The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs (37 page)

“Good. Because I’d like to write an op-ed refuting certain aspects of Nouriel Roubini’s latest report, and I need you to do a little digging on the dollar carry trade. I’d like you to send me a summary and an outline for the op-ed by the end of the day. Oh, and I’m supposed to give a speech on risk management at a conference in New York next week. I’ll send you an outline for my PowerPoint presentation. Could you pull that together?”

“Sure.”

“Excellent.”

He whirls around and heads back into his office, humming “La donna è mobile” at full volume. Ah, yes. Another glorious day at the office.

After eight painful hours of reading through currency reports, I head back to my apartment, and as I round the corner I run into Blake, who is virtually skipping down Church Street.

“Hey!” he says, meeting me in front of his wrought iron steps. “Exciting news! They haven’t finished counting the votes, but going by the early results, it looks like I’m going to win.”

There was only one person running against Blake, and from what I read on a few local blogs, his opponent was a seventy-five-year-old, borderline senile Libertarian. The contest wasn’t exactly heated. Still, his enthusiasm is endearing. “Wow, Blake—congrats. That’s great.”

“Thanks.” He smiles and gently nudges my shoulder. “I couldn’t have done it without your vote.”

Truthfully, voting for Blake was probably one of the more insane things I’ve ever done. By voting for him, I endorsed a candidate who would, given the authority and power, shut down The Dupont Circle Supper Club without compunction. But
not
voting for him would have endorsed the idea that holding secret supper clubs in his house without his knowledge was the morally upright thing to do. And not voting at all—well, that wasn’t an option. So I voted for him, and I’ll just hold our next supper club outside his jurisdiction—something I planned to do anyway, after all the time we’ve spent together lately. Besides, on Sunday Blake opened my eyes to the possibilities before me—culinary school, a new career, a fulfilling existence. He gave me an entirely new outlook on life. How could I not give him my vote?

“Some friends are coming by in a bit to celebrate,” he says. “You’re welcome to join.”

“I’d love to, but I have a lot of work to catch up on.” Work that involves the next installment of The Dupont Circle Supper Club—which, incidentally, will no longer take place in Dupont Circle.

He shrugs. “Well, you know where to find me if you change your mind.”

“Okay. Thanks.” We linger at the bottom of the steps, an awkward silence hanging between us. “By the way,” I say, trying to keep the conversation going, “I submitted the application to L’Academie yesterday.”

Blake brightens. “That’s awesome. Congratulations.”

“Save your congratulations until I actually get in. It’s a little late in the application process.”

“Nah,” he says. “You’re a shoo-in. Nicole told her aunt all about you. I sent an e-mail about you, too.”

“You did?”

He smiles. “Of course. Between the honeycomb ice cream and the devils on horseback, I told them it would pretty much be a federal crime not to admit you.”

“A federal crime? Wow, breaking out the big guns.”

“Well, now that I’m part of the Dupont Circle Neighborhood Commission …” He smirks as he offers a mock self-important shrug.

“I can already feel the power from where I’m standing,” I say.

The skin around his eyes wrinkles as he laughs at my lame joke, and for a minute we just stand there like that, smiling at each other. Then he glances down at his watch. “I’d better get inside and start setting up. But come up anytime, if you want. And remember—I’m looking out for you. No more of these underground supper clubs to ruin your shot at making it.”

My cheeks flush. “I’m sure you have bigger fish to fry.”

“Hey—who’s the one making fish jokes now?” He laughs. “I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”

“Sure. And congrats again on the election.”

Blake clasps his hands together and shakes them on either side of his head, as if he were just elected president of the United States, and as I watch the smile bloom on his face, I start to think everything would be a lot easier if I’d never started The Dupont Circle Supper Club in the first place.

The week drags on, each day filled with more inane and incomprehensible requests from Mark, and by Friday my week has reached a new level of shitastic. When I arrive at my desk Friday morning, I find a cardboard box bearing the Amazon.com logo sitting to the right of my keyboard. A package for Mark? No. The label on the box is addressed to me. Did I order something from Amazon? I don’t think so. And even if I did, I wouldn’t have it delivered to the office.

I rip open the box and dump out a collection of goodies: the latest edition of Kaplan’s
Get into Graduate School: A Strategic Approach for Master’s and Doctoral Candidates
, some sort of self-help book titled
Getting Organized from the Inside Out
, and a detailed Excel spreadsheet outlining acceptable economics PhD programs with coordinating application deadlines, Web site addresses, and GRE codes. I rifle through the box and find a small gift note:

Chance favors the prepared mind! Thought these might help with your grad school applications. Please note that Harvard’s deadline is
DECEMBER 1
.

Love,

Mom and Dad

p.s. Good luck with your work on Mark’s book!

Thought number 1: Shoot me.

Thought number 2: How did they know I was working on a book for Mark? I haven’t told them.

I am beyond annoyed, but before I can give the subject any further consideration, my phone rings.

“Mark Henderson’s office.”

“Is this Hannah?” asks a woman’s voice on the other end.

“Yes …”

“This is Daphne Curtis. In Human Resources? I was wondering if I could speak with you.”

“Okay …”

“Is now a convenient time?” she asks.

“Sure.”

“Fantastic. Do you know where my office is?”

“Your office? Can’t we do this on the phone?”

Daphne hesitates. “No, I’d rather talk in person. If that’s okay with you.”

She reminds me where her office is and tells me to swing by in the next fifteen minutes, at which point we will discuss … I have no idea what. All I know is that when Human Resources gets involved, it’s serious: hiring, firing, pay cuts, and benefits.

