The Receptionist Read online

  These are the things you should be focusing on, I wanted to say. This is what you should aspire to. Everything else is madness.

  Maybe I should have said it. Maybe she would have taken the advice, embarked on a shallow existence, and left us alone. Maybe she would have dismissed me as a materialistic loon. I refuse to speculate. Turning philosophical is the last refuge of the pathetic.

  I believe in judgment. I believe in assigning blame. Everything that came after was Doug’s fault.

  And I did try to help Chloe that day in my office. I used my gentlest tone as I said, “You’ll need to upgrade that purse if you want to be taken seriously.”

  She looked like I’d smacked her.

  I almost said I was sorry, that I didn’t mean it to come out that way. I almost told her not to worry about any of this because life was long, and she was young and probably wouldn’t even remember this in a couple of years. But I said nothing.

  You have to be careful of people.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHLOE

  Chloe makes a wrong turn out of Doug’s wife’s office. She’s desperate to escape Emily, escape the RFG Entertainment building, but nothing is ever easy. She starts left instead of right. The assistant jumps up from his desk and says, “No, this way.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Chloe. She stumbles as she turns, and her cheeks—she can barely see over them. It’s like they’re bulging, like her whole body is swelling with shame.

  Just twenty minutes earlier, she was fearless, bounding down this same hall with disorienting optimism. She had a meeting at RFG! She had a contact! Contacts. Networking. It’s who you know. That’s what everyone says. But these things that work for other people, they never work for Chloe.

  She lunges for the elevator button. She can feel the agents and their underlings on the floor behind her, watching. The elevator is empty, thank God, and for a moment, she’s safe. But then, every few seconds, it stops with an agonizing bell chime. The doors open to clone after clone of Doug’s wife. They crowd the car in groups of two and three, and it doesn’t matter if they’re male or female; they’re the same, all bundled against the air-conditioning in their sleek gray suits and closed-toed shoes.

  Chloe’s instinct is to smile, to offer them tiny greetings. But no one reciprocates. Instead, each person gives Chloe a hard once-over, and not with jealousy or lust like she’s used to but with an authoritative sweep from her hair to her roman sandals. They assess and ignore, and Chloe stares down at the nail polish chip on her right big toe and wonders, Why, oh why didn’t I get a pedicure? These are the type of people who notice feet.

  She hits the lobby atrium and winces at the sight of the giant Calder mobile. It’s imposing now, casting its translucent shadow across the marble floor. On the way in, she was comforted by the artwork, by the thought that it had started just as an idea in someone’s head. Chloe swallows. She focuses on the front door as she passes the guard booth. She’s almost out of the building when she senses she’s in trouble. It’s always there, that feeling she’s about to be yelled at, but right now it’s strong.

  “Miss,” she hears. “Excuse me.”

  It’s the security lady, calling out to her.

  “What’s the matter?” Chloe asks.

  “Do you—”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Do you need your—”

  “What?”

  The lady thrusts out her bosom with the shiny brass badge and draws out every syllable. “Your parking. Do you need it validated?”

  “No, I parked on the street.”

  The people around Chloe stop, listen, and stare. The lady puts a smile and a frown on her face in a way that no one ever does, and Chloe’s body sparks in anger. That’s not a real expression, Chloe thinks. She’s just showing off. Chloe turns her head hard to her right, to give one of the bystanders a dirty look, but the guy’s back is turned. He’s studying the directory.

  She speed walks out the door, into the sun, and down the street. She waits until she’s across the six lanes of Wilshire Boulevard before she turns around. The top half of the agency is still visible, a monolith of dark amber jutting up over its neighbors like a middle finger. She flips a bird back to the building and glances at the bright smattering of pedestrians on the sidewalk. No one noticed what she did. She can’t act like that in public, making obscene gestures at buildings. It’s how things unravel.

  She leans against one of the Beverly Wilshire’s front columns. The terra-cotta is hot and sandpapery on her shoulder. She closes her eyes, trying to make the last half hour of her life go away, but the memory of meeting Doug’s wife keeps replaying like a looping GIF. She’s looking for the flyer, and she can’t find the flyer, and what did Doug’s wife say? That her purse was ugly? How did that awful woman end up with someone as amazing as Doug?

