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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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She stood in the hallway for a minute and a half, so she could walk into Sheldon Rosenthal's office at ten-thirty on the dot. It was an exercise in discipline, and a chance to pull herself together. She thought about ducking into a restroom, but that would have meant heading back down to the sixth floor: she didn't—yet—have the key to the partners' washroom. Her makeup would have to look after itself. Her bladder would hold on till the meeting was over.
Then, after what felt like a week and a half, it was time. She licked her dry lips, stiffened her spine, and walked through the mock-oak-paneled door with its discreet brass plaque:
Sheldon Rosenthal, Esq.,
it said. That was all. No title. No ostentation. Noble self-restraint.
That restraint was, in its peculiar way, as much in evidence inside as out. Of course the office was a lot more lavishly appointed than anything down on her floor: acres of deep expensive carpet, gleaming glass, dark wood, law books bound in red and gold. But it was all in perfect taste, not overdone. It was a perk, that was all, a symbol. Here, it said, was the founding partner of the firm. Naturally he'd surround himself with order and comfort, quiet and expense, rather than the cheap carpet and tacky veneer of the salaried peon.
Lucinda Jackson looked up from the keyboard of—of all things—an IBM Selectric. Not for her anything as newfangled as a computer. She was a light-skinned black woman, the exact shade of good coffee well lightened with cream.
She might have been fifty or she might have been seventy. One thing Nicole did know: she'd been with Mr. Rosenthal forever.
“He still has the client in there, Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” she said. Her voice was cultured, soft, almost all traces of the Deep South excised as if by surgery. “Why don't you sit down? He'll see you as soon as he can.”
Nicole nodded and sank into a chair so plush, she had real doubts that she'd be able to climb out of it. Her eyes went to the magazines on the table next to it, but she didn't take one. She didn't want to have to slap it shut all of a sudden when she received the summons to the inner office.
Twenty minutes slid by. Nicole tried to look as if she didn't mind that her life—not to mention her day's work—had been put on hold. When she was a partner, she would be more careful of her schedule. She wouldn't keep a fellow partner waiting.
At last, with an effect rather like the parting of the gates of heaven in a Fifties movie epic, the door to the inner office opened. Someone her mother had watched on TV came out. “Thanks a million, Shelly,” he said over his shoulder. “I'm glad it's in good hands. Say hi to Ruth for me.” He waggled his fingers at Lucinda and walked past Nicole as if she'd been invisible.
She was almost too bemused to feel slighted. Shelly? She couldn't imagine anyone calling Sheldon Rosenthal Shelly. Certainly no one in the firm did—not even the other senior partners.
“Go on in, Ms. Gunther-Pernn,” Lucinda said, at the same time as Rosenthal said, “I'm sorry to have kept you waiting.”
“It's all right,” Nicole said, carefully heaving herself up and out of that engulfing chair. It wasn't all right, not really, but she told herself it was—the way hazing is, a kind of rite of passage. And after all, what could she do? Complain to his boss?
Rosenthal held the door open so that she could enter his sanctum. He looked like what he was: a Jewish lawyer—thin and thoughtful type, not fat and friendly—in his mid-sixties,
out of the ordinary only in that he wore a neat gray chin beard. He waved her to a chair. “Please—make yourself comfortable.” Before she could sit down, however, he pointed to the Mr. Coffee on a table by the window. “Help yourself, if you like.”
The mug on his desk was half full. Nicole decided to take him up on his offer—a show of solidarity, as it were; her first cup of coffee as a partner in the firm. She filled one of the styrofoam cups by the coffee machine. When she tasted, her eyebrows leaped upward. “Is that Blue Mountain?” she asked.
“You're close.” He smiled. “It's Kalossi Celebes. A lot of people think it's just as good, and you don't have to rob a bank to buy it.”
As if you need to rob a bank
, Nicole thought. Her office window looked out on the street, and on the office building across it. His offered a panorama of the hills that gave Woodland Hills its name. He had a mansion up in those hills; she'd been there for holiday parties. Serious money in the Valley lived south of Ventura Boulevard, the farther south, the more serious. Sheldon Rosenthal lived a long way south of Ventura.
He made a couple of minutes of small talk while she sipped the delicious coffee, then said, “The analysis you and Mr. Ogarkov prepared of the issues involved in the Butler Ranch project was an excellent piece of work.”
There. Now. Nicole armed herself to be polite, as polite as humanly possible. Memories of Indiana childhood, white gloves and patent-leather shoes (white only between Memorial Day and Labor Day, never either before or after), waylaid her for a moment. Out of them, she said in her best company voice, “Thank you very much.”
