A Thousand Pardons

by Jonathan Dee

  A silence ensued. “It’s funny,” Helen said, “just because Malloy is actually the name of the town where I grew up.”

  “How about that,” Malloy said.

  “Listen,” Helen said abruptly, “can I get you anything? I really should have asked that before we sat down. I guess we’re a little rusty. We don’t get that many visitors here.”

  “You’re very kind,” Malloy said, “but no thank you. You’ve probably already figured out why I’m here. We follow the trades, of course—we’re not so arrogant as to think we can’t learn from our competitors, however small—and it’s clear that when it comes to the art, if I can call it that, of public-image repair, you have an extraordinary gift. I have come here to try to hire you.”

  Now was the time for her to say something. He waited patiently. “Well,” she finally managed to produce, “it’s a complicated situation here.”

  “So I see. In fact, now that I’m here, it’s unclear to me whom I’d be competing with for your services. Who owns this place, now that Harvey is no longer with us? Who pays the rent?”

  “No one, really,” Helen said, cursing the blush she could feel coming on. “I mean, technically it’s Harvey’s son. But when Harvey died, there was actually some outstanding debt that we hadn’t known about, and my colleague, Mona, and I decided to work off, and collect on, the existing contracts, so there’d be something more than just legal headaches for Michael to inherit. He doesn’t work here himself, though he does come in from time to time. Fairly often, actually. He’s a little bit of a lost soul.”

  Malloy pursed his lips. “Remarkable of you,” he said. “So then the plan was really to wind the business down all along.”

  “Well, yes, that’s the plan. It’s just—it’s taken a bit longer to climb out of the hole, to be honest, than I’d first calculated. The pure business end of things—it’s not my strong suit.”

  “No, it wouldn’t be,” Malloy said.

  “Excuse me?”

  He lifted his eyes to hers. “I only meant that you have a gift,” he said gently, “and that gift has nothing at all to do, strictly speaking, with business. This is why I wanted to come to talk with you in person.” He tapped his fingertips together, thinking. “Would you know how much the debt consists of, right at this moment?”

  She would have been embarrassed to tell him how small an amount it was, how shallow the hole they were laboring to get out of. “It isn’t just a matter of getting back to zero, at this point,” she said. “I have responsibilities, to the others here, to existing clients—”

  “I see that,” he said indulgently. “What if, then, rather than hire you, we simply bought out the agency, from Harvey’s son? And then, what’s the right word, absorbed it? That would take care of the debt and then some, I should think.”

  Helen’s heart started to pound. She was afraid to ask him what he thought the whole operation might be worth. It was part of her lack of business acumen that she wouldn’t have considered it worth a cent to anybody but her.

  “And what about Mona?” she said, surprising herself. “I couldn’t just put her out of work. She has a family.”

  “We would offer her a job,” Malloy said calmly, “though at this point of course I’m unacquainted with her particular skills. As an alternative, we could offer her a very fair severance package.”

  Helen sat back in Harvey’s chair. An old line of the nuns’ kept sounding in her head: Close your mouth, they’d say, you look like a trout. Nothing like this scenario had ever even occurred to her, which made her reflexively search for reasons why it wouldn’t work. She couldn’t come up with any right away. Still, what she felt most was not excitement or relief, but fear.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked him.

  He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “I’ll be honest,” he said. “I don’t care about these other people—though I understand why you do. But not many people, Helen, can do what you do. Nor can they be taught to do it, even though business schools make a fortune pretending otherwise. It’s a calling. This is why I came here myself today to try to persuade you, instead of just sending one of my managers to do it. Think of it this way. This place, it’s like your training ground. But there’s a whole world out there, where a lot of people need your help. It’s time to expand your mission.”

  Fifteen minutes later, when Helen had seen him to the door, she turned to acknowledge Mona’s direct, skeptical stare with as much of a poker face as she could muster. She knew it wasn’t worth much, her poker face; people had told her so all her life. “What the hell was all that about?” Mona said.

