Jenna Takes the Fall Read online

  “That’s true.” Any controlled or witty language deserted her.

  “He’s not an easy man.” Jenna stood there watching as he continued to work on the stock of the gun, massaging it with a soft cloth. “Besides, there’s not that much for you to do, and I’m not here as often as I should be.”

  “That’s what I was told.” She was afraid to say too much, though felt certain that she already had, like a fool.

  “Jorge told you that?”

  “Was he not supposed to?”

  Now Hull just stared at her. “Okay, check with Martin tomorrow and see what’s happening. He needs all the help he can get.” As she walked out of the room, she felt conscious of how her body moved and that he must be assessing the dimensions of her rear end.

  Jenna had been in the great man’s office so long that, unusual for him, Jorge had stepped to the door to listen. When she finally reemerged, she almost ran right into him. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, but she brushed past him to flee what she considered the single most baffling interview she’d ever had.

  “I must be insane, talking that way. I can’t believe he asked me to take charge of Martin. That’s your job, isn’t it?” She plopped down into her desk chair, fooling with her hair compulsively.

  “Was my job, dear. I’m so happy. Never try to deal with a chef, just open your mouth and consume. Tell me, though, how did you get here?”

  “By subway.”

  “No, here in this office, at this time. You’re from Ohio, no?”

  “Right, Burton, Ohio, but I have connections, or my art prof does. He thought I needed a change, and you know, ‘a change is as good as a rest.’” Jenna gazed up at him philosophically.

  “It is?”

  “According to Granny Mac.”

  “My grandmother never said much except, ‘Shut the friggin’ door, you moron,’” but Jorge stopped himself from saying more, horrified at the cultural contrast between Queens and rural Ohio. Of necessity this young woman had to like him, because lately the mood in the Hull realm had turned even darker than usual, intensified, actually brought about by their leader himself, who, after years of being actively engaged, almost hyper-engaged, now occupied some mysterious psychological limbo. He refused to deal with the editors and writers at NewsLink, hid out at one of his far-flung residences for weeks at a time—even while his family remained in the city—and when he did come in, threatened bodily harm to his employees and then refused to acknowledge their existence, an unusual mode, since normally he charmed them to death or showered them with money after he had insulted them. It was ghastly, and Jorge had no playbook for this state of affairs. At the very least, he needed help. Jenna was the first decent candidate for a job that was both menial and important, and he could tell right away that gratitude was high on her list of virtues, as after the first interview she had thanked him at least five times and also sent him a handwritten card.

  THREE

  The next day Hull showed no signs of making an appearance, but Jorge shoved his personal schedule Jenna’s way. “Inscribed by the man himself,” he announced, as if it were a sacred document. Just a series of dates in big block handwriting. “You must have made a good impression.” Jorge patted her on the back. “Usually he communicates with a shout.”

  “You don’t care for him?” She looked up at the neat little man in his black V-neck sweater and his blue-checked shirt, apparently so comfortable in this Hull world. He looked like a professor of something serious, maybe statistics, and she almost waited for the word “stochastic” to fly out of his lips. What was his age, forty, fifty?

  “Liking isn’t really the issue with somebody like that. He’s the man, the one, he owns us, and we’re his little pawns. Is he a benevolent king? Uhh—no. Is he rational? Only sometimes. He wants big, and he gets big, but the bad that comes his way comes thick and fast and gets ugly fast too. You’ll see.”

  “I don’t know if I want to.”

  “Wanting isn’t allowed around here. Now get cracking. Here’s the list of writers invited for lunch, in-house people. Poor schmucks probably think the boss will show up.”

  Jenna straightened her tight blue skirt assertively and peeked through the door into the kitchen, where she saw the chef turning a wooden spoon around in a saucepan. He started when he heard her, throwing the spoon up vertically and waving it at her like a flag. “It’s beautiful. Those crummy journos don’t deserve this. Half of them smoke! They can’t taste anything, their lungs are shot, and they can’t smell either, but their clothes smell, you betcha.” He scooped out a bit of sauce and held it toward her. Something touched her tongue that was thick, buttery, exquisite, with a hint of sherry. “Oh my god, I can’t stand it,” she moaned.

