Part 7 (1/2)
I averted my eyes. Kind of. ”I'm sorry.”
”Jesus, can't it wait?”
”Well...” I looked away, then back, away, then back.
She finally yanked the tail of her s.h.i.+rt down hard and planted her fists on her hips. No more smiles for me. ”Come on.”
”I wasn't kidding about why you shouldn't take this job. I know she's my friend and all, but I wouldn't want to work for her.”
”Yeah, I got that.”
”Listen, don't you feel any sort of bad vibes? You've got to have some sort of little voice in your head telling you something's off. It's not your scene. You'll be miserable.”
Harriet laughed before I'd even finished. ”Miserable? You're telling me, like, an eighty percent increase in pay, health insurance, working with the best ingredients, pretty much cooking whatever I feel like, and no greasy, crowded, sweaty kitchens full of guys that can't even speak f.u.c.king English is my idea of a party?”
”Octavia told you that, didn't she?”
She ignored me and swooped the t-s.h.i.+rt off, revealing all the ink and a black sports bra. I'd been a.n.a.lyzed and tagged as harmless, my eyes weaker than your average males. She picked up a ragged local band tee, snugged into it, and then whirled, face to face.
”Mick, right? Mick. What does it matter, man? Why do you care?”
Yeah, why did I? Why look out for the happiness of someone who obviously thought I was a puny sn.o.b? Dunno. I just did. ”Those guys in your kitchen? They're your friends. You drink with them, and they've taught you some cool phrases in a bunch of different languages. They showed you neat dishes and tricks in the kitchen that you would've had to pay a lot of money for at culinary school.”
Shrugged. ”I won't lose my friends.”
”And you love the pressure cooker, right? You thrive on it. When you sleep, you dream about work. Your whole s.h.i.+ft revolves around where you guys go drink after, and all the bands you hang out with until sunrise.”
Crossed her arms. ”Now I'll have more time to sleep and still stay out all night. s.h.i.+t, it's healthier all around.”
”G.o.dd.a.m.n it, Harriet, I swear, in six months...” Caught myself. Decided to try another track. ”You know the vegan she talked about?”
”Well...I thought she meant you at first, but I suppose it was the butler. He's vegan?”
”Vegan, gay, and a jet-setter.”
”Okay, I'm cool with that. Why'd he eat the steak?”
”She forced him to.”
Harriet blinked. ”No way.”
”Oh, yeah.”
”I'm not into all that s.h.i.+t, but if someone else is, you've got to respect, man.”
”Octavia doesn't. She made him eat the steak to remind him who's boss. And she pays him so much money that he eventually gave up trying to date regularly because she would wait until his day off to find stuff that would make him late or miss it entirely. His only trips now are either short vacations or business trips for Octavia. In the old days, he'd spend weekends in Manhattan, L.A., Vegas, Tahoe. Tonight, she made him eat meat for the first time in years.”
As I spoke, fear appeared in the middle of her pupils and spread outward until both orbs were quivering. Lips parted. Silence after I was done, until she realized she was staring into her own future, thinking about how it was all going to change, and she didn't want to believe it.
She closed her lips and swallowed and then said, ”That's not going to happen to me.”
”No, it will. Maybe not as direct a sting, but it'll happen.”
She eyed her jeans, maybe trying to decide if my harmlessness extended to letting her change into those in front of me. I guess it didn't. Still some teeth on this old tiger.
”So, then, why, Mick? Why would he stay with her?” Lowered her voice. ”They're not, like...lovers, something like that?”
”Not at all. Much worse. Let me tell you.”
EIGHT.
Here's pretty much what I told her: After grad school, Octavia got roped into working for a conservative think tank. They paid her a lot of money to write papers on politics with an eye towards comparisons to cla.s.sic literature. I guess they thought if it's all happened before, maybe they could skip the part about finding new answers and just rely on the old ones, as long as enough people had forgotten about them. But then, a couple of trips to Was.h.i.+ngton later, she discovered her true talent was in lobbying. Octavia had a talent for threatening people to vote her way while still having them return her calls.
She was bored, though. Lots of money, lots of power, lots of dinners and lunches and drinks shared over topics like Ethanol subsidies, prayer in schools, television standards, pharmaceuticals, on and on. It was too easy for her. Talking points memorized, Psychology 101 level manipulation, close observation and deductive reasoning employed to find weaknesses and/or strengths that could be somehow ma.s.saged should the congressman vote a certain way. Dull stuff.
