by Jane Heller
“I don’t know that I like being an accountant exactly,” I said. “Part of me would rather be a backup singer for, say, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, but I’m good at my job, so I must enjoy the work. According to my secretary, I enjoy it a little too much.”
“Ah, the proverbial workaholic,” said Steven. “I guess we’ve got that and movies in common.” He chuckled, then gave the waiter our dinner order.
During the meal—don’t ask me what we were eating; suffice it to say it was light brown—Steven spoke animatedly about his work, which apparently involved an incredible amount of research as well as travel. He was one busy guy. And smart, too. The more he talked, the more the memory of our bumpy beginning receded, and I found myself being drawn in by his anecdotes, excited by the very fact that I was out for dinner with a man for a change. By the time dessert and coffee rolled around, I had forgotten all about Steven’s ears.
And we didn’t just discuss business. No, we chatted about personal matters, too, discovering that we had several things in common. Steven was born in Manhattan and I was born in Manhattan. He was conflicted about his relationship with his widowed mother and I was conflicted about my relationship with my widowed father. And to top if all off, we were both allergic to mold spores, cat dander, and dust mites.
We were getting along so well that when Steven invited me up to his apartment for a nightcap, I surprised myself and said yes.
Steven, it turned out, lived on the penthouse floor of a gleaming, forty-story building on East Seventy-ninth Street. Unlike my place, which was sparsely furnished and looked as if no one lived there, his apartment was a Ralph Lauren showroom—a positive paean to paisley.
He poured us each a glass of cognac and we picked up where we’d left off in the restaurant, sharing little factoids about our lives. At one point, he confessed that he’d been married twice—to the same woman. Something his mother had neglected to mention.
“She’s out of my life now,” Steven pledged, referring to the ex-wife, his voice heavy with conviction. A little too heavy, if you ask me.
He didn’t volunteer any further details but I could tell by how red his ears had gotten that the subject of this ex-wife was still a loaded one.
“How about you, Crystal?” he asked. “Have you ever taken the plunge?”
“Just once,” I said. “Very briefly, when I was practically a kid.” I’d been married right out of college, for only a year, and hadn’t seen or heard from my ex in nearly two decades. Sometimes, when people asked me the “Have-you-ever-been-married” question, I actually said no, figuring the marriage hadn’t lasted long enough to count.
Steven and I spent about an hour in his apartment that evening. A very chaste hour. At about ten-thirty—just after I had tried unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn—he rose from the paisley sofa on which we’d been sitting and said, “Well. This has worked out better than I thought it would. I feel very comfortable with you, Crystal. I’d like to see you again. Would that be all right with you?”
I considered the question. Steven Roth hadn’t exactly lit the fires of passion within me, but he seemed like a decent enough guy. Since I knew there was a terrible shortage of decent enough guys, I thought: What the heck.
“Sure it would be all right with me, Steven,” I said. “I’d like to see you again, too.”
“I’m glad,” he said and walked over to his briefcase. He pulled out his date book and studied it for a minute or two. “I’ll be out of town on business for a while,” he said finally. “What about two weeks from Sunday? We could have lunch, then see a movie.”
“Sunday is my father’s birthday,” I said. “I’ll be spending the day with him.” Why, I didn’t know. I visited my father every Sunday, and every Sunday the routine was the same. Hello, Dad, I’d say. How are you feeling today, Dad? Would you like to hear about my busy week? You’d rather watch television? That’s fine, Dad. I’ll just sit here for the next few hours with my tongue hanging out in case you decide to acknowledge my existence. I assumed the Sunday of his birthday wouldn’t be a radical departure from this torture, except that I’d probably bring a cake, cut him a piece, and then he’d tell me he didn’t want any. Rona said I was a glutton for punishment when it came to my father and that I should let the old geezer sit by himself on Sundays. But I was determined to work as hard at getting his love as I did at straightening out people’s tax problems. “I should be back in the city by six or so,” I told Steven. “Maybe we could do something that evening instead.”
