The Assistants (19 page)

I
WAS STILL SHAKING
when I turned the key to my apartment door. I dropped my messenger bag on the kitchen floor and fell onto my bed with my sneakers and jacket still on.

That so didn't go according to plan.

I hadn't intended to walk in there and threaten Robert, but I also hadn't intended to be so insulted by his total lack of belief that I could—what? Steal from him? Shouldn't I have been glad he found it hard to believe I'd be capable of that?

But that wasn't it. It was the way he doubted my intelligence and my drive. My ability to manifest (as
The
Oprah
Magazine
would say). Somewhere along the line I'd started believing in myself and I wanted Robert to believe in me, too.

Walking out of the rich people's gym the way I did, I didn't know if Robert would call my bluff or not—even though it wasn't actually a bluff. I did have in my possession enough documentation
to send him to prison. But I didn't want to manifest him into a cell, or even one of those country-club prisons they made special for wealthy white men, where they get to wear chinos and play shuffleboard and then write a memoir about it that gets made into a movie after they get out. I just wanted Emily to come home.

I checked my phone to be sure Emily hadn't called. She had not, but I did have a text from Wendi:
We're coming over.

Jesus, what now?

I brought my laptop onto my bed with me and checked the latest news about the site. I Googled
the Assistance
and what I found was inevitable, I guess—word of Emily's arrest had finally reached the Internet.

Assistance Cofounder (the Hot One) Hauled Away in Cuffs
, said BKmag.com.

Girl Who Founded the Assistance May Be a Thief
, said Gothamist.

The first commenter asked the question on everyone's mind: “The hot one? Or the other one?”

We weren't looking good in the public eye, with my getting fired and now Emily in a cell. All the posts I read mentioned that Emily hadn't been charged with anything yet, but this seemed to only stir more curiosity. A lot of people were asking questions, and if there was one thing I understood about the Internet, it was that multiple questions posed in all caps were basically the same as answers.

Then I began typing my own name into Google. T-i-n-a-f-o-n-t-a—and Google tried to help by finishing my search for me:

Tina Fontana fired,
it suggested.

Tina Fontana thief.

Tina Fontana lesbian.

My buzzer buzzed just in time.

On my doorstep, Wendi, Lily, and Ginger were waiting to be let in.

“What, do you guys travel in a pack now?”

They'd come from the office and were dressed accordingly. Ginger in a cobalt-blue skirt suit, Wendi in a black hoodie, and Lily in her favorite pink cardigan with cartoon giraffes on it. Someone should really start enforcing a dress code upon the entry-level staff at Titan.

I led them to the kitchen table and brought my computer out from the bedroom. “Have you seen the Internet in the last few hours?”

“That's what I'm talking about.” Ginger flared her manicure at Wendi. “She needs to do something. Make a statement or something.”

“This she you speak of is me, I assume?” I took a seat next to Wendi.

“No she shouldn't,” Wendi said. They seemed to be continuing an argument that had begun on their way over.

Wendi took control of my laptop and opened up the Assistance page. “Have you looked at how much donation money's come in?”

It was a shitload of money, actually. Twenty thousand more than last time I'd checked only a few hours ago.

“Wow.” Lily's eyes got big behind her glasses. “Where did all those donations come from?”

“There is no such thing as bad publicity,” Wendi said as an explanation.

Ginger leaned forward, offering the table a beguiling view of her cleavage. “But there are rumors flying around that Tina and Emily stole from Titan. People are calling them thieves.”

Wendi pulled back in her chair to offset Ginger's onslaught. “And for every person calling them thieves, someone else is calling them heroes.”

This got me thinking.

Wendi was right. It didn't matter so much what people were saying as long as they were saying something. Wasn't this the golden rule of the new millennium? Had we been taught nothing by Her Imperial Majesty Miley Cyrus, Emperor of the World Wide Web?

What was happening now wasn't really so different from when I got fired and Wendi used the Internet rumor mill in our favor. This was worse, but all that meant was that we had to go bigger.

“Shouldn't Tina at least defend herself?” Ginger said. “And what about Emily? Has the girl even gotten a phone call yet? For all we know, she might have a face tattoo by now.”

“No,” I said. “I'm not going on the defensive.”

They all turned to me like it had just now occurred to them that I was sitting there at all.

“What?” Ginger said.

“I know what we need to do,” I said.

My voice hardly sounded like my own. It came out sounding deeper than usual, more sure of itself. “I want to put a call out to the network. Everyone who owes us a favor, all those assistants, the ones with the too-big glasses, and the Zara girls, and Accent Accessory. Everyone.”

I sounded calm and confident.

