Wendy typed away, sending e-mail after e-mail to wait for morning in sleeping in-boxes. She felt a sense of communion with Janet, working this late. Despite the difference in ages, in position, they had the same drive, or so Wendy fancied. They wouldn’t quit until the work was done, exceptionally so. Being the best was their reward.
And so was explicit validation and approval. No one said the best couldn’t be self-aware.
She looked up from her laptop, some reptilian brain impulse driving her head up. She saw that the lights to Janet’s office were off. The communion vanished, replaced with a stark fear of being caught…doing what? Working late?
“Interesting attire for a janitor.” Janet Lace was standing right next to her.
Wendy turned her head, saw a tower of nylon-encased leg, goddamn leg, and looked back at her laptop. Felt like she was back in high school, trying not to get noticed staring at the head cheerleader.
“And I didn’t know defragmenting hard drives was part of your duties.”
Wendy forced herself to look up. They were co-workers. All she was doing was talking to a co-worker. “I was just finishing up.”
“Everyone else went home four hours ago. That’s not finishing, that’s working. And if you like it so much, there’s always tomorrow.” Janet offered her hand.
Wendy took it, maybe a little too quickly, or maybe a little too slowly—weird to think of Janet Lace as someone you could touch, no matter how casually. Janet helped her to her feet, Wendy shutting the laptop and tucking it under her arm. Now she was face to face with Janet, and Janet was taller than her. By a few inches. High heels. Wendy wore sneakers.
“You’re here too,” Wendy pointed out.
“I’d never ask an employee to do something I wouldn’t do myself. Speaking of, since you’re up…” Janet brought a dossier out from her briefcase, and Wendy could do without the image of Janet’s fingers sliding over glossy black leather. At least, she could do without it until she was alone. Very, very alone. “Your new in-pile.” She handed a dossier to Wendy, thick and heavy. “I’ll expect it to be done with your usual alacrity.”
Usual alacrity? So she was usually…alacritical? That sounded like praise. But what the hell was alacrity?
“Of course,” Wendy said. “I’ll get right on it. With lots of alacrity!”
Janet rolled her eyes, a little fondly, Wendy thought. “Tomorrow. When you’re fresh and well-rested. A good sleep cycle is something you don’t appreciate until it’s gone.”
“I went to engineering school. I don’t remember what one of those is.”
Janet smiled in commiseration and Wendy felt like she’d won the lottery. We have something in common!
“Well, we’ll just have to see about getting you to mind your bedtime, won’t we?”
Why had God put sweat glands on Wendy’s thighs? It felt like a monsoon season in the backs of her knees. Was that normal? Maybe she had a gland condition.
Wendy clutched the dossier tight to her chest, bundled with her laptop—hugging them, really. Was this what getting the team captain’s letterman jacket felt like? “It’s not my bedtime just yet,” Wendy said, because a demon had suddenly possessed her and someone with a voodoo doll of her stuck a needle into the ‘say stupid shit’ part of her brain. “Why don’t we get a drink?”
Janet blinked, a bit like a particularly lazy lizard might.
Wendy found that hot. Slightly frightening.
Then Janet’s head tilted forward, her glasses catching a beam of light and becoming two brilliant oval jewels, gleaming too bright to be looked at directly. “I think you’ve misunderstood our relationship,” Janet said, her voice affectless.
Wendy said, “Oh,” and would’ve liked to be anywhere else. In a split-second, she thought of all the ‘anywhere elses’ in the world, from North Korea to the South Pole, and decided that all of them were better than here.
Janet raised her hand and pressed two fingers, fore and middle, into Wendy’s chest. “I think you’re going to make a fine employee. I appreciate the contributions I foresee you making to this company. And I recruited you in that expectation. But we’re not friends. I’m not your mentor. I’m not some sister helping you out of feminist solidarity. I’m your boss, you are my subordinate, and our relationship—our working relationship—is strictly that.”
