The Assistants

by Camille Perri

  Emily ended her call and gestured for me to take a seat in the empty chair at the table, but I stayed put. Then she began waving her manicure in front of Ginger’s face while loud-whispering, “Don’t forget to ask about swag bags.”

  I bolted for my bedroom while her attention was diverted. God bless the two of them for being the exact sort of girls who were my polar opposite, because I’d never pull this off without them. They took to this abrupt change in plan like white on rice, as Robert would say. They were built for this shit—party planning, attention getting, convincing people to give them money.

  I changed into my pajamas even though it was only eight thirty at night and took out my contact lenses, enjoying the soft, comforting blur the world became when I could no longer see it. I plopped down onto my bed and stared up at the ceiling bubble. It had lost a little weight on account of the recent dry spell. Who knows, I thought, if the current drought continues, the ceiling bubble might dehydrate into the ceiling dried apricot. Then who would I tell my problems to?

  I glanced at my bedroom door to make sure it was tightly shut but I could still hear Ginger on her phone. “Remember that time you accidentally forgot to book your boss a hotel room, and he was stranded in LA, and I managed to call in a favor to get him the penthouse suite even though it was already booked? And he never even knew how badly you messed up? Do you remember that? Because here’s what I need from you now . . .”

  I listened to one call after the next, one favor traded for another.

  “If you can get Brooklyn Brewery to sponsor us, I can get you a reservation for the best table at Per Se.”

  “If you score us Cipriani, I’ll score you press tickets to Katy Perry at the Garden.”

  “I can get you on the list at Provocateur if you can hook us up with a DJ.”

  It was like listening to a podcast on high-end bartering. Access as currency, access in lieu of currency, because I knew for a fact that neither Ginger nor Emily, nor any of the assistants on the other end of the phone lines, had two dimes to rub together. After all, that’s what got us into this mess in the first place.

  As Robert Barlow’s assistant, I understood the value of being in close proximity to power. Of being power’s gatekeeper. Everyone who was anyone owed me a favor, and if they didn’t owe me a favor they were dying to. But I never called in any of them, so to speak, because I never cared about any of that crap. Restaurants, nightclubs, hotels. I was much more of a Seamless-in-bed type.

  But Emily and Ginger . . .

  “You slept with my boyfriend while I was right in the next room. The least you can do is design our logo for free.”

  . . . were masters of leverage.

  I wondered what Robert would think if he heard about our launch party, or when he heard about it, because Robert heard everything. Would he be proud of me, say, Good job, shooter? Would he become suspicious? And once the website went live, would it alter the way Robert looked at me? Would it force him to see something he hadn’t seen before? Maybe he would sit me down for a drink in his office, and someone else would cut the limes. Imagine that. Maybe he would trust me a little less but respect me a little more. That was a trade-off worth making.

  Ginger was on the phone with someone new. “You want a meeting with him? I’ll put you on his calendar for this Wednesday morning, right after his massage so he’ll be in a good mood, but only if you can deliver us no less than five donors. And I’m talking significant donors, like the Rockefeller kids, or the offspring to some oil mogul, or a Russian metals tycoon.”

  “What about George Clooney? Can’t we get him involved somehow?”

  I had the urge to go to the kitchen to remind Emily of that one altercation Robert and Clooney had on a Long Island golf course, the one where Robert made Clooney rerake his dune dirt or whatever—but I resisted. Perhaps Clooney’s assistant would want to bury the hatchet, or the rake, as it were, and help us out.

  My lord, this was blowing up fast. Fast as small-town gossip. Faster than a prairie fire with a tailwind.

  How much money could we raise from real donors? I hadn’t truly considered the possibilities, but all of a sudden it seemed like there was so much money all around us.

  “Fontana!” Emily shouted in the direction of my bedroom door. “What are your measurements? I want to call you in a proper dress for the party.”

  I turned off my lamp and threw my covers over my head.

