Work for Hire

by Margo Karasek

  Julian smiled, and out came his creases. I sighed. He was one beautiful man—in a totally masculine way.

  “Don’t worry.” He leaned over to pat my leg. His hand lingered, its heat seeping through the linen of my pants. “Everything’s fine. We’ll be there shortly.”

  The phone in his lap jingled to life. He pulled his hand away.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Yes, Monique … ”

  “HEY RHONDA, these are for Mr. Lamont.”

  Julian pulled manila envelopes out of a mailbag he had slung over his shoulder and placed them on the counter of a concierge desk. Then he winked at the heavyset woman in a velvet brocade uniform manning the downstairs lobby of Mr. Lamont’s grand office building. It was 3:50 exactly, and we had just arrived, twenty minutes late for my appointment.

  Rhonda grunted in response, obviously immune to Julian’s charm.

  “And this is Miss Tekla Reznar,” he continued, still smiling.

  My mouth dropped open. Julian knew my last name. Mrs. Lamont must have told him, obviously, yet somehow his knowing felt rather personal. I blushed.

  “She has an appointment with Mr. Lamont,” he advised Rhonda.

  Rhonda swiveled her head, gave me the once-over, then punched some letters on her computer keyboard and grunted again. A nametag magically appeared in front of me; apparently I now had permission to go to the executive suite on the twenty-ninth floor.

  “Got some ID?” Rhonda barked at me.

  I dug my license out of my wallet.

  After Rhonda looked at it, she grunted for a third time. “The elevator’s on your left.”

  We were dismissed.

  I grabbed the nametag and followed Julian to the elevators. He pressed the up button and faced me.

  “I’ll leave you here.”

  Was he going so soon? My heart jerked.

  “Best of luck. And listen, if all goes well, we should get together for dinner sometime. You know, just the two of us,” he said softly.

  Stunned, I nodded in absolute agreement.

  Was he asking me out? He was! Man, oh man, I had to get this job, regardless of the money or my rent.

  I was still nodding when Julian strutted away and I got into the elevator.

  My mind screamed the statement over and over. Okay, okay, correction; he had asked me out on the condition of my gainful employment. But still, it was a potential date, and I hadn’t had one in months. Not that Markus hadn’t been asking.

  I marched out of the elevator, shoulders squared. I still faced one last hurdle before I could reap a host of financial and social benefits.

  Failure is not an option, I told myself over and over again. I survived Ms. Jacobs. I survived Mrs. Lamont. I even survived the twins from hell. I cannot bomb now.

  So I located a receptionist and announced my arrival. The perfectly coiffed blonde sat at a dainty rococo desk surrounded by what appeared to be rare eighteenth century art. This pale, model-thin woman could’ve been a painter’s muse herself. And with its Italian marble, gilded mahogany, rare Persian rugs and rich velvets, Mr. Lamont’s suite was the polar opposite of his wife’s minimalist work and home space. It was the Louvre to Mrs. Lamont’s Guggenheim.

  “You are very late,” the blonde scowled up from her discreetly disguised computer, the machine’s faux-antique veneer clearly meant to obliterate any traces of modernity. “Mr. Lamont left for another meeting five minutes ago. He was not impressed by your tardiness. Please take a seat in the waiting area and I will check if his assistant is still available to see you.”

  My heart and confidence plummeted. I wanted to explain about Mrs. Lamont, the taxi, the horrible congestion, and my Constitutional Law class.

  “But … ” I began.

  The receptionist rudely interrupted. “Over there,” she ordered me, and pointed to a flower print settee.

  I slumped over and did her bidding.

  This was bad. Goodbye, $150 per hour and goodbye, Julian.

  I stared straight ahead. A long-case grandfather clock stood in my line of vision. Its bronze pendulum mocked me with its every swing. Tick. Tick. Tick. Time slipped away as I sat immobilized. But then, why was I feeling responsible? None of this was my fault. Mrs. Lamont had scheduled the appointment without consulting me. And the receptionist? Who was she to be haughty with me anyway? I should just march right up to the desk and demand she schedule another appointment and leave. After all, I did have a class to get to.

