by Greg Herren
My father died shortly before my graduation from college. He had always had an aversion to doctors—which had something to do with their inability to save my mother when she was dying—and he hated being lectured about his smoking. I don’t even remember the last time he’d actually been to see a doctor for a routine checkup. The years of smoking and Mrs. Harris’s traditional style of cooking had taken their toll on his heart, and a week before my graduation he had a massive heart attack and died in his sleep.
I was suddenly an orphan, and the death of my only relative pulled the rug out from under me. I had applied for jobs, at newspapers and magazines, with no luck. When it became obvious that a job in my field simply wasn’t going to happen, my father suggested graduate school—and I perhaps should feel some shame in the fact that he used his influence to get me accepted, even though the deadline for applications had already passed.
But once he died, everything changed.
To my horror, I discovered there was no money left. Unfortunately, I had never given money much thought growing up, and it was a subject my father never discussed with me. He’d always discouraged me from getting a job and just gave me cash whenever I needed any, telling me there was plenty of time left for me to work once I was finished with school. I rarely needed anything more than a twenty here and there, to get a soda or something on campus. Since he was on the faculty, my tuition had been free—and for books and my clothes, he always used a credit card. He’d never owned a car, and I didn’t even have a driver’s license.
He left behind no life insurance, no savings, nothing other than a checking account with less than a hundred dollars in it. There was no money to pay for a funeral—fortunately he had bought a plot adjacent to my mother’s when he had to bury her. It was typical him, of course—he was a terrible procrastinator and often put things off as long as he possibly could. It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to me that he’d not thought about his own death or made any plans for that eventuality.
He didn’t, after all, like to think about things he considered unpleasant.
There was nothing left but debt—and a lot of it. His attorney, Lucas Sharpe—who’d also been one of his regular poker buddies—advised me against trying to keep the house, since it was his only asset. “Sell it to settle the debt,” he told me, and tried to explain the tangled financial mess my father had left behind. I didn’t understand all the legalities, the ins and outs—there had been bad investments, apparently, followed by loans from banks and against credit cards to make other investments intended to make up the original losses, and that money was lost in other bad investments, and on and on it went until the debt had reached such a staggering figure that I could only stare at Mr. Sharpe in disbelief.
I had always believed my father to be an intelligent man—but this record of compulsive and almost obsessive failure forced me to see him in an entirely different light—one that wasn’t particularly flattering.
The bottom line was there was no money for me to live on, let alone go to graduate school, and once the house was sold, I would have not only nowhere to live, but no money to find a new place.
Understandably, my grief was now mixed with terror. I had no relatives, I had no friends, I had no prospects—I had nothing.
I had no other choice but to find a job—and find one quickly.
My father, however bad he was at business and investments, was equally good at earning the love of the people who knew him, and in this new, horrible situation I reaped the benefits of that affection. The news about my situation spread through the journalism department of the university in no time, and his colleagues pooled their money to pay for the funeral. The university president himself called me and offered the campus chapel for the memorial service, and volunteered to not only host a reception afterward at his large home, but to pay for it as well. It never occurred to me that my father was, in fact, a highly venerated professor much beloved by his former students—to me, he was just my father.
But once the news of his death spread, I was deluged in condolence cards and so many flowers that their scent actually managed to cover the stench of stale smoke in the house. So much food was dropped off at my front door by crying women with sympathetic eyes that I couldn’t possibly eat it all—and so I began taking it to the homeless shelter so it would get put to good use. I sleepwalked through the days leading up to the funeral itself, paralyzed and unable to make any decisions about my future, all too aware that the clock was slowly but surely ticking away. I checked the help wanted sections of newspapers online every day, eventually spreading the search to include Tulsa, Omaha, and Oklahoma City—but there was nothing for a recent journalism graduate with no work experience. The house was up for sale, and I began the odious chore of boxing up my father’s belongings and selling the furnishings around the visits from real estate agents showing potential buyers around. I would simply smile politely at them and go back to the packing.
These things kept me and my mind occupied—so I wouldn’t have to worry about the future.
That reality would come all too soon.
The day of the service I shaved and showered and put on a black suit of my father’s I was going to put in the Goodwill box once it was all over. The university president’s wife, Mrs. Lapierre, a short round woman with dark hair shot through with gray, picked me up and gave me a ride to the university chapel. She was dressed entirely in black, and she didn’t try speaking to me on the way there. But as soon as we were parked and she turned off the car, she gave me a very sad smile and patted my leg twice with her gloved hand.
I was stunned at the size of the crowd at the service. As I was led to a pew in the very front row by one of my father’s colleagues from the newspaper whose name I couldn’t recall, it was difficult to take it all in. As I sat down and glanced around the chapel, I felt a knot rise in my throat and my eyes filling. He was my father, and I’d had no idea he was so beloved and so well thought of, and had affected so many lives in a positive way. We had lived in the same house for almost twenty-two years, and he had been practically a stranger to me. I hadn’t known him, not really.
