The Hazards of Hunting While Heartbroken

by Passananti, Mari

  Judging by the expressions around the room, this is news to most people here.

  O’Malley pauses for a moment to let the fact sink in. He must have nerves of steel. I bet most candidates in his position would not willfully keep the audience focused on any kind of exploitation of young girls.

  The Councilman consults his notes and keeps going. “Make no mistake: the oldest profession in the world is alive, well, and thriving right under all our noses. And the fastest growing segment of the oldest profession is the sale of teenage girls. So let’s not lie to ourselves for one second longer. The overwhelming majority of these girls and women are not entrepreneurs. They are controlled by pimps who beat them down, isolate them from everything and everyone familiar, force them to turn tricks for hours on end every night, and take all the money they earn. They control who these girls see and speak with, and what they eat for lunch. Despite what the music industry, and several legitimate but misguided feminist organizations would have you believe, there is nothing glamorous—or good for women—in prostitution.”

  I glance around the room. Many people are silently nodding as they listen.

  “Because of the Internet, all prostitution, but especially child prostitution, has moved indoors, into the shadows, and most of all, into hotel rooms. My predecessors may think they’ve cleaned up the problem, but they’ve just brushed it off 42nd Street and into the Executive Suite.

  “So what can we do about it? Our great city wastes millions of dollars every year prosecuting children, stuffing twelve-year-olds into over-crowded jails. After these kids serve their weeks or months, we release them back onto the streets, with no direction, education or means of support. And then we act surprised when they turn up with the same pimps who lured them into prostitution in the first place.”

  O’Malley has everyone’s full attention. People are actually leaning forward in their chairs, waiting to hear where he’s going with this.

  “We need a complete change of course. We must go after the adults who profit from the vicious abuse of our children. Adult men pimp these girls, these children, to adult customers, many of whom are well-to-do, middle-aged, educated men who pay the pimps good money to—let’s be honest here—sexually assault minors. And what happens to these johns? What does the greatest city on earth do to punish these predators? I’ll tell you what we do. We fine them a hundred bucks and clear their records if they manage to stay out of trouble for one year.”

  Stunned whispers emanate from a few tables, but O’Malley keeps going. He looks around the room and makes eye contact with select reporters.

  “Under my mayoral administration, all of this will change. I’m rolling out a plan, here, tonight, to protect young girls from the worst kind of exploitation. As your mayor, I will propose new legislation so we can stop jailing kids and instead get them the help they need. I will champion funding for prevention programs, to mentor at-risk kids, to keep them out of the sex industry. And I will use every ounce of political capital I have left to change the laws of this great city so the pimps and johns, grown men who permanently damage innocent kids, go to prison.” He pauses and stares straight into the lone TV camera in the room. “And if you pay for sex with a minor on my watch in New York City, I will do everything in my power to make sure you will have to register as a sex offender. I don’t care who you are, or how outwardly upstanding you look.”

  Applause starts in the back of the room and rolls through like strong surf. Soon everyone is on their feet. The Councilman stands at the podium and beams. I glance at Kevin. He’s clapping madly off to the side of the stage. He looks like a man reprieved. His candidate just won back my vote, and judging by the standing ovation, I’ll have lots of company at the polls. Even his wife looks impressed.

  I feel so sorry for Holly O’Malley. Anyone can see she loves her husband, but she’s smarting from the shame he’s caused. And though she’s probably not as easily distracted by his bold campaign tactics as the rest of us, her desire to believe in him, to believe he really didn’t know where his money was going, is written all over her exhausted face. When the applause dies down enough for O’Malley to keep talking, he makes the interesting tactical decision to recognize her.

  People start murmuring again. Angela whispers that men never know how to quit when they’re ahead. The Councilman had everyone in the room, and everyone who’d hear the sound byte later, focused on the new sex offender registry. How can someone with so much political savvy allow himself to steer the discussion back to his own personal problems? The only explanation I can think of is that he’s actually innocent, and desperate to have us all believe him.

