Jenna Takes the Fall Read online

  “What does this painting mean, Vincenzo?” She had started to use this mysterious nickname just recently, and to him it sounded demeaning, as if he were an Italian lounge singer. “Why did you buy it?”

  “It’s magnificent. One year later the painter killed himself.”

  “Charming.” She stuck her fork into another chunk of the beef stew before her. “It’s completely blank, just dark colors. Anyone could do that. I don’t see how it has any value whatsoever.”

  Neither of the girls listened to what she said, and as her husband threw back his head, savoring a finely roasted potato, neither apparently did Vince, but after dinner he insisted his wife come with him to observe his magnificent purchase. As they stood before it, he put his arm around her shoulder, and she responded by touching his hand.

  Vince said nothing but pointed to the center of the painting. “See how the dark and the light blur together, so beautiful, Japanese almost, a nightmare or a point of rest.”

  “Yes, I do see that,” she said and held onto his arm. “Who’s the new girl?”

  “Which girl?” No, he shouldn’t have said this.

  “A girl from the office called today.”

  “Probably just one more of these floater-types. Let’s see if she can figure anything out. They come, they go, and my executive assistant just keeps telling me to fire them.” But he wasn’t sure what to say, as he didn’t know which girl she referred to and was not prepared to learn more. Out of nowhere, suddenly, Vince murmured, “I need you,” and pulled her into his arms. She opened her beautiful mouth and kissed him, caught up in his embrace.

  TWO

  Today, on this muggy day in June, after a remarkable few weeks of floating incompetently through reception, advertising, subscriptions (the biggest demotion of all), then upwards into research, Jenna McCann occupied her desk at the center of an astonishing suite of offices, one of the most incredible in this opulent New York world. “Office”—the word did not do justice to Vincent Hull’s domain. How she had gotten here mystified no one more than herself. In her tiny hometown of Burton, Ohio, she was regarded as smart but clueless, mouthy, erratic, up for anything the wind blew her way, but lovely too, with mounds of light brown hair, beautiful white shoulders, sexy calves. She looked like a wellfed woman, curious but naïve, openly waiting, even asking for something to happen to her. After the death of her last living relative, her grandmother Margaret Grace McCann, her art history professor at Ohio University had interceded with someone who worked at a New York art gallery, who in turn was familiar with the fact that Vincent Hull lost assistants the way a fisherman loses bait. So, why not suggest this rootless twenty-something who had had one or two menial jobs, in possession of a fairly useless degree, not actively evil to anyone’s knowledge; why not recommend her for a job at Hull’s somewhat tacky magazine, NewsLink, and give her a shot at the big wide world? Up until now she had had very few helping hands.

  Each day Jenna’s new job began the same way—opening up a bag full of colorful, misspelled cards, notes, and ragged clippings meant to insult or castigate her boss, Vincent Hull. These letter writers were the people who rarely could penetrate Hull’s private email address, although if they did, an IT guy dealt with them. No, these were the Luddites with pen and pencil, with old typewriters, even pinking shears, sometimes using cut-out letters like writers of ransom notes, and boy did they rave. Today’s batch contained worse, much worse, as she held up a thick piece of white paper onto which had been drawn a man dangling from a rope, with a swastika upon his chest. Misshapen legs, arms, and a large male member stuck out from the torso. “Eww,” she shouted over to Hull’s other assistant, his real one, the executive one, Jorge Garza, a nattily dressed fiftyish man with graying black hair, thick glasses, and a perpetual air of stern and deep thought. So far she knew nothing much about him except that he collected labels off the bottles of wine that he and his family drank, a family that consisted of his mother and a disabled brother.

  Jorge came over to her desk to get a better look. “Shows a certain flair, I think, in the hatred department. What did you reply?”

  “Dear Mr. —hmm, he only calls himself Sam. Dear Mr. Sam, Vincent Hull appreciates very much your interest in NewsLink and your views on its politics. He is committed to maintaining an open dialogue with his readers, and letters like yours keep that conversation open. Please do continue to let us know what you think.”

  “Send it up to Security.”

  “Okay, you’re right, but I’m just wondering what a little kindness might do for this guy.”

