Warner Center office building, far enough that, with luck, she’d be the only one from the firm there today. Shop talk and gossip were the last things she wanted.
She sat alone at a table in the casual elegance of the restaurant — no storefront fast-food ambience here — eating soup, drinking tea, and going after chili shrimp with chopsticks. Yang Chow’s were of hard, smooth plastic, and didn’t give as good a grip as the disposable wooden kind. She counted herself lucky not to end up with a shrimp in her lap.
Why shouldn’t they be happy? They were men.
One of them caught her looking. She saw what she’d come to call The Progression: widened eyes, Who-Me? glance, broad come-hither grin. He was wearing a wedding ring, a broad gold band. He didn’t bother to hide it. Without that, she would simply have ignored him. As it was, the look she sent suggested he had a glob of snot in his mustache. He hastily went back to his pork chow mein.
Nicole took her time finishing her lunch. Going back to the office had all the appeal of a root canal. She stared out the window at the traffic whooshing past on Topanga. She was aware, rather remotely, of the busboy taking her dishes. Only after the waiter came by to ask for the third time, in increasingly pointed tones, whether she wanted anything else did she admit to herself that she couldn’t stay there all afternoon. She threw a five and a couple of singles on the table and walked out to her car.
When she drove into the lot, she had to park a long way from the building. She’d expected that; most people had been back from lunch for half an hour, maybe more. As she trudged wearily across the gray asphalt, someone called, “Nicole!”
She looked around a little wildly, wondering if she was having a flashback to the morning. But it wasn’t Gary Ogarkov this time, smoking his blasted cigar and blowing up her hopes till they couldn’t do anything but explode. Tony Gallagher, who’d just got out of his Lincoln Town Car a few spaces away from where she’d parked, waved and called her name again. When she paused, he caught up with her at a ponderous trot, belly lapping over the waistband of his slacks.
She didn’t have much gladness to spare for anyone, but, thanks to that Midwestern upbringing, she could still be polite. “Hello, Mr. Gallagher,” she said. Of all the senior partners, she liked him best — not that that said much right now. But Gallagher had more juice in him than the rest of them put together. He was a vigorous sixty, his hair dyed a red close to the color it must have been when he was younger. He’d probably grown his bushy muttonchops when they were cool, back about 1971, and then never bothered shaving them off. Whoever had made his jacket had killed and skinned a particularly repulsive plaid sofa for the fabric. Nicole doubted it had ever been cool, but Gallagher didn’t care. He wore it with panache.
“I just want to tell you, I personally think you got a raw deal today,” he said, breathing whiskey fumes into her face. Half of her wanted to hug him for even such a small kindness. The other half wanted to run. When she was little, her father had come home from the factory — or rather, from the bar after the factory — reeking just like that. Then he’d stopped coming home at all. Then, in very short order, her mother had divorced him. One, two, three. Nicole still hated the smell of alcohol on a man’s breath, the strong sour-sweet reek that, her mother had told her, signified everything bad about a man.
Now that Nicole thought back on it, her father hadn’t kept up with his child-support payments, either. He’d poured them down his throat instead, one shot at a time. Frank didn’t do that.
“Like I say, Nicole,” Tony Gallagher said, just a little unsteady on his feet, “I did what I could for you.” He held the door of the office building open so she could go in to the lobby ahead of him. “I got outvoted. You know how it is with some people — can’t see the nose in front of their face. It’s a goddamn shame, pardon my French.”
A couple of paces away from the elevator, she turned toward him. “Thank you for what you tried to do. Believe me, it’s nice to know someone here thinks I’ve been doing a good job. I guess it just didn’t work out.” It sounded lame, but it was the best she could manage. She felt she owed it to him.
“Damn shame,” Gallagher said again, vehemently. The odor of stale Scotch came off him in waves. What had he had, a six-drink lunch? He patted her on the back, heavily: between her shoulder blades at first, but slipping lower with each pat, till his hand came to rest a bare inch above her panty line.
When the hand didn’t move after that, Nicole did, away from Gallagher and toward the elevator buttons. She punched UP with unnecessary violence. Was he being sympathetic or trying to feel her up? Did he know the difference? With that much Scotch sloshing around in him, did he even care?
The elevator door slid open. Nicole got on. So, of course, did Tony Gallagher. She eyed him with more than a little apprehension as she pressed the button for the sixth floor. But, as etiquette demanded, he took his place on the opposite side of the elevator after hitting the seventh-floor button.
With a thump, the car started up. Gallagher said, “Why don’t you come up to my office with me, Nicole? We ought to talk about ways to make sure this doesn’t happen the next time the opportunity rolls around.”
She didn’t answer for a second. And he said he’d been on her side. Was he thinking of closing the door to his office and trying to get her clothes off? If he did, she’d scream and knee him in the nuts. Then she’d sue him and the firm for every nickel they had. Which added up to a lot of nickels.
She shook her head a tiny fraction. No. He might be a lush, but he was still an attorney.
She grasped at the one straw he’d offered — and if that was desperate, so be it. So was she. He’d talked about a next time — about another partnership. Sheldon Rosenthal had been notably silent on the subject. “All right,” she said, hoping he hadn’t noticed the length of her hesitation. “I’ll come up.”
The elevator stopped at the sixth floor. Nicole let the door open and close, but didn’t get off. On the seventh floor, Gallagher stood back with courtly manners, and held the door for her to get off. Somewhat encouraged, holding her breath against his effluvium of Scotch, she walked with him down the long carpeted hallway. His secretary didn’t look up from her computer when the two of them went by into his inner office.
He did shut the door behind him, but, instead of trying to grope her, he went over to a coffee machine like the one in Mr. Rosenthal’s office. Next to it he had a little refrigerator, atop which stood several bottles and a neat row of crystal tumblers. “Coffee?” he asked. “Or can I fix you a drink? Sounds like you’ve earned one today.”
The frost in her voice only made him grin disarmingly. “You know what they say. Drink — and die; don’t drink — and die anyway. But suit yourself.” He poured her the coffee, then splashed a good jolt of Johnnie Walker Black over ice for himself. He carried it to his desk and sat down, leaning back in the big mahogany leather chair: leopard on a tree branch, Nicole caught herself thinking, or lion on the veldt, waiting in lordly ease for his wives to bring him dinner. “Sit down,” he said. “Make yourself at home.”
Nicole sat. This wasn’t the sort of place that she’d have wanted for home or office, not with those gaudy LeRoy Neiman prints — a redundancy if ever there was one — on the wall, but it fit the flamboyant Gallagher perfectly. The only thing missing was a lava lamp.
He knocked back the Scotch, then held up a well-manicured forefinger. “Cooperation,” he intoned, giving the word the same mystic emphasis with which the fellow in
Nicole tensed. “Mr. Gallagher,” she said, “I’ve been cooperative in every way I know how. I’ve worked as hard as I can for this firm. The Butler Ranch report is only one example. I’ve also — ”
Gallagher waggled that forefinger. “Not exactly what I meant.” He wasn’t looking at her face as he spoke. He was, she realized, trying to look up her skirt, which was a little above the knee when she stood and a good deal shorter than that when she sat down. She crossed her legs as tight as she could, and hooked one ankle behind the other for good measure.
Cooperation?
Here it was, almost the turn of the millennium, and a woman couldn’t get a damned thing on her own merits.