  Still, I remained seated. No point rocking the boat. Yet. I would just wait a little bit longer—five minutes, tops—and if no one came to see me by then I would definitely leave.

  But five minutes stretched to ten, and then to fifteen, and twenty.

  Finally, at well past four, a woman glided into the waiting room.

  “Tekla Reznar?” she demanded.

  This woman was in her mid-twenties and short, with a riot of red curly hair and the biggest chest I had ever seen. Her chest’s sheer size should have toppled her over, especially when combined with her short stature. Yet, defying all laws of gravity, she stood upright. Her chin was pointy and her eyes brown; together with her red hair, she resembled a fox, one in a skintight mini—a little short for work, if you asked me—and four-inch stilettos that did little to supplement her height.

  “Please follow me.”

  I got up from the settee and collected my bag. Whatever happened, I had to impress and keep this meeting under fifteen minutes. Maybe then I could still make my class.

  We walked into an oversized office adorned with an uninterrupted view of the East River. Unlike the reception area, with its frilly French antiques, this room screamed nineteenth-century man. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases dominated the walls, and a massive Federal desk sat in its center. Two leather club chairs stood side by side in front of the desk, and an executive chair sat behind it. A subtle aroma of smoked cigars and old leather bound books lingered in the air.

  The redhead slipped into one of the club chairs and gestured to the other.

  “Please, join me,” she said. “I realize you had some trouble getting here. I’m sure it wasn’t your fault. Monique has,” she paused, as if searching for the right words, “difficulties calculating time and distance. She can be very absent-minded at times, you know. We all learn to deal with it.”

  Monique? I sat and frowned, my relief at not getting the blame dissipating. Whoever this redhead was—I had guessed she was Mr. Lamont’s assistant—she seemed extremely familiar with his wife as well.

  “Stephen … Mr. Lamont,” she corrected, “will be here shortly. He’s just tying up a few loose ends, and thought it would be nice for us to chat first. He told me all about your impressive qualifications, but wanted me to make certain you were the absolute right fit for the children.”

  I nodded. The redhead leaned out of her seat and gave me an unobstructed view of her impressive bosom. I glanced down my own chest, at its meager size B: nope, no competition here. Was that her point?

  “Let me start,” she said, sitting back in her chair. Score one for me, her face seemed to say.

  I was getting the uneasy feeling the redhead thought we were opponents in some game familiar to her, but not to me.

  “I’m Lisa, Mr. Lamont’s assistant. You could say I’m his right-hand man—or woman,” she offered, chuckling at her own wit. “I graduated from Harvard.”

  She waited a beat, to see if the name registered.

  “Oh,” I quipped. Two could play her game. “Graduate school, or just undergrad?”

  She hesitated. “Undergrad.”

  I wanted to whoop. Take that, my own face itched to twitch, but I held back because I really, really, really needed this job.

  “Anyways,” Lisa said as she adjusted her body in the seat, “before I joined Mr. Lamont’s executive headquarters, I was Xander and Gemma’s live-in nanny.”

  I sat up at these words, all attention. Now this was interesting.

  “However, Mr. Lamont thought my talents
and intelligence were wasted at such a simple job, so he insisted I come and work exclusively for him.”

  Simple job? Was she implying that tutoring and working with children didn’t require any real skills? I bristled, remembering suddenly that Mrs. Lamont had claimed she had fired the last nanny.

  “The job switch, of course, has left a hard-to-fill void with the children. They really adored me.”

  Lisa folded her hands in her lap and looked forlorn, as if she really missed the brats. Yeah, right, I smirked. Mrs. Lamont said the children demanded she replace the nanny. Liar, liar …

  “We were really close, especially since Mr. Lamont is a very busy man, and Monique is usually off here and there pursuing her latest hobby.”

  As in Mrs. Lamont’s photography? I was under the impression Mrs. Lamont was shooting Vogue covers. For God’s sake, that seemed pretty established in the field to me.

  “But since I can’t do both jobs at once, here you are.”

