Alternate Side(11)
“Mr. Harris? He said you knew him?”
“Did he give a first name?”
“Bob?” Madison said. She handed a message slip to Nora. “He said to use this number.”
“Close the door, Madison,” Nora said. “Please.”
Nora looked down at the message slip in front of her, the request to call Bob Harris, founder and chairman of the investment firm where Charlie worked. For just a moment she had a nonsensical thought: that work was like school, and that just as the head of the middle school had called to tell her that Rachel would suffer an in-school suspension for hiding in the girls’ room during an obligatory morning meeting, his boss was calling to give her bad news about Charlie’s continued employment. Nora knew this was ridiculous, but she could think of no other reason that Bob Harris, a man who had become legendary for his cornpone demeanor and uncanny ability to make money, would call her. That was how he was almost always described: the legendary Bob Harris.
“Well, hey now,” he said when she dialed the number, which was clearly his private line, no secretary, no intermediary, no screening. “I wonder if you and me could have a little meeting.”
“About what?” Nora said.
“See, that’s one of the things I always liked about you. You’re a straight shooter. None of this, Sure, Mr. Harris, when, Mr. Harris, whatever you say, Mr. Harris. About what? That’s what I like.”
“Thank you,” Nora said. “About what?” There was something about Bob Harris that always brought out the peremptory headmistress in her.
“I’ve got a business proposition for you, but I want to have a sit-down to talk more about it. How about if my girl calls your girl and they sync our schedules? What’s your girl’s name again? She told me but I don’t think I heard her right.”
“It’s Madison.”
“Well, hell, I did hear her right. Whatta ya know? Tell Madison to call Eileen. I want to get together real soon.”
“About what?” Nora said.
“There you go. Like I said, straight shooter. Nothing better. I hate the telephone. Let’s get down to brass tacks when I see you.”
Nora put down the phone and looked at the clock on her desk. Jenny was in class, teaching, so she couldn’t call her. Her sister, Christine, would be barely awake in Seattle. And she certainly couldn’t ask Charlie why Bob Harris would want to speak to her. Nora was completely baffled, but there was no mystery in how her husband would react to a personal call from the man he felt insufficiently valued his talents. Unless he already knew. She had to hope Bob Harris didn’t run into Charlie in the elevator anytime soon, that assistant Eileen didn’t pass along the word to Charlie’s assistant, Maryanne, while they were picking up sandwiches for lunch.
Nora wondered if Madison had recognized Bob Harris’s name. She wouldn’t put it past her. Madison had grown up in New York City, and she was as hungry a twenty-four-year-old as Nora had ever encountered. “This is my dream job,” she had said during her interview, following up with “I want to be you when I grow up,” which Nora told Jenny made her feel a million years old, and Jenny said would have caused her to shred Madison’s résumé. “Plus, I’m sorry, but how do you take seriously a person who is named after an avenue?” Jenny said.
“You must have had at least one Madison as a student,” Nora said.
“Of course I have,” said Jenny. “Right now I have a student named Celestial, and another named Otto, who insists on spelling his name with a lowercase o at the beginning. But I didn’t choose to hire them. They were thrust upon me.”
Madison was a heat-seeking missile; Nora, by contrast, felt as though she’d fallen into nearly every job she’d had, although Jenny always insisted she was selling herself short. During the summer between sophomore and junior year at Williams she had wanted to stay on campus because the man with whom she was topsy-turvy in love was working on a historic restoration project nearby. There had been an opening for an assistant in the development office, which was fine with her, although she had had no idea what a development office actually did. Two weeks in, the assistant director was put on bed rest with a dicey pregnancy, and Nora found herself showing more rich alums around the campus than anyone had expected, and taking several trips to the enormous shingled houses of Nantucket and Naragansett while the director asked for what Nora quickly learned to call a significant multiyear gift. At the end of summer the director had asked her if she would continue part-time during the school year, and when the director left to go to the Folk Art Museum in New York City, she had taken Nora with her.
Even before college Nora had understood that there was a kind of desire expected of smart and capable people that she had never really had, that wanting fever that so clearly ran through Madison’s veins. Nora’s ambition was a simmer, not a boil. Her best friend in high school had wanted to be an actress with a ferocity that was like a mental illness; it shaped the way Amanda looked at everything. Nora was certain that because of this she would succeed, that it was this inflammatory ambition, not talent, that made a difference. But in the back of her mind was the understanding that having that kind of hunger was a razor blade hidden at the bottom of the bag; that it meant that not getting what you wanted would be crippling. Nora had to admit that she was slightly relieved not to have it, to be content to move from one responsible position to another in a business that, after all, was all for a good cause. Raising money first for the folk art museum, then for the law school. The fashion institute job seemed a bit less like giving back to humanity, but it was the first time she’d been asked to head the office rather than sit second seat, and the money was good. There had been private-school tuitions, and the economy had hit one of those speed bumps that made Charlie ask if Rachel really needed to spend the summer at drama camp.