The Assistants

by Camille Perri

  “Yup. Exactly.”

  “You’re really keeping this close to the vest, aren’t you?” He said it lovingly, or I would have struck back at him with my scorpion claw.

  “It’s still in the early stages,” I said, after swallowing my fries. “I guess I just don’t want to jinx it.” Which made no sense at all, but Kevin, well-bred as he was, politely replied, “I get that. That makes total sense.”

  Brought up by animals as I was, I lunged at the chance to impolitely change the subject. “So what was it like growing up in Massachusetts? I bet your parents are really proud of you. Being a lawyer is second only to being a doctor, right? And you don’t have to be around germs.”

  “Massachusetts?” Kevin appeared perplexed. “I’m from DC.”

  A piece of hamburger bun caught in my throat. “Sorry, I must be mixing you up with someone else.” Like the Kennedys.

  He kindly ignored the grotesque choking sound that escaped from my mouth. “To be honest, my parents don’t love that I’ve chosen to work for the Titan Corporation, and I don’t either. I’d much rather move out of the corporate world and into public service—I’d love to work for a nonprofit. But I’d have to take a significant pay cut, and that’s not really an option right now.”

  What was this? Was Kevin Handsome snowing me to make himself appear more human? My cell phone vibrated in my bag before I could decide.

  It was Robert. “Barlow can’t find me anywhere,” I said, reading his text. “He’s not used to me leaving the building. I should get back.”

  “Doesn’t someone cover for you when you’re out?” Kevin asked.

  “An intern. But she’s not me.” I said this with the utmost pride, because when you’re the second-most-pecked chicken in the coop, you have to take pride where you can find it.

  This was a common Barlowism, by the way, explaining social hierarchy and laws of dominance in terms of farm animals, namely fowl.

  Kevin stood up and gathered our trash. “Maybe we can have dinner sometime.”

  I wasn’t certain I’d heard him right. He’d been bending down to grab a napkin that had caught in the breeze, but just in case, I said, “Sure.”

  Back at the office, it turned out all Robert needed was for me to remind him of the name of the restaurant “with the good view, on top of that hotel.”

  It was Asiate, at the Mandarin Oriental, and he asked me this at least once a week. If only my useless fill-in (dumb as a prairie dog, Robert might say) could have gotten it together and remembered such critical information, I wouldn’t have had to cut short my lunch with Kevin. Fortunately, I’d brought my leftovers back to the office with me.

  I reached into the now fully-greased-over paper bag for a cold french fry. It was just as well that lunch got abbreviated, I thought. It could have only gone downhill from there.

  —

  LATER THAT NIGHT, I was sitting on my bed, eating pad thai out of the carton with chopsticks from the Chinese restaurant (my favorite Thai place never gave out chopsticks; apparently real Thai people don’t use them) and flipping through the pile of mail that had accumulated on my nightstand, a paper mountain of bills and useless notifications, when I came across an envelope from my old friend Sallie—Sallie Mae, the former title holder of my student-loan debt. Who knew how long this letter had been there, buried between various credit card offers and multiple supplications from the World Wildlife Fund.

  I was alone in the apartment—Emily was out on a date—but I still set my chopsticks down like a secret I didn’t want anyone to hear before slitting the envelope open.

  It was a letter of congratulations, informing me that my debt had been paid in full. It boldfaced my final statement balance: double zeros.

  Well I’ll be damned, Sallie Mae.

  I released a shocking and spontaneous orgasmic breath. It wasn’t right, how thrilled I was at the sight of those zeros. The sensation that washed over me was like nothing I’d ever felt before, except maybe, appropriately, when I found out I’d gotten into NYU.

  I returned the letter to its envelope and set it down onto my nightstand, then inexplicably stashed it beneath my pillow.

  It was done. I had a clean slate. A new start, like I was eighteen and hopeful again, but this time I was smarter—too smart to sign my life away to a school I knew nothing about.

