“I trust you, Casey,” Celeste said. She stood up and came around the desk, put her hand on my shoulder like a minister giving a small child a mix of chastisement and blessing. “And I’m looking forward to seeing what you’re capable of.”
“Oh gosh—” I said. I put a hand over my heart. It sounds silly to say I wanted to cry in that moment—Celeste was my boss, asking me to work more, granting me a credit card to be used solely for business expenses—but I bet Moses felt just as strange and sentimental when he was promising a burning bush that, sure, he’d help an entire population of slaves flee Egypt. Sometimes you get asked to do weird things for weird reasons, and you don’t entirely understand the nature of the assignment, and maybe it feels a little off, but maybe it also feels a little, you know, on. A little special, I mean. A far cry from dull. And so at the end of the day you just have to go with it. Because what’s the alternative to taking these chances? Staying the same old person doing the same old thing, the only difference being what television series you stream at night?
“This is a big opportunity for you.” Celeste’s thumb dug into my shoulder blade. “I believe you’re very well-suited for a leadership position at Nanü.”
“Yes!” My voice had a whinnying quality.
“A position you’ll have the opportunity to create as you go, with maximal growth opportunities.”
“Wonderful!” More platitudes ran out my mouth as more complicated thoughts struggled to form in my frontal lobe. Susan was going to be appalled. There was a chance that I, too, was already appalled, but this was hard to pin down. When I was around Celeste’s magnetism, my moral compass malfunctioned. True north turned upside down; the dial bobbed and weaved.
Still, I could not stop clutching that credit card in my hand. Credit was promise. Promise of money, yes, but also promise of a future in which I could have anything I wanted and nothing could hurt. Not even the one-line rejection from the director of the organic dairy commercial saying, thanks but no thanks in response to my callback audition. Money, as Celeste said, made for excellent skin. You could love money, and everyone knows loving is way easier than being loved back.
Celeste’s hand was cold, even through my blazer. “Simone made a reservation for you and Ben at Horse & Stable for twelve-thirty. She should be sending an e-dossier too, with relevant asset info and the terms of creative brokering.”
“Asset?” She nodded. “Asset—author, right.”
Celeste removed her palm from my shoulder, a signal that I should stand. Which I did. “And Casey?” she said as I headed for the door, smoothing the butt of my dress.
I turned around. “Yeah?”
“For now Nanü is, for all intensive purposes, a need-to-know sort of project.”
“All intents and purposes,” I said without thinking.
Just the slightest nod toward irritation appeared in her upper right lip.
“But of course!” I said. “Yeah. Of course, yeah.”
“I’ll be bringing people on, a few at a time, assuming all goes well. But without a proof of concept I don’t see the need for any big announcement.”
“Sure, sure.”
“Just keep it on the down-low for a while.”
“Okay.” I shifted uncomfortably. “What should I say when people ask what I’m doing?”
“Tell them I’ve got you on a personal project or something.” Celeste lifted her bony shoulders. “They shouldn’t be asking anyway. They’ve got questions, they can come to me.”
“Okay.” I shifted again. Subterfuge was the sort of thing that wreaked havoc in the office. Too many women. Secrets drove us crazy, especially if they made it harder to figure out the pecking order. I think Celeste knew this, and so she used secrets cannily, tokens of power to be fought over and distributed. I was terrible at keeping them. Though I loved the power they afforded, I also hated their divisiveness. Even by being in Celeste’s office this long, I knew I was in for it when I got back to my desk. People would ask what I’d been doing in there, and it would take all the strength I had to keep my mouth shut. “No problem. Hakuna matata. Everyone’s going to know eventually, I guess, so no biggie.”
When she didn’t answer right away, I said, “Right?”
She walked back to her desk and sat down without looking at me. Maybe she hadn’t heard me. “Remember to tell Ben he’s not selling out. He’s buying in. This is what progress looks like.”
