Helen of Pasadena (9 page)

Judging by the open lust on Sarah’s face, I knew she was not kidding about the anything. And now I knew exactly who Nubby Sweater was. Damn.

“Helen, this is the visiting scholar I was telling you about,” Sarah continued, turning her velvet voice to me.

Please don’t let me emit a whimper
.

“Dr. O’Neill, I understand from Karen you’re looking for help in organizing your work. Helen would be a perfect research assistant. She’s very qualified. She’s been with us a long time.”

Could it be any worse? I think not.

Dr. O’Neill, Dr. Nubby Sweater O’Neill, extended his hand first to me, then to Sarah. “Patrick O’Neill. Nice to meet you. I hadn’t gotten Helen’s name but I was already impressed by her passion and her position here as a ‘freelance volunteer docenting person.’ Delighted to hear that you are interested in the research assistant job.”

And then he smiled for real at the whole group and I thought Sarah was going to resign her current position and apply to research whatever the hell it was that Dr. O’Neill wanted researched. Even Karen had to unbutton her blazer. Hot flash?

“Yes, very interested in the job.” Short phrases seemed like the safest conversational gambit right now. “Love archaeology. Super organized. Prompt.”
Prompt?

Dr. Patrick O’Neill looked straight at me. With his arms crossed against his chest and his right hip cocked to one side, he took in my whole package, as if he were examining yet another statue. His face was neutral, not giving away any emotion that might assuage or increase my anxiety. I was pretty sure that I was everything his prior research assistants had not been: a mother, a widow and a woman who just turned 40. The khaki suit, the headband and the stockings didn’t exactly scream, “Ready to get down in the dirt and dig!” Plus, he had much better hair than me.

“I just have one question.”

Oh, no, please don’t talk to me in ancient Greek and expect me to answer back with a pithy comment. Please, God, no.

“One of my students told me to be sure not to miss La Estrella. Apparently they have the best tacos in town. Do you know where it is? “

I was thrown for a second, then I answered triumphantly, “Yes!’

He waited. He wanted the full answer. This was my test. And I was gonna pass! When I was pregnant with Aiden, I ate nothing but tacos and popsicles for the first four months. I’d secretly frequented taco stands ever since, despite Merritt’s warning of food poisoning.

“There are several La Estrellas in Pasadena, but the original is over on Fair Oaks and Washington. It has the best carne asada tacos in town. And they carry the Coke from Mexico with the real sugar, not the American Coke with corn syrup.”

“Are you a freelance volunteer docenting taco person, too?”

“Sometimes.”

Karen was mystified and Sarah looked a tiny bit jealous.

“Then, we’re all set. Can you start next week? Or at least bring lunch to my office?”

“Both.”

I was a tad giddy when I returned home to share my triumph. Even the sight of Shelly Sleazy on TV reporting on the effects of caffeine on the male libido couldn’t dim my spirits. Though the pay was small and the commitment was only a few months, it felt like a really important step in my life. Tina and Candy, my daily dose of good spirits, dropped by to confirm what I was feeling: I would make it out of the darkness.

Aiden’s first reaction to my new job as Dr. Patrick O’Neill’s assistant was, “Cool, you’re going to work for Indiana Jones!” Maybe this would help bring Aiden back into the world a little, too. I hadn’t even considered that as a by-product. Score one for Mom.

Candy wanted to know if he was single. I told her he wore no ring and she told me that meant nothing.

“He digs all day in the dirt,” she pointed out. “Surgeons don’t wear rings either.”

It seemed futile to try to explain to Candy that he wasn’t going to be doing any actual digging at the Huntington. She enjoyed using wild exaggerations to make her point. And seeing as how I did not really want to elaborate on my personal life with my new boss, I was hardly going to quiz him on his personal life.

“Candy, my plan is to work for the guy, not marry him,” I reminded her.

“But I might want to marry him!” she reminded me. “Get the scoop.”

Tina wanted to know if he was honorable. “You’re going to be alone with him all day. What do you know about him?”

So like a good research assistant, I did my research. What did suspicious minds do before Google? Dr. Patrick O’Neill had more than twenty pages of mentions on Google, so many I stopped clicking through. A Google search on me turned up two pages, most of the entries reading, “Merritt Fairchild and his wife, Helen.” I hoped Nubby Sweater didn’t Google me.

