Chapter 4
In the weeks that passed from that first night Emily Johnson knocked on my door until the morning Margie Fischer cornered us, I learned a number of things.
I learned how easy it is to acquire a calculating blond girl as your roommate, especially one who doesn’t pay rent and likes to boss you around.
I learned that pretty blond girls don’t always wake up so pretty, and in the evenings they often have gas.
And finally, I learned that Emily Johnson, the portrait of popularity, was secretly as friendless as I was—otherwise why else would she be spending so much time with me all of a sudden?
The air mattress had just appeared on the floor one day, wedged between the radiator and my dresser, fully inflated, covered in pink sateen sheets and a white comforter.
But I still woke up most mornings to find Emily sleeping beside me like a sneaky pet, her bony elbow or knee digging into my side.
I was supposed to be an island. An island unto myself, like John Donne famously said, or was it Buddha?
John Donne might have said no man is an island, but whatever, either way, I was not into having somebody else around all the time—somebody who tried to ride the train with me to work every morning and who interrupted me, without fail, every time I settled in at night to catch up on the latest episode of something on HBO GO.
“Who’s that?” Emily would ask, commandeering my bowl of popcorn.
“Why’s he so mad?” “What’s with all the bad wigs on this show? ”
“Shouldn’t we avoid showing up to work together?” I would argue. “Wouldn’t it be better to avoid being associated with each other in any way?”
I even tried: “If you start watching this show now, you’re going to get a major spoiler.”
But Emily wasn’t worried. I was the worried one.
Emily wanted to talk about it constantly—what she adoringly referred to as our scheme, like it was our love child, like we were its baby mamas. She was all uses and wes, cooing googly-eyed at her rapidly dwindling student-loan balance.
It occurred to me (probably much later than it should have) that it was highly unlikely that Emily would let me put a stop to the scheme even after the last of her debt was paid off.
But it turned out not to matter, because Margie Fischer happened.
The morning that Margie Fischer cornered us, Robert was really in a huff.
Around eleven a.m. he screamed to me from his office in a tone of voice that could only be called desperate, while pantomiming a drinking motion with his hand.
He pointed at red-faced Glen Wiles, who was seated across from him perched forward in his chair, poised to have a heart attack at any moment, and then at himself.
“With lime,” he mouthed through the glass walls of his office.
That meant tequila. Before noon. It was going to be a long day.
A lesser man than Glen Wiles would have crumbled beneath the stress of such a meeting, but fortunately Wiles, like Robert, thrived on pressure, ambition, and cutthroat competition.
On money, basically. So much money. Glen Wiles was a blundering brute, whereas Robert was a stickler for good manners, but aside from that, they were pretty much on the same page.
Politically, they were two sides of the same coin, and that coin had better be free of government regulation of any kind.
When I brought them their drinks Robert had been talking about the islands—which he abruptly stopped doing the moment I entered the room.
“Thank you, Tina,” he said, and then waited for me to exit before finishing his sentence.
I didn’t understand half of what upset Robert about the islands on a daily basis, but taxes were his only true archenemy—that much I understood.
Reporters from the liberal papers were always criticizing Robert for his “offshore tax havens” and “abuse of tax loopholes,” so I knew not to discuss the Caymans or Bermuda with anyone.
I’m pretty sure it was in my employment contract that just uttering the words Cayman Islands or Bermuda in a voice louder than a whisper could get me fired immediately.
I returned to my desk, watching the tiny rainbow speckles in the carpet, imagining myself as one of those hear-no-evil monkeys with his nimble monkey thumbs lodged in his ear holes. A g-chat message from Emily was waiting for me when I sat down.
I have to talk to you about Kevin Handsome, she’d written.
And when I hadn’t written back, she’d added: Seriously.
Almost immediately Kevin then g-chatted me. Hiya.
Hiya, I wrote back, as I always did.
Then Emily chatted again. I won’t be ignored.
I blocked her because this was more social multitasking than a woman no longer in her twenties could handle, but a second later my phone started to ring.
