The Assistants

by Camille Perri

  “There he is,” Emily said, referring to Kevin, who was standing at the bar.

  Emily was wearing vintage Valentino (that some ex-boyfriend must have bought her) in silvery pearl. My dress was basic black with thin shoulder straps, nothing to come in your pants over, but Kevin opened his arms and dropped his jaw at the sight of me like I was Belle from Beauty and the Beast (the only Disney princess, mind you, who loved to read, and also the only one whose name literally meant beauty). He went in for a kiss that I swore made even the chandelier overhead blush.

  Kevin had been the model supportive boyfriend since the announcement of the site. Partly, no doubt, because he still felt a little guilty for being the reason we had to prematurely announce it, but also because what Kevin had so Freudianly declared on our first date at Nougatine proved to be true: he was used to having a strong woman around telling him what to do. And I, against all odds, in the course of a few months, had become a strong woman who was telling a lot of people what to do. Kevin loved it. So the guy had mommy issues. Big deal. At least he’d finally stopped asking so many questions.

  An hour of mingling passed, most of which involved Ginger leering over me, with her breasts about to break free from their low-cut scoop neck, and removing alcoholic beverages from my hands. “Pace yourself,” she’d say. “You have a speech to give.” And then she’d down the drink herself.

  By the time Emily appeared onstage to thank the crowd for coming, for their generous donations and their encouraging support, I’d managed to sneak just enough sips of booze to keep myself from throwing up in my mouth.

  Emily was a presence onstage, confident, attractive, poised. All those years of acting training were finally paying off. She called my name with perfect elocution.

  Kevin squeezed my hand once, twice, three times, and everyone else was clapping, so I knew it was time to drag my trembling ass to the stage.

  I tried to breathe, but my heart was a bird that had just swallowed an Alka-Seltzer. I tried to remain calm, but the ruffled feathers of said bird had clogged all my airways. There were so many heads trained on me, each with a set of hopeful, expectant eyes.

  The Titan assistants I’d gotten to know from our nights in the back room at Bar Nine stood out from the rest of the crowd. They were the ones whose dresses hung a little more cheaply, who hadn’t just sat for professional blowouts, who weren’t dripping with Harry Winston diamonds. They were the ones who’d volunteered to help out with the party planning in return for attendance. I still didn’t know most of their names, but they all knew mine. The group of them stood together at the center of the floor: the Latina woman with hair that was brown on top and blond at the bottom; the women wearing too-big and bigger glasses; the blond and brunette Zara girls.

  The one I referred to as Accent Accessory was holding her cell phone up in the air like a lighter at a Coldplay concert, videotaping me. “Yeah, Tina!” she called out, which I understood meant I was taking too long to begin.

  “Thank you,” I said, and forced a smile. I decided to focus on the chandelier hanging serenely above us, without falling down. How I wished to be that chandelier, or any inanimate object, really.

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

  These words, when I’d practiced them, had made me uneasy. (Who was I to be saying them, really? What did I know about any of this?) But hearing them now, amplified across this beautiful ballroom into the ears of all these flawless people, it felt like . . . well, honestly, it felt like singing.

  “Add student-loan debt to the mix . . .” Pause. Eye contact with the audience. “The cost of a college degree in the United States has increased twelvefold in the past thirty years. That’s one thousand, one hundred twenty percent.”

  Pause. Take a breath.

  “Forty million Americans currently have outstanding student loans. Seven in ten college seniors will graduate with student debt. And forget about the six-figure graduate-school or law-school tuition debt so many of us take on in addition to our undergrad loans, as we race to super-educate ourselves, collecting more and more diplomas . . .” Pause. “For what?” Look up. “It’s honorable that today’s students think they’ll be able to rise above all this, that they accept the skyrocketing cost of a college education without question. That they refuse to give up on their dreams in spite of these debilitating obstacles. But as the years pass, they struggle to pay down their loans, while striving to find decent work at a fair wage, while fantasizing about one day buying a home or starting a family . . . and they are just buried. And do you know who they blame? Themselves. They wonder: Why can’t I get it together?”

