The Assistants (5 page)

The salads arrived, and for Margie, the waiter set down a grilled lobster.

“Ah, lobster,” Margie said. “They say they're the cockroaches of the sea, but man-oh-Manischewitz are they delicious.”

Emily and I left our salads untouched.

“First things first,” Margie said. “I'm not part of this. I have enough hard evidence to put you both in jail tomorrow, so don't fuck with me. Being pretty isn't going to help you here. Understand?”

For a split second I was actually distracted and flattered by the fact that she'd implied I was pretty.

“You're not part of
what
?” Emily asked.

Margie smiled wide. “There's an assistant in Accounting, her name doesn't matter. She's the best kid I've ever known, smart as a whip. Works really, really hard, never had a break in her life. You're going to help her pay off her debt just like you've helped yourselves.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Eighty thousand; a real bargain, considering she had no help from her parents. She's been dutifully making payments since graduation.”

Emily's neck was speckling with hives as pink as her dress.
“You're insane. You think Robert Barlow isn't going to notice all this money disappearing?”

“You weren't so concerned about that when it was for your own benefit,” Margie said.

“I was.” I raised my hand. “That's why we were about to stop. I think Emily's right, this is going too far. And Robert doesn't deserve this.”

“Robert,” Margie said, “is a warmonger, neoconservative imperialist. He's a bully with no interest in helping anyone but himself. And more than all that, he's a thief. A bigger thief than any of us in a million lifetimes could ever be. Trust me, I know. I keep his books.”

“I think you're exaggerating just a bit,” I said, offended on Robert's behalf.

“Oh, you think so? You think I'm exaggerating?” Margie slid her plate in closer and cracked open her giant lobster. “Want to talk about his tax shelters?”

“Not really,” I said.

“I didn't think so.” Margie was acting smug, but she was wrong. In spite of what Robert's most vocal critics claimed, all of his island accounts were perfectly legal. He was just smarter than everyone else, and people resented him for it.

“Do you honestly think a man like Robert would do something as dumb as cheat on his taxes?” I said. “With so many people watching him?”

But Margie was finished with that argument. “Look,” she said. “This is the deal I'm offering you. You do this for me or I turn you in. It's as simple as that.”

I turned to Emily and had never seen her looking so pale beneath her suntan. “I really don't understand,” she said. “Making us do this. What's in it for you?”

“Nothing,” Margie said. “Can you imagine that?”

“There has to be something,” Emily said. “Your assistant can't be that good.”

Margie looked directly at me. “Because the game is rigged and nobody does anything about it; not to mention, I know you can get away with it. And I guess the honest-to-God truth is, I've always dreamed of being a class hero.”

Then she let out a roaring burp for all of Michael's to hear.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Emily and I both called in sick. Instead of facing the horror of going to work, we lay on my bed side by side in our pajamas, me in my leisurely stripes and she in her lace Chanel two-piece. Emily had trickled her stuff into my apartment from the back of her Range Rover little by little so that before I knew what hit me, “we” owned stemware, kept a hair dryer in the bathroom, and drank mimosas for breakfast.

“I know we're in a situation that will most likely lead to life in prison for both of us,” Emily said, swirling the juice in her glass. “But can we talk about Kevin Hanson for just a minute?”

“What about him?”

Emily sat up. “He doesn't like me, no matter how much I flirt with him.”

“You're twenty-eight years old,” I said. “You're due.
Humbling rejection comes with the Saturn Return; you'd better get used to it.”

“You don't understand. I think he likes
you
, Fontana. He's seen us together and keeps asking about you.”

The look we shared was one of mutual bewilderment, like we'd just encountered a talking cat or one of those Sudoku puzzles—or even something not so bafflingly Japanese. “That can't be right,” I said. “He must need me for something, from Robert.”

“I thought that, too, at first. But how would that explain his dis-interest in me?” Emily said it like the
dis
had been painfully extracted from the
interest
.

She had a point.

We both jumped at the sound of my buzzer, spilling a little mimosa over the side of our crystal flutes. I peered through the dusty horizontal bars of my venetian blinds just in time to catch a black Grand Marquis pull away from the curb. “I think the FBI is here,” I said.

“When the FBI comes for us, they won't need to be buzzed in.” Emily topped off her glass.

The buzzer rang again and it seemed useless to fight anything at this point, so I got up to see who it was.

