Household Gods Read online

  “Do you think she’d want to take on two more?” Nicole tried to make it sound light, but couldn’t hide how hard Josefina’s desertion had hit.

  Cyndi heard the story with sympathy that looked and sounded genuine. “That’s terrible of her, to spring it on you like that,” she said. “Still, if it’s family, what can you do? You can’t very well tell your mother not to be sick, you have to stay in the States and take care of other people’s kids.” She hesitated. Probably she could feel Nicole staring at her, thinking at her — wanting, needing her to solve the problem. “Look,” she said uncomfortably. “I understand, I really do. You know? But I don’t think Marie would want to sit any kids who aren’t family, you know what I mean?”

  Nicole knew what she meant. Nicole would have felt the same way. But they were her kids. She was left in the lurch, on a bare day’s notice. “Oh, yes,” she said. She hoped she didn’t sound as disappointed as she felt. “Yes. Of course. I just thought… well. If my family were here, and not back in Indiana… Oh well. It was worth a try.” She did her best to make her shrug nonchalant, to change the subject without giving them both whiplash. “Ten-thirty, you said? I’ll see what I can catch up on till then. Lord, you wouldn’t believe how long it took me to get here this morning.”

  “Traffic.” Cyndi managed to make it both a four-letter word and a sigh of relief. Off the hook, she had to be thinking.

  Lucky Cyndi, with her sister in town and not in Bloomington, and no chance of her disappearing into the wilds of Ciudad Obregon. Nicole mumbled something she hoped was suitably casual, and retreated to her desk. She was still riding the high of Ogarkov’s news, though the bright edge had worn off it.

  The first thing she did when she got there was check her voice mail. Sure enough, one of the messages was from Sheldon Rosenthal, dry and precise as usual: “Please arrange to meet with me at your earliest convenience.” She’d taken care of that. Another one was from Mort Albers, with whom she had the eleven-thirty appointment. “Can we move it up to half-past ten?” he asked.

  “No, Mort,” Nicole said with a measure of satisfaction, “you can’t, not today.” It was just as satisfying to have Cyndi make the call and change the schedule — the pleasure of power. Nicole could get used to that, oh yes she could. Even the little things felt good today. Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow she’d be doing them as a partner. Today — her last day as a plain associate — had a bittersweet clarity, a kind of farewell brightness. She answered a couple of voice-mail messages from other lawyers at the firm. She wrote a memo, fired it off by e-mail, and printed out a hard copy for her files. Frank would have gone on for an hour about how primitive that was, but the law ran on paper and ink, not electrons and phosphors — and to hell with Frank anyhow, she thought.

  It was going to feel wonderful to tell him she was a partner now. Even if -

  She quelled the little stab of anxiety. He had to keep paying child support, as much as he ever did. That was in the divorce decree. She was a lawyer — a partner in a moderately major firm. She could make it stick.

  The clock on the wall ticked the minutes away. At ten twenty-five she started a letter, hesitated, counted up the minutes remaining, saved the letter on the hard drive and stood up, smoothing wrinkles out of her skirt. She checked her pantyhose. On straight, no runs — thanks to whichever god oversaw the art of dressing for success. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders, and forayed out past Cyndi’s desk. “I’m going to see Mr. Rosenthal,” she said — nice and steady, she was pleased to note. Cyndi grinned and gave her a thumbs-up.

  Nicole took the stairs to the seventh floor. Some people walked all the way up every day; others exercised on the stairs during breaks and at lunch.

  Nicole never had understood that, not in a climate that made you happy to go outside the whole year round — even on days when the smog was thick enough to asphyxiate a non-smog-adapted organism. People who’d been born in L.A. didn’t know when they were well off.

  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-Perrin,” 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 ju
st 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-Perrin?” 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 reall
y 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.

  2

  Nicole 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?”