The Assistants

by Camille Perri

  This was all customary. This systematically chaotic gathering of the receipts, the retracing of steps to manifest the paper trail of everything he’d bought that week using cash. It was the same every time.

  You’d be amazed by how much money the man could shell out in a seven-day stretch. Don’t let his outward grit fool you; Robert enjoyed his comforts and luxuries. And I think he must have gotten a kick out of reaching into his vest pocket, pulling out a wad of bills, and fanning them like a winning hand of poker onto the table at Per Se or Porter House. Otherwise why not just charge everything?

  In fact, I bet Robert would have paid for all his purchases using gold bullion if only he could carry that much gold bullion in the vest pocket of his Armani suit jacket. Once I overheard his senior VP ask him if his Mercedes was a lease, and Robert nearly spat on the carpet. “I like owning things,” he replied. I imagined a similar situation whenever a clerk or attendant innocently asked Robert, “Cash or credit?” I could see the way he’d glare at them just before throwing down a rubber-banded brick of hundreds.

  It was nothing but more work for me, the weekly process of collecting the receipts, scanning them, and sending them to T & E for approval. But today it would be my lifeline. Today I filed Robert’s out-of-pocket expense report in the usual way, methodically, robotically. Then I hit replay and did it again. Same receipts. Two reports. One for him, and one for me.

  How did this plan dawn on me?

  I’ll tell you: In the past six years there had been many days I thought, Wow, Robert Barlow really trusts me! Because I had serious access to this man’s identity. Account numbers, passwords, when he was due for his next prostate exam. I knew all his secrets. On the worst days my thinking was more along the lines of, Wow, I could rob Robert Barlow blind if I really set my mind to it!

  But this was a working-class girl’s fantasy not so different from my childhood wish that I was actually a foundling whose real parents were the royal king and queen of all the land . . . The truth was, I took great pride in the trust Robert had in me. I was flattered by it, and by simply being associated with him. On my own, as a person, I wasn’t so important. But as Robert Barlow’s assistant, maître d’s and hoteliers knew me by name. I couldn’t afford to frequent their establishments, but they still knew my name. They sent fifteen-pound panettones addressed specifically to me at Christmastime.

  Robert made me worth something. I would no sooner have stolen from him than I would have from my own peasant-stock mother and father.

  But now this. Emily fucking Johnson. Beneath Emily’s pomposity I had never believed her to be very intelligent. I’d assumed she was just another dumb blonde with an expensive education. Now I didn’t know what to think. She was obviously smart enough to outsmart me.

  From today onward, for however long it took, this would be my method: duplicate Robert’s out-of-pocket expense receipts (totally illegal), get reimbursed for the false receipts (all lies), cash the reimbursement check (no turning back now), and hand the cash over to Emily. (What were the odds she’d even say thank you?)

  Filing the same receipts twice, the second time with my account information plugged in instead of Robert’s, was by no means an ingenious plan. If Emily weren’t the one doing the approving, I would have gotten caught on the first false report. I cannot stress this enough. The reason we could actually get away with this is because the men who made the big bucks passed off the responsibilities they couldn’t be bothered with (like signing their own names) to their assistants.

  A few weeks’ time, Emily said it would take—which was highly optimistic. So I added an extra thousand dollars here and another few thousand there to the report on my computer screen—each time clicking the box for Receipt Lost or Damaged. That would speed things up a bit. Usually you needed to provide a receipt for any expense over one thousand dollars, no exceptions, but (a) this was Robert’s company, and (b) Emily didn’t give a damn either way.

  I hesitated before hitting File and then just closed my eyes and went ahead, because if I’d learned anything from reading Hamlet in my senior-year Shakespeare colloquium, or from consuming ceaseless Nike commercials throughout the midnineties, it was to just frigging do it already.

  Ten grand. Boom. Filed.

  Just then, Robert yelled something from inside his office and I understood he was calling for his senior editor.

