The Deed (12 page)

He chuckled. “Hello?”

“Jason, I’m glad you’re in,” said a frosty female voice. Horror of horrors—it was the great and terrible Diana. “Can you come into my office, please?”

His heart deflated instantly. “Oh, hi, Diana. I’m on the other line with the client—can I come in in a few minutes?”

“Yep,” she said tersely, hanging up without further comment.

He retrieved his grandmother. “Sorry about that, Grandma.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“Oh, it’s no problem,” she assured him. “I feel like a thoroughly modern girl. Anyway, I hope I was able to help you, Jason.”

“Well, yes, you have, thank you. But I’m really trying to go back further,” he said gently. “Back a
long
way…all the way back to when our family came over from Holland, if possible. Do you know if we have any old papers or anything?”

“I’m afraid not,” she replied. “There were a lot of old family files we lost in a fire about forty years back. Daguerrotypes and everything. We had an old family Bible that had a lot of names in it too, but it was lost as well. I wonder if anybody ever made a copy.”

He checked his watch absently: time to wrap this up. He hit her up for some particulars on how to find the graveyard, made a little more small talk catching up with what was left of the extended family, and began forging an exit.

“Thanks, Grandma. You remember a lot.”

“Well, it’s a shame you never got much of a chance to talk to your parents about it, God bless them,” she said. “A boy should have a father. It was lovely talking to you, dear.”

They only died last year,
he said to himself.

Hanging up, Jason looked over his notes thoughtfully.
The Haansvoort family graveyard,
he thought, rolling the phrase over on his tongue. Who said nothing good would come of this?

Crap—Diana,
he reminded himself with a shudder.
This should be fun.
He took a slug of the now-tepid coffee, wishing he could kick it up a notch with some whiskey, and stared at the phone for a long minute, as if hoping for a reprieve from the governor.

The simultaneous dismantling and refurbishing of the office that was now Diana’s had produced a number of little undecided islands: squat towers of books perched atop file cabinets, ergonomic plastiform chairs piled high with bound files, and, alone on a librarian’s gurney by the door, a forlorn first-generation IMAC, its now-useless plug dangling down over its face like a renegade cowlick. Behind a desk curiously out of parallel with the wall, Diana cradled a phone to one ear and signaled for Jason to
Come in, come in,
in a rushed one-handed semaphore. A van Gogh sunflower print from the Met leaned hopefully against one wall in mute protest at the institutional gray of the room, though whether it was coming or going was anybody’s guess.

“No, I don’t want to
talk
about it anymore,” Diana ranted into the phone. “Every item on that list is necessary and I’m not discussing it again. Do you understand?”

She paused, flashing Jason an openmouthed,
Can-you-believe-these-brain-dead-peons?
expression as she listened to the pitiful miscreant on the other end of the line stammer out a feeble excuse. “Look, just fill the goddamn requisition,
then
send your little messenger up here now, and my secretary will fill out all your little forms,” she hissed. “That’s all.
Thank
you.”

Slamming the phone down with a plastic clang, Diana looked up at last, rolling her eyes in a slow boil of frustration. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Thanks for coming by, Jason. You want coffee or something?”

More than life,
he was thinking, but declined with a shake of his head; it was at cross-purposes with his goal of keeping this meeting as short as possible.

“Well, I’m going to have some, so don’t be shy,” she enjoined, gleefully stabbing a button on her intercom. “Janine!” she barked at top volume, as if testing the microphone.

A small commotion in the outer room convinced Jason that Diana’s frazzled secretary had just been startled into falling off her chair, or tossing a stack of papers high into the air. Diana continued, without waiting for a response, “Get me, please, a coffee, black, with cream and sugar on the side.” She covered the phone with one hand and added, to Jason, “Last chance…”

“I’m set,” he replied, and Diana released the intercom button. She frowned at a Post-it note on her desk before crumpling it violently.

“Sorry about the craziness,” she said insincerely. “Oh, listen, could you shut the door for us, please? That’d be great.”

Jason was half a beat slow in rising to oblige; first, because there was a small dignity in such acts of fleeting resistance, and second, because he’d never felt less inclined to seal himself in with another living creature. Diana had always been deeply irritating, a socially graceless politicker of the first order, but it was already clear that her promotion had brought out her inner tyrant. He wondered whether the “us” in “shut the door for us” was meant to include him or not. The subtext of this meeting had begun to dawn on him, and even as he reached for the knob to do her bidding he realized that had the door been closed, she’d have required him to open it.

“Thanks,” she offered when he returned, features cringing inauthentically in a
Don’t-mundane-tasks-suck?
expression.

“No problem,” he replied woodenly.

“Isn’t this
exciting?
” she asked, confirming his worst suspicions. “Not my little renovation, I mean the whole…transition.”

Dear God; how to answer this one.
“I guess I’m still a little bewildered,” Jason replied, stalling, hoping he could pinpoint what she wanted from him before he made an irreparable blunder.

“Of course, it’s unfortunate for certain individuals, obviously,” she conceded. “Pete Halloran, for example; it’s too bad. But you know what? The ship wasn’t exactly being run one hundred percent efficiently, if you know what I mean. I think we’ll look back in six months and realize this was the best thing for Y & G.”