  The audience began to applaud. A few people whooped and hollered. This hadn’t happened when I’d rehearsed alone in my bedroom.

  I had to raise my voice to speak over them. “Our country is failing to live up to its promise of opportunity and fairness. It used to be true that if you went to college and worked hard, you could count on having a decent middle-class life—but that’s just not true anymore. Economic and political changes that have occurred over the past three decades have made the middle-class American dream for today’s twenty- and thirtysomethings far less possible than it was for their parents’ generation. It’s not that we’re lazy, that we have no work ethic, or that we have outrageous spending habits. It’s that we’ve been screwed.”

  The room roared. I felt it in my chest. In my loins, wherever they may be. Unintentionally, I smiled.

  “So we’re taking things into our own hands. Our goal is to help all the women out there who’ve tried so hard to do everything right but still can’t get ahead. And maybe, just maybe, the people in power will take notice of what we’re doing here. What we’re trying to do. And then we can really spark some change.”

  I stepped back from the microphone and flashbulbs exploded.

  Kevin’s was the first face I saw, once I could see again. By the way he was beaming at me, smacking his hands together hard and high in the air, I knew I’d done a good job. Against all odds, I’d rallied this crowd. They better than liked me.

  Emily joined me onstage, carrying a remote control. She adjusted the microphone to her height and pointed the controller at a giant screen behind us.

  “And now the moment we’ve all been waiting for,” she announced as the screen came to life.

  It was the website. Our website. Wendi had fiddled with it since I’d last seen it. She’d made it cleaner, sharper, less wordy, and she’d added two scrolling tickers across its top.

  “We are live,” Emily said.

  The ticker on the left was labeled Members. It started at two. Emily and me, I guessed.

  The ticker on the right was labeled Money Raised. It started at $250,000. The amount taken in from tonight’s tickets, I supposed.

  And then it happened. The numbers started rolling.

  The site reached fifty-two members in less than sixty seconds.

  “Look at ’er go,” Emily said, reluctant to step away from the microphone. “Your donations made this possible. Thank you.”

  The Members ticker rolled like it was on molly. We reached 102 members in less than another minute.

  “But if you’re feeling a little extra generous,” Emily said, “after all the delicious beverages you’ve enjoyed tonight, provided by Patrón and the Brooklyn Brewery . . .”

  She smiled. Sponsorship shout-outs, check.

  “. . . our diligent volunteers are coming around with iPads . . .”

  Out came Wendi and Lily, each carrying an eye-high stack of iPads. They were both wearing T-shirts featuring our logo. Our logo was just the words The Assistance in a cool-looking font, but this “design” was garnering lots of attention because the designer was some kind of art star. “I could have done that,” I whispered to Emily when I first saw it,
and I’ll say it again here. Design is a career that baffles me, along with consulting and hedge fund management, and waving the flag at a construction site. But I digress.

  Lily’s T-shirt was pale pink; Wendi’s was black and she’d torn off the sleeves, so it was more of a muscle shirt. The iPads were unknowingly on loan from the Titan digital supply closet.

  “Feel free to pick up an iPad,” Emily said, “and donate a dollar, or ten dollars, or ten thousand dollars, just to see the ticker here on the big screen change.”

  What a bunch of fools. Would you believe they actually fell for this? Half the crowd scrambled for an iPad and began tapping away at it while watching the big screen.

  The Money Raised ticker started to flip as quickly as the Members ticker.

  I figured it was safe for me to leave the stage at this point. My work for the night was done, at last.

  Kevin appeared the moment I stepped down and handed me a glass of wine. “I’m so proud of you,” he said.

  I gratefully accepted the wine, as well as his praise. “Thank you so much for coming,” I replied, which was a throwaway comment, but I followed it up with, “I’m really glad you’re here.” And the moment I said it, I realized just how much I wasn’t bullshitting him. I actually was glad he was there. I would rather have had him there with me than anyone else in the world. Which may not sound like much—but I’d never been able to say that about anyone before.

