The Assistants (9 page)

I
MUST NOT BE
cut out for genuine alcoholism because a liquid lunch just did not do it for me. So before returning to my desk, I beelined to the cafeteria's sandwich station to grab a BLT.

One might wonder how I could eat at a time like this, but I needed to eat because I needed to think. Fucking Emily Johnson. We'd done it, we had crossed the finish line, and she had to go and screw it all up by telling someone. Ginger Lloyd, who was obviously terrible.

This was what I got for letting my guard down, for thinking Emily was my friend. And for believing, even for an instant, that anything could go right, ever.

I ordered my BLT as usual—heavy on the B, light on the L and T—then scanned the table area for the standard sights: the four sharp corners of suited power lunches, the anxious outer perimeter of interns unpacking brown-bag PB&Js, the showy center of look-at-me fashionistas picking nuts and berries off plates of
lettuce, and off to the side, in her no-man's-land table for one, sat the Lean Cuisine Lady, who always ate alone.

It was by accident that our eyes met. Or so I thought.

Then a light came on behind her thick, pink-tinted grandma glasses (which I had the sense to understand were not intended to be ironic) and she raised her fingers.

Was she waving? I checked behind me, saw that my BLT was ready, took it in hand, said thank you, and when I turned back around, she still had her fingers raised.

The Lean Cuisine Lady was waving me over. The plastic-tray-loving crackpot who assisted Margie Fischer in accounting. But what could I do but make my way to her table? Allowing her to continue waving from across the crowded cafeteria, even if I pretended not to see her, would only draw more attention.

“Hi,” she whispered when I reached her, in the exact voice you'd expect from someone who wore a salmon-colored cardigan over a salmon-colored turtleneck all summer.

“I think you may be confusing me with somebody else,” I said.

She adjusted her glasses. “Oh aah well.” She made sounds that weren't quite words. She had to be a practical joke, right? “I don't think so,” she whispered. “I'm Lily Madsen. I work for Margie Fischer.” She gestured awkwardly at the empty seat across from her. “Would you join me for a moment?”

So
she
was the one Margie blackmailed us for. She had to be.

I sat, because standing there for even a second longer would have gotten the entire cafeteria straining their eardrums to hear our conversation.

“I only wanted to say thank you,” Lily said. “And, oh aah well”—this was apparently a repetitive vocal tic of hers—“I was
wondering if you might also be able to help my friend. Oh aah well, she's not really my friend, but she works here at Titan.”

“Wait.” I pushed aside my untouched BLT so I could better grip the table's edge. “So you know it was me who helped you?”

Lily nodded. “You and Emily Johnson.”

“And you know
how
we helped you?”

Lily nodded with more vigor.

“Margie Fisher told you all that?”

More vigor still.

“And then you told someone else?”

Lily stopped nodding.

“For fuck's sake!” I said, and Lily's face went red so fast I thought I would have to smack her across her tiny mouth to get her breathing again.

“I'm sorry, is that bad?” she asked with a gasp. “I'm sorry.”

“Who is it?” I asked. “Who did you tell?”

“She won't say anything, I can assure you. I can honestly assure you. She hardly speaks at all.”

“Who is it?”

“Wendi Chan.”

“Wendi Chan from Digital?”

“Yes.”

Wendi Chan was one of Titan's digital assistants. Like most of Titan's digital team, Wendi Chan was Chinese, but unlike most of Titan's digital team, she wore black combat boots, a wallet chain, and dark eyeliner, and she regularly dyed two hot-pink “horns” into her bangs.

It was true that Wendi Chan usually said very little. She was more of a starer than a talker, a creepy, Gothic starer who always
looked a little bit like she was on the brink of knifing someone to death. Once when I called her up to my desk because my mouse ball was no longer working, she leaned over me, knocking her heavy wallet chain against my hip; picked up my mouse; spit on its ball; rubbed the thing down on her combat pants; tossed it back onto my desk; and barked, “Now it works.”

“Well, fuck, Lily,” I said. “You told crazy Wendi Chan? Is she the only person you told?”

Lily began to partially asphyxiate once more. “Yes. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

I covered my face with my hands.

“Oh dear,” Lily said. “Oh aah well, I realize I've upset you, but would you be willing to speak to her?”

“I don't know,” I said into my palms, which still smelled of pickle brine from the bar. “I need to think.”

“Oh aah well, but would it be all right if I give you her address?” Lily pulled a slip of paper from her cardigan pocket and passed it to me. “She wanted me to tell you that she'll be home tonight and she'd like you to go see her.”

How was this my life? I was supposed to be an island. Hell is other people. Hell is other people!

I had lost all control of this situation, and I
needed
to be in control.

“That's Wendi's address there,” Lily whispered. “Please go and see her tonight if you can.”