  Maybe there was such a thing as too much money. Imagine that, ceiling rain bubble, imagine that.

  20

  IT WAS PRETTY CRAZY, how everyone hopped on the Tina Fontana train. How there was a Tina Fontana train. Emily and I (and sometimes Ginger, Wendi, and Lily, too) started going to Bar Nine after work, taking over the back room to make plans, talk things over. And each night that we went, more Titan assistants showed up. They’d linger for a while near our table before making a move, but then it would be: Hi, I’m so-and-so, assistant to so-and-so. Hi, Tina! You probably don’t know me, but I’m so-and-so’s assistant. Hey there, my name is so-and-so and I assist so-and-so.

  I need help, each of them said.

  These were the assistants to some of the most influential men in the world. They ran their boss’s high-powered lives with formidable efficiency. And so, so many of them wept.

  I’ve been perma-lance with no health insurance for four years, and he spends my year’s salary on a jaunt into Prada on the way back from lunch.

  I live with two roommates in a one-bedroom just to get by, while my boss takes a cab to the Hamptons every weekend. Do you know how much a cab to the Hamptons costs?

  Most of them addressed me, not Emily, even though she was prettier. I had a hunch it was because I was the Big Boss’s assistant, so by proxy I was the big boss of whatever this was. We were all defined by whom we assisted. On e-mail chains among us with bosses of the same name it was: My Jeremy can do Tuesday at ten a.m. Does that work for your Jeremy? But Robert was always just Robert. I was queen bee assistant.

  All of the women who came to us had their own story, but it was the same story, and not so different from Emily’s or mine. Student-loan debt coupled with shit pay had driven them all to desperation—okay, desperation might be an overstatement. We were assistants, not coal miners, not janitors at a nuclear power plant—but I’m talking serious frustration here.

  After two straight weeks of this, I finally took Emily aside in a quiet corner of the room, pushed a fresh mojito into her hands to keep her calm, and said, “What the hell is going on? Why are all of our lives so utterly fucked up? We’re college-educated white women, for fuck’s sake.”

  She didn’t have a ready answer, for once. She only suckled her mojito.

  “Do you even realize what this has become?” I gestured toward the flock of women converged at our table, awaiting our return. “This started as a means to an end, but it’s not anymore. We should be preparing.”

  Emily got serious then. “You’re right, we should get facials. And you definitely need to get your teeth whitened. They do it with a glow-light now, it only takes an hour.” She moved past me to return to our table, but I caught her by her bracelet.

  “We might have to make a statement,” I said. “Like publicly. These girls are already looking to us for—”

  “They’re looking to us for money, Fontana. That’s it.” Emily freed her wrist from my grasp and rubbed at it dramatically. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  I took a pause. Was I flattering myself? Was I putting myself at the center of this, egocentrically?

  I thought back to my years at NYU’s Women’s Center. Egocentrically was a term used ad nauseam there, along with gaze (e.g., “the male gaze”) and voice. Voice was huge. There was one girl who sang to herself all the time—like, constantly—and if anyone asked her to please be quiet, we’re trying to plan a Take Back the Night rally here, she would scream out, “Don’t t
ry to silence me! This is my voice!” And the room would concur, because the Women’s Center, if nothing else, was a place where everyone had a right to their voice no matter how annoying and disruptive it may have been. Was that me now? Flattering myself into thinking I could sing and should be singing aloud when other people were present, and believing I had anything worth singing about?

  “Can I go back to the table now?” Emily asked.

  “We’re probably going to have to do an interview,” I said. “What are you going to answer when a reporter asks how we got here?”

  Emily aligned her posture and locked her jaw. “I’ll simply tell the truth. That I didn’t always know what I wanted to do, but I always knew the woman I wanted to be.” She tipped her drink toward me. “Diane von Furstenberg said that. I think she was talking about how she invented the wrap dress, but it applies here, too.”

