The Hazards of Hunting While Heartbroken

by Passananti, Mari

“Oh, Angela,” is all I can think to say. I reach across the table and touch her hand. “Talk about burying the lead. Are you sure?”

  “I’m ten days late and I’m exhausted. I’ve been pushing the possibility out of my mind, but it’s seeming increasingly likely.”

  I feel my eyes roll, involuntarily. “But have you taken a test?”

  “Not yet. I can’t bring myself to buy one. I walk into the drug store, stand in that aisle for ten minutes, then buy something else, like soap or a toothbrush, and scurry out of there. I’ve repeated this exercise at least two dozen times this week. I’m set for toiletries for the next twenty years.”

  “Do you want me to go buy one for you?”

  “Can you just come with me?”

  “Of course. We can go right now, if you want. I don’t know how you got through lunch, not to mention your party last night, acting as if nothing’s wrong. I’d be a basket case.”

  “I guess I’ve got a talent for compartmentalizing my life.”

  Angela suddenly looks smaller and meeker, somehow, than I’ve ever seen her. Underneath her perfectly applied façade, she looks like a scared teenager. I don’t know what else to say, so I push the now forgotten brownie sundae around with my spoon and flag down the waitress to bring us the check.

  “How can this be happening?” Angela asks in a quieter voice than usual. “Infertility runs in our family to the point that I’m shocked we have a family. All three of my maternal cousins are killing themselves with that IVF thing.”

  Well, I guess she knows about Niles and Susie. That answers one, suddenly trivial, question.

  “My mom had three miscarriages before she had my sister.” She stares despondently at the mostly uneaten dessert.

  “But then your sister got pregnant on her honeymoon.” I don’t mean to sound argumentative, but the sooner she knows if she is or isn’t, the sooner she can decide what she wants to do.

  “I had blocked that out.” She puts her elbows on the table, rests her face in her hands and blows her bangs, a new and instantly regretted development, out of her eyes.

  The put-upon looking waitress reappears and deposits our bill on the table. We both wait until she retreats again to say anything.

  “Seriously, Angela, you’re getting ahead of yourself. Sometimes stress can throw your cycle.”

  “Not when you’re on the pill.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do. And I also know I missed three pills when I went away for a weekend and forgot them on my bathroom counter. I’m such an idiot. I realized it five or six blocks from my place, but I didn’t bother to go back for them, because I thought the relevant window of time had passed for the month. I guess I was wrong.”

  Forty-five minutes later, Angela pees on a stick in her bathroom and makes me stand in there and wait for the results, which the instructions say can take up to five minutes. She paces in her narrow hallway. Ernest and Algernon join her. They look surprisingly anxious, considering they normally don’t care about anything but the presence of Angela and canned food, and their feline brains can’t possibly process the present drama.

  The little blue plus sign forms almost instantly. “I think you need to see this,” I say, tentatively.

  Angela comes in, tears already welling, and confronts the evidence. She stares at the test stick on the counter for a moment, then picks it up and flings the offensive piece of medical technology into the trash.

  “Are you going to tell him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you think Claudio would say?”

  “I have no idea. We’re not what you’d call a long-established couple. I don’t even know for sure if he’s seeing anyone else.” She lets out a little laugh and dabs at her eyes with her fingertips. Her eyeliner smudges downwards. “But at least I know he’s the only candidate. Some months in my not-so-distant past, I wouldn’t even have that.”

  “Well, you don’t have to decide today. Whether to tell him, I mean. Or anything, actually.”

  “Shouldn’t all the alcohol I’ve put away over the past few weeks make me miscarry?” Angela says, suddenly sounding hopeful.

  “I doubt it. I think it just causes birth defects.”

  “Thanks. That’s really comforting.” Her face is starting to turn white.

  “Come here.” I open my arms and constantly composed Angela allows herself to fall into a big hug.

  “Let’s keep this between us for now, okay?” she snuffles into my shoulder.

  “Of course.”

