The Assistants (16 page)

This effectively made it impossible for Kevin to rest his puppy eyes on mine. I couldn't deal with puppy anything right now. My intestines ached and I felt like crying. All I really wanted was to go home and be by myself.

But Kevin persisted. “Tina, I can't help you if you don't let me into what you're feeling right now.”

Jesus.

“I don't know what I'm feeling,” I said as honestly as I could. “Robert didn't fire me exactly. It's more like he gave me a nudge out of the nest.”

“I don't know what that means,” Kevin said. “Was it your decision to leave?”

“Ultimately, yes,” I lied. “I got a generous severance package, and now I can focus all my attention on the site.”

“But the way you were escorted out, he made it look like you were some sort of criminal—”

I nearly spilled my second beer at the word. “That's what they
do when people who are close to Robert leave the company,” I said, which sounded plausible even to me. “It wouldn't have been such a big deal if a crowd hadn't formed to see me out.”

“So you quit.” Kevin's puppy brows were crinkled in that way that suggested he didn't fully believe me. “But everyone's saying you were fired.”

“I didn't want to be an assistant anymore,” I said. “Is that so hard for you to understand?”

Kevin drew back like I'd spit in his face. I hadn't spit, I don't think. I was pretty sure it was his sensitivity that made him draw back like that. It was a constant struggle for me to keep my Bronx in check and not steamroll over Kevin's gentleness at any given moment.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean to snap at you. The truth is, I'm feeling a lot of different things right now. This is a big change for me, and I'm not great with change.”

I impressed even myself with this one.

Our food came, finally, and Kevin, recalibrated to his former balance, held a perfect forkful of his entrée up to my mouth. “Do you want to try this? I think it might be trout. Possibly in truffle oil?”

“I hate truffle oil,” I said.

“Yeah, fuck truffle oil.” He threw his fork down onto his plate, smiling wide.

He was trying so hard to be a good sport.

But I was barely keeping it together.

There were suddenly so many variables, everything that felt like a given only yesterday now had to be called into question. Even my relationship with Kevin. If Robert had caught on to anything,
or if my being fired wasn't the end of this, or if I was going to Thelma and Louise it with Emily before the week was through, I should maybe, like, give Kevin a clue that things weren't kosher. That everything wasn't coming up roses. Or whatever other idiomatic cliché existed as shorthand for saying things had in fact become totally fucked. What would such a clue be? I didn't know, but blatant avoidance of meaningful conversation and random tantrum throwing appeared to be my current course of action till I came up with something better.

When dessert came, the flourless chocolate cake we ordered had walnuts hidden inside it. I wasn't allergic—but, come on, walnuts?

“The flourless chocolate cake is a classic,” I shouted, loud enough for the entire airship to hear. “Why do this?”

Maybe our waiter had mentioned the walnuts during our chat and we'd missed it, but still.

Kevin called for the check.

We didn't talk the entire walk back to my apartment, which was only about twelve minutes, yet a lot of time for silence. And when we reached my front door, I didn't invite him inside. Instead I just stood there like a moron.

“Listen, Kevin,” I started to say—fully prepared to let him off the hook and break up with him right there—before he leaned in and kissed me.

I drifted backward, momentarily dazed. In spite of my hysteria, of behaving suspiciously and dodgily all night, of refusing to eat my dessert on principle—he still wanted to kiss me good night.

“Don't worry,” he said. “Everything's going to be okay.” And he kissed me again.

The sensation of his lips on mine made the taut muscles of my jaw relax. My shoulders settled and the knot in my gut loosened just so. But I knew I had to go inside alone.

You're likely to be wearing an orange jumpsuit by next week
, Emily had said. What if she turned out to be right? And what if starting over in Mexico with a new identity, subsisting on empanadas or whatever, was better than finding out?

“Thank you for dinner.” I closed the door in Kevin's sweet face, and it felt like I was closing the door on my entire life.

If you love someone set them free
, I told myself.
Before they're brought in on accessory charges.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, I didn't have a job to go to. When was the last time I was just hanging around my apartment alone on a Tuesday morning? Couldn't tell you. I might have immediately lapsed into boredom, ambling around, opening the fridge, closing it, opening it again—had the future of my entire adult life not been pushed to the edge of a cliff the day before. So I made coffee and checked the website.

Overnight, Wendi had apparently gone into full-on fixer mode (à la Olivia Pope from
Scandal
). Wendi was a gladiator when it came to manipulating the Internet. She'd somehow managed to turn a clear negative (me, fired) into a positive (me, class hero). Wendi posted photos of me being hauled out of the Titan building onto the “
News”
section of our website, beneath buzz-worthy headlines like:
Tina Fontana Quits Titan Corp., Escorted Out
. And:
Fontana to Barlow: I Quit!
The subtext here, if you hadn't caught it, was that I left my job of my own accord.