  Jorge frowned. “We don’t do kindness here, but at least you spelled everything correctly.”

  “I really can’t lie to save my soul.”

  “Don’t worry, that’s a skill you’ll learn.” He certainly did not want to tell her how the most recent letter-writing girl had gotten fired when Hull actually read one of her replies and then stood before this very same desk shouting at top volume, “You can’t even fucking use a comma correctly. Your sentences just go on and on, typos, grammar errors. I sound unbelievably stupid. You sent this crap out under my signature? If I put a gun to your head, could you figure out the fucking spell-check key?” He had shouted into her ear and then actually picked up a pencil and poked her in the forehead with the sharp end. The woman had fainted on the spot, and only the resultant several weeks of heavy lawyering could get Hull out of the whole expensive business.

  “Luxe, calme et volupté,” Jorge whispered into Jenna’s ear now. “You and I need to create that here because nobody else is going to do it; no one else cares, so it’s up to us. Luxury, peace, and—” but he didn’t want to say “exquisite pleasure” so instead, he said—“beauty, that’s what we’re going for. Some French poet, I forget his name, once described a room that way.”

  “Baudelaire.”

  “Holy god, at last someone who knows something! We’ve been a brain-free zone for quite a while.”

  “Ohio University, major in art history, minor in French. I owe it all to them, but of course I do miss my last job at the internet start-up in Cuyahoga Falls. They were into porn.”

  “Maybe you could’ve gotten stock and become a billionaire.”

  “Not a fucking chance. Oops, no swearing around here, right?”

  “Not by you and me, anyway.” As things stood now, Jorge didn’t want to burst her bubble about how thrilling this promotion from Ohio porn might seem. In fact, he wanted to clue her in on several upcoming difficulties, but didn’t quite know how to start. When Jenna’s phone bank lit up, he retreated to his desk across from hers on the opposite side of the foyer. Several feet behind them lurked Hull’s inner sanctum, an office that resembled a large living room, several times larger than the apartment Jenna shared with two roommates in Gramercy Park. To its left was the kitchen and behind that the executive dining room, a small but companionable space. To the right of Hull’s office, behind a perpetually closed door, resided a much smaller, “secret” office, entirely off limits except to those invited in.

  The mystified girl stared down at the buttons on the telephone console before her, all of which, all twenty of them, appeared to link them to the known universe as it stood today. One was labeled “Janitor,” one “Executive Editor,” and another knob sported the word “Washington” ominously pasted beside it. Could “Washington” mean the President of the United States? This phone button? “Hey, I could scramble jets through NORAD. Let me think of people I can bomb.”

  “Now, now, these are early days. Power must be used wisely.” Jorge folded a piece of copy paper into an airplane and lobbed it her way. No matter what the new girl said, she said it with a lilt, a bit of joy at the end of each sentence, and he began to feel better about his life.

  A button lit up, and she punched one of the flashing lights on the magic machine, receiving only bits and pieces of someone shouting through a cell phone as if through shards of glass. “Yes, yes? Who’s there?” she cried, into the digital void apparen
tly, because now she heard no sound at all. “Okay, if that was Mr. Hull, I’m totally fucked. Geez, sorry, my grandmother used to say I had no governor on my mouth, but I’ll work on it.”

  “Don’t worry, probably not him. He’s been AWOL lately.” Jorge actually hoped the great one himself had finally decided to show up. Since late April, Hull had rarely come in to work. He could often not be found; instead he allowed Jorge to do every single thing for him. Not that this executive assistant hadn’t already had that function, but now the situation had deteriorated. Habitually his boss’s feet rarely touched pavement. Cars, bills, appointments, phone calls, taxes, gifts, children, dogs, doctors—Jorge had handled it all. If someone had ever asked him, he would have said, “I live his life.” And that he did. It was an odd sort of ventriloquism, but the man who takes up ownership of a big chunk of the world needs a stand-in, a dummy with a mouth talking but saying exactly what the ventriloquist wants that world to hear. At the present time, though, Jorge could no longer even find out what his lines were supposed to be. Constant accessibility: once upon a time his boss’s mantra, but for several months he’d gotten only the occasional email, followed perhaps by a late-night phone call. If only people knew that almost everything in Vincent Hull’s life originated with a bean-counting-type guy from Queens who lived with his agoraphobic brother and a mother with multiple health complaints. In another life he would have figured as the designated priest in the family.

