What You’re Actually Worth #2
“I have. I’m allowed, I’ve got a garage and no chair.
” A car went past on her end. “I looked up what he does. Not him, the company. It took me forty minutes on a Tuesday because I’m nosy and the internet exists, and I read about a dozen articles, and there wasn’t one single mention of you anywhere in any of it.
Not a name, not a quote, not a photograph.
Five months of the best work you’ve ever done and you don’t exist.”
“That’s not how it works. Assistants aren’t in the trade press.”
“I know that. I’m not an idiot and I’m not accusing anyone of anything.
” Reagan’s voice went careful, which happened about once a year.
“I’m telling you what it looked like from Philadelphia, where I’ve been getting phone calls for five months from a sister who is happier than I have ever heard her and who has slowly stopped mentioning her own work.
You used to tell me about the buildings. Do you know you stopped?”
Jo did not know that.
“When?”
“Around the spring.” A pause. “I noticed because I liked those bits.”
“That’s a very Philadelphia way to put it.”
“I have two children under six and eleven minutes. You get the version I’ve got.
” A small laugh, then not. “Tell him. Not because it’s the right thing, though it is.
Because right now you’re carrying it alone, and carrying things alone is the whole habit, and this is the first one that’s big enough that the habit might actually cost you the thing. ”
Vivienne Castellane was in the Kade Tower lobby on Friday at eight-fifty in the morning, which she had no reason to be.
The Warrick Street committee had moved to Mondays.
There was no session, no meeting, no calendared anything, and Jo — who ran the calendar — knew that with total certainty, and understood inside about two seconds that Vivienne had come to a building she did not need to be in and had picked the one place in it where an encounter could plausibly be an accident.
“Ms. Marlowe.”
“Ms. Castellane.”
“I have four minutes and a car outside.” She did not sit down; there was nowhere to sit down. She stood in the lobby in the ordinary Friday traffic of people badging through, and she looked as she always did. “You asked Corinne for a third week.”
“That’s between me and Corinne.”
“It is. She didn’t tell me. Jonah’s firm bills the search and the search has a clock on it, and the clock moved.” A small motion of one hand, dismissing her own explanation. “I’m not here about the week.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because you’ve been carrying it fifteen days,” Vivienne said, “and in my experience that is the point at which a person starts building a reason to say no that they can live with.”
Jo did not answer that.
“Ask me the question,” Vivienne said. “You’ve had it since Fifty-Third Street. You’ll ask it eventually and I’d rather it was now, while I can answer it properly, than in October when it will sound like an accusation.”
So Jo asked it.
“Why are you doing this?”
Vivienne considered her for a moment. It was not a pause for effect. It had the quality of a woman deciding how much of the true answer the situation could carry.
“Because there is no version of your life,” she said, “in which you find out what you’re worth while you are standing next to the man who currently sets it.”
Jo said nothing at all.
“That is the entire answer and it is not about Alexander. I want to be precise, because you will replay this and I would like you to replay it accurately.” Vivienne’s voice did not move.
“He is not underpaying you out of malice. He is not keeping you small. From what I understand he has recently done rather a good job of not solving it for you, which is more than I’d have predicted, and more than I got.
That isn’t the problem. The problem is structural and it would exist if he were a saint. ”
“Say the structural part.”
“Every number attached to you at that company is set by a man who is in love with you.” She let it stand, one beat, and did not soften it.
“Your salary. Your title. Your access. The row on Farrah’s org chart.
Whatever he does about any of it from here — whether he promotes you tomorrow or refuses to on principle for the next decade — you will never, for the rest of your life, be able to tell which part of it was your work.
Neither will anybody else in that building.
And you are somebody who needs to know. I could see that across a conference table in about six minutes. ”
Jo’s hands had gone cold.
“You don’t know me.”
“No,” Vivienne agreed. “I know the arrangement. I was in it. Not the same one, and I’m not going to insult you by pretending the two of us are a matched pair, because we aren’t and it would be a cheap thing to do.
” She glanced once at the security line and back.
“But I was twenty-nine and extremely good and engaged to a man who owned the building, and I spent four years unable to tell whether anything I did was any good, and I got out, and it cost me a great deal more than a job. I do not require you to be grateful. I’m telling you because you asked me a direct question and I’ve decided to answer it. ”
“You could be wrong about me,” Jo said. “You’ve had one conference table and six minutes.”
“I could be, and if I am, the cost to you is that you turn down a job you’d have been good at, which is survivable and happens to people constantly.
” Vivienne inclined her head a fraction.
“That is not the risk you’re weighing and we both know it.
You are not standing here worried that I’ve misjudged you.
You’re standing here worried that I haven’t. ”
Jo looked at her.
“Does it work?” she said. “Getting out. You said it cost you more than a job.”
Something in Vivienne’s composure adjusted, and it was not a softening; it was the stillness of a woman deciding whether to answer a question she had not expected anyone to ask kindly.
“It works,” she said. “Not quickly. And you don’t get the four years back, and there is a version of me that is still angry about them, and she is not somebody I’d introduce you to.
” She glanced at the revolving door. “But yes. It works. I know what I’m worth now, and I know it in a way nobody can take off me by changing their mind about me, and I would not trade that back for anything I gave up to get it.
That is the entire testimonial. It is not a warm one. ”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t have believed a warm one.”
“And the fact that it also happens to remove me from him.”
“Is real, and is not why, and you have no way to verify that, which is a problem I can’t solve for you.
” A shrug so small it barely occurred. “You’ll notice I structured it so I can’t reach you.
One seat of five. No hiring below Corinne.
Full abstention on anything touching my own companies.
I didn’t have to do any of that and it cost me leverage I’d ordinarily keep.
” She looked at Jo directly for the first time.
“You’ve read it. You know what it says.”
“I’ve read it.”
“Then you already know I’m telling the truth about the structure, which is the only part I can prove.”
“That’s not enough.”
“No,” Vivienne said. “It isn’t, and I’d think less of you if you said it was.
” She adjusted the strap of her bag, the first ordinary gesture she had made.
“So here is the part you can check yourself, and I’d encourage you to, because I would rather you trusted the arithmetic than me.
Go and look at what Corinne paid the last person in that seat.
It’s in the deck. Then look at what she is offering you, and notice that it is the same number, and that she fired him in April for being unable to read a document. ”
Jo said nothing.