Household Gods (5 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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Now that Nicole thought back on it, her father hadn't kept up with his child-support payments, either. He'd poured them down his throat instead, one shot at a time. Frank didn't do that.
No
, Nicole thought—
he spends the money on Dawn. Some improvement.
“Like I say, Nicole,” Tony Gallagher said, just a little unsteady on his feet, “I did what I could for you.” He held the door of the office building open so she could go in to the lobby ahead of him. “I got outvoted. You know how it is with some people—can't see the nose in front of their face. It's a goddamn shame, pardon my French.”
A couple of paces away from the elevator, she turned toward him. “Thank you for what you tried to do. Believe me, it's nice to know someone here thinks I've been doing a good job. I guess it just didn't work out.” It sounded lame, but it was the best she could manage. She felt she owed it to him.
“Damn shame,” Gallagher said again, vehemently. The odor of stale Scotch came off him in waves. What had he had, a six-drink lunch? He patted her on the back, heavily: between her shoulderblades at first, but slipping lower with each pat, till his hand came to rest a bare inch above her panty line.
When the hand didn't move after that, Nicole did, away from Gallagher and toward the elevator buttons. She punched UP with unnecessary violence. Was he being sympathetic or trying to feel her up? Did he know the difference? With that much Scotch sloshing around in him, did he even care?
The elevator door slid open. Nicole got on. So, of course, did Tony Gallagher. She eyed him with more than a little apprehension as she pressed the button for the sixth floor. But, as etiquette demanded, he took his place on the opposite side of the elevator after hitting the seventh-floor button.
With a thump, the car started up. Gallagher said, “Why don't you come up to my office with me, Nicole? We ought to talk about ways to make sure this doesn't happen the next time the opportunity rolls around.”
She didn't answer for a second. And he said he'd been on her side. Was he thinking of closing the door to his office and trying to get her clothes off? If he did, she'd scream and knee him in the nuts. Then she'd sue him and the firm for every nickel they had. Which added up to a lot of nickels.
She shook her head a tiny fraction. No. He might be a lush, but he was still an attorney.
She grasped at the one straw he'd offered—and if that was desperate, so be it. So was she. He'd talked about a next time—about another partnership. Sheldon Rosenthal had been notably silent on the subject. “All right,” she said, hoping he hadn't noticed the length of her hesitation. “I'll come up.”
The elevator stopped at the sixth floor. Nicole let the door open and close, but didn't get off. On the seventh floor, Gallagher stood back with courtly manners, and held the door for her to get off. Somewhat encouraged, holding her breath against his effluvium of Scotch, she walked with him down the long carpeted hallway. His secretary didn't look up from her computer when the two of them went by into his inner office.
He did shut the door behind him, but, instead of trying to grope her, he went over to a coffee machine like the one in Mr. Rosenthal's office. Next to it he had a little refrigerator, atop which stood several bottles and a neat row of crystal tumblers. “Coffee?” he asked. “Or can I fix you a drink? Sounds like you've earned one today.”
You don't know the half of it.
But Nicole said, “Coffee—black, please. I don't use alcohol.”
The frost in her voice only made him grin disarmingly. “You know what they say. Drink—and die; don't drink—and die anyway. But suit yourself.” He poured her the coffee, then splashed a good jolt of Johnnie Walker Black over ice for himself. He carried it to his desk and sat down, leaning
back in the big mahogany leather chair: leopard on a tree branch, Nicole caught herself thinking, or lion on the veldt, . waiting in lordly ease for his wives to bring him dinner. “Sit down,” he said. “Make yourself at home.”
Nicole sat. This wasn't the sort of place that she'd have wanted for home or office, not with those gaudy LeRoy Neiman prints—a redundancy if ever there was one—on the wall, but it fit the flamboyant Gallagher perfectly. The only thing missing was a lava lamp.
