Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  “This isn’t Dawn darlin’,” Nicole said, cold as black ice in a Midwest February. “Sorry to disappoint you. It’s your ex-wife. ‘

  “Oh. Nicole.” Frank Perrin’s voice dropped about forty degrees. “I didn’t think it would be you. “

  “Obviously. ‘Dawn darlin’.’ “ Nicole imitated his eager tone again, as nastily as she could. Goddamn blond California bimbo, fresh out of college and raring to go after the prof. Dawn — Dawn Soderstrom, how was that for a nice sexy Nordic name? — had been Frank’s editor at the University of California Press. She’d been just wild, like totally jazzed, she said, about his book on industrial espionage and the Internet. In Nicole’s day, busty blondes had got the hots for cuter topics, volumes of deeply angst-ridden poetry, say, or passionate monographs on Derrida or Thomas Pynchon. Dawn’s hots were the wave of the future.

  She hadn’t been the only one, either. Frank had got lucky. After he turned in the book but before it saw print, the topic caught fire. To everybody’s surprise — most of all Nicole’s, but obviously not Dawn’s — Spy by Wire took off, and even made a couple of nonfiction bestseller lists. And then, a few weeks later, Frank took off, too — with Dawn.

  Frank couldn’t have been aware of Nicole’s train of thought, but he couldn’t have missed the direction it was going in. He exhaled through his nose the way he always did when he was angry. “Just tell me what you want, okay?”

  “What do I want?” Nicole shot back. “This month’s check would be nice. Last month’s check would be even nicer.” The other thing Nicole wanted, the thing she couldn’t say, was to understand what Frank saw in an airhead more than ten years younger than he was. She’d seen enough of Dawn both before Frank left that note on her pillow and in the time since, dropping off and picking up kids on weekend visitations, to be sure her only visible asset (aside from the nicely rounded ones in her bra) was the ability to listen to Frank go on about encryption algorithms for hours at a time without her blue, blue eyes glazing over.

  Frank snorted again. He sounded like an irritated mule. “Is that why you called? To nag me again? I’ll get ‘em to you as fast as I can. I’m not made of money, you know.”

  Thanks to Spy by Wire, he had a very nice little pile. If he thought Nicole didn’t know that, he was bone stupid. Stupider than somebody who’d run off with a twenty-two-year-old golden girl when his son was just starting to crawl. Nicole had been listing all the payments he’d been late on or skipped. One day, in court…

  But she didn’t need the list now. She needed cash — cash and a place for Kimberley and Justin to stay.

  Her grip on the telephone tightened. If only it were his neck. But she couldn’t afford to lose her temper. She couldn’t afford anything right now, least of all an ex-husband more annoyed with her than he already was. “No, that isn’t why I called.” She didn’t apologize — she never apologized when she was right. “I called to ask if you could take the kids tomorrow. Your hours are a lot more flexible than mine. If you could just — ”

  “What’s the matter with Josefina?” Frank broke in. “Immigration finally catch up with her?”

  Nicole took a deep breath and counted to five — counting to ten, right then, was beyond her. When she could trust her voice, she said “No” and explained in words of one syllable, with a minimum of sarcasm, about Josefina’s mother. “I know it’s impossibly short notice” — for that, she could apologize; her pride wasn’t so sticky — ”but she didn’t give me any warning at all, just hit me with it when I dropped the children off this morning. I’ll find somebody else as fast as I can. I’m sure it won’t be past this weekend. By that time I’ll — ”

  Frank interrupted again: “I can’t.” She’d always had a knack for knowing when he was lying — except, of course, about Dawn, but that wasn’t the issue now. She was sure, down in her bones, that he was telling the truth. “It is impossibly short notice,” he said. “I’ve got way too much stuff going on to take ‘em now. I’m sorry, Nicole. I wish I could.”

  He was telling the truth about that, too. She could feel it much too clearly for comfort. Dammit.

  “Please, Frank,” she said — never mind if she had to get down on her knees and beg, this was critical. “Have I ever asked you for anything like this before?”

  “No, you haven’t,” he admitted, but there wasn’t any give in his voice. “It doesn’t matter. I can’t do it.”