“I want them to float a news piece for us. A fluff piece. It doesn't need to be based in any fact . . .”

It occurred to me that I sounded a lot like Robert. A
helluva lot
like him.

“And this news piece needs to state that some say Robert's a tax evader. That he has a long history of hiding a bunch of his money in illegal offshore accounts. That's it. We're not saying it, per se, but some people are.”

Ginger, Wendi, and Lily were all staring at me like I'd just spoken in tongues or that snake-speak Harry Potter came out with on occasion.

I should explain where this idea came from: Basically, it was Robert's idea. Or at least he popularized it.

Titan's twenty-four-hour news channel was known for many things, but thanks to a documentary some liberal folks made a few years back—whose mission was to criticize Titan's not-so-objective methods of reporting the news—this little tactical nugget was brought to the attention of a discerning public:
Some say. Some people say.
Some would say.

These were magic words that, when uttered before anything—anything—served as an automatic disclaimer, a get-out-of-jail-free card. Hopefully, in this instance, literally.

“Huh.” Wendi was the first to respond. “That's so Titan.”

For a split second I thought Wendi might tip my kitchen table onto its side and screech out some sort of “the beast is us” statement, or claim that she could no longer distinguish which of us card players were pigs and which were human beings—but that was all in my literature-heavy mind.

In fact, Wendi smiled at the idea, I think.

“I love it,” she said.

“I don't get it,” Ginger said.

By the looks of Lily's suspicious scowl, she didn't get it either.

“We just need to put the words out there,” I said. “Get people asking questions about what Robert's done instead of what we've done. He's smart enough to catch on that we're willing to play dirty, and then he'll back off.”

“Oh aah well, are you sure this is wise?” Lily's suspicion had evolved to full-face incredulity. “Making public accusations like this, especially ones that are false?”

She uttered the word
false
in such a way that made me wonder if she knew exactly how not false these accusations were. She was Margie Fischer's assistant after all. It was possible Margie had hinted at the existence of her stockpiled documents. But with Lily, who could tell? You'd have better luck getting an emotional read on Siri.

Either way, I wasn't ready to make those incriminating documents public. Which meant first and foremost keeping them a secret from Wendi and Ginger.

“I'm only trying to scare Robert into doing the right thing,” I said. “We're not accusing him of anything new. It is true that some people say Robert's a tax evader. People have been saying that for years. No one's ever been able to prove anything, and no new evidence has come to light, but we're not claiming it has. We're only bringing the subject back up.”

“I guess it's now or never.” Ginger undid the knot on her fuchsia neck scarf. “Legally, I'm pretty sure they can only hold Emily till tomorrow—then they either have to charge her with something or let her go.”

“See?” Wendi said. “And you thought law school was a total waste of time and money.”

Ginger gave Wendi the finger.

“What are we waiting for then?” I reached for my phone. “Let's start making calls.”

—

B
Y TEN P
.
M
., my bedroom looked like ground zero of an eighth-grader's slumber party. Pizzas had been ordered, a candy run had been made, and we all had our eyes attached to some form of electronic screen.

Earlier, I'd bitten the bullet and called Tim, Kevin's friend from BuzzFeed. Fortunately, he hadn't yet heard that Kevin had dumped me and was therefore eager to be of assistance. Using me as an anonymous source, he lobbed the first softball-size piece of clickbait into the airwaves—
Is Robert Barlow About to Be Ruined for
Life?
—abruptly followed in kind by the rest of the Internet-beast feeders.

Our “news” story got coverage on sites big and small, indie and corporate: Slate, the Hairpin, the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast Cheat Sheet,
New York
magazine's Daily Intelligencer, even the YouTube channel of that girl who got famous for putting on makeup.

It wasn't hard to envision all those e-mail chains: the under- or unpaid blogger at HuffPo calling in a favor owed to her by the politics editor; the intern at the Daily Beast who craved the bragging rights that would come with aiding and abetting us; even the trust-funded freelancer at the Daily Intelligencer who wanted to contribute to our efforts in order to appease her own class guilt.

All their articles pretty much said the same thing—nothing. But that was good, that's what we wanted.

I sat at my desk in front of my computer, hitting
refresh
over and over again, announcing every time a new version of the story appeared someplace new.

Robert Barlow Guilty of Tax Evasion? Some Say Yes.

Crime, Corruption, and the Caymans: Is It Time for Robert Barlow to Come Clean?

Barlow a Fraud? Some People Say, Uh Duh.

“Yes!” I called out. “We just scored Upworthy.”