“An excellent piece of work,” Rosenthal repeated, as if she hadn't spoken. “On the strength of it, I offered Mr. Ogarkov a partnership in the firm this morning, an offer he has accepted.”
“Yes. I know. I saw him downstairs when I was coming in.” Nicole wished she hadn't said that; it reminded the
founding partner how late she'd been. Her heart pounded.
Now it's my turn. Let me show what I can do, and two years from now Gary will be eating my dust.
Rosenthal's long, skinny face grew longer and skinnier. “Ms. Gunther-Perrin, I very much regret to inform you that only one partnership was available. After consultation with the senior partners, I decided to offer it to Mr. Ogarkov.”
Nicole started to say,
Thank you.
Her tongue had already slipped between her teeth when the words that he had said—the real words, not the words she had expected and rehearsed for—finally sank in. She stared at him. There he sat, calm, cool, machinelike, prosperous. There was not a word in her anywhere. Not a single word.
“I realize this must be a disappointment for you.” Sheldon Rosenthal had no trouble talking. Why should he? His career, his life, hadn't just slammed into the side of a mountain and burst into flames. “Do please understand that we are quite satisfied with your performance and happy to retain you in your present salaried position.”
Happy to retain you in your salaried position?
Like any attorney with two brain cells to rub against each other, Nicole knew that was one of the all-time great lies, right up there with
The check is in the mail
and
Of course I won't come in your mouth, darling.
If you weren't on the way up, you were on the way out. She'd thought she was on the way up. Now—
She knew she had to say something. “Could you tell me why you chose Mr. Ogarkov”—formality helped, to some microscopic degree—“instead of me, so that … so that I'll be in a better position for the next opportunity?” Rosenthal hadn't said anything about the next opportunity. She knew what that meant, too. It was written above the gates of hell.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
He coughed once, and then again, as if the first time had taken him by surprise. Maybe he hadn't expected her to ask that. After a pause that stretched a little longer than it should have, he said, “The senior partners were of the opinion that, with your other skills being more or less equal, Mr. Ogarkov's
very fluent writing style gives the firm an asset we would do well to retain.”
“But—” Nothing Nicole could say would change Sheldon Rosenthal's mind. That was as clear as the crystal decanter that stood on the sideboard in this baronial hall of an office. Nicole could do the mathematics of the firm, better maybe than anybody in it. She was five times the lawyer Gary Ogarkov would ever be-but Gary Ogarkov had ten times the chances. All it took was one little thing. One tiny fluke of nature. A Y chromosome.
They all had it, all the senior partners, every last one of them. Rosenthal, Gallagher, Kaplan, Jeter, Gonzalez & Feng, and most of the junior partners, too. A precise handful of women rounded out the firm, just enough to keep people from raising awkward eyebrows. Not enough to mean anything, not where it counted.
Class action suit? Discrimination suit? Even as she thought of it, she looked into Sheldon Rosenthal's eyes and knew. She could sue till she bankrupted herself, and it wouldn't make the least bit of difference.
Men,
she thought, too clear even to be bitter. They would not give a person her due, not if she was female: not as a woman, not as a partner, not as a professional. All they wanted to do was get on top and screw her, in bed or on the job. And they could. All too often, they could. In the United States at the end of the twentieth century, in spite of all the laws, the suits, the cases piled up from the bottom to the top of an enormous and tottering system, they still had the power.
Oh, they paid lip service to equality. They'd hired her, hadn't they? They'd hired half a dozen other peons, and used most of them till they broke or left, the way they were using Nicole. Hypocrites, every last one of them.
“You wished to say something, Ms. Gunther-Pernn?” Rosenthal probably didn't get into court once a year these days, but he knew how to size up a witness.
“I was just wondering”—Nicole chose her words with enormous care—“if you used anything besides the senior
partners' opinions to decide who would get the partnership.”
However careful she was, it wasn't careful enough. Sheldon Rosenthal had been an attorney longer than she'd been alive. He knew what she was driving at. “Oh, yes,” he said blandly. “We studied performance assessments and annual evaluations most thoroughly, I assure you. The process is well documented.”
If you sue us, you're toast,
he meant.
Performance assessments written by men, Nicole thought. Annual evaluations written by men. She knew hers were good. She had no way of knowing what Gary's said. If they were as good as hers …
If they're as good as mine, it's because he's got the old-boy network looking out for him. There's no way he's as good at this as I am.