  Helen smiled nervously. “Turns out that man works at—”

  “I know where he works. I Googled him while I was sitting out here by myself staring at that closed door. So what did he want?”

  Helen walked to her desk but did not sit down; she put her hands on the back of her chair. “Do you want to go out and have lunch today?” she said.

  Mona pulled her head back. “What,” she said softly, “you mean together?”

  Helen nodded soberly.

  Mona looked around the surface of her desk, picking things up and putting them down again. She looked at her watch: it was only about quarter past ten. “Listen,” she said, “if it’s bad news, just please give it to me now, I’m not good at waiting. I don’t know why people always think you need to be eating something when you get bad news.”

  “It’s not bad news,” Helen said. “It’s … well, it’s either good news or no news.” By which she meant, though of course Mona could not have known it, that if Mona was not amenable to the offer, in any of its forms, they would turn it down, and things would go on as they had been.

  “Okay, then,” Mona said, without much confidence. “I’m going to make you take me someplace nice, though, if you’re gonna torture me like this.”

  “No problem,” Helen said, smiling.

  Five minutes later, Mona grabbed her bag and said, “The hell with this. There’s a Hot and Crusty on the corner. Let’s go.”

  When they were seated at a tiny Formica table for two with their coffees and a gigantic cranberry muffin cut in half, Helen told her that Teddy Malloy had come to buy out the business and to offer them both jobs at Malloy Worldwide, jobs whose salaries, she now realized, she had neglected to inquire about, though they seemed bound to be better than what the two of them were currently taking home.

  “You mean you,” Mona said. “It’s you he wants, not both of us. He didn’t even talk to me. Why would they need me anyway? I’m good, but I’m sure they got people who can do what I do.”

  “Well, he does,” Helen said. “He wants to hire us together.” She took a long sip of her coffee and watched Mona pick a hunk out of her half of the muffin. “Although he did present an alternative offer, for you. If you didn’t want to go work there, he would offer you a severance package.”

  “A severance package?” Mona said combatively. “So I’d be fired, is what he means.”

  “Well, sort of. It’s not your usual deal. He’d offer you a year’s salary.”

  Mona stopped chewing for a long moment, then hurriedly resumed until she could repeat, “A year’s salary?”

  Helen nodded. “Also COBRA benefits for up to a year if you needed them. So that’s pretty generous. But, Mona, I don’t want you to feel like you’re being—”

  “Done,” Mona said, and she laughed. “Sold. Accepted. Let’s call this old dude right now before he regains his senses or dies or something.”

  Helen felt stricken. “Just like that?” she said. “You don’t need to think about it? You’re not curious what this Malloy place would be like, or what it might be like to do what we do at a place with some resources?”

  “Someone offers you a year’s salary,” Mona said, “you take it. That’s just basic sense.”

  “But don’t you—don’t you want to keep working?”

  “Who says I won’t keep working? I’ll get another job of some kin
d. There’s lots of them out there. I’m not the type to sit around and do nothing. But if I play it this way, then it’s like I have two salaries for one job. Why would I … What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you crying?”

  “No,” Helen said, though she was a little.

  “Good Lord,” Mona said. She sat back in her undersize chair and stared at Helen less in sympathy than in puzzlement. “It’s just a job. For you, too, I mean. There’s lots of jobs out there a smart, hardworking person can do. Jobs are for making money, so you can take care of your own, and maybe give them something nice once in a while that you didn’t have. Isn’t that what it’s about? You’re a single mom, you must know what I’m talking about.”

  Helen nodded, and wiped her eyes with a scratchy paper napkin. “Sure,” she said, “but we built something together. We kept something alive. You and me, just the two of us. Doesn’t that mean something to you, at least a little bit, besides just a paycheck and health insurance? I mean, I know we aren’t really friends, but I’m never going to see you again, am I?”