  The only reference I’d had for NYU when I decided I had to go there was that Theo Huxtable went there in season five of The Cosby Show. I could have chosen a cheaper school, like my parents wanted me to. But cost was no issue, my Doc Marten–boot–stomping self insisted. This was my college education we were talking about! I wanted to go to the best school I could get into, the school I’d seen on television.

  Not since then had I been this free.

  Emily’s key rattled in the front-door lock, so I returned to my dinner and tried to appear normal, or at least regular. My mouth was full of noodles when she appeared in the bedroom doorway, kicked off her high heels, and said, “I brought you a hamburger.”

  I glanced down at my mostly eaten pad thai and attempted an instant calculation of how disgusting it would be to eat both. Then I recalled the hamburger I’d already eaten for lunch and had to recalculate.

  “My date sucked,” Emily said, crossing the room. “And I have no intention of ever seeing that jerk again, so when he went to pee, I told the waitress to give me a burger to go.”

  Emily dropped a plastic satchel that looked more like a swag bag from the Oscars than a restaurant’s to-go carton onto my nightstand. “It’s actually quality meat, so you’ll probably think it tastes weird.”

  She sat beside me and started removing her jewelry, piece by shiny piece. “What’s wrong with you? You look like you’re hiding something, or like you just had sex. What are you hiding?”

  How did she already know me so well? I pushed my Thai food aside and allowed myself one nibble of burger, seeing as it was still warm. “I got a letter confirming the untimely death of my student loan.”

  Emily’s doll eyes popped. “Let me see it. I bet I’ll be getting one of those too, soon. When I do, we should frame them side by side and hang them on the wall like diplomas.”

  I retrieved the letter from beneath my pillow to show her. “My diploma is buried under a dozen rolls of wrapping paper in the bottom drawer of my parents’ china closet.”

  Emily put her hand on my shoulder, squeezing as she scanned the letter from top to bottom. “This is way better than a diploma anyway,” she said. “I’ll get the champagne.”

  “Hang on a sec.” I caught her by the wrist. “You’ve still never told me, where did you go to college?”

  “Harvard,” she muttered, yanking her wrist free and turning quickly away. She scurried to the kitchen.

  “How did you get into Harvard?” I called out after her, striving not to put too much emphasis on the you.

  Emily returned with a bottle, not bothering with glasses. “Hartford. H-a-r-t-f-o-r-d,” she said, spelling it out for me. “It’s in Connecticut.”

  I should have known. Only Emily Johnson would choose a college based on its likelihood to induce favorable misunderstanding.

  “You know everyone at Titan thinks you went to—”

  “I know.” She uncorked the bottle.

  “What was your major?”

  “Don’t get me started.” She took a long slug of champagne and handed it off to me. “I wanted to be an actress; that was my biggest mistake. But who knows, maybe there’s still hope for my starring role in Busted: A True Crime Story of Not Getting Away with It.”

  My stomach churned, not from the Thai food mixed with my second burger of the day, mixed with champagne, but from the realization that we were in fact an Oxygen network original series waiting to happen.

  “Do you think it’s our own fault?” I asked. “That after all these years, we’re still
just assistants?”

  “You’ve got a few years on me, don’t forget.”

  “Two. Two years doesn’t even qualify as a few.”

  “But you’re thirty, and that counts extra.”

  “I guess it’s all our own fault,” I said.

  But wasn’t there something wrong with the fact that I’d still have been paying for a college education that got me nowhere if I hadn’t stolen my way out of it? When all my life I’d done everything I was told?

  My phone bleeped before I got very far in hypothesizing an answer. It was a text: Got your number from Emily. Hope you don’t mind. Just wanted to say lunch was fun, how about dinner this Saturday night?

  “Oh,” Emily said. “I forgot to tell you something.”

  “You gave Kevin my phone number?” It occurred to me that I was yelling. “Kevin asked for my phone number?”

  “I know, right?” Emily shook her head in disbelief. “Though he’s kind of a pussy for not asking you for it himself, don’t you think?”

  I was feeling a feeling, but I wasn’t sure which one. Shock? Doubt? Diarrhea?