  The Councilman asks his wife to stand up. She does so, but with the deer-in-headlights look in her eyes. She waves at the crowd and sits back down as quickly as possible. Flashbulbs go off from every direction. This wasn’t scripted. I glance at Kevin. He looks alarmed.

  The Councilman goes on for a full minute and a half about all the things his wife has done for women in general, and for the Feminist Majority in particular. Then he motions to a junior campaign volunteer, some freckle-faced kid who’s probably not even out of college yet. The intern scampers up to the podium with some kind of plaque and foists it towards his boss before scurrying away.

  “I decided to go off the script tonight,” the Councilman says. I hear Kevin groan. More flashes go off.

  “I know the organization has its own awards to present tonight, and I in no way want to upstage them, but I thought that my wife was due some recognition. Holly McDonough O’Malley has worked tirelessly to advance the standing of women in New York and all over the United States. She’s championed a wide variety of critical issues ranging from day care reform, to equal access to health care and contraception, to ovarian cancer awareness. She’s served on too many task forces and committees to enumerate here. She’s always led with grace, poise and level-headed intellect. While doing all this, and raising our daughters, she’s been the best wife a man could ask for. She’s been my most trusted adviser and constant confidante. And I want to thank her for standing by me during this tumultuous time for me personally.”

  Angela nudges me and points at Kevin. He’s turned a pale shade of green, almost the color the Crayola people call sea foam. In the back, reporters who would never have bothered with this event, if not for the hope of catching something as audacious as this, scribble furiously on their note pads.

  The Councilman invites his wife to join him. She appears riveted to her seat and looks like she might vomit. He waits a moment, adjusts his tie, and asks a second time. Holly O’Malley gets up slowly, as if being reeled in by some invisible thread. The Councilman smiles his best proud family man smile as Holly takes a tentative step towards him, then stops, bursts into tears and makes a mad dash to the exit. She knocks into a few guests along the way. Cameras flash madly and a couple of the reporters try to sprint after her. The room erupts in a low roar. Angela leans over and whispers to me that the Page Six writer, a slightly-built brunette whose face is somehow pretty and forgettable at the same time, is already on her cell phone.

  I look at Kevin. He’s got his head in his hands. I wonder if this is the final coffin nail. The Councilman’s campaign for the most prominent mayoral office in the land was supposed to rocket Kevin’s career to the national level. It looked marginally salvageable on the Sunday morning talk shows, and tonight’s speech should have corralled thousands of straying voters back into the O’Malley fold.

  But tomorrow everyone who matters in the world of political consulting will be asking why the Councilman’s campaign advisers allowed their candidate to adjust his personal settings to self-destruct mode, mere seconds after delivering what should have been a watershed speech. If the media decides to focus on the rift between O’Malley and his wife, and what caused it, Kevin will be lucky if his next gig is with a second tier candidate for an upstate Congressional district. Even though he’s been a twit lately, I feel a pang of sympathy for him.

  Th
e Councilman takes this moment, while the attention is briefly diverted elsewhere, to wrap it up and yield the stage to Trudy Bainbridge, who will kick off the presentation of awards. Hardly anyone pays attention. I spend the rest of the evening studying Olivia surreptitiously, for clues and insights about her true character and her relationship with my man. She gives me nothing. She sits and listens politely and claps when everyone else does. The bitch.

  FIFTEEN

  Marvin waltzes in at quarter after nine the next morning, wearing a ridiculous ear-to-ear grin and bearing Starbucks for everyone. He balances two cardboard cup-holder trays on one arm and distributes thirty or forty dollars’ worth of caffeine to our colleagues before stopping at my desk. I thank him for the coffee and ask, “Well, which one? Blondie-boy-next-door, or dark, brooding underwear model?”