  I popped my head above my desk’s dividers like a mole peeking out of its hole and called out over the plain of cubicles. “Dillinger! Robert wants you.”

  Everyone on our floor addressed one another by their last names, Longhorns football style. It was a habit nobody who worked outside of a male-dominated office could really understand.

  Dillinger, whose first name was Jason, rushed to Robert’s office and closed the door behind him. When I returned to my seat, I noticed the lower right-hand corner of my computer screen had come alive.

  Lunch today?

  Kevin Handsome was g-chatting. By “lunch” he meant heading down to the cafeteria at the same time to buy our lunches, and then riding the elevator back upstairs together to eat separately at our respective desks. In all it was a ten-minute date, five minutes tops of uninterrupted conversation. A minimum of three minutes of palm sweats and me obsessing. What does this guy want from me?

  Kevin wasn’t called Kevin Handsome for nothing. Genetics had been good to him. He had a mop of dark hair and round brown eyes in an all-American style. He was tall and fit with just enough dork mixed in to make him approachable. I sometimes imagined him jogging or boating, or playing touch football with his brothers à la the Kennedys.

  A guy like Kevin could only be this nice to me because I was Robert Barlow’s assistant. It had happened before with other guys, albeit less attractive ones. Eventually the flirtatious male would ask for some favor—a slot on Robert’s calendar or an invitation to some event. But manipulation or not, he was cute.

  I agreed to lunch. It’s build-your-own-burger day, I replied, to emphasize that I was in it solely for the red meat and unlimited fixings, not Kevin’s company. See you down there.

  I should mention that the Titan cafeteria wasn’t really a cafeteria. It was more of a food service Pangaea, connecting all imaginable menu options together in one space. There was a grill station, a soup station, an international station that changed according to obscure holidays and days of observance no one’s heard of, and—a crowd favorite—the “action station,” in which a line of chefs cooked up your meal in fast-action. Of course there was also sushi, pizza, specialty sandwiches, a salad bar, and a celebrity chef’s table. Don’t even get me started on snack time, which ran from three to four p.m. and encompassed more dessert options than the Viennese hour at the last Italian wedding you attended. But the pinnacle of all, to me, was build-your-own-burger day. I loved build-your-own-burger day so much that each month when it rolled around, I’d enter it onto my Outlook calendar ahead of time. Once, in my excitement, I accidentally entered it onto Robert’s calendar instead of mine—with the requisite triple exclamation points and all. (This is why no one person should ever oversee more than one calendar, but such is the assistant’s burden.) The exclamatory note sat there for about a week before I discovered the error, but Robert never mentioned it.

  Kevin was already on line at the burger station when I arrived. I admired the fact that he wasn’t looking at his phone, like everyone else on the line. He just waited, with his hands in the pockets of his gray suit pants, soaking up the atmosphere, as they say. His eyes brightened when I made my approach.

  “I saved you a spot,” he said, letting me cut in front of him.

  I knew the woman behind us wouldn’t complain about my cutting because Kevin had that soothing effect on people. People, mainly women, yearned to do him favors.

  “How’s Wiles today?” I asked.

  Glen Wiles was the head of Titan’s legal department, and Kevin’s boss.
He was also the only man at Titan more feared than Robert—not because he had more power, but because he was by far the bigger asshole.

  “At the moment, Wiles is turning the office thermostat all the way down to make his assistant’s endowment perk up. You know . . .” He gestured toward his own pectoral nipples. “So business as usual, really.”

  “Yeah, Robert would never do that to me,” I said, looking down at my non-tits beneath my sweater.

  Kevin cleared his throat and politely looked away. Fortunately, it was our turn to build our burgers.

  —

  LATER THAT NIGHT, the guilt really hit hard, the way it tends to do when the distractions of the day all fall away and you’re finally left alone with yourself. Until this point—rational or not—using Titan’s money to pay off my student-loan debt had felt like something that happened to me more than something I’d done. But this was deliberate. I’d chosen to do this for Emily, or with Emily, instead of turning myself in, and that was wrong no matter how you looked at it.