Thankfully, no one had yet struck upon the terms
embezzlement
,
forgery
, or
grand larceny
.

For now, Wendi's posts and the resulting online chatter only gained traction for the site. Our donations spiked. Such is the justice of the digital age.

Robert understood this sort of justice better than anyone—he'd been its master for years, using his vast media empire to control the layman's chatter. How many times had I sat in the conference room, taking the editorial-meeting minutes, and jotted down a variation on the same statement:
We don't have to win this argument. We only have to muddy this argument enough so they don't win
. Robert may as well have had those words tattooed across his bare chest (which, to be clear, I had never seen). So it was surprising—and perhaps fitting?—that this was exactly what we accomplished in the hours following my firing. Wendi stirred up enough mud to make a clear winner impossible to decipher.

Only yesterday Emily had wanted to run away, and I was on the brink of setting Kevin free into the wilderness, the way John Lithgow and the Henderson family had to do back in the eighties with their beloved bigfoot, Harry. But as far as I was concerned, that plan was officially off the table. How could I run away from this? Google
Tina Fontana
now, and it was me who came up first, not those other Italians and Spaniards of lesser notoriety who shared my name. Such success came with responsibility, didn't it? I couldn't just bolt.

Besides, in the light of a new morning, with a fresh pot of
coffee in front of me, I reevaluated my situation more favorably. If Robert had actually figured anything out, wouldn't he have pressed charges immediately? He could have had me airlifted straight to Guantánamo if he wanted to. So maybe he really was just kicking me out of the nest. Because deep down he loved me like a daughter (maybe even more than he loved his one daughter who wrecked his Mercedes that one time). And maybe it finally occurred to him, like it had only recently occurred to me—and to these total strangers on the Internet—that I was capable of doing more with my life than just filing papers, keeping a calendar, and mixing drinks.

So I brought my coffee and my laptop into bed with me, to more comfortably explore all the new features Wendi had added to the site—and there were many. She'd created tabs where people could submit short essays, so they could tell us how they would pay it forward if we paid off their debt. And she'd added a place for users who'd just had their debt paid off to tell us how their lives had already changed for the better.

She'd added a few banners, too. One read:
Did paying off your student-loan debt free you up to get married? Buy your first home? Start a family? We want to see photos!

There were links to my speech from the launch party. And, of course, user comments:
The problem is that nobody talks about what they make. It's shame disguised as humility. Screw that. I'm a thirty-two-year-old assistant and I make $30,000 a year.

I clicked around some more and discovered a place where users could upload videos.

Great
, I thought. This was all we needed. DIY porno and homemade cat movies. But when I began scrolling through the thumbnails, I quickly got sucked in. First I chose a video posted by Lisa in
Detroit (former debt: $78 K). Then one from Su-Yung in Philadelphia (former debt: $103 K). Then one from Joanna in New Orleans (former debt: $91 K). All the women looked to be somewhere around my age.
Thank you
, each of them said.
This changes everything for me.

I let my head fall back onto my pillow and allowed my eyes to go soft on the ceiling rain bubble. Robert had tie clips that cost as much as those debts. One man's private-jet ride to Key West was another woman's second chance at life. I know, this isn't news to anyone—and it sure as hell wasn't news to me.

What can you do?

Gratitude is so much more dignified than ungratefulness, than speaking out about a subject as frowned-upon as an “unlevel playing field,” so these women simply said thank you. They promised to pay it forward. They went back to their jobs as office assistants and teachers and X-ray technicians and worked extra hard. I got it. That's just the way it was. But if one wasn't careful, it was enough to turn a girl like me into a girl like Wendi Chan, at least in the privacy of her own collapsing, overpriced bedroom.

That's where I was, and what I was thinking, when I received Kevin's text.

—

K
EVIN ASKED ME
to come over, to meet him at his apartment after he got home from work, which should have been my first clue that something was amiss. In spite of what New Yorky television shows have misled non–New Yorkers to believe, city dwellers, especially those who reside in different boroughs, never just say
come over
. In truth, we usually don't meet face-to-face without
scheduling a week ahead of time and confirming the day of. Our LA counterparts who come to visit and want to hang out may be frustrated by this, but they just have to learn to deal. We're busy here. Also, when we do meet, it will probably be at a bar, coffee shop, or restaurant located halfway between our starting points, because unless you're very rich or lucky enough to have a dead grandmother who left you her rent-controlled mansion, you live in a cramped one-bedroom.

Yet I refused to question Kevin's ominous text requesting that I take the forty-five-minute subway ride from my apartment in Williamsburg to his on the Upper East Side. Nope, nothing weird about that at all.

