The Up and Comer (2 page)

JACK: You big on summer vacations?

ME:
    
Not necessarily.

JACK: Good answer. The job starts June first, it pays a hundred fifty thousand, and if you don't pass the bar on your first try you're fired. You can give me an answer now or let me know by tomorrow morning. Any later and the guy who actually knew why manhole covers are round gets the offer.

ME:
    
I'll talk to you in the morning.

At 9:01 the next morning I called Devine and accepted the job. He welcomed me aboard and told me to prepare to be great. That was five years ago.

* * *

"Morning, Philip, how was your weekend?"

"Great," I said. "And yours?"

"It sucked."

My secretary, Gwen. Candid to a fault.

I had once been at this law school wine-and-cheese party where this guy with a tan, some senior partner at a firm in Miami, was bending my ear about the dos and don'ts of the legal world. Most of it was forgettable, except for one thing. He said no matter what I did, no matter how many rules I bent or truths I stretched, never, ever hire an attractive secretary. The temptation, he said with a mouth full of Gouda, would prove too great a distraction. It seemed to be an insightful observation. Even more so when I learned that his second and third wives could each type better than eighty words a minute.

So I made sure Gwen was unattractive. Actually, her parents made sure of that. I simply made sure that she worked for me. Gwen was fat, had acne scars, and her hair was even thinning. (Okay, so I went a little overboard.) But damn if she didn't know how to cover my ass.

"The Devine One was looking for you," she said, following me into my office. "He came by twenty minutes ago. I told him you were at a deposition."

"Good save," I told her, looking down at my watch. Nine-thirty-five. Where did I think I worked, an ad agency? I started to head back out the door.

"Don't bother; he only wanted to make sure you could sit with him this afternoon at two," Gwen said.

"Any details?"

She shook her head. "No, just two o'clock in his office."

"Tell Donna to let him know I'll be there," I said.

Gwen went back to her desk and I settled into mine. The offices of Campbell & Devine were on the thirty-first floor of the Graybar building, right smack in the middle of mid-town. It was an okay area to work in, I guess, though I'd never had anywhere else to compare it to.

After sorting through a couple of files in between long stares out my window, I got up and closed my door to make the call. After two rings, Jessica picked up. We exchanged hellos. Then we got down to business.

"I can't today," she said in a super-hushed tone. As an ad sales rep for
Glamour
magazine, Jessica was subject to the virtual-office concept and the lack of privacy that went with it.

"Aw, c'mon," I said.

"No, really," she continued, her voice trying to sound more earnest, "I've got a presentation this afternoon and we've changed around some of the charts. Everything's a mess. I've got to get it in order."

"Bring the stuff," I said. "I'll help you."

She laughed. "Yeah, right."

"Seriously, I will."

"Philip, I—"

I interrupted her. We had a rule about not using our names, especially on her end. She broke it regularly.

"Sorry," Jessica whispered. It was all the leverage I needed.

"Listen, I'm busy too," I said. "I just really want to be with you today, that's all. We'll keep it to an hour, max." I could sense the tide was turning. "I'll bring lunch, chicken Caesar wraps from Piatti Pronti."

"And a diet peach Snapple?"

"And a diet peach Snapple," I repeated back. Victory. "See you around twelve-thirty. I'll be the early one."

FOUR

Jessica Levine was born, raised, and will probably die in New York City. Depending on your opinion of Woody Allen movies, that's either a blessing or a curse. Her father lost a battle with cancer when she was six, a precarious age as far as someone's memory goes. One time when we were lying in bed together she began to cry over no longer being able to recall how he smelled. She knew it was a sweet smell, not flowery or anything like that, just somehow sweet. Only suddenly she could no longer smell it. Mere weeks ago, she said, she needed only to think of him and breathe in to remember. Now nothing. Another casualty of the distance the advancing years were putting between her and her memories of the man.

Her father had been a successful financier and, as one might have expected, very well insured. So Jessica, her mother, and her younger brother, Zachary, had carried on very nicely in their duplex on Park Avenue. As Jessica would tell it, her mother suppressed her grief by joining practically every committee for the arts there was in the city. Consequently, Jessica grew up going to anything and everything that featured a curtain, velvet ropes, or raging homosexuals.

She was pretty, not turning-heads pretty, rather the kind of pretty that seemed to develop slowly before your eyes. I tried to explain that to her once by comparing her to a Polaroid snapshot. I don't know what I was thinking. Let me get this straight, Jessica said, what you're saying is that at first I'm an out-of-focus blur? Okay, not the best analogy, I assured her, switching immediately into my backpedal mode. She understood, though. She always understood.

Affairs may be first and foremost based on sex, and yes, there was barely a time that Jessica and I were alone together that we weren't proving that point. Nonetheless, there was something else going on. It was as if the two of us both lived our lives dreading the thought that one day, with death imminent, we would look back and ask ourselves with a defeated sigh,
"Was that all?"
Ours was a greedy generation to begin with, and she and I still seemed to want more than most others. We were two driven individuals for whom the idea of being selfish wasn't such a bad thing. In short, we were to each other what our spouses had turned out not to be. Kissable ambition.

Logistics. When the affair first started we had to pick a place to rendezvous at. We discussed renting a small studio, but the more we talked about it the less it seemed like a good idea. Having to sign a lease, nosy neighbors, and the prospect of one day having to hear, "Honey, what are these keys for?" were way too much to handle. No, a hotel would be the better choice, we decided. But which one? Jessica suggested the Paramount. I suggested that we'd have less chance of being discovered if we confessed on
Nightline.
The idea, I reminded her, was to not have to worry about bumping into friends and acquaintances. The hotel didn't have to be a dive, it merely had to be a little out of the way.

