The Receptionist Page 4

  The waitress returned with menus. Doug ordered a mushroom flatbread and another round of drinks. He ignored her attempts at eye contact and grazed my leg with his hand as he gave the menus back. He looked at me for a moment without speaking.

  “Don’t do the children’s-antidepressant thing,” he said. “At least don’t have Dr. Maryn prescribe it on the show.”

  “We’ll have safeguards,” I said. “Medicate only the kids who need it.”

  He shook his head. “You know something will go wrong with that, and then you guys will try to cover it up. You might even be able to. But it’ll rot your soul.”

  But there was no reversing course, not after the network’s ad sales had gotten involved. I swallowed against the muscles tightening in my throat. Morality was a luxury at this point.

  He put a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll make it disappear. I’ll do a survey. We’ll make sure it points away from drug placement.”

  “Okay,” I said. I took a deep, involuntary inhale and missed my mother, with a sudden longing, a ferocity completely out of sync with the party happening around me. The bar was now standing room only.

  Doug looked out at the crowd and raised his voice over the clamor. “I think we’re the oldest people here.”

  Doug put his hand on my back as we made our way past the smokers in front of the entrance. I handed him my valet ticket and walked away to take a work call. When I came back, he kissed me.

  “You’re tipsy,” he said. “Let me drive.”

  “Where?”

  “My house.”

  “I have to get my car.”

  “Your car is fine. She can leave her car, right?”

  Doug slipped the nearest valet guy a tip and opened his arm to shepherd me to the passenger side of his Porsche. I looked back, to the crowd around the entrance, imagining Dr. Maryn and Stan among them, sanctioning my decision to go home with this man.

  He lived in Malibu, and his house was narrow, set into a small cliff dropping off the Pacific Coast Highway into the ocean. The entrance was on the top floor. I counted three bedrooms before we descended to a spare living room and kitchen decorated in standard-issue modern: Barcelona sofa, Noguchi table, Egg Chair. The style was overwhelmingly male and musky. It needed softening, a shag rug or mismatched pillows. The couch would have to go.

  There was a sliding glass door leading to a balcony. I watched his reflection in the glass as he walked behind me to the refrigerator. He pulled out a bottle of wine. I turned. His counters were granite. Those would have to go too. I’d been lusting after a bright-blue stone from Brazil, azul macauba, that would be perfect for a breakfast bar.

  He picked up a corkscrew and pointed toward the door. “I’ll meet you on the deck.”

  Stepping outside was like boarding a boat. The ocean came right up under the balcony, the waves surging below the floorboards. I leaned over the railing and watched the sea-foam swirl around the pylons.

  Doug came out with a glass of wine and stopped close beside me, injecting desire into the thin strip of air between us. He pointed over my shoulder. “Can you see the tip of that rock?” he said. “Where the water is breaking up a little?”

  I saw a hint, a gleam, of some barnacle-covered magic in the distance.

  “That’s where the waterline is at low tide. If the conditions are right, I take my paddleboard out before work.”

  I waited for him to say something else, something about me. He wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me toward him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I always stayed friendly with the men I dated. Former lovers were scattered through my network, creating sweet little pockets of intimacy and allyship. That was what I thought Doug would turn into: someone I could call on for favors. But we lasted, spending nearly every night together after the first few weeks. We formed our own unit. We’d stay up late during the week, having sex and then opening up our laptops and strategizing about the Dr. Maryn Store and his EEG project. We always woke early after an especially busy night, going out for an extra-long run before sunrise. It was exhilarating, jogging by all those dark windows, all those sleeping people.

  I hired his company, Beyond the Brand, to help out full-time on the Dr. Maryn project. Sometimes he did research for us. Other times, he was just my sounding board. I’d never ventured so far outside the entertainment industry. I was incredulous the first time one of our press releases was vetted for accuracy. If we couldn’t throw around terms like miracle cure and magical properties to describe FDA-approved drugs, how were we going to make them sexy? I considered handing off some negotiations to my colleagues in business development, but Doug wouldn’t let me.