Ginger had been hovering over my shoulder, but she finally stepped away to make herself comfortable on my bed. Careful not to flash us as she tucked her knees beneath her cobalt-blue skirt suit, she flashed us anyway. “Well, if getting Robert's attention is what you wanted, Tina, I think you might have done it.” She reached for a Whirly Pop from our candy stash. “You really think all this is going to scare him into backing off?”

Lily was on the bed beside Ginger, picking her way through a sack of Jujubes, choosing only the green ones. “Oh aah well, it would if we had any actual evidence that Robert's done something wrong.”

I let that one go unanswered.

“How many page views is our site up to?” Ginger asked as she peeled the clear wrapper from her lolli. “I bet all this chatter is only improving our traffic.”

I clicked onto our site and hit
refresh
. “We're almost at a million views.”

“Wow,” Lily said, with her mouth full of Jujubes. “That's a lot of people.”

Wendi was lying across Emily's air mattress with her boots propped up against the wall, gnawing on a stick of red licorice. She had her iPad on her lap. “No it's not. That video of the cat that plays the piano has, like, twenty million views.”

Lily blinked at us obviously behind her thick glasses. “But that's a cat that plays the piano.”

“You're not considered a welebrity,” Ginger said, between licks of her Whirly Pop, “until you hit at least five million.”

“Tina's not trying to become a welebrity.” Wendi threw a stick of licorice at Ginger's face. “She's trying to get Emily out of jail.”

Ginger reached for the nearest gummy ring and chucked it at Wendi, nailing her square in the horns.

Lily ducked for cover, probably fearing for the giraffes on her cardigan, as Wendi retaliated with a handful of Swedish Fish.

“Stop throwing the candy!” I yelled. “It's more teasing than the rats in the walls can handle.”

Wendi agreed to a truce and returned to her lying-down position, further scuffing my walls with her boots. “If I knew you'd be this good at bluffing, Tina, I would have entered you into the World Series of Poker.”

I laughed like I thought I should.

Let everyone think it was a bluff. I didn't trust Wendi to not go ahead and leak the documents if she found out about them—and then what? There would be no undoing that once it happened. I'd probably get subpoenaed, sworn to an oath to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, and what the hell was the truth anyway? None of that mattered. I only needed one person to believe I had those documents, and that was Robert.

I
WOKE FIRST
, dry-mouthed and momentarily confused as to why there were other people's limbs draped across my chest. Then I remembered how the night had turned into a sleepover, all candy and pizza and late-night stomachache. There had even been an impromptu hairbrush sing-along to Aretha Franklin's “Respect” when our page views reached one million—which in retrospect made little if any literal sense, but it felt right at the moment. I know, girls singing into hairbrushes, right? But would you believe I'd never done that before? I mean, not when I wasn't by myself, alone, doing my own backup vocals. It was different in a group—louder, for sure. My upstairs neighbor had to bang on the floor with a broom handle to quiet us down. But now all was silent.

I reached across Ginger's rack to grab my cell phone from my nightstand. She stirred but didn't wake. Lily was curled up at our feet like a house cat, and Wendi was sprawled out on Emily's air
mattress. We'd all fallen asleep in our clothes. I found it impressive how Wendi managed to snooze comfortably in pants with chains on them.

“Oh shit,” I said aloud, but no one heard me. It was later than I thought, already almost nine a.m., and there had been no call from Emily.

Robert didn't take the bait.

“Oh shit,” I said again. Why wasn't anyone waking the heck up?

Emily was probably being charged right now. What was I doing just sitting here? I had to do something. Anything. Call a lawyer, cry for help, check on Margie's envelope maybe—the documents I'd hidden in the freezer beneath the ice trays, camouflaged behind a forest of frozen vodka bottles.

I hurdled over Ginger and Lily to stand upright—and then stopped. I'd caught sight of myself in the mirror above my dresser.

Sometimes in an instant you realize everything.

I know that sounds like the tag line to a Taster's Choice commercial, but I swear that's how this was. All at once I knew I had to turn myself in. Not only for Emily, but for that crazed woman in the mirror.

She wasn't who I wanted to be. Cowardly, rationalizing, passing off blame. Where was my integrity? Had I not once been a wide-eyed NYU student underlining her
Norton Anthology
raw, elated by the words of Emerson and Thoreau?

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

What you are comes to you.

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody's going to know whether you did it or not.

That last quote may have been Oprah piggybacking on Emerson, but you get my point. I couldn't let this go on this way. So I took a breath and went to her, that crazed woman in the mirror, and pulled a hairbrush through her frazzled hair—a hairbrush that had just last night been a microphone. Then I tugged on my shoes and threw on my coat, all the while allowing the decision to settle over me.

They say people who decide to kill themselves experience a profound tranquillity once the deliberation is over, the ending decided. I was feeling something like that, with a bit more gastrointestinal bustle.

