by R. R. Banks
“Does that change the fact that he’s a thousand years old and has more folds on him than an origami Shar Pei?” Robin dipped the tip of his pinky into the shallow dish of chocolate sauce beside one of my plates and licked it off. He looked at his finger contemplatively. “If it is all wrinkly, do you think that it stays that way when he gets hard? I mean, is it like an accordion-type situation where it smooths out, or does it get hard and still have all the wrinkles and stuff?”
I grimaced as I took the churro from my mouth before taking a bite and settled it back onto the plate in front of me, draping a napkin over it to cover the ridges that were no longer as appealing, even covered in sugar and cinnamon.
“I really wouldn’t know,” I said.
Another waiter started toward our table, making Robin’s eyes light up, but just before he arrived, he took a sudden turn and presented a nearby table with an elaborate spread of sweets. Robin turned back toward me and sagged against the table.
“Someday. Someday my blintz will come,” he said. He pouted for a few seconds and then looked at me like he had just heard what I had said. “Of course you don’t know,” he said. “You’re as pure as the driven…”
“Please, don’t.”
“Snow.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m sorry. I was already committed. I had to finish it.” I glared at him, not willing to let this one slide. “OK, so that probably wasn’t the best idiom I could have gone with.”
“You’re an idiom,” I muttered.
I couldn’t blame Robin entirely. When you have a name like Snow it’s kind of hard to make a purity comparison without it coming across as incredibly heavy-handed. He might as well not pussy-foot around it and go right for the brutally clichéd kill.
“Blintz?”
Robin and I looked up at the waiter who had appeared at the edge of our table and blinked at him, somewhat stunned that he was actually there. He stood staring back at us, holding a plate of cherry cheese blintzes in between us, the three of us now locked in some awkward tableau of bad service. Finally, Robin nodded and the waiter lowered the plate to the table.
“I’m really not as pure as all that,” I said. I had hoped that the waiter was far enough away from us at that point not to have heard the declaration, but by the way he glanced back at me over his shoulder I figured that I didn’t have that much luck. I leaned forward on the table so that I could speak to Robin in a more conspiratorial tone. “It’s not like I’m a virgin.”
Robin looked up at me as he deconstructed the carefully folded blintz so that he could smear the cherry sauce inside rather than eating it like a civilized human being worthy of the dainty desserts.
“You’ve had sex with exactly one person, Snow,” he said. “One. I don’t even think that counts as not being a virgin. That’s like training wheels.”
“I don’t think that’s accurate,” I said. “How many do you think it takes?”
I didn’t necessarily want to hear the answer. Robin might look sweet and innocent, but I knew very well that he was far from as pure as the driven anything. Upon further thought it might be because he looked so sweet and innocent. There could be some appeal there.
“At least three to be a bit dingy,” he said. “Eight to be really, really dirty.”
I thought about that for a moment, trying to come up with eight men whose name I could even think of, much less who I could imagine having sex with. I was unsuccessful. I returned Robin’s gesture with my chocolate sauce by swiping some of the cherry juice left on the plate. It was bright and tart, less sweet than I would have expected.
“So, what got your brain into the disturbing place where you started comparing my boss’ undercarriage to instruments and puppies?” I asked.
Robin’s eyes widened and he looked like he regretted the huge bite of ricotta cheese and cherries that he had just shoved into his mouth. He chewed frantically as he leaned back and lifted up his hips to dig his phone out of his pocket. I watched as he swiped through a few screens and then turned the phone toward me. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I reached for the phone and pulled it closer to me, not taking my eyes off the screen. Robin swallowed hard.
“I can’t believe you didn’t know,” he said.
I looked up at him and then back at the screen, and then up at him again.
“What the hell?” I asked.
“Yep,” he said. “That’s a thing.”
I looked at the screen again, hoping that it would have changed since I first looked at it. It hadn’t. Mr. Royal, the origami Shar Pei, was smiling up at me from a wedding announcement splashed across the front page of the social page of a blog. He looked so happy he was virtually glowing from above the garish red and blue bowtie tightened around his neck. The bride looked decidedly less enthralled by the entire situation. She was smiling, but the expression didn’t reach her eyes. She stood beside him, hands gripping a red rose bouquet in front of her. The matching satin dress that she was wearing was decidedly not bridal, but I was more concerned with her face.
“How did she manage to weasel her way into his life?” I asked.
“You know her?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “You do, too. That’s Lucille Verne.”
“Are you serious?” he asked, snatching the phone back from me so that he could look at the picture of Mr. Royal and Lucille again. “That’s her?”
“Yep,” I said.
I took a sip of my coffee, wishing that I had gone a bit more on the Irish side with it. I had a feeling I was going to need some of the whiskey o’ the Irish to get me through the rest of this evening. Maybe not to the Erin-go-braless point, but definitely until I could see myself dangling upside down to kiss a guy named Blarney. Robin started laughing and I slammed my mug down to the table with a little more intensity than I had intended.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Come on, Snow, you have to admit that it’s at least a little amusing. This chick trailed your ass all the way through college and graduate school and has done everything that she could think of to beat you in the advertising industry. Now she’s married to the owner of the company you work for. That’s some serious deviousness right there.”
