“We ought to do it immediately,” Nico said. “Since Mike is going to be named in the lawsuit, if he’s no longer employed by Splatch-Verner, it makes their case look silly. Plus, we can probably salvage the relationship with Glynnis without making it look like we’re caving in to her demands. If we move quickly, no one will be the wiser.” This was the speech she’d been preparing for days.
“Righty-ho, then,” Victor said, standing up to indicate that the meeting was over. He rested the thickened, gnarled knuckles of his left hand on top of the desk for balance. “We’ll do it this afternoon. At four o’clock.”
“Thank you, Victor,” she said, rising.
“I hope you’re available,” Victor said, with his customary relish. “I want you to be in on this. In fact, I want you to deliver the news.”
* * *
NICO SAT STIFFLY ON the backseat of the Town Car as it drove slowly along the East Drive in Central Park. It was not yet five o’clock, but the park was full of people. People pulling dogs on leashes, people on bicycles and Rollerblades (Rollerblades! Nico thought, did people still do that?), people running, walking, even riding in those horse-drawn carriages that should probably be outlawed. Those poor horses, she thought, as the cab swerved around a carriage. She peered out at the horse, trying to judge by its face whether it was happy. She couldn’t tell—its eyes were blinkered—but it was bobbing its head up and down, like one of those animals people put on the dashboards of cars, with heads on a spring . . .
Her phone rang. “Did you do it?” Seymour asked eagerly.
“Oh God, Seymour,” she said, with more emotion than she intended. She glanced at the back of the driver’s head to see if he was listening. “It was hard,” she said, frowning as if this were Seymour’s fault.
“But did you do it?” Seymour asked.
“Did I have a choice?”
“So you did it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And?”
Nico suddenly felt angry. “Like we planned, Seymour. Like I told you it would happen. That’s all.” She ended the call and pressed the button to lower the window. Soothing warm air rushed into the car. Why did the drivers always crank up the air-conditioning as soon as winter was over? she wondered. It was a man thing.
But that wasn’t all.
She dialed the number to her house. Seymour answered. “Seymour, Mike . . .” She was going to say “cried,” but thought better of it. “He was upset.”
“Yeah?” Seymour said. “What were you expecting him to be?”
“Upset,” she said.
“So there you go,” Seymour said.
She hung up in frustration. She wished she could explain to Seymour, make him understand the unexpected emotional violence of the day. Not to mention the confusion, fear, and guilt.
The emotional violence . . . she shivered. What nobody understood was that it was like real physical violence, which bore no resemblance to the fake violence you saw on TV or in the movies. She remembered one time when she and Seymour had been at a small bar in the West Village, and a fight had broken out. Seymour’s immediate reaction had been to take cover under the table, but she had been too stunned to move. She was shocked by how actually violent human beings could be when they crossed the boundary of personal space, even though the fight was practically nothing—a couple of guys taking a few swings at each other and knocking over some chairs and a bottle of water. But it was enough. “Get down!” Seymour screamed, grabbing her wrist and pulling her under the table. For a second the thought crossed her mind that he was a wimp—he ought to be fighting—but that was insane, and she suddenly realized how fragile and vulnerable they were. Once someone broke through that boundary and made contact, were you ever the same? Could you ever forget? And grabbing her arm, Seymour had urgently pulled her out of the bar and onto the little triangle of sidewalk in front, where they had looked at each other and collapsed into sobs of laughter that they couldn’t stop for at least half an hour.
But what had happened to her today was not, she thought, something Seymour would ever understand. There was triumph in it, but triumph at a cost. You could achieve, but you paid a price for those achievements. It was the kind of thing a husband didn’t really want to know about, and only your girlfriends could comprehend.
“He cried, Wendy,” she’d whispered into the phone earlier, when she was out on the sidewalk waiting for her car to pull up. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
“I know,” Wendy said. “It’s always amazing how quickly they crumble when the pressure gets to be too much. We have all these ideas about men, but they’re all wrong. Men are just weak little frightened people with penises attached. When Shane cried, it was awful. It was like suddenly he wasn’t the man anymore and I wasn’t the woman. And I realized I was going to have to learn how to become a new kind of woman, living without all those clichéd ideas about what men and women are supposed to be.”
Nico nodded. “I felt like such a shit. And then he attacked me. He said I was Victor’s handmaiden, a bitch. I didn’t mind the bitch part so much, but being called a handmaiden?”
“You’ve never been a handmaiden in your life,” Wendy snorted. “We’re the kind of women who have handmaidens. And they’re called men.”
“But that’s what everyone’s going to say. They’re going to call me Victor Matrick’s handmaiden . . .”
“So let them,” Wendy countered. “It’s just a way of denigrating you because you’re a woman in a position of power, so they can feel better about their own lousy lives. We have to stop worrying about what other people think about us. There’s all this judging going on all the time. It’s the yes-but—is she a good mother, businesswoman, wife? Who cares what other people think, Nico? They’re not inside you. They’re not walking in your shoes. We do the best we can—and better than most—given the circumstances that we deal with. And that’s really all we can do. I, for one, have decided to give up the guilt. I can’t do everything, and I don’t want to. And I shouldn’t be expected to either.” She took a breath. “Christ, Nico,” she muttered. “You do everything. And really well. You’re an exceptional person. You’ve got to share it, and if it means some people don’t like it, tough. You are now the president and CEO of Verner Publishing, and God knows that goddamned company is lucky to have you!”
And that, Nico thought, was the kind of speech you would only ever hear from a girlfriend.
The car took the curve around a patch of green lawn, stopping at the light at Seventy-second Street and Fifth Avenue. How pretty it was, Nico thought—the green grass and the budding trees against the elegant gray buildings of Fifth Avenue. Everything was going to be okay, and why shouldn’t i