Pot of Gold

by Judith Michael

  "Will you be able to.?"

  "It's a school night; he won't have any other plans. Have you a preference for dinner tomorrow night.'*"

  "You decide."

  "Is there any kind of ethnic food you can't abide?"

  "None. I like them all."

  "An admirable woman." He pulled on his leather jacket and picked up his briefcase. "By the way, a friend of mine has a play opening in the Village next Tuesday; would you like to go.'' I've read it; I think it's very good, and they've got a good cast."

  "Yes," Claire said. "I've never been to an opening night."

  "There's a party afterward, unless that makes it too late for you."

  Claire smiled. "I don't have a curfew."

  "Good. Neither do I." He took her hand and held it for a moment; what had once been a handshake had become a lingering clasp of friendship. "Good-bye, Claire, and thank you once again for letting me share this wonderful place."

  "I enjoyed it. It seems empty when you're not here."

  He paused in the doorway. "Thank you for telling me that."

  Claire sat on her high stool for a long time after he left, gazing at the door and her cluttered drawing table and the furnishings of her studio without really seeing them. She was content to sit. She had no desire to go anywhere.

  "Won't you be late.''" Hannah asked, standing in the doorway. "Or aren't you going.''"

  "I'm going. I just can't seem to get moving."

  Hannah came in and sat in one of the armchairs. "Emma left half an hour ago. She said to tell you she'll be late."

  "She's always late."

  "But at least she comes home. That one night—"

  "She promised not to do it again. I don't think she liked it. What do you think happened at Thanksgiving, Hannah, that made her so different.'' I'd duplicate it, if I knew how."

  "I imagine it was a little vacation from all the things that are troubling her. And I think it was a first step. Now that she's had one vacation, she's going to want another one, and she'll look for ways to make it happen."

  "Speaking of vacations, I'm going to dinner with Alex tomorrow night."

  "What a fine idea. It's taken you a long time to get around to it."

  "Has it.^ I've only known him a few weeks."

  "And you've been preoccupied with Quentin. Are you still.'"'

  "Sometimes." Claire stood and moved aimlessly about the studio, trailing her hand across the small animal sculptures she had grouped on tables and windowsills. She knew she was putting off getting dressed to go out with him.

  "You know, my dear," Hannah said, "by now you ought to have some very definite ideas about him. kx. the very least, you ought to know exactly what he wants from you and what you want from him."

  "What he wants from me," Claire mused. "A decorative companion. A hostess for his parties. An intelligent, knowledgeable listener who can discuss business and politics and the arts. A woman who enjoys sex. A loyal and dedicated employee. Someone who isn't anxious to get married."

  "And you're all those things."

  "He seems to think so."

  "And what do you want from him.^"

  "Now.'' I'm not sure. What I did want, in the beginning, was his world: different people, different lives, different ways of thinking about people and things. I didn't know how to live Quentin's kind of life. He taught me. He took me there."

  "And now.''"

  "Now I've seen it and it's very pleasant, but there's less there than meets the eye."

  Hannah chuckled. "I know all about that. I once broke off with a man because his only goal in life was making his company the biggest in town so he could swing his weight around without interference. He was rich and good-looking and knew all the best restaurants and which nightclubs had little private rooms upstairs, but there was no poetry in his heart and no music in his soul and I told him so." She nodded as she met Claire's quizzical gaze. "I think you're ready for poetry and music."

  "Hannah," Claire asked, "how many of your stories are true.^"

  "Oh, dear." Hannah shook her head. "Why would you doubt me.^ Is it easier to do that than to think about breaking off with Quentin.?"

  "Of course not," Claire began in annoyance, but then she thought about it. She did have doubts about Hannah's stories, but why had she brought it up now.^ Maybe Hannah was right: maybe she had brought it up because Hannah had given her the best reason of all to break with Quentin, and she was afraid of facing it. Poetry and music, she thought ruefully. She had been with Quentin for six months. He still could arouse her with a touch or a word, but part of that, she knew, was the aphrodisiac of power: she reveled in the attention she got at his side, and it, too, was a kind of arousal. Quentin Eiger made ease and luxury and acquisition seem the natural order of things. "It's a very comfortable way of life," she murmured.

