Seventeen
My father is firmly ensconced in Switzerland. It is beautiful, writes Scarlett, with views across the mountains and a large,
luxurious room. He has not eaten solid food in two weeks. Instead, they are flooding his body with organic juices, hoping
the nutrients will stimulate his own immune system into fighting back. He is taking something called artemisinin, and Laetrile,
a substance derived from the kernels of apricot seeds, and is about to have all his mercury fillings removed. Frankly, given
my father, I am surprised he didn’t have those removed years ago.
Part of his daily therapy includes hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and he is banned from all technology, especially cell phones.
Radiation poisoning, they say. No one at the center is allowed to talk to anyone on the phone, but there is a room for guests
of patients, with a computer that people are allowed to use for fifteen minutes a day.
They are going for walks every day, and my father’s skin and eyes are glowing. It is too early for the tumor markers to show
the effectiveness, but the medical team are thrilled with how it seems to be going.
“Write to him,” says Scarlett. “That’s what they encourage here. Pen to paper, and snail mail. The old-fashioned way.”
I stop at Papyrus on my lunch break, even though I don’t really have a lunch break as such, anymore.
My father, as CEO did not play by the same rules as the rest of us.
His lunch might be a salad, eaten in the middle of a meeting, with everyone else wondering when it would be over so they could go out and grab something to eat for themselves, or a five-hour bacchanalian feast which might, on occasion, send him home to recover for the rest of the day.
As the quintessential rule follower, I take lunch breaks, ensuring they are not a minute longer than an hour. I grab a Superfood
Bowl at Sweetgreen, smiling as I remember the packed lunch Noah made for me last week, and eat a few hurried bites as I’m
driving to find stationery. I buy a beautiful notepad, and a Le Pen pen to go with it in green, my father’s favorite color.
On my way back to my car, I notice a couple of men with cameras slung over their shoulders. They might be tourists, except
they don’t look like tourists, they don’t have the eager look on their faces that the tourists have. They look jaded, shifty.
They look like snappers. Paparazzi.
Childishly, I think that perhaps if I don’t look at them, they won’t see me, but it is too late. I have already been seen.
“Missy! Missy Cooke! Over here!” Suddenly, they are directly in front of me, snapping the camera in my face as I keep my head
down. “What’s it like being the new CEO of ipryy? How will you do things differently? How’s your father, Missy? Is it true
he’s dying?”
I feel sick for a second, but remember that they know nothing. They are guessing. If there were bad news, I would be the first
to know. I keep walking, ignoring them, my pace quickening. We have not yet made a public statement, but we have to, I realize.
This interest in me being the interim CEO will not wane until we speak up.
CNN has been in touch, wanting to do a profile on me, as has The Wall Street Journal. I have a meeting this afternoon with the corporate press team to decide what to do. The thought of any kind of attention
is enough to make me want to run away.
I imagine what my father would say if he were here, advising me. Feel the fear and do it anyway? He would say that. But he’d
also say get a media coach. I make a mental note to ask for one.
I should be used to attention by now. Not that I’ve been the subject, but I spent years accompanying my father to galas, or
restaurants, or parties. As a little girl, I loved that very occasionally, if he was in a benevolent mood, if he remembered,
if he decided that day that he did actually want to see me, I got to be next to my father, a public acknowledgment of who
I was, particularly since he had disappeared those first few years.
As a teenager, I hated it. I had puppy fat, and faint acne. I couldn’t bear looking at myself in the mirror, let alone in
the pages of a magazine. I look back at photographs of me then and note how I lean into my father with a pained smile on my
face. I wanted to disappear.
Since my father married Scarlett, the photographs in magazines, newspapers, online, have been replaced by those of my father
with her. Occasionally, Nico and Paloma are in them too. My loss of status in this way has been both painful, and something
of a relief.
The photographers continue leaping in front of me.
“Just one smiling photo and we’ll leave you alone,” he says. This sounds reasonable, but a smiling photo? What is there to
smile about? My father is fighting the battle of his life, and these people are taking advantage of it. No. I will not give
them the smiling photo they want. I realize that if they follow me back to my car, they will know to look for Celeste, my
distinctive convertible Beetle, forevermore.