  Doug. Chloe keeps her eyes shut and touches her collarbone. She conjures an image of her boss in one of his faded T-shirts, leaning over her desk and whispering, I’m sorry my wife was mean.

  “Are you all right?”

  Chloe opens her eyes. There’s a lady in front of her with a face full of wrinkles crisscrossing into matronly disapproval. She’s close enough for Chloe to smell her coffee breath, to grab her silk scarf if she wants to. Chloe shuts her eyes again. Go away, go away, go away.

  “It’s hot out,” says the woman. She reaches for Chloe. Her fingers touch Chloe’s arm.

  “Boundaries!” Chloe screams. She slaps the woman’s hand away. But it’s not enough. There’s a wave inside her, and it’s fiery and cresting, pushing her forward, toward the woman’s chest until Chloe has shoved the woman back a step. Chloe wants to hit her. She raises her hand.

  A picture enters her mind then: a vivid blip of a different old lady falling to the ground. A half-cried moan of “Why!”

  Chloe stops. This surge, this continuing of anger, she’s been trained to recognize it. She can choose to interrupt it. She can calm down. She lowers her hand and takes a deep, conscious inhale, but the woman—if only the woman would stop moving too—the woman spreads her hands across her neck, all imperious, like she’s never been told to mind her own business, like she’s never had to worry about getting punched in the face.

  “You pushed me!” yells the woman. She turns to the crosswalk, where a man in a suit is watching. The lady points at Chloe. “She pushed me!” The man starts toward them.

  One, two, three, Chloe thinks. She blows air through her lips, like she’s blowing through a straw. She unclenches her fingers. Four, five, six. She holds up her hands. Her fingers are splayed. The woman flinches.

  “I didn’t,” says Chloe. “You grabbed me.”

  “I was trying to help.”

  A young woman in a printed maxi dress joins them. “Is everything okay?”

  The man reaches them. The lady starts explaining how Chloe looked like she was fainting, hanging on to the pillar. Chloe wants to run. But they’ll chase her if she runs.

  The bystanders’ eyes are on the old woman. Chloe takes a sideways step. They don’t notice. She backs up. She turns and walks at a normal pace. She doesn’t look their way, doesn’t jinx her head start. The Beverly Wilshire doorman smiles as she enters yet another marble lobby blasting cold air.

  “Where’s the bathroom?” she asks.

  “Up those stairs and to your left,” says the doorman.

  Chloe navigates around the clusters of tourists snapping selfies in front of jewelry displays. She locks herself in an empty bathroom stall. Her phone chimes. “Shit!” she says and turns it off.

  She waits. She slows her breathing. Someone in kitten heels enters and click-clacks across the tile floor. Chloe lifts her feet. She scrunches her whole body on the toilet and holds her breath as the person tries her door.

  The person moves to the next stall over. Chloe digs a fingernail into the side of her thumb. The skin there is sore and raked over.

  This thing, it keeps happening. When she goes outside, there’s trouble. It
doesn’t matter how many warnings she gets, how many anger-management classes they make her take. It doesn’t matter that her public defender got her latest expunged, that she has a clean slate. Even with all the help, she never knows how she’ll react to provocation.

  The bathroom door opens again. Chloe winces. She braces herself as the sound of footsteps approaches her stall. Please, Chloe thinks. Please. Get me out of this. I swear I’ll never lose my temper again.

  PART TWO

  EMILY

  CHAPTER THREE

  EMILY

  After Chloe stumbled out of my office, I closed the door and stared at my cell phone on my desk, lit up with a dozen notifications urging me to get back to work. But all I could think of was Doug.

  He’d asked only once if I was pregnant, months before, on that first morning after Bella had gone missing. I’d just thrown up in the guest bathroom, the one I’d had tiled in abalone shell. I could see him approach in the mirror behind me. He ran his fingers through his messy hair and folded his hands at his waist, looking penitent. I dabbed toothpaste on my tongue and wondered again, in a flutter of panic, if he’d had something to do with Bella’s disappearance. He asked if I was pregnant. I lied. I said it was impossible.

  Admitting I could be pregnant would have made it real.

