“Right, Mom,” Katrina said, not entirely convinced.
“You see,” Nico tried again. “Nobody knows exactly how they’re going to behave until they’re faced with certain challenges. It’s one of the great things in life—putting yourself in positions to meet new challenges and not being afraid to do so. It’s what keeps life interesting and ultimately makes you the best person you can be.” And that is your lesson for the day, Nico thought, for whatever it’s worth. “Does that make any sense?” she asked.
“I guess.” Katrina shrugged. She picked up a pink patent leather book bag, emblazoned with thunderbolts and a kitty cat wearing blue eyeshadow. “Good luck, Mom,” Kat said, giving her a brief hug. And as Kat went out of the room, Nico realized that it wasn’t her daughter she was trying to convince, it was herself.
* * *
KIRBY CALLED HER AS she was walking into her office.
“Hiya, pretty lady,” he said, his typical greeting, which still made Nico wince. He shouldn’t be calling her at all, but it was too late. She had allowed it, and slowly but surely they had ended up talking at least once a day, and sometimes two or three or even four times a day—the fact was, she was more involved with Kirby than she’d admitted, even to Victory. “I can’t talk now,” she said into the phone. One of her assistants looked up and nodded. For the past few months now, they must have been wondering who it was that she talked to like this. She had to break it off . . .
“Will I see you later?” Kirby asked.
“I can’t. I have a very important day ahead of me.” She went into her office and half closed the door, leaving it open a little so as not to arouse undue suspicion. No one in offices trusted closed doors—there was something about a closed door that led to speculation about what was going on behind it. And ever since that item had appeared in the Post about her possibly taking Mike Harness’s job, she’d been especially careful. On the Monday morning after the item had appeared, Mike had sent her an e-mail, which he’d cc’d to several other executives, saying, “Glad to see that you’re taking over my job.” To which she’d replied smartly, “You wish!”—the idea being that she wasn’t taking it seriously, and neither should he.
“But you’re thinking about it, aren’t you?” Kirby asked.
“What?” she asked, knowing exactly what he was referring to.
“Sex,” he said. A month ago, the word, coming from his mouth, would have caused immediate arousal, but now all she felt was annoyance. What was wrong with her? Was it possible that nothing could satisfy h
er anymore?
“I’ll have to call you later,” she said firmly, and hung up.
She sat down in front of her computer. It was eight-thirty a.m.; she had one hour until her meeting with Victor Matrick. She opened her e-mails, which were filled with correspondences from various departments (everyone cc-ing everyone else on all kinds of mundane issues in order to prove they were on top of things and that no one was being left out of the loop—and therefore couldn’t be blamed or responsible for anything that might potentially go wrong), along with attached layouts and stories and schedules for the magazine. She asked her assistant to print out two of the stories, then called Richard, the art director, and asked him to change one of the layouts. He made a fuss about it, coming down the hall to her office to argue about it. She gave him two minutes to make his case, then coolly repeated her objections and told him to change it, asking for the new version just before lunch. He left her office in a huff and she shook her head in annoyance. Richard was considered the best in the business, but he was overly emotional and took every criticism personally, clinging to his work as if he had just painted the Sistine Chapel. Nico knew that behind her back, he called her the Nico-tano Bomb, and she’d thought about firing him several times. She had done that in the past—fired employees who’d bad-mouthed her excessively—her thinking being that if it got back to her, it had to be extreme, and if they had that much of a problem with her, they would undoubtedly be happier someplace else.
She picked up one of the stories and began reading, but put it down again after a few seconds. She couldn’t quite concentrate. She got up and went to the window, looking out over the view, which contained a sliver of Central Park. Mike’s office, which was two floors up and in the front of the building, had a full view of Central Park, and so, for that matter, did Wendy’s. Editors in chief weren’t quite as high up on the totem pole as presidents of entire divisions, and the fact that Victor Matrick was even considering her for Mike’s job was unusual. Normally, editors in chief could go no higher—once you became an editor in chief, you could only move laterally, becoming the editor in chief of another magazine. But she didn’t care about precedent. If someone said something couldn’t be done, it seemed like something worth trying. And she was clever, she thought. Why allow herself to rot in a dead-end job?
Listen to her! she thought, smiling. Dead-end job. Ridiculous. She already had a job people would kill for. Women were always telling each other to be happy with what they had, that it was the small things that mattered most. And she was happy and appreciative, but that didn’t mean that the big things weren’t important either. It didn’t mean that the big things in the outside world weren’t worth going after. Excitement, drive, success—these were the things that fueled a woman too. They gave her gravitas—weight in the world. How could a woman really be content unless she knew that she’d lived up to her true potential, or at least given it her best shot?
She turned and looked back at the clock on her desk. Thirty minutes now until her meeting with Victor. She walked to her door and poked her head out. “I’m going to be unavailable for the next few minutes,” she said to her assistants. “Do you mind holding my calls?”
“Sure,” they said. They were nice girls, agreeable and hardworking. Nico made it a point to take them out to lunch once a month. When she moved up, they would move up too. She would take them with her . . .
