Ms. Sharpe:
Were you facing any undue financial pressure that may have altered your own behavior at the time of the suit, Ms. Glover?
Respondent 1:
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Ms. Sharpe:
Interesting. You see, I have a credit report here. It tells me that you are pretty heavily leveraged.
Respondent 1:
I think that’s fairly natural. Seven years’ worth of school loans. A mortgage. Credit cards. Two cars. It adds up.
Ms. Sharpe:
So you didn’t want any more money? More money wouldn’t have been helpful to you?
Respondent 1:
I’m sorry, Cosette, Truviv is paying you how much to ask hard-hitting questions like: Would more money be helpful? Cosette, I want to keep working at Truviv. As you said, I make $310,000 per year and my family and I, we enjoy a certain quality of life. I didn’t exactly think I’d be retiring early to the French Riviera on whatever payout I got from a lawsuit here. But, please, write me a postcard from whichever vacation home this proceeding helps you to pay the down payment on, won’t you?
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
3-APR
Grace returned early that night and dropped her purse on the kitchen table. Liam was already home, loading the dishwasher. The microwave hummed, the sterilizer turning inside it. Bottles—beaded water stuck to the insides—stood at attention in the plastic grass mats that sat next to the sink. Grace had a theory that the main reason Liam was so helpful around the house was actually because he made so much money. All these career women she knew griping about how they were the breadwinners but their husbands still didn’t do the grocery shopping and she thought: That’s because they’re threatened! It had been, and still was, a working theory.
Grace greeted Liam and went to the living room where she knelt down beside Emma Kate. She was playing on her back in her activity gym, staring up at the assortment of elephants, lions, and toucans that had been hung above her head to keep her attention. She held her daughter’s foot in her hand and Emma Kate kicked. She couldn’t think of much to say, so Grace returned to the kitchen and grabbed a sleeve of Ritz crackers from the pantry.
She leaned over the granite countertop, her heels still on. “Liam, why do you think I’ve never been, you know, sexually harassed?” She wondered whether the premise of her question was even true. She had been whistled at on the street, asked to smile in the line for lunch, had men in meetings stare at her breasts. Her high school tennis instructor had once even asked her to sit on his lap on a crowded car ride (she’d declined, choosing one of her teammates’ laps instead). But she wasn’t traumatized by any of it.
Liam slung a dish towel over his shoulder and pushed up the door of the dishwasher. He was tall and well-built, a former lacrosse player at Vanderbilt. “You’ve never had chicken pox, either.”
Emma Kate cooed from the other room.
“I don’t think it’s that random. I mean, I’m not immune, am I? At the risk of sounding like a huge bitch.” Grace probably was a huge bitch. “I’m, you know, pretty. Prettier than some of the women I know that have had negative experiences.”
He held out his hand. She passed him a cracker. “You’re feeling left out of sexual harassment?”
“Of course not.” Maybe she was. “I’m trying to understand.”
“I don’t know.” The timer on the microwave went off and it was Liam who moved to take out the sterilizer and who began unloading it. Grace slipped off her shoes. The tile cooled the soles of her feet. “You’re asking me to get in the heads of people with whom I don’t have a whole lot in common.”
She hoped that was true. She believed it was. It bothered her that she didn’t know whether Ames’s wife, Bobbi, felt the same way.
Liam considered. “But probably something like animal instinct. They’re preying on the weakest in the herd. The young. The vulnerable.”
Grace snorted. Cracker crumbs flew from her mouth and she cupped her hand over her mouth. “Sorry. Sloane isn’t what I’d call vulnerable.”
She quickly tiptoed around the corner—such a good mommy, as Liam would say!—to check on Emma Kate, who was now quiet, mouthing her own wrist.
“Yes.” Liam held up a finger. “But she made herself vulnerable with the affair, didn’t she? He had something on her.” Grace didn’t know the rules on whether she’d been allowed to tell Liam about Sloane’s affair. As an adult, she believed the understanding was that if a friend told you a secret, you could tell your spouse. But she’d never confirmed this with any of her friends in case she was wrong, and that alone probably meant that she was.
“So, it’s their fault, then? I haven’t been harassed because I’m not harass-able?”
“No.” Liam twitched. “It’s just like a crime of opportunity, I suppose. You wouldn’t blame a murder victim. The murderer’s just trying to commit a murder he thinks he can get away with.”
“That’s dark.”
“Are we ordering dinner or were you going to cook?”
* * *
The message from Sloane came sometime just before ten, after Liam had gone to bed. Grace was waiting to perform something called a “dream feed,” which she planned to do at approximately ten-thirty. A dream feed involved picking up Emma Kate and, without fully waking her, holding her to Grace’s breast and encouraging her to nurse for a full meal so that she would sleep through the rest of the night. That was the concept. The reality was usually that Emma Kate woke up angry at having been roused, tiny fists balled, eyes pinched into her face. But Grace couldn’t give up the promise of six hours of uninterrupted rest. The fact that it hadn’t happened yet didn’t matter.
She’d been scrolling through her Netflix watch list, which was dwindling with all the added TV time since Emma Kate’s birth, when her phone buzzed.