  “They’ll take the whole thing from you,” he said. “Don’t you dare tell me you can’t handle this.”

  I made a generous deal for Beyond the Brand to sell Doug’s EEG and app through the Dr. Maryn Store. His products weren’t ready yet. He had to make the EEG smaller and sleeker, make it fashionable so people would wear it in everyday life, but it also had to function like a hospital-grade EEG. It was tricky. None of this was fun or glamorous. It was just hard work. That was our specialty.

  Doug helped me the most with the tech consultancy we’d hired to develop the platform.

  Erik, the project manager, was in his early thirties. He had fluffy, overly shampooed hair that would fill our morning meetings with the sharp scent of Pert Plus. I could never look at him without picturing him in a steamy bathroom, applying bits of toilet paper to his shaving nicks.

  Erik was a pain in my ass.

  He wanted to leave the Dr. Maryn Store open to independent companies so that any random person could list an app for sale on our site. I kept telling him no. We were selling exclusive deals with major brands. He never listened. Whenever I spoke, he’d look down at his phone.

  I called Doug when I was frustrated. He let me vent. He even argued once for Erik’s side. We were in his car, on the way to dinner, when he said, “Just playing devil’s advocate here, but you guys are going to amass a whole hell of a lot of data.”

  That was our sticking point. Erik, and now Doug, loved to talk about all the data we’d be capturing. But Dr. Maryn couldn’t sell any of it. She was a doctor.

  “This is people’s medical information,” I said.

  “But that’s the beauty of making it open to third-party developers,” Doug said. “If some app swoops in and steals people’s psychiatric histories, you can say you didn’t know anything about it.”

  He pulled up to the restaurant valet. A man in a red vest opened my door. I put a hand on Doug’s arm. “Doug, you were the one who said we needed to protect Dr. Maryn’s credibility.”

  “Are you talking about that pay-to-play scheme? With the children’s antidepressants? You were going to endanger kids. Plus, it was so obvious. Anyone watching would know something was up as soon as Maryn started spouting off brand names. This, with the apps, the data, it’s behind the scenes. A secret.”

  “And you called me sleazy!”

  The valet opened Doug’s door. He started out, but I gripped his arm tighter, feeling suddenly unstable. I’d thought Doug had been working off some sort of moral core, that he had a set of principles I could lean on, borrow from.

  He squinted at me. “Actually, you’re right,” he said. “A flood of apps from wherever, it would end up being chaos. The Wild West. We’d want to be more deliberate.”

  He got out of the car, and I sat for a moment. “Miss?” asked the valet guy. Doug stood in front of me, spotlighted by his headlights. He made a shocked face, with his mouth open in a round O. I laughed. He was so sure of himself. And I didn’t want to be alone anymore.

  Erik went behind my back a week later. He tried going straight to Dr. Maryn, inviting her on a tour of his office, a playground of a space with lime-green love seats and supersize photographs of pomegranate seeds. I showed up, uninvited, and straggled within earshot as they strolled together at the front of her entourage, where he pitched her on his
open-app-store idea. He broached the subject casually, like it was something he’d only just thought of.

  “I love it!” said Dr. Maryn. Of course she did. She loved anything if she didn’t have to do the legwork.

  I stepped between them. “Erik, we discussed this.”

  Erik motioned for Dr. Maryn to continue walking. She stayed put, waiting to hear what I had to say. I smiled. I had him, the fucker. He was counting on me not to make a scene, but that was the only way to win these testosterone-fueled games.

  “There are privacy issues,” I said. “If you open it up to random app developers, we lose control of it.”

  He glanced at me before angling himself closer to Dr. Maryn. He was about to blow it. I could feel it. He lowered his voice.

  “Think about all that data, Dr. Maryn. People’s worries, their prescriptions and routines. It’s a resource. You can’t just not use it.”