—

I
STEPPED INTO
my apartment after work to find Emily and Ginger Lloyd on my kitchen floor surrounded by markers, glitter, glue
sticks, and towering stacks of various Titan magazines.
Home Beautiful
,
Architecture Digest
,
Lush Décor
,
Mode
,
French Mode
,
Mode Teen
,
Mode for Men
,
Yachts and Yachting
,
Fancy Fish
.

“Are you guys making dream boards?”

“You've got to be able to see what you want in order to have it,” Ginger called to me while gluing down a picture of a Marilyn Monroe look-alike in a fur coat driving a red Ferrari. She had arranged it so that the Ferrari was headed straight for a picture of Glen Wiles. And she'd creatively pasted the Target logo over Glen Wiles's receding hairline.

Emily held her board up for me to see. It was far less ordered than Ginger's, less of a homicidal narrative and more of a Jackson Pollock–like splatter of jewelry and swimming pools.

“It's not too late to change your mind,” she said. “I got you your own piece of paperboard just in case.”

I was inexplicably touched that Emily had considered me while stealing art supplies from the Titan office supply room.

“And look at this.” She reached across the floor to a copy of
Millennium Foodie
and turned to a page she'd marked with a glitter pen. “This is the FleurBurger 5000,” she said. “It's a hamburger they have in Las Vegas that contains foie gras and a special truffle sauce. It's served with a bottle of Château Petrus, poured into Ichendorf Brunello stemware. It costs five thousand dollars, but we'll be able to afford it!”

Staring down at this full-page spread of charred meat on a brioche bun made me realize something vitally important: Emily and Ginger were going to run their scheme with such moronic ostentation that they would get themselves caught in a matter of days,
possibly minutes. And then
I
would be caught because the paper trail of forged documents would lead right back to me.

“Don't you like it?” Emily asked.

I took the issue of
Millennium Foodie
from Emily's outstretched hand, closed it, and set it down on the kitchen table. “You have to stop this,” I said as gently as I could. “Don't you think if the two of you start showing up to work draped in blood diamonds and Birkin bags that people are going to start asking questions?”

Without warning, Emily grabbed the nearest issue of
Ultimate Houses
and chucked it at my feet. “I picked that burger out for you myself!”

“I appreciate that, Emily, but I can't let you do this. You'd be putting me at risk. Even if I don't cooperate with you.”

I ducked out of the way of a soaring glitter pen, then a glue stick, and, most egregiously, a pair of scissors. In Emily's defense, they were at least safety scissors.

“You put yourself at risk when you cashed that check!” Emily Frisbeed a double issue of
Fine Wines
straight for my forehead.

Fortunately, I was a seasoned flying-object dodger on account of my parents, so Emily had yet to land a blow. Ginger, meanwhile, was calmly cutting the crotch out of another picture of Glen Wiles. It was a known Titan fact that Glen Wiles was a serial sexual harasser, so I could only imagine what it was like for someone with Ginger's cup size to be his assistant—but still, she was a little too entranced by rendering him a eunuch.

“You're killing our good-energy vibe in here,” Ginger said without looking up. “I think you should take your negativity elsewhere.”

A box of crayons ricocheted off my collarbone and I knew I had no choice but to go. Only after I slammed the door shut behind me did I realize I'd just been driven out of my own home.

My cell phone tinged and I was sure it was Emily calling me, to tell me that her psychotic break had ended and it was now safe for me to reenter my own apartment without a helmet.

Instead, it was a text from an unknown number:
I'm waiting for you—WenDi
.

How did Wendi Chan get my cell phone number?

Immediately following that text came another:
I'm still waiting
.

Then a third:
Still waiting. I've got all night.

Lucky for Wendi Chan, I had nowhere else to go anyway.

W
ENDI CHAN LIVED
in Bushwick, Brooklyn—Williamsburg's grittier, less gentrified younger sibling. (It should be noted that given the warp speed of gentrification in present-day New York, Bushwick is already becoming a coveted neighborhood on par with the city-as-luxury-good at large—but trust me when I tell you that Wendi's apartment building was an enduring, gentrification-resistant hellhole.)

No wonder she was so ornery. She worked all day in the creepy Titan basement surrounded by computer screens, doing god knows what with zeros and ones, and then she came home to here, the bowels of a broken building on Knickerbocker Avenue. I was surprised the doorbell worked when I pressed it.

She buzzed me in and I descended the stairwell, following the sounds of drums and screeching to the only apartment door that
was propped open. I was free to let myself in to what I realized was band practice.

There were four of them, all Wendi look-alikes, set up in the middle of the living room. Honest to god, they could have passed for an Asian gothic version of Jem and the Holograms.

I stood awkwardly, straining not to cringe as the singer hit her high notes. Then Wendi called cut.

None of the girls acknowledged my presence before disappearing into one of the two bedrooms.

“You all live here together?” I asked as Wendi propped her bass up against the wall.