We settled on the Doral Court, off Lexington on Thirty-ninth Street. It was one of those places that you'd never know was there unless someone pointed it out to you. It was clean, conveniently located for both of us, and had all the pretensions of being discreet.

We never walked in together and we never left together. The way it worked was like this. One of us, usually me, would be "the early one." This meant that I would go ahead and get the room (using my corporate Am Ex, of course, with the monthly statement being mailed to me at work). Once in the room, I would call Jessica at her office and let her know the room number. Ten minutes later we'd be between the sheets.

Two, maybe three times a week this would happen. At Jessica's office she would claim that she was taking lunch. At my office, where eating at your desk was the norm, I claimed to be going off to the gym. I even carried a gym bag around with me.

To some people, I imagine, this would all seem a little paranoid. Then again, those people have probably never had an affair. The odd thing was, all the precautions had become more than two people making sure they wouldn't get caught. They had become part of the attraction. Simply put, the secrecy was a turn-on. It made the bond between us stronger. And yes, it made the sex better.

* * *

I picked up lunch for the two of us and headed over to the hotel. Checking in had become almost comical. The day shift had obviously come to recognize me, and it wasn't too long before they figured out what was going on. Naturally, they pretended not to know, and in doing so had turned somewhat robotic in their actions. They would smile and say all the pleasantries required of them, but their movement was stiff around me, and all of them avoided making unnecessary eye contact. All of them, that is, except for Raymond.

Raymond, as his name tag read, was a young black guy who stood out not because of his skin color but because he seemed actually to enjoy his job. While his co-workers all wore the faces of opportunities missed, Raymond walked around like he had grabbed the brass ring. He was tall and lanky, with a shaved head and a diamond stud in his left ear. I had little doubt that his supervisor had checked some handbook when he first started to see if male employees were in fact allowed to have an earring.

Not only did Raymond know what was going on, but he let me know that he knew. It was a look. A slight smile combined with a tilt of his head as he would hand me my room key. It wasn't as if he was trying to embarrass me. If anything, it was more like,
Hey, man, does
she
have a sister?

Raymond didn't check me in this time, though. It was Brian. He was new to the hotel and had only been working there a couple of weeks. This was the second time he had waited on me. I pictured him at the coffee machine in some backroom being clued in by another employee about me and my nooners. Did he laugh? Did he want to know more? Or did he simply nod, not really giving a shit? Perhaps Jessica and I were just one of many affairs that were going on in the hotel. Maybe there was a whole parade of indiscretions passing back and forth in front of these guys. It was a big city, after all.

"Here's your room key, Mr. Randall. Enjoy your stay."

You bet I will, Brian.

There's a weird sense of anticipation when you walk into a hotel room for the first time. Even when you basically know what it's going to look like. A bed, a bathroom, a television, a desk or table of some kind. Except now it's suddenly your bed, your bathroom, your television, your desk or table. At least for the night Or in my case, just an hour or so in the afternoon.

First things first, I headed straight for the phone and dialed. One ring.

"This is Jessica," she said.

"Room four-oh-six."

"Okay."

We both hung up and I leaned back against the headboard. I was a terrible waiter, regardless of whether or not the wait was for something good. My parents (we'll get to them) maintained that it was because I was born nearly a month premature. The pattern was set, they said — it made me a restless child who in turn grew up to be a restless adult. While that's a little too simplistic for my liking, I will concede that from the womb to my marriage, I perhaps wasn't much for the feeling of confinement.

I checked my watch. Twelve-twenty-seven. I opened my gym bag and took out my toothbrush and a tube of Colgate. Improved oral hygiene: the unintended benefit of having an affair.

I checked my watch again, this time with better breath. Twelve-thirty-two. I started to pace, something I did a lot, and when that didn't cut it, I sat back down. I grabbed the remote and turned on the television. A soap opera appeared. A very good-looking woman was telling a very good-looking man that she couldn't take it anymore. She didn't say what the "it" was that she could no longer take, but she looked really serious. Time was you couldn't pay me to watch this stuff. Way too ridiculous. Now it didn't seem so far-fetched.

Finally, a knock on the door. When I opened it, Jessica came bursting in with an angry huff.

"My boss is such an asshole!"

"What happened?" I asked her.

"She's an asshole, that's what happened. I'm the top producer in the entire group, and the bitch reshuffled my accounts around without consulting me first. I can't fucking believe her; it's like she can feel me breathing down her neck!"

"You know, if I wanted to hear complaining I've got a wife I can call," I wanted to say but didn't. "That sucks," is what actually came out of my mouth. Not that that did any good. I don't even think she heard me. I'd never been too adept at knowing when to keep talking and when to shut up around a woman, especially an angry one. I was pretty sure, though, that this was a shut-up moment. So that's what I did. I stayed quiet. Turned out I was right. After steaming for a little while longer, Jessica abruptly stopped.

"Oh, god, I'm sorry," she said with a guilty smile. "It's just that it made me so angry." She started to walk toward me. "I didn't even say hello, did I?" Before I could decide if it was still a shut-up moment, she kneeled down and unzipped my fly. Hello.

I've been intimate with two Jewish women in my lifetime, neither one of whom had any problem performing oral sex. So much for that theory.

I returned the favor to Jessica. Then, after concluding with the good old-fashioned missionary position, we broke open the sandwiches and promptly lost track of the time. Before we knew it, it was ten of two.
Shit!
I had ten minutes to get my ass back to the office and meet with Devine. In thirty minutes, Jessica had to be showing those newly arranged charts of hers to some media slugs at Young & Rubicam. We both dressed in a panic. Were there an Olympic event that involved buttoning a shirt while simultaneously doing a video checkout from a hotel room, I would've surely gotten my face on a Wheaties box.