But if Rosenthal said the process was well documented, you could take it to the bank. And you'd have to be crazy to take it to court.
“Is there anything else?” he asked. Smooth. Capable. Powerful.
“No.” Nicole had nothing else to say. She nodded to the man who'd ruined her life—the second man in the past couple of years who'd ruined her life—and left the office. Lucinda watched her go without the slightest show of sympathy. Woman she might be, and woman of color at that, but Lucinda had made her choice and sealed her bargain. She belonged to the system.
The stairway down to the sixth floor seemed to have twisted into an M.C. Escher travesty of itself. Going down felt like slogging uphill through thickening, choking air.
A couple of people she knew stood in the hallway, strategically positioned to congratulate her—news got around fast. But it was the wrong news. One look at her face must have told them the truth. They managed, rather suddenly, to find urgent business elsewhere.
Cyndi's smile lit up the office. It froze as Nicole came in clear sight. “Oh, no!” she said, as honest as ever, and as inept at keeping her thoughts to herself.
“Oh, yes,” Nicole said. She almost felt sorry for her secretary.
Poor Cyndi, all ready and set to be a partner's assistant, and now she had to know she'd landed in a dead-end job. Just like Nicole. Just like every other woman who'd smacked into the glass ceiling. “They only had one slot open, and they decided to give it to Mr. Ogarkov.” She felt, and probably sounded, eerily calm, like someone who'd just been in a car wreck. Walking past Cyndi, she sat down behind her desk and stared at the papers there. She couldn't make them mean anything.
After a couple of minutes, or maybe a week, or an hour, the phone rang. She picked it up. Her voice was flat. “Yes?”
“Mr. Ogarkov wants to talk to you,” Cyndi said in her ear. “He sounds upset.”
I'll bet,
Nicole thought. She could not make herself feel anything. “Tell him,” she said, “tell him thanks, but I really don't want to talk to anyone right now. Maybe tomorrow.” Cyndi started to say something, but Nicole didn't want to listen, either. Gently, she placed the handset in its cradle.
 
 
N
ICOLE SAT STARING AT the phone. After a while, when it didn't ring, she picked it up. Work was a lost cause even if she'd given a damn. But the kids weren't going to go away, the way her partnership had, and Josefina, and Frank, and most of the rest of her life. She had to do something about them, find someone to take care of them tomorrow.
She paused with the receiver in her hand, ignoring its monotone buzz. No, she could not quit. She could not go tramping back upstairs and tell Sheldon Rosenthal to take his crummy little salaried job and shove it. She could not take the kids, the Honda, and the assets she didn't have, and run back to Indianapolis. The world didn't work that way. She
didn't work that way. She had to do it right. She'd hunker down, grit her teeth, and let them put it to her here, till she could find something else somewhere else. Never mind where.
Meanwhile, Josefina was off to Mexico tonight, and Kimberley and Justin weren't going to take care of themselves. There wasn't any help for it. She had to talk to Frank.
She dialed the UCLA number. She didn't expect to get him, not right away. Frank had always despised phone calls. They interrupted. They disrupted. They interfered with the thinking of wise thoughts.
Horny thoughts, more likely,
Nicole thought sourly. But he wasn't too bad about answering his voice mail—when he got around to it.
She had the message all ready in her mind, set to give to the machine. But the phone cut off at the first ring, leaving her wondering briefly if she'd dialed a wrong number. Then Frank's voice said cheerily, “Hi, Dawn, darlin', how you doin'?”
“This isn't Dawn darlin',” Nicole said, cold as black ice in a Midwest February. “Sorry to disappoint you. It's your ex-wife.”
“Oh. Nicole.” Frank Perrin's voice dropped about forty degrees. “I didn't think it would be you.”
“Obviously. ‘Dawn darlin'.'” Nicole imitated his eager tone again, as nastily as she could. Goddamn blond California bimbo, fresh out of college and raring to go after the prof. Dawn—Dawn Soderstrom, how was that for a nice sexy Nordic name?—had been Frank's editor at the University of California Press. She'd been just wild, like totally jazzed, she said, about his book on industrial espionage and the Internet. In Nicole's day, busty blondes had got the hots for cuter topics, volumes of deeply angst-ridden poetry, say, or passionate monographs on Derrida or Thomas Pynchon. Dawn's hots were the wave of the future.