He knocked back the Scotch, then held up a well-manicured forefinger. “Cooperation,” he intoned, giving the word the same mystic emphasis with which the fellow in
The Graduate had informed plastic
. “That's what we've got to see.”
Nicole tensed. “Mr. Gallagher,” she said, “I've been cooperative in every way I know how. I've worked as hard as I can for this firm. The Butler Ranch report is only one example. I've also—”
Gallagher waggled that forefinger. “Not exactly what I meant.” He wasn't looking at her face as he spoke. He was, she realized, trying to look up her skirt, which was a little above the knee when she stood and a good deal shorter than that when she sat down. She crossed her legs as tight as she could, and hooked one ankle behind the other for good measure.
Cooperation?
Sleep your way to the top,
he meant. He couldn't mean anything else, though he hadn't been so blatant as to leave himself in trouble if she wanted to make something of it. Nicole damned herself for having been right the first time—and also for having been so stupid as to miss the fact that there was another way than the obvious and actionable.
Here it was, almost the turn of the millennium, and a woman couldn't get a damned thing on her own merits. Why not forget about degrees and credentials and qualifications? Why not just demand that every female applicant submit her bra size and her body measurements, and never mind pretending that anything else mattered?
Her teeth were clenched so tight her jaw ached. Outrageous, unjust, hypocritical—
When was any society so unfair? Not in any time I ever heard of. Not in any, ever, I'd bet.
While she stewed in silence, Gallagher got up and made himself another drink. “More coffee?” he asked. Nicole shook her head stiffly. Gallagher's Adam's apple worked as he swallowed half the Scotch he'd poured into the tumbler. He filled it again and set the bottle down on the refrigerator with a sigh of regret. He wobbled a bit as he walked back to his desk. “Where was I?”
Halfway to Skid Row.
Nicole's thought was as cold as the ice in his glass.
More than halfway, if you can't remember what you're saying from one minute to the next.
Well then, she thought, colder yet—the kind of coldness she imagined a soldier must feel in battle, and she knew a lawyer felt in a bitterly fought case: an icy clarity, empty of either compunction or remorse. In that state of mind, one did what one had to do. No more, not a fraction less. Maybe she could take advantage of his alcoholic fog to steer him away from the line he'd been taking and toward one more useful to her. “We were talking,” she said, “about ways to improve my chances for the next partnership that becomes available.”
“Oh, yeah. That's right.” But, even reminded, Tony Gallagher didn't come back at once to the subject. At least, for the moment, he wasn't leering at her. He was staring out the window instead; he had a view as splendid as Mr. Rosenthal's, as emblematic of both eminence and power.
Nicole began to wonder if he'd forgotten she was there. She pondered slipping quietly away while he sat there in his semistupor, but she couldn't be sure if he was drunk enough to let her get away with it. She stirred in her chair. As she'd half hoped, half feared, the motion drew his attention back to her. He wagged his forefinger in her direction again, as if it were something else, something not symbolic at all. “Say, I heard a good one the other day.”
“Did you?” Nicole said. Gallagher told jokes constantly, both out of court and in. He insisted he'd caught several
breaks from judges and juries over the years because of it. Nicole could believe it. Not that she'd have cared to try it herself, but with his personality and his—well—attributes, he could carry it off.
“Sure did,” he said now. “Seems this gorgeous woman walked into a bar and asked the bartender for a six-pack of Budweiser. She …” From the very first line, Nicole hadn't expected she'd care for the joke, but she hadn't expected the disgust that swelled up in her as Tony Gallagher went on telling it. When he finished, he was grinning from ear to ear: “—and so she said, ‘No, give me a six-pack of Miller instead. All that Budweiser's been making my crotch sore.'”
