Chapter 3 #2
“I saved you a spot,” he said, letting me cut in front of him.
I knew the woman behind us wouldn’t complain about my cutting because Kevin had that soothing effect on people. People, mainly women, yearned to do him favors.
“How’s Wiles today?” I asked.
Glen Wiles was the head of Titan’s legal department, and Kevin’s boss. He was also the only man at Titan more feared than Robert—not because he had more power, but because he was by far the bigger asshole.
“At the moment, Wiles is turning the office thermostat all the way down to make his assistant’s endowment perk up. You know . . .” He gestured toward his own pectoral nipples. “So business as usual, really.”
“Yeah, Robert would never do that to me,” I said, looking down at my non-tits beneath my sweater.
Kevin cleared his throat and politely looked away. Fortunately, it was our turn to build our burgers.
—
Later that night, the guilt really hit hard, the way it tends to do when the distractions of the day all fall away and you’re finally left alone with yourself.
Until this point—rational or not—using Titan’s money to pay off my student-loan debt had felt like something that happened to me more than something I’d done.
But this was deliberate. I’d chosen to do this for Emily, or with Emily, instead of turning myself in, and that was wrong no matter how you looked at it.
Things are going to hell in a handbasket, Robert would have said.
His voice was always in my head. I couldn’t help it.
So much of my daily energy went to thinking about Robert, thinking as Robert, anticipating his needs, responding to his requests, manifesting his every wish.
It wasn’t possible to just turn his voice off at the end of the day.
A couple sandwiches shy of a picnic, he would have called my thinking now. Crazy as a bull bat.
I stared up at the rain bubble that hung down from the ceiling over my bed—a white plaster water balloon threatening to plunge onto my head at any moment.
It was an anomaly of nature that defied all logic considering I lived on the ground floor of my apartment building, but there it was every time it rained, taunting my limited comprehension of both plumbing and architecture.
It was storming outside, and the roaring thunder and flashing lightning only reinforced my notion that God was angry with me.
I watched the bubble swell with each passing second, stretching like a waterlogged belly.
The Internet had gone out in the storm and I didn’t own a television, so tracking the bubble’s growth was my only active form of entertainment.
I could have gone on that way all night, but the buzz of my doorbell shook me back to consciousness.
It was just after midnight. Who could be at my door?
A rumble of thunder crescendoed to a crash. My windows rattled and I realized it must be death at my door, a scythe-wielding reaper, come to massacre me in my blue-and-white-striped pajamas as punishment for my crimes.
Actually, it was a soaking-wet Emily Johnson.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “How did you know where I live?”
Emily looked like she’d just stepped out of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, if the swimsuits were replaced by the designer nightclub-wear Westchester girls partied in to get laid. She was all drenched and disheveled. Her eye makeup ran down her face in crooked inky streams.
“Are you crying?” I asked.
She pointed up at the sky like I was a moron. “It’s raining.”
“Right. But what are you doing here?”
“My date tonight was a bust,” she said, in a way that sounded like she might actually begin to cry.
“And I can’t make it back to Bridgeport in this storm.
Some asshole smashed the driver-side window of my Range Rover with a goddamn brick.
I covered it with a plastic bag, but there’s no way I can sleep in there tonight. ”
“You sleep in your car?”
“It’s not a car, it’s a Range Rover.”
“You have a Range Rover but no apartment?”
“Fontana, I have nowhere else to go. Can I come in or not?”
I was still so disoriented, trying to relate this Emily Johnson to the one I knew from work. That version of her was a wire pulled taut. This girl on the brink of tears in my doorway was slack and loose, unguarded. She was vulnerable. Real. And a little insane looking.
“I don’t have much space,” I said. “It’s not like I’ve got a guest room. I barely have a living room. And how did you know where I live? Did I already ask you that?”
“Don’t you have an air mattress?” She stepped past me, through my doorway.
“No, actually.” I followed behind her to the kitchen as she began to disrobe.
“I brought this,” she said. From her oversize Coach hobo bag she pulled a bottle of Jameson. “To say thank you for letting me crash here.”
I was suddenly transported to the most significant moment of my adolescence: seventh grade, when the queen bee, Dana Vandorn, was surprised by her period in the bathroom stall next to mine.
She came out sheepish, searching her purse for a dime in order to vend a pillowy maxi pad from the machine.
But who carried dimes? I just happened to also be experiencing menses that week and I knew this was my moment.
I knew I could have let Dana Vandorn suffer—lord knew she deserved it—but I chose instead to take the high road and offered her a Playtex Sport from my bag.
She thanked me with an expression exactly like the one Emily was wearing now.
Gratitude pregnant with shame. And you know what?
After that day, Dana Vandorn never called me a dyke again.
“Are you a lesbian?” Emily asked.
Had I been thinking out loud?
She was standing in pasties and a black thong. Her dress and accessories lay in a damp puddle at her feet. “It’s cool if you are,” she said. “But I want to be clear that I—”
“I’m not a lesbian.” It was just like a pretty girl to assume everyone wanted her.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Because your clothes.” She pointed to my white Hanes T-shirt and striped men’s pajama bottoms.