  I spent the next weeks ignoring the little invader, the tiny alien inside my body, like some teen mom in denial, terrified of consequences, of bringing a child into our depraved world. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have a plan. That was the worst part, that this man I’d married, who thrived on chaos and poor impulse control, had finally infected me, turned me into an improviser just like him.

  But after Chloe left, I reached for my phone, propelled by some final rush of tenderness, an echo of affection. Doug and I had once been a team.

  His phone went to voice mail after five rings. I hung up.

  How? I wanted to ask him. How did we get here?

  I was single for the whole year leading up to meeting him. I’d just turned thirty-six and was working a respectable client list at a small agency in West Hollywood when my dog, my snapping, haughty Pomeranian named Gucci, died.

  She’d been my mom’s. Bequeathing Gucci to me had been one of the many logistical obsessions consuming my mother on the hospice bed set up in my parents’ living room. Her death wasn’t peaceful. She spent her last days restless, wedged there between the La-Z-Boy and the overstuffed couch. Every few minutes near the end, she’d startle and strain to lift her downy head, whispering with an urgency that made me rush to her side, thinking she was about to confess some tragic secret.

  “If you take the limo to the grave site,” she said at one point, “you’ll need a ride back to town.”

  “Mom, it’s okay.”

  “It’s not,” she said. “Your father can’t handle Gucci.”

  “I’ll take her.”

  She turned her face away from me and reached unsuccessfully for the bedside rail. “You’re a good girl,” she murmured. “You be good.” She fell back asleep before I could ask if she was being sarcastic, if that was her parting shot. I pressed back into the La-Z-Boy and closed my eyes. No. My mom wouldn’t do that. She wasn’t like me.

  After the funeral, after lunch with my family and friends who’d made the trek up to Figblossom Valley from LA, I opened the door to my Range Rover and made kissing noises, summoning Gucci to the driveway of my parents’ split-level ranch. She pranced to the foot of the lawn and panted at the edge of the asphalt.

  “Come on,” I said. Her face was fox-like and smiling.

  She touched a front paw to the blacktop and sat on the grass. It was too hot. I shook my head. I’d been back a month and was sick of the daily miseries of life in my desert hometown: the burning tar underfoot, the untouchable steering wheels.

  “Wally!” I shouted. My brother opened the front door and stood in his undershirt behind the screen. He’d gotten a haircut for the funeral, a flattop, buzzed on the sides.

  “Where are Gucci’s bootees?” I asked.

  “Dogs don’t need shoes.”

  “I gave them to Mom for her birthday.”

  Wally yelled to my sister-in-law inside the house. “Jessica? You see those dog shoes anywhere?” I didn’t hear Jessica’s answer, only the muffled sound of my dad coughing in his upstairs bedroom. Wally turned back with a shrug. “Sorry.”

  I swept Gucci under my arm. She weighed less than a baby doll and gave an appreciative moan when I plopped her on the passenger seat. She climbed onto my lap as I sped south on the freeway and lay there the entire three-hour drive south to LA.

  I petted her. I needed her. She was my tether, my tactile reminder of what had just happened.

  I’d grown accustomed to this euphoric feeling whenever I drove out of the Mojave, leaving behind the windowsill knickknacks and wall-to-wall mediocrity of my childhood. On this trip, though, it scared me, how quickly that familiar joy came rushing back. As I drove through the Cajon Pass, the world started to seem unreal. The sun dipped behind the hill, and the lack of shadow afterward made the puckered dirt on either side of the highway look two dimensional, the shrubs like cardboard cutouts.

  It was as if my mother’s life had been reduced to a movie, and I was now casually exiting the theater. I kept a hand on Gucci, smoothing her coat. This poor, motherless pup, I kept thinking, until I was finally overtaken by a reassuring wave of anguish. I was grateful for my tears, for my ability to experience an appropriate emotion.

  Gucci and I spent the next few weeks protecting one another in our grief. I brought her everywhere, to work, to the store. I tucked her in my purse. She let out high-pitched yaps from under my arm and nipped at anyone who dared approach me.

