The Assistants(3)

I read off the number to my second credit card, got “one moment”–ed again, but—at last—tragedy was averted.

I hung up the phone and took a deep breath.

Of course I filed an expense report the moment I received an e-mail confirmation for the fare. Twenty thousand dollars was half of my yearly salary.

People often assumed I made more as the assistant to one of the richest, most powerful men on the planet, and I let them. It was less humiliating that way. Maybe there was a time when “executive assistants,” also known as “secretaries,” were “taken care of,” but those days are long gone, at least in the media industry. They went out with lunches at the Four Seasons, smoking indoors, and the existence of the middle class. Every assistant I knew made under fifty K a year. But the new hires made only thirty-five K, so it wasn’t really my place to complain.

—

YOU KNOW HOW sometimes when you call to order something over the phone, like plane tickets, let’s say, a recording might come on just before a real person answers that says, This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes?

Well, my call with the hater from the airline was one of those lucky calls. I’d never filed a complaint the way I threatened to; I’m way too lazy for that sort of thing. But a few days after the incident, I received a call from the airline’s head of customer relations apologizing for the “confusion” of the attendant on the phone. She’d been “let go,” I was told, also known as fired. The airline retroactively comped Robert’s flight and they were sending a gift for his troubles.

“Would Mr. Barlow enjoy a bottle of good red wine?” the groveling woman asked.

“Why, yes. Yes, he would.”

Things like this happened to Robert all the time. Before I worked for Titan, I never realized that very rich people didn’t pay for stuff.

(Let’s call that rule number four: Very rich people don’t pay for stuff.)

I was so na?ve. This sucking-up from the airline would have at one time struck me as shocking and unbelievably unfair, nonsensical even. Why wouldn’t a billionaire have to pay for something a poor person would absolutely have to pay for? But I’d grown used to it in the past six soul-crushing years, so it no longer fazed me. I immediately filed the whole incident under forgotten, went home, watched some Netflix, and fell asleep ignoring the unpaid bills piling up on my kitchen table, per usual.

A few days later I was g-chatting with Handsome Kevin Hanson from legal (that’s what every female in the office called him, or just Kevin Handsome for short) while shoveling spoonfuls of Pinkberry into my mouth. I was enjoying an intense brain freeze coupled with the rush I always experienced while chatting with Kevin, when Billy the mail guy (aka “Patchouli,” on account of his stinking to high hell of the stuff and dutifully passing it on to all of our parcels) dropped a white, hippie-infused envelope onto my desk that read: Travel & Entertainment Reimbursement.

Suddenly I remembered.

I signed off g-chat, made sure Patchouli Billy was at a safe distance, and then sliced open the envelope with my silver letter opener. And there it was. A crisp green check in the amount of $19,147 with my name on it.

Of course. My credit cards were billed. My credit cards were unbilled. But T & E had already filed the claim. I’d already been approved for the reimbursement.

I couldn’t stop looking at that beautiful, blossoming number. Nineteen thousand, one hundred forty-seven dollars. It was so much money to me. It was nearly, to the dollar, the exact amount of my student loan balance, and I’d been struggling to pay that down for almost a decade. (Thanks for nothing, NYU.)

I folded the check in half, then in half again, and shoved it deep into the black-hole darkness of my bag.

Later, I would recognize this as the moment that I faltered, my pivotal turn. But at the time it seemed innocent enough. I would just, you know, bring the check home and then tear it to shreds.

Sure, I could have torn it up right then and been done with it, but I wanted to look at it some more first. To sit with it in my moldy one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, with its leaky roof and rats in the walls. I needed to take the check home to bed with me, for just one night, before discarding it.

So I did.

One night then turned into a week that I slept with that gorgeous green-patterned piece of paper on my nightstand, weighted down by my half-empty orange pill bottle of Lexapro. Then I had a nightmare that one of the rats in the walls made it into my room when I wasn’t home and ate the check, so I weighed it down with a mousetrap instead. Not one with cheese in it, just the trap, set and ready, cocked like an armed security guard.

While gazing into the check’s fine crosshatched surface, I’d let my eyes go soft and compose scenarios of cashing it and then being caught. What would I say? Oh, that check? Didn’t I cancel that? I’d never intentionally take money that didn’t belong to me. That’s just not how I was raised.

Which was true. I was raised Catholic by what they call old-school Italians. (Or what Robert in his native Texan twang would call Eye-talians.) My parents were the kind of people who favored the vengeful, Old Testament God over the more forgiving, nonviolent version from the “Americanized” (their word) New Testament. My father would threaten to cut off my pinky finger himself for a lesser offense than stealing. But then again, wasn’t my angry Geppetto of a dad’s most favorite phrase God works in mysterious ways?