  Mona reached across the tiny table and squeezed Helen’s fingers. “It don’t mean I don’t like you,” she said. “I do. But in my opinion? You have always gotten worked up about the wrong things.”

  Helen nodded and squeezed Mona’s hand, eager for it to be over now. When they got back upstairs, she went straight into Harvey’s office and shut the door; she phoned Teddy Malloy to accept his offer, left a message for Scapelli the lawyer, and then she took a deep breath and called Harvey’s son. “Cool” was all Michael said, though in a cracked tone suggestive of shock; then he asked her how soon he could expect the check, not out of avarice or impatience, she could tell, but out of need. It wasn’t important that he be grateful. It was more that she was hoping that what she had just done for him had cemented a bond between them. But she was never going to see him again either. She could tell just from the quaver in his voice that it was too much money for him, that he knew he was going to blow it. He had no one to help guard him against himself. But she had to be able to let these relationships go. They were never all that real to begin with, she told herself, notwithstanding her sadness over their end. You couldn’t feel responsible for everybody.

  4

  “THERE’S A HEALTH CLUB on the third floor,” Yvette said; “your key card opens it. If you need a locker, send me an email and I’ll get you set up. It’s twenty-four hours, with the exception of the pool and the Jacuzzi, for obvious reasons.” Nothing was obvious to Helen about any of this. She just kept trailing behind Yvette, who was the office manager and who looked like a catalogue model, nodding and making noises of assent and wishing that the needlessly comprehensive tour of Malloy Worldwide’s facilities would terminate at Helen’s own desk, which she was eager to get behind and gather herself a little. She carried over her shoulder a new soft briefcase that had in it only a New York Times, a pen, a yogurt, and a plastic spoon.

  “On the fourth floor is the staff cafeteria,” Yvette continued. She walked like most people ran. “You’ll get another card—a lot of cards, right?—that’s good for the employee discount there. You can pay cash if you want, though most people just have it deducted from their paycheck. The food”—she turned around to confide in Helen—“is really good, I have to say. I mean you know it’s just to encourage you to stay in the building and take shorter lunches, but still. The whole place is nut-free, though, for obvious reasons, so you’d have to go outside the building if you’re, you know, desperate for nuts.”

  A glance into the cafeteria, occupied at this hour mostly by people waiting in line at the cappuccino bar, was enough to tell Helen that she probably wouldn’t be eating there all that often. She was now immersed in the world she had taken notice of when she first started job hunting in Manhattan, the world where people her age were nowhere in evidence, where she was, or felt, old enough to be everybody’s mother; she did not see herself sitting at one of those long tables in one of those clusters of skinny women in their twenties, complaining about whatever it was such creatures thought they had to complain about. Only some of them were from Malloy—they shared the building with, among other enterprises, a casting agency and a website devoted to shopping. The notion of cheap food did still have a strong pull; Helen had to keep reminding herself that she had not just a new job but a new salary, and so saving a few bucks on lunch was no longer the imperative it had been just a few weeks ago. Still, she thought she would bring her lunch most days.

  “And here we are at your office,” Yvette said suddenly. It was indeed an office—not a cubicle, as she’d feared—and she felt a surge of pride at the sight of her nameplate on the wall outside the door, even though the plate was attached with what looked like Velcro. She just wished she’d been paying better attention to how they’d gotten there. She laid her briefcase carefully atop the empty desk. Pictures, she thought—that’s what people put on their desks. Tomorrow she would bring in a few framed pictures of Sara, if she could figure out which still-sealed box she’d packed them in when they left Rensselaer Valley. “I’ll leave you to it,” Yvette said, still on the threshold. “You have my email if you need anything. Good to have you with us.” Helen smiled her thanks. The tour had lasted nearly an hour, and most of it had been about the aspects of office life that did not involve actual work; not once had Yvette referred to how Helen was expected to use her time when she was not exercising or smoking or eating or taking a Jacuzzi.

