They studiously ignored the subject of his father, sort of the way, he now realized, he’d focused on Daniel’s statuesque physique and professional solidity and ignored other things before coming up here. Robbie had disregarded the way Daniel took his hand a little too firmly during their few restaurant dinners with Maize, or badgered them both whenever they shared an opinion about a play or a book or a movie (“You two liked that? I can’t believe you liked that”), or glared at Robbie whenever he failed to back up Daniel’s more questionable pronouncements (beige was the best color for a living room sofa and most lawyers were people who weren’t smart enough to get into medical school and Germans were obsessively clean because they had a dirty history), which issued more frequently during their nights with Maize than they otherwise did, as if her presence uncorked Daniel’s need for self-assertion.
There was rarely enough reassurance for either of them, Robbie was starting to discover; in that respect they were well or terribly matched. Or there was sufficient assurance somewhere but Robbie couldn’t access it. Daniel had endless appetite, he had vaunting ambition, he had ceaseless drive, he had boundless energy, and like Robbie lately he was practically a sex addict. Even on mornings after Robbie had spent the whole night with him and was dressing to leave Daniel’s room in NYU housing for work, he would reach his long arms toward Robbie and say, “Where are you going so fast? Have you decided you don’t like me anymore?” and Robbie—rolling his eyes yet flattered—would strip and jump into bed for a quickie before he was allowed to depart.
It mystified Robbie why Daniel clung to him. He wasn’t nearly as handsome as Daniel, and he looked puffy-eyed in the mornings, and he was so high-strung that his hands sometimes shook for no reason at all, and he wasn’t en route to an interesting career. In fact his work life so far was an utter flop.
He didn’t tell Daniel much about his internship at the newspaper because it was too boring. Instead he reported the details to Maize, just as she’d relayed the special horrors of working for André Gilbert to him. They made a little sport of whose work life was worse, offering their humiliations for comic relief (I restocked the office’s toilet paper! I had the boss’s shoes shined!), but when they went too far with it they crossed into glumness and had to comfort each other by saying it would get better soon.
But his own job wouldn’t ever get better because it wasn’t even a job. It was an internship and not remotely as advertised. It was subsecretarial and exploitative. In seven months, the closest Robbie had come to the editorial experience promised was the emergency fact-checking of a book review on a day when two junior editors had called in sick. He’d been working at the Arts section of the newspaper about eight weeks—nearly as long as he’d known Daniel—for a California avocado heiress named Jocelyn, who had bohemian airs and flowing skirts and a Yale degree and a trust fund. Before that he’d been the minion of a fifty-something man named Howie, who’d appointed himself the Czar of All Things Queer at the newspaper, and for months before that a “floater” from department to department, staying at each desk just long enough to feel completely alienated and superfluous.
Robbie thought that when he’d finally landed in the Arts section everything would improve, but it hadn’t. If anything, it had gotten worse. It wasn’t just that he had to answer the phones and change the toner in the printers and run the postage meter and pack up thousands of CDs and DVDs and review copies. It wasn’t just the mouse droppings he found on his desk in the mornings or the fact that the office was musty and windowless. It wasn’t even that Jocelyn stole Robbie’s few ideas about layout and organization and passed them off as her own right in front of him, at the staff meetings where he took the minutes, or that he’d allowed her to string him along for weeks and months with false promises that his internship might someday turn into a real, paying job if he worked hard and waited, when by now it was clear that it wouldn’t.
No, he could have put up with all that. What irked him most was that he’d been snubbed for his highbrow-mainstream taste (playwrights and directors and classical musicians whom Jocelyn called “the usual suspects,” followed by snoring sounds) and rebuffed everywhere else at the newspaper, apparently, for his appearance. He didn’t have tattoos like the other expensively educated assistants on the staff. He didn’t have piercings. His hair was combed into the same neat side part he’d worn all his life rather than artfully mussed, and he didn’t wear camouflage cargo pants or vintage rock tees or flip-flops to work either. He didn’t even own clothes like that. He showed up each day in the fine shirts and elegant Milanese sports coats he’d gotten from his father, wearing high seriousness on his sharply pressed sleeves, and they treated him like a bourgeois square they could roll their eyes at, or an uptown spy to be viewed with suspicion, or simply as someone too dumb and too uncool to bother with even if he tried desperately to make conversation.
