Chapter 9
Elena
“You need a system,” Nadia says, setting a bowl of pasta in front of me like she’s delivering a subpoena.
“That’s exactly what I have.”
“You have a survival instinct and a very forgiving boss.” She sits across from me and reaches for the parmesan. “Those are not the same thing. Write everything down. Every call, every request, every name. Get a notebook, not your phone, not a sticky note. A notebook you don’t lose.”
“I have never lost a notebook.”
She looks at me.
“I’ve misplaced notebooks. Temporarily.”
“Elena.”
“I’m writing things down. I write things down constantly.
The problem isn’t the writing, the problem is that the job doesn’t make sense to me.
It’s like being handed a piano and being told to just play it.
I can read music, theoretically, but my fingers don’t know where to go and the keys are all out of order and everyone is watching. ”
“That’s not how pianos work.”
“You know what I mean.”
She does. She eats for a second, the way she does when she’s decided not to say the thing she was going to say.
The apartment smells the way it always does, pasta and eucalyptus and the faint sweetness of the peonies she’s got in three different buckets by the window.
I love this smell. I’ve slept in it for over a month now and I’m starting to think I’ll miss it when I leave.
If I leave.
“You could get your own place now,” Nadia says. “You’re making real money.”
“I could get my own place if I was sure I’d keep making real money. Which I’m not.” I twist pasta around my fork. “He’s going to fire me eventually. I’m buying time.”
“You’ve been saying that since day three.”
“And I’ve been right to say it. I’m still waiting for the other shoe.”
“What if there is no other shoe?”
I consider this seriously, the way it deserves to be considered.
No other shoe. A future in which Patrick Aldera continues to employ me indefinitely, despite the scheduling errors and the transferred calls and the incident with the Ferrante meeting that I still can’t think about without my chest tightening.
A future where I keep showing up, keep pretending to manage the inbox, keep bringing cookies and asking if he slept well, and he keeps answering in monosyllables and not firing me.
It’s not the worst future I’ve ever imagined.
It is, in fact, the second-best future I’ve imagined this week. The first one involves Broadway and is not happening anytime soon, and I know this, and I’ve made peace with it, mostly, in the way you make peace with things you refuse to fully accept.
The money is good. That’s what I tell myself when the emails blur and the phone rings in a register that means whoever is calling is already annoyed and I haven’t even picked up yet.
The money is good and the view from the fortieth floor is genuinely spectacular and there is a plant on my desk that is thriving under my care.
And then there’s the other reason. The one I haven’t mentioned out loud to anyone, not even to Nadia, who is currently looking at me with the focused attention of a woman who knows I’m not telling her something.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing.” She refills her water. “You have a look.”
“I don’t have a look.”
“You have your private-thoughts look. The one where you’re somewhere else entirely and you think your face isn’t giving it away.”
“My face isn’t giving anything away.”
She lets it go, which means she’s storing it for later.
Nadia is a long-game person. She’ll wait until I’m three glasses of wine in and off my guard, and then she’ll ask again, and I’ll tell her something I didn’t mean to tell her and she’ll file it away with everything else she knows about me that I’ve never officially said out loud.
What I haven’t told her: I have been writing a love story.
It lives in a folder on my work computer called “filing notes Q4” which contains no filing notes whatsoever and approximately fourteen thousand words of a romantic narrative in which Patrick Aldera is a slightly more talkative version of himself and I’m a slightly braver version of myself and the things that happen between us are, frankly, not appropriate for office hours.
Only Bernard and the peace lily know about this. Neither of them is going to tell.
“Okay,” Nadia says, and I know from her tone that we’ve arrived at the thing she’s actually been building toward since she put the pasta on. “One month.”
“One month.”
“In one month, has a wife called the office?”
I see where this is going. “No.”
“Has he mentioned a wife? A girlfriend? Anyone?”
“He barely mentions himself.”
“Has he worn a ring?”
“He doesn’t wear jewelry.”
“Has he been unavailable in a pattern that suggests a person waiting at home for him?”