No matter what she did, how much she flirted or tried to build true relations.h.i.+ps with these people, it always came down to money and fear. Other women lobbyists, she noticed, could flash a little leg and laugh at the tasteless jokes, and could get a lot further than Octavia ever could unless it came down to the bra.s.s tacks and some serious blackmail needed to be put on the table. This was before she weighed as much as she does now, too. Back then, around two-fifty. A striking woman in high school and college, but not exactly what senators wanted to take to a hotel after hours. Forget trying to make herself the talk of the town for her expensive dresses and pretty face. She decided the power was worth chasing, which meant she had to say and do some awful things to get what she wanted-votes, s.e.x, respect-and the more fear that registered on the faces of her victims, the better.
Octavia missed the Twin Cities a lot, and traveled back and forth at least twice a month except for a long five month stretch where her services were in demand during an especially divisive Congressional season. More dinners and lunches and phone calls than usual. Finally, the work was done, the threats threatened, the pressure applied. She destroyed a couple of promising political careers during those months, and drove more than a dozen lobbyists to retire rather than fight with her anymore.
At last, plane ticket in hand, she boarded a flight back home just in time for the Thanksgiving travel rush. Unfortunately, she couldn't get her usual first cla.s.s seats-all sold out or given over to upgrades. Rather than wait for a late flight, she decided to chance it on a shuttle. By this point, she'd packed on a number of extra pounds, and the seats on those small jets could only take so much.
She could barely squeeze in, to begin with. Adding insult to injury, the flight attendant, a frosted blonde young gay man, immediately brought her the seat belt extension without her even asking. He told her, ”Oh, don't thank me. We just don't want you bouncing around the cabin in case of rough air. You might kill someone.”
A small jet, too, so everyone around could hear. Giggles. Even with the flight attendant winking at her, Octavia didn't take kindly to the joke.
Then she heard the snap. Her seat reclined without pus.h.i.+ng the b.u.t.ton, and she let out a yelp.
The attendant came back over, helped her up, but wasn't too nice about it. She explained that it had just broken. He rolled his eyes. ”I wonder why?”
She looked up and down the plane, asked for one of the free seats.
He crossed his arms and pursed his lips and said, ”Well, they won't take off with a broken seat, so that's a delay right there.” Groans for the other pa.s.sengers. ”Plus, what are the chances another seat would survive?”
That set her off. She was tired, cranky, and embarra.s.sed, so the venom didn't quite spill like she wanted. A lot of ”How dare you?” and ”Do you know who you're dealing with, princess?”, but the attendant-you've surely guessed his name already-stood his ground, turned on the fake-polite Airspeak and told her she needed to hold her tongue. Flight attendants had gained so much authority after Nine Eleven, so all it took was another round of insults to get the pilot to step back into the cabin and kick her off the flight. It didn't matter that mechanics would need to repair the seat anyway, giving everyone time to cool off. Too late. She'd pushed past the line of forgiveness.
Needless to say, she left the airport immediately, went back to her apartment, and sulked. Didn't bother rescheduling the flight. She went home, ordered some Vietnamese delivery, and shut herself in for two days.
When she came out, she had it all planned, written, detailed, and ready to be unleashed. Her first discrimination lawsuit. She filed against the airline, the airport, the pilot, the flight attendant, and their respective unions. Of course, she had even lined up witnesses, her mind like a steel trap, remembering the names called out before boarding, those people who needed boarding pa.s.ses or were on stand-by.
And she was so p.i.s.sed that even after the one-point-five million dollar settlement offer, she held onto one demand that was nonnegotiable-that Gene Jennings be fired by his airline and never again allowed to work in the airline industry.
Of course the unions threw a fit, the airline clamped down, and their attorneys threatened to cut the settlement to eighteen hundred bucks and two free tickets to Hawaii. In fact, they had found some witnesses from the plane who thought her behavior was obnoxious and deserving of the expulsion. Smug b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, sliding their hands behind their heads, feet on the desk, just waiting for her desperate call to save the original deal, sans firing the ”stewardess”, as Octavia insisted on calling him.