  Jenna’s phone bank lit up again. A gravelly male voice announced, “I’m coming in,” then hung up. Say what? Jenna held the phone out in front of herself and stared into its silent microphone.

  “Okay, Jorge, that had to be him.”

  “Deep voice, authoritative, like an SUV crushing dirt?” Jenna nodded, but Jorge looked grim, staring down at his watch. “Jesus, I wonder what’s going on? It’s so late in the day, almost five. Go check out his office and straighten things up in there. Maybe dust a bit.”

  “I’ll make it ‘shiny as two dogs’ balls under a bed.’ That’s what my granny always said.” In shock, Jorge could find absolutely no reply.

  Jenna ran into the kitchen, got two towels, and then went back through the foyer into Hull’s office, only the third time she had actually entered that room. To her art-history-trained eye, her so-far invisible boss inhabited an art museum. Chinese scroll paintings unspooled along mahogany walls, onyx statues with grimaces on their faces backed up against the four corners of a room that sported a marble desk the size of three dining tables. Colors were muted, deep green and brown, down even to the Persian rugs, all sumptuous, oozing importance and the luxury of a thousand choices. Outside of the Cleveland Museum, Jenna had never seen anything like this before, and it reemphasized the importance of the people who owned it, certainly of the man whose assistant she now was, no matter how temporarily. As she surveyed her surroundings and then the panoramic view from the windows, she could almost feel the rich man’s cultivation of his contemplative self. The phone didn’t even ring here; it lit up silently, to her eyes like a tiny bomb. Staring down at the flickering buttons, some coming on, others dying out, she hoped she had time to fix things up, though why was something of a mystery, as, according to Jorge, nothing ever got moved or touched except by Mr. Hull’s wishes.

  Jenna swept over almost every art object with the soft towels, including the fat, laughing Buddhas, lining them up evenly on the shelves. Books that had crept out of place got pushed back. She glanced at a few titles and saw they all related to current events, mostly written by notables who had signed the first page. A little too intimate for her, this private contact; as if she were touching a part of the man himself. When she got to Hull’s desk, she found an antique silver frame that had fallen face down, and when she propped it up again saw a slender, dark-haired woman hugging two young girls in parkas, snow-capped mountains behind them. The family, no doubt, and she stopped a moment to see them better because they looked so happy. She closed the heavy office door behind her.

  Before she could run out to primp, a skinny man with red spiky hair brushed straight skyward popped his head around the doorway. “Want some shrimp amandine?” It was only five thirty in the afternoon, but perhaps dinner started early in these parts.

  “Hmm, I don’t know if I should.” Jenna was hungry and anxious, but she wanted to please Hull’s personal chef, mainly to score freebies she could take home. No gift too small in this, the dark-hearted city, so she took the plate and walked back to her desk, Chef Martin trailing behind.

  Jorge smiled over at her. “You’ve got to watch Martin. He’ll have us all fat.”

  “That is not true. My food is pure, no chemicals, no bad stuff, you will lose weight on it, I guarantee.” Martin retied his apron and straightened his bowtie while he spoke. His voice had a foreign ring to it, but Jenna couldn’t place the accent.

  She rushed through the delicious concoction to finish before the great man arrived, and indeed within moments after wiping her mouth and putting on more lipstick, she heard heavy footsteps coming toward them. Jorge made a sweeping hand gesture that signaled, Sit up straight. Down through the hall, they heard people greeting Mr. Hull, subdued though these greetings were, and she couldn’t pick up any reply from him at all. Hurriedly she wiped her mouth again, but not before a very tall man strode through the door.

  He didn’t look at her, didn’t look at Jorge either, and she only glimpsed an impressive profile. He went straight for his office, waving a hand in the air like the conductor of an orchestra. All Jenna had really seen was the back of him, his black leather jacket and his blue jeans.