He waited, chortling, for her to fall over laughing. No, she thought. Not even for a senior partner. “Mr. Gallagher,” she said with rigid deliberation, “that was the most sickening, sexist thing I've ever heard in my life.” She could have stopped there—should have, if she'd started at all. But something in her had snapped. “Nobody,” she said, shaking with the force of her disgust, “nobody should tell a joke like that, under any circumstances, to anybody. If that's what it means to ‘cooperate,' to be ‘one of the boys'—if I have to crawl down in the gutter with all the rest of you, guzzling pricey liquor and laughing at sick jokes—then frankly, Mr. Gallagher, I don't want to play.”
There was an enormous silence. Nicole knew with sick certainty that he'd erupt, that he'd blast her out of her—his—chair.
He didn't. His eyes went cold and hard, like green glass. He was, she realized with dismay, much less drunk than she'd thought. “Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” he said with perfect and completely unexpected precision, “one of the complaints leveled against you by your peers and by the senior partners was that you did not get along with people as well as you should. I took the contrary position. I see now that I was mistaken.”
“What exactly do you mean, I don't get along?” Nicole asked. Maybe he would give her enough rope to hang him.
She should have known he wouldn't. He was a lawyer,
wasn't he? “I mean what I said,” he snapped. “No more, no less.” But even while he played the lawyer's lawyer, his eyes slid down to her hemline again. Maybe—and that was worst of all—he didn't even know he was doing it. He straightened in his chair. “Good afternoon, Ms. Gunther-Perrin.”
“Good afternoon,” Nicole said, with the starch of generations of Midwestern schoolmarms in her voice and in her spine.
She left with her head high. Oh, he wanted her to cooperate, no doubt about it—in bed and naked, or more likely wearing something vinyl and crotchless from Frederick's of Hollywood.
So now she'd offended not only the founding partner but the one senior partner who'd even pretended to be on her side. At least, she thought, she still had her self-respect. Unfortunately, it was the only thing she did have. She couldn't eat it, put it in the gas tank, or pay the mortgage with it. She'd shot her chance for a partnership right between the eyes.
On the other hand, if she'd read Sheldon Rosenthal right, she'd never been in line for a partnership. She'd been a blazing fool from start to finish.
 
“Thank you so much, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” Josefina said when Nicole handed her a check that afternoon. “You are the last one. I got to cash this, then run for the airport.” Nicole's nod was grim. She'd have to get a cash advance from her MasterCard to keep the check from bouncing. She was buying groceries, gasoline—everything—on plastic till she got paid again. The MasterCard was close to maxing out. So was the Visa. Her whole life was on the verge of having its charging privileges revoked.
Kimberley and Justin hugged Josefina so tightly when she bent to say good-bye to them that she laughed a little tearily and said something half reproving, half teasing, in the Spanish that they understood and Nicole never had. At that, Kimberley, who professed loudly and often that “only babies cry,” wept as if her heart would break. Nicole's own heart
was none too sturdy, either. Damn it, it pulled her apart to see her baby hurt.
“Oh.” Josefina straightened, wiping her eyes and sniffing. “I got to tell you, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin, we got a virus going around the kids. I had to call two mothers this afternoon.”
Great
, Nicole thought. Why not? The way this day had been going, all she needed was a nice round of the galloping crud. “Thanks,” she managed to say to Josefina, though the last thing she felt was gratitude. She fixed Kimberley with a mock-severe look, one that usually made her erupt into giggles. There were no giggles today, just tears. “Don't you dare get sick, do you hear me?” Nicole said—as if by simply saying it she could make the virus sit up and behave.
Kimberley had stopped sobbing, at least. “I won't, Mommy,” she said, sounding stuffy and forlorn. “I feel fine.”
“Me, too,” Justin declared, not wanting to be left out.
Then why were you wailing like that?
Nicole thought uncharitably as she buckled her daughter into her car seat and got Justin into his. It wouldn't be much longer before Kimberley outgrew the one she was in. Another milestone. These days, Nicole measured time by how her children changed. First step, first time dry through the night, first dirty word … Her mouth twisted. Her own life was on the downhill slide. First abandonment, first divorce, first partnership lost—first firing next, probably, if things didn't get better fast.

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