  Things are going to hell in a handbasket, Robert would have said. His voice was always in my head. I couldn’t help it. So much of my daily energy went to thinking about Robert, thinking as Robert, anticipating his needs, responding to his requests, manifesting his every wish. It wasn’t possible to just turn his voice off at the end of the day.

  A couple sandwiches shy of a picnic, he would have called my thinking now. Crazy as a bull bat.

  I stared up at the rain bubble that hung down from the ceiling over my bed—a white plaster water balloon threatening to plunge onto my head at any moment. It was an anomaly of nature that defied all logic considering I lived on the ground floor of my apartment building, but there it was every time it rained, taunting my limited comprehension of both plumbing and architecture.

  It was storming outside, and the roaring thunder and flashing lightning only reinforced my notion that God was angry with me. I watched the bubble swell with each passing second, stretching like a waterlogged belly. The Internet had gone out in the storm and I didn’t own a television, so tracking the bubble’s growth was my only active form of entertainment. I could have gone on that way all night, but the buzz of my doorbell shook me back to consciousness.

  It was just after midnight. Who could be at my door?

  A rumble of thunder crescendoed to a crash. My windows rattled and I realized it must be death at my door, a scythe-wielding reaper, come to massacre me in my blue-and-white-striped pajamas as punishment for my crimes.

  Actually, it was a soaking-wet Emily Johnson.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. “How did you know where I live?”

  Emily looked like she’d just stepped out of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, if the swimsuits were replaced by the designer nightclub-wear Westchester girls partied in to get laid. She was all drenched and disheveled. Her eye makeup ran down her face in crooked inky streams.

  “Are you crying?” I asked.

  She pointed up at the sky like I was a moron. “It’s raining.”

  “Right. But what are you doing here?”

  “My date tonight was a bust,” she said, in a way that sounded like she might actually begin to cry. “And I can’t make it back to Bridgeport in this storm. Some asshole smashed the driver-side window of my Range Rover with a goddamn brick. I covered it with a plastic bag, but there’s no way I can sleep in there tonight.”

  “You sleep in your car?”

  “It’s not a car, it’s a Range Rover.”

  “You have a Range Rover but no apartment?”

  “Fontana, I have nowhere else to go. Can I come in or not?”

  I was still so disoriented, trying to relate this Emily Johnson to the one I knew from work. That version of her was a wire pulled taut. This girl on the brink of tears in my doorway was slack and loose, unguarded. She was vulnerable. Real. And a little insane looking.

  “I don’t have much space,” I said. “It’s not like I’ve got a guest room. I barely have a living room. And how did you know where I live? Did I already ask you that?”

  “Don’t you have an air mattress?” She stepped past me, through my doorway.

  “No, actually.” I followed behind her to the kitchen as she began to disrobe.

  “I brought this,” she said. From her oversize Coach hobo bag she pulled a bottle of Jameson. “To say thank you for letting me crash here.”

  I was suddenly transported to the most significant moment of my adolescence: seventh grade, when the queen bee, Dana Vandorn, was surprised by her period in the bathroom stall next to mine. She came out sheepish, searching her purse for a dime in order to vend a pillowy maxi pad from the machine. But who carried dimes? I just happened to also be experiencing menses that week and I knew this was my moment. I knew I could have let Dana Vandorn suffer—lord knew she deserved it—but I chose instead to take the high road and offered her a Playtex Sport from my bag. She thanked me with an expression exactly like the one Emily was wearing now. Gratitude pregnant with shame. And you know what? After that day, Dana Vandorn never called me a dyke again.

  “Are you a lesbian?” Emily asked.

  Had I been thinking out loud?

  She was standing in pasties and a black thong. Her dress and accessories lay in a damp puddle at her feet. “It’s cool if you are,” she said. “But I want to be clear that I—”

  “I’m not a lesbian.” It was just like a pretty girl to assume everyone wanted her.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “Because your clothes.” She pointed to my white Hanes T-shirt and striped men’s pajama bottoms.