Sloane Glover
Going to file lawsuit. Public = only way to have protection + prevent Ames from taking over the company. Talked to Katherine. She’s scared re: what happened at Frost + I feel a little responsible. Tired of ignoring it all! Kisses.
Grace waited for Ardie, who was included on the chain, to respond, but when she didn’t, she realized that Ardie must have already gone to sleep. Grace decided to pretend she’d done the same. What, exactly, did Sloane want them to say, anyway?
You go, girl!
If anything, Grace was thinking about how disruptive a lawsuit from Sloane would be to their jobs. Was anyone worried about that?
Twenty minutes later, she’d positioned herself inside the crater now permanently embedded within their sofa from incessantly sitting cross-legged there, the “U”-shaped pillow balanced around her hips. Emma Kate had switched from screaming to sucking, at which point Grace realized that she’d forgotten to place the cup of water on the side table next to her. A desperate thirst overtook her every time Emma Kate latched. She needed to distract herself. The TV was on a low volume, the remote inches out of reach. She clasped her phone. The text from Sloane was still on screen and she got the same snag of annoyance she had when her mother was texting too often.
She wanted to talk to someone who agreed with her. It was late, but she scrolled through her contacts and dialed Emery Bishop, one of her closest sorority sisters. The two of them still took a girls’ trip to Fredericksburg every year. Emery lived in Houston. She didn’t work “outside of the home” and sat on the board of both an AIDS foundation and a local theater. She picked up on the second ring. “Is everything okay?” Emery had a chronic raspy voice caused by vocal cord nodules and a slight Southern accent.
“Yes, yes,” Grace said quietly so as not to disturb Emma Kate. “Sorry, were you asleep?”
“God, no.” Emery had always been nocturnal. In college, she ate a second dinner at midnight. “Emma Kate?”
“Also fine. Feeding her right now.” The blue light of the television played off her baby’s head.
“Christ.” Emery made the word two syllables. Grace pictured her
friend. Hair drained of color by way of bleach, a lasting affinity for turquoise jewelry. “I remember those days. Don’t have four kids, Gracie.” Grace smiled into the phone. There were few friends made after high school that you could call just to talk. Emery was one of Grace’s last.
“Do you think women are too sensitive?” Grace asked after a short pause.
Emery hummed. Grace heard rustling on the other end and then the crack of a refrigerator door opening. “It depends who’s saying it. Like, if Clark calls me too sensitive, I will cut off his testicles and feed them to Willie.”
Grace laughed, then stopped herself when she felt Emma Kate almost lose her suction. “At work, there are women complaining that they’ve been, I guess, sexually harassed. Not in those words, but that’s the gist of it.”
“Oh.” A drawer opening. Silverware. “I don’t know. Not all women are like us, you know? My mom always says: nothing really changes after high school.”
“That’s depressing.”
“Certain girls need to get attention one way or another. I’m not saying that they’re doing it intentionally for that reason. They probably believe, on some level, that’s what’s happening. You know?” Grace didn’t say anything. “I’m always worried that Clark is going to be accused of something he didn’t do. Or Tyler or Mason when they get older. Scares me to death. What am I going to tell Tyler or Mason? Never be alone in a room with a girl you don’t know extremely well? Is that even enough?”
Grace pinched the phone to her ear, used her pinky finger to unlatch Emma Kate, like the lactation nurse had taught her, and moved her to her left breast. “Um, I don’t know,” she said, absently, trying to imagine Ardie having the same conversation about her son, Michael.
“When Clark was at Air Force Academy, he told me stories of cadets getting kicked out just because a woman claimed misconduct. Those women had the power to ruin those young men’s lives and they chose to use it.” It sounded as though Emery were now eating ice cream, the clink of a spoon on her teeth.
Grace listened, imagining Ames’s wife, Bobbi, saying that. And it did make Grace think: What if someone came to her and said that Liam had been harassing women? What then?
She listened to Emery talk about Tyler’s tackle football team—he was eleven—and Mason’s soccer and Annabelle’s ballet and Finley’s physical therapy until Emma Kate had finished feeding. Then she could no longer keep her eyes open and she said good night to Emery and swaddled Emma Kate and patted her until she agreed to go willingly into her Rock ’n Play, which was still stationed in the first-floor office, not in the nursery upstairs, which had never actually been used.
Grace woke up to the sound of her daughter’s crying. She had read somewhere that a baby’s cry was physically louder to its mother. Liam slept. She felt like she’d been asleep only twenty minutes, but it had been three hours. Small consolation. Soon she was wide awake, having nursed and now rocking. Rocking and rocking and rocking even after Emma Kate’s eyes had closed and her cheeks had gone slack.
Grace tugged her cell phone from where it stuck to the skin on the back of her leg. She swiped the phone screen open and typed a message to Sloane.
Deposition Transcript
26-APR
Ms. Sharpe:
I’m not saying necessarily that you set out to ruin Ames Garrett’s life. I’m not saying that was your intent, your primary objective.
Respondent 1:
Is a failure to become the head of a public, Fortune 500 company life-ruining? I hope not or else a lot of us have pretty sorry excuses for lives.