  Kevin put his hands on my bare arms, and they felt so warm. He slid them up to my shoulders, then back down to my elbows, and pulled me in toward him. He kissed my cheek, then my neck, and then whispered into my ear, “I love you so much.”

  Love, he said. Love. For the first time.

  He reached for my face and kissed me with a passion that brought even the tickers to a stunned halt. If a photo of the moment hadn’t been Instagrammed, I would have been sure I’d imagined it. I would have been sure I’d imagined the entire night.

  22

  I AWOKE the morning after the launch party to the sounds of hipsters gossiping their way to Sunday brunch, which told me I’d slept till at least eleven. My alarm clock verified this and Emily arrived shortly after, still wearing last night’s dress.

  “Walk of shame?” I asked.

  “I didn’t walk.” Emily reached for my coffee cup and finished what was inside. “The young gentleman I went home with last night was the most generous lover I’ve ever known. I think his father is some sort of Russian metals tycoon? He bought me a thirty-dollar breakfast.” She unzipped the back of her dress. “Eggs Benedict.”

  “Congratulations,” I said, reaching for an Oreo from the stack on my nightstand.

  Emily waddled into the kitchen on bare feet, her dress wide open in the back. She returned with a fresh cup of coffee for herself and resumed her striptease, ceremoniously stepping out of her dress and then wrapping herself in a silk kimono robe that my mother surely would have described as Oriental.

  “Have you looked at the website?” she asked. “How much money did we raise last night?”

  “I don’t know,” I said with my mouth full. “I haven’t checked.”

  “Are you kidding me? You’re just lying there eating cookies and didn’t even think to turn on your computer?”

  “Why didn’t you check?” I shot back in the vicious manner of voice I usually reserved for the a-holes who worked at the South Williamsburg post office.

  “My phone is dead or I would have. What the hell is your problem?”

  “Kevin told me he loved me last night.”

  “Whaaat?” Emily pulled her silk kimono tighter and took a seat on the edge of my bed. “And what did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “I guess I panicked. I was so caught up in the moment.” I knew what Emily was going to say: that I was socially inept, emotionally stunted. And she was right. I was basically the Holden Caulfield of adult dating.

  I sat up to shoo away the cookie crumbs that had gathered on my chest just as the apartment’s buzzer rang out.

  “Oh my god.” I locked eyes with Emily. “I bet it’s Kevin. He’s been doing this supposedly romantic thing lately called ‘surprising’ me.”

  “Or he just wants to hear you say I love you back, you idiot.” Emily glanced out the window and then back at me. “You can’t let him see you this way. You’re a goddamn mess. You have Oreo all over your mouth.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Go hide in the bathroom and run the showerhead. Quick!”

  I did as she said. I could have probably used an actual shower, but instead I put my ear to the bathroom door, trying to hear the action over the whooshing water.

  The apartment door opened with a squeak, followed by heavy footsteps.

  A gruff voice penetrated the quickly rising steam, nothing like Kevin’s consistently agreeable baritone. “You’re not who I came to see.”

  Emily called out to me. “False alarm!”

  I skulked out of the bathroom to find Wendi sitting down at our kitchen table. She eyed Emily from head to toe. “This robe you’re wearing,” she said. “It’s bordering on racist.”

  Emily swept her hands down the front of her robe’s silky, cherry-blossomed surface. “It’s not like I taped my eyes back or something.”

  “I will let that one slide because today is such a happy day.” Wendi reached across the table for Emily’s laptop, pecked it to life, and tapped at a few keys, bringing up the Assistance website.

  “Holy cannoli!” I said, sounding like the Italian version of the chick from Fifty Shades of Grey. “Look at all the money!”

  The Money Raised ticker had hit $406,813.54.

  “This happened overnight?” Emily scrambled for the chair closest to Wendi. “While we were asleep? Do you think people were drunk-donating?”