  “Positive. I’d probably get a lot more action if I was, but sadly no.”

  Satisfied, Emily pranced into my bedroom. “Do you have another pair of man pajamas for me to wear?” she asked, and then stopped in her tracks. “What the hell is that?” She pointed, horrified, at the rain bubble hanging down from the ceiling. “It looks like a tit.” She jumped up on my bed and poked at the bubble with her pinky.

  “Please don’t touch it,” I said.

  “Look, it’s even got a little nipple. We should stick it with a pin and milk it.”

  “I said don’t touch it!”

  I tossed a clean pair of pajamas at her and went to the kitchen to let her get dressed in private.

  This was so not the tightwad bitch I knew from the office. I couldn’t get over the fact that she’d actually used the word tit. I returned to the bedroom carrying the Jameson and two souvenir shot glasses.

  Emily tilted her head at me and frowned. When she blinked, her blond bangs caught onto the tips of her eyelashes. “How old are you?” she asked. “Are we on spring break in Fort Lauderdale? Don’t you have any rocks glasses?”

  I dashed back to the kitchen and returned with the only other glassware I owned besides coffee mugs—old jam jars with the labels torn off.

  “That’ll do,” Emily said, unscrewing the cap from the whiskey.

  I also brought out my coveted box of Thin Mints from the freezer, a sure way to impress any houseguest—not that I was trying to impress Emily Johnson, but still.

  “Want one?” I asked, holding an icy-cold cookie out toward Emily.

  She shook her head no, but I noticed her smile.

  “You live here alone?” Emily scanned my cramped yet sparsely furnished space. “I figured,” she added, before I could answer. She pulled her golden hair back into a ponytail. “You seem like the loner type. It’s probably because you have low self-esteem.”

  Why exactly had I let this girl in from the rain? She was a textbook example of why I never invited anyone over.

  As Emily got drunk, her eyelids grew heavy and her speech pattern slowed, but she didn’t get any friendlier, as some people do. “You shouldn’t feel self-conscious about being a thirty-year-old assistant,” she said. “At least you’re good at it. Not ev
eryone could handle how demeaning it is.”

  Thanks, I thought. This was the Emily Johnson version of a compliment.

  “So what’s your deal?” I asked, once I sensed she was inebriated enough. (I’d been waiting for her to become inebriated enough to ask.) “If you’re as broke as you say you are, then what’s with all the fancy clothes and jewelry? How do you pay for it all?”

  Emily brought her Connecticut lockjaw back into play for her response. “I live by the kindness of others,” she said. “The kindness of men.”

  Pure Hollywood. I countered with my best Blanche DuBois impression. “Whoever you are,” I drawled with a Southern accent, brandishing my whiskey like a prop, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

  Emily lifted her eyebrows, bleary-eyed. “I don’t know what the hell that was, but please don’t ever do it again.”

  “Sorry.” I set my glass back onto the nightstand.

  I was finding Emily’s sense of humor difficult to pin down. I’d heard she’d gone to Harvard, but that couldn’t have been true. No one familiar with the Harvard Lampoon would have scoffed at a literary reference that way. Not to mention the fact that Emily was basically a professional con woman.

  “Where did you go to college again?” I asked, with a bit too much nonchalance.

  “When a man’s kindness comes up short,” Emily said, irrespective of my question, “and I don’t have it in me to drive all the way to my parents’ house, I sleep in the back of the Range Rover. Even that was a gift.”

  “Some dude gave you a car?”

  “Do you understand that a Range Rover isn’t just a car? It’s a one-hundred-K full-size luxury SUV.” Emily reached over me to refill her glass. “The guy who gave it to me was a famous plastic surgeon. After we broke up I tried to sell it, but it turned out to be a lease, so it’s mine for another year.”