  She looked over at Jorge uncertainly, who mouthed, “Just wait.” Nervously she wiped her mouth again, afraid of stray amandine, and for a whole hour she fretted; no sound from Hull’s office, only the ominous little gleam of the phone lights. What should she do? Jorge always worked feverishly, but he barely looked up. At last Hull buzzed her—she knew at least that much about the system, and she picked up. “Come in here, please,” the man said in a low, slightly less harsh voice than the one she had heard before.

  “Right away, sir.” To herself she made a face and then unaccountably threw her fingers up around her eyes like a pair of googly glasses, all the while shaking her head at Jorge, who laughed. Just then Vincent Hull popped his head out of the doorway, surveyed her for a moment, and waved her in.

  The powerfully built, tall man bent down over a package covered with customs stamps and bound with canvas straps, which he was trying to wrestle open. Jenna thought maybe she should help him but was too frightened to advance, worse yet to retreat, and so she waited. The silence had just about gotten to her when Hull looked up and fixed his dark brown eyes upon her, what the Irish call “speaking eyes.” His face was square, with a prominent nose and a high forehead, and his white hair curled slightly around his ears. This was the only soft feature on a big man who looked more like a well-dressed lumberjack than someone who ran a significant chunk of the New York world. He surveyed her and cleared his throat. “Do you like food?”

  “I eat it,” she said, a little too loudly, clasping her hands together to stop herself from fidgeting.

  “Some women don’t eat. Watch them at parties, they’re figuring how not to actually ingest anything.” He grabbed a box cutter from a drawer in the desk and began slashing at the carton.

  “Oh, that wouldn’t be my problem, as you can see.”

  Now he smiled, and it was a broad grin that made her sure his laugh would be even better. He sat himself down cross-legged in front of the box and began to root around with his hands. Out fell heaps of white Styrofoam popcorn. “Jorge tells me you’re handling the letters well.”

  “I don’t know, I mean they’re pretty disgusting. Umm, could I help you with that, sir?”

  “No.” He pulled out the black walnut stock of a hunting rifle from the rubble of plastic and ran his hand along it. “This is part of a custom made Mauser 98,” he said, and she watched silently as he assembled t
he pieces, several engraved with silver tracery. “What’s the matter? Not used to guns in Manhattan? Or just guns period?”

  “Not used to Manhattan with a gun in it.”

  He pointed the amazing firearm toward the floor-to-ceiling window before them. “I could drop anyone or anything with this, and from a long distance.”

  “‘When you’re dead, you’re dead, as dead as Kelsey’s nuts.’ That’s what my granny used to say. Nobody cares which gun shot you.” Hull let out a harsh laugh in Jenna’s direction and hugged the weapon to his wide chest. She forced herself to shut up. No chattering, another new mantra.

  Certainly, she had never seen the makings of a gun quite like this, but she had seen guns. From her stepfather she knew deer rifles firsthand. He would spend hours cleaning his latest firearm from the Galco Army store, spreading all the components down onto the kitchen table, then working away with baby diapers and oil, while a grainy, bitter smell filled the house. This in order to take potshots at the rabbits and gophers out in the yard, one of whom he nicknamed Billy. He became obsessed with this one particularly elusive bunny, but he never hit anything whatsoever, though Jenna had lived in fear that he might.

  “But you’re used to food, as you said.” Vincent Hull wiped his hand on his jeans and then stared at her again with those dusky eyes, and she knew he saw before him a non-New York kind of person. Plumper than her predecessors no doubt, with freckled skin, her hair bunched together imperfectly in a black barrette, today she wore a floaty yellow dress adorned with random daisies. It hugged her breasts, and Jenna could read the man’s blunt assessment, but didn’t move away from his concentrated look. After what seemed like forever, Hull cleared his throat. “I want you to take charge of the executive dining room. Jorge doesn’t have time, and it’s not rocket science, it’s food and people sitting at a table. You check in with Martin every morning, Jorge will give you the list of guests, and then you call and confirm each one. He’ll show you the menu. If there’s anything that looks disgusting, that’s where it’ll get tricky. You’ll have to handle that yourself.”