“Right,” I said, palming the credit card with affection the way Lindsey handled her crystals. I opened the glass door. Simone was sitting there, her desk angled so she appeared to Celeste’s visitors as a gatekeeper. She typed furiously at her keyboard, as if the matters at hand were of national significance instead of something like scheduling. With her silky blouses and slender neck and countless hours spent in hot yoga classes, she was the kind of girl who took pride in never buying her own drinks at night. “Guys buy them for me,” she’d say with a toss of her dark head. Though she was only five years younger than me, technology moved so fast she belonged to an entirely different generation. From the minute I met her, about a year earlier, I understood she had her heart set on stealing my job. “Are you married?” she’d purred, two seconds after we shook hands. When I shook my head, she said, “But you’re going to have kids, right?”
As I walked past her, she said, “Check your email,” in a voice that could frost the spring grass. The nerve! Her jealousy sunk fangs into my ass.
“I know,” I said. My voice was equally cold. “She already told me you sent it, thanks.”
I sounded like a thirteen-year-old, and I did not care. What I wanted to communicate to Simone but could not, directly, was: I AM VERY IMPORTANT! SHE THINKS I AM VERY IMPORTANT! WAY MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOU!
“Fine,” she said, giving me the old up-and-down, classic mean-girl stuff. “She also wants a status update after lunch.”
“I know,” I said again, though I didn’t.
“Fine. Enjoy your lunch then,” she said, and looked back at her computer.
“You enjoy your—” but there was nothing I wanted her to enjoy. Sometimes I think life would be a whole lot easier if we women could just admit when we didn’t like each other. Say it once, real loud, then give each other a wide berth instead of pretending to be friendly. “—coffee.”
“I will!” she said. A stevia voice: sweet with an acrid aftertaste. As I stalked away I thought: in future generations, may mothers teach their daughters to be straight with each other.
I did not have what psychologists would call a “great” relationship with men. Naturally, I blamed this on men, namely my father. Rake Pendergast was the kind of guy who did a lot of good for a lot of people and a lot of harm to a few. Because I was one of the few, I hated him with the ferocity of many—which maybe wasn’t fair, but what child is fair to her parents? A beloved motivational speaker, subregionally famous, Rake spent a majority of my childhood on the road, exhorting employees to rise to the challenges of the workplace and daring middle schoolers to resist drugs and alcohol. He was so convincing and—okay fine, inspiring—that about every third time we were out in public, someone would stop to thank him for either saving or changing their lives.
The way these strangers looked at him, their faces full of fear and hope and gratitude, embarrassed me with its false familiarity. My father never seemed to mind. “Come here,” he would say, opening and wrapping his big arms around them. Rake was built like a football player—he played wide receiver in college—and moved like one still. That he could crush these strangers with his embrace was precisely what they loved about him: people like to make themselves smaller to fit in something larger. Around Rake there was only one point of view, and this relieved people. They relaxed into his embrace the way a body softens to accept a blood draw or a shot going in.
Not me, though. Rake, for all the good he did, was also a depressive philanderer. It surprise
d me, even when I was young—too young, really—how seldom adults acknowledged these flaws in his character. Especially, for all her intelligence, my own mother. One of my first memories is when Louise and I dropped by his office, a modest two-room operation inside a shabby commercial building, unannounced. It was midday; I wasn’t in school yet, was maybe four. I remember my mother turning up the volume on the radio—a James Taylor song—in our brown Oldsmobile as she pulled into the parking lot. She reapplied lip balm and mascara using the rearview mirror and smoothed out my little cardigan, re-pinned my barrette. “You be good,” she said to me, which was something she said often.
When we entered the front office, after climbing two flights of stairs, I knew something was wrong because the air felt funny. Rake didn’t see us at first. He was sitting on the edge of his secretary Jeanine’s desk, leaning forward and laughing softly. “You and I are a lot alike,” he was saying. “I’ve always thought so.” Jeanine’s face was high with color as she fingered the chunky glass beads around her neck.
Jeanine saw us before my father did. I saw her drawn-on eyebrows raise, her lipsticked mouth curl into a cracked Oh. Her teal suit jacket with gold buttons was too big for her. At the sight of her expression my father turned around.