  Angela disentangles herself from me so that she can step back and look me in the eye. “That means don’t share with Oscar.”

  “I would never. Don’t worry about that for one second. Your personal life is none of his business.”

  Monday morning arrives with alarming punctuality, and without any progress on the mystery of my boyfriend’s true character, or Angela’s pregnancy dilemma, or my now-eclipsed drama with Kevin. I have to put all of it out of my head for the next few hours anyway, since Carol has decided to “reward” me for closing Niles Townsend by having me tag along with her and Marvin to a pitch meeting with Walker Smythe, the investment banker whose son she made me coach pro bono a few weeks back.

  Honestly, I shouldn’t be so flip about this development. It means Carol believes I have a future here, which is more than a lot of her employees can say. It’s just that I’ve seen firsthand, how fast she can take away whatever she sees fit to give, which makes it difficult to put a lot of stock in my new favorite child status.

  It’s only 8:30 in the morning, but Carol has whipped herself and Marvin into a frenzy. If all goes well today, my boss will get to bed Walker Smythe and, equally importantly, Silverblum Gatz will give Broadwick & Associates an assistant general counsel spot to fill. And if that happens, Marvin will become the point person for the account. Which means he will have to dazzle them with the quality of people he sends over, or Carol will never get another Silverblum assignment again.

  Marvin fully understands the need to bring his A game. He’s even abandoned his traditional whimsical ties in favor of bold blue stripes, in honor of the occasion. Carol knows Marvin appreciates the importance of this meeting, but she can’t help herself. She appears hell bent on spending the time before we need to leave making him crazy. She’s standing over his desk, yelling at him to rearrange Power Point slides. She points at the screen and shouts cryptic instructions at him, even though she’s less than two feet from his ear. Every once in a while, she jabs at the screen with her index finger if he doesn’t move “this” or “that” fast enough.

  Carol performs a similar futile exercise before every major meeting. She screams and yells that the presentation sucks, and this is somehow not only news to her, but also not her fault, even though she authored almost every word of every bullet point personally. Her normal modus operandi is to spend an hour tweaking the presentation, and then make one of us scramble, in the three minutes before we need to get out the door, to restore it to its original state. Carol developed Broadwick & Associates’ new client pitch over the course of several years, it works like a charm over ninety per cent of the time, and everyone, even New Girl, who has not yet been allowed to interact live with an actual client, knows it needs very little in the way of improvement.

  Not until it’s twelve minutes before we absolutely have to be in a cab to have any hope of making it downtown on time, does Carol start shrieking at me to pull up the pitch presentation on my computer and, “Fucking fix the fucking cluster fuck Marvin has made.”

  Because I knew this was coming, I have the file open on my screen already. I don’t have to fix anything, actually, since the changes she ordered Marvin to make are on his computer. Carol, for all her business acumen, holds only the weakest grasp on the workings of modern technology. She can’t fathom that if her presentation has been tampered with, the changes don’t automatically appear on all versions of the document. But I know better than to try to ex
plain this to her. I move the mouse around for a moment and then pronounce the presentation “fixed.”

  She barks at Marvin to print it out. I am not allowed to print anything. I stopped taking this personally when I learned that only Marvin holds this sacred privilege, and that he has to log every letter, file and document he puts to paper. This policy has nothing to do with conservation, but rather with Carol’s paranoia and previously noted lack of computer savvy. She thinks, by preventing her employees from printing anything, she’s insuring that we will never carry any confidential client information out of the office. Nobody in the history of the firm has had the male anatomy necessary to enlighten her that it would be really easy for any one of us—even useless New Girl—to email Carol’s entire proprietary database out of here in about two seconds.