  Nicole rolled all her frustrated fury into a bullet — rage at Josefina, rage at Sheldon Rosenthal, years’ worth of rage at Frank — and sighted it dead center on her ex-husband. “Why not? They’re your children, too, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “I can’t take them tomorrow,” Frank said again. He not only snorted like a mule, he could dig in his heels like one. He wasn’t budging now.

  Nicole didn’t care if he grew roots to China. “Why not? What are you doing that’s so important?”

  “Nicole…” There it came, the tone of sweet reason driven to desperation, with the edge of temper that threatened but hadn’t quite, yet, blown up. “Look, I’m not on the witness stand. You don’t get to cross-examine me anymore.”

  “What do you mean, ‘anymore’?” Nicole couldn’t manage sweet reason, or desperation, either. She was plain, flat angry.

  “Just what I said,” Frank said. “If you’re done, will you kindly get off the line? I’m expecting a call.”

  “Go to hell,” she said crisply, and hung up.

  The rush of gratified fury died away, leaving her shaking too hard to do anything more useful than stare at the telephone. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. It had been her idea to move to L.A. from Indianapolis. She’d always been the dynamic one, the go-getter, the one who’d make her mark on life in capital letters, while he’d messed around in grad school playing with computers because they were easier for him to deal with than people. And now, somehow, he was happily shacked up with Ms. Young-Blonde, with a big name that was likely to grow bigger, while her life and her career headed the wrong way down a one-way street, head-on into a phalanx of trucks.

  She swiveled her chair to glare at the framed law degree on the wall. Indiana University Law School. In Indianapolis, it would have stamped her forever as second-rate: if you weren’t Ivy League, you weren’t anybody. In Los Angeles, she’d found, it was unusual, even exotic. That still bemused her, after half a dozen years.

  “There ain’t no justice,” she said to the wall. The wall didn’t deign to answer.

  Nicole was still sitting there, still glowering at the diploma, when Cyndi came into the office and plopped the day’s mail on the desk. “Doesn’t look like anything you have to handle right away,” she said. She was trying to sound normal — trying a little too hard.

  Nicole didn’t snap at her for it. Much. “Good,” she said. “The way this day is going, I’m not up for handling much of anything anyway.”

  Cyndi bit her lip. “I’m sorry,” she said, and hesitated, visibly wondering whether to go on. At last she decided to go for it: “It should have been you, Ms. Gunther-Perrin.”

  “It wasn’t.” Nicole’s voice came out flat. “That’s all there is to it.”

  Cyndi couldn’t say anything to that. She shook her head and left for the relative safety of her desk.

  Nicole hardly noticed. Opening envelopes gave her hands something to do but let her mind stay disengaged: perfect. If she worked hard enough at it, she might just disconnect altogether. Once the envelopes were open, she shuffled the papers they’d held, looking busy without doing much till she could escape to lunch.

  Yang Chow, over on Topanga Canyon, was hands down the best Chinese place in the west half of the San Fernando Valley. That wasn’t why Nicole drove there. The restaurant was also a couple of miles away from her Warner Center office building, far enough that, with luck, she’d be the only one from the firm there today. Shop talk and gossip were the last things she wanted.

  She sat alone at a table in the casual elegance of the
restaurant — no storefront fast-food ambience here — eating soup, drinking tea, and going after chili shrimp with chopsticks. Yang Chow’s were of hard, smooth plastic, and didn’t give as good a grip as the disposable wooden kind. She counted herself lucky not to end up with a shrimp in her lap.

  That’s what my luck’s come down to, she thought, splashing soy sauce onto steamed rice: I don’t spill food on myself. All around her, businessmen chattered happily in English, Chinese, Spanish, and some other language she didn’t recognize.

  Why shouldn’t they be happy? They were men.

  One of them caught her looking. She saw what she’d come to call The Progression: widened eyes, Who-Me? glance, broad come-hither grin. He was wearing a wedding ring, a broad gold band. He didn’t bother to hide it. Without that, she would simply have ignored him. As it was, the look she sent suggested he had a glob of snot in his mustache. He hastily went back to his pork chow mein.