Steven shook his head as he ran his finger over the entries in his date book. “I’m tied up that Sunday night with a client and my weeknights are a disaster. What about the following Saturday night?”
“Are we talking about three weeks from tonight? I didn’t have my calendar with me.”
“Yes. I can do a seven o’clock, seven-thirty, or eight. Do any of those times work for you?” said Steven, sounding like a doctor’s receptionist.
“Off the top of my head, they’re all fine,” I replied. “If I have a scheduling conflict, I’ll get back to you.”
So. That’s how it began with Steven and me—two people slotting each other in. And we’d been going along in that vein ever since, without so much as a harsh word between us. From my vantage point, the relationship was a good one—steady, dependable, like a Maytag washing machine. Who needed fireworks? I’d had those with my ex-husband and they’d blown up in my face.
Rona never let up about how wrong Steven was for me, as I’ve mentioned. But I kept telling myself that I knew better; that he and I met each other’s needs perfectly; that, despite Rona’s supposed higher state of consciousness, she didn’t have all the answers. After all, she claimed that in a former life she was the wife of one of the kings of England, but she had no idea which wife or which king.
No, I don’t need my aura cleansed, I smiled as I dismissed my friend’s New Age mumbo-jumbo and refocused on Jeff Jacobson’s tax problems. My life is fine and dandy.
Chapter Two
I tried to reach Steven over the weekend but kept getting his answering machine. It wasn’t until the following Wednesday afternoon, while Rona was out of the office having her Tarot cards read and I was, therefore, stuck answering my own phone, that we finally made contact.
“Steven,” I said. “You’ve been impossible to get hold of.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve been crazed with work.”
“Must be a big case,” I said.
“It is.”
“Are you working tonight?” I asked. It had been about ten days since I’d last seen him and Rona’s all-work-and-no-play speech Friday night had left me wondering if I shouldn’t try to spend more time with him. Quality time.
“’Fraid so,” he said. “But that’s what’s so great about you, Crystal. I never have to worry about telling you I have to work nights or weekends. You’ve been there. You understand.”
“Of course I do,” I said. “I just thought we could both use a break. Have dinner. See a movie, maybe.”
“I could use a break, all right,” he said, “but not tonight.”
“Because of that big case you mentioned?”
“Exactly. I’ll be home preparing for Littleton v. The Betty Ford Center.”
“Somebody’s suing the Betty Ford Center for medical malpractice?”
“Somebody’s always suing somebody for medical malpractice. That’s why I don’t have a life anymore.”
I nodded silently, knowingly, despondently. Nobody my age had a life anymore, what with the demands of job, marriage, kids, elderly parents, take your pick. No, nobody had a life anymore, except Rona, who, if you bought her adventures in regression therapy, had several. “Well, call me when you come up for air,” I suggested to Steven. “I’ll be going to see my father on Sunday, but I’ll be around on Saturday night. We could—”
“Sorry. I’ve got another call,” he interrupted, sounding rushed. “Talk to you later, Crystal.” There was a dial tone.<
br />
Yes, later, I thought, an idea occurring to me. Steven had said he would be home all night working. What if I did something totally out of character for me—for him, too? What if I surprised him at his apartment with a shopping bag full of goodies from the gourmet takeout place near his building? He had to eat, didn’t he? What if we ate together, sipped a little wine, relaxed, just for an hour or two? There might even be time for us to make love on his paisley sheets before he had to re-immerse himself in Littleton v. The Betty Ford Center.
I decided to leave the office early so I could hurry back to my apartment, shower and change, hit the gourmet shop, and head over to Steven’s. Unfortunately, Otis Tool, one of the managing partners at Duboff Spector, telephoned just as I was almost out the door and asked me to stop by his office. He said he had something important he wanted to discuss with me.