“Hi honey,” my mother said. I saw surprise move like the shadow of a manta ray across my father’s face before he rearranged it liquidly into a pleasant expression. “Well, look who it is,” he said, and moved with ease off the desk to give Louise a kiss on the cheek. He picked me up, and I felt the change between my two parents as clearly as I could feel temperature. I never liked it when my father held me. There was something sour in his body.
“Hi Louise!” Jeanine said too brightly. My mother smiled stiffly with her hands in half fists. My father kissed me on the temple. I moved my head away. “She’s a daddy’s girl,” he told Jeanine, and bounced me a little.
On the car ride home, Louise told me that we should feel sorry for Jeanine because she was a single mother who hadn’t gone to college. “It isn’t easy for those women,” she said. What had happened, she was saying, hadn’t actually happened. No, my mother never again brought up what Rake had said or the way he sat on Jeanine’s desk or why he used that slick-wet voice I didn’t recognize. She never brought up the drinking, either, nor the temper nor the late-night phone calls for which he’d disappear for hours into the garage. This turning of a blind eye from a woman who otherwise missed nothing continued to disorient me for years after, had perhaps disoriented my whole life. Love was a mental disorder, denial more than a river in Egypt. It turned out that if you closed your eyes you could believe anything, absolutely anything, about someone, even if all evidence pointed to the contrary.
Yes, yes. Louise was an empiricist, and she still got duped. I was an emoter, and I couldn’t help but rage on her behalf. Nary a moment would pass after my father came home from a business trip before—with the help of adolescent hormones—I would set upon him with complaints and accusations. They were the same ones Louise had but would never dare articulate as she stood there, with her damp rag, silently wiping the countertop. Why hadn’t he been there for my violin recital? Why did his coat smell like cigarettes? He was home three hours later than he said he’d be; where had he been?
Ah, but my father built his life and livelihood on the sands of unimpeachability. Look at how hard he worked, he’d shout, how much he did for us, how spoiled I’d become in my mother’s hands. “Stop it, both of you, stop it!” Louise would say. She had not the strength to fight him, and when he felt like it, Rake rewarded her weakness with affection. The worst fight we ever had, he got purple in the face and balled up his fists, and though he didn’t hurt me, he could have. That’s the day I realized my father would do anything to protect himself. Male lions kill cubs all the time, you know. Monkeys too.
* * *
—
Horse & Stable was one of those elevated american restaurants popping up everywhere those days, where traditional was trendy and simple meant expensive. Nestled in the warehouse district among skyrocketing rents and lofted condominiums, the building had once been used to mill blue-collar grain. Now the white-collar types who frequented it were triathletic men who talked loudly about microbrews, and women so smooth they looked like dolls from a mold. I’d been there before with people from PR, but never with Susan. Susan wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this.
Simone had reserved a table for two, but I took it upon myself to move the reservation to the bar. I didn’t want a block of reclaimed barn wood coming between Ben and me. There was an art to these types of conversations, a craftsmanship to the con. If I had learned anything from Rake, it was the art of persuasion. Even when he was in a checkout line, Rake would look at the sales clerk like he or she was the prime minister. In response, or in thrall, to his charisma, they’d fall all over themselves with gratitude. Sometimes we got discounts, sometimes free stuff. Celeste thought desire boiled down to money, but I, I thought it came down to value. People wanted to feel like they mattered, and the thing is, they rarely did. If you led them to this feeling, as Rake knew, they’d give you pretty much anything: trust, loyalty, coupons, and, as I’d learned through advertising, slavish brand allegiance.
Not to toot my own horn, but I was preternaturally good at making people feel good. At work, yes, Ellen was a case in point. But also in life. Women were trickier, but men, I could get them to do pretty much whatever I wanted. It’s hard to explain but I guess it boils down to this: I sensed what they were missing, and I gave it to them. Or was it that I emptied myself out, so they could fill me? Whatever the case, it did not hurt that I was a hellcat in bed.