I popped two TUMS into my mouth and bade Ginger, Wendi, and Lily a silent good-bye. They stayed sleeping like they'd been roofied, or whatever kids were using to drug one another's drinks those days. I let them sleep. They'd figure it out when they woke up and found me gone; they'd understand without my having to tell them.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary woman, but she is brave five minutes longer.
(That's me piggybacking on Emerson.)

Slinging my messenger bag across my shoulder—empty except for my phone, keys, wallet, and photo ID, because I wouldn't need anything else—I reached for the doorknob, just as the door swung open, smacking me in the face.

I cried out, covering my face with my hands, and fell backward, then removed my hands, looked up, and there she was.

“Emily?”

She was disheveled, wearing the same “house clothes” she'd had on when they took her away, and her hair was pulled back in a frizzy ponytail, but it was her, in the flesh, Emily fucking Johnson.

“They let me go,” she said.

I hobbled up to standing, disregarding my aching and probably broken nose.

I couldn't believe it. She was home.

“I was just on my way down there,” I said, letting my messenger bag slide from my shoulder onto the floor.

Emily surveyed the kitchen, the empty pizza boxes and candy wrappers. “I see you've been eating your pain,” she said. “Because you missed me.”

That blond-haired, blue-eyed bitch from Connecticut. She was home!

“I did miss you,” I said. “I missed you so much.”

The others, finally, had woken up from all the commotion and were out of the bedroom—Wendi with creases on her face, Ginger with her hair wild as a house fire, and Lily struggling to get her glasses on fast enough.

“You're all here?” Emily said. “For me?” Her voice cracked and she lapsed, unconsciously perhaps, into her natural lower-class accent. “I thought for sure you all were just going to let me . . .” She broke off, her neck and cheeks reddened, her eyes filled with tears. She covered her face with her hands.

“Never,” I said, going to her. “I was just on my way to turn myself in.” I folded my arms around her, squeezing so hard I thought for sure she'd complain, but she didn't.

Wendi, Ginger, and Lily huddled around us, clinging, howling, crying. My upstairs neighbors might have thought someone had died, because when you get right down to it, there's such an indistinguishable line between crying out for dear life and crying out for dear death.

I always wondered what the sensation was like, to win. The lottery, the Super Bowl, a gold medal—to win anything, really. To want something so much, and to get it. Now I knew.

Beneath all the tears, I was saying thank you, thankyouthankyouthankyou, to God, the Universe, Buddha, Oprah, anyone and everyone who'd helped out with this in any way. And then I made a silent promise to pay my good fortune forward, because suddenly I had something to pay forward. I was supposed to be an island, and hell might be other people, but what I had there at that moment in my overfull kitchen—well, it was something.

—

L
ATER THAT NIGHT
, Emily and I drank champagne in our pajamas. Me in my leisurely stripes, she in her lace two-piece. It was just the two of us again, lounging on my bed. Ginger, Wendi, and Lily had gone home; the news that Emily was free had quieted the chatter on the Internet, and we could take a deep breath and relax back into our old selves—or, the newly updated versions of our old selves.

“So, how exactly did you manage to get me out of jail?” Emily asked while uncorking our second bottle of Asti Spumante.

“Long story. I sort of had Robert by the balls.” I held out my glass to be refilled. “The cojones.”

Emily set the bottle onto my nightstand and scrolled through a few new messages on her phone. She was already being bombarded with calls and e-mails. Everyone wanted to know what had happened. Why was she held in custody? Why wasn't she charged with anything? People wanted answers. Emily didn't have any of those answers, but she was still enjoying the attention nonetheless.

“You're going to have to be a little more specific,” she said. “I have to have a good story to tell my fans; that's what they want from me now.” As she was scrolling, her phone chimed again.

I checked my own phone, not for messages—which was good because there weren't any—but for the time.

It was only a little after eight p.m. Not so late as to make it entirely insane for me to forgo my champagne flute, lift myself from the bed, throw on some clothes, and make my way uptown. Kevin had to have heard the news by now that Emily and I had come out okay. I liked to imagine that he'd been closely monitoring my situation on the sly since we broke up; I pictured him peeping around Titan corners, eavesdropping on conversations, worrying over Emily's arrest, and even cheering on the snowballing success of our website from his too-small couch in his too-small apartment.

Of course I understood that in real life Kevin was still angry. And that even now, my being exonerated didn't un-betray him. I'd still lied to him over the course of many days and nights and hamburgers—and that was unforgivable. But I wanted to go to him, tonight, immediately, unforgivable or not.