I call myself an Uber and rush into a store, pretending to look at sweaters while I wait for the car. The photographers don’t follow me in, but I watch them light cigarettes through the window, biding their time.
“Are you okay?” The sales assistant, an older woman, looks at me, concerned. I can tell she knows who I am. I can always tell.
There is a spark of recognition, quickly suppressed, but I always see it and know that they are trying to treat me as a normal
person. I am a normal person, I want to say. Treat me as you would anybody else.
“I’m fine. Thank you. I’ll be out of your hair in a minute.”
“Stay as long as you want. Can I get you anything? We have fresh coffee in the back.”
I check my phone to see the car is pulling up outside. “No, thank you. I’ll come back another day when I have more time. Your
clothes are beautiful.”
Two minutes later I am in the back of a black town car with darkened windows, black leather seats, and mints in the center
console. I breathe a sigh of relief as we pull away.
Back at my desk earlier than I had anticipated, I am wolfing down the salad, barely tasting anything, as I email the press
office asking to move our meeting up to determine the next course of action. I press Send, and, on a whim, google Noah. I
used to do this a lot, but it has been years since I skulked around online, mooning over pictures of my best friend’s brother.
“Noah Langley” I type. Then, “Noah Langley girlfriend.” Up pops a series of articles of women Noah has dated. I recognize
one of them as an actress in a popular comedy series set in New York. I study the various women he is pictured with, wondering
if he has a type, wondering if I might be that type, but all the women are completely different. He has dated blondes and
brunettes, short and tall, Asian, white, African-American. My God, I think. He’s dated a lot of women.
The office door opens and Jerome walks in. I shut down the window feeling guilty, even though I have done nothing wrong.
“Hey, stranger. I miss you.” I put my fork down and stand up, walking over and putting my arms around him. He feels solid,
and warm, and familiar, and I lean into him for a while, filled with appreciation for this man.
I feel him laugh gently. “I saw you in the meeting this morning!”
“That’s not the same as spending real time together. I feel like I haven’t seen you properly for ages.”
“I keep trying,” he murmurs. Which is true. He had been suggesting doing something every night—taking me out for dinner, quiet
nights in, accompanying him to museum galas, but my focus has been solely on work, and I haven’t spent the night with him
in a while.
I walk over to the door and look outside to see that William, my assistant, is out for lunch. The office is empty, and I close
the door and slide the lock into place, turning to see Jerome smile.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
I shrug. “Just ensuring some privacy.”
“Why would you be doing that?” He stands, watching me approach, as I snake my arms up, clasping them around his neck and tilting
my head.
“When I said I missed you, I meant it.” I kiss him, pulling back to see him smile. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I think so, although . . . maybe we could go somewhere?”
“Why would we go somewhere when we have a perfectly good, and big, sofa. Mmmm. Look. A very comfortable sofa.” I step toward
the sofa, unbuttoning my shirt, never taking my eyes off Jerome’s.
“I’m very turned on right now,” he whispers. “But . . . I don’t know that I can do this in your dad’s office.”
I sigh. He’s right. It’s too weird. I take him by the hand and pull him into the bathroom, and as soon as the door is closed, he relaxes. I pull my shirt off and unbuckle his belt, needing the closeness, needing the intimacy, needing to remember why Jerome and I are together.
He slips the straps of my bra off my shoulders, and he is hard, and inside me, and for just a moment, an image of a shirtless
Noah flits through my head. I push it aside, forcing myself back to the present, but the image of Noah’s back, his beautiful
back, won’t disappear. My breath quickens, my excitement rising as I imagine, just for a second, that this is Noah’s skin
I am touching, Noah’s back I am clutching. We both come together, deliberately suppressing our moans, even though no one could
possibly hear. I push all thoughts of Noah out of my head, flushed with pleasure, and guilt.
“That was unexpected,” he says, buttoning himself back up. “What came over you?”
“I just missed you,” I say, putting my arms around him again and snuggling into him.
Jerome is delighted, murmuring into my hair as we stand in the bathroom. “Maybe we can see each other later? Maybe you’ll
come over and stay?”
I think about my evening plans. Writing a letter to my father. Noah cooking dinner. Noah.
I could take my lovely notepad and new green pen to Jerome’s and write the letter there, I think. But if I did that I would