I think about this honestly. He stays late.
He cancels evenings sometimes but not with the regularity of someone managing a relationship.
He talks about Erick—his son, I know that now, in the weeks since the Chinese food evening, I’ve picked up enough fragments—but never in a way that includes anyone else in that picture.
“No,” I say.
Nadia spreads her hands. “So, there’s no wife.”
“Or she’s incredibly independent and uses his cell phone and he’s so private that she would never have had any reason to call the office line and I would never know.”
“Elena.”
“That’s a real possibility.”
“You are working very hard to talk yourself out of something. You clearly like him. You are terrible at the job, the man hasn’t fired you, you could make things interesting.”
“I’m working very hard to be realistic about my employment situation.”
“Seduce him,” she says. Just like that, fork in hand, completely unbothered.
I put my fork down. “Nadia.”
“I’m serious. You’re already there. You’re already making him food and asking about him and dressing like you’re trying to get his attention, which you are, don’t look at me like that. So, either you keep doing the slow approach until one of you retires, or you do something about it.”
“Seducing my boss is not something I do.”
“Why not?”
Because I would combust. Because the idea of actually turning the full force of my attention on Patrick Aldera in a deliberate, intentional way, and having him look at me, actually look at me, with any awareness at all of what I’m doing…
“Because it’s complicated,” I say.
“Only if you make it complicated. It doesn’t have to be a whole thing. It can just be…” she shrugs, “ a thing. You’re both adults.”
I look at her across the table. My sister, who has been having efficient, no-drama affairs with various men since she was twenty and treats the whole enterprise with the same practical energy she brings to flower sourcing.
I have never been able to do this. I stayed with Ryan for two years out of sheer inability to locate the exit when I knew the exit was necessary.
I’ve never had a fling in my life. I’ve never been the kind of person who just decides she wants something and takes it.
But I’ve been thinking about it.
Specifically, about what it would mean to decide I want this, as a contained, defined, temporary thing.
Not a love story. Not the version I’ve been writing in the folder on my computer.
Just the other thing. The thing that would be, if I’m being genuinely honest with myself, the most spectacular achievement in the romantic history of Elena Brown, whose previous roster includes Ryan, who thought Dutch courage meant not splitting the bill, and a man in Colorado who broke up with her via voicemail to say he was “simplifying.”
Patrick Aldera as a fling. That’s the sentence I won’t say out loud. I sit with it privately for a second and it feels like holding something too warm.
“Maybe,” I say.
Nadia points her fork at me. “Maybe is yes with extra steps.”
“Maybe is maybe.”
We finish dinner and migrate to the couch, and somewhere between the second glass of wine and the conversation circling back to the apartment question, we make a decision.
No new place yet. Not until I know the job is stable.
But I’m buying a better pull-out. The current one has a bar running directly through the center that I’ve been waking up on every morning like a human croissant.
I’ll buy a real one, with an actual mattress inside it.
They make those. I’ve looked into it. You can have a pull-out couch with a mattress that has springs and everything, a mattress that doesn’t suggest you’ve done something to deserve this.
Nadia considers this a reasonable compromise and only mentions “seducing your boss” twice more before I go to sleep.
The next morning I’m at my desk by eight and I’ve started keeping a private taxonomy.
I’ve been doing it unconsciously for weeks, I realize, cataloguing the ways Patrick looks in my direction, filing each variation for later analysis. Now I’m doing it deliberately. It’s research. It’s character study. It’s absolutely necessary.
There’s the Exasperated Look, which involves a very slight tightening around the eyes and an almost imperceptible exhale. This is his response to things like misfiled documents and incorrect bookings. I know this look well.
There’s the Furious Look, which looks almost identical to his regular face but carries a different atmospheric pressure. I can feel it before I see it. The room changes temperature.
There’s the look I’ve privately labeled The One, which I clock approximately twice a week and which involves him glancing at me when he thinks I’m not watching. It lasts less than two seconds. It does not look like how you look at an employee you find professionally adequate.
And then there’s today’s look.