“I don’t think that her marrying him had anything to do with me. She wouldn’t go that far just to try to one-up me.”
Even as I said it, though, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was convincing myself. There were a lot of words that I would use to describe Lucille and devious was definitely one of them. The others are ones that wouldn’t be appropriate to say in front of pastries.
“If she did, she sure is willing to take one for the team just to piss you off.”
“What do you mean?”
Robin grabbed the napkin and whisked it off of the plate with flourish, revealing my abandoned churro.
“That woman is like a third his age. The only reason a woman that young would marry a man that old is because he’s wealthy and she’s hoping she can kill him off before too long, and the only reason that a man as old and as wealthy as Mr. Royal would marry a woman like that is if he’s hoping that if he does die any time soon it will be because she fucks him to death.”
“Well, that was a touch more graphic than I think was necessary.”
Robin shrugged.
“I speak the truth.”
I sighed and picked up a fork to poke part of a petit four on a plate in front of me.
“It does hurt a little that I wasn’t even invited to the wedding,” I said. “I thought that we were closer than that.”
“The man is grooming you to be on the board of the advertising agency,” Robin said. “He’s not adopting you.”
“But still. I’ve worked with him since I graduated. I’ve spent more time with him in the last few years than I’ve spent with my own family. Besides, aren’t the weddings of socialites supposed to be the events of the season with guest lists that are a couple thousand people long? I didn’t even get to sit at the
table beside the kitchen and look at them through binoculars while people they barely know make toasts about them?”
“Apparently there wasn’t a table by the kitchen,” Robin said, looking back at the screen and reading through the announcement. “There wasn’t even a reception. There was barely a wedding.”
“What do you mean?”
Poking the cake had made me want a bite and I moved it around on my tongue so that he wouldn’t call me out for talking with my mouth full.
“It says that they had a spontaneous destination wedding on his private island.”
“Does that mean that she smuggled herself onto his jet and then plied him with little umbrella drinks until he agreed to marry her?”
“I think it might. That would explain the red dress.”
“Maybe. Of course, if she had tried to put on a white dress it would likely have burst into flames before she could get all the way down the aisle.”
“Ah. So, our friend Lucille is in the Dirty Eight Club?”
“She makes the Dirty Eight Club look like a Carmelite nun drum circle.”
Robin got an expression on his face like he was thinking through what I had just said.
“I think that we just found our Halloween costume for this year.”
“So, what am I supposed to do?” I asked.
“What do you mean what are you supposed to do? I didn’t think that you were involved.”
“Of course, I am. I have to walk into the office Monday morning and face Mr. Royal. What do I do?”
“I think that the only choice that you have is to plaster on a smile and say congratulations. Maybe bring a muffin basket.”
“A muffin basket?”
“Do whatever you would do for anyone else who suddenly got married. Do what you would do if you found out that I frolicked off to the islands and up and got married.”
“I appreciate the advice, but I really don’t think that Mr. Royal would appreciate a basket of flavored condoms and body glitter. Besides. I’d kill you if you did that so the gift wouldn’t be necessary.”
“That’s true. Alright, so we go back to the plastered smile and the muffin basket. It’s a nice gesture and he would appreciate knowing that you support him and are happy for him.”
“But I don’t support him and I’m not happy for him.”
“Of course, you aren’t. Ninety percent of people who go to weddings or congratulate people after weddings aren’t happy that those weddings happened or think that the people made massive mistakes. It’s one of the great beauties of our culture.”
“So, what am I supposed to do?”
“Lie, Snow. You lie.”
Chapter Two
I was running late when I got to work Monday morning because apparently it is far more difficult to pack fifty tiny chocolate chip and banana nut muffins into a basket than I thought that it would be and the bakery was simply not prepared to work in my timeframe. Juggling the basket under one arm and my briefcase under the other, I struggled to squeeze them against my body hard enough that they wouldn’t slip as I tried to sign the card I held. The elevator doors opened and I curled forward to try to guide the pen cap in my mouth toward the pen in my hand without dropping anything. I couldn’t quite make it work so I tossed the pen aside and spit out the cap before anyone noticed me.
Scurrying as fast as I could, I made my way down the hallway toward Mr. Royal’s office. Before I could get to the door, though, I saw Cindy, Mr. Royal’s secretary, waving me down. She had a phone pinned between her ear and her shoulder and she finished the call before dropping the receiver back to the cradle.
“Morning, Cindy,” I said. “I just wanted to bring this in to Mr. Royal.”
“He can’t be disturbed right now, Snow,” Cindy said.
I looked at her quizzically. Never in the years that I had worked with him had Mr. Royal been inaccessible. Usually his office door was standing open and more often than not he was standing in the doorway looking up and down the hallway for someone to talk to. Now I glanced over at the office and noticed that the door was firmly closed, the blinds over the large window beside it pulled down tightly.