“Maybe I should show up naked,” he’d said to Maize one night, to which she’d replied, “Not your style, Robbie. You don’t even like to be naked in the shower.”
“You’re shallow! Talk to me!” he’d wanted to scream at his coworkers on particularly frustrating days. “I have a lot to offer! If you’re not going to pay me a salary, the least you can do is make conversation!” But as the dreary months passed he felt more and more like a high school nerd sitting alone in the cafeteria, eating a sloppy joe that spilled onto his lap while the popular kids smirked at him from a distance.
It was all the more painful because the editors were friendly and chatty to some of the other assistants. They were downright effusive, for instance, with a plump and sassy Barnard girl in the production department named Shawniqua, who wore a uniform of sweat pants and Doc Martens and tight tees splattered with subversive phrases. On the day Shawniqua came to the office in a red tee with black lettering that read I GOT THE PUSSY, I MAKE THE RULES, no fewer than eight editors and writers had said, “Love your outfit!” as they passed her layout table before sweeping by Robbie as if he were untouchable. Robbie had counted her compliments, and was ashamed to have.
Now Robbie listened to his father’s pathetically long voice-mail message for a third time, saved it, and turned off his cell. He didn’t want to worry about his father or think about the newspaper people while he was up here at his mother’s, but he couldn’t help himself. He stewed about all of it as he slipped into Daniel’s guest room as quietly as a prowler, making no sound as he opened the door and closed it behind him.
How enticing Daniel could be when asleep. Robbie lay next to him gingerly and tried to breathe in sync with him again. But he couldn’t quite manage it. Suddenly he was swamped by the implacable sense of solitude that sometimes overcame him—the loneliness that threatened to implode him and render him unreachable. He wished Daniel would roll on top of him, sealing his mouth with his own before either of them could say anything wrong, but he didn’t. Daniel didn’t know Robbie was beside him. Their bare arms brushed each other and Robbie lay there inhaling and exhaling and staring at the ceiling, waiting till daylight, when they all would rise for their next assignments.
* * *
Maize had lied to Robbie. She hadn’t been writing about college hookups in her journal when he’d caught her sitting on the bed during her work break. She’d been describing her fumbling encounters with her real estate coworker Eli, whom she hadn’t spoken to until shortly before she got fired but on whom she had spied at his cubicle for several months beforehand.
For all she knew, other people in the office had glommed on to Eli, too, since he was impossible to block out even if you tried. Eli was extremely tall and rangy and redheaded. The strong features in his lean face made him look, Maize had thought immediately, like a slightly underfed Viking, and he turned himself out like nobody else in the office, in blunt defiance of the dress code, wearing scuffed boots, motorcycle jackets, ripped jeans, and brightly crocheted skullcaps on cold days. When Maize first overheard him speak from four desks away his voice was husky, with a gravelly
rasp that somehow made it seem smoother and more lyrical than a regular voice: a Hells Angel reciting sonnets. Yet when he smiled his face blazed with a white boyish light and he looked, for a second, like a severely overgrown eight-year-old who’d gotten waylaid en route to the playground.
Maize couldn’t resist darting her eyes in Eli’s direction on the two or three afternoons a week that he loped into the office. Nor could she help wondering how he’d scored a part-time gig when all the other assistants like her were slaving six full days a week. Nor could she help marveling at his cheerful insubordination toward his boss. He slouched at his desk, rolling his wide shoulders forward—the apologetic posture that Maize had often observed in tall people—yet there was nothing else that was the least shrinking about him. He listened to his iPod constantly as he performed his clerical tasks, as though literally tuning out his brain-numbing duties, nodding almost imperceptibly to whatever he was listening to at the moment, and didn’t remove his earpiece even when he answered his boss’s phone, as if passively refusing to be distracted from what mattered to him.