Ms. Sharpe:
What I’m saying is that I know these issues are hard to discuss objectively. I know there are sensitive issues buried in the salacious details of this complaint. I am not trying to make light of the seriousness of the allegations. I’m a woman, too. But I’m also a lawyer and, as a lawyer, I search for facts. For evidence. Truviv has actually undertaken its own independent investigation and I will say this: no other women have come forward to complain of Ames Garrett’s behavior.
Respondent 1:
You mean other than the three that already have. How many would be enough?
Ms. Sharpe:
Yes, we have three women with complicated motives. Walk me through your reasoning the day you decided to take legal action.
Respondent 1:
Katherine had told us that Ames had become aggressive, sexually, with her and he seemed ready to retaliate professionally based off her rejection. At the same time, he told Ardie that all women were crazy. Something finally clicked. I realized that I couldn’t keep doing what I’d been doing for so many years. Nothing was going to change the way Ames acted unless I changed it myself.
Ms. Sharpe:
So, you filed a lawsuit and we all know what happens next.
Respondent 1:
Do we?
Ms. Sharpe:
Tragedy.
CHAPTER THIRTY
6-APR
We wanted to do our jobs—was that too much to ask? We were tired of planned server outages and mandatory training sessions to learn the latest updates to Adobe Acrobat Pro. We a little bit hated cake day and whoever came around to force us to attend, despite the fact that we’d already announced quite publicly that we were trying to eat Paleo this month. We couldn’t understand who was still clicking on those virus emails that prompted the proliferation of so many more emails aimed at encouraging us to stop clicking, but without fail, one of them popped up in the right-hand corner of our screens the precise moment we were trying to close out of Outlook to do actual work. (Wait, was email actual work?)
We were always signing last year’s, this year’s, or next year’s beneficiary forms with a frequency that defied the calendar and our ability to recall our dependents’ Social Security numbers. We had an inkling that face time requirements were an instrument of the oppression. We would prefer 65 percent less networking, but likely needed to do at least 50 percent more of it. There were a hundred things small and large that stood between us and our jobs every day, ranging from the incidental to the nefarious. So when we said that we would prefer not to have to be asked to smile on top of working, we meant that: we would like to do our jobs, please. When we said that we would like not to hear a comment about the length of our skirt, we meant that: we would like to do our jobs, please. When we said that we would like not to have someone try to touch us in our office, we meant that: we would like to do our jobs. Please.
We wanted to be treated like men at work for the same reason that people bought smartphones: it made life easier.
Ardie had been trying to do her job while battling a slow computer connection this morning when the two men in suits had passed by her office window on their way to Ames Garrett. It had been one day since Sloane hired Helen Yeh to file suit against Truviv and Ames, a lawsuit to which Ardie had made the decision to become a party. With the looming possibility of Ames being announced as the successor CEO any day now, time had been of the essence.
Two hours after the men in suits had passed her office, a meeting invitation appeared on her screen to request her presence in HR in twenty minutes. She chose “accept” and the meeting appeared on her calendar.
Ardie was a single mother—did that mean she had the least to lose or the most?
The two men in suits had stayed in Ames’s office for approximately forty-five minutes before leaving. Whether this was a long period of time or a short period of time, Ardie wasn’t sure. She watched the clock. Her own twenty minutes managed to be both long and short, too.
She got up, pulled her blazer off the back of the door, and stuffed her arms through the sleeves. Sloane waited for her at the elevator banks.
“And so it begins,” Sloane said. “You ready for this?” Ardie had never understood the strategy of focusing all one’s energy on appearance when something important was going on, but that was clearly Sloane’s MO today. She wore a crisp, royal blue skirt suit with a white blouse, her hair tied int
o a sleek, low ponytail, not a hair out of place. It was like she was Corporate Wonder Woman and this was her superhero costume of choice.
“I’m sure as hell not letting you do it alone.” Partially true. Or, perhaps something could be wholly true without being the entire truth, in which case that was what she meant.
Sloane pushed the button. Moments later, from out of the restroom, Grace appeared.
“Well,” she said, “if we need someone to wield the bloody tampon at them, I just started my period for the first time in fifteen months.” The three of them stepped onto an empty elevator. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to get my period while I was breastfeeding. What the hell?”
You’re going to need me.
That was the text message Grace had sent late the night Sloane had decided to sue. She wondered if Grace could tell how much Ardie had misjudged her, whether it was broadcast on her face.
A short ride upstairs, and a bald man, who had neither mustard stains on his shirt nor glasses but seemed like the type of person to have both, stood in the foyer waiting to greet them. “Al Runkin.” He clasped each of their hands with both of his. “Come on down, ladies, let’s see what we can do you for.”
Sloane and Ardie exchanged a look. There was a physical difference in the landscape between the ninth, where HR resided, and fifteenth floors. Like taking the train from the Upper West Side into an only partially gentrified neighborhood in Queens. The employees here mostly occupied cubicles instead of individual offices. The staff trended younger, except for the exceptions, who, because of their juxtaposition against their colleagues, seemed stuck.
Whisper Network Page 21
