In the Drink (4 page)

I doubted this very much. Margot was the kind of person I had always viewed with an uneasy admixture of intimidation, incomprehension and envy, one of the chosen few whose lives
seemed to progress along a brightly lit superhighway without even the most fleeting inclination toward dark alleyways. Her chiseled face was designed aerodynamically, like the prow of a ship; the planes of her long limbs were angled like oars. During her tenure with Jackie, she had written articles and essays in her spare time, several of which her agent had sold to magazines. An autobiographical essay for
Vanity Fair
about her childhood in Greenwich, Connecticut, had won her a nice big contract with a reputable publisher to be expanded into a book-length memoir,
In the Land of Silk and Money
. This in turn had led to more and flashier magazine assignments and a contract for a second memoir, this one called
Innocence Abroad
, about her junior year of college, when she’d lived in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne and suffered from an eating disorder—it seemed like a terrible waste to me to be an anorexic in France, of all places, but she’d no doubt had her reasons, one of which may well have been that it would net her a hefty advance one day.

Margot and I were maniacally friendly to each other, as if an infusion of artificial warmth would overcome the natural hostility neither of us wanted to acknowledge, but which lay like a frigid spring under our every interaction. We had met through William, with whom she had had a year-long affair when she was a senior at Barnard and he was in his first year of Columbia Law School. She’d dumped him just before summer vacation; I privately suspected that their relationship had served as her experiment with the lower classes, but of course there was no way to verify this theory. Margot treated William with a detached friendliness, but he accorded her an almost reverential respect that made me want to shake him, hard, until his head cleared. Meanwhile, he worried about me and confided in me and listened to me, which was fair enough, except that it wasn’t enough for me.

But if Margot thought I was capable of replacing her, I certainly wasn’t going to argue, especially after she mentioned the pay (eighteen dollars an hour) and promised that although I was hired to be Jackie’s personal secretary, my true purpose would be to fulfill her multi-book contract. “She’s not very literary, to put it mildly,” she said. “All I have to do is mention that you’re a writer and she’ll hire you over the phone. I’m telling you this for your own good: you’ll write her books for her, but the fun of writing them is the only reward you’ll get.”

“I see,” I said blithely; I had just been laid off from a particularly awful waitressing job.

“No you don’t,” she said. “I’m warning you, she’s impossible. She’ll drive you crazy.”

I laughed. “How bad can she be?”

“How bad can she
be
,” she repeated bemusedly, as if she didn’t know quite where to begin, then launched into an account of humiliations I couldn’t imagine someone like Margot having to undergo at the hands of one old lady on the Upper East Side. That old bat wouldn’t dare tell me in front of three of her society-lady friends that I reeked of garlic; she would never make me take her niece’s poodle’s bloody stool sample in a taxi to the veterinarian, or kneel down to zip the fly of her jeans; if she did, I would just tell her to go to hell. Margot was obviously more sensitive, more serious than I was; I could put Jackie in her place. Anyway, eighteen dollars an hour—“Do you really think she’ll hire me?”

Margot said sympathetically, “I’ll call her right now.”

Jackie called me ten minutes later. “I trust Margot completely,” she said, “and I need someone right away, so I’m not even going to interview you or ask for any sort of résumé. Just come at nine on Monday morning, and we’ll take it from there.”

I showed up at her Park Avenue building wearing my only
suit, a matronly and unfashionable navy-blue affair I’d bought at a Salvation Army several years before to wear to an interview for a job I didn’t get. The doorman, who’d been alerted that I was coming, said a cheery hello (“I’m Ralph,” he said, “and you be careful up there!”); the elevator doors opened onto a small vestibule flanked by two doors marked 4A and 4B. On the wall between them hung a dark, authentic-looking oil. Antique urns filled with freshly cut lilies sat by both doors; I reached down and touched a cool, waxy funnel. The wallpaper was cream-colored, faintly flecked with maroon, the air scented with traces of a perfume I didn’t recognize. A chill crept along my arms.

