by Jonathan Dee
Helen could not believe her ears. It was plain from the studiously passive look on Mona’s face that she had known this was in the works for some time and had shown where her loyalties lay by choosing not to mention it.
“But I thought—” Helen said and then couldn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t know anymore what she’d thought. Nevaeh, standing in front of her desk, looked down at her with a kind of curtailed pity.
“My aunt got me a job down at the Department of Housing,” she said. “I wish the best for y’all here, but that’s a city job, and city jobs ain’t going anywhere. This here, I can’t live with the uncertainty.”
Helen was very sensitive to any assumption that she was the boss of this place; true, her title had been senior to theirs (even if titles had always had an element of whimsical inflation around there), and from the day of Harvey’s death they had looked expectantly to her not because they thought she knew better but because they just didn’t have the interest or commitment to it that she did. But race, she often felt, made the whole dynamic too complicated. She felt that way right now. The three of them were still crowded into the one outer room: no one would have stopped her if she’d moved her few things onto Harvey’s desk, but she still hadn’t done it.
“Isn’t it customary to give two weeks’ notice?” Helen said.
Nevaeh shrugged genially.
Helen must have looked especially discouraged after Nevaeh walked out, because Mona actually broke character and tried to cheer her up. “One less salary to come up with every week,” she said, cocking her head. “That keeps us going that much longer. There wasn’t that much for her to do anyway.”
“You’re right,” Helen said, her eyes stinging. “Of course you’re right. Why can’t I just think of it that way?”
“Course, I’m looking around myself,” Mona said, turning back to her computer screen. Maybe she meant she was looking right now, Helen thought. “You should be, too. I mean it’s fine to hope, but when you’re responsible for others, you got to make sure they’re covered by something besides just hope, you know what I’m talking about?” Helen actually thought for a moment that Mona was talking about herself, that she meant to say that Helen was now responsible for her; but no, of course not, she was referring to Sara, who in Mona’s eyes, even though the two women spent eight hours a day together, was the single most real thing about her.
They were not overly taxed by the amount of work they had left to do. It was simple stuff, even though Mona had to explain to Helen a lot of the nuts and bolts of it: how to get out a press release for a nightclub that was applying for a license on a residential block in the West Village and needed some positive coverage; how to gratify a Korean merchants’ association out in Flushing that wanted some publicity for its modest charity work; how to talk patiently to a man in Floral Park who had bought up the trademarks for various boomer junk foods, such as Screaming Yellow Zonkers, and was convinced he could make a killing by reviving them. Mona and Helen took the train all the way out to Queens to meet that guy, at his pompous insistence, and then it turned out he was living and working in his married sister’s basement. But somehow, miraculously, his checks kept clearing. That contract had another four months to run. Each of these little short-term contracts expired in the same way: with a handshake from the client, a rueful “So tragic about Harvey,” and then done. No talk of renewal. Helen split each fee between payroll and the skeletal office expenses and Scapelli the lawyer, who emailed irregular updates on Harvey’s shrinking posthumous debt. That was satisfying, as was the thought of actually handing Michael a check when all was said and done. Still, there was something inescapably gloomy about winding the business down like this. It was like Harvey’s death all over again, only with a bedside vigil this time. Helen would have lowered her own salary for Michael’s sake, but there was just no way she could afford it. Mona spent about a third of every workday looking at online listings for other jobs; Helen knew she should be doing the same but somehow couldn’t rouse herself, those days, to think more than one step ahead.
At around four o’clock one Thursday afternoon, Michael showed up at the office, unannounced. He seemed shaken by the look of surprise on Helen’s face. “I thought maybe that website idea we talked about,” he said waveringly. “Of course,” Helen said, ignoring Mona’s indiscreetly raised eyebrows, and she showed him to the computer terminal on his father’s desk.
“He’s designing a webpage for the agency,” she whispered to Mona as she sat down again. “It’s something we really should have.”
“Why?” Mona said and then waved her hands in front of her as if to erase her own question. “What does he expect to be paid for his time?”
Helen made a zero with her thumb and forefinger.
“Like father, like son,” Mona said. “Well, I am leaving here at five either way.”
“Me too,” said Helen, “but he’ll be fine here, we’ll give him a key,” and then she had a brainstorm.
“Michael?” she said, leaning against the doorjamb between the offices. “I just had a thought. One of our last remaining clients is a nightclub that’s opening downtown. That’s a business I know absolutely nothing about. How would you feel about handling that account with me? Figuring out what past problems have been with license applications, how to avoid them, how to put the owners in the best possible light?”
Michael had been scowling at his father’s computer, which was less than state of the art, for most of this pitch. He blinked up at her. “What’s the name of the club?”
“Repentance,” Helen said.
He sighed. “That would be pretty awkward for me,” he said. “I know those guys. So no.” He began typing again, and Helen went back to her desk, more crestfallen than ever, not entirely sure what it was she’d been trying to make happen anyway.