She went on from there, trying to let Wendy down easy—as easy as she could, anyway. But Wendy wasn’t listening anymore. She’d seen what was on Janet’s left hand.
There was a very good reason why Janet had not fallen hopelessly in love with her as well. She had already fallen hopelessly in love.
And, naturally, Janet had married him.
CHAPTER 4
Dear Roberta,
I remember you suggested a marriage counselor some time ago. Despite how things have deteriorated, I still believe that’s unnecessary. I’ve read numerous texts and internalized them quite thoroughly. We’re two reasonable people—we can resolve our issues without an outside party. If that’s what we both want.
Frankly, I believe you want a counselor because you think they’ll take your side. Let me disabuse you of the notion. From any outside, unbiased perspective, I am in the right. My decisions and my career have consistently benefitted us. What do you have to complain about? The home my work has provided you? The luxuries? The respect? You treat my good fortune like an oppression of you, my career aspirations as your embarrassment. It’s aggravating me and shameful to yourself…
Janet stopped writing. Too aggressive. Too angry. She usually never let herself get this angry. At a certain point, too much fire stopped fueling an engine and started damaging it. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? Bobbi had grown tired of putting up with a wife who was more successful than she was.
Or she’d just grown tired of Janet.
Janet set her fountain pen aside with her notebook—both in the cold space where Roberta had once slept—and rolled over to see her bedside clock. It was 7 a.m. Saturday, no work. Still, she wouldn’t sleep in. She would keep her habit. Otherwise, it was useless.
Exercise regimen: an hour every day, seven days a week. She wasn’t a kid anymore. She couldn’t afford to be lazy. Cardio. Jump rope. Light weights. Treadmill to cool her down to a finish. Her earbuds beat out a rhythm, she followed it. No peak, no summit, just control. She wasn’t trying to burn fat, lose ten pounds, or build muscle. She was trying to maintain. Keep the statue polished to a sheen. Keep chipping away at it, because there was always something underneath. She pushed her limit to the almost comfortable frenzy, hard sweat, harsh breaths, burning in her arms and legs. The rhythm pushed into her and she didn’t have to worry, didn’t have to think.
She guzzled from her water bottle after. The bottle was by Alexander Wang. The water was by Angelina Jolie.
Shower routine: warm water. She preferred to be scorched, but lukewarm was better for her skin. Shampoo rubbed into her scalp, especially at the nape of her neck. Sixty seconds. Conditioner. Brush. Soap. Scrub. Blast of cold water to seal the cuticle for shiny skin. Then, as the steam hung in the air, she moisturized. She didn’t admire the tautness of her own body, but she did appreciate it. All her exercise, her dieting, her care, they’d given her this raw material that she could now play with. Make something out of.
Beauty routine: she washed her face with cleansing crème. Moisturized with Luzern lotion, adding a mist of rose water and a light helping of sunscreen. She considered a perfecting mask, but no. Once a week was enough.
Makeup was minimal. Highlighter, mascara, rose balm. A touch of lip sheen. Then a dab of fragrance on her wrists, the nape of her neck, by her ears. She used her hands for as much of the application as she could. She liked to be sure with her makeup, to know what she was crafting. Brushes and other tools were always so imprecise.
She put on a cream-colored shearling and cashmere vest underneath a beige long-sleeve sweater tunic. Then a suede pencil skirt. Brunello Cucinelli. Pink underwear beneath. Kitten
heels in sable-black. A low-key look. Light, but ascetic. She stared into the reflection of herself and saw nothing to chisel away, to grind down or excise.
Not yet.
9 a.m. She’d finished breakfast, but the notebook sat in the kitchen nook, the pen an unsteady bookmark to an unfinished page. She gave it a wide berth, as she took her dishes to the sink, rinsed them, then placed them into the machine. The job seemed unfinished, though—she’d tried to think what hadn’t been done.
Of course. She hadn’t washed Roberta’s dishes.