  "But would you be uncomfortable without him.''"

  "You mean, would I miss him.'' I don't know. Not a lot, I think. But that doesn't mean I want to lose his particular kind of excitement." Claire sat on the arm of the chair near Hannah. "It's heady stuff to be on his side of the fence instead of the other side, watching the fun."

  Hannah sighed. "I'll tell you what I think about Quentin Eiger. I'm sure he's essential to the smooth functioning of our economy, and I should be grateful to him and people like him, all those millions of businessmen with their eye on making money and swinging their weight around, because they're no doubt responsible for food being shipped so efficiently to our grocery stores, and cars and planes being built so we can whiz about the country with ease, and clothes coming from all over the world, and all the rest of it. I grant him and his kind all of that. But it seems to me there is little joy in him."

  Claire sat still, staring unseeing at the black squares of her windows and the mounded snow visible on the windowsills. Little joy in him. And there never has been, she added silently. She thought back over the months they had been together. He was determined and aggressive, forceful, confident, and skillful in whatever he undertook, but everything Quentin did, even his lovemaking, was without buoyancy; he never really let go. All his real energy and focus, and whatever passion he had, was bound up in the drive to succeed in one sphere, and then go on to another, wider and more influential, and then another beyond that. His friends knew that; they had told her more than once. Everyone knew, and so did Claire, that Quentin was more interested in the bottom line and the horizon than in the people he carelessly gathered around him.

  He knew which nightclubs had little private rooms upstairs. Yes, he knew the little secret places of the world and how to use them. He was exciting and fascinating and sexually powerful. And there was no joy in him.

  "Thank you, Hannah," Claire said, standing up. "You have a way of putting everything in perspective." She bent over Hannah and kissed her on both cheeks. "You're wonderful at that. I have to get dressed; we're supposed to be going to dinner."

  "Supposed to be.'"'

  "I don't think we'll get there. I think I'll be home very early. In fact, if you're making dinner for yourself, save some for me."

  On Saturday afternoon, in mid-December, Eiger Labs sat silent and dark beneath the heavy clouds that lay low over the land. Here and there a light was on in the offices and laboratories and signs of life could be heard: the tapping of computer keys, the clink of a coffee cup, the rush of water from a faucet at a laboratory table. Gina let herself in the side door that was kept open during the day when the rest of the building was locked and made her way along a dim corridor to the testing lab. No one was there. The testing tables and the offices along one side of the large room were still and dark; they looked abandoned, as if everyone had fled. Or died, Gina thought, because there was something ghostly about the silence.

  She shook herself. Enough of that; she was there to look for . . . something; whatever she could find. It was her last chance

  before she left. Test reports, she said silently. Always kept in the same file, but maybe there's another set somewh
ere. If I were altering test reports, would I keep the originals.^ Of course not; I'd destroy them. But people don't; for some reason I don't understand, they keep them. All those executives at dozens of companies like Dow, Ford, GM, Monsanto—even a president of the United States—kept everything, even the most incriminating documents and tapes. So it's worth another look.

  She heard footsteps and froze until they faded. Have to hurry, she thought, and, in the pale light from the corridor, went to the file cabinet from which Kurt had pulled the reports he had shown her. She shone her flashlight into the top drawer. The reports were still there. She riffled through the rest of the folders in the drawer, each on a different product of the PK-20 line, but no more on the Eye Restorative Cream. She opened the next drawer and then the two below that and skimmed reports on other Eiger products, documentation, interviews, analyses. But there was nothing else on PK-20.

  They got rid of the originals, she thought. Or Emma misread the memos and there's no problem and never was.

  She sat back on her heels, her flashlight on the floor beside her. If there were original reports that had been altered, they could be in any file cabinet in the room, or in any of the offices. It would take hours, days, to go through them. Well, if I can't find them, I can't, she thought. I don't know what else to do. If Emma weren't so sure of what she'd read in those memos . . .