“Yo, Empress,” Eli called whenever his boss (a high-octane barracuda with the unlikely name of BeeZee) pranced into the office on her kitten heels. He’d visor his hand over his smooth forehead to give her a mock Scout salute that he ended with florid curlicues. If BeeZee stormed up to Eli’s desk—long nails digging into her waist—demanding to know exactly when Eli intended to finish a work project she’d been waiting for, he would say, “It will get done when it gets done, BeeZee,” and she’d let it drop. The one time Maize had witnessed her yelling, “That’s simply not acceptable, Eli!” he’d lifted his pointer to signal a pause, slipped on a pair of thick Clark Kent–ish eyeglasses, and trained a flat stare on BeeZee as if wanting a sharper view of the ugliness before him. In response BeeZee scurried off to the bathroom like someone who’d just realized she’d been walking around all day with her zipper down.
O, to be that self-possessed! Maize had never been truly intimidating in her whole life—to a boss, no less—and she’d let out an involuntary chuckle at the sight of it, which made Eli turn her way and perhaps notice her for the first time in the nine months she’d been there. He beamed his boyish white smile at her and made a circling gesture around his ear to indicate his boss’s craziness, and when he kept smiling her way Maize buried her head in her work again and blanched at having been caught staring.
A few days later Maize was in the office copy room, stymied in her efforts to make multiple sets of a co-op board package and cursing under her breath at the machine that kept jamming on her, when suddenly she heard Eli’s deep voice behind her saying, “Allow me,” and then he was in front of her, fixing it with a few deft strokes, and towering over her head-on. “All yours,” he said.
“Thanks—thank you,” Maize mumbled as she resumed her work, gaze averted. When he didn’t answer she supposed she should say more. “You’ve saved my life. Really, André will disembowel me if I don’t get this package out by five, and I’m a disaster with anything mechanical.”
“André’s a squirt,” Eli said. “You could probably take him with one hand tied behind your back.”
The image of Maize beating André to the ground popped into her head and made her laugh. “Well, I don’t know about that,” she said. “But thank god somebody here is competent with machines.” She leaned toward him a bit and whispered, “I’ve noticed you’re pretty good at handling your boss, too.”
“She’s another machine,” Eli said. “Only a simpler and cruder apparatus than this one.”
“How long have you worked for her?”
“About a year. But the market’s tanking, so BeeZee won’t be able to afford me anymore. I suspect it’s coming to an end.”
“You think?” Maize had been so consumed with her petty tasks that she hadn’t looked up from them long enough to notice the condition of the market or anything else beyond her desk. The pulse in her neck jumped like a fish.
“That’s my forecast.” Eli predicted that BeeZee would probably invent a fake reason for getting rid of him in the down market, so that she wouldn’t look like she was faltering as an agent, before she hired another assistant to do the same job at a much lower salary. He said he didn’t care as long as she gave him severance, which would buy him a few months to rehearse with his band.
“Oh, you’re a musician?” Maize asked, hearing her own dimness. What else would someone in a band be?
“I am.” He smiled differently now—diffidently—and shifted his weight from one long leg to the other as though her interest in his nonoffice life required a chord change.
When she asked him what instrument he played he replied, “Bass, drums, piano, and violin,” and when she said “Wow,” he asked her what work she did when she wasn’t stuck at André’s desk.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“You’re creative, right? You look like a painter.” He narrowed his big gray eyes at her. “No. I take that back. You look like a writer. I’m guessing a writer.”
“Me? No.” She shook her head and looked at the floor. “I mean, sometimes I write in my journal, but it’s not for anyone else.”
Now she peered at her blouse and her skirt and her sensible shoes—the boring professional attire André required—and though she was flattered to be mistaken for an artist she couldn’t fathom how anyone could look at her and come to that conclusion. She felt mortifyingly straight as she stood there dwarfed by a guy dressed like a road warrior and she decided to deflect the discomfort by playing it for laughs.
She smiled at Eli. “I wish I were an artist. But I’m just an average flat-footed girl from the suburbs. If I have any special talent, it’s for shopping. I spent my formative years in malls.”