Dear Roberta,
I know you think that if you’d stuck with your legal career, you would have become a senior partner by now. You were a fair legal mind, but in all honesty, the point is moot. You became a paralegal. You supported me as I pursued a career at Savin. We moved here. We built a life here. I attained a position of respect and responsibility. And now you want to throw it all away to start a law firm with some college buddy and pretend you’re fresh out of law school?
Clearly there’s something lacking in our life. Fine. Tell me what it is, because I can’t see it. You have a wife who loves you. A wife who is intelligent and successful. A wife who looks practically the same as the day we met, and I am well aware of how long ago that was. What else must I contribute to your happiness?
The maid arrived slightly behind schedule. Janet left little for her to do, but whatever there was, she did it.
Janet sat in her living room, listening to the spritz of spray bottles, the squeak of washcloths, the burr of brooms. She didn’t know why—after seven years, surely she could trust the woman with her homestead.
Perhaps it was just her place, as it was the maid’s to clean.
She tried to concentrate on her book. Unfriendly Skies: The Air Battles of World War II. It was hard to be engrossed in it. The author made the most basic errors, confusing the SBD and SB2C dive bombers, mistaking the caliber of the IJNS Yamato’s guns. She tossed it aside and lifted another from the tower of To Be Reads. Hunting Warbirds: The Obsessive Quest for the Lost Aircraft of World War II by Carl Hoffman.
On February 21, 1947, the Kee Bird crashed on a frozen lake in the Arctic. A Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, the Kee Bird had been one of the last of its kind—at the time, the pinnacle of American engineering. Its development had cost a billion dollars more than the Manhattan Project, and two of the Kee Bird’s brethren, the Enola Gay and Bock’s Car, had ended the war they’d been designed for.
As part of Project Nanook, the Kee Bird was sent on a top secret mission to search for possible Soviet military activity in northern Greenland. Encountering bad weather and the North Pole’s compass-killing magnetic anomalies, the Kee Bird’s crew became disoriented and flew off course, burning fuel for over nine hours, until they had no choice but to crash land and await rescue. Three days later, they were rescued by First Lieutenant Bobbie Joe Cavnar aboard the C-54 Red Raider.
And the Kee Bird stayed in the ice. Ninety feet long, its wingspan 141 feet wide, its only damage was the props bent from a wheels-up landing and a leak in the number-three engine. The plane that had won the Second World War, still fully functional, still a beauty of a machine, was now only so much scrap metal.
Janet closed the book before she started, blaming her sudden emotion on the overall melancholic day she’d had. She wanted literary comfort food, an old familiar friend in paperback, but she didn’t want to taint a good book with her present mood. She wanted to slip out of herself, just for a moment, and fill her lungs with something other than this numbness.
The maid started vacuuming. Janet could hear the steady thrum of air being sucked in, the slight rattle of chunks disappearing into the intake. Morsels of food. Particles tracked in from inside. Outcroppings on her perfect life that just had to be chiseled away, sanded down, made pure.
She didn’t know the maid’s name. She’d forgotten it.
Roberta would know.
The maid was done by 11 a.m. Janet had an appointment at her nail salon for noon.
She got there early. Someone else had canceled. She got to have her manicure at 11:40. Janet liked saving time, even when she didn’t know what she was saving it for.
The manicure took twenty-five minutes, the pedicure thirty-five. Five minutes of drying. She tipped thirty percent.
She spent fifteen minutes on the letter after, to make it an even hour and a half. She wanted to be back on track.
Dear Roberta,
Is it control? Is that what you miss so dearly? Is that what you’ve starved for, more and more hungrily, during all our wedded bliss?
Can you not enjoy our good fortune because it’s under my name instead of yours? Do you think you’d be happy, an over-the-hill paralegal playing greenhorn lawyer in this day and age, simply because all your disasters are your own?
Every choice we made, we made. You agreed to all of it. I supported you as much as you supported me. It’s been a good life.
