The Decent Proposal (23 page)

She broke through the tray's remaining layer of frost with a fork, stirring the gloopy contents underneath with a savagery the task did not require. Why did everything always have to
change
? It wasn't just the trip to the desert. She had no desire to attend this stupid premiere, either.
Fight on a Flight
was obviously the sort of brainless action movie she detested, but more important, the premiere on Tuesday would be another aberration, another opportunity to disturb the delicate balance they'd struck. Saying no would have been just as bad, though. She would have hurt his feelings. So she decided the best way to handle it would be to show up as late as possible and leave immediately after the movie. Plus, she had no desire to meet Drunk Richard again, or to say more than a few words to Mike, who surely hated her. Elizabeth noticed that Richard had stopped mentioning Mike after their meeting at Keith's birthday party, and guessed that Mike had voiced her displeasure with Elizabeth, and did so often, and loudly.

Elizabeth threw the dinner back in the microwave, setting it spinning once again. What was she going to wear to this premiere? Here was another source of anxiety; she knew she'd dressed too formally for Keith's birthday party, but people
had
to kick it up a notch for a premiere, didn't they? Even in L.A.? When she'd asked Richard, his eyes had gone vague and he'd said, “it doesn't really matter,” which was about as helpful as she'd expected him to be. Her current plan was to wear the skirt
he'd given her, but she'd already returned two tops to go with it. The whole thing was exhausting.

The microwave beeped again. Elizabeth used a wad of paper towels to remove the tray and cantered with the steaming, gooey mess back down the hallway. Shutting her door, she took a deep breath. As usual, she needed to calm down.

When she got behind her desk, she saw that Amber had e-mailed her back:

            
Pop into my office pls? Thx!

“Ugh!” Her assistant was gone for the day; no one else could hear her through the door. Why did everything always have to be so
difficult
? There was nothing she wanted less right now than a face-to-face chat, but there was no getting around it, so she rose from her desk and marched back down the hallway, past the kitchen, toward one of the plush corner offices on the other side of the elevator bank. This Band-Aid was getting ripped off. Now.

The door was open. She tapped a fingernail against its frame, jumping slightly when a child-sized woman in a tailored suit popped up behind an oversize computer monitor, like an impeccably dressed jack-in-the-box.

“Elizabeth! That was quick! Come in!”

Amber Hudson gestured frantically for Elizabeth to take a seat, the fortysomething partner's blond bob shimmering in the custom recessed lighting overhead. Elizabeth stepped inside, captivated for a moment by the view on high of Wilshire Boulevard's “Miracle Mile” captured behind Amber's desk. From here Los Angeles almost looked citylike, with high-rises leading toward the skyscrapers of downtown far, far in the distance. The partners' offices had all the best views.

Elizabeth sat on the edge of the hardest chair she could find, trying to convey without being rude whatever the opposite was of “settling in.” A studio portrait of Amber with her husband and two small children stared her in the face. In the
highly
unlikely scenario that Elizabeth were ever to put a photo on her desk, she would at least have turned it inward so that she could see it from her desk. Wasn't that the point? But it made sense that Amber would turn hers outward; she loved to tell the story of how she met “the one” at thirty-eight and had two children with him by forty-two—all of this narrated as though by the survivor of some great peril narrowly escaped. Elizabeth didn't like Amber very much, but had to admit she was an excellent lawyer, who used her perky demeanor to her advantage against anyone foolish enough to patronize or underestimate her.

“I am
so glad
you reached out because I've been meaning to talk to you!” chirped Amber, collapsing into her big, comfy desk chair with an affected sigh and, to Elizabeth's horror, kicking off her heels and drawing up her little birdlike legs in one fluid motion. “
What
a day! So. First thing's first.
Of course
you can have your day off! You've been doing
such
great work, and
not
just for me. Everyone's always saying what a
rock star
you are!”

“Thank you,” said Elizabeth uneasily. She was waiting for the “but.”

“But I
did
want to bring up something with you. Something we noticed.”