A uniformed FedEx deliverywoman shoved an envelope into my chest. Then she held out a digital notepad for me to sign with a pretend pen. I initialed an illegible scribble-scrabble and carried the envelope back to my bedroom.

“Special delivery,” I said, tearing it open. “No return address.”

“Is it anthrax?” Emily asked, not bothering to raise her head from my pillow.

It was not. The envelope contained a stack of crisp white
papers—neatly collated and studiously stapled—photocopies of my and Emily's fake expense reports. Every single one. On top of the stack was a yellow sticky note that read:
In case you thought I might be bluffing
.

The note was handwritten by Margie; I could tell by the heavy-pressed wide loops. A spasm shot through my gut. “We are so screwed,” I said. “We are so screwed!”

Emily tore the papers from my grasp, gave them a quick once-over, and set them aside. “Maybe not.” She handed me my mimosa. “Think about it for a minute. With Margie in on this now . . .”

“There is no
this
,” I said.

“I'm just saying, there's not really anyone left to catch us at this point. Not if we're careful. We could probably even—”

“No.” I set the glass down on my nightstand. “No, no, no, no, no.”

“You don't even know what I was going to say.”

“Yes I do. And the answer is no.”

“Consider the apartment we could get instead of this one.” Emily was up on her knees now, tugging on my pajama shirt. “Bigger, better, sans rats.” She banged on the wall with the palm of her hand and there was a claw-toed scurrying behind the drywall.

“We're not really a we,” I said. “And this is
my
apartment.”

“That hurts my feelings, Fontana, it really does.”

“You don't have feelings.”

Emily reached over me, apprehended my mimosa from the nightstand, and swallowed it down. “I would if I could afford psychotherapy. Or a weekly massage. Or a hot tub. I'd have lots of feelings then.”

Observing the change in my expression, Emily paused. “I'm kidding,” she said.

But I knew she wasn't really. I moved to the other side of the bed, like Emily's copious greed might be contagious.

“You got over seventy thousand dollars of student-loan debt to disappear,” I said. “Do you understand how long it would have taken you to pay that back? You'd have been in dentures and a housedress by the time you paid that back. Platform shoes would have gone in and out of style, like, six times by then. Isn't that enough for you?”

“I don't think you really want me to answer that.” Emily pointed her glass at the ceiling rain bubble.

I knew what she was up to. She took it for granted that with enough bullying and harassment, she could convince me of anything—but I wasn't really as weak as I appeared. I am from the Bronx, after all. I hail from a neighborhood where the local library had a metal detector, and a household where the heat was never turned up higher than fifty-three degrees in winter. I was raised by parents whose approach to discipline relied heavily on the level swing of a wooden macaroni spoon. So I could handle a little pestering from doll-eyed Emily Johnson without losing my will.

Sure, the part of Bridgeport where Emily grew up was known for its high frequency of muggings, violent crimes, and easy accessibility to drugs. And her childhood home did get broken into by that meth head that one time. But she was still softer than I was.

“I'm just saying.” Emily adjusted her timbre—she was shooting for reasonableness now. “It wouldn't take that much money
to significantly raise us up, you know, to a position of real self-sufficiency.”

I reclaimed my empty crystal flute and held it out to Emily for a refill. “I have no intention of going to prison because you want to live like a Kardashian, so put it out of your mind. We'll help Margie's assistant, whoever she is. We'll pay off her debt—it'll take a few weeks, maybe a few months—and then this will all be over. For real this time.”

Emily smirked as she filled my glass to its brim. “We'll see.”

“We're stopping once we get Margie off our backs,” I said. “I'm serious.”

“We'll see,” she said again.

But we would not see. I admit that Emily was growing on me, or maybe it was just that I'd gotten used to having her around, but I wasn't going to budge on this. I wasn't about to lose sight of the fact that as white college graduates living in New York, poor and disillusioned as we were with our negative net worth, we were still relatively high up on the socioeconomic food chain. If I learned anything of value at NYU, it was that. So, no, Emily would not convince me to keep this scam going so she could have a weekly massage and a hot tub. If I lost my new best/only friend over it, so be it. At least I'd still have what was left of my dignity.

Emily fluffed the pillows behind her and propped one at the back of her neck. “So what are you going to do if Kevin asks you out?” she asked.

“Do you think that's a real possibility?” I inched a bit closer in from the small corner of the mattress that still belonged to me. “Should I be preparing for that?”