Jason was horrified: Less than a day into her promotion, and here she was, cheerfully parroting company dogma straight from the peppy in-house newsletter.
This could be the beginning of a beautiful, deep-seated loathing,
he decided. Any residual guilt he’d been carrying around for disliking Diana for no definable reason flaked harmlessly off into the wind.

“But how do
you
feel?” Diana wanted to know. “I know you and Pete were kind of close…Do you resent that he was fired?”

Jason’s brow furrowed.
“Resent” it? What kind of grade school psychiatrist crap is that?
“Well, I don’t understand it, to be frank,” he admitted warily. “But I wouldn’t say I ‘resent’ it, exactly. I don’t really have that kind of…personal investment in my coworkers’ lives. It does seem like there must have been better, smarter…ways to trim the staff, if that’s what needed to be done.”

Watch your step, dumbshit,
he chided himself. Diana’s eyes remained fixed on his the whole time, while her head nodded stupidly—
I see, I see
—a meat metronome.

Suddenly, the rationale behind Diana’s uncanny good fortune autofocused into perfect clarity. She’d been promoted not
in spite of
being unqualified, but
because
she was unqualified, and thus utterly beholden to whatever superior had created her. Diana represented the perfect empty vessel: eager to tank up on the new corporate spirit and redistribute it at full strength to the rank and file, to police her fellow inmates in exchange for a seat in the officers’ mess.

What I resent,
he realized,
is having to treat you as a superior until I decide whether I’m going to quit or not.

Diana’s response was charitably postponed by a double knock at the door, heralding the arrival of Janine. She’d shanghaied an inverted legal pad into service as a wobbly tea tray for a sloshing cup of coffee and a handful of sugars and creamers; her haunted face spoke volumes.

Completing her delivery without incident, Janine turned and was on the verge of escape when Diana, staring coffeeward, called her back. “Oh—could you put that in there for me?” she said, indicating the cream and sugar, scrunching up her face like a little girl. “Jason, this is the best assistant in New York,” she gushed, and he was ashamed to find his head nodding and smiling obsequiously of its own accord as Janine quietly, robotically, retraced her steps, tore open the packets, and swizzled them into the brew.

“Anyway,” Diana continued after Janine had slunk out to kill herself, “the reason I called you in was to get a kind of an update. Now, you’re working on…?”

“Hair Peace,” he replied robotically. “For Johnson and Beatrice. It’s still in the early stages.”

“And how long have we had that account?”

Is that the corporate “we” or the patronizing “we”?
Jason wondered silently. “About four months, I guess,” he estimated.
Six months, seven months.
“I’ve only been on it for a couple of weeks.”

“Okay,” she said. “And what else?”

Jason shook his head, not comprehending.

“Are you working on.”

I’m being fired,
he realized with a shock. “That’s all,” he had to confess. “I was on Automatic Static, but Halloran thought I should concentrate on the one.”

“Ah,” said Diana, rhythmically tapping her pencil on her chin, in a Morse code that seemed to translate as:
So, how long have the two of you been conspiring to defraud the company?

Jason started bailing. “It’s an unusually difficult project, conceptually,” he tried to explain. “Y and G have had…a number of false starts.”

Diana removed the swizzle stick dramatically, like a sword, and took a tentative sip of coffee. “Well, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that the glory days of languishing on just one project are over,” she informed him bluntly. “Starting in about two weeks, everyone at your level’s going to have at least three projects to work on. We’re about to become a leaner, meaner, more competitve organization.” She took another tiny sip, though perhaps only for the dramatic pause. “It’s going to call for a lot of hard work and quick results—no more sitting around for a month here, a month there. I’m not naming any names, you understand, Jason. I’m just talking generalities.”

Jason didn’t respond; in his head he was quietly lowering his new boss, tied and gagged on a chain, her power suit stuffed with Alpo beef chunks, into a kennel full of yelping, half-starved Dobermans.

“And that’s the real reason I called you in, Jason,” she continued, cliché piling on top of cliché in a rising crescendo as she prepared her summation. “What I need from you…”

Bring me the head of John the Baptist.

“…is to know whether being a part of this organization is something you’re still interested in.”

Jason was dizzy with despair.
This is happening too fast,
he protested,
way too fast.
As a rough equal, Diana had simply annoyed him; as a superior, her very presence brought rage to his brain like mercury rising in a thermometer pinned by a ten-year-old’s magnifying glass.

“So…,” she pressed, uncomfortable with his pause, “what do you think?”

As if from across a canyon, he heard himself reply tamely, “Well, I guess I’ll have to roll with whatever…the new rules are. But I feel compelled to say that I think putting emphasis on quantity over quality is…ill-advised, even as a transitional plan. We’re a creative agency; we live or die by the end product.”

“Thanks for the primer,” said Diana coldly, keeping her eyes locked to his. “But that’s not
really
the answer I’m looking for. No one’s suggesting that we sacrifice quality for…efficiency. The point is that we have to face up to the realities of the new marketplace; we can’t continue to produce at the old pace.”

Come on, boy: We playin’ ball or what?