  “Good, you’re my taster from now on. You appreciate Martin Riegel. You will be at the head of our unhappy band.” Martin had an airy, theatrical form of declamation, and it threw her off momentarily. “How many people are there today?”

  She looked down at her list. “I think about ten, though according to Jorge several of them haven’t responded.”

  “I must know, I must know now. Scallops wait for no man and certainly for none of the women around here.”

  Jenna hit the phones immediately, this time with success, and when, hours later, the participants filed in, she tried to appear cheerful and upbeat, welcoming them like a hostess. To the dismay of a number of them, Hull never did show up, but still they seemed grateful to feed in his lair. Most barely noticed her, but one tousle-haired young man, “Inti,” he had announced when he first arrived, had casually asked about the identity of the expected guests. Was “Inti” his name or an object of some kind? In any case, she couldn’t remember any of the names, and somehow or other she had misplaced the list. Inti was handsome in a boyish, off-kilter way, blue-eyed with curly black hair, a slightly crooked nose, and an expansive smile, very much at home in this setting, in contrast to a number of the other writers, who seemed harried, on edge. Was there more for her to do? There had been no job description at all, just get them in and out and satisfied.

  When the last invitee had trailed away, Jenna sank down into her chair with relief. “You note that most of them had no idea whether Mr. Hull would appear. Keep them in line, keep them wanting more, it’s a life technique. He should write a book on it.” So opined Jorge, in a sardonic, post-mortem mood. He perched on the side of her desk, quiet, concerned.

  “You really worry about him, don’t you?”

  “I do. He’s worth worrying about, despite all the bad stuff, or maybe because of it.”

  The next several days produced more lunches and another bag of letters, and Jenna found herself overwhelmed with food and bad handwriting. She saw nothing of Hull but felt him to be a looming presence, both in Jorge’s occasional asides and in Martin’s fuming and fussing about what the great man might like to eat, should he ever actually eat with them or somewhere near them. She had had a few disasters, as when an assistant ran in and handed her a list to be stealthily given to one of the writers while he was in attendance at lunch. This turned out to be an overdue dry cleaning bill, so Jenna took the heat, nasty heat too, from the angry writer himself. “Are you trying to fucking ruin me?” he hissed into her ear after everyone else had filed out.

  “I don’t even know you. Why would I be trying to do that? Your assistant gave me the note and said it was important.”

  “When I am in that room, nothing is important. My mother could eat anthrax, my father could set himself on fire, but it makes no goddamned difference to me. Got that?”

  “Of course. I’m sorry.” What was wrong with these people? Why should this man tie himself in knots over what happened in the dining room, since Hull hadn’t even been there to see the gaffe?

  Later, standing at the coffee cart, Jenna puzzled over her new situation, thrust upon her, it seemed, as a result of her professor doing her a good turn. She had hardly had time to recover from her grandmother’s demise when now she found herself at the
center of something that those who surrounded her gave great importance to, almost like life and death. Yet when she read NewsLink, she thought it just a slick summary of the news, lots of photos, almost every one embarrassing to the person caught in the act of whatever, the occasional gossip item with way too many column inches devoted to it, several features, almost all about state senators doing bad things, and quantities of sports. She sank down with her coffee into a chair in the hallway, though many passed her by, almost stepping on her. When the Inti guy again approached, she beamed. At last, someone she kind of knew. “Sort of a deer in headlights look you have about you, Miss McCann.” He sat down next to her. “I’m Inti, remember?”

  “Of course I remember. Guess I’m still back in Ohio, thinking about my grandmother.”

  “How is she?”

  “She died six months ago.” Inti looked abashed, but she continued. “She was ninety-four, and her helper stopped the clocks at the hour of her death, opened the window to let her spirit escape, and covered the mirrors out of respect, the Irish way. Granny didn’t suffer, she just forgot to take a breath. That made me feel better.”