There were articles by, books by, filmed lectures by Dr. Patrick O’Neill, Ph.D. He even had a Wikipedia page, which really impressed me. That meant he had some pretty devoted students to create the entry or that he paid somebody to write the entry, a common practice here in the land of Hollywood. Candy and Tina stood over my shoulder and we read:

Current Position: Dr. Patrick O’Neill holds the Walter F. Beady Chair in Classical Archaeology at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. He is also the Executive Vice Chairman of the Ancient City of Troy Foundation and Director of Excavations of the Troy site in Hissarlik, Turkey. Currently, he is on sabbatical in Pasadena, California, as the Mortimer Levitt Distinguished Scholar at the Huntington Library.

Current Research: Dr. O’Neill is one of more than 350 scholars, scientists and technicians from nearly two dozen countries collaborating on the excavations at the site in northwestern Turkey. The Troy site began as an early Bronze Age citadel in the third millennium BC and ended as a Byzantine settlement before being abandoned in AD 1350. Dr. O’Neill’s research focuses on excavating, mapping and time-lining the entire site. His research has lent credibility to the Homeric texts as historical sources. Dr. O’Neill is also recognized for his work as a biographer of Heinrich Schliemann, the German archaeologist who originally excavated Troy and is considered the father of modern archaeology.

Background: Dr. Patrick O’Neill is an American, but he grew up all over the world. His father, Thomas O’Neill, was an expatriate executive with Questum Pharmaceuticals, and the family lived in Sao Paolo, Brazil; Athens, Greece; and Geneva, Switzerland. Dr. O’Neill graduated from the International School of Geneva and Amherst College with a B.A. in Ancient History. He received his Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from Princeton University. His interest in Troy and the Homeric Interpretation was kindled as a child at the International School in Athens and the family’s frequent trips to Mycenae and other Bronze Age sites. His work at Troy has helped to rekindle the enthusiasm for the site among scholars, foundations and interested amateurs.

Works:

The Big Three: Homer, Schliemann and Troy
(2005)

History without the Histrionics: Fact, Myth and Interpretation
(2001)

Why Homer Matters
(BBC documentary)

Articles:

see links at
www.ancienttroy.org

“Where’s the personal stuff?” Candy asked.

“Where’s the photo?” Tina added.

“Where’s the wine?” I wanted to know. This guy was the real deal, everything I wanted to be and then some.

I was not just intimidated, I was terrified.

CHAPTER 7

I have found that four in the morning is the best time to worry. It’s that perfect hour wedged right in between getting a good night’s sleep and being fully awake. Four in the morning was not so early that I stressed about getting back to sleep, but it was way too early to actually rise and make coffee. So instead, if I woke up at four, I’d lie in bed and let my mind work through my Worry List.

I'd run through all the worries I had lined up for the day. I’d pick my top three and either figure out a solution or decide to continue to stress until I was convinced by a friend that I had nothing to worry about. As in, “Oh, Helen, you know that someone will step up and sponsor the t-shirts for the school fair. They always do!” Then poof, that worry would disappear because, yes, someone did step up to do the underwriting.

Before Merritt’s death, a typical early February Worry List consisted of items like the booking of a hair appointment, the probability of a terrorist attack at LAX, the likelihood of sex on the weekend with Merritt, and the location of that little card from the dentist about my next cleaning.

After I’d formulated the Worry List, then I could attack it with some action plan, right after that third cup of coffee and drop-off. Nothing I could do about the terrorist attack or that long-lost card from the dentist, so those items dropped to the bottom of my action plan. But there were worries I could jump on. I’d make that hair appointment! I’d book a bikini wax because Candy had made me see the errors of my razor ways, or at least shamed me into more maintenance in that area. I was on top of things!—or so I thought.

Back then, I really had
nothing
to worry about.

I’d always suspected that my life was pretty stress-free, but now I knew for sure that I had a good thing going. I used to actually worry about whether I was happy, whether I was making Merritt happy, whether Aiden was completely fulfilled. What a luxury to worry about happiness.

In recent days, my Worry List was filled with real worries about selling my house and getting enough money out of it to cover my debts and buy a crappy condo. I worried about getting myself more life insurance because, God forbid, what if something happened to me? I worried about the trees on the property being overgrown and crashing into the garage after a giant rainstorm, even though we’d just had them trimmed a year ago. I worried Aiden would start sniffing glue as a way to mask his anger, because I’d seen some terrifying statistic on teenage boys and glue-sniffing on
Good Morning America
. I worried that I would never have sex again with another real human being. I worried I would die alone.

At least these were honest-to-goodness worries.

