Chapter 11
At last, on an overcast day in late July, we finished paying off Margie’s blackmail debt.
Kevin and I had been dating for reals for about three weeks.
There was never a conversation like, Are we boyfriend and girlfriend now?
But after our movie date it became obvious to me that we were soul mates—as long as he never found out about, you know, the embezzlement thing.
During the days and weeks that followed, we went to fancy Upper East Side restaurants and took in the pretension.
We went to Lower East Side dive bars and took in the hipsterdom.
We went to the Guggenheim and took in the art.
When we stayed in, we took in each other—though not literally, to Emily’s horror.
Kevin and I had not yet slept together, but like the popular girls in my high school used to say, we’d done everything but.
The truth is, I was still testing him. I had a natural inclination to mistrust people who had a lot of money—people who grew up with money—because how could anyone who’s never suffered be depended upon to suffer through me?
I am not a low-maintenance girlfriend. I’m more like a fixer-upper in a dicey neighborhood.
Kevin came from money, but the weeks of testing were conclusive that he didn’t act like it—and he didn’t seem to care that I didn’t.
In fact, the more time we spent together, the more it dawned on me that Kevin liked that I didn’t come from money.
I hadn’t told him much about my immigrant parents or the tiny Bronx apartment I hailed from, but whenever I’d slip and forget myself—like the time I lost my r’s and g’s saying, Aw you fuckin’ kiddin’ me?
when a car cut us off in front of a crosswalk—Kevin would throw his head back and laugh.
He’d pull me in and smack my low-rent cheek with a kiss.
It was all kind of perfect . . . too perfect.
I kept waiting for the moment when teenage Freddie Prinze Jr. and the rest of the cast from She’s All That would jump out from the shadows, pointing and laughing, revealing this was all a cruel joke. But it never came.
Kevin and I shared a mutual appreciation for Freddie Prinze Jr. movies—I Know What You Did Last Summer, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, Scooby-Doo Knows What You Did Last Summer—and anything and everything by John Hughes.
We once acted out the entire first half of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
We once acted out the post-prom kiss from Pretty in Pink.
I knew we would sleep together soon. Kevin had managed to gradually wear me down, to get me to let go of who I thought I was supposed to be and instead just be who I am.
So doing the nasty had to be the next step.
But on this particular overcast day in late July, I did everything in my power to push Kevin out of my mind as I rode the elevator up to Margie’s office with her final payment—the last bundle of cash stuffed in an envelope, stuffed in a bigger envelope.
Dear God, please let this really be the end, I prayed while squeezing the envelope close to my thumping bunny-rabbit heart.
That I was in no position to be asking God for jack shit didn’t stop me from trying anyway.
The elevator doors opened and I marched, head down, to Margie’s office, handed her the envelope, and recited my line: “Robert would like you to look at these documents right away.”
Margie picked her head up and fastened her eyes to mine, and it occurred to me that no one else was around.
The bespectacled accounting underlings who usually buzzed around Margie’s desk were nowhere to be found.
Had she arranged that? If this were a movie from the late nineties, now would be the moment when some ambient, concern-inducing Radiohead music would start to play.
Margie rested her meaty hands flat upon the envelope.
“Okay?” I said.
She blinked her round eyes a few times but said nothing.
“So we’re good?” I said.
Margie leaned back in her chair, and it squeaked formidably. As much as I knew this was supposed to be the end, part of me never believed it. Whether I was conscious of it before this moment or not, I’d been afraid all along that Margie wouldn’t let us go.
“You and Emily had your fill?” she asked. “You had enough?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, out of nowhere morphing into an obedient Southerner, because maybe it made me sound more sorry?
Margie erupted with a full-belly laugh. “You’ve been spending too much time with that redneck boss of yours.” She gave a nod to the door. “Get the hell out of here; I’ve got work to do.”
I flooded with relief and bolted before she could change her mind—the music would now change to some buoyant, joy-inducing Radiohead song, whatever that would sound like.
In the elevator, I began to see spots. My hearing went underwatery and my head spun. But I was safe.
It was done.
My body felt floppy all of a sudden, loose, like a balloon let go to deflate and swirl around.
And by the time I was back at my desk, I’d already begun considering possibilities for myself in a way that I hadn’t since college.
I remained debt-free, after all—through all of this, that hadn’t been taken away from me.
So what would I do now? How could I be a positive force in the world?
What was my true life purpose? I was suddenly thinking in Oprah-speak now that I was no longer hyperventilating.
At lunchtime, Emily insisted we go to the bar down the street with the booze-lunch special to celebrate.
Have you ever made a new friend who’s a vegetarian and found yourself eating more vegetables?
I was beginning to wonder if Emily was an actual alcoholic and if I was gradually becoming one by proxy, so my first reaction was to suggest we put off the celebration till after the sun began to set.
But Robert had a twelve p.m. lunch meeting at Marea, followed by a two p.m. lunch meeting at La Grenouille, which meant he’d be out of the office till at least four, so there was really no good reason for me to decline Emily’s offer.
Even my useless fill-in could hold down the fort in a Robert-less office.
Emily and I ordered two-for-one dirty-pickle martinis with blue cheese–filled olives off the lunch-special menu, which almost qualified as real food, and hunkered into a shadowy booth in the bar’s corner.