And now she did shut her door. She needed to think. She sat down in an armchair covered with a lambskin throw—Victory’s idea, she remembered. Victory had helped her with her office years ago, and she’d even found a place that had made the furniture, the desk and two armchairs. And now she had to thank Victory again, for she’d gotten the information needed for the coup from Glynnis Rourke. But that was how it worked. She’d helped Victory years ago with her career, by lending her money for her business. And now Victory had helped her, by setting up those secret meetings with Glynnis, which had taken place at Victory’s showroom . . .
But was it right? she wondered. There was something about what she was about to do that was so juvenile and petty. But maybe that was just her own conscience. Recently, the papers had been filled with a story about a politician who was not going to be getting a government position because of what people at first thought were “nanny problems,” but later turned out to be an affair with a high-level attorney at a law firm. Why this woman—Marianna was her name—had had an affair with Sam, the politician, was beyond Nico. Sam was old, bald, and pickled. But Marianna, who was in her mid-fifties, was the old model of the “powerful” woman—the woman who became successful because she loved being the only woman in a room filled with powerful men. She was the woman who didn’t trust, or like, other women; who still believed that the only way a woman could become successful was by being a bitch. But women like Wendy and Victory and herself, Nico thought, were a new model of powerful women. They weren’t bitches, and they weren’t enamored with that old-fashioned idea that being with powerful men made you more important. The new power babe wanted to be around other powerful women. They wanted women to be ruling the world, not men.
Nico absentmindedly rubbed a little piece of the lamb’s fur between her thumb and forefinger. Success in life could be boiled down to two things: having the courage to hold passionate beliefs, and being able to make commitments. Her passionate belief was that women ought to succeed to the very top, and she’d made a commitment to do it. But the tricky part was how you went about it. And being a courageous person, she had to ask herself, one more time, if she was going about this in the right way.
The strategy was simple, and Victory had dropped the plan in her lap that afternoon when Seymour was winning Best in Breed at the Westminster Dog Show. As Seymour was trotting around the ring in his dark blue velvet jacket with Tunie prancing by his side, Nico had received a text message from Victory: “Important info re: work. Top secret. Contact immediately.” After Seymour had collected his ribbon and she’d congratulated him, she’d slipped off to the bathroom to call Victory. The short version was that Glynnis Rourke, who had signed on to do a magazine with Mike Harness in conjunction with her talk show, was planning to sue Mike Harness and Splatch-Verner for breach of contract. Nico knew something about the project, but the first issue of the magazine kept getting delayed, and Mike had been secretive about it.
“He’s a sexist asshole,” Glynnis had exclaimed, during her and Nico’s first meeting. “You can’t talk to him straight. I told him his ideas were bullshit, and he got all huffy and walked out of the room. I’m sorry, but am I wrong about this? We’re doing business. It’s my name on the magazine, not his. Why should I have to coddle the guy’s ego? I mean, hello? Isn’t he a grown-up?”
“Not really,” Nico had murmured. The upshot was that, while contractually obligated to consult Glynnis on all decisions regarding content in the magazine, Mike had not. He wouldn’t take her phone calls and refused to meet with her in person, hiding behind e-mails. Glynnis had asked him repeatedly to scrap the project, but he’d refused, contending that they “owned” her name, and could do whatever they wanted with it. This had gone on for two months, and she was now going to sue for $50 million—“I’ll never get that, but you need a big number to scare these idiots,” she explained—and was planning on filing the legal papers any day now. Corporations like Splatch-Verner had lawsuits all the time, but Nico knew that this situation was different: Glynnis was a public figure, and highly vocal. It would be all over the papers.
And Victor Matrick wouldn’t like it.
She stood up, crossing to the window again, and drumming her fingers on the radiator. Victor was of a different generation. He would consider it unseemly for his top executive to be engaged in a public brawl with a celebrity. A couple of years ago, when Selden Rose had been married to that Victoria’s Secret model, Janey Wilcox, and Janey had gotten herself involved in a scandal that had been plastered all over the front pages of the newspapers, Victor Matrick had told Selden that he had to get rid of his wife or leave the company. Victory Ford had gotten the story out of Lyne Bennett, who had gotten it out of George Paxton, who was one of Selden’s best friends. Selden had only been involved in the scandal due to the unfortunate occurrence of being married to the source, so Nico could only imagine how Victor would feel about Mike’s problem. On the other hand, going to Victor with this information felt a little tattletale-ish. It was schoolyard stuff, she thought with disgust.
She narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest. This wasn’t exactly gossip, though, it was information. A man in the same situation wouldn’t have hesitated, she thought, wouldn’t have had any qualms about doing in another man with secret information. Nobody liked office politics, but they were simply unavoidable if you wanted to get to the top in a corporation. She had to do this. Mike was seriously messing up, and Victor had told her to find something.
She went into her private bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet, taking out a tube of lipstick and some face powder. She would be one of Victor’s first lieutenants now, she imagined, lightly running the lipstick over her mouth. She supposed there would always be some man to answer to, until the day came when she had Victor’s job. Then, and only then, would she not have to answer to anyone except herself . . .
But first things first. Everything had to be accomplished in order. And snapping the top back on the lipstick, she went upstairs.
* * *