  Dr. Maryn jerked her head back. “Wait, are you talking about selling medical data?”

  Erik held up a hand, course correcting. “No. I mean, we wouldn’t sell it.”

  “Because that’s a violation,” said Dr. Maryn. She crossed her arms and edged closer to me. I could feel myself expanding as we stared him down together. I knew how to ally myself with powerful people. He didn’t.

  After everyone left, I lingered in the lobby. Erik was vulnerable. But we weren’t firing him, not yet. It would have been complicated to start over with someone else.

  I texted Doug:

  E dispatched.

  He wrote back:

  Take him out.

  I stopped outside the door to Erik’s office. He was sitting at his desk, his chin propped on his fists. He looked up at me with a hooded-eyed sullenness.

  “You want to embarrass me again?” he asked.

  “You did that to yourself,” I said. “Let me buy you a drink.”

  We arranged to meet in a half hour at Shutters on the Beach. Doug texted me as I drove:

  I’ll join you later?

  Yes

  Erik was sitting in the lobby when I arrived, in an overstuffed armchair, finishing a martini. I asked the hostess for a table, and we moved to the French Riviera–themed patio, overlooking the beach path and its sunset joggers and bicyclists. I ordered a Campari and soda. Erik asked for a second martini. He gestured to a group of skateboarders practicing tricks on a wheelchair ramp.

  “Look at this,” he said. “You don’t get this view anywhere.”

  I looked out in surprise. “I guess I take it for granted,” I said. “I spend most of my time in Malibu.”

  He nodded and fell silent. The waitress came with our drinks. He picked an olive off the skewer and popped it in his mouth. His hair was sticking up in front, like a rooster’s.

  “Can I ask you a question?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Why are you always looking at my hair?”

  “Seriously?”

  “I’ll be making a presentation, and your eyes always drift up to the top of my head. What’s the deal with that?”

  “You need to use conditioner,” I said.

  He touched his head. “My shampoo has conditioner in it.”

  “Doesn’t work,” I said. “Maybe if your hair were close cropped, but anything longer than two inches, you need a separate conditioner.”

  He chuckled.

  “Now I have a question for you,” I said.

  “Shoot.”

  “Why are you making my life so difficult?”

  “Don’t take it personally,” he said. “I can’t abide inefficiency.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He smoothed his hair with his palm. “All that data we’ll be collecting,” he said. “That’s your product. That’s your wealth. And you just want to let it sit there and do nothing.” He put a hand to his heart. “I find it offensive.”

  “What about when you go to the doctor’s office?” I asked. “Should we just make everyone’s medical records available?”

  “That’s different,” he said.

  “How?”

  “The rules change when you go online. This is about scale. Monetizing the population, that’s the future.”

  He drained the last of his martini and looked around for the waitress. I slapped a hand on the table.

  “So,” I said. “You think your dermatologist should be able to sell information about that sebaceous cyst on your back?” Erik looked at me. His mouth opened. “The one that got infected after you tried to drain it yourself?”

  “How do you know—”

  “What about your therapist?” I asked. “It’s okay for her to share details of your low-level depression? How is that pronounced? I can never get it right. Is it disthihmia or dystheemia?”

  “What the hell?”

  I pointed to his martini. “And you should really think before you order another martini, what with your elevated liver enzymes and all.”

  “Are you blackmailing me?”

  I laughed. “I wish! To be honest, your secrets are pretty dull.”

  He stared. He made a motion to leave but stopped. I knew what was keeping him at the table: curiosity. “What did you do, hack my insurance?”

  “Of course not. I have no idea how it works, but I think this was off your internet searches? All we needed was your IP address, which I got from your emails, and then Doug searched the logs of his clients’ sites for it. You accepted their cookies, and voilà. I think it was even legal.”