She got home on time that night—there was nothing to keep her at work late, nor was there any real reason to take work home on the train—and when she rolled down the car window to pull the day’s mail out of the box at the top of the driveway, she found a plump, oversize manila envelope from the office of Joe Bonifacio. It had no stamp on it: he must have driven it over himself, to save the postage. Inside the dark garage she turned the engine off and opened the envelope, and there she found her divorce papers, ready for her signature.
“There is nothing to eat in this place” was how Sara greeted her when she walked into the vestibule. “And I did not think it was even possible to get sick of pizza but I cannot eat pizza again, like ever.”
Helen got back in the car and drove to the IGA for a chicken, thinking that they couldn’t really afford to be ordering out all the time anyway; on her way home she stopped at the liquor store and bought a bottle of Gewürztraminer, which she hadn’t had for years because Ben was a wine snob and couldn’t bear even the smell of it. She cooked dinner, and cleaned the broiler, and did the dishes, and then when Sara was in bed she took the Gewürztraminer out of the refrigerator and filled one of the big wineglasses to about a quarter inch from the top. She pulled the divorce papers out of her purse and told herself that she would set aside for reminiscence only the time it took her to get to the end of that glass of wine: when it was empty, she would sign and be done with it. At this point looking at her own past felt to her like standing with your heels on the edge of a subway platform: losing your balance was obviously a bad idea, but if you thought about it too hard you’d go over anyway.
She knew she’d fallen for all the wrong things in Ben—his confidence, his ease in social situations, the way she’d catch him staring at her, the life free from want that seemed like a lock in the company of the kind of man who knew exactly where he was headed. He was so smart. His mind was always going. He treated her more gently than any man, in her admittedly thin experience, had ever treated her. She used to ask him to tell her what to read, what to wear, what to order; if, later in life, she found this same sort of input from him invasive or condescending, that wasn’t really
his fault—the change was in her. She had come to the city after college with the money left to her by her father when he passed away her senior year, money that would not last long, no matter how frugal she was with it. He was in his third year of law school, with a job offer already in hand, and she was working for Ralph Lauren. It seemed as decent a job as any other. She was not a shallow person by any means, but she had no sense of a calling. He was in the city for the weekend, and a friend of Helen’s fixed them up. The friend had been out with Ben once herself. “You will love him,” she said. “Personally I like them a little more malleable.” Helen did love him, and he found her worth loving too, and as clear and shameful as it seemed in retrospect that what had drawn them together was his self-regard and her naïveté, still, even on that foundation, they had been happy for many years.
They had even stayed happy, and boundlessly supportive, through the sad struggle to conceive a child, the three miscarriages, the last of which changed the tone of her doctor’s voice dramatically. She had never been told that she was barren—no woman under sixty was ever told that nowadays, it seemed—but faced with the obstacles involved, the drugs and the nine months lying in bed and the long odds against ending up anywhere other than where they had ended up three times already, they decided to adopt. That way they could still be parents at what seemed like a reasonable age. Thirteen months and two trips to China and a move to the suburbs and a lot of Ben’s money later, they brought home Sara, eleven months old, the best day of all their lives. One child seemed like such a blessing at that point that two was something they had never even discussed.
She stopped working, while Ben of course still put in long days in the city, and somewhere in those years, static though they seemed in every respect other than the growth of Sara herself, the great drift took place. His life and her life were shaped like parentheses that came closest to touching at the very beginning and the very end of every day. Sex, when they had it, became for Helen a form of denial, the way some couples will point to their children’s good report cards as evidence that everything at home is actually okay. They didn’t fight about anything—it wasn’t really their nature; instead she just watched her husband’s face turn slowly blank, and decided to attribute it to the demands of his job. He made partner, and Sara grew into a child with no hidden developmental surprises other than an extraordinary gift for sports, and Helen, at some point, forgot to find anything else to want from life, and this had turned her into a boring person, a burden, a part of the upkeep, and she might have floated along mindlessly like that forever, or at least until Sara went off to college, were it not for the fact that her lack of inner resources had driven her husband insane. She drank off the last of her wine, signed her name to the divorce papers, stuffed them back into her purse, and walked unsteadily down the hall to bed.
The next morning she found a message on her office desk, left there the night before by Michael: “A Congressman called,” it said. That didn’t seem right, particularly when accompanied by a 718 phone number. Helen dialed it. “Councilman Bratkowski’s office,” a woman’s voice answered. Councilman, congressman, whatever, Helen laughed to herself as she sat on hold; but something about the name rang a bell. Holding the phone with her shoulder, she Googled his name and hit Return, and she saw what it was just at the moment the councilman’s voice boomed over the line.
“So you are still in business?” he said jovially. “The guy I talked to last night told me Harvey Aaron was dead, which my condolences. You’re the folks who handled the Peking Grill strike, right?”
An hour later, Helen was on the subway out to Elmhurst, a ride long enough to give her time to read through that day’s Post and Daily News, much of which was devoted to the reason she’d been called. Doug Bratkowski, a two-term councilman with a wife and three teenage children, had been caught on a building surveillance camera in the Bronx, beating a young woman purported to be his mistress. Helen had seen the silent, fifteen-second clip online as she pulled her coat on: first an empty hallway, then a large figure in an overcoat pulling a much smaller woman into the frame by her long hair; she pushes away from him, hits him weakly in the chest, and then he punches her in the face. Prodding her down the stairs ahead of him, he turns to scan the hallway behind them, and at that point his face, though bloated with anger, is clearly identifiable.