Now I had a whole new frontier of worries to add to the Worry List: the workplace. My eight-hour orientation (Paid! Bringing home the bacon!!) prior to my first official day on the job consisted of a few hours at Human Resources, and then a grueling training session with Karen from Library. At HR, I had to fill out all sorts of paperwork, most of which seemed unnecessary for a temporary, 30-hour-a-week job. But Min Cho, the HR person, just kept repeating, “good to get in the system,” and I agreed. It had been so long since I’d been in a system of any kind, just draping my Huntington employee ID around my neck gave me a sense of accomplishment.

Then I entered the vortex of Karen from Library, bedecked in her red blazer. Karen took her work very seriously. I supposed if part of my job was to insure the health and safety of an original draft of the Gettysburg Address for future generations, I’d be a hard-ass, too. As a lowly volunteer, I’d never seen this side of Karen; now as a research assistant, I was under the scrutiny of a Master Librarian. My new greatest worry was about keeping my hands clean at all times so as not to “soil or stain the pages” with my, gasp, “personal body oils.”

I would be working with notebooks that were roughly 140 years old. Karen debriefed me as if I were about to embark on a secret mission and she could only reveal a few details at a time or else my very existence would be compromised.

“Here’s what I can tell you at this time. There are fifteen notebooks, numbered Roman numeral-style, that have been gifted to our collection. The notebooks belonged to the nephew of noted archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. The nephew was Rudolph Schliemann. The notebooks were discovered over a year ago in the attic of one of the houses owned by the California Institute of Technology. At one point, the two elder Schliemann brothers came to California from Germany to make their money during the Gold Rush. Heinrich’s brother died, and his widow relocated to Pasadena with their son, Rudolph. Dr. Rudy Schliemann became one of the first professors of engineering at Caltech, but the diaries predate his work at the University. He was on the original excavation crew at Troy. The notebooks detail the original site prior to and during the excavation. That is all I can say.”

I half-expected Karen from Library in her red blazer to self-destruct after the debriefing. But instead, she smiled her crazy smile and handed me a pair of soft white gloves. “Never, ever touch these notebooks without these gloves. Any violation may result in termination.”

Termination, as in death? Or as in being fired? This new Karen was capable of both.

Karen then took me through the “document scanning protocol,” or “DSP,” as Karen referred to the process by which I would photograph the individual pages of the notebooks, scan them into the computer and create a working file for Dr. O’Neill, as Karen kept referring to my future boss. She explained in great detail the daily check-in and check-out process. Then came an excruciating examination of the inner workings of the camera, the book-stand and the computer. She even broke down the fiber content of the gloves vs. the fiber content of the paper in the notebooks. It felt like slow motion watching Karen. Didn’t she realize that I’d constructed my own document scanning protocol when helping Aiden with his history projects? I can scan in my sleep, I wanted to scream. Finally, she allowed me to practice the technique on comic books, then on one of the real notebooks, hovering over me.

At several hours of tedium, Karen suggested we break because of the “intense pace of the training.” A brisk walk and one of Annie’s espressos shook me from my stupor.

At the end of the day, Karen declared that I was approved for Level One DSP, the lowest level of scanning.

“I don’t want see you touching the Gutenberg Bible,” Karen actually joked.

I almost self-destructed.

Now at four in the morning, unable to sleep or relax, I amassed my Worry List for Day One of my employment:

Don’t forget white gloves or risk termination
.

What do I call Patrick O’Neill? Dr. O’Neill? Professor O’Neill? Patrick? Pat? Dr. Dig? Hey there?

Should I tell him about my failed master's? Or just pretend that I am an archaeology enthusiast with no formal training so I won’t have to reveal my shameful academic past?

Do I mention that my husband just died? Should I tell him about Aiden? Of course I should tell him about Aiden, but should I mention my age?

Should I ask him about his family? Is that legal? Aren’t there laws in the workplace now about questions like that?

What do people in offices do for lunch? Always together? Always alone?

Can I possibly work for a man as attractive as Patrick O’Neill?

I constructed my action items. I would call him Dr. O’Neill, as that seemed to be the standard at a formal place like the Huntington. No reason Dr. O’Neill had to know about my master's or any other part of my life, like that fact that I used to have money and now I did not. I would mention Merritt’s death and Aiden if asked, but I didn’t need to offer up details as small talk. I’d bring my own lunch, ask only about his work, and hope that I didn’t fall for this guy.

Because he probably had a gorgeous Greek girlfriend waiting for him in Athens.

There, I had a plan. I just needed to stick to it.