She nodded. “Four Chinese girls from Flushing living in a Bushwick basement.”

“That should be your band name,” I said.

Wendi made a sour face. “Our band name is I'm Not Chun-Li from Street Fighter but I'll Still Fuck You Up.”

“You're right,” I said. “That's totally better.”

We each sat down on a vintage Marshall amp. Wendi reached into a red cooler filled with ice, pulled out a soaking can of Budweiser, and offered it to me. It was emblazoned with stars and stripes, a leftover from the Fourth of July.

“I love this American can, don't you?” Wendi said in her gruff voice and slight Chinese accent. “Don't you feel such freedom drinking from it?”

I cracked it open, causing a small volcano of foam to erupt onto the already sticky floor, and nodded.

Wendi tossed me an open bag of Lay's Classic to go with my beer. “I didn't think you would show.”

Neither did I, but now that I had a cold beer and salty chips, I would have stayed forever if she let me.

“I only came to tell you that whatever Lily Madsen told you, it isn't true.” I crunched on my chips and avoided Wendi's searing eye contact. “I don't know anything about . . . about anything, really.”

“Stop embarrassing yourself,” Wendi said, cutting me off. “Have some dignity; don't be a liar.”

I went silent and she stared at me hard. “Forget all that for a moment,” she said. “First, tell me your story, Tina Fontana.”

“My story?”

“You interest me,” she said. “The way Lily Madsen the Lean Cuisine Lady interests me.”

That could not be a compliment.

“I look at Lily and I know there's a story,” Wendi explained. “I want to find out what it is.”

“Have you?” I asked.

Wendi shook her pink horns. “It's not so easy getting into her little vacuum-packed world. You're not so different. You have a certain quality, it's difficult to describe. Like a stray cat that you can see is hungry, but if you reach to it, it'll claw your hand off, you know?”

I did, actually.

“Maybe it's those big sad eyes you have.” Wendi pulled a soft pack of Marlboros out of her cargo pants pocket. “You have, like, weepy Winona Ryder–from-the-nineties eyes. And she was no cat you could just pick up and take into your lap either.” She held the pack of cigarettes out to me. “Smoke?”

“No, thanks.”

“Have you ever?” She Zippo'd her cigarette lit.

I shook my head.

“You always been a rule-follower?”

“I guess you can say that.”

“You're a first-gen, aren't you? That's typical. Where are your parents from?”

“Sicily and Calabria,” I said. “What about you?”

“I was born in Beijing. Came here when I was six.”

“Have you always been a rule-breaker?” I asked.

“Did you not hear me? I said I was born in
Beijing
.”

She smiled, I think. So I smiled. Then she blew a cloud of smoke into my face. “So how did a rule-follower like you end up as Robert Barlow's assistant?”

“I don't really know.”

Wendi glared at me until I said more.

“I was an English major in college, managed a bookstore for a while, worked as a research assistant to a journalist—she's the one who told me Robert was looking for an assistant. She recommended me.”

“So did you think you'd become a journalist?” Wendi flicked the ash off the end of her cigarette onto the floor. “By starting out as Robert's assistant?”

“Maybe?” I wiped the potato chip grease from my fingers onto my jeans and went back to my beer. “Honestly, I didn't know what I wanted, but I thought if I could get an in somewhere, my foot in the door . . . becoming a journalist sounded like it could be a solid choice, like an actual job. But now it's six years later and I'm still doing the same thing I was doing when I was twenty-four, with no chance of advancement and . . . I'm rambling.”

“You're answering my question,” Wendi said. “You're just taking the long way. Tell me about your student loans.”

I hesitated, but my hesitation was pointless. Wendi obviously knew everything and she wasn't letting me off the hook.

“It all seems so stupid now,” I said, “graduating college with so much debt and no real career plan, but I didn't have a whole lot of guidance. My parents can't even read English. Nobody explained to me what all those numbers meant when I signed for my loans. It all just felt so possible, like I was doing the right thing by investing in myself.”

Wendi shocked me by laughing a high-pitched laugh that was one part schoolgirl and two parts hyena. “My parents don't even
speak
English,” she said. “But they guided me all right. They guided me through before-and-after-school study sessions, three hours of violin every day, a perfect score on my SATs. They guided me through a nice beating when I missed valedictorian by one-thousandth of a point.”

“You were salutatorian of your high school and you still have student-loan debt?”

There was that maniac laugh again. “I would if I went to Harvard like I was supposed to. Six-figure debt, for sure. But instead I rebelled.”

Wendi let the word hang in the smoky air between us for a moment. “That was my first broken rule,” she said. “I said fuck you to Harvard and went to Queens College instead, for free. My parents haven't spoken to me since. I'm an orphan now, by disownment.”

“Wait.” I came to fuller attention. “Lily said you have debt. Isn't that why you wanted me to come here?”