“Please have a seat,” the councilman said, closing the door behind them. His office might have belonged to a storefront lawyer, with fake white paneling and a breakfront that looked like it was made of particleboard. On his desk, facing outward, were framed photos of his family, and one of himself shaking hands with Mayor Bloomberg, both men facing the camera rather than each other.
“Will anyone else be joining us?” Helen asked.
Even his smile was like a hand on her shoulder. “Best to keep the loop as small as possible in times like these, I think. Here is where we stand. The young woman in question is not pressing any charges. She has been publicly named, though, and I’m sure the tabloids have all got their checkbooks out. At some point she may crack, I don’t know. So what I need is to figure out how to limit my exposure, not legally, but … well, you’re the pro, you must know what I’m talking about.”
He was a bear of a man, red-faced even when calm, with the tracks of a comb clearly visible in his hair. Helen fought down her fear of him. “Were you having an affair with this woman, Councilman?” she asked.
He affected surprise and smiled again. “Call me Doug,” he said. “Is that strictly relevant to what you need to do?”
She wasn’t sure it was. But she found herself needing to know it anyway. “Think of me as you would think of a lawyer,” Helen said. “I cannot be in a position where I am taken by surprise by information the other side has and I don’t.”
He nodded. “Well then, yes,” he said. “Assuming we have the seal of the confessional here, I was, and am, having an affair with the young woman on the tape. For about two years now. My wife, who is currently not speaking to me, did not know about it until the day before yesterday. There’s no love child or anything like that. I never spent any public money on her, I never hired her for any phony campaign job. She is,” he said, “just this smoking hot Latina chick I have been banging on the side, just like millions of people do all over the world every day. Does that give you everything you need to work with?”
She recrossed her legs and resmoothed her skirt, just to give herself a few seconds. Then, with great effort, she stared back right into his eyes. “The way I see it, there’s really only one way for you to go,” she said. “You tell the woman who answers the phone out there that all media inquiries are to be forwarded to me. I will announce that you’ll be delivering a statement tonight at, let’s say, eight-thirty, plenty of time for the late news and for tomorrow’s papers. I don’t know what your home looks like, but if the optics are right, we can do it there—outside, not inside—and if not, we can do it here, I suppose. Little cramped, though.”
“And what will I be saying?” the councilman asked evenly.
“You will admit to everything. You will apologize to this young woman, by name, for your violent behavior. You will not use any phrases like ‘moment of weakness’ or ‘regrettable incident.’ You will apologize to your wife, and to your children, and to your parents if they are still alive, and to your constituents whether they voted for you or not, and to women everywhere. Basically, you will get up in front of the cameras and make an offering of yourself.”
Some of the redness drained from his face as she spoke; she could feel, as she’d felt before, the power her words gave her over him. “You really think that’s the play?” he said.
“That is the only play. To ask forgiveness. If you hold back in any way, the story lives. Let me ask you this: presumably you are a man with ambitions. What do you want to happen now? What is the outcome that will put those ambitions back on the track that your own mistakes threw them off of?”
He tipped back noiselessly in hi
s chair. “I want to stay in office,” he said. “I want to be reelected. This was a stupid thing for me to have done, but it does not define me. It was a one-time thing, and I want to get away from it.”
“You will never get away from it,” Helen said. “But you can incorporate it into the narrative. You have to be sincere. You have to be completely abject, and not attempt to defend yourself or your behavior in any way. No ‘I was drunk,’ no ‘she hit me first.’ You have to take, and answer, every question. You have to hold your temper when people try to get you to lose it. Do you think you can do that?”
“Should my wife be there?” he said.
Helen considered it. She was sure just from talking to him that, for better or worse, he could make it happen. “Depends,” she said. “Depends on the look on her face.”
His eyes drifted off to one side for a few seconds. “Okay, probably not, then,” he said. “Listen, don’t take this the wrong way, but this had better work. It’s not really my nature to get up in front of a bunch of cameras and show my ass like that.”
“It’s not about your nature, it’s about everybody else’s. And it will work. This way and no other.”
He stood and lifted Helen’s coat off the chair beside her, holding it as she turned her back to him and inserted her shaking hands. “You know,” he said, “for what it’s worth, this was the first time I ever raised my hand to her.”
“That,” she said, “is exactly the kind of thing I don’t ever want you to say to anybody but me.”
IT WORKED; she knew it would work, even without completely understanding why. In her faith in the tactic of total submission she felt herself delivering a kind of common-sense rebuke not just to her ex-husband and his lawyer but to legal minds everywhere. She stood shivering behind the councilman, out of camera range, on the front stoop of his Elmhurst row house for an hour and forty minutes, and he was so good she found it hard to doubt how sincere he was. Even with a unanimous motion to censure him in the city council, it was out of the news in four days.