The Assistants(15)

“Yeah, preparing.” Emily outstretched her legs, lifting one, pointing and flexing her toes to check her pedicure, and then the other. “You should be stocking up on bottled water and duct-taping the windows.”

Emily was missing my point. Kevin was a Titan lawyer. He worked with Glen Wiles.

I leaned over the side of the bed to retrieve Margie’s photocopies from where Emily had dropped them. “With all this going on”—I shook the papers at Emily—“you think it’s wise for me to go out with Kevin?”

Emily checked her manicure then, one fingernail at a time. “You’re forgetting that Kevin is also by far the best-looking man who’ll ever be interested in you in your entire life, so if I were you, I’d take what I could get when I could get it. Now give me those.” She flicked her fingers at Margie’s photocopies, which I dutifully handed over.

She rose from the bed, papers in hand. “Let’s go burn these on the stove right now.”

“There’s no gas.” I followed behind her, toward the kitchen. “It got turned off.”

“Seriously?” Emily turned around on me, inexplicably incredulous.

“I didn’t pay the bill.”

“What if I wanted to heat up some soup or something?” Emily said.

And then we both burst out laughing. For whatever reason, Emily standing over a hot stove, stirring a steaming pot of Campbell’s minestrone, was the most hilarious and unlikely image in the world.

“I’m sure we’ve got a match somewhere in this place,” I said, wiping the laugh-tears from my eyes. I appreciated the momentary reprieve from our humorless reality: that we were in fact in a situation that would most likely lead to life in prison for both of us. If the burning of documents didn’t tip us off, nothing would.





6




IT WAS THE TAIL END of a blessedly uneventful week when I noticed that Robert had taken to expensing his shoe-shines. Was he testing me? Perhaps he was reassessing my loyalty to him or my talent for creative nonfiction. I would not fail him now. It’s commensurate with Mr. Barlow’s position to maintain freshly shined shoes, I wrote in the comments section of the reimbursement form. It’s not like Emily was about to reject any claim that I processed. I should have written: It’s commensurate with Mr. Barlow’s position to have someone touch and rub and smack around his feet on the regular because he gets off on it, but like most men he will never admit this is the real draw of shoe-shines.

Filing Robert’s expense reports had taken on new meaning since Emily and I had teamed up. I began to see every one of Robert’s company-paid-for $500 dinners, every pair of center-stage theater tickets, every penthouse hotel room, in terms of real paper money—which, for whatever reason, I’d never done before. Like: What I needed to pay the Roto-Rooter man to unclog my ancient toilet, Robert used to play a round of tennis at the country club. What I needed to buy a computer that didn’t spontaneously shut itself down, he used to have his Mercedes waxed with a rare special formula that was probably composed of the placenta of baby dinosaurs. My monthly MetroCard was a single RM-monogrammed handkerchief, which Robert considered to be use-and-toss disposable.

The Oprah Magazine would refer to this as an “aha moment.”

(Yeah, I read O, The Oprah Magazine, so what? We all need some sort of religion in our lives.)

As I scrolled through Robert’s corporate-card-statement, I grouped his purchases by category: entertainment, travel, food, lodging, etc. It was a game of solitaire I could play in my sleep, but then a rogue charge suddenly caught my attention.

He dropped $2,400 at the Bel Air Pro Golf Shop?

I hated having to knock on Robert’s door to question a transaction; it always felt like I was accusing him of something. But this wasn’t the typical cost of a “golf meeting,” which I was pretty sure Robert coined as a business-expense term in the first place—this was for stuff he bought in the shop. It might appear suspicious if I didn’t question him about it.

I shot a look to his office. He was watching the wall of flat-screens across from his desk and he was alone, for once not on the phone. I had to go now.

“Um, excuse me, Robert . . . ,” I said, entering invisibly and pointing to the charge, which I’d highlighted in the statement printout. “Does this look right to you?”

“Yes,” Robert said. “That was my golf meeting with Gary from the West Coast office. I forgot to have my clubs and shoes sent over from the hotel so I had to buy a new set.”

“Of course.” I nearly bowed and crept back to my desk.

Of course? Really, Tina? Do you hear yourself?

Something had been stirred in me that I’d never felt before. Rather than going back to the hotel, or even sending a lackey back to the hotel, he’d just bought a whole new set of golf clubs? What the—

Hiya, Kevin chatted. Lunch?

I took a deep breath. Sure. Meet you down there in five?

How about out front?

Wait. What? Like leave the building?

It’s sunny out today, he wrote, followed by a smiley face, which gave me pause. I was all for gender equality and all that, but let’s put it on the record here that no self-respecting man should implement the smiley or any emoticon, ever.

! I wrote back. Ok.

This is going to sound crazy, but I’d never seen Kevin outside in the light of day before. When we came face-to-face in front of the building, his eyes did this sparkly thing that reminded me of the attractive vampire from Twilight, and for a few seconds I was rendered utterly speechless. He wasn’t wearing his suit jacket and his shirtsleeves were rolled up the way Robert kept his, except Kevin’s arms were a golden brown with just the right amount of dark hair covering them. The sun also brought to light that I had a ketchup stain on the front of my pants from yesterday’s hamburger.