I raised my glass. “To the end,” I said. “To this nightmare finally being over.”
Emily ignored my heartfelt toast and got right to drinking. There was something on her mind. I could tell by the way she kept glancing left and right all shifty, like she was peeking through a newspaper with eyeholes cut out.
“I heard it’s got bulletproof glass,” she said. “And a rocket-detection system. To keep him safe from all the people who want to murder him.”
I set down my cloudy glass of lunch. Emily was referring to the luxury yacht Robert had just purchased. His fifth. Because four wasn’t enough.
“I heard it’s got a helipad and a swimming pool. And an aquarium.” Emily shook her head. “An aquarium. On a boat!”
“Is there something you’re trying to tell me?” I asked.
She brought her face in close to mine. “I want a boat with an aquarium,” she whispered, as if it were a secret. “Or, at the very least, a house with an inground, temperature-controlled, saltwater swimming pool. Don’t you?”
“I thought we came here to celebrate,” I said.
Emily leaned in even closer. “I do have something to tell you. Don’t be mad.”
Just then I noticed a tall redhead approaching our table, and I knew I’d been tricked.
I recognized this bombshell of a woman from the Titan building. She always wore bold-colored skirt suits and six-inch heels, even on dress-down Fridays, which made me despise her a little. Okay, a lot.
“This is Ginger Lloyd,” Emily said. “She’s Glen Wiles’s assistant.”
“Huh,” I said, because Glen Wiles’s assistant and I e-mailed each other, like, fifty times a day. But I’d never matched the woman to the name.
Of course her name was Ginger. How did the parents of all the Gingers of the world know their little ones wouldn’t grow up to be blondes or brunettes? Or was the name itself so powerful it actually oxidized the hair follicles over time, to match the name by adulthood?
Ginger strong-armed me into a firm handshake. “We finally meet face-to-face.”
“After Robert, Glen Wiles is the company’s highest-paid executive,” Emily said, and I could see the inground, temperature-controlled, saltwater swimming pool in her eyes.
“After Robert, Glen Wiles has the company’s highest-allowance expense account, and what does he even need an expense account for?
Lawyers shouldn’t need expense accounts. ”
I had a feeling I knew where this was headed.
I stood up to go, but Emily grabbed me by my shirtsleeve, pulling me back down. “Just hear her out. She wants to join us, and she has a lot to offer.”
“No, I’m not doing this.” I shook my sleeve free. “I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you told!”
If there had been anyone else in the bar drinking their lunch, they would have turned to look to see which adult woman was throwing the tantrum.
Ginger sat down beside Emily and made herself comfortable. She removed the silk scarf that had been modestly wrapped around her ample chest, and for a split second I felt my eyes bulge out like Bugs Bunny’s.
“I heard one of the fish in Robert’s yacht aquarium cost eighty thousand dollars,” Ginger said with a devious calm. “One fish. I heard he had it flown in from Singapore.”
That was true. I’d overseen the flying in of the fish myself.
“I owe one hundred sixty K,” Ginger said. “The equivalent of two fish.”
There wasn’t a hint of desperation to Ginger’s tone. She hadn’t come to beg.
“That’s a lot of money,” I said. “Is it all in student loans?”
“I went to Brown.” Ginger tied her silk scarf to the strap of her purse with an elegant knot. “Then Columbia Law School.”
“Shouldn’t you be a lawyer, then?” I asked. “Instead of a lawyer’s assistant?”
“I dropped out of law school,” Ginger replied matter-of-factly.
“It was all wrong for me, not that where I’ve ended up is any better, working for Glen Wiles of all people.
No one is worse than he is. No one. Except Robert.
” Ginger had a glint of crazy in her eye that made me nervous.
“Nobody deserves to make that much money,” she said.
“That’s why I want to join you and Emily.
Imagine what the three of us could accomplish if we joined forces. ”
I turned to look at Emily and she was good as gone. Her mind was off planning a stable for her pet horse.
Ginger leaned back, crossed her long legs, and the emerald in her crazy eyes glistened into something more pointed. “Glen Wiles is in the pool of executives who make so much money they buy West Village mansions just to house their art collections.”
Emily moaned at the word pool.
“That’s a true story,” Ginger said.
It was. I’d read about that sale in the Times. Wiles needed the mansion for his new Picasso.
Emily waved to the bartender and ordered us a bottle of chilled champagne with three glasses.
“We’re not doing this,” I said, for Emily’s benefit as much as Ginger’s.
“Don’t listen to her,” Emily said.
“No, I’m really not doing this,” I said. “I’m going back to work.”
Emily retaliated with a lockjawed severity I hadn’t heard since that first morning up on the forty-third floor. “Not for anything, Fontana, but what makes you think we can’t just go ahead without you?”
I’d already stood up to go, to storm out brandishing my self-importance like a flag.
What made me freeze in place? Was I really shocked that Emily would be so quick to disregard our weeks of collusion and bonding, the bottles upon bottles of Asti Spumante we’d shared—that she’d drop me in a second for an upgrade to a shinier partner in crime? Since when did I believe in friendship?
“I’m leaving,” I said.
“Bye then,” Ginger said.
Emily called to my back, “I want you with us, Fontana; that’s why I set up this meeting. But if you’re not with us, I’m certainly not going to let you stop us.”
I kept walking, without turning around, all the way back to the office.