  While Marvin prints the original version of the presentation, I finally focus on Carol’s face. I can’t believe I didn’t check earlier. Maybe I didn’t want to risk eye contact, because her mood was so obviously manic and vile. And now, when we should be heading to the elevators, I wonder if I have a professional obligation to tell her that she’s applied her trademark blue eye shadow expertly over one eye, and slopped it garishly over the other. I’ve never seen this happen before, although Marvin once mentioned a sighting of the same phenomenon about six years ago. Never mind what incomprehensible statement her make-up makes about her mental state. We can’t possibly allow her to go to Silverblum Gatz looking like that, and I can’t believe Marvin hasn’t noticed, or more likely, is pretending not to have noticed. As the senior person, shouldn’t he be the one to tell her she needs to look in the mirror?

  Of course I chicken out. Marvin and I follow our asymmetrically blue-eyed boss down to the street and cram into the back of a cab for the stop and go ride to Wall Street. Maybe she’ll whip out her compact and fix her face in the car. No such luck. Instead she gets on her cell phone and starts barking nonsensical orders at some registered nurse unlucky enough to be looking after Carol’s infirm but not utterly incapacitated mother. Evidently the moldings in her room at assisted living offend Carol, and she wants them replaced. Today, naturally. Marvin and I listen to this for a good five minutes before I work up the nerve to mouth, “Did you notice her eye shadow?” When Carol looks out the window at the passing storefronts lining Fifth Avenue, I gesture frantically at my own eyelids.

  “What can we do?” Marvin hisses at me.

  I shrug.

  “We’re meeting a bunch of straight men. They won’t notice,” Marvin says.

  I’m not so sure, but before I can do more than shrug again in response, Carol claps her phone shut and begins rooting around in her purse. She’s muttering under her breath about the idiots at the old folks’ home, and that it’s no wonder people lose their minds while living there. As the cabbie accelerates to beat a yellow light, she holds up a full-sized bottle of Bulgari perfume, which strikes me as an odd thing to carry around in a $10,000 Birkin bag.

  Before I realize what’s happening, she’s doused—not just spritzed, but fully drenched—both herself and me with the perfume. And while it’s a nice scent, it’s not a weak one, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to clash with what I was already wearing. Marvin coughs dramatically, and the driver starts cursing Carol in his native tongue. I can actually see the cloud of fragrance hanging in the air over the backseat. Marvin rolls his window all the way down, and hangs his head out like a dog, while the cold air rushes in.

  When we finally pour out of the taxi in front of Silverblum Gatz, Carol tips the driver less than a dollar. Sometimes when she does that, and she does it almost all the time, Marvin will slip the driver a couple of bucks, but this meeting is too important. He can’t risk triggering a tantrum. The cabbie speeds off with an effusive and obscene hand gesture aimed in our general direction.

  The offices of the most prestigious bank in the world are plain and unremarkable, compared to the lavishly decorated law firms we frequently visit. We go through a main reception desk to get to Walker Smythe’s secretary, an old battle axe of a woman in gray, whose breasts have sunken to stomach level and whose no-nonsense glasses perch on the tip of her pointy nose. She ushers us into a medium-sized interior conference room. That’s also not par for the course; our law firm clients love to show off their views, so we always get put in the best boardroom space available. The idea is that we’ll gush to the recruits about the real estate.

  The secretary leaves us, only to return almost immediately with a tray of coffee and Walker Smythe and two other bankers in tow. We stand up to shake hands. Carol sucks in her non-existent stomach and shamelessly arches her spine so her boobs thrust forward as she greets Walker Smythe. If he notices, he’s enough of a gentleman not to let on. Which, come to think of it, would be a rare thing in a heavy-hitting finance guy. They tend to be a pretty crass bunch. I also assume, admittedly based on stereotypes of rich older males, that Walker Smythe is not the kind of man who’d notice a woman his own age coming onto him. Especially one whose eye make-up resembles something from Picasso’s blue period.

  After brief introductions, one of the bankers looks pointedly at the clock on the wall. I surreptitiously study Mr. Smythe, whom Carol pronounced “dreamy” a few weeks back. He’s got a strong chin, deep set eyes, and an overall distinguished air about him. He also sports manicured fingernails and what appear to be tweezed eyebrows. I wouldn’t say he’s dreamy, or even handsome, but then, to Carol, power and money hold way more sex appeal than any particular physical attribute.

