Chapter Twenty-One #2
He caught her glance as she sat at the couch at the back of the room, just beyond the doors. Like she’d be waiting for him when he was ready.
“Let’s cut to the chase, shall we.”
The older gentleman at the center. The man whose signature adorned the letter that got sent with that piece of tabloid garbage.
He was the one who ran the family.
He was the one who, if Jason had to guess, Naomi had researched. “Let’s not waste more time kibbitzing when the business is at stake, hmmm?”
Which, as Jason could tell, was his cue. He pulled out that huge overfilled red folder, untied it and removed and the stapled packets of information. Passing them to the four people sitting at the table across from him.
“Can you demonstrate how you are going to keep your tuchus out of the tabloids once your name is officially connected to the family business? Make a positive impact?”
The older man, again, speaking as if Jason had forgotten what he was there for or why. Like if he didn’t speak, he’d lose control of the room and the family, neither of which he wanted.
But Jason was focused, in a way he hadn’t been before; there was apparently something about having your feet held to the fire that made him concentrate. “Yes,” he said, opening his own copy of the packet. “If you’ll direct your attention to the pages within this packet?”
But the older gentleman swatted the air, as if he was shoving a recalcitrant fly out of the way.
“I don’t need the fakakta papers. I need your assurance that you will do everything in your power to keep that tuchus of yours out of those papers.
Your brother’s career, and our choices depend on what you say right now, so you’ll choose those words of yours wisely. ”
There was a moment where there was nothing in his brain, no speech, no chart, no evidence that hours of creating a business plan for his future career, had done anything to impact his brain.
Make it your own.
Naomi’s words ran through his head, the ones that had arrived at the perfect time hours before.
His reputation counted on it.
And what was his reputation? What was it he pulled out of his mouth when he talked to Batya?
That was what he’d tell his relatives. That’s what was his.
“I will do my job as a chef,” he said, remembering the conversations he’d had with so many people, including both Batya and Naomi in specific.
“I will make the people I’m cooking for happy with my food choices.
I will bring honor to my name with my food and the reputation I make with the people who ask me to make their culinary dreams come true.
I will be above board with my business practices, continuing to partner with an experienced event planner.
I will be above reproach with how I treat those I encounter and work with.
” He paused, looking across the table. “I put together a sketch of the business of my own I intend to create.”
“And the papers?”
“All I can do is to be a good person, and my job. If a photographer decides to take a photograph of a single moment of downtime during an exhausting and fulfilling job, working alongside a Teruah and Music Award winning artist as he does a historic performance at a famous festival in the California desert, I can’t control that.
I can only control the smile on the musician’s face when he gets off stage, his eyes lighting up when he sees the post-show meal I made for him. ”
“Can you create positive media to counteract the damage if you’re not willing to keep yourself out of the press?”
There was something about his life where the most random things made sense.
How would he have known that the important conversation he’d had with Batya only days before would be so important now?
“I had a wonderful conversation with Batya Averman-Neumann a few days ago; I’m working with her husband on an event, actually.
Anyway, she issued an open invitation for my brother and I to tell the Greenblatt family’s story, in a way that added the Michigan family on to the story of the New York family, of course, on her show. ”
And considering he knew that Batya hadn’t done a Greenblatts episode, and how much this particular relative was interested in such things, the expression on the other man’s face made it very clear he’d done what he’d intended.
*
Jason had done it.
Naomi was in awe. She’d known in the back of her mind that he was capable of convincing his relatives of his abilities both inside the kitchen, and with the connections he’d been able to make over the years.
But seeing him?
She wanted to rip his clothes off. Then and there. But she’d wait until they were back at an apartment.
And yet her heart pounded as she watched the family deliver their decision, the official changing of the guard that made his brother the official heir in waiting, on the stationery for the Greenblatt’s Knishes and him…set to do what he wanted to.
The best of all worlds, at least at that point.
But once that decision was delivered, she watched as he turned in her direction and winked.
Which made her heart pound.
She watched, breathing with every single step he took toward her, as he cut through the assembled group of people trying to wish him well.
But she recognized the expression, the particular brand of intensity on his face. He only had eyes for her.
And that made her heart pound. “You did it,” she said as he arrived at her side, throwing his arms around her. “I’m so, so excited for you.”
“For us,” he said, breathing into her.
He leaned in and kissed her, his lips welcome and excited.