“Yeah, preparing.” Emily outstretched her legs, lifting one, pointing and flexing her toes to check her pedicure, and then the other. “You should be stocking up on bottled water and duct-taping the windows.”

Emily was missing my point. Kevin was a Titan lawyer. He worked with Glen Wiles.

I leaned over the side of the bed to retrieve Margie's photocopies from where Emily had dropped them. “With all this going on”—I shook the papers at Emily—“you think it's wise for me to go out with Kevin?”

Emily checked her manicure then, one fingernail at a time. “You're forgetting that Kevin is also by far the best-looking man who'll ever be interested in you in your entire life, so if I were you, I'd take what I could get when I could get it. Now give me those.” She flicked her fingers at Margie's photocopies, which I dutifully handed over.

She rose from the bed, papers in hand. “Let's go burn these on the stove right now.”

“There's no gas.” I followed behind her, toward the kitchen. “It got turned off.”

“Seriously?” Emily turned around on me, inexplicably incredulous.

“I didn't pay the bill.”

“What if I wanted to heat up some soup or something?” Emily said.

And then we both burst out laughing. For whatever reason, Emily standing over a hot stove, stirring a steaming pot of Campbell's minestrone, was the most hilarious and unlikely image in the world.

“I'm sure we've got a match somewhere in this place,” I said, wiping the laugh-tears from my eyes. I appreciated the momentary reprieve from our humorless reality: that we were in fact in a situation that would most likely lead to life in prison for both of us. If the burning of documents didn't tip us off, nothing would.

I
T WAS THE TAIL END
of a blessedly uneventful week when I noticed that Robert had taken to expensing his shoe-shines. Was he testing me? Perhaps he was reassessing my loyalty to him or my talent for creative nonfiction. I would not fail him now.
It's commensurate with Mr. Barlow's position to maintain freshly shined shoes
, I wrote in the comments section of the reimbursement form. It's not like Emily was about to reject any claim that I processed. I should have written:
It's commensurate with Mr. Barlow's position to have someone touch and rub and smack around his feet on the regular because he gets off on it, but like most men he will never admit this is the real draw of shoe-shines.

Filing Robert's expense reports had taken on new meaning since Emily and I had teamed up. I began to see every one of Robert's company-paid-for $500 dinners, every pair of center-stage theater tickets, every penthouse hotel room, in terms of real paper
money—which, for whatever reason, I'd never done before. Like: What I needed to pay the Roto-Rooter man to unclog my ancient toilet, Robert used to play a round of tennis at the country club. What I needed to buy a computer that didn't spontaneously shut itself down, he used to have his Mercedes waxed with a rare special formula that was probably composed of the placenta of baby dinosaurs. My monthly MetroCard was a single
RM
-monogrammed handkerchief, which Robert considered to be use-and-toss disposable.

The
Oprah
Magazine
would refer to this as an “aha moment.”

(Yeah, I read
O, The Oprah Magazine
, so what? We all need some sort of religion in our lives.)

As I scrolled through Robert's corporate-card-statement, I grouped his purchases by category: entertainment, travel, food, lodging, etc. It was a game of solitaire I could play in my sleep, but then a rogue charge suddenly caught my attention.

He dropped $2,400 at the Bel Air Pro Golf Shop?

I hated having to knock on Robert's door to question a transaction; it always felt like I was accusing him of something. But this wasn't the typical cost of a “golf meeting,” which I was pretty sure Robert coined as a business-expense term in the first place—this was for stuff he bought in the shop. It might appear suspicious if I
didn't
question him about it.

I shot a look to his office. He was watching the wall of flat-screens across from his desk and he was alone, for once not on the phone. I had to go now.

“Um, excuse me, Robert . . . ,” I said, entering invisibly and pointing to the charge, which I'd highlighted in the statement printout. “Does this look right to you?”

“Yes,” Robert said. “That was my golf meeting with Gary from the West Coast office. I forgot to have my clubs and shoes sent over from the hotel so I had to buy a new set.”

“Of course.” I nearly bowed and crept back to my desk.

Of course? Really, Tina? Do you hear yourself?

Something had been stirred in me that I'd never felt before. Rather than going back to the hotel, or even sending a lackey back to the hotel, he'd just bought a whole new set of golf clubs? What the—

Hiya
, Kevin chatted.
Lunch?

I took a deep breath.
Sure. Meet you down there in five?

How about out front?

Wait. What? Like leave the building?