“I’m going to kill you,” I said aloud while reaching over to smack the silence button—but my fingers came to a halt. It wasn’t Emily. My caller ID informed me of the worst: it was Margie Fischer.
Margie Fischer was the Titan Corporation’s long-suffering head of accounting.
She controlled Titan’s purse strings. That was her job, watching the numbers, and everyone did their best to stay out of her way (even Robert, I was pretty sure).
Margie was gruff and couldn’t have cared less what was appropriate in terms of social interaction, which made people very nervous.
You could never be sure what would come out of her mouth, but more often than not, it would be a scolding of some sort.
Once she’d caught me in the Titan cafeteria taking a whiff of the half-and-half before pouring it into my coffee and she boomed from behind me, “What are you sticking your nose in that for!”
I stuttered an explanation of how I was only checking to make sure it was fresh, but Margie wasn’t having it.
“You think anybody wants to use that now that you’ve stuck your face into it?” Her voice was like a cannon blast. Heads from as far away as the action station turned.
Never one to think clearly under pressure, the best defense I could come up with in the moment was, “Nobody but me uses the half-and-half anyway. Everyone around here uses skim.”
Margie’s face dropped.
This was the absolute wrong thing to say for a slew of reasons, not the least of which was that Margie, who had in fact been waiting for the half-and-half, was on the heavy side.
A less-polite person might describe her as very fat.
I wouldn’t have dreamed of calling Margie fat to her face, or even behind her back—but I may as well have done just that with my half-and-half comment. She’d had it in for me ever since.
And now she was calling me for no good reason I could think of.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
I pressed my desk-phone’s mute button ever so gently and watched the accusatory red light above the keypad blink on and off like a soundless alarm.
I must not have moved or breathed for a full minute after the blinking stopped because I was light-headed and seeing spots when my cell phone’s vibration snapped me back to reality.
It was a text message from Emily: Margie Fischer from accounting jst called me. We’re fkd.
I immediately texted back: What did she say?
Emily wrote: I didn’t answr.
So how do you know we’re fkd? I was about to write back, but of course we were. How could we not be? If there was anyone at Titan capable of figuring out our expense account scheme, it was Margie.
Kevin’s chat momentarily averted my attention: Coffee break later today?
Then a burly voice behind me said, “Knock knock.”
My cell phone was still in my hand. Margie pointed at it with her thick, stubby pointer finger. “You must be texting with Emily,” she said. “Is that why neither of you could answer your desk phones?”
I slipped my cell into my bag and glanced quickly at Robert, who was still busy barking at Wiles in his office, then swiveled my chair away from him to face Margie. “Hi there,” I said as cheerfully as I could while resisting my gag reflex. “What can I do for you?”
I guessed Margie Fischer was probably in her sixties, but it was difficult to tell because she dressed like an old Jewish man from Long Island, which adds a decade no matter what your age.
“I was calling to confirm our lunch date today at Michael’s,” she said. “Is one o’clock still good for you and Emily?”
I swallowed hard. My cell phone kept vibrating inside my bag. I could only imagine all the WTFs Emily had written.
Margie’s thick gray hair was pulled back in a low ponytail that was so tight, the skin of her face was pulled back with it. The way she was hovering over me now I couldn’t help but think of a sumo wrestler. A smiling Jewish sumo wrestler in high-waisted pleated khakis.
“Lunch?” I asked.
“Yeah, lunch. Unless you’d rather I speak to Robert directly about his T we have to deny everything.” We were marching down Sixth Avenue on our way to meet Margie for lunch.
Emily was in a pink Stella McCartney dress and matching heels and I was in my usual pants from the Gap and a V-neck sweater over a button-down.
I guess I shouldn’t hold it against anyone who mistakes me for a lesbian, or an adolescent boy wearing a Catholic-school uniform.
“You could have at least changed into something less designer,” I said to Emily. “Didn’t you have anything from the Gap or Old Navy in your office closet?”
“I’m wearing a pair of your underwear that I’m pretty sure are Hanes Her Way,” Emily said. “Does that count?”