The Assistants(9)

“Right. But what are you doing here?”

“My date tonight was a bust,” she said, in a way that sounded like she might actually begin to cry. “And I can’t make it back to Bridgeport in this storm. Some * smashed the driver-side window of my Range Rover with a goddamn brick. I covered it with a plastic bag, but there’s no way I can sleep in there tonight.”

“You sleep in your car?”

“It’s not a car, it’s a Range Rover.”

“You have a Range Rover but no apartment?”

“Fontana, I have nowhere else to go. Can I come in or not?”

I was still so disoriented, trying to relate this Emily Johnson to the one I knew from work. That version of her was a wire pulled taut. This girl on the brink of tears in my doorway was slack and loose, unguarded. She was vulnerable. Real. And a little insane looking.

“I don’t have much space,” I said. “It’s not like I’ve got a guest room. I barely have a living room. And how did you know where I live? Did I already ask you that?”

“Don’t you have an air mattress?” She stepped past me, through my doorway.

“No, actually.” I followed behind her to the kitchen as she began to disrobe.

“I brought this,” she said. From her oversize Coach hobo bag she pulled a bottle of Jameson. “To say thank you for letting me crash here.”

I was suddenly transported to the most significant moment of my adolescence: seventh grade, when the queen bee, Dana Vandorn, was surprised by her period in the bathroom stall next to mine. She came out sheepish, searching her purse for a dime in order to vend a pillowy maxi pad from the machine. But who carried dimes? I just happened to also be experiencing menses that week and I knew this was my moment. I knew I could have let Dana Vandorn suffer—lord knew she deserved it—but I chose instead to take the high road and offered her a Playtex Sport from my bag. She thanked me with an expression exactly like the one Emily was wearing now. Gratitude pregnant with shame. And you know what? After that day, Dana Vandorn never called me a dyke again.

“Are you a lesbian?” Emily asked.

Had I been thinking out loud?

She was standing in pasties and a black thong. Her dress and accessories lay in a damp puddle at her feet. “It’s cool if you are,” she said. “But I want to be clear that I—”

“I’m not a lesbian.” It was just like a pretty girl to assume everyone wanted her.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Because your clothes.” She pointed to my white Hanes T-shirt and striped men’s pajama bottoms.

“Positive. I’d probably get a lot more action if I was, but sadly no.”

Satisfied, Emily pranced into my bedroom. “Do you have another pair of man pajamas for me to wear?” she asked, and then stopped in her tracks. “What the hell is that?” She pointed, horrified, at the rain bubble hanging down from the ceiling. “It looks like a tit.” She jumped up on my bed and poked at the bubble with her pinky.

“Please don’t touch it,” I said.

“Look, it’s even got a little nipple. We should stick it with a pin and milk it.”

“I said don’t touch it!”

I tossed a clean pair of pajamas at her and went to the kitchen to let her get dressed in private.

This was so not the tightwad bitch I knew from the office. I couldn’t get over the fact that she’d actually used the word tit. I returned to the bedroom carrying the Jameson and two souvenir shot glasses.

Emily tilted her head at me and frowned. When she blinked, her blond bangs caught onto the tips of her eyelashes. “How old are you?” she asked. “Are we on spring break in Fort Lauderdale? Don’t you have any rocks glasses?”

I dashed back to the kitchen and returned with the only other glassware I owned besides coffee mugs—old jam jars with the labels torn off.

“That’ll do,” Emily said, unscrewing the cap from the whiskey.

I also brought out my coveted box of Thin Mints from the freezer, a sure way to impress any houseguest—not that I was trying to impress Emily Johnson, but still.

“Want one?” I asked, holding an icy-cold cookie out toward Emily.

She shook her head no, but I noticed her smile.

“You live here alone?” Emily scanned my cramped yet sparsely furnished space. “I figured,” she added, before I could answer. She pulled her golden hair back into a ponytail. “You seem like the loner type. It’s probably because you have low self-esteem.”

Why exactly had I let this girl in from the rain? She was a textbook example of why I never invited anyone over.

As Emily got drunk, her eyelids grew heavy and her speech pattern slowed, but she didn’t get any friendlier, as some people do. “You shouldn’t feel self-conscious about being a thirty-year-old assistant,” she said. “At least you’re good at it. Not everyone could handle how demeaning it is.”

Thanks, I thought. This was the Emily Johnson version of a compliment.

“So what’s your deal?” I asked, once I sensed she was inebriated enough. (I’d been waiting for her to become inebriated enough to ask.) “If you’re as broke as you say you are, then what’s with all the fancy clothes and jewelry? How do you pay for it all?”

Emily brought her Connecticut lockjaw back into play for her response. “I live by the kindness of others,” she said. “The kindness of men.”