Chapter 4 #2
"I'd like to offer you a job," he said. "I'm going to do it badly, because I've been rehearsing it in the car for two and a half hours and it got worse every time.
So I'll just say it. I want to build something and I don't want to build it alone and you're the best operator on this coast and everybody has apparently known that except the people who print things. "
"Mr. Bertrand —"
"Hugo."
"I'm not going to hear this."
"Okay."
She had been braced for the next sentence. There was always a next sentence. Nine years of men in that industry and there was always a just hear me out, a let me buy you lunch, a small pressure applied with a smile.
He said, "Okay," and he meant it. He took his hands out of his pockets.
"Can I leave a card?"
"You can leave a card."
He came up two steps, put a card on the rail, and went back down. Then he stopped.
"For what it's worth," he said, "and it's worth nothing, I'm aware — I didn't drive up here because your marriage is in the paper. I drove up here because of a number in a magazine. I want to be clear about which one it was."
"Mr. Bertrand."
He stopped with the door open.
"The Alcorn's cost per occupied room," Clara said. "It's four dollars under mine and I've never worked out how."
Hugo Bertrand stood in a parking area in Cambria in the fog and something happened to his face that she would think about later.
"Laundry," he said.
"You don't outsource."
"I don't outsource." He shut the car door again and leaned on it.
"Everybody outsources. Everybody's been telling me for nine years that the math says outsource.
The math does say outsource. The math is wrong, and the reason the math is wrong is that it doesn't price a housekeeper standing around at ten in the morning waiting for a truck. "
"It prices the labor."
"It prices the labor. It doesn't price the waiting." He shrugged. "You lose forty minutes a floor a day and it never shows up as a line item anywhere. It shows up as needing an extra body on Fridays and nobody ever asks why."
Clara stood on the porch.
"That's good," she said.
"I know it's good. I've been sitting on it for six years and I've had nobody to tell.
" He got in the car properly this time. "That's the actual pitch, if you want the honest version.
Not the money. I've got four hotels and one interesting idea and there's nobody in my life who wants to hear about laundry. "
Then he drove back to Ojai.
Clara stood on the porch for a while.
She picked up the card. It was a bad card. The stock was cheap and the type was too big.
She put it in her back pocket and went to finish counting the walk-in.
Two days later a woman in the market on Main recognized her.
Clara was holding a bag of onions. The woman was perhaps sixty, in a fleece, with a basket over one arm, and she stopped in the middle of the aisle and said, "Oh — you're the hotel woman."
Clara's whole body did something automatic and unpleasant.
For seven years the sentence that followed you're had always ended the same way.
You're Adrian's wife. At benefits, at openings, at a funeral in Pasadena, at her own wedding reception where a man from the syndicate had said it to her twice in an hour.
She had a smile built for it. The smile was up before she had decided anything.
"The one from the magazine," the woman said. "My daughter sent it to me. You're the one who ran the Whitmore places?"
"I — " Clara stopped. Started again. "Yes. That's me. The magazine."
"My daughter's a housekeeper down in Morro Bay." The woman shifted the basket. "She said, look at this, Mom, they finally printed who does it."
And then she nodded once, briskly, the way you do when a transaction is complete, and went on down the aisle toward the dairy.
Clara stood in a market in Cambria holding a bag of onions.
Nobody had asked about her marriage. Nobody had asked where Adrian was, or whether she was all right, or any of the hundred sympathetic questions she had been bracing for since September.
A stranger in a fleece had identified her by her work.
She got as far as the parking lot before she had to sit down on the low wall by the carts for a minute, and she was not entirely sure, sitting there, whether what she felt was joy or grief, and she came to the conclusion that at thirty-eight she had lost the ability to tell those apart, and that this was probably the actual damage.
That night she couldn't sleep, so she went down and sat at Imani's kitchen table with the shoebox and a legal pad, and did the thing she had said would take a week.
It took four hours.
She built Imani a supply account with a distributor in San Luis Obispo, restructured the breakfast so it used six ingredients instead of twenty-one, moved the rate up fourteen dollars on weekends and down on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and wrote out a one-page turndown standard on the back of an envelope.
At two in the morning she sat back and looked at what she'd done to a four-room inn.
Then she cried for the second time in five weeks, and this time she knew exactly why, and it had nothing to do with Adrian.
It was that it had taken her four hours.
Four hours, on a legal pad, in a kitchen, with no staff and no system and no title.
And she had given seven years of that to a man who put it in a folder and asked her to check the sequence.
In the morning she called Gwen Amsel.
"They came back," Amsel said, before Clara could speak.
"What?"
"Century City. Yesterday afternoon." Papers moving. "They've withdrawn the offer."
Clara's stomach dropped an inch. "Withdrawn."
"Withdrawn the terms," Amsel said. "The confidentiality provision, the non-disparagement, all four pages of it.
Gone. They've replaced it with a letter that says, and I'm reading it exactly: Our client instructs that no provision of any settlement shall restrict Mrs. Whitmore's speech in any respect. "
Clara sat down on the stairs of Imani's inn for the second time.
"That's not a negotiating position," Amsel said. "In thirty-one years I have not seen anybody give that away for free. You want my read?"
"Yes."
"He's not trying to buy you. He's trying to work out what you want." A dry sound. "Which is what you said he'd do. And you told me to leave him nothing to find."
Clara sat on the stairs with the phone against her ear and the door standing open on Bridge Street and Hugo Bertrand's cheap card still in the back pocket of yesterday's jeans.
"Did he say anything?" she said. "Adrian. Personally. Is there — was there a note, or —"
"No note."
"Right."
"Clara." Amsel's voice changed slightly. "Do you want there to be one?"
Clara looked at the door for a while.
"No," she said, and it was the first lie she had told anybody since September.