  “Still counts.” Wendi scrolled through the thousands—thousands!—of members who’d already submitted their debt statements to the site.

  “I’ve got to hand it to you, Tina,” Wendi said. “This was not my original vision for my program, but it’s working out pretty nicely.”

  “This wasn’t my original vision for becoming a millionaire either.” Emily’s face shone with the radiance of her laptop screen. “But it is working out nicely. It’s like, who even remembers anymore what we took from Titan?”

  For a moment, I feared Wendi might gore Emily with her horns.

  “It’s okay.” I cautiously touched the elbow of Wendi’s hoodie. “She knows not to talk like that outside of this apartment.”

  Wendi contorted her face into a sneer and then shifted the laptop away from Emily and closer to me. “Let me show you how the new site works.” She continued scrolling through our many members. “Until we can make this a more perfect science, I suggest just picking a winner at random, like a lottery. Watch me now.”

  She double-clicked to open a debt statement for $81,101 that belonged to a twenty-nine-year-old woman in Chicago.

  One click, two clicks, three clicks, and an e-check for $81,101 was sent to the woman’s account. The ticker labeled Money Donated flipped accordingly.

  “That’s all there is to it,” Wendi said. “The only tricky part is to pace yourself with the money.” She turned the laptop toward me. “Your turn.”

  It was so idiotically simple a Gen X monkey with no computer training could have done it. I clicked on a debt statement for $108,023 that belonged to a twenty-six-year-old woman in Portland, Oregon.

  One click, two clicks, three clicks, and an e-check for $108,023 was sent to her account.

  The Money Donated ticker flipped to $189,124. It made me light-headed, like my first adolescent drag of a cigarette, which by the way was not electronic.

  “This could get addictive,” I said.

  “Let me do one.” Emily slid the laptop b
ack toward herself.

  “Just a moment, Memoir of a Geisha.” Wendi placed a bullying hand on Emily’s silken shoulder. “You have to be careful to limit the amount you give out each day. It has to be a ratio, so people recognize there’s a direct correlation to the giving and receiving. Like supply and demand, understand?”

  Emily glanced up from the screen. “Do you honestly think there’ll ever be a supply to meet this much demand? That’s absurd.”

  Wendi erupted in inexplicable high-pitched laugher. “You’ve got a better head for business than one would think. You’re correct, this site is the technological equivalent of throwing a bunch of money onto the street. There’s not going to be any left over when you walk away.” She turned to me. “But the more money we take in with time, the more we can distribute. For now, send out five checks a day. No more, no less. This’ll make people excited about it, like a contest or a sweepstakes. Try to mix it up, some small debts with some large ones each day. But obviously you can’t exceed the amount we’ve got in the Money Raised bank at any time.”

  “That’s it?” I’d already snatched the laptop back from Emily and was scrolling through the statements, searching for our next winner. “Only five a day?”

  I felt like God, or what I sometimes imagined God to feel like when he was blowing off steam: scrolling through people’s lives on his iPad like an old lady at a Vegas slot machine. Cherries-orange-apple—you’ll get hit by a car today. Lemon-grapes-banana—sorry, that’s cancer. Triple sevens—jackpot; someone just paid off all your student-loan debt.

  It felt good, playing the Almighty. Because like the Tibetan Buddhists who don’t even believe in Him claim (and who, by the way, threw awesome concerts with the Beastie Boys in the late nineties), real happiness just might come from putting others first.

  Though the Buddhists would probably insist that the “real happiness” also be egoless—and this was definitely not that. No, this was a way more Americana type of happiness, steeped in pride and self-regard. Happy as a pig in shit, Robert might have called it. Or maybe that’s what I’m calling it, I don’t know. Because something about it was sort of shitty. Yeah, I was happy I was helping others. And I was happy I’d struck upon something I was good at, and even got applauded for. And I was happy to really feel like somebody for the first time in my life. But more than all that, I was happy that we’d gotten away with it.