Business, I told myself. Business business business business business.
I opened my mouth to talk, but for once I couldn’t find anything to say. So I sat there, mute, until he reached out his hand.
“Ben Dickinson,” he said. “Jesus, I hope I am who you’re waiting for. The hostess said your name was—”
His hand was warm and dry. Touching him revived something in me, or ignited it. “Casey Pendergast,” I said. “Creative director at People’s Republic, interlocutor for Nanü, Celeste Winter’s right-hand woman. Pleasure to meet you.”
“Pleasure’s all mine,” Ben said. His smile took up a fair amount of his face. There were faint lines on his face, around his mouth and eyes, the impishness of a well-used boyhood. It was one of those smiles you couldn’t help but smile back at: a mirroring, connecting impulse. Electricity zinged down my spine and straight into my pelvis. I thought: to see a grown man smile like a boy is one of the lesser-sung pleasures of this life.
I recrossed my legs, adjusting the hem of my dress. “How are you?”
Ben slid out of his stool. He stood and angled his body toward mine, so close I could catch the scent of man shampoo: crisp and piney. He nodded toward my clatter of beverages. “What are we drinking?”
“Don’t you mean,” I said, having recovered myself, “what aren’t we drinking?”
He looked at me. No, he looked into me. My body throbbed.
“I’m going to like you,” he said, and then leaned over the bar with two fingers up and ordered a couple of whiskeys.
* * *
—
My God. So annoying, and yet so exquisite, to be in the position I usually put other people in. Ben was one of those people you couldn’t say no to, and believe me, I tried. “You’re terrible!” I said, some two hours later, slinging back an oyster in a half shell and washing it down with a flute of champagne. The lunch crowd had petered out by then, and it was just the two of us at the bar, the restaurant nearly empty.
“You’re terrible,” he said, chucking down his own oyster. “Profligate spender of company money.”
“Who said this was on the company?”
“You did, half a drink in.”
“No, I said it was on the company if you behaved yourself.”
“My sense is you’d rather I didn’t.”
We were like that right away, he and I, falling into a repartee that signaled, as it always does, that we immediately wanted to bed each other. Talk like that, it’s as good as sex, sometimes better; an attraction both rare and beyond reason. Unreasonable, even. Causes decent people to throw whole lives away and indecent ones to do worse. I mean, I’d met Ben solely to pitch and close the deal, and yet for hours all I could do was banter and catch his eye while in the meantime my body burned.
It was not just that Ben was handsome, intelligent, funny. I’d been with plenty of guys who possessed such qualities, though admittedly rarely all three. There was something else. We were, from the get-go, like tennis partners, well matched. What exactly matched between us was harder to say, but I felt this matching as soon as he sat down beside me, and I know he felt it too. Which was why I could not pull myself away from the pleasure I took merely in sitting beside him, seeing his eyes light up and crinkle when he laughed, his posture lively and erect.
Jules Verne glided up to us. “How’s everything tasting?” he said to Ben. Since Ben’s arrival, he’d begun to address questions to him exclusively.
“Great!” I said. I used a lot of tone. I wanted this tone to say: hey bucko, look at me, I am not this man’s enfeebled hausfrau; I’m the bad bitch who’s about to pay for everything.
“Anything else I can bring you two?” he said to Ben.
“We’ll take the check,” I said to him.
Ben looked at me with mock horror. “So soon?”
“Some of us have to work, you know.”
Jules Verne looked back and forth between us. “So…” he said to Ben. “The check?”
Ben waved Jules off. “Thanks. We don’t need the check just yet.”
“We’ll take the check,” I said imperiously. “Thank you.”
“I’ll give you a couple minutes,” Jules said. As soon as he was out of earshot, I let out a whuff of displeasure.
“Do you see how he does that?” I said. “Only talks to you?”
“Guy’s an idiot. Anyway, I work too, you know.”
“Sure you do.”
“I also play video games and keep up on Reddit.”
“Ah, that’s comforting,” I said. “Captain of industry, right here.”
Ben leaned back in his stool and crossed his arms, cocking his head to the side as if working out a puzzle in his brain. He put his feet on the rungs of my stool with a sense of ownership I found both irritating and extremely sexy. “You’re a bit of a workhorse, aren’t you.”
“Psssh. Me? Who just allowed you to turn a business lunch into a three-martini party? Yes, that’s right,” I said, leaning forward. “I allowed you. Because I’m generous.”
“I bet it’s surprising to some, since you come off initially like a wild child. But look,” he said, spreading his arms out wide. “We’re getting to know each other. Establish rapport. You can’t rush that.”
“We don’t need to get to know each other. This is a business meeting, not a date to see if we’re likely to breed and buy real estate. What I need for you to do is sign a few papers and be on your merry way.”
He smiled. That smile. I smiled back because: biology.
“You want to buy real estate with me?”
“Oh, please.”
“I’m flattered.”
“You shouldn’t be. I said that’s not what this is. I already own real estate, thank you, and I only brought that up to explain—”
“A condo of one’s own, is it? You strike me as the condo type.”