  “What are you waiting for?” Emily said. “Text him back before he comes to his senses.”

  “I don’t know, Em. Don’t you think this has prison stripes written all over it? What if he starts asking questions?”

  “You’re impossible.” Emily grabbed my phone and texted something with the lightning quickness of a late-millennial, then tossed my phone onto the bed.

  I scrambled for it. “What did you write?”

  Emily smirked. “I wrote, ‘Let’s skip dinner and get right to dessert.’”

  “Are you kidding me?” I retrieved the phone and tapped furiously at its screen. “Is that supposed to be sexual innuendo?”

  She was messing with me. What she actually wrote was: Yes!

  “Damn it, Emily, you used an exclamation point? I would have never used an exclamation point there. Of all punctuation, it’s the neediest.”

  “You’re so lucky I entered your life,” she said. And then waited a beat. “It’s the only way we’re gonna get Kevin to enter you. Right here!” She raised her hand for a high five.

  “Or turn me in,” I said, passing on the hand slap.

  7

  WHAT DO YOU WEAR to dinner with the perfect man?

  I Googled just that, but the top hits were all from ask-any-idiot-anything dot com, and they all suggested “comfort” as the most important component of a proper outfit, which I wanted to be true from the bottom of my heart but knew had to be false. My striped manjamas, as Emily called them, could not be the correct attire for my date with Kevin, so I went with my go-to black dress, which the salesgirl at Forever 21 had assured me was right for any occasion.

  Hair down. Contacts, not glasses. Makeup? Regular. I’d learned the hard way on previous dates that trying something fancy with my makeup always ended in disaster. Keep It Simple Stupid, or KISS, which was a rule I also applied to kissing itself, though it was doubtful tonight would end anywhere near the arena of tonsil hockey.

  I carefully applied my mascara with my mouth open, as I always did. (I’m not the only one who engages in this nonsensical act, am I?) No need for blush since I was already a little anxious-pink beneath the surface. For a full-blooded Italian, half-Sicilian on my mother’s side, I was implausibly pale and quick to go red. If not for my dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, and penchant for rigatoni, I could have easily been mistaken for Irish—or, more likely, what some nefariously referred to as Black Irish.

  My cell phone bleeped and I was sure it was Kevin canceling, but it was only Emily wishing me luck. Actually, her exact text was: don’t fk this up. But I knew what she meant. There was something suspect about this night, something I was missing and therefore bound to fk up. This may sound to you like the idling hum of low self-esteem, but it wasn’t. It was an indisputable fact that Kevin Hanson and I were not on an equal plane of hotness. Every eligible woman and half the eligible men at Titan would have entered the Hunger Games for the chance at a date with him. Why was he pursuing me?

  We met at Nougatine, which Emily had explained to me was “the more casual sister of Jean-Georges,” which sounded not so impressive to me at first. Was I not good enough for the fancier, more formal sister? Should I read into the fact that Kevin had opted for the Edith Crawley restaurant over the Lady Mary? But Emily assured me that Nougatine was in fact a respectable and highly regarded first-date choice—and no, its name had nothing at all to do with the nougat of a Snickers bar.

  Kevin was waiting out front when I arrived, which I appreciated because I was five minutes early. I would have been fifteen minutes early had I not ducked into a Duane Reade to check my hair in the cosmetics-aisle mirror. I also helped myself to a squirt of hand lotion, so what?

  Kevin was wearing a tailored blazer over crisp jeans and a dress shirt. He waved when he saw me walking up the block, and I waved back, and then there was that terrible five or six seconds where you don’t know what the hell to do with yourself before you reach the person. I tried to smile wide enough so he could see it and fought the urge to do something goofy—a battle I lost when I goofily brought my hands to my mouth and called out, “Helloooooo,” as if he were very far away.

  He played along, waving his arms to and fro high above his head and shouting, “I’m over here!”

  This was a good man.

  After we were seated and starting on some wine, Kevin ordered for us—from the tasting menu, which turned out to be an unexpectedly large amount of food considering it sounded like a practice dinner before the real one.