  The memos. Gina raised her head and looked down the length of the room, toward the corner office. Kurt's office. Kurt is the head of testing; the memos would have come from him. And Kurt is leaving, he says, for a better job, though he won't say where. Would he bother to erase everything from his computer.'' I'll bet he wouldn't. I'll bet he's thinking about the future, not the past. I'll bet it's all still there.

  Excitement flared within her, the kind of excitement she felt in the lab when she saw that something was going to work, the kind she felt when she first rode a horse at Roz's farm, the kind she felt about Roz. There are times when we know what we're doing is right, Gina thought; the words almost sang in her head. And this is one of them.

  She shone her flashlight on the floor and made her way along

  the side of the room, past open doors, to Kurt's office. She turned off the flashhght. The last light of the gloomy afternoon barely penetrated the room through its corner windows, but Gina could make out the computer keys, and that was all she needed.

  She closed the blinds on the windows and switched on the computer, pulling up the list of files. There were over a hundred for PK-20, each with its own identification code. "PK-20— testpre," she read, and struck a key to bring the document to the screen. It was a preliminary plan, from two years earlier, setting out the guidelines for testing all the products in the new line. In a few minutes she found the final plan, written three months later. Gina sighed. Ninety-eight files to go.

  But she soon learned which ones she could skip. The code for test results was the date of the test and its sequential number in Kurt's final plan. So, since the memos Emma saw were probably written in October, when she saw them, or September, at the latest, Gina looked for the numbers 9 and 10 and a high sequential number, and those were the ones she brought up on the screen and scrolled through.

  To: Quentin Eigerfrom Kurt Green. Per our discussion with Hale Yaeger, we're expanding the test on Restorative Day Cream, Restorative Night Cream, and Eye Restorative Cream to include black women, 250 from cities in the North, 150 from the South. Test findings should come in at about the same time as . . .

  Gina exited that document and brought up another.

  . . . early tests on the exfoliant scrub indicate minor contamination, probably from the equipment; later tests, on a different unit, were clean. We should purchase a replacement for the first unit; the cost is $175,000 and I strongly recommend that. . .

  "Damn," she muttered, and got rid of that one and brought up another.

  . . . toner A preferred by 65% of the subjects; toner B preferred by 15%; 20% did not like either one. Of those, 17%: said it dried their skin. A possible solution is to make it clear rather than pale blue; women like things that look clean.

  "What does he know about what women like," Gina muttered, and called up another file and then another. She found nothing in October, nothing in September. She went back to August and found nothing. This is ridiculous, she thought, it can't go back this far. But, doggedly, she went on, into July.

  PK-20 human sensitivity tests {test #2)

  The latest test results of PK-20 products confirm a 4% to 5% incidence in test subjects of allergic skin reactions. Subjects experienced some of the following: minor burning, itching, irritation, folliculitus, acneform eruptions, and allergic contact dermatitis. In addition, 1% of the subjects who used the Eye Restorative Cream experienced an allergic conjunctivitis, and one subject had a severe reaction, which resulted in blindness in one eye (Note: we may be able to show that the subject used the product improperly . . .)

  Gina read it again. Just what Emma had said. And they knew it last July. But where's the Latin Emma said she saw.^ Oh, she said there were two.

  She turned on the printer and printed out the memo, then turned back to the computer and went further into Kurt's test file, scanning the documents, until she came to March.

  PK-20 human sensitivity tests {preliminary report) . . . 4% of test subjects experienced a variety of minor allergic skin reactions. A few subjects exhibited conjunctivitis, which may have been caused by the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa or from an allergic reaction to one of the compounds in the product, either of which could cause corneal damage. The lab should have their report on the cause. . .