“Sure, Otis,” I said, dreading the meeting. Otis was a small man in every sense of the word. In his late sixties, he was as puny as he was petty—a mean-spirited gossip with a slash of a mouth, slitty eyes, and hands the size of a child’s. What’s more, he spoke so softly you had to stand extremely close to him in order to hear him. Either that or you had to read lips. One way or another, you always felt manipulated after even a few minutes in Otis Tool’s company.
“Thank you for coming,” he said as I sat in the visitor’s chair opposite his desk. He was wearing a charcoal gray suit and a dour expression—everyone’s idea of an accountant. Or an undertaker.
“What did you want to discuss with me?” I asked, glancing at my watch. I was eager to get going.
“It concerns your se…” he said in a voice that trailed off and was, finally, inaudible.
“My what?” I shouted. That was another thing about Otis: you found yourself yelling in his presence. To compensate, I guess.
“Your secretary,” he said, as I leaned closer to him. “Mrs. Wishnick.”
“What about her?” I said suspiciously. Otis lived for office politics, corporate intrigues, opportunities to spread nasty rumors about people. Trust me, he was a devious little gnome.
“The other managing partners and I were going over the payroll—we do have to keep our own house in order, don’t we?—and we were startled to find that Mrs. Wishnick’s salary is considerably higher than that of the other secretaries.”
“Yes, because Rona has worked here longer than the other secretaries,” I said. “She’s more experienced, too. She knows as much about accounting as most of the CPAs here.” You included, asshole.
“But the job description calls for a secretary, not a CPA,” Otis pointed out. “It doesn’t call for a woman of her age and experience.”
“Of her age and experience?” What was the loathsome creature getting at? I wondered. Rona and I were practically the same age.
“Yes,” he said. “You know the trend in business these days, Crystal. Everybody is cutting operating costs by replacing the older, more experienced people—and their hefty salaries—with more junior personnel, younger men and women who may require a bit of training but don’t drain the bottom line, as it were. To be perfectly candid, we’re looking at this trend very carefully, reviewing all of our people to see where we can do a little trimming.”
I couldn’t get over this. Was Otis suggesting that Duboff Spector actually downsize Rona and replace her with some eighteen-year-old? Or was there something else on his mind? You never could tell with this guy.
And then a distant bell sounded. Yes, I was beginning to get it now, get what this we’re-reviewing-all-of-our-people stuff was really about. It was entirely possible that, in his typically oblique way, Otis was only using the issue of Rona and her age, experience, and salary to tip me off that it was I who should be sending out the résumés; that the managing partners were considering my age, experience, and equity in the company a drain on the bottom line; that they were salivating at the thought of buying me out of my contract and trading me in for a younger, less expensive drudge, someone who’d literally just taken—and, theoretically, passed—the CPA exam.
Otis saw the mixture of bewilderment and betrayal on my face and nodded.
“I knew you’d understand,” he said, sensing that he had accomplished his mission. He knew he had told me without telling me that the other partners were looking to scale back by scaling me back; that a large firm like Duboff Spector could easily make do with one less partner; that even partners were disposable, whether they had a contract or not.
So that’s how they do things now, I thought sourly. They don’t fire you outright anymore when they want to cut costs. They “indicate” that you’ll be canned somewhere down the line. The idea, I suppose, is to allow you sufficient time to find employment elsewhere. That way, you can quit instead of being canned. Which means that you can save face and they can avoid a lawsuit.
How humane, I mused, feeling as if I’d just been told that I’d been sentenced to death but that the actual date of the execution was still up in the air. How fucking nice of everybody.
“I think we’re finished here,” Otis said, rising from his chair. I rose from mine, too. “There’s nothing for us to worry about today, of course. I just wanted to bring this matter to your attention and alert you that there may be a problem in the fu…” His voice was trailing off again.
“Would you mind speaking up?” I said. “I didn’t catch the last word.”
“Oh. Yes. Certainly,” he said, surprised, as if I were the first person to notice his odd and thoroughly irritating speech pattern. “I said, I just wanted to alert you that there may be a problem in the future.”