I was getting flustered. He was more in control of this than I was, which I didn’t like. As Oscar Wilde said, everything was about sex except sex. Sex was about—
“Into girl power, and all that feminist jazz,” Ben continued.
Jules Verne appeared again, and I snatched the black folder out of his hand and stuck the gold credit card inside. “Thank you so much,” I said. “Everything was delicious.”
“And for the record, I’m not a workhorse,” I informed Ben after Jules went off to swipe the card. “I’m a fun horse.”
Ben laughed, genuinely.
“Can we talk shop for, like, a second?” I said, checking my watch. “We’ve been here for—God, I don’t even know how long. Walk me back to my office. Obviously we’re getting nothing done here.”
Jules reappeared with the receipt and a pen, and as I scribbled my name on the exorbitant tab, Ben stood and placed my blazer, which I’d shrugged off hotly at one point, upon my shoulders. He left his hands there for a second, and I felt something I had felt only a few times in my life: a man’s protective instinct, different from possessiveness. There was, beneath his cleverness, solid good-heartedness. He had returned home, despite the prestige and attention he was getting elsewhere, to care for his mother. In that moment I found myself strangely honored by his attentions: that he would see through and still accept me.
* * *
—
The walk back to the office was brisk and efficient. I told him what Waterman Quartz was asking him to do, and he seemed more amused than anything. He asked what the workload would be, and I guessed that it would be one, maybe two hours a day, especially if he scheduled posts ahead of time. The trick with social media was to appear like you were always working, I explained, not to always be working, so if he had a busy week he could front-load a bunch of photographs, status updates, and whatnot, line them up, and have a social media deck fire them off for him. He considered this for a moment, and then agreed
faster than I had expected that he would.
The money, he explained, was so he could hire an in-home aide for his mother, whose decline was more rapid than anyone had expected. He was loath to put her in a nursing facility, but she became confused when left by herself for too long, and her husband, Ben’s stepfather, worked all day. From Ben’s tone of voice I understood that he did not like his stepfather. The money from his book was good, he said, better than most, and there were promises from his agent and editor that another contract was in the works for his second, but none of it was substantial or steady enough to support both him and his mother. “It’s a clusterfuck, really,” he said. “Sometimes I wish I’d gone into accounting.”
I screwed up my face. “Do you really, though?”
He laughed, and reached his arm up to brush the budding springtime leaves of one of the trees that lined the sidewalk. “No. Sometimes I wish I wished. Mostly I’m okay with the fact that I’ll never be rich. But my mom—”
“I understand,” I said. And I did, or I thought I did, or I tried my very best to.
“Say,” I said after a minute. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. My best friend’s a writer.”
“Yeah? Who?”
I told him about Susan. “She hasn’t published anything yet. She’s a genius, honestly, a virtuosic talent, but she just gets so—I dunno, heady, I guess, about putting herself out there.”
“Happens frequently with writers, as you might imagine.”
“It’s like she’s terrified to make a single move because she sees too many possible outcomes or consequences to that move, like on a chessboard. She simultaneously lives only in the past and, like, twenty years ahead of the rest of us.”
Ben glanced over at me. “You’re very observant.”
I shrugged, blushed. “I try.”
We walked in silence for a minute. A man busking on the sidewalk began a pan flute rendition of “My Heart Will Go On.”
“I’ve been thinking about her a lot today because I’m sort of dreading hearing what she has to say about Nanü—I mean, about you working with us. She’s going to compare it to the Fall of Rome. She literally compares everything to the Fall of Rome. Caligula—is that the emperor’s name? The guy that started out okay then devolved into a greedy tyrant?”
Ben laughed. “Why?”
“I’m just saying, Susan hates advertising. Plus she has sort of a—an exaggerated view of the artist’s role in society.”
“I get that. Most artists in their twenties do.”
“And older. Hel-lo, James Baldwin.”
“Hello, English major.” Ben side-eyed me appreciatively. “Who knows, maybe Nanü is the Fall of Rome. But honestly, the older I get, the less able I am to see the world in absolutes. For me, working for Waterman Quartz isn’t representative of anything except the fact that I need money to help my mom out.”
“Susan wouldn’t buy that. She’d say something about the—oh, what would she say—the systemic degradation of language into quote-unquote salable content in which you’re now complicit.”
“To which I’d say, artists’ve always made shit for the sole purpose of making money. You think those old masters painted a bunch of old women with dogs in their laps because they were called on by the Muse?”
I made a mental note to remember that line. As we kept walking, we passed by a toothless woman panhandling, her cardboard sign saying something about homelessness and sickness and anything at all would help. I never knew what to do when I saw such people. Louise had taught me never to give money because, she’d say with a wrinkled nose, you never knew what they would do with it. But that reason never felt good enough for me to justify walking past these folks, straight-faced, gaze ahead, pretending, for my own sake, that I lived in a world where they did not exist. A few years before I’d taken to keeping granola bars in my purse to give away, but one time a burly flanneled guy, clearly mentally ill, had pushed the offering away in a frothed-up fury. “I don’t want your filthy food!” he’d slurred. “Gimme your filthy money!” After that I had kicked the habit.