Elizabeth knew without asking that “we” meant the partners. She stiffened, as if in expectation of a blow.

Amber licked her cherry-painted lips, which were already quite moist, her tongue catching slightly on a sticky patch.

“Like I said, your work is
top-notch
, Elizabeth, as always, but we just did our third-quarter breakdowns and noticed
your billables were
way
down from the same period last year.”

A tight little wave of nausea shot through Elizabeth like a bullet. She had to restrain herself from visibly shuddering. She remembered this feeling from the handful of Bs she'd received over the course of a quarter century of school: a lethal little mixture of anger and shame poking at the lining of her stomach.

“By how much?” This came out more sharply than she intended.

“Twenty-nine percent.” Amber shot this figure back without consulting so much as a piece of paper.

Elizabeth's stomach churned again; this was what she got for being an overachiever. Even now, at this reduced rate, she still had to be one of the top-billing associates in the firm.

Amber reached a tiny, infant-sized hand across the table. “You're
fine
, Elizabeth. It's not like you're in trouble or anything. We just wanted to make sure”—she offered up what was ostensibly a concerned smile—“everything was okay?”

How could she not have realized she was slipping? Elizabeth wished she could refute it, but now that she forced herself to think about it,
of course
her billables had plummeted. Between Orpheus and Richard, she hardly ever came in on Saturdays anymore, and her concentration when she
was
here had become undeniably less . . . concentrated.

What could she say? She had to say something. Amber could tell her she was “fine” all she wanted, but they both knew she wasn't by virtue of this conversation's existence.

“I recently started a new relationship,” she said. Because it was true, wasn't it? Twice over.

“Oh!” Amber's wispy eyebrows lifted, and her red smile widened, turning jubilant. “How wonderful!
Well
, I'm not such an old married woman I can't still remember
those
days. You don't have to tell me!”

Elizabeth decided to take her at her word, and just stared at her.

“So what does he do?” asked Amber.

“Who?”

“Your boyfriend!”

Elizabeth paused while considering how to extricate herself from this mess in the quickest and cleanest way possible.

“Or girlfriend!” Amber squeaked, suddenly panicked. “Don't want to be heteronormative!”

“He's a film producer,” Elizabeth said finally, not bothering to hide her annoyance.

“Ooh,
fun
!” Amber was relieved. “Anything I might know?”

“No,” said Elizabeth. Surely this was almost over?

“What's his name?”

“Orpheus,” she said, perhaps because she liked the idea of merging the two men who together were responsible for her inferior work product, or perhaps because it was less humiliating to make up someone who didn't exist than to pretend she was dating someone who did. Either way, she had forgotten what a crazy name “Orpheus” was.

“Oh, wow!” Amber's eyes widened disbelievingly. “
Love
that name!” she overcompensated.

At the very least, the weird name put a pall over Amber's enthusiasm, ending their conference sooner than it would have otherwise. Elizabeth promised to improve her time management skills, and Amber kept insisting everything was
fine
.

Elizabeth returned to her office. She closed her door again. Her Smart Ones was waiting for her where she'd left it on her desk, lukewarm and congealed. Behind it glared not-Rosie, the “We Can Do It!” woman. Elizabeth gave her the finger and sat down heavily, like a much older person. Hadn't she just been lamenting the way everything changed? Well, now she was going to have to embrace that change. And it wasn't
just a simple matter of reverting to the singularly focused La Máquina; she had other obligations now, to Orpheus in particular, which couldn't be ignored. And yet she refused to let her career founder; she would not, could not fail. Why was it that when people like Amber talked about “having it all,” they assumed everyone
wanted
it all in the first place? In this moment, as she shoved a forkful of whatever the hell it was she was eating past her lips, she wanted none of it.

MIKE NEVER REMEMBERED
her dreams. She had read somewhere this was a common effect among those who enjoyed deep, untroubled sleep, which is why it made sense that in the few seconds before she woke from her neck-cramping doze on the fainting couch, she found herself inside a surprisingly lifelike vision.