What decision have I made that you can’t live with?
Was it the baby?
Her hair salon appointment was at 1:30 p.m. It was within walking distance of the nail salon. Because she had finished early, she took the brisk walk rather than an Uber. She tried to think about the letter some more, about Roberta, about control, but her thoughts circled each other, chased their own tail and refused to yield dividends. It didn’t make sense and she couldn’t make it make sense and she wished someone could explain it to her and she felt guilty that she needed it explained.
And more and more, she wondered if there was an explanation, or if it mattered that she knew it.
Inside the hair salon, there were no cell phones, no eating, and no loud conversations. A stereo played a song Janet didn’t recognize. It was low and soothing, a curtain thrown up between her ears and the sound of snipping. Denise, her preferred stylist, was there and, as always, she asked if Janet would like to try something new. She always had an idea for a new look and sometimes Janet indulged her, but she was in no mood today. She asked for the same look, asked if Denise needed to see the picture on her phone again. Denise didn’t. She’d done the cut enough times.
Just little tendrils of hair, pushing out of her short, neat side part. Slowly pulling the lines of her silhouette out of alignment, adding one more frizzy deviation to her overall look, then another, then another. They were all stripped away. Scoured. Until all that was left was her undiminished, unencumbered perfection.
Two hundred dollars for an hour’s work. She tipped thirty percent. It was 2:30 p.m. She had nothing else to do with her day.
She went back to her apartment. It was quiet. Not too quiet—she didn’t believe such a thing existed. The four-bedroom was spacious, she knew, but its real virtue was quiet. That was the premium, the rarity, the value. Only the most wandering sounds made their way up from the streets below—tires, horns, but no people; nothing as messy as that. Divorced from context and shorn of environment, the sounds became little semaphore flags against her windows. The world politely trying to contact her, and Janet refusing its attentions.
The living room was like a reverse painting. The appropriately bold whitewashed walls, the hardwood floors, the prints on the wall of a ballet company in repose (Roberta’s) and the models of the furnishings of airplanes in flight (hers)—they were all framing for the TV, the sound system, stereo equipment, and plasma screen just abreast of the dappling of light from the shuttered windows. She filled the frame. Powered on the TV, the surround sound, the Blu-ray player in ritualistic sequence. Selected Netflix. Checked her watchlist.
She settled on a documentary. At an hour long, it wasn’t in-depth enough to be informing, but also didn’t dramatize the subject well enough to be engaging. Eventually, she just let the noise of it play; it compelled being watched only so that she could say it did not get any better. It didn’t. At 3 p.m. she left it playing to make herself a late lunch. She’d forgotten to eat again.
After a salad, she turned Netflix back on. Checked the new release
s.
Nothing of interest. Everything was too old to be intriguing, but not old enough to be classic.
Horror movies. Serial killers she wasn’t afraid of—too easy to deal with so long as you had a brain in your head, which none of the characters did. Ghosts she didn’t believe in. Zombies she was just bored of.
Action movies. Nothing with a budget high enough for so much as a decent explosion. Starring the washed-up and those who would never be famous enough to ever wash up. They would just disappear one day when they walked around a corner out of sight, like something unloved.
Dear Roberta,
Twenty-five years in this business have convinced me that I have my managerial style down, and down so well that I can apply it in any aspect of my life with similar success. When faced with a dilemma, I weigh my options, I solicit advice, I decide the right course of action, then I apply myself to it with all my strength.
Maybe I’ve treated you as just another team member, giving me advice, when you’re not. You’re my wife. That’s not fair to you.
But I can’t regret my life. I can’t take back my career. This is my home. This job is what I do.
Janet stopped. She crossed out the last sentence. She wrote:
This job is who I am.
She wondered why she’d written that. She wondered if it was the truth. It seemed like it, and she had no one to tell her otherwise. Funny as hell: all this time, she’d never had to choose between work and a relationship until now. And it hadn’t been hard at all.
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