“I'm running out of battery.” Emily poked at her phone without looking up. “Have you seen my charger?”

I wheeled around to the side of my bed, put my feet on the floor, and stood up. By the time Emily realized I wasn't searching the room for her phone charger, I was already pulling my pea coat out of the closet.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked, suddenly aware of me. “Where are you going? Out to sea?”

I buttoned my pea coat closed. “I won't be gone long.”

“Where could you possibly have to go? I just got out of prison, I'm an ex-con, the least you could do is drink with me all night.”

I leaned over her and gave her a kiss on the forehead just as her phone chimed again—but this time she ignored it.

“Hey,” she said, making her eyes big. “Fontana. I know where you're going.”

Heating up quickly in my heavy wool sailor's coat, I vacillated between dashing out the door and disrobing.

“Good for you,” Emily said, full of pride. “Go to him.”

“Fuck off,” I said to sabotage the moment, and then left the apartment before the vulnerability and my wooly sweat could really seep in.

Go to him.

Who did Emily think I was, pre-op Meg Ryan?

You know what Robert would say to that?
Hogwash.
What a buncha hokum.
Grow a set.

Once outside I became acutely aware of my light-headedness, the wobbliness in my knees. In a split-second decision I called a cab. And, no, it wasn't because I was going to start living like a spoiled rich girl who took cars everywhere now that I was all out of debt and not a criminal. It was that it was post–rush hour—the trains would take forever and traffic would be light. I also wanted to give myself the least opportunity to change my mind and turn back. The investment of a $30 cab ride was as good a deterrent as I could think of.

Plus, cab rides are awesome. Except for the slight carsickness and occasional fear for your life, there is nothing like zipping through nighttime New York in a foul-smelling automobile. To get
to the Upper East Side from Williamsburg, you have to go over the Williamsburg Bridge, which isn't quite the Brooklyn Bridge, but it's no scrub either. Crossing it, the view of the Manhattan skyline always made my chest feel too full, like my heart had suddenly swelled in the way of the Grinch who stole Christmas the moment he went soft. I was a real sucker for shiny lights and tall buildings. Tonight the sky was so black and clear, the skyscrapers looked Photoshopped against it—it was truly beautiful, and I thought to myself,
This is going to be horrible, what I'm
about to do
. This was going to make me feel like I wanted to die, but once it was over, I could move on. I'd continue with my life knowing that at least I tried. At least I fought for him. That Tina Fontana—island unto herself—was willing to do everything in her power to keep someone in her life.

My cabdriver carried on a conversation in a foreign tongue as he negotiated the FDR Drive and it dawned on me gradually: this would make two people now that I didn't just wave off with a
see ya
before closing the door and plopping down in bed with Netflix and some cookies.

“
Ana baneek omak!
” my driver shouted, but he was addressing someone else.

When we finally turned onto Kevin's block, it was the strangest thing—Kevin was right there, trudging alongside us up the sidewalk, with his hands dug deep into his coat pockets. It was a moment I recognized from a thousand movies, starring Meg Ryan and her contemporaries. Kevin was on his way to find me just as I was on my way to find him.

“Stop the car!” I yelled to my driver. “Pull over. I want to get out here.”

He did so without hesitation or a blip in his earpiece
conversation. Kevin, possibly alarmed he was about to be clipped gangster style, jumped back.

I stepped out of the cab, slammed the door, and looked at him. “Where you headed?” I asked, trying to make light of the fear in his eyes.

I was on my way to find you
, I was sure he was going to say.

“I was on my way to get a slice of pizza,” he actually said.

“Oh.”

Then my driver palmed his horn and cussed at me from inside the car. I needed to pay him.

So I took care of all that and once he peeled away, I returned my attention to Kevin. It was just cold enough for condensation to blow from our mouths. He didn't move. So I went to him.

“I won't keep you,” I said, forcing myself to look at him, not down at the sidewalk. “I just wanted to tell you in person how sorry I am. For everything.”

Kevin exhaled a deep breath that made it look like he'd been smoking an invisible cigarette. Then he knelt down and took a seat right there on the curb.

I didn't wait for an invitation to sit beside him. “If you're willing to hear me out—” I began, and then broke off.

Were there even words?

Tears welled in my eyes, so I closed them, but that only made the streams form faster down my face.

“I'm just so sorry,” I said, because it was all I could say. I reached for Kevin's hand and he didn't pull it away from me. Instead he wrapped his arm around my torso and drew me in.

He smelled like himself. And his shoulder was both soft and hard all at once. How I'd missed his shoulders.

“I shouldn't have run out on you like that,” he said. “When you needed me most.” He hugged me tighter. “I won't do that again, I promise.”