“That's what I told her. But the truth is, I wanted to show you something.” Wendi nodded her horns at the laptop resting on the floor. “I've been working on a program that I think works well with . . . what you and Emily Johnson have been doing.”

“We're not doing it anymore,” I said.

Wendi rolled her eyes, stubbed out her cigarette, flicked the filter across the room, and picked up her laptop. “I've created software that would enable you to systemize on a larger scale the base design you and Emily have generated.”

“I have no idea what any of those words mean,” I said.

“It means I don't want anything from you.” Wendi pulled her amp closer to mine. “I'm presenting you with an opportunity. In plain English, I've designed a pay-it-forward network. Let me show you.”

She fingered the computer's touchpad mouse with her purple-polished pointer finger. “This program allows you to track all the money you and Emily move around. Checks can go in and checks can go out, and you control it all. So if you wanted to, you could subsidize whoever you approve—me, for example, or some other lowly Titan assistant drowning in student debt—and then allow them to contribute what they can if they choose to. But I see by your glazed eyes that I've lost you.”

She'd lost me when she picked up her laptop.

“Look.” Wendi snapped her fingers to direct my attention to the screen. “Here's where people can submit their student-loan-debt statements. And here's where you or Emily, or anyone, can submit monetary contributions to the site's account. And here's where you click to send people their e-checks. That's pretty much it, very simple.”

“So it's like a charity?” I asked.

“It's not a charity.” Wendi reached into the cooler and pulled out another can of red, white, and blue Budweiser. “I like to think of it as a program to aid in the redistribution of wealth. Robert's wealth.”

She let that statement float for a few seconds. “For example. I don't have student-loan debt, but I do my boss's expenses. So if I join the network, I can fudge his expense reports just like you and Emily have been doing, but now you can put those funds toward another network member's debt.”

“So it's an expense account scheme,” I said. “Plain and simple. That's the brilliant idea you're pitching?”

Wendi set her laptop down onto the floor, then put her boots up on the milk crate that served as her coffee table. “It's not a scheme,” she said. “Think about the potential here, Tina. We're not only the ninety-nine percent, we're the assistants to the one percent. There's power in that.”

I looked around Wendi's cruddy basement apartment. At the cardboard-box bookshelves and repurposed lamps. The cracked claw-foot bathtub that served as a planter for what may or may not have been marijuana.

I had to ask: “Are you proposing this as a way to get rich?”

Wendi squealed with laughter like a poltergeist. “No. I don't want to become rich, because then I would have to despise myself. I'm proposing this to make Robert a little less rich, but not enough that he notices.”

I considered this for a moment. To be honest, there was a Robin Hood–esque element to Wendi's idea that I found tempting. My college self would have jumped at it. Actually, that's a lie. My
college self would have listened attentively with owl eyes while the more active activists at the Women's Center jumped at this idea. But philosophically I would have totally been on board.

While I was lost in this thought, Wendi tossed me another beer and I reflexively ducked out of its way, letting it drop to the floor.

“Sorry,” I said. “Habit.” I picked up the beer, opened it without thinking, and it exploded all over the two of us. “Sorry again,” I said, but Wendi hadn't even flinched.

“So this program,” I said, thinking back to the dream boards currently being constructed in my kitchen. “It would allow me to prevent people from using the money for anything but student-loan debt. Right?”

Wendi nodded gravely. “Not everyone's so honest as you.”

“You think I'm honest?”

“I think you're okay, Tina,” she said. And from Wendi Chan that was saying a lot.

—

I
RETURNED HOME
to find Emily pouting, knees to chest on the kitchen floor, which itself now looked like a haywire linoleum dream board, a sea of discarded, half-crumpled cutouts of luxury goods mottled by smears of glittering paste. Ginger was nowhere to be found.

“You came back!” Emily jumped up and ran to me for a hug. “I was afraid you'd gone for good.”

I kept my arms at my sides but allowed her embrace.

“Fine,” I said into the skin of her bare shoulder, which smelled like a gardenia—all she was wearing was a lace nightie. “I'm back in. But only if we do this my way.”

And my way meant no dream boards, no spending sprees that would land me in a cell.

“Whatever you want.” Emily squeezed me tighter. “I'm just so glad you're home.”

“We're going to use a computer program,” I said.

“I love that.”

“I said
computer program
. We're going to use a computer program to pay off Ginger's debt. And I'm in charge of it.”

I would control the money. Me and only me. Because if I couldn't stop Emily and Ginger from going ahead with this, I could at least keep them on a leash.

Emily released me and went to the fridge to search for, most likely, a fresh bottle of Asti Spumante.

“Did you hear me?” I said. “I'm going to be in charge. And for fuck's sake, don't tell anyone else! And make sure Ginger doesn't either.”

“Okay, okay,” Emily said. “I'm just happy you're back.”