  I gave up then and let Emily return to our table. At least she had a role model whose quotes she could bootleg, which was more than I could say for myself. I shuffled my One Stars upon the distressed wooden floor and watched Emily reclaim her seat, maintaining her perfect posture. Only Emily, Ginger, Wendi, and Lily were sitting. Everyone else fluttered around them. Like moths to a bug light.

  I disagreed with Emily. These girls were looking to us for something more than just money. But I wasn’t sure that we could actually give it to them. I wanted to, I really did. I wanted the Tina Fontana train to be real.

  —

  IT WAS the Friday morning before our launch party when Robert snuck up behind me. “I hear you’re hosting some kind of charity shindig.”

  I jumped at the sound of his voice before the literal threat of his statement could set in.

  “Did you?” I swiveled my chair around.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t come to me,” he said.

  Pause.

  “We are the media, you know.” He was polite enough not to say “I am the media,” but that’s what he meant.

  “Oh, it’s just a little thing,” I said. “Something I got roped into helping out with.”

  “It doesn’t sound little.”

  I started to sweat.

  Instead of heading into his office like I’d hoped he would, Robert brought one of his brogues up on top of my drawer stand and leaned in.

  “I never knew you were such an activist,” he said.

  “I’m not.” I laughed nervously. “I’m really not.”

  Robert stared deep into my eyes, still with his leg up. “I wish you would have come to me, Tina. Before you went ahead with all this. You’re a representation of this company, you know. And of me.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.” I looked around aimlessly—at the silent screens flashing today’s news in Robert’s office, at a quartet of fresh-faced interns being trained on the coffeemaker, at Dillinger across the way trying to listen in on our conversation.

  Robert leaned in closer. “If you’re unhappy here, or with your salary . . . Or if you think things are unfair . . .”

  “I’m not. It’s not. It isn’t even about me.”

  “But you started it,” Robert said in a tone reminiscent of a sandbox argument. He shot a forbidding glance around the office to divert anyone from staring.

  It occurred to me just then—Robert’s tone. It wasn’t challenging or aggressive or even belligerent. He was making this out to be about the company’s image, or his reputation, but that wasn’t it at all. It was far simpler than that: I’d hurt his feelings.

  If there was one thing I understood about Robert, it was how important it was to him that you mind your manners. Think before you speak, he’d always say. Think before you do. And if you make a mistake, be a man and own up to it. Make it right.

  I didn’t think about how it would make Robert feel to hear about the launch from some website or, worse, one of his employees—but I should have. It was a matter of pride and a matter of respect.

  I should have told him first.

  So I adjusted my tone accordingly. “Shoot,” I said. “I really screwed up. I didn’t intend for this whole thing to become what it has, you’ve got to believe that. Other people got involved, and—”

  “It’ll be fine.” Robert waved his hand dismissively. He stepped back and took his balls out of my face. “I just wish you would have come to me and talked to me about it. After all we’ve been through together.”

  After all we’ve been through together. I could literally feel my heart breaking.

  I stood up then, which was a massive gesture on my behalf.

  “Robert.” I shocked us both by taking his hand. “What can I do to fix this? Tell me. I’ll do anything.”

  “Forget it.” He tugged his hand away, embarrassed—I’d gone too far.

  “But I’m sorry,” I said, and I truly was. “I’ll do everything I can, to make sure this doesn’t . . .”

  What? Get any more out of hand? Who was I kidding?

  “Good.” Robert’s dark eyebrows settled. And it seemed like he was about to say more when Glen Wiles arrived like a whirlwind for their daily meeting.

  “Tina,” Wiles said. “I hear you’re the mastermind behind this new socialist website that’s about to launch. That true?”

  “Leave her alone,” Robert said, protective in a fatherly way that made me silently swear an oath to somehow, someday, pay him back every cent. “When you have a free moment, Tina, would you fix us a cocktail?” Robert led Wiles into his office and closed the door.

  In the meantime, I’d do the only thing I could do—fix him the best tequila with lime this side of Texas.