  “Both.” He says it with forced nonchalance. “And they’re both underwear models.” Marvin’s got that tired but sated look about him, and his navy blue tie is flecked with happy little green frogs who look like they’re leaping for joy.

  “Nice.”

  “They were way more than nice.”

  “And I don’t even get a thanks for inviting you?”

  “I’ll pay you back when you really need it sometime.”

  Across the bullpen, the Town Crier catapults out of her chair and squawks, “She’s on the elevator!”

  “Incoming. That’s my cue,” Marvin saunters off in the direction of his desk. “People! Try to look busy! And awake! And important!” he yells on his way there. He does it for fun, not because he’s in charge or anything.

  Carol stomps into the office with a cell phone pressed to each ear. Her blue eye shadow has been applied in two uneven cerulean blazes over, around, and inadvertently under, each eye socket. She’s yelling into the phones alternately, demanding to know what the hell is going on. A few months ago, Carol stunned all of us by announcing that she would open a west coast office. Broadwick & Associates already has a sizeable presence in Washington, D.C., but that’s a short hop away. Carol regularly swoops down on her D.C. staff on the early shuttle, without warning, to make sure everything is running to her specifications. Marvin claims she has hidden nanny-cam devices down there, so she can watch them on closed circuit television, and presumably fly down the moment she spies anyone running amok. Office legend has it that she stashes them inside the awards she distributes at each year’s holiday party, since she expects the recipients to display these tokens of her recognition prominently. But Los Angeles is a different matter. Any way you book the travel, you basically lose an entire day or night with the trip. Which makes it challenging, even for a slave driver like Carol, to keep her staff under her thumb.

  She’s worked herself into such a lather that she’s apparently forgotten which incompetent imbecile she’s speaking with. She holds one of the phones directly in front of her mouth and brays, “WHO is on this call? WHO is on the phone?”

  When it seems that nobody replies within a nanosecond, she flails the first phone maniacally in one hand and repeats the exercise with the second. She then mashes both phones to her ears and waits for a response. Tiny beads of sweat percolate on her forehead and dampen her professionally blow-dried coif. “Who is on the fucking phone?” she bellows once more, before emitting a guttural, animal growl.

  Evidently the person on the other end of the call has managed, probably by merely existing, to piss her off beyond the ability to form words. Carol flings one of the two phones at the wall behind her assistant’s desk. She throws her weight into the pitch and it sails from her fingers with surprising speed and misses the secretary’s head by less than a foot, before leaving a ding in the sheetrock.

  “Nobody wants to fucking work!” she yowls at all of us, but no one in particular.

  New Girl says, “It’s only six thirty in the morning out there.” It must be the extra shot of caffeine Marvin brought her. It’s killed her brain.

  A collective gasp escapes the cube farm.

  Now, if this were a happy, on the meds, beautiful make-up morning, Carol might let a thoughtless yet offhand remark like this slide. But any moron can see it’s not that kind of day. “What did you just say?” Carol exhales loudly through flaring nostrils.

  “Nothing.” New Girl’s voice wavers.

  “I didn’t hear nothing. Zoë! Did you hear nothing?”

  “No, ma’am.” I wince as I say it, but it’s better to throw New Girl under the bus than to lay down in front of it myself.

  “That’s what I thought. Thank you.” Carol smiles what she must think is a benevolent smile in my direction, but it looks more like her usual sadistic grin to me. “New Girl!” she barks. “Who signs your checks?”

  “You do.” The poor thing is shaking. She can barely manage a whisper.

  “Right. So if I sign the checks, and those lazy idiots work for me, then they can damn well make themselves available when it’s convenient for me. If they don’t want to start before nine, then they should move to New York, right?”

  “Right,” New Girl squeaks.

  “And they should also be thankful to have jobs in this economy,” Carol booms.

  “Exactly,” New Girl nods earnestly.

  “Nobody was asking you.” Carol stomps through the bullpen and slams her office door shut behind her.