Eli glanced at her from his sovereign height, grinning as though faintly amused, and he narrowed his eyes further still. “Somehow I doubt that’s what you are,” he said. “You don’t seem average to me.”
“Swear to god—that’s it!” Maize spoke a little too loudly and emphatically, in her broad parody of herself. “And you know something? Now that I live in a city without malls, I do nothing but come here and go home and come here again. On weekends I dust my apartment.” She made a cartoonish pout as she hefted her load of copies and prepared to retreat to her desk. “That’s the sum of my stimulating life in the world’s greatest city.”
“Even tonight?” Eli said.
“Sure.” She shrugged. “Every night’s the same.”
She was about to turn to him and say, Thanks again for your help. I’m done here, when he said, “I think I can fix that for you, too. Come out with me tonight.”
* * *
When Robbie had entered the guest bedroom and interrupted her journal writing the other day he’d broken her focus from Eli, which she supposed was just as well. It was far easier and less frightening to be describing André again, instead—everything she could register about him, from his Gucci loafers and custom suits to his obscenest turns of phrase.
She was ashamed to be dwelling on André a full month after being fired by him. If she was a stronger person she’d have moved on as ruthlessly as André himself did, dropping irresolute buyers from his phone contacts list, ordering Maize to lose the numbers of “poor people” who didn’t have a net worth of $5 million minimum, informing parents from his adopted son’s school that they were out of their gourds if they thought he’d be attending their fund-raisers, though he might order his underemployed stay-at-home partner to mail them a check if they asked him nicely.
Maize couldn’t set the subject of André aside just yet, as if André were an unsolved puzzle or a towering figure among men although he stood only five feet six.
In fairness, André was nothing if not memorable—a veritable font of zingers Maize had quoted to Robbie from the start. He was as crudely fascinating as a horror movie you were appalled to find entertaining yet couldn’t stop watching anyway. And he had a split personality. If Maize didn’t k
now André, she’d never have guessed that the short, caustic, potty-mouthed man who criticized her work and brayed at other brokers and routinely denied them access to his listings was the same supple charmer who seduced sellers into giving him their property to handle and wheedled buyers into ponying up far more than they thought a place was worth. It was astonishing how deftly André could switch from one persona to another, between sips of the espresso he sent Maize out to get for him three times a day, and it was most impressive when he had multiple phone calls on hold and he pivoted from Mean Vulgar André to Smooth Cajoling André at the push of a button, into his headset, like a psychic channeling different voices during a séance.
Well, face it, Maize thought, as she sat on the edge of her bed with her journal again. She and André had had a sort of weirdly intense bond, with André as the harsh, reluctant mentor and Maize as the—what? She wasn’t André’s protégé by a long shot. Although she wasn’t certain what she wanted to do with her life yet—she wasn’t directed like Daniel or Eli or the legions of painfully bright young things in this city—she knew she didn’t want a career in the shark tank of Manhattan real estate. Working for André was merely a phase en route to whatever came next. Yet whether or not he’d meant to, André had nonetheless hammered some knowledge of his industry and his world into Maize with an endless series of rules and regulations that issued from his mouth as frequently as barbs directed at his cobrokers.
Never cut your commission, he’d instructed Maize many times during the year she’d worked for him. Fight against giving referral fees. Never let sellers be around during showings and don’t be nice about it either, throw them out of their own damn homes if you have to. Never work with fashion types because all they want to do is shop, they’re rarely satisfied, and they’ll waste years of your life. Ditto with interior designers. Ditto with movie people unless they absolutely have to have an East Coast pied-à-terre pronto. A celebrity waste of time is the same as a nobody waste of time unless you get publicity from it. And never take a buyer out for the first time on a weekend—say you’ll be in Paris or the Hamptons or your country home—or they’ll never respect you. And never do after-hours showings because they’ll always be late, and never do early mornings because if they’re serious they’ll make the time at lunch, and never ever take shit from anyone—sellers or buyers or brokers or lawyers or mortgage brokers or appraisers—and never forget the client isn’t your friend, you’re the hired help, but never signal you understand that or they’ll walk all over you.
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