It had never occurred to me that so many people would care enough to come.
The words spoken during the service were words, just noise that I heard but didn’t comprehend. I have no idea how many people spoke—but many did. I couldn’t take my eyes away from the open casket, at the sight of what was left of my father. And then it was over, and Mrs. Lapierre took my arm and led me through the crowd of sad-faced people, all of them murmuring condolences and their sympathies at me, shaking my hand or slapping my shoulder or giving me a hug, all of them strangers to me.
Once we were back in the car, Mrs. Lapierre patted my leg again and murmured her own inanities as she put the car in gear and drove me to the reception she and her husband were hosting.
It was there, at the president’s home, that I met Valerie Franklin, and my life changed.
I was sitting by myself in a corner, a paper plate of uneaten food on my lap, when a slight figure in black approached me. She cleared her throat and I looked up from my food, more than a little dismayed. All day long as people voiced their sympathies, all I had been able to do was nod slightly to acknowledge their kindness. Everyone assumed I was speechless in my grief and utter devastation at having lost my father.
But the truth was I had always been awkward in social situations and never knew what to say, so I always found it best to say nothing. I was indeed grieving for my father, but all I wanted to do was escape that house and all those kind strangers, just get away and be alone with my grief. There were too many people in the house and all of them wanted to offer their condolences, to tell me how much my father had meant to them, what a difference he’d made in their lives.
The woman in black sat in the seat next to me, and I looked back down at my plate.
“Really, dear, is your food so fascinating that you can’t stop staring at it?” the woman finally said after a few
moments of silence. Her tone was bored and borderline rude.
I swallowed and didn’t answer her.
“Put your food down and come outside with me,” she said, standing up. “You need to get out of here—I know I do. This air in here is stifling.” She took the plate away from me and set it down on a nearby table. “I can’t believe I’m back in Kansas,” she said, half under her breath so I could barely hear her. “It surely must be snowing in hell today.”
She grabbed one of my hands and pulled, trying to get me to stand up. I looked up, opening my mouth to ask her to leave me alone, but before I could say anything I recognized her.
“Valerie Franklin?” I somehow managed, and could think of nothing else to say. She inclined her head slightly to acknowledge my recognition and tugged on my hand again. Her facial expression let me know there was no point in resisting. So I stood and followed her through the crowded room, nodding and looking down as people murmured more condolences. She pushed open the French doors and I followed her out onto the side lawn. She sat down in a wrought iron chair painted white in the shade of an enormous tree, and indicated with a hand that I should sit in the other chair.
She was a very small woman, much smaller than I had imagined, but she carried herself like a queen. I had been regaled with tales of her success in the jungle of magazine publishing for most of my life, and while I had seen her photograph on the editorial page of Street Talk, in my mind I always pictured her as a kind of modern-day St. Joan ready to drive the English out of Orleans. But the reality was she was just barely over five feet tall in her heels, and very slender—a mere wisp of a woman. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. She had a heart-shaped face, with black hair brushed back from a widow’s peak and a broad forehead. Her chin was sharp, and her mouth small, her lips thin. When she spoke, I could see small white teeth. Her hands were also small, so small they looked like they would be more at home holding a tiny teacup at a party for dolls than the glass of whiskey and ice she sipped from periodically.
“So, tell me, what are you going to do?” she asked shortly after we sat down. Her voice was sharp and pointed, like her chin. When I didn’t answer, she made an annoyed sound and went on, “I know about your situation, I know there’s no money and you have to sell the house, so you won’t have a place to live and you don’t have a job or any prospects.” She narrowed her eyes and tilted her head to one side. “Or has any of that changed?”
She caught me completely off guard. I had no idea she—or anyone other than Mr. Sharpe, for that matter—knew anything about my situation. I fumbled for words, not certain what to say. “I, um—”
Her small black eyes glittered, and she pursed her lips. “You haven’t the slightest idea of what you’re going to do, do you? I figured as much.” She finished the whiskey and put it down. “Your father despaired of you having to make your way in the world on your own.”
I felt color creeping into my face.
“He asked me to help you, should the need ever arise, and God help me, I said I would.” She shook her head as she opened her small black bag and fished out a business card. It was creamy vellum, with her name in raised black print directly in the center. Below it were listed a couple of phone numbers, a street address, and an e-mail address. She sighed. “I am certain that I am going to regret this, but I do owe your father.” She looked back at the house. “Your father convinced me I could make it in New York, that I had what it took to be a success. Whenever I had doubts I could call him and he would give me the strength to keep fighting.” She inhaled and wrote a phone number on the back of the card with an expensive looking pen—I later learned it was a Montblanc. “This is the number for the personnel director at my office. Call her tomorrow.” She held out the card to me. “Go on, take it. My assistant is leaving at the end of the month, and God help me, I’m offering you the job. Call Arlene—she’ll make arrangements, find you an apartment, and we’ll advance you the money for deposits and so forth, as well as a ticket to New York. You need to report to work on the first, is that clear?”