It's sunny out today
, he wrote, followed by a smiley face, which gave me pause. I was all for gender equality and all that, but let's put it on the record here that no self-respecting man should implement the smiley or any emoticon, ever.

!
I wrote back.
Ok.

This is going to sound crazy, but I'd never seen Kevin outside in the light of day before. When we came face-to-face in front of the building, his eyes did this sparkly thing that reminded me of the attractive vampire from
Twilight
, and for a few seconds I was rendered utterly speechless. He wasn't wearing his suit jacket and his shirtsleeves were rolled up the way Robert kept his, except Kevin's arms were a golden brown with just the right amount of dark hair covering them. The sun also brought to light that I had a ketchup stain on the front of my pants from yesterday's hamburger.

“You okay?” Kevin asked. “You look a little confused.”

I nodded.

He started walking forward and I followed. “What do you think of burgers and shakes from Lucky's?” he asked.

I think I'm in love
, I thought.

We took our food order to go, in greasy paper bags, and walked across Columbus Circle to Central Park. He helped me up the giant prehistoric-looking rock just off the playground and shooed away some bratty kids having a water pistol fight. It was all too good to be true.

“Is this an occasion of some sort?” I asked, unfolding the waxy wrapping on my burger.

“No, not really.” He was already chewing his first massive bite. How did guys do that? I was no slouch when it came to rushing greasy meat into my mouth and he still had me beat by a solid thirty-five seconds.

“Not
really
?” I said.

“No, I just . . .”

Here it comes
, I thought.
The part where I find out what he wants from me.

“Emily Johnson,” he said. “She . . .”

I knew it. He was intimidated by Connecticut Barbie and was calling on fainthearted Skipper for assistance. I wanted to stand up on that brontosaurus rock, raise my fists, and scream out all the way to Sheep Meadow: I knew it, you predictable motherfucker!

“She told me she's been staying with you,” he said, staring down at his fries. “Which I found surprising because Emily can be kind of . . .”

He was fiddling with his food the way guys who are sexually frustrated peel at the labels of their beer bottles. I took this for a tell: he wanted to bone Emily.

“Well,” he said, fiddling on. “From my perspective, it wouldn't seem like you two would be friends, but I guess I was wrong about that.”

“You wanted to sit down to lunch so you could unravel the mystery of my and Emily's friendship?” I asked, sounding really bitchy.

“Ha.” His laugh was perfect, damn him. “No, I guess it just made me realize that I don't know you that well.” He raised his eyes to mine. “But do I really need a reason to lure you out here into the fresh air and sunlight?”

I turned away for fear of being compelled, seductive vampire style. “We're working on a project,” I said. It was the best lie I could come up with on the spot. “That's why we've been spending so much time together.”

“Oh.” He pushed his soda straw in and out of its plastic lid, causing it to squeak like a slide whistle, and this was somehow not that annoying coming from him. “A project for work?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“Not really?”

“No,” I said. “It's not. It's a . . .”

I was scrambling. If it wasn't a project for work, then what was it? A book group? A knitting circle?

“It's sort of a . . .”

For the love of God, Tina. Think.

“It's sort of a
consciousness-raising
project?” I said.

A little background: In college, like many freshmen venturing into the liberal arts for the first time, I was besotted by electives with titles like “Feminism and the Body,” “Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements,” and “Gentrification and Its Discontents.” A girl I met in “Gender, Race, and Class,” who wore a
leather corset as a shirt, convinced me to join the Women's Center. (Technically, it was the Wom
y
n's Center, but let's not even.) There, flannel-clad girls with names like Andy and Grover introduced me to private-school-tuition-worthy terms like
hegemony
,
social constructionism
, and
consciousness raising
. Finally, this hard-earned education was paying off.

“Consciousness raising about what?” Kevin asked.

Robert's new set of golf clubs popped into my mind.

“Inequality, mostly,” I said, like a true expert on the subject.

Kevin stared at me for a moment and I could almost see the preconceived notions he had of me shifting around in his beautiful brain.

“You okay? You look a little confused.” I was mimicking the crack he'd made at me in front of the Titan building, but I don't think he got it.

“I'm impressed,” he said. “What sort of inequality are you focusing on?”

“All kinds.” I stuffed my mouth full of french fries.

“Is it a nonprofit?”

“Yup. Exactly.”

“You're really keeping this close to the vest, aren't you?” He said it lovingly, or I would have struck back at him with my scorpion claw.