  Nicole took her time finishing her lunch. Going back to the office had all the appeal of a root canal. She stared out the window at the traffic whooshing past on Topanga. She was aware, rather remotely, of the busboy taking her dishes. Only after the waiter came by to ask for the third time, in increasingly pointed tones, whether she wanted anything else did she admit to herself that she couldn’t stay there all afternoon. She threw a five and a couple of singles on the table and walked out to her car.

  When she drove into the lot, she had to park a long way from the building. She’d expected that; most people had been back from lunch for half an hour, maybe more. As she trudged wearily across the gray asphalt, someone called, “Nicole!”

  She looked around a little wildly, wondering if she was having a flashback to the morning. But it wasn’t Gary Ogarkov this time, smoking his blasted cigar and blowing up her hopes till they couldn’t do anything but explode. Tony Gallagher, who’d just got out of his Lincoln Town Car a few spaces away from where she’d parked, waved and called her name again. When she paused, he caught up with her at a ponderous trot, belly lapping over the waistband of his slacks.

  She didn’t have much gladness to spare for anyone, but, thanks to that Midwestern upbringing, she could still be polite. “Hello, Mr. Gallagher,” she said. Of all the senior partners, she liked him best — not that that said much right now. But Gallagher had more juice in him than the rest of them put together. He was a vigorous sixty, his hair dyed a red close to the color it must have been when he was younger. He’d probably grown his bushy muttonchops when they were cool, back about 1971, and then never bothered shaving them off. Whoever had made his jacket had killed and skinned a particularly repulsive plaid sofa for the fabric. Nicole doubted it had ever been cool, but Gallagher didn’t care. He wore it with panache.

  “I just want to tell you, I personally think you got a raw deal today,” he said, breathing whiskey fumes into her face. Half of her wanted to hug him for even such a small kindness. The other half wanted to run. When she was little, her father had come home from the factory — or rather, from the bar after the factory — reeking just like that. Then he’d stopped coming home at all. Then, in very short order, her mother had divorced him. One, two, three. Nicole still hated the smell of alcohol on a man’s breath, the strong sour-sweet reek that, her mother had told her, signified everything bad about a man.

  Now that Nicole thought back on it, her father hadn’t kept up with his child-support payments, either. He’d poured them down his throat instead, one shot at a time. Frank didn’t do that. No, Nicole thought — he spends the money on Dawn. Some improvement.

  “Like I say, Nicole,” Tony Gallagher said, just a little unsteady on his feet, “I did what I could for you.” He held the door of the office building open so she could go in to the lobby ahead of him. “I got outvoted. You know how it is with some people — can’t see the nose in front of their face. It’s a goddamn shame, pardon my French.”

  A couple of paces away from the elevator, she turned toward him. “Thank you for what you tried to do. Believe me, it’s nice to know someone here thinks I’ve been doing a good job. I guess it just didn’t work out.” It sounded lame, but it was the best she could manage. She felt she owed it to him.

  “Damn shame,” Gallagher said again, vehemently. The odor of stale Scotch came off him in waves. What had he had, a six-drink lunch? He patted her on the back, heavily: between her shoulder blades at first, but slipping lower with each pat, till his hand came to rest a bare inch above her panty line.

  When the hand didn’t move after that, Nicole did, away from Gallagher and toward the elevator buttons. She punched UP with unnecessary violence. Was he being sympathetic or trying to feel her up? Did he know the difference? With that much Scotch sloshing around in him, did he even care?

  The elevator door slid open. Nicole got on. So, of course, did Tony Gallagher. She eyed him with more than a little apprehension as she pressed the button for the sixth floor. But, as etiquette demanded, he took his place on the opposite side of the elevator after hitting the seventh-floor button.

  With a thump, the car started up. Gallagher said, “Why don’t you come up to my office with me, Nicole? We ought to talk about ways to make sure this doesn’t happen the next time the opportunity rolls around.”

  She didn’t answer for a second. And he said he’d been on her side. Was he thinking of closing the door to his office and trying to get her clothes off? If he did, she’d scream and knee him in the nuts. Then she’d sue him and the firm for every nickel they had. Which added up to a lot of nickels.

  She shook her head a tiny fraction. No. He might be a lush, but he was still an attorney.