  She died, though. She was old. I was ready to pay the veterinarian $1,000 for a necropsy. It was unfair that I’d lost my dog, that I’d lost my mom. I wanted him to uncover foul play, some excuse for retribution.

  But I couldn’t afford the vet’s fee. My credit cards were maxed out.

  My finances came at me like whiplash. I’d almost forgotten that I needed to make money. I worked on commission. And I’d done well until that point. Agenting was lucrative. But my mother’s death had distracted me. I’d looked away for what I thought was a reasonable amount of grieving time, and my career was suddenly in danger.

  I came back from lunch one Tuesday to find my boss, Frank, a quick-tempered man with a bulbous nose, standing in the gray-carpeted hallway outside my office. “Fire sale on Emily’s clients!” he bellowed as I approached. He paused his speech, waiting for my colleagues to poke their heads out of their doorways. Public humiliation was his specialty. “You know what your good doctor has been up to?” He wagged a finger at me. “She just had lunch, in Beverly Hills! With Gerry Handman and Faye Watts!” He was referring to my star client, my celebrity psychiatrist, Dr. Maryn. She’d just met with people from a major agency, an iconic one, based out of Century City.

  My mother just died, you fucking asshole! I wanted to shout, but instead I let my upper lip curl into a snarl. Dr. Maryn was mine. I’d discovered her seven years before, scouring local news stations around the country for star commentators. There she was, a “special contributor” to the NBC affiliate in Saint Louis, standing amid the rubble of a collapsed apartment building as she simultaneously reported on the scene and counseled the survivors. Her compassion was outsize, and her hair was cut in a bright-red pixie. I loved the hair more than anything, a ready-made signature.

  After I signed Dr. Maryn, I got her gigs on national news, appearing live via satellite after the latest hurricane or mass shooting. Within two years, she was headlining her own talk show. She now hosted and executive produced two additional reality shows. Her book, Ten Hacks to the Life You Deserve, was a bestseller for fifteen straight weeks.

  “Emily!” Frank was now yelling. His jacket collar bunched around his neck as he pointed at me. “Where’s your head at, girl? This is the major leagues!” My arms were bare in my
silk shell. I could feel my exposed skin betraying me in a web of blotch and goose bumps. I brought my hands to my biceps.

  “Frank, I just found out about the lunch.” I looked to my colleagues, hoping for just one sympathetic glance, but every one of them avoided my gaze. Cowards.

  I went into my office. It was small, a glorified cubicle. My desk was made of plastic. How was I supposed to keep pace with my most ambitious clients in this shitty workspace?

  I leaned against the door and covered my face with my hands, cursing Dr. Maryn. She didn’t care how much I’d hustled. She didn’t care how many hours I’d spent demanding and pleading and cajoling on her behalf until I couldn’t stand to hear my own voice anymore. I was alone. The world was a brutal place. It would only turn crueler if I let myself fail.

  It wasn’t a question of working harder. I’d tried that. It wasn’t enough. What I needed was power. What I needed was to destroy my fucking boss, Frank, for screaming at me.

  I grabbed a pen and legal pad and sat at my desk. I had to find an area for Dr. Maryn to grow. I sketched a map of everything I’d done for her, with each category spindling out to various subheadings and ancillary deals. Her television show led to her production company, which led to her book deal, which led to product licensing and massive fees speaking at conferences. It was all connected.

  But there was one word, TECH, floating unconnected near the edge of the page like an abandoned satellite. I circled it. Dr. Maryn had a website, of course. She was on Twitter and had a mobile app. But she was using them the same way every celebrity did: for promotion, outtakes from her show, and a social networking element that no one ever used.

  Tech was where we would innovate.

  I flew to her vacation home in Saint Louis, a new mansion still smelling of paint, with front columns and a three-story foyer. Dr. Maryn and her husband, Stan, greeted me at the front door in matching Lycra. They were the same height, with the same short haircuts and rubbery divots above their lips. I heard the shouts and splashes of her grandkids in the pool out back. I knew the children. They called me Aunt Emily. But Maryn and Stan didn’t invite me to the patio like usual. They didn’t even offer me water. Instead, they led me to a seldom-used front parlor decorated like the lobby of a grand hotel. This meeting was their final courtesy.