She hadn't been the only one, either. Frank had got lucky. After he turned in the book but before it saw print, the topic caught fire. To everybody's surprise—most of all Nicole's,
but obviously not Dawn's—
Spy by Wire
took off, and even made a couple of nonfiction bestseller lists. And then, a few weeks later, Frank took off, too—with Dawn.
frank couldn't have been aware of Nicole's train of thought, but he couldn't have missed the direction it was going in. He exhaled through his nose the way he always did when he was angry. “Just tell me what you want, okay?”
“What do I want?” Nicole shot back. “This month's check would be nice. Last month's check would be even nicer.” The other thing Nicole wanted, the thing she couldn't say, was to understand what Frank saw in an airhead more than ten years younger than he was. She'd seen enough of Dawn both before Frank left that note on her pillow and in the time since, dropping off and picking up kids on weekend visitations, to be sure her only visible asset (aside from the nicely rounded ones in her bra) was the ability to listen to Frank go on about encryption algorithms for hours at a time without her blue, blue eyes glazing over.
Frank snorted again. He sounded like an irritated mule. “Is that why you called? To nag me again? I'll get 'em to you as fast as I can. I'm not made of money, you know.”
Thanks to
Spy by Wire
, he had a very nice little pile. If he thought Nicole didn't know that, he was bone stupid. Stupider than somebody who'd run off with a twenty-two-year-old golden girl when his son was just starting to crawl. Nicole had been listing all the payments he'd been late on or skipped. One day, in court …
But she didn't need the list now. She needed cash—cash and a place for Kimberley and Justin to stay.
Her grip on the telephone tightened. If only it were his neck. But she couldn't afford to lose her temper. She couldn't afford anything right now, least of all an ex-husband more annoyed with her than he already was. “No, that isn't why I called.” She didn't apologize—she never apologized when she was right. “I called to ask if you could take the kids tomorrow. Your hours are a lot more flexible than mine. If you could just—”
“What's the matter with Josefina?” Frank broke in. “Immigration finally catch up with her?”
Nicole took a deep breath and counted to five—counting to ten, right then, was beyond her. When she could trust her voice, she said “No” and explained in words of one syllable, with a minimum of sarcasm, about Josefina's mother. “I know it's impossibly short notice”—for that, she could apologize; her pride wasn't so sticky—“but she didn't give me any warning at all, just hit me with it when I dropped the children off this morning. I'll find somebody else as fast as I can. I'm sure it won't be past this weekend. By that time I'll—”
Frank interrupted again: “I can‘t” She'd always had a knack for knowing when he was lying—except, of course, about Dawn, but that wasn't the issue now. She was sure, down in her bones, that he was telling the truth. “It is impossibly short notice,” he said. “I've got way too much stuff going on to take 'em now. I'm sorry, Nicole. I wish I could.”
He was telling the truth about that, too. She could feel it much too clearly for comfort. Dammit.
“Please, Frank,” she said—never mind if she had to get down on her knees and beg, this was critical. “Have I ever asked you for anything like this before?”
“No, you haven't,” he admitted, but there wasn't any give in his voice. “It doesn't matter. I can't do it.”
Nicole rolled all her frustrated fury into a bullet—rage at Josefina, rage at Sheldon Rosenthal, years' worth of rage at Frank—and sighted it dead center on her ex-husband. “Why not? They're your children, too, in case you've forgotten.”
“I can't take them tomorrow,” Frank said again. He not only snorted like a mule, he could dig in his heels like one. He wasn't budging now.
Nicole didn't care if he grew roots to China. “Why not? What are you doing that's so important?”
“Nicole …” There it came, the tone of sweet reason driven to desperation, with the edge of temper that threatened but hadn't quite, yet, blown up. “Look, I'm not on the witness stand. You don't get to cross-examine me anymore.”
“What do you mean, ‘anymore'?” Nicole couldn't manage sweet reason, or desperation, either. She was plain, flat angry.
“Just what I said,” Frank said. “If you're done, will you kindly get off the line? I'm expecting a call.”
“Go to hell,” she said crisply, and hung up.
The rush of gratified fury died away, leaving her shaking too hard to do anything more useful than stare at the telephone. It wasn't supposed to happen like this. It had been her idea to move to L.A. from Indianapolis. She'd always been the dynamic one, the go-getter, the one who'd make her mark on life in capital letters, while he'd messed around in grad school playing with computers because they were easier for him to deal with than people. And now, somehow, he was happily shacked up with Ms. Youngblonde, with a big name that was likely to grow bigger, while her life and her career headed the wrong way down a one-way street, head-on into a phalanx of trucks.
She swiveled her chair to glare at the framed law degree on the wall. Indiana University Law School. In Indianapolis, it would have stamped her forever as second-rate: if you weren't Ivy League, you weren't anybody. In Los Angeles, she'd found, it was unusual, even exotic. That still bemused her, after half a dozen years.