She was in the church she attended every Sunday in Koreatown. Richard was there too, which made no sense, but then, it was a dream; sense wasn't really part of the deal. Even though she couldn't picture the individual faces, she knew everyone important to her was there, including her parents. Richard was looking out at the crowd, and when he turned to her, he smiled, and all her problems—her current physical discomfort, the pit that even as she slept pulsated steadily inside her like a second heart, the ever-present anxiety she felt over her father's failing health—all this
crap
lifted away from her, magically, like a stain in some dumb commercial for laundry detergent. Richard crooked his arm for her to take, and even though he was wearing the same jeans-and-polo outfit he'd worn to Keith's birthday party, Mike knew suddenly what this was.
No.
She couldn't say the word, not even to herself, and all the hurt and anxiety, the shame and pain seeped back inside her, staining her indelibly. She opened her mouth to protest, and from out of the hole spilled everything that had been growing inside her, everything that had sprouted
from that hideous pit, except now it was growing ten or maybe a hundred times faster—uncontrollably, relentlessly, like Jack's beanstalk, assuming a life of its own and twisting, plaguelike, to the vaulted ceiling, blotting out the light from the multicolored windows and scattering the panicked crowd like extras in a disaster movie. Swept up by their movement, Richard threw out his arm for her, his delight transformed to horror as the tide of human flesh carried him away . . . until he became no more than a pinprick of light at the edge of her vision. Moments later he disappeared altogether. And then there was nothing but darkness.

Mike struggled to open her eyes, but it was impossible to move her eyelids or any other part of her body. For what felt like ages she remained pinned to the couch, an insect in its case, the agony of this claustrophobic sensation silently consuming her. Finally, with a superhuman effort, she managed to jerk one of her legs, thereby freeing the rest of her body like a spring releasing a lock.

Her eyes snapped open. She nearly screamed. Peaches was peering over her, inches from her face, and from below all Mike could see was the salt-and-pepper bob and a single, narrowed eye, like one of those hairy ghost-monsters in a Japanese horror movie. It was the perfect epilogue to Mike's fever-dream-turned-nightmare.

“Keys!” the monster screeched.

Mike dug her hand into her pocket without getting up, forking over the entire set. She watched Peaches painstakingly extricate the Jeep Wrangler fob from the larger ring, and when the phrase
one good fob deserves another
popped into her head, she heard laughter, unaware until after the fact that it was hers.
I'm still drunk
, Mike realized.
Very drunk.

Peaches thrust the rest of the keys back into her hand and gestured, glaring, for Mike to get up, which somehow she did,
following the old woman back through the tropical courtyard, down the front path, and out toward a taxi idling next to her car.

Mike tumbled into the cab, slumping against the far window. She supposed she must have given the driver her address, but she didn't remember a thing about the ride home except for when she tried to pay, realizing she'd left her wallet—her whole bag, in fact—inside her car. As it turned out, it didn't matter. The driver had already been paid in advance.

The next morning was torture, but Mike told herself she deserved every thwack on the side of her head (she imagined a giant spoon prizing open her skull like a hard-boiled egg), every fiery burst of pain shooting through her ruined gut (she pictured the fires of Mordor bubbling inside her). She pulled on gym shorts and an old T-shirt, dreading the inevitable return to the scene of the crime. But she had to get her car back.

A tiny gray envelope lay on the floor, just inside her front door. She stared at it, puzzled. All the units in her building had mail slots rendered vestigial years ago by mailboxes installed in the lobby. One of her neighbors must have left her a note. Had she made too much noise coming in last night? This portion of the evening was hazy at best.

It took a good half minute to retrieve the envelope from the floor. Inside it was her car fob and nothing else—not even a slip of paper.
The hell?
Mike shambled outside, nearly vomiting up the few gulps of water she'd managed thus far to keep down.

There it was on the curb: her locked and lovely car, everything exactly as she'd left it except for her driver's license, which had been removed from her wallet and placed on her dashboard, no doubt for the purpose of finding her address. It was a little creepy, but it was also the best possible thing that could have happened to her in this moment.