I stared at the card. “Yes.”
“I know you have a journalism degree,” she went on. “The salary is quite low, of course, and I am not an easy employer—I have incredibly high standards and I expect—no, I demand—competence and professionalism from my employees. I tolerate nothing less. But it’s also an entry-level position at the top magazine in the country—and the world, and there are any number of more qualified graduates who would sell their mothers into sexual slavery to get this job and learn from me.” She snapped her fingers. “Always bear in mind that I can replace you like that.”
I stared at the card. “I—I don’t know what to say.”
“Thank you would be a good place to start.” She stood up, finishing the whiskey and setting the empty glass down on the table. “And from now on, you’ll have to earn your keep.” She shook her head. “This is undoubtedly an enormous mistake I will regret.” She walked back into the house.
That was the last time I spoke to her before my first day on the job.
And that was how I came to be living in a roach-infested three-hundred-square-foot one-room apartment in a very seedy area of Hell’s Kitchen within three weeks of my father’s funeral. The outrageously expensive rent almost equaled one of my twice-a-month paychecks. Most of the time there was no hot water, there was no air-conditioning, and I doubted there would be much heat in the winter. It didn’t really matter much, though—I was hardly ever there.
But I was living in New York, working for Street Talk magazine as the personal assistant to one of the biggest names in magazine publishing, Valerie Franklin—the envy of everyone I’d gone to college with, the envy of everyone with a journalism degree working as a barista or waiting tables while they tried to break into the business.
I was living the dream of every journalism student.
This was something I had to keep reminding myself on an almost daily basis.
Valerie Franklin had said she was not “an easy employer,” but there was no way I could have known what an understatement that would actually prove to be. It was particularly eye opening for me since I had never worked before. I was on call twenty-four hours a day, and at least three times per day I was called on the carpet for another one of my “exceptional failures,” as she referred to them. Everyone at the magazine was terrified of her and her moods, and those moods could—and did—change in the blink of an eye.
But she pushed herself just as hard as she pushed all of us, with an almost inhuman energy that never flagged. She was always operating at a high level. She was in her office every morning at seven—and I had to make sure the coffee was brewed and ready to be poured for her. She never left the office before seven in the evening—and many times went from the office to a function of some sort or a party. I was in charge of making sure her life—personal and professional—ran smoothly. I was in the office myself at five—it took at least two hours to get her schedule together for her day, and I often was answering e-mails and returning calls until one in the morning.
I kept primarily to myself—I didn’t have time to gossip or be friendly with anyone else at the office, or any of my neighbors. I lived in New York for a year without ever seeing a play or going to a museum. I was usually so exhausted by the time the weekend rolled around—provided, of course, that it wasn’t a working weekend, which they so often turned out to be—that the last thing I wanted to do was leave my horrible little apartment and be around people. Working at Street Talk had helped me learn how to talk to coworkers and deal with situations as they developed—but unfortunately that didn’t translate into my personal life. I still couldn’t think of anything to say to people, got nervous and clumsy around them—it was best not to even try. I went to a gay bar one night, to test the waters, but I sat there at the bar in a state of anxiety that grew by the minute until after an hour I couldn’t stand it anymore and ran out, never to return.
Sometimes, on those r
are free weekends, I would write something—nothing much, an observation piece about my neighborhood, or something random about living in New York. I never dared show her any of these little vignettes—I certainly didn’t have the nerve to broach the subject of my writing to her. The depth of talent she worked with—Pulitzer Prize winners, best sellers, critics’ darlings—was certainly not something I could truly dare to aspire to. Being published in the magazine where I worked was an impossible dream—she had her pick of the best in the world.
There were times when I was so tired and exhausted that all I wanted to do was lie down on the floor, curl up into a ball and sob, and thought about quitting, getting on a bus to somewhere, anywhere, as long as it was far away from Valerie Franklin. But where would I go? How would I pay my rent?
And who would hire the idiot who walked away from a job at one of the top magazines in the world?
Valerie didn’t take vacations the way most people thought of them. To her, a vacation simply meant working from another location that was neither her office nor her town house. She took a vacation every three months without fail, but remained in constant touch with the office, since she “couldn’t trust anyone to not run the magazine into the ground in a week.” I went with her on those “vacations”—to make sure things ran smoothly, to make sure that she was in constant touch with the magazine. I went with her to London, Toronto, and Acapulco—all without managing to see anything or do anything I’d always dreamed of doing if I ever had the chance to visit any of those cities. Valerie didn’t believe in doing touristy things, of course—she was on the lookout for the next big artist, fashion trend, play, or restaurant.
That was why I was sitting in a little café on Ocean Drive in Miami’s South Beach with her that particular morning in mid-May.
She was watching people—the way she always did when she was in a public place—while I was going over her schedule for the day on my smartphone. She whistled quietly and put her coffee cup down, sliding her enormous designer sunglasses down her nose and peering over them. “Why, I believe that’s Carlo Romaniello! What is he doing in Miami?”