  “I’m so sorry.” He’d just wanted coffee and to chat up a lovely girl, and now this.

  “I will never forget how beautiful she looked in her coffin.” Amid shuffling feet and chattering all around the coffee cart, Jenna wanted to cry. “‘Inti,’ what kind of name is that?”

  “The Inca sun god. I’m from Olympia, Washington, home of Evergreen College and innumerable hippies, among them my parents. Besides, they were desperate for sun, but they had to settle for me.”

  “I never heard that name before.”

  “No one else ever has either. How about I take you out to dinner Friday night? I’ll cheer you up.”

  “Wonderful.” He looked promising, fashionable in a beige linen jacket and navy slacks, and he might be interesting, what with that name. Positively everyone else here wore a black T-shirt and jeans, the men that is. The women writers, of whom there weren’t many, wore dark pants with a tailored blouse and a black jacket. They never said much, always just seemed to rush around in consternation. Besides, anything was better than another strained evening with her two roommates, one a skinny, eccentric person named Vera, who claimed to be in interior design. Jenna understood that to be retail, as in selling strange lamps and couches in Soho. The other girl, Allyson, a chunky, athletic blonde, worked at Chase Manhattan bank and, according to her, shuffled millions of dollars about daily. Smoking endless numbers of cigarettes while holding a beer, she then shot the butts through the little opening in the cans. She was carrying on an affair with a sportswriter at The New York Post and spent hours on the phone with him explaining herself, brew and cigs in hand.

  No news from Vincent Hull that day, so Jenna merely sat, opening up yet more letters, one containing a graying, mashed piece of chocolate, sent as a gift presumably, while Jorge answered phones and seemed to work on endless spreadsheets. So efficient, so competent he appeared, while she wondered how she’d managed this upward climb without having done much of anything. Despite the paltry salary, others considered her something of a higher-up, and after being here only one month. Extraordinary, undeserved, and she pondered her good fortune, swiveling her chair around toward the immense window that let her see down onto Fifth Avenue. The heat flickered in the air and caused ripples across the glass and steel of the buildings. It was a different kind of heat from what she knew in northeastern Ohio—that had been wet, like the sky sweating. Of the many things she hated about where she grew up, the weather loomed as her sworn enemy. Thank god she had gotten out, if only to land in this cauldron of blossoming, proliferating heat. According to her roommates, three more months of this weather, possibly four, loomed, and they moaned that there had been no spring at all.

  Jenna looked at her watch: almost five. Jorge was still working. On this night, her roommates had included her in their usual dinner at the neighborhood burger joint, probably because they felt guilty, having given her only a fold-up couch in the living room, but this was Gramercy Park after all, a posh address, no matter the small, dingy apartment. “Hey there, girl,” Jorge called over to her. “You’ve got a new assignment.”

  “I already know, managing Martin.”

  “That’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one, or possibly just a moron. No, we—and I do mean the imperial we—need you to pick up this special brand of bath oil and take it to the Hull hotel suite at Sixty-first and Park Avenue.”

  “Why do they have a hotel suite when they already have a townhouse?”

  “For guests, for relatives, for anyone they want to please.” Cryptically, he raised his eyebrows. “Don’t try to figure them out. It’s not possible.”

  Yes, this was why she had graduated college, struggled and gone into debt, and worked now for almost no money—for bath oil. The only compensation, she got to ride in the Hull limousine with Angelo, a round, redfaced Italian, with nine brothers, and he the youngest. “My god, do you have any idea of the odds against that? Statistically, of course, it was impossible, and my mother knew that somehow. A girl had to be forthcoming but never was. She blamed my father, naturally.”

  “Naturally.”

  While the gigantic vehicle idled outside, double-parked, Jenna entered an unlikely address on Madison Avenue, a place stuffed with dolls and jewelry, every surface covered with boas and rhinestone chandelier earrings. In among the frills lurked a dark blue bottle of oil from France, Huile d’Automne, so precious it fetched one hundred and fifty dollars an ounce.