Ideally I will be told the economic downturn has hit the NIRD coffers hard, and they cannot afford my services any longer, so they’re letting me go and offering me an enormous severance package, which I will then use to pay for culinary school or launch my own catering company. Of course the likelihood of this happening is infinitesimal, but a girl can dream.

I take the elevator to the tenth floor and slink down the hallway to Daphne’s office. She sits at her desk, stuffed into a leather swivel chair that, set against her plump figure, looks as if it were made for a child.

“Ah, Hannah, come in,” she says when she sees me in the doorway. “Please, sit down.”

I pull up a chair directly across from her. “What’s up?”

She removes her wire-frame glasses and runs her fingers through her feathered, honey-colored hair. “I’d like to talk to you about your relationship with Mark Henderson.”

“Okay …”

“It was brought to my attention that he has, perhaps, made some inappropriate and potentially threatening advances, some of which may have been sexual in nature.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

What, what,
what
?

“Another member of our staff voiced some concern over events that occurred a month ago, though it is unclear if there have been other incidents as well.”

“A month ago?”

She looks down at her desk calendar. “Five weeks, to be exact.”

Jesus Christ, what is this woman talking about? My mind races. Five weeks ago. What happened five weeks ago? I barely remember what happened yesterday. Five weeks, five weeks. That was around the time of the CNBC interview, right? And the meeting in Mark’s office, where he offered to let me help on his book?

And that’s when it hits me. Mark’s office. The tipped chair. My legs in the air. My crotch.
Susan
.

“Oh, Daphne—no, no, no. This is all a big misunderstanding. Nothing happened. Honestly.”

Daphne leans forward and places her elbows on her desk with her hands clasped together. “Hannah, I want you to know this is a safe space. Anything you say in here is between you and me.”

Yeah: you, me, and the board of trustees.

“Listen,” I say, “I can provide absolute assurance that nothing has happened between me and Mark. He was trying to help me after I fell over in one of his chairs. The leg was propped up on some of his clothes.”

“But see that’s what’s so curious: what were Mark’s
clothes
doing on the floor?”

Is this woman on glue? She clearly does not know me at all. If Mark so much as laid a finger on me, I’d scream so loud the whole office would know about it. Is she suggesting I am complicit in this? For Christ’s sake, the man is totally insane and looks like a Muppet.

“Daphne,” I say. “Look at me. The chair tipped over. That’s it. End of story.”

“I still need a statement from you, and I will need to take one from Mark as well.”

“A statement?”

“Yes,” she says. “We will need to keep this on file in case another staff member reports an incident in the future.”

“But nothing happened.”

“Yes, well, this is protocol. If you don’t mind?” She pushes a form across the desk. “Make sure you sign at the bottom.”

I grab the pen from her pudgy fingers and write a two-sentence statement explaining what happened. Then, on the dotted line, in a firecracker move that would surely make Adam cringe, I scrawl my signature in grand, swooping cursive: “Bull Shit.”

After lunch, Mark stampedes down the hall, dragging his wheely briefcase with one hand and clutching a manila folder with the other.

“Hannah, I just had lunch with someone at the IMF, and I am
very
worried about the situation with Greece,” he says. “I’d like to write an op-ed for the
Post
or the
Times
. I need you to summarize this report by the end of the day.” He drops the folder on my desk.

“Okay … sure …”

He cocks his head as he skims the titles of the books on my desk. “I also want to chat about your progress with my book,” he says. “Give me a few minutes to settle in, and then let’s talk.”

Yesterday, I e-mailed Mark a twenty-page outline—per his request—on the origins of the Federal Reserve, with annotations and room for expansion. I don’t normally brag about my work, but I must say, I did an excellent job.

Mark calls me into his office, and I pull up a chair behind his desk, dragging it through the detritus on his floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot the remnants of a cheese sandwich sitting atop a pile of economics journals. I’m pretty sure I saw the same sandwich sitting there last week.

“So,” Mark says, “how are you coming along with the outline?”

“Did you see my e-mail?”

“No. What e-mail?”

“The one I sent you yesterday. With the outline attached to it.”
Like you asked me to, you moron
.

Mark presses his glasses up the bridge of his nose and scrolls through his in-box. “Let’s see … Ah, yes. Book outline … from Hannah Sugarman …”

He opens the attachment and, as if deciphering ancient hieroglyphics, squints as he skims through the outline.

“I’m sorry, what is this?” he asks.

“The outline you asked for. On the creation of the Fed?”

“But this is a banal compilation of facts. Where’s the insight? Where’s the analysis?”

“It’s … an outline. I figured I would add the analysis later.”

This is only partially true. I thought I did a fairly good job at putting the history of the Fed into context. Though who knows. Mark’s demands and desires are like the wind: erratic and imprecise, changing every few hours. My outline may be exactly what he wanted yesterday, but today he fancies something else entirely.

“Let’s hope so,” Mark says. “If people want a generic history of the Federal Reserve, they can go on Wikiphilia and get it there.”

“Wikipedia,” I say.

“What?”

“The site is called Wikipedia.”

Mark frowns. “That’s what I said. Wikipedia.” He pulls at one of his untamed eyebrows. “Anyway, try to send me something a little more substantive by the end of next week. Take a look at that book your parents bought you. It might help with organizing and streamlining the process.”

“Good idea,” I say. I start to stand up, but I pause. “How did you know that book was from my parents?”

“Because I recommended they buy it for you.”

I sit back down in the chair, my shock over the fact that Mark has ever so much as glanced at a book about organization supplanted by the unwelcome news that he has spoken to my parents. “When did you do that?”