  The last guy I had gone on a date with (more than a year ago, a guy I met at my corner bodega while debating between a pint of Cake Batter Ben & Jerry’s and Birthday Cake Oreos) had brought me to a restaurant / bowling alley called Bowlmor. Yes, it was a restaurant literally inside a bowling alley. We could hear pins crashing around while we chewed. He did not pay for my chicken wings and then got pissed when I beat him by a spare. So you could definitely say I was trading up.

  Kevin’s dark hair looked so thick and healthy beneath the restaurant’s fine lighting that it took all the self-control I had to not reach out and run my fingers through it. I wondered what he washed it with. Certainly not the no-frills brand I used. This had to be some sulfate-and-paraben-free stuff they didn’t even carry at Duane Reade. And his teeth were so white and clean, and perfectly straight. I could have watched him eat for hours.

  “So tell me more about this project of yours,” he said, after plate number eleven was set down before us.

  “Let’s not talk about that,” I replied, striving to appear coy.

  “Are you kidding? That’s all I want to talk about. I was just being polite by waiting till now to bring it up.”

  I giggled the way I hated when other girls did it. Between my first-date-with-a-beautiful-man jitters and the all-encompassing dread related to my recent embezzlement habit, I couldn’t control any of the words or sounds coming out of my mouth.

  “You’re just trying to flatter me, aren’t you, ha ha ha, no really though, let’s not talk about that, tell me more about your folks. Are they still in DC?”

  What was I saying? Folks? Why was I talking like Pa from Little House on the Prairie?

  Kevin blinked his long eyelashes twice, maybe three times, in rapid succession and then nodded.

  “What do they do?” I reached for my wine.

  He craned his neck sideways and smiled at me. “Don’t you know it’s rude to ask?”

  I was about to catapult into a motormouthed apology when Kevin said, “I’m kidding. It’s fine. My father’s also a lawyer, actually. So is my older brother. And my mother’s in politics.”

  “Politics?” (Is it rude to ask one-worded questions that aren’t actually questions?)

  “She had been a social worker,” Kevin s
aid. “But she got frustrated and decided to take matters into her own hands.”

  “Is she, like, secretary, of state or something?”

  “Ha.” (That laugh of his. I could die.) “No, but she does work for the State Department, and people are always comparing her to Hillary Clinton. So I guess you can say I’m used to having a strong woman around telling me what to do.”

  I choked on my Chablis.

  “Sorry,” he said. “That was supposed to be a come-on, but it sounded more like I was flirting with my mother.”

  A come-on? Was he implying that I was a strong woman who would tell him what to do? Man, was he way off. My cheeks were turning red; I could feel them burning up, the bastards.

  At least Kevin was also blushing. “Seriously though,” he said, “I want to hear all about this nonprofit you’re working on. Talking with you the other day reminded me how stupid my job is, and how much happier I’d be doing something meaningful.”

  “You do remember my real job is being Robert Barlow’s slave, right?”

  “Aside from that, though. You give a fuck.” He stunned me with his sudden use of profanity. “That’s not something I’ve found in most of the women I’ve met.”

  He was really going for it.

  I smiled and looked down modestly.

  “So come on,” he said. “Tell me more about it.”

  When I looked up, he was pitched forward with his eyes wide. His whole demeanor seemed to be crying out, Touch me, pet me, love me. He was obviously a mama’s boy and possibly part Labrador retriever, but so what? This guy really liked me, or the idea he had of me. I had to keep that idea alive.

  “Well . . .” I found myself stuttering as I searched my brain for all those smart-sounding words I learned at NYU’s Women’s Center meetings. “The thing is, we, as in our generation, we’ve tried to do everything right but we’re still . . .”

  Kevin was holding his wineglass suspended in midair, so rapt he was by my manifesto.

  “. . . People say we’re lazy and entitled. But the truth is, the deal we were promised growing up, if we work hard and get a good education, it’s really not working out. The dream we were sold, and the job market we encountered . . .”