An unfamiliar voice interrupted, “You gonna keep him in line?”
She blinked as he broke the kiss, turning toward the sound of the voice. Which just happened to belong to Sy Greenblatt, the family patriarch. She could recognize him anywhere, the bald head with fluffy beard and moustache, the round glasses.
Jason grasped her hand as they broke apart.
“Sir,” Jason said, without preamble, taking control of the conversation. “This is Naomi Nachman, of NN Events. She’s an ace event planner, and my ace in the hole.”
“I see,” the Greenblatt patriarch said.
But she recognized the expression on the Greenblatt family patriarch’s face: a combination of disdain and disrespect. To him, she was an accessory, and as she described to Jason earlier, a fancy sex toy.
“And I repeat my question, Miss Nachman. You’re going to keep him in line?”
And there it was.
How could she answer? What could she say?
Yes is the answer they were looking for. Yes. He needed a keeper. An assistant, like ages of these Greenblatt men who had personal assistants who organized their lives.
That’s how they saw her.
No. He’s his own man. Which would be unacceptable, considering the expectation in that question. And the fact that the family patriarch was asking her, someone he saw as no better than Jason’s personal assistant.
How?
How could she answer the way she wanted and not screw up Jason’s future?
How could she answer as diplomatically as the situation required?
That was when she knew there was no right answer; no in-between answer.
There was no way to be diplomatic and not screw up Jason’s future, his family’s future. To someone like this, she didn’t have an opinion. She didn’t really exist.
This man had the same views of the world as Ida did.
Which meant there was a bad choice and a worse one.
Jason would hate her for both choices, but one would save him in front of the patriarch who controlled his future. She nodded, committing herself to the decision that would cost her everything. “Yes,” she said before pausing. “Of course. He and I can figure that out together.”
And as the older gentleman nodded, the smirk switching to an expression that was full of what seemed like pride in Jason, the man she loved dropped her hand.
*
Carefully and easily, Jason left the meeting room.
The last thing he wanted was to show his rage in front of the man whose every other word was now ‘my boy.’
How?
How the hell could she have done this?
He hoped Naomi…he could barely think her name…followed him; he had no goddamned clue how he’d manage going back in that room when she was there.
She was, thankfully, when he turned around, standing, waiting. He could barely look at her.
And she knew she’d fucked up. There was no other way to describe it.
“He put me between a rock and a hard place,” she said, and he didn’t have time to see the signs of emotional breakdown.
She didn’t deserve his sympathy or his direction or his cues or his help.
“I didn’t want to say anything that would put you or anything you were doing in jeopardy,” she continued, swallowing, the words falling out of her mouth in ways that usually would have him holding her.
Not now. Not this time.
“Which meant no flippant, remarks, nothing wholly contradictory…”
“Nothing contradictory?” He shook his head and walked away.
He was in public; he wasn’t going to yell.
“You made it look like you were going to officially act as my keeper, which made their absolutely asinine purposes for this meeting feel completely and utterly correct, and me look like a jackass.”
He paused.
He was yelling; he could feel the scratch in his throat.
He needed to calm down.
“And,” he said, pulling his temper in, “that absolutely ridiculous cherry on top of it, was the implication that you were going to use some personal, physical means to keep control over me.”
“Dammit,” she said. “I told you. People like that don’t ever listen to reason. Not him and not anybody else from that generation. How could I tell him to go to Hades when he has your family’s entire future in his hands? Your dreams, your brother’s…”
He wasn’t going to listen to any arguments she made. All she was doing was making him angrier. Listening to the woman who professed to know him best, who he’d thought knew him best, justify words that had sounded like she’d never heard him at all, was more than he could bear.
“I don’t have time for this,” he said, moving his hand as if he was breaking any invisible string that tied them together.
“But whatever conversations we were having, whatever agreements we had, they’re over.
Business, emotional, whatever. Except for the fact I won’t fuck up my best friend’s wedding because the woman who’s planning it thinks she’s my keeper. ”
And then he paused, the thoughts of her in his apartment, at Jimmy’s and in other spaces that he found…home, made him nauseous.
“I trust you can find your own way home. I’ll mail you the things you left at my place.”
“Fine,” she said, the business mask on her face reminding him what a coward she was. “I’ll do the same.”
And then, he turned and walked away, back toward his brother and his father. At least for as long it would take her to leave.