ginger
leering over me, with her breasts about to break free from their low-cut scoop neck, and removing alcoholic beverages from my hands. “Pace yourself,” she'd say. “You have a speech to give.” And then she'd down the drink herself.

By the time Emily appeared onstage to thank the crowd for coming, for their generous donations and their encouraging support, I'd managed to sneak just enough sips of booze to keep myself from throwing up in my mouth.

Emily was a presence onstage, confident, attractive, poised. All those years of acting training were finally paying off. She called my name with perfect elocution.

Kevin squeezed my hand once, twice, three times, and everyone else was clapping, so I knew it was time to drag my trembling ass to the stage.

I tried to breathe, but my heart was a bird that had just swallowed an Alka-Seltzer. I tried to remain calm, but the ruffled feathers of said bird had clogged all my airways. There were so many heads trained on me, each with a set of hopeful, expectant eyes.

The Titan assistants I'd gotten to know from our nights in the back room at Bar Nine stood out from the rest of the crowd. They were the ones whose dresses hung a little more cheaply, who hadn't just sat for professional blowouts, who weren't dripping with Harry Winston diamonds. They were the ones who'd volunteered to help out with the party planning in return for attendance. I still didn't know most of their names, but they all knew mine. The group of them stood together at the center of the floor: the Latina woman with hair that was brown on top and blond at the bottom; the women wearing too-big and bigger glasses; the blond and brunette Zara girls.

The one I referred to as Accent Accessory was holding her cell phone up in the air like a lighter at a Coldplay concert, videotaping me. “Yeah, Tina!” she called out, which I understood meant I was taking too long to begin.

“Thank you,” I said, and forced a smile. I decided to focus on the chandelier hanging serenely above us, without falling down. How I wished to be that chandelier, or any inanimate object, really.

“Here are the facts,” I said, and then paused. “Money buys less than it did a generation ago, while at the same time paychecks have dwindled.”

These words, when I'd practiced them, had made me uneasy. (Who was I to be saying them, really? What did I know about any of this?) But hearing them now, amplified across this beautiful ballroom into the ears of all these flawless people, it felt like . . . well, honestly, it felt like singing.

“Add student-loan debt to the mix . . .” Pause. Eye contact with the audience. “The cost of a college degree in the United States has increased twelvefold in the past thirty years. That's one thousand, one hundred twenty percent.”

Pause. Take a breath.

“Forty million Americans currently have outstanding student loans. Seven in ten college seniors will graduate with student debt. And forget about the six-figure graduate-school or law-school tuition debt so many of us take on in addition to our undergrad loans, as we race to super-educate ourselves, collecting more and more diplomas . . .” Pause. “For what?” Look up. “It's honorable that today's students think they'll be able to rise above all this, that they accept the skyrocketing cost of a college education without question. That they refuse to give up on their dreams in spite of
these debilitating obstacles. But as the years pass, they struggle to pay down their loans, while striving to find decent work at a fair wage, while fantasizing about one day buying a home or starting a family . . . and they are just buried. And do you know who they blame? Themselves. They wonder:
Why can't I get it together?
”

The audience began to applaud. A few people whooped and hollered. This hadn't happened when I'd rehearsed alone in my bedroom.

I had to raise my voice to speak over them. “Our country is failing to live up to its promise of opportunity and fairness. It used to be true that if you went to college and worked hard, you could count on having a decent middle-class life—but that's just not true anymore. Economic and political changes that have occurred over the past three decades have made the middle-class American dream for today's twenty- and thirtysomethings far less possible than it was for their parents' generation. It's not that we're lazy, that we have no work ethic, or that we have outrageous spending habits. It's that we've been screwed.”

The room roared. I felt it in my chest. In my loins, wherever they may be. Unintentionally, I smiled.

“So we're taking things into our own hands. Our goal is to help all the women out there who've tried so hard to do everything right but still can't get ahead. And maybe, just maybe, the people in power will take notice of what we're doing here. What we're trying to do. And then we can really spark some change.”

I stepped back from the microphone and flashbulbs exploded.

Kevin's was the first face I saw, once I could see again. By the way he was beaming at me, smacking his hands together hard and
high in the air, I knew I'd done a good job. Against all odds, I'd rallied this crowd. They better than liked me.

Emily joined me onstage, carrying a remote control. She adjusted the microphone to her height and pointed the controller at a giant screen behind us.

“And now the moment we've all been waiting for,” she announced as the screen came to life.

It was the website. Our website. Wendi had fiddled with it since I'd last seen it. She'd made it cleaner, sharper, less wordy, and she'd added two scrolling tickers across its top.

“We are live,” Emily said.

The ticker on the left was labeled
Members
. It started at two. Emily and me, I guessed.

The ticker on the right was labeled
Money Raised
. It started at $250,000. The amount taken in from tonight's tickets, I supposed.

And then it happened. The numbers started rolling.

The site reached fifty-two members in less than sixty seconds.

“Look at 'er go,” Emily said, reluctant to step away from the microphone. “Your donations made this possible. Thank you.”

The
Members
ticker rolled like it was on molly. We reached 102 members in less than another minute.

“But if you're feeling a little extra generous,” Emily said, “after all the delicious beverages you've enjoyed tonight, provided by Patrón and the Brooklyn Brewery . . .”

She smiled. Sponsorship shout-outs, check.

“. . . our diligent volunteers are coming around with iPads . . .”

Out came Wendi and Lily, each carrying an eye-high stack of iPads. They were both wearing T-shirts featuring our logo. Our
logo was just the words
The Assistance
in a cool-looking font, but this “design” was garnering lots of attention because the designer was some kind of art star. “I could have done that,” I whispered to Emily when I first saw it, and I'll say it again here. Design is a career that baffles me, along with consulting and hedge fund management, and waving the flag at a construction site. But I digress.

Lily's T-shirt was pale pink; Wendi's was black and she'd torn off the sleeves, so it was more of a muscle shirt. The iPads were unknowingly on loan from the Titan digital supply closet.

“Feel free to pick up an iPad,” Emily said, “and donate a dollar, or ten dollars, or ten thousand dollars, just to see the ticker here on the big screen change.”

What a bunch of fools. Would you believe they actually fell for this? Half the crowd scrambled for an iPad and began tapping away at it while watching the big screen.

The
Money Raised
ticker started to flip as quickly as the
Members
ticker.

I figured it was safe for me to leave the stage at this point. My work for the night was done, at last.

Kevin appeared the moment I stepped down and handed me a glass of wine. “I'm so proud of you,” he said.

I gratefully accepted the wine, as well as his praise. “Thank you so much for coming,” I replied, which was a throwaway comment, but I followed it up with, “I'm really glad you're here.” And the moment I said it, I realized just how much I wasn't bullshitting him. I actually
was
glad he was there. I would rather have had him there with me than anyone else in the world. Which may not sound like much—but I'd never been able to say that about anyone before.