She opened the door and we looked each other over. Her face was impenetrable, her hair a bronze lacquered shell. She wore a tailored Chanel suit, the same navy blue as mine, but the resemblance ended there. The phrase “hired sight unseen” hovered unspoken in the air between us; I was suddenly aware that I hadn’t combed my hair after my windy walk through Central Park. She sniffed deeply and lifted her nose a notch higher, apparently resolving to make the best of things. “Well, hello, Claudia, come in,” she said in a hard, deep voice that didn’t match the rest of her. I shook the hand she offered; it was cool and bony and smooth as a lizard. She ushered me into her foyer (gilt, mirrors, marble) and opened the door to the coat closet. As I hung my wool coat between two glistening furs, she said, “I’m so sorry, you’ll think I’m very rude, but I’m absolutely crazy today, I have an interview in twenty minutes and a lunch meeting with the man who’s translating my book into French. I’ve left a list of things for you to do, but I don’t have time to go through it all. I’m sure you can figure it out. We’ll have time to chat later. Margot spoke so highly of you. Right in there. I’ve got to run.”

She disappeared down the hall. I examined my reflection in
the enormous mirror over the marble stand, finger-combed my hair and smoothed my blouse, then skulked through the arched doorway into the dining room. Dark green velvet curtains covered the window; daylight filtered in around the edges, giving the room an undersea murk. When I pressed the wall switch, the chandelier above the large oval table leapt into light, illuminating the place in which (although I couldn’t know it yet) I would spend a good part of my waking hours for the next several years. The room was high-ceilinged, formerly elegant, now a little worn around the edges, as if its decline had been too gradual to be noticed by someone who saw it every day. The wallpaper, a repeating Mediterranean landscape of meandering river, olive and cypress groves, church spire in the hazy distance, was peeling behind the radiator and near the baseboard in one corner. The Persian rug was frayed and faded in several places. The table, covered by a dark green tasseled cloth, was spotted with fallen petals from a vase of browning yellow roses; ten or twelve straight-backed chairs with worn green cushions were lined up against the far wall, as if to make room for a junior-high dance.

By the window stood a folding table and plain wooden folding chair, and a small computer table on which were a laptop computer and miniature printer: my new office. I sat at the folding table and stared at Jackie’s scrawled list for a while, then shuffled through the papers next to it, which I guessed were related in some way to what she wanted me to do, if I could only read her handwriting. I got up and opened the curtains and squinted at the list again. One of the items appeared to be, “Order three books from editor, Gid Row,” and a phone number. I dialed it. “Hello,” came a curt male voice after half a ring.

“This is Genevieve del Castellano’s secretary,” I said hesitantly.
Her name was hard to say all at once; I had to take a break halfway through. “May I speak to Gid Row, please?”

He asked in astonishment, “Is this Margot?”

“No,” I said, “my name is Claudia Steiner. Margot left. I’m new.”

He chuckled; I pictured a fat clean pink man with a highly intelligent face. “With a name like that, you should be the castrating bitch on a soap opera, but you sound more like the ingenue. It’s Gil Reeve, by the way, unless she’s calling me names.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. I double-checked the instructions. “I think she wants me to order three copies of her book.”

“Jackie will tell you to call me for every little thing, but you’ll learn who does what before too long. I’ll switch you over to Janine. Hold on.”

Janine said without much enthusiasm that she’d send the books. This was the day’s sole achievement. At five o’clock I found Jackie on the phone at her desk in the sitting room. I stood in the doorway until she hung up. When she asked what I’d accomplished that day I said apologetically, “Well, I tried to figure everything out. I looked through the hard drive on the computer and went through some file drawers.”

“That’s all you did, all day long?”

“And I ordered the books you wanted.”

She gave me a look I would come to know very well, a wide-eyed vacuum of a stare that sucked me in and immobilized me. “You didn’t do
anything
,” she said finally.

What could I say? She had been expecting a real secretary, someone who would bustle in and take charge. I wasn’t capable of taking care of myself, let alone someone else. I folded up my desk and wheeled my computer table into the pantry under her direction (“Make sure you put it away every night, Claudia,
I don’t want visitors to see my dining room looking like a common workplace”). Then I put on my coat, said a meek good night and stomped home. I sat at my table and devoured the contents of a white carton, a glutinous mess of miniature corn ears and crunchy beige disks left over from the night before, not at all improved with age. After dinner, I looked through my closet and despaired at the lack of suitable outfits, Jackie’s Chanel suit hanging miragelike before me. Finally I gave up and went to bed, where I lay awake, my thoughts revolving without going anywhere, for several hours.