  After much waiting, honking, and swearing on Angelo’s part, they had traveled two large city blocks across town and six uptown in the time it would have practically taken Jenna to drive from Columbus, Ohio, to Akron. Sweat flowed down the side of her blouse, and she would now have no time to make it to dinner with the ghastly roommates, at least some form of company on this lonely island. Worse yet, if Mrs. Hull looked up at all, she would find a scary slob at her door. Hoping at last to jump out and leg it, she stopped herself when Angelo said he was on the clock, and this was all part of his “let’s spend the rich people’s money” scheme, so they crawled. At long last, limo at the Regency Hotel, the doorman seemed prepared for her. “Don’t worry, he knows me,” Angelo explained as she clambered out and rushed in.

  Jenna had never been in such a place and straightened herself up just to look worthy of the lobby. With key in hand, she ascended to the tenth floor and traversed a hallway lined in plush dark blue carpet. Sliding the plastic card into the slot, she waited a moment before getting up the courage to enter, but when she did, she encountered a setting more like a museum: heavy burgundy curtains, gray velvet furniture, and golden light fixtures. Yellow calla lilies soared out of a glass vase on a round mahogany table.

  As she edged forward, uncertain where to find the bathroom, she heard a sound coming from behind one of the closed doors. Someone was there, the maid perhaps. Cautiously, Jenna moved into a large living room area, seeing no one, but then she heard a woman’s voice, loud, angry, and moments later, crying. Not sniffling, but wracking sobs. “Oh don’t say that, don’t say it’s hopeless. I love you.” Jenna backed up right away into the table and nearly knocked over the flowers. Should she leave the oil right here and flee? But these had not been her instructions, and she was insanely curious, anyway. As she rounded the corner, through another half-open door, she spotted an athletic leg swinging back and forth and a black phone cord draped over a well-manicured foot. The foot stopped swinging, so too the wailing. In the ominous silence, Jenna advanced toward the door, and as she did so, a woman’s voice rang out in a distinctly French accent. “Hello? Who’s there?”

  “Hi, it’s just me, Jenna McCann, from the office?” She uttered this last bit as a question.

  “You can’t come in here.” But in another moment the door opened, and Jenna found herself in front of a trim woman possibly in her thirties, whom she recognized from the office photo as Mrs. Hull. She was
dressed in yoga pants and a T-shirt as if she had just stopped in from the gym and wore a thick diamond eternity band on her ring finger. Pushing a strand of dark hair behind her ear, she grabbed a Kleenex out of a box on the table and wiped her eyes. “Oh, the oil. Thank you, put it down here,” she said, but then she hid her face in the crook of her arm. After waving at Jenna in dismissal, she blew her nose and once again picked up the phone. Jenna could hear only an angry comment as she backed out of the room. “That’s the way he always is, c’est dégoûtant.”

  Jenna hurried along the ornate corridors of the hotel, embarrassed at coming upon so intimate a scene. She wouldn’t tell Jorge about the crying. It just seemed too personal, and due to her own tumultuous family times, she had vast experience in keeping secrets. Maybe she could make it in time for a burger, even though her roommates condescended to her so aggressively. At least she would have some company.

  “How was the little woman?” Angelo waved her into the enormous vehicle.

  “Unhappy, really unhappy.”

  “Oh dear, we go by the Mafia code around here, omertà all the way. Just don’t say anything.”

  “As if anyone I know would be interested.”

  “Please. There’s a world of gossip out there.” As soon as he said this, Jenna insisted on jumping out of the car and headed for the subway. This New York life was just too weird, too unreal. Through the grime and heat and late dinner-eaters rushing about, she got herself to McSwiggan’s pub near Gramercy Park, heartened to see Vera and Allyson drinking martinis perilously close to a television dangling above their heads. She waved, and several guys in suits looked over, but the noise was too great, and the need for solace so immediate that she sped her way through the crowd, not even looking. “Hey you,” Allyson sang out, and at once Jenna felt herself at home. She knew someone, and that someone called out to her. “We waited for you.”