The Assistants(8)

A guy like Kevin could only be this nice to me because I was Robert Barlow’s assistant. It had happened before with other guys, albeit less attractive ones. Eventually the flirtatious male would ask for some favor—a slot on Robert’s calendar or an invitation to some event. But manipulation or not, he was cute.

I agreed to lunch. It’s build-your-own-burger day, I replied, to emphasize that I was in it solely for the red meat and unlimited fixings, not Kevin’s company. See you down there.

I should mention that the Titan cafeteria wasn’t really a cafeteria. It was more of a food service Pangaea, connecting all imaginable menu options together in one space. There was a grill station, a soup station, an international station that changed according to obscure holidays and days of observance no one’s heard of, and—a crowd favorite—the “action station,” in which a line of chefs cooked up your meal in fast-action. Of course there was also sushi, pizza, specialty sandwiches, a salad bar, and a celebrity chef’s table. Don’t even get me started on snack time, which ran from three to four p.m. and encompassed more dessert options than the Viennese hour at the last Italian wedding you attended. But the pinnacle of all, to me, was build-your-own-burger day. I loved build-your-own-burger day so much that each month when it rolled around, I’d enter it onto my Outlook calendar ahead of time. Once, in my excitement, I accidentally entered it onto Robert’s calendar instead of mine—with the requisite triple exclamation points and all. (This is why no one person should ever oversee more than one calendar, but such is the assistant’s burden.) The exclamatory note sat there for about a week before I discovered the error, but Robert never mentioned it.

Kevin was already on line at the burger station when I arrived. I admired the fact that he wasn’t looking at his phone, like everyone else on the line. He just waited, with his hands in the pockets of his gray suit pants, soaking up the atmosphere, as they say. His eyes brightened when I made my approach.

“I saved you a spot,” he said, letting me cut in front of him.

I knew the woman behind us wouldn’t complain about my cutting because Kevin had that soothing effect on people. People, mainly women, yearned to do him favors.

“How’s Wiles today?” I asked.

Glen Wiles was the head of Titan’s legal department, and Kevin’s boss. He was also the only man at Titan more feared than Robert—not because he had more power, but because he was by far the bigger *.

“At the moment, Wiles is turning the office thermostat all the way down to make his assistant’s endowment perk up. You know . . .” He gestured toward his own pectoral nipples. “So business as usual, really.”

“Yeah, Robert would never do that to me,” I said, looking down at my non-tits beneath my sweater.

Kevin cleared his throat and politely looked away. Fortunately, it was our turn to build our burgers.

—

LATER THAT NIGHT, the guilt really hit hard, the way it tends to do when the distractions of the day all fall away and you’re finally left alone with yourself. Until this point—rational or not—using Titan’s money to pay off my student-loan debt had felt like something that happened to me more than something I’d done. But this was deliberate. I’d chosen to do this for Emily, or with Emily, instead of turning myself in, and that was wrong no matter how you looked at it.

Things are going to hell in a handbasket, Robert would have said. His voice was always in my head. I couldn’t help it. So much of my daily energy went to thinking about Robert, thinking as Robert, anticipating his needs, responding to his requests, manifesting his every wish. It wasn’t possible to just turn his voice off at the end of the day.

A couple sandwiches shy of a picnic, he would have called my thinking now. Crazy as a bull bat.

I stared up at the rain bubble that hung down from the ceiling over my bed—a white plaster water balloon threatening to plunge onto my head at any moment. It was an anomaly of nature that defied all logic considering I lived on the ground floor of my apartment building, but there it was every time it rained, taunting my limited comprehension of both plumbing and architecture.

It was storming outside, and the roaring thunder and flashing lightning only reinforced my notion that God was angry with me. I watched the bubble swell with each passing second, stretching like a waterlogged belly. The Internet had gone out in the storm and I didn’t own a television, so tracking the bubble’s growth was my only active form of entertainment. I could have gone on that way all night, but the buzz of my doorbell shook me back to consciousness.

It was just after midnight. Who could be at my door?

A rumble of thunder crescendoed to a crash. My windows rattled and I realized it must be death at my door, a scythe-wielding reaper, come to massacre me in my blue-and-white-striped pajamas as punishment for my crimes.

Actually, it was a soaking-wet Emily Johnson.

“What are you doing here?” I said. “How did you know where I live?”

Emily looked like she’d just stepped out of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, if the swimsuits were replaced by the designer nightclub-wear Westchester girls partied in to get laid. She was all drenched and disheveled. Her eye makeup ran down her face in crooked inky streams.

“Are you crying?” I asked.

She pointed up at the sky like I was a moron. “It’s raining.”