  Though Mr. Malloy had been clear that this was a full-time position, still Helen had imagined herself, in the weeks before she started there, as something like a consultant, on call for new or longstanding clients in case of some extraordinary public-image emergency; she couldn’t imagine that there would be some crisis to deal with, some nominal fire to put out, forty hours a week. About that she turned out to be mistaken. Back at Harvey Aaron they had sometimes waited around for days with only scutwork to do, until some sort of scandalous event would trigger the process by which she worked and got paid; here, though, as it turned out, the demand for their time was almost more than they could keep up with. Part of it was that the term “crisis” was defined at Malloy in a way that was sometimes so petty it would have seemed comic under less exigent circumstances: her first week on the job, Helen was called in on a Saturday because a Broadway play in which one of their clients had invested had gotten panned in The New York Times the day before. But part of it too was that Malloy was an operation whose true range Helen simply hadn’t understood when she signed on with them. They had thousands of powerful clients all over the world, and at every moment of the day there was at least one of them, paranoid and imperious, who was being perceived, fairly or otherwise, as having done something wrong, someone who saw where the story of his life was headed and wanted to redirect it.

  She had a boss, or more strictly speaking a supervisor, a very good-looking young man named Arturo—gay, she was quickly and preemptively informed, as if the notion of a straight Arturo would keep her from being able to concentrate—who cultivated an air of knowing what you were going to say before you had quite finished saying it. Every morning at ten-thirty the Crisis Management group met in the conference room on the fifth floor, a room known among the staff as the Fishtank because of its glass interior walls. There was one of those single-cup coffee machines, and an array of pastries and fruit, though that had usually been thoroughly picked over by the nine-thirty meeting of the Promotions group.

  Arturo’s oversight of the individual members of the group was intimidating but loose. The ten-thirty meeting was often the only time all day he spoke to them. Most crucially, though, he was in charge of assigning them to new clients, or to old clients with new crises, and in this area his disregard of Helen’s particular skill set, not to mention the limits of her previous experience, was so perverse she wondered if it was intentional. She had a hard time imagining that he wouldn’t have known she was his own boss’s personal hire. But Mr. Malloy was more
of a specter than a presence there—his office, though only three floors above theirs, had its own elevator, so sightings of him were rare—and with a rigorous impartiality Arturo felt free to assign her to the aggrieved Broadway investor, and to an online-gaming company whose IPO valuation was threatened because its CEO had just died, and to other clients who often seemed as puzzled by her anxiety as she was by theirs.

  One Friday morning in the Fishtank, Arturo laid out for them the news that feuding board members at a cellphone-chip manufacturer they represented—one of those companies you’ve never heard of that turns out to dominate a whole vital corner of your world—had been secretly taping one another’s conversations, both on the phone and in person, and that the transcripts had been leaked to The Wall Street Journal, which was going through some high-level legal review, even as they spoke, to see what they could safely publish and what they could not. “Ashok will take you through our response,” he said, nodding curtly to another member of the group, a diffident young man (they were all young to her) whom Helen had pegged as decent, despite his nervous adherence to a handful of business school aphorisms.

  “It goes without saying that we have to get out in front of this,” Ashok said, and everyone, including Helen, nodded; but it turned out that what he meant by getting out in front of it was that they should mount an all-out attack against The Wall Street Journal, focusing on the morality of profiting by someone else’s criminal act.

  “Does that mean we can question whether the tapes themselves are even genuine?” said Shelley, who sat next to Helen at the conference table. Not by accident: Helen always tried, at these meetings, to sit beside either Ashok or Shelley, a rock-bodied young woman who also managed to exude a kind of good-heartedness despite the rapidity of her speech and the fact that she had a rather uncorporate and scary tattoo of someone’s initials on the back of her neck. You couldn’t always see it; it depended on what Shelley was wearing that day.