  Yes, here I am, listening to you instead of talking to Mr. Lamont and getting on with my day.

  “Tekla.” Lisa leaned her body forward, in a seemingly friendly gesture. “May I call you Tekla?” she smiled, baring small teeth. “I feel that you might just be the right girl to fill my former shoes.”

  Girl! Who was she calling “girl”? I was her age, maybe even older. The nerve! And fill her shoes! As if I would ever need to wear four-inch stilettos.

  “And I just want you to know that you can always come to me for help. I still live in the Lamont house, so you will see me quite often.”

  I sat back, rendered speechless by this tidbit.

  “In fact, Mr. Lamont wanted me to make sure you understood the children’s special needs before you started. You see, Gemma is like her mother. She’s not really academic. So just make sure she passes all her classes. But Xander … he’s different. He’s extremely bright, like Mr. Lamont. He needs to do well in school. Stephen insists. Unfortunately, Xander is also very lazy and might prove to be a challenge. You will have to figure out how to get him to do his work. Oh, and here’s Stephen,” she said, capping this last bit of information with a sharp nod.

  She got out of her chair, and I turned my head to see a slender, middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair. He wore a tweed suit and red bowtie, along with cognac Lattanzi shoes and purple socks. His clothes looked expensive, but his physique was otherwise unimpressive; he barely topped five feet seven inches, and sported a weak chin. Frankly, his entire body looked weak. With his tortoiseshell frames on, he resembled more a pampered British scholar than a Wall Street tycoon. I couldn’t envision him with the glamorous—and tall—Monique.

  “Ladies,” he said as he approached the club chairs, “is everything going well?”

  I got out of my seat. Unlike his stature, Mr. Lamont’s voice was powerful. I could easily imagine the strong baritone riveting an entire boardroom of listeners.

  “Very,” Lisa chirped, and she leaned her standing body in his direction, cleavage in full view. “We have covered everything you mentioned.”

  “Good.”

  Mr. Lamont walked away from Lisa, stepped around the desk and sat in the executive chair. Lisa and I remained standing.

  “Well, then,” he said, reclining the chair, hooking his hands on the back of his head, and eyeing me from underneath drooping eyelids. “I expect you to commit for at least one year—I haven’t the time or the inclination to look for a replacement mid-semester—and I expect results. Whatever it takes, Miss Reznar. I don’t tolerate failure. And now, if you’ll both excuse me?”

  He pulled a file off his desk and proceeded to read, as if the two of us had already exited.

  My jaw dropped. That’s it? I wanted to yell at him. That is my entire meeting with you? For this … two minutes … I’ve been dragged halfway across Manhattan? For this I potentially jeopardized my Constitutional Law grade?

  I turned on my heel and stomped out of the room. Lisa scurried after me. She closed the door and grabbed hold of my arm.

  “Tekla,” she said swiftly. “Congratulations! Mr. Lamont really liked you. So don’t do anything stupid,” she warned, gauging my reaction accurately. “He’s a really busy man.”

  She led me past the startled receptionist—yeah, look your fill, honey—towards the elevators, where she finally let go of me.

  “Well, here you go.” Lisa smiled. “Best of luck with everything.” She turned to walk back to the office but paused mid-stride, and turned back to again face me. “Oh, and Tekla, let me give you some friendly advice, just between the two of us.”

  I tipped my head to the side. What could chirpy Lisa possibly advise me about that she hadn’t already?

  “Watch out for Julian.”

  I held back a gasp.

  “He’s Monique’s special pet. Women seem to go crazy for him, though I don’t know why. Personally, I wouldn’t date him even if he asked.”

  He probably never did, and the oversight still stings, right, Lisa?

  “The man’s trouble, and you’re just his type. Physically, that is. So you might get more than you bargain for if you play with that guy.”

  “Thanks,” I scoffed before I got into the elevator. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.”

  Her warning fled my mind completely when I glanced at my watch. 4:45 p.m.

  I had less than fifteen minutes to get to class. Julian was the least of my worries.

  CHAPTER 5

  I STOOD OUTSIDE the door of lecture hall 206 and stared through its windowpane.