“It's still in the early stages,” I said, after swallowing my fries. “I guess I just don't want to jinx it.” Which made no sense at all, but Kevin, well-bred as he was, politely replied, “I get that. That makes total sense.”

Brought up by animals as I was, I lunged at the chance to impolitely change the subject. “So what was it like growing up in
Massachusetts? I bet your parents are really proud of you. Being a lawyer is second only to being a doctor, right? And you don't have to be around germs.”

“Massachusetts?” Kevin appeared perplexed. “I'm from DC.”

A piece of hamburger bun caught in my throat. “Sorry, I must be mixing you up with someone else.”
Like the Kennedys.

He kindly ignored the grotesque choking sound that escaped from my mouth. “To be honest, my parents don't love that I've chosen to work for the Titan Corporation, and I don't either. I'd much rather move out of the corporate world and into public service—I'd love to work for a nonprofit. But I'd have to take a significant pay cut, and that's not really an option right now.”

What was this? Was Kevin Handsome snowing me to make himself appear more human? My cell phone vibrated in my bag before I could decide.

It was Robert. “Barlow can't find me anywhere,” I said, reading his text. “He's not used to me leaving the building. I should get back.”

“Doesn't someone cover for you when you're out?” Kevin asked.

“An intern. But she's not me.” I said this with the utmost pride, because when you're the second-most-pecked chicken in the coop, you have to take pride where you can find it.

This was a common Barlowism, by the way, explaining social hierarchy and laws of dominance in terms of farm animals, namely fowl.

Kevin stood up and gathered our trash. “Maybe we can have dinner sometime.”

I wasn't certain I'd heard him right. He'd been bending down to grab a napkin that had caught in the breeze, but just in case, I said, “Sure.”

Back at the office, it turned out all Robert needed was for me to remind him of the name of the restaurant “with the good view, on top of that hotel.”

It was Asiate, at the Mandarin Oriental, and he asked me this at least once a week. If only my useless fill-in (
dumb as a prairie dog
, Robert might say) could have gotten it together and remembered such critical information, I wouldn't have had to cut short my lunch with Kevin. Fortunately, I'd brought my leftovers back to the office with me.

I reached into the now fully-greased-over paper bag for a cold french fry. It was just as well that lunch got abbreviated, I thought. It could have only gone downhill from there.

—

L
ATER THAT NIGHT
, I was sitting on my bed, eating pad thai out of the carton with chopsticks from the Chinese restaurant (my favorite Thai place never gave out chopsticks; apparently real Thai people don't use them) and flipping through the pile of mail that had accumulated on my nightstand, a paper mountain of bills and useless notifications, when I came across an envelope from my old friend Sallie—Sallie Mae, the former title holder of my student-loan debt. Who knew how long this letter had been there, buried between various credit card offers and multiple supplications from the World Wildlife Fund.

I was alone in the apartment—Emily was out on a date—but I
still set my chopsticks down like a secret I didn't want anyone to hear before slitting the envelope open.

It was a letter of congratulations, informing me that my debt had been paid in full. It boldfaced my final statement balance: double zeros.

Well I'll be damned, Sallie Mae.

I released a shocking and spontaneous orgasmic breath. It wasn't right, how thrilled I was at the sight of those zeros. The sensation that washed over me was like nothing I'd ever felt before, except maybe, appropriately, when I found out I'd gotten into NYU.

I returned the letter to its envelope and set it down onto my nightstand, then inexplicably stashed it beneath my pillow.

It was done. I had a clean slate. A new start, like I was eighteen and hopeful again, but this time I was smarter—too smart to sign my life away to a school I knew nothing about.

The only reference I'd had for NYU when I decided I had to go there was that Theo Huxtable went there in season five of
The Cosby Show
. I could have chosen a cheaper school, like my parents wanted me to. But cost was no issue, my Doc Marten–boot–stomping self insisted. This was my college education we were talking about! I wanted to go to the best school I could get into, the school I'd seen on television.

Not since then had I been this free.

Emily's key rattled in the front-door lock, so I returned to my dinner and tried to appear normal, or at least regular. My mouth was full of noodles when she appeared in the bedroom doorway, kicked off her high heels, and said, “I brought you a hamburger.”

I glanced down at my mostly eaten pad thai and attempted an
instant calculation of how disgusting it would be to eat both. Then I recalled the hamburger I'd already eaten for lunch and had to recalculate.