  Doug appeared just then. He came in through the patio door behind Erik, like he’d been listening for the right moment to enter. He had on a zipped-up hoodie and jeans, and his hair was tamped down on one side. He looked good with unbrushed hair, wearing his power haphazardly. A woman passing our table startled at the sight of him and then smirked down at me in a show of soft-shouldered brutality. Doug ignored her and beamed at me, buoying me. He was mine. We were an army of two, and Erik was our first kill.

  Doug leaned down to kiss me. Erik shoved his chair back and looked at Doug, incredulous.

  “You did this?”

  Doug pointed to Erik’s empty glass. “What are you drinking?”

  “This is unbelievable,” said Erik.

  Doug waved him off. “Relax. We were just trying to make a point.”

  “Which was?”

  I leaned forward, put a smile on my face, and spoke softly, deliberately. “That if you go behind my back with Dr. Maryn again, if you fuck with me at all, I will fuck with you. And I’m better at it. I’m so good at it, in fact, that if you want to beat me at any kind of shit, you better make it your full-time fucking job.” Erik’s eyes widened for just a millisecond. Doug touched my arm.

  “I think he gets it,” Doug said.

  Erik balled the napkin in his lap and threw it on the table. “Well, maybe I’ll just quit.”

  Doug raised his hands. “Everyone, calm down. No one’s fucking anyone. No one’s quitting. Erik, we have a consolation prize for you, okay?” Doug motioned for the waitress. She raised her index finger to indicate she’d be with us and disappeared back into the main dining room. “You know the wearable company I acquired?” he asked.

  Erik nodded. Doug pulled his phone from his pocket and flipped to a picture of the EEG. His designers had been working on it. It was sleeker and more discreet than the photo he’d shown me on our first date.

  “This is our portable-EEG helmet. Our plan is to sell it to the public as a lifestyle tool, right? People can measure their stress responses, optimize their emotions. It’ll be synced with an app that we’ll put on the Dr. Maryn Store.”

  Erik looked at me and then at Doug. He nodded. “So you’ll be collecting a lot of data yourself.”

  Doug turned to me and winked. My cue. I stood.

  He’d asked me for time alone with Erik. I didn’t know what they were about to discuss, not officially anyway. But of course, I understood. They were going to use Doug’s app to rip off data from the store. All I needed was for D
r. Maryn’s reputation to stay clean. Doug had promised me it would. And again, I technically had no idea why Doug and Erik wanted to be alone. That was how I rationalized my part in this side deal, this swindle that was about to take place.

  A waiter approached our table. “I’ll have a Hefeweizen,” Doug said. I cocked my head. Doug looked up at me and winked again. He turned to Erik. “You want another martini?”

  I didn’t move. “A Hefeweizen?” I asked.

  “When in Rome,” he said and waved me off. “Beer’s fine.” From what I’d learned about sobriety, though, beer wasn’t fine.

  Erik sat up, attuned to the nascent conflict. I’d humiliated him more than once today. No doubt he’d gather whatever ammunition he could on me. I glanced to the ocean, to the streaks of dark purple signaling the end of twilight. The beach was empty except for a few straggling exercisers and a small group of homeless people setting up camp. I turned to Erik and held out my hand. “Sorry I had to be harsh earlier. Don’t take it personally.”

  I waited at Doug’s house for an hour and ran upstairs as soon as I heard his car pull into the garage. He pressed me into a wall and kissed me. His breath smelled like an Altoid. We stumbled into the bedroom and inhaled each other, the air between us entering our bodies all crisp and cool, like we were climbing a mountain together, ascending to higher and lighter-headed altitudes.

  I waited until after sex to ask him about the beer. I ran my fingers up his chest. “I thought you were sober.”

  “It’s about moderation.”

  Moderation. There was no such thing. My parents had both been smokers. I’d spent my childhood watching them cycle in and out of their pointless addictions, quitting one day, taping together torn cigarettes out of the garbage the next, until my mother got cancer.