Like attracts like, I told myself on the way there, which was obviously something I'd read in
The Oprah Magazine
. It was a New Agey way of saying:
Think positive, dear one, because if you think bad thoughts, really fucking awful things will happen to you and it'll be your own goddamn fault
. But in spite of this positive self-talk, my heart began to race while I rode the train to Kevin's apartment and then waited on his doorstep to be buzzed in. The blue-black night sky took on an eerie prescient glow, the way the light changes in a movie flashback, or when you've had too much Red Bull and vodka.

Kevin opened his apartment door and I went right for him, wrapping my arms around his torso, burying my face into his neck. “I missed you today,” I said.

He held himself rigid, then carefully detached me and took a step back. He was wearing a Hanes T-shirt and loose jeans. I wasn't used to seeing him dressed so casually, and the first thought to run
through my mind was,
This is what he'd look like around the house all the time if we got married
. Clearly I was not feeling like myself.

“Can we sit down for a minute?” Kevin said. “I want to talk to you.”

I followed him across his minuscule apartment, to the couch, with an impending doom coagulating in my gut.

“I had a meeting today,” he said. “With Glen Wiles.”

I stared down at the area rug, which was still vaguely discolored with chocolate and strawberry stains.

“Tina, can you look at me?”

I did, though it took effort, and I noticed then that Kevin's wholesome eyes were tinged with red. His mop of dark hair looked Beethoven wild, as though he'd been tugging on it nervously.

“There were some very important people at this meeting, Tina. Lawyers, and they were talking about your website. Specifically, how it's funded.”

It's interesting, how long I'd dreaded exactly this, the hours of night sweats I'd devoted to foreseeing my reaction, the first-thing-in-the-morning anxiety attacks I'd offered up to foretelling my response—but now that it had actually happened, now that the words had been spoken, all I could do was not hear them. I wasn't pretending. I literally did not hear the words because how could I, when I wasn't even there in that room? When I wasn't even present in mind or body within the suffocating confines of that coffin-size apartment?

“Why is the Titan legal department looking into the funding of your website?” Kevin asked.

I swallowed hard, willing myself to pass out or succumb to an
attack of angina, anything that would keep me from having to give him an explanation. I returned my attention to the area rug, wishing to collapse onto its hand-tufted surface, to roll myself up into a New Zealand–wool burrito.

“Tina.”

The funny thing was, technically all of the official website's funding was legitimate. But if they started digging, they would probably uncover how Emily and I got it started.

“What exactly were the lawyers saying?” I asked.

“So it's true,” Kevin said.

“What is?”

“Tina, is there a part of this nonprofit thing that you're not telling me? I'm giving you a chance here, to come clean. To trust me. With the truth.”

“The truth,” I said, “is . . . complicated.”

“I don't believe this.” Kevin brought his fingers up to his temples. “Why did Robert really fire you, Tina?”

“I don't know. I swear.”

He ran his hands through his maniac hair. “I hope you realize that I'm associated with you now.”

“You're
associated
with me?”

“I'm just saying I'm part of this whole thing, so if there's something illegal going on, I need to know about it.”

I had no idea what to tell him, or what to leave out. I felt like I needed a lawyer present, but he was the only lawyer I knew.

“Tina, do you understand I don't want to be—”

“Disbarred,” I said.

Kevin closed his eyes and his head dropped. “Heartbroken. I don't want to be heartbroken, but maybe it's already too late.” He
stood up and went to the window to look out, at anything. “You should have told me.”

“Told you what?”

“You haven't actually denied anything, do you realize that? You haven't said, I have no idea what you're talking about, Kevin, nothing illegal's going on, I never stole any money from the Titan Corporation.”

“Kevin.” I joined him at the window. “Nothing illegal's going on.” Beat. “Anymore.”

“I don't believe this.” He stormed to the other side of his tiny living room. “I don't believe this!”

“Please, don't freak out on me.” I followed after him. “I'm sorry I didn't tell you, but I was only trying to protect you.”

“No. No, you don't get to rationalize any part of this. I put up with a lot, but you stole money from Robert Barlow?”

“It wasn't stealing exactly.”

“And Emily, too?”

“It's kind of all her fault.”

“Oh my god. What were you two thinking?”

“Kevin, listen to me . . .” My mind raced in such a way that I experienced every trauma to come in sped-up form: the getting kicked to the curb, the being left there to die, alone, forever and ever.

But I had nothing to say for myself. I had no valid excuses. What we did was wrong, it was so wrong! So I did the only thing I could do. I grabbed Kevin by the collar and shoved my tongue into his mouth.

He hurled me off him like I was a ravenous zombie. “You're insane,” he said. “And I think you need to go.”

“You can't kick me out,” I cried. “I love you!”

“Now? Now you decide to say that?”

I grabbed at him again. “But it's true. It isn't any less true just because I waited till now to tell you. Please, Kevin.”

He steered me toward the door.

“Please don't,” I said. “I need you.”

“Tina, it's over.” He opened the door and shuffled me out. “I'm done.”