Ben stopped, dug into his back pocket, and pulled five dollars out of his wallet. “Thank you,” the toothless woman murmured. “Beautiful couple. God bless.”
It seemed silly to explain to her that we were not a couple, seeing as we’d likely never see her again. Plus the sound of the words pleased me, like an unresolved chord resolving in my head.
“We’re not a couple,” Ben said to her, dissonantly clanging me back into the present.
“Definitely not,” I said for good measure.
“Beautiful couple,” she said again. Her eyes had a film over them, the way eyes get when they look out onto a world only they can see. “A lot of hair.”
We laughed about that as we continued. It was true: we each had a good head of hair. Though normally I hated the “we” that so many couples used, I understood that afternoon, or re-understood, why people did it. We’ve got a lot of hair. It was a tool of sorts with which you could knock down the hard jail bars of the I. Outside those bars, you could stand up a little straighter. We’re in this together.
We passed a popular Mexican place, a fast-food chain that had taken over the industry with pound-and-a-half burritos and promises of healthfulness, naturalness, organics. Just the year before, famous authors’ words had started appearing on the company’s take-out bags. Bon mots, poems, quotes you could easily digest. This seemed to give further credence to Ben’s point: writers and corporations had a normal, even symbiotic relationship.
But I remembered what Susan had said when we’d stopped at the restaurant last fall for burritos to-go on our way to the movies, right around the time this ad campaign started. On her paper soda cup had been a little story from one of the great white men of our current century. A little story, in fact, that I liked a great deal. Something about kindness and change. But as soon as Susan saw it, her face darkened and closed. “What the hell are they doing?” she’d said.
I’d been digging into my bag for a handful of tortilla chips and hadn’t seen her furious expression. With my mouth full I’d said, “What’re who doing?”
“Bullshit neoliberal propaganda,” she’d said. She had raised her voice to address the entire restaurant. “You guys know that this meat is constantly getting recalled for E.coli and none of the food is actually good for you, right? That they’re just trying to make money?” She held up her cup and pointed to the story. “This guy? They paid him to manipulate you into forgetting all that with this gauzy bullshit feelgoodery. But you see any voices of color on these cups? You think any of the people behind the counter will see a wage increase if this entitled dude’s story causes sales to spike? Stay woke, people. Life’s too short to buy into this fuckery.” And with that she’d thrown her cup, along with her uneaten burrito, straight into the trash.
My first thought as she stalked out of the restaurant was: oh, come on.
My second: even if she gets hangry at the movies, she is not allowed any of my burrito.
Burning with embarrassment—although, what did I care, the people staring were people I’d never see again—I’d followed her outside, where she’d been trying unsuccessfully to light her cigarette. As she turned the lighter over and over with a grating click, cigarette dangling from her mouth, she said, “I cannot believe that motherfucker signed on to shill burritos. Give me a fucking break.”
“Actually he didn’t say anything about the burritos—” I’d started, but stopped when I saw Susan glaring at me. Our patience for each other had been eroding steadily for years by then, but slowly enough that we could look straight ahead instead of down, distracting ourselves, pretending the common ground beneath our feet wasn’t disappearing. Once in a while, though, events demanded we clock the loss. This clocking had such a cataclysmic effect that the first time it happened I had to take to my bed for two days to wat
ch British television. This was maybe a year after I began working for PR, after I’d invited Susan to be my date at one of the award ceremonies advertisers are constantly throwing for themselves. I’d picked her up wearing a rented Dolce & Gabbana dress and my first pair of designer shoes; Susan had slid into the car wearing Timberlands and a torn rayon dress. “I didn’t have time to shower,” she’d said, shrugging.
That night Susan had proceeded to get riotously drunk and talk heated nonsense while sitting with her legs splayed wide in her chair. I knew Susan drank too much when she was nervous, but there was something else to her drunkenness that night. Susan had a destructive streak: her capacity to ruin was just as powerful as her capacity to create. What she was saying to me that night through her actions was I don’t respect any of this. And there was nothing I could do about her acting out, which is precisely why she did it.
Our fight came to a head in the bathroom. Lots of tense words and arms crossed followed by crying. Eventually we forgave each other, but you don’t forget these moments: they form patterns in the mind. They leave a bone bruise.
Walking with Ben, feeling the movement of his fingers just inches away from mine, I shook these memories from my head. Susan was intractable; I was not. That’s what made me so good at my job. I was no philosopher, no moral imperialist; I didn’t even know what neoliberalism meant. As much as I’d admired Susan’s principles over the years, they could be, on a day-to-day basis, extremely off-putting. Lecturing an entire fast-food restaurant on the dangers of propaganda? People don’t respond well to moralizing, I could have told her, but Susan wouldn’t have listened. She couldn’t read people the same way I could. She was interested in them, but only in the abstract. After zero real inquiry or curiosity about them, she came up with stories about them in her head. If you thought about it, that was no more charitable than encouraging these same people to buy burritos.
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