The future. I met Otis Tool’s eyes, which were so narrow I wondered how he saw out of them. Did I even have a future at Duboff Spector? Had all those long hours I’d put in for the company, all those days and nights hunched over the computer, all those years of seemingly endless tax seasons, been for nothing? Absolutely nothing?
I felt shaky, off balance, about as stressed out as a person could be. I was dying for a Pepcid AC—my acid reflux was refluxing in a particularly distasteful way—but mostly I just wanted to tell Otis he could take his partnership and shove it.
Instead, I shook his moist little hand, wished him a pleasant evening, and left. I figured I would keep my mouth shut until I discussed the situation with Steven over dinner. He was a lawyer, after all. He would strategize with me, help me come up with a plan, tell me what my legal options were if Duboff Spector tried to squeeze me out. Yes, I thought as I fled the office. Steven is the ideal person to lay this on.
Not for the first time, I was grateful that the man in my life was not some superficial playboy who was forever juggling women behind my back but a conscientious attorney whose advice would be invaluable to me in my time of need.
When I finally arrived at Grace’s Marketplace, the takeout food emporium on the corner of Third Avenue and Seventy-first Street, it was dinnertime. The place was jam-packed with harried-looking professionals, jockeying for position in front of the prepared foods counters, trolling for chicken this or pasta that or whatever looked microwavable, too exhausted to decide what to eat, let alone cook it.
I didn’t have much of an appetite following my chat with Otis, but I assumed that Steven would be hungry so I bought food—lots of food—for the two of us. Appetizers. Bread. Salad. A main course. An assortment of side dishes. Even some pastries. And then I lugged the three shopping bags, along with my purse and briefcase, eight blocks to his building.
When I got there, arms aching, head throbbing, heartburn off the charts, Jimmy, the silver-haired Irish doorman who usually worked nights, was absent from his post in the lobby. Figuring that he’d slipped off to the package room or men’s room or wherever doormen go when they’re not guarding the door, I didn’t wait to be buzzed upstairs; I proceeded straight to the elevator. Once inside, I pressed “P” for penthouse, rested my bundles on the floor of the elevator, and rode the forty stories to Steven’s apartment.
There, I got off
the elevator, trudged down the hall with my bags, rang his doorbell, and waited.
When he didn’t answer after several seconds, I rang again. He’d said he’d be home working, hadn’t he?
God, that would be a kick in the teeth, I muttered. I go and spend all this money on dinner, drag it uptown, and then Steven decides to work in the office, not in his apartment. Swell.
I rang his bell once again and was relieved when I finally heard him padding toward the door. So he’s here after all, I thought, eager to see his face when he caught a glimpse—and the aroma—of my gourmet delights. I assumed he would be pleased to see me, too, of course.
“Crystal!” he said when he opened the door. He was dressed casually, in jeans and a polo shirt, as if he’d been home a while, long enough to change clothes, anyway.
“Hi,” I said cheerfully. “I’ve got a special delivery for Mr. Steven Roth.” I held up the shopping bags and smiled. A regular Avon lady.
“Uh, yes. You do,” Steven said with a rather anemic expression. “Did we make plans to…I mean, you didn’t tell me you were coming, did you?” His ears were bright red. I really had surprised him.
“Don’t tell me you’ve eaten already,” I said. I hoped he hadn’t grabbed some Pakistani snack on his way home.
“I haven’t eaten. Not a single bite,” he said, shaking his head back and forth repeatedly, as if it were stuck in the “no” position.
“Good,” I said. “I’ve got dinner for two coming right up.”
I bustled into his apartment, heading for the kitchen, but I never made it past the living room because there on the sofa, amidst all that paisley, was a blonde. A blonde with very big hair.
“Oh. Hello,” I said, speaking of surprises.
“Hi. How’re you doing?” said the blonde in a way that suggested she was completely unfazed by my presence.