“There ain't no justice,” she said to the wall. The wall didn't deign to answer.
Nicole was still sitting there, still glowering at the diploma, when Cyndi came into the office and plopped the day's mail on the desk. “Doesn't look like anything you have to handle right away,” she said. She was trying to sound normal—trying a little too hard.
Nicole didn't snap at her for it. Much. “Good,” she said. “The way this day is going, I'm not up for handling much of anything anyway.”
Cyndi bit her lip. “I'm sorry,” she said, and hesitated, visibly wondering whether to go on. At last she decided to go for it: “It should have been you, Ms. Gunther-Perrin.”
“It wasn't.” Nicole's voice came out flat. “That's all there is to it.”
Cyndi couldn't say anything to that. She shook her head and left for the relative safety of her desk.
Nicole hardly noticed. Opening envelopes gave her hands something to do but let her mind stay disengaged: perfect. If she worked hard enough at it, she might just disconnect altogether. Once the envelopes were open, she shuffled the papers they'd held, looking busy without doing much till she could escape to lunch.
 
Yang Chow, over on Topanga Canyon, was hands down the best Chinese place in the west half of the San Fernando Valley. That wasn't why Nicole drove there. The restaurant was also a couple of miles away from her Warner Center office building, far enough that, with luck, she'd be the only one from the firm there today. Shop talk and gossip were the last things she wanted.
She sat alone at a table in the casual elegance of the restaurant—no storefront fast-food ambience here—eating soup, drinking tea, and going after chili shrimp with chopsticks. Yang Chow's were of hard, smooth plastic, and didn't give as good a grip as the disposable wooden kind. She counted herself lucky not to end up with a shrimp in her lap.
That's what my luck's come down to
, she thought, splashing soy sauce onto steamed rice:
I don't spill food on myself.
All around her, businessmen chattered happily in English, Chinese, Spanish, and some other language she didn't recognize.
Why shouldn't they be happy? They were men.
One of them caught her looking. She saw what she'd come to call The Progression: widened eyes, Who-Me? glance, broad come-hither grin. He was wearing a wedding ring, a broad gold band. He didn't bother to hide it. Without that, she would simply have ignored him. As it was, the look she sent suggested he had a glob of snot in his mustache. He hastily went back to his pork chow mein.
Nicole took her time finishing her lunch. Going back to the office had all the appeal of a root canal. She stared out the window at the traffic whooshing past on Topanga. She
was aware, rather remotely, of the busboy taking her dishes. Only after the waiter came by to ask for the third time, in increasingly pointed tones, whether she wanted anything else did she admit to herself that she couldn't stay there all afternoon. She threw a five and a couple of singles on the table and walked out to her car.
When she drove into the lot, she had to park a long way from the building. She'd expected that; most people had been back from lunch for half an hour, maybe more. As she trudged wearily across the gray asphalt, someone called, “Nicole!”
She looked around a little wildly, wondering if she was having a flashback to the morning. But it wasn't Gary Ogarkov this time, smoking his blasted cigar and blowing up her hopes till they couldn't do anything but explode. Tony Gallagher, who'd just got out of his Lincoln Town Car a few spaces away from where she'd parked, waved and called her name again. When she paused, he caught up with her at a ponderous trot, belly lapping over the waistband of his slacks.
She didn't have much gladness to spare for anyone, but, thanks to that Midwestern upbringing, she could still be polite. “Hello, Mr. Gallagher,” she said. Of all the senior partners, she liked him best—not that that said much right now. But Gallagher had more juice in him than the rest of them put together. He was a vigorous sixty, his hair dyed a red close to the color it must have been when he was younger. He'd probably grown his bushy muttonchops when they were cool, back about 1971, and then never bothered shaving them off. Whoever had made his jacket had killed and skinned a particularly repulsive plaid sofa for the fabric. Nicole doubted it had ever been cool, but Gallagher didn't care. He wore it with panache.
“I just want to tell you, I personally think you got a raw deal today,” he said, breathing whiskey fumes into her face. Half of her wanted to hug him for even such a small kindness. The other half wanted to run. When she was little, her father had come home from the factory—or rather, from the
bar after the factory—reeking just like that. Then he'd stopped coming home at all. Then, in very short order, her mother had divorced him. One, two, three. Nicole still hated the smell of alcohol on a man's breath, the strong sour-sweet reek that, her mother had told her, signified everything bad about a man.

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