  Still reading the memo, Gina printed it. She rummaged through the desk drawers until she found a box of blank floppy disks, then inserted one in the computer and made a copy of both memos. In case anybody decides to erase things. She tucked the printed copies and the disk into her shoulder bag and turned off the computer. The room was plunged into darkness. Though it was only five-thirty, it was dark outside. Getting late, she thought; what time does the maintenance staff come in.'' For the first time she was nervous and thought it was better not to use the flashlight; instead, she fumbled for the dustcover and fit it over the computer, ran her hands over the desk drawers to make sure they

  were all shut, and left the room. And only then, as she was standing in the dark, did she realize that the memos proved that the cumulative test reports she had seen were false. And there was a chance that the originals were still somewhere in the test-lab files. And a good chance, she thought, that the computer codes for the memos might be the codes for the cumulative reports.

  "A few more minutes," she muttered to herself. "There's no way I can leave now." Shielding the flashlight, she moved along the ranks of file cabinets. Three of the cabinets were organized by months, one month for each drawer. Gina flipped through the folders in March, and at the back of the drawer, behind test reports on other Eiger products, she found a folder coded as the memos had been in the computer, and inside it were test reports on PK-20 Eye Restorative Cream. They were not the ones Kurt had shown her, taken from a file cabinet at the other end of the room; these showed a report of blindness in one eye of a test subject. These listed conjunctivitis and minor burning, itching, irritation, foUiculitus, acneform eruptions, and allergic contact dermatitis. These were the reports Kurt had summarized in his memos to Brix.

  A feeling of triumph swept through Gina. They kept them. The damn fools kept them. Shoved them in a file and forgot about them. So why bother to make copies? Til just take these with me.

  She slipped the reports into her shoulder bag with the memos and the disk, turned off the flashlight, and made her way back through the laboratory. As she got closer to the door, she could make out tables and workbenches in the pale light from the corridor, and she moved more quickly. Once outside the lab, she heard a distant voice saying good-night to someone, and a door slam. She turned to the right and almost ran to the product laboratories and her own worktable. A ca
rton was on the floor, partially filled with the things she would take with her on Monday, when the chemists and technicians in her laboratory were giving her a going-away party. She threw her books, an empty flowerpot, and a box of pens and pencils into the carton and picked it up. Now, if anyone saw her, she had a reason for being there.

  But she saw no one. She left by the side entrance and walked to the parking lot. Floodlights illuminated the few cars that were there, and Gina turned toward hers.

  "Gina! Gina, hi!" She spun about, wondering if she looked

  guilty, and saw Emma, sitting in her car, leaning out the window.

  "What are you doing here?" Gina asked.

  "Waiting for Brix. We're going to somebody's party. What about you.^"

  He was here the whole time, Gina thought. Both of them. I was practically breaking and entering and he was here. "It's moving day," she said to Emma, gesturing with the carton. Then she thought how absurd it was to lie to Emma. "Well, not really. I came in for something else." She hesitated. "Look, do you have a minute.'' I mean, when does Brix appear.'"'

  "Not for about ten minutes. I'm early. Come keep me company,"

  Emma had the motor running and the heater on, and when Gina sat next to her on the front seat, she closed the window against the cold mist that had drifted in. "Did you find out anything about the memos.'"' When Gina hesitated, she said again, "Did you.?"

  "I found the jackpot. The memos you saw. They were still in Kurt's computer. I've got printed copies and I've got them on disk and they're exactly what you said they were."

  "Oh." Emma's breath came out in a long sigh. "That's awful, isn't it.'' I mean, I knew I didn't make them up or imagine them, but now . . ."

  "Now it's really true. I found the original test reports, too, Emma; I've got the whole thing. And now we have to do something about it."

  Emma's eyes widened. "Like what.''"

  "We have to tell the FDA. They can't do anything about a product until it's shipped across state lines, but I have a few acquaintances there and they could call Quentin, unofficially, and warn him that they've got evidence that could cause them to seize his shipments as soon as he makes them. He'd cancel the release if that happened. And then there's the State's Attorney. He's intensely interested in what products are on the shelves of Connecticut's stores, so I think he'd call Quentin, too, and tell him he has evidence that would not permit the product to go on sale in the state."