“He can’t be disturbed?” I asked, thinking I might have heard her wrong. “Is something wrong? Is he alright?”
“He’s fine,” she said. “He just asked that he not be disturbed this morning. There’s going to be a meeting at 10 and he said that he is not to be disturbed until then.”
“But I wanted to bring him this,” I said.
I knew that I had reduced myself to sounding like a whiny teenager, but, like Robin, I had already committed and was going to see it through. I held up the muffin basket, hoping that the puffy red and blue bow I had chosen specifically to match the picture that I had seen on the announcement would sway her.
“You can put it in the first conference room,” Cindy said.
The phone on her desk rang and she picked it up, gesturing toward the conference room like she was shooing me away. I had been dismissed. I turned around and took a few steps toward the conference room. Before I even stepped inside, I got a glimpse of the table inside and sighed, hanging my head for the last few steps. Pushing a few of the other of the baskets on the table aside, I settled mine into the fray, trying to get it positioned so that Mr. Royal would see it first when he came into the room.
“Stupid Robin,” I muttered to myself.
I glanced down at my phone to check the time. Just long enough before the surprise meeting to grab a cup of coffee and scarf down a break room doughnut since I didn’t have a chance in my morning of muffin selection to eat breakfast. Fortunately, one thing that Mr. Royal did extremely well was stock the break room. Every morning the tidy little space filled with the rich, sweet fragrance of every flavor of doughnut offered by the gourmet shop just up the road almost by magic. At least, it would seem almost by magic if I hadn’t spent my first six months at the company doing the morning doughnut runs before I found out that that wasn’t actually a part of my job description and it was just Mr. Glass, the company advisor’s, way of not having to do it himself.
I adjusted my skirt as I walked into the break room, then stopped short, no longer caring that my zipper had wriggled its way from the back around to my hip. My eyes locked on the table in the center of the room and the blatant lack of light pink bakery boxes that were usually still staked high at this time of morning. I drew in a breath and noticed that there was no lingering fried dough smell that would indicate the rest of the office had just eaten all of the doughnuts before I could make it. Instead, there was a painfully clean disinfectant smell and in the center of the table a large bowl of fruit and plate of individually packaged granola bars.
What kind of shit was this?
Rosa stepped into the break room behind me and I saw her do the same scan of the room that I had. She looked at me with the expression of unique horror that came from being deprived of her early morning fat and sugar rush. I nodded at her in commiseration and we both stepped up to the table, staring down at the plate and bowl as if it was going to be one big joke and they were going to flip over and turn into our doughnuts and coffee.
We didn’t have much time to question the new craziness of the world. The crackling, old-fashioned PA system that Mr. Royal refused to upgrade told us that it was time for us to report to the main conference room for the big mysterious meeting. I had a bad feeling in my stomach as I settled into one of the blue-cushioned swivel chairs at the table and looked around at my colleagues. Everyone was exchanging questioning looks and there were a few mutterings about the wedding announcement, but it seemed that there was no indication that anyone knew why we had been brought there. We sat there for a few tense minutes, and exactly at 10, the door to the conference room swung open. I looked toward it and saw Mr. Royal step in.
“Good morning, everyone!” he exclaimed in his usual bold, jubilant style.
There was an extra sparkle in his eyes and I couldn’t help but think about what Robin ha
d said. As much as I didn’t want to.
“Good morning,” we all burbled back to him.
“I’m so glad to see all of you here this morning because I have a thrilling announcement that I am sure that you will all be as excited about as I am.” He took a breath and I felt my stomach flip. Here it comes. “As some of you might know, life took me on an unexpected and enthralling adventure over the last few weeks and this weekend it reached its pinnacle when I married the love of my life.” The door opened again and Lucille stepped inside. “Please meet my wife. Mrs. Lucille Royal.”
My blood ran cold and I felt the same physical reaction toward her that I always did when we were in school. This was the woman who had done everything in her power to try to pull me down. From the moment that she met me, she was determined to stomp on me on her way to the top, even if it wasn’t strictly necessary. Fortunately for me at the time, that just pushed me to work harder and I was always enough ahead that she never had the opportunity. Now as I sat there at the conference table watching Lucille as she looked out over us with a stony expression on her face, I was starting to feel like her stiletto was on its way to my head.
“Hello,” she said. Her voice was just as icy as it had always been. “I look forward to getting to know all of you.”
Getting to know all of us? That sounds ominous.
“And she will have plenty of opportunity,” Mr. Royal said. “The primary reason I’ve called all of you together this morning, other than to share my wonderful news with you, is to announce that moving forward there will be a shift in the leadership of Royal and Company. I have been considering retirement for some time now and my lovely bride has convinced me that now is my chance. I will spend the next few days getting some loose ends tied up around here and then I will be leaving on a world tour. I will be handing over power of the company to your new president…Lucille.”
I felt like I was going to throw up. Lucille’s eyes seemed to darken slightly as they swept across the room toward me and a vile curve came to her lips.