“Positive. I’d probably get a lot more action if I was, but sadly no.”
Satisfied, Emily pranced into my bedroom.
“Do you have another pair of man pajamas for me to wear?” she asked, and then stopped in her tracks.
“What the hell is that?” She pointed, horrified, at the rain bubble hanging down from the ceiling.
“It looks like a tit.” She jumped up on my bed and poked at the bubble with her pinky.
“Please don’t touch it,” I said.
“Look, it’s even got a little nipple. We should stick it with a pin and milk it.”
“I said don’t touch it!”
I tossed a clean pair of pajamas at her and went to the kitchen to let her get dressed in private.
This was so not the tightwad bitch I knew from the office. I couldn’t get over the fact that she’d actually used the word tit. I returned to the bedroom carrying the Jameson and two souvenir shot glasses.
Emily tilted her head at me and frowned. When she blinked, her blond bangs caught onto the tips of her eyelashes. “How old are you?” she asked. “Are we on spring break in Fort Lauderdale? Don’t you have any rocks glasses?”
I dashed back to the kitchen and returned with the only other glassware I owned besides coffee mugs—old jam jars with the labels torn off.
“That’ll do,” Emily said, unscrewing the cap from the whiskey.
I also brought out my coveted box of Thin Mints from the freezer, a sure way to impress any houseguest—not that I was trying to impress Emily Johnson, but still.
“Want one?” I asked, holding an icy-cold cookie out toward Emily.
She shook her head no, but I noticed her smile.
“You live here alone?” Emily scanned my cramped yet sparsely furnished space. “I figured,” she added, before I could answer. She pulled her golden hair back into a ponytail. “You seem like the loner type. It’s probably because you have low self-esteem.”
Why exactly had I let this girl in from the rain? She was a textbook example of why I never invited anyone over.
As Emily got drunk, her eyelids grew heavy and her speech pattern slowed, but she didn’t get any friendlier, as some people do. “You shouldn’t feel self-conscious about being a thirty-year-old assistant,” she said. “At least you’re good at it. Not everyone could handle how demeaning it is.”
Thanks, I thought. This was the Emily Johnson version of a compliment.
“So what’s your deal?” I asked, once I sensed she was inebriated enough. (I’d been waiting for her to become inebriated enough to ask.) “If you’re as broke as you say you are, then what’s with all the fancy clothes and jewelry? How do you pay for it all?”
Emily brought her Connecticut lockjaw back into play for her response. “I live by the kindness of others,” she said. “The kindness of men.”
Pure Hollywood. I countered with my best Blanche DuBois impression. “Whoever you are,” I drawled with a Southern accent, brandishing my whiskey like a prop, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Emily lifted her eyebrows, bleary-eyed. “I don’t know what the hell that was, but please don’t ever do it again.”
“Sorry.” I set my glass back onto the nightstand.
I was finding Emily’s sense of humor difficult to pin down. I’d heard she’d gone to Harvard, but that couldn’t have been true. No one familiar with the Harvard Lampoon would have scoffed at a literary reference that way. Not to mention the fact that Emily was basically a professional con woman.
“Where did you go to college again?” I asked, with a bit too much nonchalance.
“When a man’s kindness comes up short,” Emily said, irrespective of my question, “and I don’t have it in me to drive all the way to my parents’ house, I sleep in the back of the Range Rover. Even that was a gift.”
“Some dude gave you a car?”
“Do you understand that a Range Rover isn’t just a car?
It’s a one-hundred-K full-size luxury SUV.
” Emily reached over me to refill her glass.
“The guy who gave it to me was a famous plastic surgeon. After we broke up I tried to sell it, but it turned out to be a lease, so it’s mine for another year. ”
“Can’t you just get one of these dumb guys to pay off your debt,” I asked, “so we don’t have to resort to grand larceny?”
“It doesn’t work that way.” Emily finally gave in and reached for a Thin Mint.
“I approved your first expense report today,” she said, changing the subject. “Ten Gs, not a bad start. I like how you got really creative in the notes section and threw all caution to the wind in terms of attaching receipts.”
Remembering the money made my stomach lurch.
Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph (this was my mother’s voice in my head now, not Robert’s), how had I gotten myself into this?
This was so not me. I didn’t even download music illegally.
I’d never in my life ingested an illicit drug.
I crossed the street only at crosswalks.
And you know what else? It was true that I didn’t have many friends, as Emily so assiduously pointed out, but that was because I didn’t really like people all that much.
Other people were usually more trouble than they were worth, so I preferred to be alone.
Yet here I was having a slumber party with one of the stars of American Hustle. She was in my bed!
Emily pointed her cookie up at the ceiling rain bubble. “Think it’ll pop?”
Hell is other people.
In my mind I recited a whiskey-infused poem: What happens to a rain bubble deferred? Does it just sag like a heavy load? Or does it explode?
The tribulations of being a former English major.
“I kind of hope it pops,” Emily said. “Even though it’ll make a huge nasty mess.”