  Marvin launches into the presentation. He looks capable and in control as he ticks off the firm’s successes. When he starts to explain how Broadwick & Associates goes about screening its candidates, Walker Smythe cuts him off. He produces a piece of paper from his inside coat pocket and slides it across the table to Carol, who has managed, while Marvin was extolling her professional victories, to unbutton her blouse one more hole.

  “We want one of these guys,” Walker Smythe says. “So that should make it easy.” His two partners nod curtly in agreement.

  Clients give us wish lists all the time, and most of the time it’s an awkward moment, because we have to explain that they’re aiming way too high. Carol sometimes tells them it’s like dating. You have to stay in your own league. That line hardly ever goes over well at first, but usually the clients admire her chutzpah, so it works out for us. But any problem with over-reaching is virtually impossible in Silverblum’s case.

  Carol smiles her most confident smile and says, “I’m sure any of these men would be thrilled to get a call from Zoë, saying Silverblum Gatz wants to talk to them. She will get started immediately. Marvin will call your assistant with a status report by the end of the week, and if you want, you and I can discuss any changes you want made to the list then.”

  “That sounds fine.” Walker Smythe rewards Carol’s smile with a business-like nod. Uh-oh. She’s not going to like that.

  It may not sound like much, but I’m going to get to make the first round of calls on their wish list. This means—without question—that my boss trusts me enough to let me interact with some of the most senior, talented and influential people in her contacts list. Carol would never let me navigate a candidate through Silverblum’s fourteen-stage interview process by myself, and Marvin has earned enough battle scars to be the client relationship point person, but this is still a big leap for me. I fully expected to be relegated back to placement of junior associates after she made an exception for Niles.

  Normally, the next phase of the meeting would be the most important, especially since I’ll be making the initial calls. It’s when the client explains the “sell” for the firm, so we know what to say when we talk them up, but that’s not necessary here. I glance over at Marvin, and he’s flipping through his notes, obviously wondering if he should just wrap it up. He opts to do so, and before we know it, we’re in another soon-be-be-underpaid taxi, heading back to midtown. Carol should be ecstatic. She’s holding a list in her bag
that confirms she, and not any other headhunter, has won one of the city’s most coveted assignments, but instead she’s stewing.

  “Marvin!” she barks. “Is he gay?”

  “Is who gay?”

  “Walker Smythe.”

  “No, I don’t think he is.”

  Wow. That’s brave of Marvin. If she’d asked me, I would have ventured a maybe. Marvin can afford to be bold. He closed a firm record of four deals last week, and was rewarded with a more ergonomically correct chair, plus immunity from persecution for at least two weeks.

  “Then what’s his problem?” my boss demands.

  Neither of us responds. We’re only in the forties. We’re stuck in here for twenty more blocks. One of us will have to speak. I’m sure she’s surmised his problem already. I’d wager almost anything that twice-divorced Walker Smythe dates significantly younger women. But I really, really, really don’t want to say this to Carol, even though it’s cruel of her to put her employees on the spot about her personal affairs.

  “Zoë, what do you think his problem is?”

  I take the wimpy way out. “Maybe he thinks it’s important to keep things professional. I mean, this is a big search he gave us, sorry, I mean, gave you.”

  Carol scrunches her face into a childlike look of extreme concentration. I think she actually holds her breath while she processes my theory because when she exhales, it comes out as a thoroughly unladylike grunt. Her age might not be in her favor, but Carol’s frequently masculine body language sure doesn’t help her case, either. I would never say this aloud, though, even if drunk and questioned at gun point.

  “I’m going to take him to lunch at Peter Luger and find out for sure,” she says, suddenly a picture of poise. Her ability to change her mood in a fraction of a second never ceases to surprise me, but this latest plan strikes me as flawed. At best. Carol may be petite and impeccably attired, but she’s like a piranha around a good steak. I’ve seen her devour a side of beef more than once, and it doesn’t make for an attractive tableau.