Top-notch Distinguished Scholars earned top-notch office space at the Huntington. I knew that Dr. Patrick O’Neill ranked high in the super-competitive academic world when I saw that he'd scored Scholars’ Cottage #7, one of a dozen small, tile-roofed bungalows scattered about the grounds at the Huntington. Middle-of-the-pack academics worked in carrels in the Library itself. Dr. O’Neill rated private quarters, outfitted with a temperature-controlled office suitable for valuable papers, all the Level One scanning equipment I would need, the best computers and high-speed Internet access and some lovely antique furniture, a gift from one of the Huntington’s benefactors. There were vintage photos on the walls, a fleece throw on the couch and fresh flowers on the coffee table. Cottage #7 even had a patio where, presumably, Dr. O’Neill and I would take tea and confer like colleagues.

It was an oddly unprofessional place to work. More like a really nice hotel suite at the Ojai Valley Inn and Spa (where Merritt and I had spent our tenth anniversary) than an office. I was tempted to call room service. The couch made me uncomfortable.

On day one, I was early, of course, arriving just after 8 for my official 9-to-3 work day. Karen had ordered, “Wait for instructions from Dr. O’Neill before initiating the DSP.” Those were her exact words. She didn’t even have to use the phrase “risk termination.” I took the opportunity to scan the premises for any of my boss’s personal effects: family photos, knickknacks that could have been made by a child, random faxes left on the fax machine that held valuable private information. But there was nothing, not even a Post-It. Dang.

So I did what I knew how to do: made coffee, cleaned the fridge, re-arranged the flowers, swept the porch, tidied up a bit and waited for Nubby Sweater to arrive.

Stop being the wife,
I had to remind myself.
You are a research assistant now. You have important work to do. You will be scanning and organizing information that could redefine one of the most important ancient sites in history. Secrets revealed! Insight gleaned! You could ignite the archaeology world and get back some of the dignity you lost when you dropped out of Berkeley. You are a scholar, not a wife. Get on that computer!

I was online checking the schedule for Aiden’s weekend water polo tournament in Mission Viejo when Dr. O’Neill strolled into our cottage around 10. He was wearing another fantastic sweater and a deep blue cashmere scarf that I really shouldn’t have noticed. The messenger bag was over his shoulder, and a laptop was under his arm. His hands were rough and tan from years in the sun and dirt. Despite his shiny appearance, I could picture him at Troy, walking slowly behind a bulldozer, covered in dust and sweat, dying to get at the newly unearthed layer of information. Like the archaeologists I’d worked with in the past, he did not seem entirely at home in these posh surroundings. He cocked his head at me as he tossed his bag on the couch.

“Hard at work already, I see.”

Aiden had taught me his trick of switching web pages quickly when busted by a teacher during study hall, so I brought up the Huntington home page to hide my real activities. I don’t think I fooled the great archaeologist.

“Just getting oriented,” I offered up, hoping to sound as if I had previous experience in this position and knew the ropes. “Do you want some coffee? And I brought some scones from a terrific local bakery down the street. Cranberry Orange. May I get you one?”

Oh, for God’s sake, I sounded like a hostess in the first-class passenger lounge. Where was my snappy hat? Shut the hell up, Helen!

“Wow, usually my research assistants are too hungover from a late night of dancing and drinking to bring baked goods.”

“Well, you know, I’m a single mother. My drinking and dancing days are over. I am up early, now that everything is my responsibility. The bills, selling my house, raising my son. I just think that nothing beats fresh coffee and a good breakfast. That’s what I tell my 13-year-old. I mean, minus the coffee. Though sometimes, I do make him a little café au lait in the morning, especially since his father just died. I’m trying to create that moment of connection for the two of us, so he doesn’t sniff glue and drop out of school.”

That really could not have gone worse. I think the only thing I declined to mention about my life was my failed attempt at grad school. That would probably come out by lunch.

“So, scone, Dr. O’Neill?”

“If you feel that strongly about scones, sure, I’ll have one. And you can call me Patrick when it’s just the two of us. No need to be formal here.”

“I apologize. I’m nervous. I haven’t done this in a while.” I replied, handing him a cup of coffee and plate with scone, jam, butter and a cloth napkin. “Worked, I mean. Not… served scones.”

“Understood.” Dr. Patrick O’Neill did appear to understand, judging by the sympathetic smile on his face. “Let me get settled in and then we can go over your responsibilities. And what I’m looking for.”

“Roger. Check. Okay.”

So much for my action plan.