  She grasped at the one straw he’d offered — and if that was desperate, so be it. So was she. He’d talked about a next time — about another partnership. Sheldon Rosenthal had been notably silent on the subject. “All right,” she said, hoping he hadn’t noticed the length of her hesitation. “I’ll come up.”

  The elevator stopped at the sixth floor. Nicole let the door open and close, but didn’t get off. On the seventh floor, Gallagher stood back with courtly manners, and held the door for her to get off. Somewhat encouraged, holding her breath against his effluvium of Scotch, she walked with him down the long carpeted hallway. His secretary didn’t look up from her computer when the two of them went by into his inner office.

  He did shut the door behind him, but, instead of trying to grope her, he went over to a coffee machine like the one in Mr. Rosenthal’s office. Next to it he had a little refrigerator, atop which stood several bottles and a neat row of crystal tumblers. “Coffee?” he asked. “Or can I fix you a drink? Sounds like you’ve earned one today.”

  You don’t know the half of it. But Nicole said, “Coffee — black, please. I don’t use alcohol.”

  The frost in her voice only made him grin disarmingly. “You know what they say. Drink — and die; don’t drink — and die anyway. But suit yourself.” He poured her the coffee, then splashed a good jolt of Johnnie Walker Black over ice for himself. He carried it to his desk and sat down, leaning back in the big mahogany leather chair: leopard on a tree branch, Nicole caught herself thinking, or lion on the veldt, waiting in lordly ease for his wives to bring him dinner. “Sit down,” he said. “Make yourself at home.”

  Nicole sat. This wasn’t the sort of place that she’d have wanted for home or office, not with those gaudy LeRoy Neiman prints — a redundancy if ever there was one — on the wall, but it fit the flamboyant Gallagher perfectly. The only thing missing was a lava lamp.

  He knocked back the Scotch, then held up a well-manicured forefinger. “Cooperation,” he intoned, giving the word the same mystic emphasis with which the fellow in The Graduate had informed plastic. “That’s what we’ve got to see.”

  Nicole tensed. “Mr. Gallagher,” she said, “I’ve been cooperative in every way I know how. I’ve worked as hard as I can for this firm. The Butler Ranch report is only one example. I’ve also — ”

  Gallagher waggled that foref
inger. “Not exactly what I meant.” He wasn’t looking at her face as he spoke. He was, she realized, trying to look up her skirt, which was a little above the knee when she stood and a good deal shorter than that when she sat down. She crossed her legs as tight as she could, and hooked one ankle behind the other for good measure.

  Cooperation? Sleep your way to the top, he meant. He couldn’t mean anything else, though he hadn’t been so blatant as to leave himself in trouble if she wanted to make something of it. Nicole damned herself for having been right the first time — and also for having been so stupid as to miss the fact that there was another way than the obvious and actionable.

  Here it was, almost the turn of the millennium, and a woman couldn’t get a damned thing on her own merits. Why not forget about degrees and credentials and qualifications? Why not just demand that every female applicant submit her bra size and her body measurements, and never mind pretending that anything else mattered?

  Her teeth were clenched so tight her jaw ached. Outrageous, unjust, hypocritical — When was any society so unfair? Not in any time I ever heard of. Not in any, ever. I d bet.

  While she stewed in silence, Gallagher got up and made himself another drink. “More coffee?” he asked. Nicole shook her head stiffly. Gallagher’s Adam’s apple worked as he swallowed half the Scotch he’d poured into the tumbler. He filled it again and set the bottle down on the refrigerator with a sigh of regret. He wobbled a bit as he walked back to his desk. “Where was I?”

  Halfway to Skid Row. Nicole’s thought was as cold as the ice in his glass. More than halfway, if you can’t remember what you’re saying from one minute to the next.

  Well then, she thought, colder yet — the kind of coldness she imagined a soldier must feel in battle, and she knew a lawyer felt in a bitterly fought case: an icy clarity, empty of either compunction or remorse. In that state of mind, one did what one had to do. No more, not a fraction less. Maybe she could take advantage of his alcoholic fog to steer him away from the line he’d been taking and toward one more useful to her. “We were talking,” she said, “about ways to improve my chances for the next partnership that becomes available.”