  21

  THE NIGHT BEFORE the launch party felt to me like what I imagined most girls feel the night before their wedding: terrorizing helplessness. There’s nothing more to do, nothing more that can be done but go to sleep knowing the very next time you lay your head down, all this crazy shit will have already happened. So you can’t stop imagining exactly how it’ll all go, the getting from here to there, what will go wrong. There’s also, of course, the enduring dread that this whole thing might turn out to be the biggest mistake of your life. It was enough to give a girl dry heaves, if that girl was me.

  So I decided to drink, and Emily helped.

  One glass of wine, two glasses of wine, and then Emily said, “We should probably go over your speech one more time.”

  It had been decided a week prior (by Ginger and Wendi) that I should be the one to give the speech at our launch party because I was supposedly “more real” than Emily was. “Emily’s the face and Tina’s the brains,” were Ginger’s exact words. Even I knew this was a stretch. Perhaps I did read as “real,” which was often just code people used to describe a woman who was willing to eat a hamburger in public, but I would never really pass for a brain. If I were a character from Alvin and the Chipmunks, there’s not a chance in hell I would be Simon. I would be Dave, the quick-tempered, insecure songwriter whose only companions were anthropomorphic rodents.

  “Now?” I said to Emily. I was just about to curl up with my laptop and call it a night.

  “Let’s go over it one last time for good luck.” Emily reached for the stack of frayed and food-stained index cards on my nightstand and handed them to me.

  “I didn’t even study for my SATs this hard,” I said, taking the cards from Emily. Then I cleared my throat and began the speech that Wendi and Lily had helped me write—most of which we lifted verbatim from a pile of library books and a couple of Elizabeth Warren YouTube videos.

  Emily reclined against my bed pillows and waited for me to begin.

  “Here are the facts,” I said. “Money buys less than it did a generation ago, while at the same time paychecks have dwindled.”

  “Stand up,” Emily said.

  “Are you serious? Come on.” But I stood even as I protested because I really di
d want to do a good job when I gave this speech. It’s a well-known fact that public speaking is ranked up there with the death of a spouse, divorce, and Christmas when it comes to the detrimental stress it can cause, so I was willing to stand the hell up if Emily really thought it would help my performance.

  “Here are the facts,” I said again. “Money buys less than it did a generation ago, while at the same time paychecks have—”

  “Project your voice!” Emily shouted. “Pretend like you’re confident!”

  “Paychecks have dwindled!” I yelled back at her.

  “Stop.” Emily scowled like the head cheerleader at bitch-squad practice. “Take a breath and try again, better this time.”

  I started my speech yet again from the beginning, striving this time to exude a no-nonsense confidence, which somehow, coupled with the wine I’d ingested, resulted in my Bronx undertones rising to the surface.

  “Here aw the facts,” I said with my hands. “Money buys less than it did a generation ago, while at da same time paychecks have dwindled.”

  Emily muffled a laugh.

  “Screw this.” I chucked the index cards onto the floor and flopped back down on my bed beside Emily. “What I don’t know by now, I’ll never know.” I took my wineglass back in hand, and Emily let me, both of us understanding that all there was really left to do was nothing.

  —

  THE FRONT OF CIPRIANI looked like the Parthenon, with Greek-style monolithic columns and decorative sculptures missing limbs. Inside the ballroom were glittering lights, shimmering cocktail dresses, suits and ties—all of which were to be expected. Unexpected was the multitude of electronic cigarette tips fireflying around the room. Why were these ridiculous things actually taking off?

  The crowd was a handsome mix of new-media enthusiasts and the young philanthropists who appeared every Sunday in the Times fashion pages—the new generation of wealthy liberals who attended parties each weekend to give away their parents’ money. These venerable future donors to the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Public Library, and the Museum of Modern Art appeared at ease in their fancy clothes and trendy haircuts, and they all seemed to already know one another.