I wanted to succeed at this job. I had spent my entire youth in a small town in the Arizona desert, then escaped to an even smaller liberal-arts college where everyone was similar in many ways to everyone else. Although I had lived in New York for six years when I met Jackie, I had managed to remain astonishingly unworldly; I’d confined myself mostly to East Village dive bars, midtown office buildings, and the shabbier areas of the Upper West Side. I had never left the States. I had never encountered anyone remotely like Jackie, except in books and movies. I knew, intuitively, that I needed to be slapped awake, and she had struck me right away as just the person who could do it. She was a die-hard Republican, a lapsed Catholic, a European aristocrat and an American celebrity. Her picture appeared in magazines and the society pages of newspapers; she was a guest on talk shows. Her tables and desktops were crowded with gold-framed pictures of herself with movie stars, bullfighters, jockeys, politicians, her handsome late ex-husband, her playboy sons.

I spent the first few weeks in a blur of confounded agony, teeth gritted, shoulders hunched as if I were bracing myself against a gale-force wind. Everything Margot had predicted came to pass. I was not in fact tougher than Margot, and Jackie was not in fact an old bat, she was a terrifying, glamorous semi-lunatic
who had it in for me for reasons I couldn’t fathom. Nor could I entirely grasp the reason for my presence in her apartment. The logic behind her requests was as inscrutable and unfamiliar as her handwriting. Who was the Countess Robles and why was I calling to tell her that “the dress wasn’t long enough”? What exactly did I mean when I called the travel agent to ask about the Florida tickets and make sure they were “the right flight”? I tried to improvise around the bits of information Jackie gave me; I felt too cowardly to risk asking for explanations and being pinned to the wall by her exasperated stare.

In most of my other jobs, I had been just another bored nobody playing computer games and sending faxes, leaving at five without a backward glance, the time colorlessly subtracted from my life like money from the bank. Being alone with Jackie all day in those airless, cloistered rooms transformed me in my own imagination into the heroine of various archetypal dramas, all sharing the common thread of subjugation and silent forbearance. I was bound to rocks, banished to the underworld, imprisoned in towers, mistaken for a frog, sent on impossible quests. Our days together took on a tunnel-visioned, hothouse compression I had heretofore associated with hostages and their captors; I typed and filed, scurried and fetched, bathed in a light that shone only in my own head.

Later that evening when I walked into George’s, the place was empty except for the three lonely-guy regulars who’d grown their tailbones down into their bar stools and the weeknight bartender, a formidable giantess named Wanda. She didn’t talk much and rarely smiled, but she knew how to toss Macallan over ice cubes until it was silky and cool but minimally diluted, then slide it at just the right instant into a tumbler. This
was important because, as part of his fledgling power-elite persona, William was cultivating a taste for perfected single-malt Scotch.

He came in right after me, looking harried and rumpled and carrying his briefcase, straight from work, still in his suit and tie. The sight of him momentarily daunted me. He looked like such a grownup. How had maladjusted little Billy Snow turned into this handsome lawyer, and what, exactly, was I to make of my own situation in light of his success? We were two seeds planted in the same soil, but he was useful and edible, and I was a weed.

“The usual?” he asked, taking out his wallet, a streamlined calfskin affair stocked with platinum credit cards.

“Okay,” I said, although I didn’t much care for perfected whiskey; all that chilling without diluting did something to its chemical makeup that made it more potent and mood-altering than whiskey drunk either at room temperature or on the rocks. But no matter: I would have what William had, in hopes that his mood and mine would align themselves, two compass arrows drawn to the same magnetic pole.

We hunkered down at a little round wobbly table. As we got a few mouthfuls under our belts, he sighed and rubbed his head. “I brought so much paperwork I might as well have camped in my office,” he said.