  All remains quiet until about ten after ten, when red roses arrive from Oscar. The card says he misses me already. They’re gorgeous, but I can’t risk their feng shui implications after New Girl sparked Carol’s wrath, so I stash them under my desk. I call Oscar to thank him but his phone rolls to voicemail.

  By lunchtime, the color has failed to return to New Girl’s face and Marvin has sunk from post-coital euphoria into morning-after regret. “Because I bedded both of them, that means I can’t call either of them, right?”

  “I can’t say I’m an expert on gay sex etiquette, but if it looks like a one-night stand and quacks like a duck, or whatever they say...”

  “Why do I do this to myself?” he moans again.

  “Because you’re a guy. Even though you’re a lovely gay one, you’ve got enough of that commitment-phobic wiring. You pick young, tight-bodied hotties over age appropriate adults every chance you get. You can’t help it.”

  “Maybe more therapy would help me.”

  “You already go twice a week. Who can afford more?”

  “Asks the girl with two nice commissions in the bag, Niles in the home stretch and, oh, what was yesterday’s big development? Right. You have no mortgage.”

  “Keep your voice down. The whole office doesn’t need to know that.” Although I presume they do already. “Oscar has more resources than most people. He’s really into me, and I’m crazy about him, so that makes it acceptable.” I’m not sure I believe my own speech, but I hope I’m mitigating the image of myself as a kept woman. And if we do end up living happily ever after like I hope we will, people will stop keeping score, right? Although, after meeting Olivia, I’m feeling insecure and inadequate. I can’t believe that when I see Oscar tomorrow I now have to tackle not only the issue of the apartment, but also the re-appearance of his ex, who, at least to the casual observer, appears to be the perfect woman.

  “Hmm. Remind me what they call a sugar daddy’s other half?” Marvin asks, almost snidely.

  I shoot him what I hope is an icy glare.

  “Shut up, Marvin. You’re sounding too much like Kevin. I can’t deal with two of you.”

  “He’s still in a snit?”

  “So it would seem. After last night’s debacle, I could hear him on the phone through the wall, yelling at someone.”

  “The Councilman’s still going to win.”

  “I’m not so sure. This morning’s paper had the poll down to a ten-point gap.”

  “Kevin’s not just sulking about his career. Although with the former child porn actress speaking on prime time tonight he’d be totally justified.” Marvin says this breezily and examines his cuticles to avoid eye co
ntact.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  My phone lights up before he can answer. I tell Marvin I need to grab this. “Yes?”

  Sybil’s chirpy voice tells me she has Susie Townsend on the line.

  “Put her through.” My mouth goes dry. I know Carol sometimes talks to the wives, and I joked about, or rather I thought I joked about it, just yesterday. Now that the moment is upon me, I have no idea what to say to Angela’s insane cousin.

  “Susie! Hi! How nice to hear from you.” I wince at how strained I sound.

  “Zoë, I just wanted to call in person and tell you how pleased I am that you’ve been so helpful to Niles. He’s so excited about joining the Cutler firm.” I hold my breath and wait for the but.

  “He came back from California all ready to pack up his office, but...” There it is. “They’re low balling him.”

  I have to hand it to Susie. She’s got nerve.

  “Nobody wants to see him get the highest possible compensation package more than I do, and I’ve gone back and asked them if there’s anything else they could do for your husband, because he’s such a rising star, but I can’t go in there screaming that $1.2 million is a low-ball number.”

  Neither is the $300,000 Broadwick & Associates would collect as the fee. Or the $150,000 which would be my share. I’m momentarily distracted by the thought of the largest commission I’ve ever had the potential to earn. Ironic that I’m on the cusp of such a windfall the day after Oscar removed my biggest financial burden.

  “I don’t care whether you consider it a low-ball number or not.” Susie snaps me from my musings. “Niles and I need another $200,000, and Angela said you could deliver it.”

  “Did she?”