  I could see my classmates seated in the long semi-circular rows of tables, busily clicking away on their laptops. Each seat in the lecture hall—like all the others in the law school—was wired for computer use and had Internet access.

  Students took full advantage. Some, I knew, were actually typing class notes. Others surfed the web or played solitaire, only half-heartedly listening to the professor’s discourse. Still others probably furiously instant messaged their neighbors. All looked completely absorbed in their respective activities. Their Constitutional Law books sat sprawled next to the computers.

  From my vantage point behind the door, I couldn’t see the professor, but I imagined he stood on the podium, behind the lectern, preaching the tenets of the United States Constitution to the amphitheater of students beyond. No doubt he was dressed in his usual uniform of khaki slacks and navy blazer, his signature powder-blue shirt, with the white collar and cuffs offset by a gold-striped tie. Professor Johnson rarely deviated from his Palm Beach lawyer look.

  Throughout the lecture the professor would play with his gold cuff links and only occasionally make eye contact with the hundred or so students obliged to attend.

  Or perhaps, if he hadn’t yet settled on the one hapless person forced to answer his brand of the Socratic dialogue, he would be perusing the dreaded class seating chart—issued by the law school to each professor so he could easily keep track of attendance and locate students—scanning it for a name that struck his fancy. If so, the class would collectively abandon all note-taking, games and other activities, and would instead e-mail bets on the winner’s identity to each other.

  I usually enjoyed these classroom antics. But today, right now, the joke would be on me.

  I was fifteen minutes late. I would have to walk into the lecture hall, the first person to be late to Professor Johnson’s class the entire semester. No one had dared commit such a faux pas before me. It just wasn’t done: Professor Johnson might be laughed at behind his back—or on the computer screens directly in front of him—but he was a former Supreme Court clerk with more than thirty years of legal academia experience at some of the finest institutions in the country. And he did have more than twenty books under his belt, not to mention numerous scholarly articles, as he so often reminded us. Then, of course, there was his on-air consulting work for both NBC and CNN. Professor Johnson was a self-proclaimed legal superstar, and no one—and I meant no one—had dared insult him to his face by
showing up late and disrupting his lecture.

  I gulped and looked around me. The corridors of the law school stood absolutely empty. All students had long ago made their way inside their respective classrooms. An echo of silence hummed in my ear. Sweat moistened my palm. I wiped it on my pant leg and reached for the doorknob, but paused the motion mere inches from its final destination.

  I couldn’t do it. I snatched my hand away and let it hang limply by my side.

  I couldn’t turn that knob, push the door open and march right in. My late entrance would likely cause quite a stir. What if, when the professor caught sight of me, he denounced me in front of the whole room and then made me scurry to my seat? Or worse, would he insist I leave the class right then, and then coldly make a note of my tardiness for future retribution?

  Nope. I stepped away from the door. I wasn’t going in. No force of nature could make me subject myself to that humiliation. And I couldn’t really fully participate in the lecture anyway; I didn’t have my laptop or my Constitutional Law book. Both were sitting on the desk in my bedroom. I had intended to pick them up before class, but the mess with the Lamonts had nixed that plan. If Professor Johnson called on me, I wouldn’t be able to answer a single question.

  I would go back to my dorm and deal with the consequences of a missed class instead. A B in Constitutional Law wouldn’t kill me, right? Sure, it would lower my average and probably make landing a clerkship or getting hired at a prestigious firm more difficult, but it wasn’t as if showing up guaranteed a perfect grade anyway. On the other hand, if I did score lower than an A in the class, an attendance-mandated grade drop could be detrimental to my future legal career. A B wouldn’t kill me, but a C or a D might.

  My fingers balled into a fist; my mouth went dry. I ran my tongue around my lips, but the move did little to alleviate the parched surface. I couldn’t take the risk. I had to go in. Leaving now guaranteed a lower grade. Going in at least left open the possibility of an A and a good job after graduation.

  I took a deep breath and scanned the rows of bodies inside the classroom, desperate for a solution.