Point is, I was unconcerned by the prospect of getting Ben Dickinson on board for Celeste. Why wouldn’t he, I practiced saying in my head, want to enter into an exciting new relationship with fountain pens? A relationship, per the e-dossier I’d grabbed from the printer before leaving the office, that could guarantee him enough money to last easily through the end of next year? My legs were bare and freshly shaved, spring’s latent sexual energy bursting from between them like a broke chrysalis. I smoothed my hair and tucked part of my bob behind my ear and thought: God help you, Mr. Dickinson, for the devil sure can’t.
I took out the printed pages from my purse and spread them out on the rustic wood of the bar. It was a few minutes before twelve-thirty, but I took the liberty of ordering my usual cocktail of beverages from a bearded, suspender-wearing man who looked like he belonged in a Jules Verne trilogy: hot water with lemon, coffee, Diet Coke, club soda, hot tea, and kombucha. I had read in a magazine that drinking liquids all day curbed your appetite and also detoxified your system. On my dating app profile, detoxification was one of the six things I couldn’t live without.
“Anything else?” Jules Verne asked, one bushy eyebrow raised.
“Why, yes,” I said, just to annoy him. “I would also like some cocktail peanuts.”
His face turned a shade of smug, something that was happening more frequently in upscale restaurants. Bartenders start using eyedroppers to make their own bitters, suddenly they’re God’s gift to the restaurant industry. “We don’t serve cocktail peanuts.”
“Well then,” I said. “I will have your finest bowl of warm olives. And please—no bread on the side.”
Jules Verne left, undoubtedly annoyed that he was being forced to wait on a customer. I turned back to the dossier. Ben’s biography was straightforward enough: three years older than me, grew up here, parents divorced, went East for college, moved to New York, dabbled in publishing, had a story published here and there, and then had made a splash in the literary world the previous fall—and a gentle wave outside of it—with his debut novel, Next Please, a comic romp through the trials and tribulations of an unemployment agency during the recession. He’d moved back here recently to help care for his mother, who’d sadly been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, but h
is publisher had him traveling a lot to shill the book. An investment like a book tour, I’d learned from hanging out with Susan and her friends, was rare in publishing, and I made a mental note to ask Susan, as soon as I got the nerve to tell her about this new venture, whether this investment could be chalked up to Ben’s talent or mere winsomeness. Likely it was both, since I saw that he’d made appearances on a couple late-night talk shows, which writers never got to do unless they were extremely charming and/or good-looking.
I learned, too, from the dossier that Waterman Quartz, the pen company in question, had been a respected firm back in the 1950s, but its reputation had slid steadily in the past couple of decades with the rise of emails and three-dollar packs of made-in-China pens. The line, WQ, that they wanted Ben to “support” on social media, was supposed to appeal to the kind of man who bought old-fashioned shaving kits and wore old-fashioned work boots and talked about “slowing down” and cooking “slow food.” A man like my bartender, Jules Verne, who seemed nostalgic for an era a hundred years before his birth. It seemed a profitable enough marketplace to me. Why, even on the walk to Horse & Stable I had passed a men’s store selling tin mugs and Swiss Army knives and something called raw denim.
Jules came back with my beverages and olives, and I became so engrossed with sipping, munching, and musing that I did not notice a man slipping into the cushioned bar stool next to mine and motioning to the bartender for a cup of coffee. When he tapped me on the shoulder I looked up and blurted out unthinkingly, “Shit! You’re him!”
“I am him,” he agreed. “If by that you mean I am me.”
Ben Dickinson looked nothing like he did in his author photo. His aspect in the photo in question was churlish intellectual: spectacles, prominent chin, humorless, scowling features. The guy in front of me wasn’t wearing spectacles and his hair was longer, a sandy mane. He looked younger, more good-natured; his face was inquisitive, handsomely unusual. He wore a velvet blazer, of all things, and of all things raw denim, both of which fit him well enough to reveal the lean physique of an athlete. The attraction I felt was so immediate that I instinctively crossed my legs.
A Lady's Guide to Selling Out Page 7