The Receptionist Page 9

  “Now, what on earth would make you feel guilty?” he asks.

  Chloe lets her lips work their way into a tiny smile.

  “What do you think?” she says.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  DOUG

  Doug raises his eyebrows at Chloe, hesitating, letting the uncertainty build. She lowers her face and blinks at him like a cartoon doe. He wasn’t actually planning to sleep with this girl. For Christ’s sake, he just introduced her to his wife. He’s not a complete asshole.

  “What do I think?” he asks, not quite making fun of her. “I think you found some confidence this morning.” She sits back in her chair, deflating, just a bit.

  “Doug!” His assistant, Harper, bounds down the hall to reception, her mass of auburn curls a lesson in controlled drama. “Emily is on line one,” Harper says. Chloe glances up at her with a skittish smile. A play for acknowledgment. Harper ignores her and waits for Doug to follow.

  He drums on the counter above Chloe’s desk and adopts a stern tone. “We’ll continue this later, young lady.”

  “Bye,” she says in a squeak.

  This girl. She shifts so quickly from statuesque to flustered. It’s exquisite, actually. Her flashes of panic when he pretends she’s in trouble for breaking the printer or parking in the wrong space. And her relief when he tells her not to worry about whatever transgression he’s just made up. She locks eyes with him and grins like she’s in on the joke. Like she’s just as far beyond the reach of the silly rules as he is.

  Doug shuts his office door and stares at the blinking red light on his desk phone. He blows a faint whistle and presses the speaker button.

  “Why aren’t you answering your cell?” Emily asks.

  “Well, hello to you too.”

  “Can you keep your ringer on? For me?”

  He pulls his iPhone from his pocket. Two missed calls and a text.

  “Doug, you have to stop sending me these people. They’re depressing.”

  “What did you say to her?” he asks.

  “Nothing! The girl’s a wannabe. She almost started crying.”

  Doug fights the urge to click into his wife’s snideness. Her dismissal of everyone who isn’t as shellacked as she is.

  Chloe isn’t like Emily. She’s unspoiled. Normally, a beautiful woman like her would be impossible to flatter. You try. You toss a compliment her way and watch as nothing happens. Just a flicker of hard acknowledgment. Maybe a laugh if she needs something from you. But once, when he told Chloe, “You don’t act like it, but you must know you’re gorgeous,” she swelled and beamed like the accounting gals do when he admires their printed blouses.

  He pulls up Chloe’s Instagram. There are new pics of her and some arty-looking twentysomethings in the desert, staring into the lens with album-cover impassiveness. He wonders if he should pay her more. Jo-Ann lowballed her when she hired her. They laughed about it at the time, how little Chloe was willing to accept.

  “Doug, are you listening to me?” He takes his wife off speaker.

  “I’m listening!” he says.

  “My job is just as important as yours.”

  He switches to Harper’s Facebook. His assistant just put up a new profile picture. She’s biting her lower lip.

  Oh Jesus, Doug loves women. He loves them. The hush of their skin, the rise of their hips. The broadcasting, broadcasting, always broadcasting. Bra straps, bellies, and vanity, and lace. There’s a woman out there for every kind of sex. Pillowy ones you can sink yourself into and sophisticates you think you’ll be able to screw head-on, but they turn on you last minute with all their demands. He likes the uncomplicated ones the best. The fun ones.

  Doug lowers his voice into the receiver. “You know what I’m thinking about?”

  “How would you like it if I asked you to hire someone who knows nothing about marketing?”

  “Market research,” he says.

  “Same thing.”

  “Now you’re just trying to piss me off. Seriously, do you remember that first night together? We were at the valet, and you went off to take a call.”

  She sighs. He pauses. He waits for the silence to turn visceral.

  “I was eavesdropping on you,” he starts. “I could tell from your tone it was a business call. An unfriendly one. I heard you say, ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ like a shot across the bow. I thought, This woman is going to eat me alive.”

  She was a pit bull. He needed someone like her. The women before were too defenseless. Too hurt by his misbehavior.

  “What time are you coming home?” she asks. An unusual question. They’ve taken to socializing separately during the week.

  “Why?”

  “Let’s have dinner.”

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “I’ll pick up Italian.”

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “Love you.”

  Emily hangs up. He spins his chair and looks out his window onto Rose Avenue. A barefoot, shirtless homeless man is dancing in front of a store window. Doug opens the camera app on his cell and videos the guy. He texts it to Emily:

  I see potential—can u meet with him?

  Fuck off

  He laughs and wonders if having a baby will soften his wife. She’s been hiding her pregnancy from him. For most couples, this would be a sign of something terribly wrong. But he and Emily are a match.

  Doug strides to his whiteboard and uncaps a marker. Brain Trainer and Connected Thought and other terrible names for his portable-EEG project are scribbled in Maurice’s handwriting. He clenches his jaw. The project is so far behind schedule he’s going to have to drum up more money. But he doesn’t want to think about it right now. He erases the board and writes TIME!!! at the top.

  He’s been kicking around a theory for a while now. Vertical Tasking. Which is just like multitasking, except you’re doing only one thing at a time. How many ways can you exploit a moment? Altruistically, monetarily, sexually. How can you leverage time?

  The idea overtook him in college one morning as he surfed Mission Beach near his parents’ house. He’d just duck dived under a wave when the ocean calmed suddenly, sizzling into stillness like a hot tub with its jets turned off. The marine layer started coming in fast above him. Doug watched the fog surround him and meld with the sea, until he couldn’t tell where the mist ended and the water began. It felt like he was floating on something vaporous and sweet.

  The strangest notion filled him then—this idea that time was a three-dimensional object. He had only to dig into the moment, into time itself, and for a split second, he’d experience everything that split second contained.

  He paddled hard to shore, ditched his board on the sand, and ran to his car. He scrambled through his glove box for a pen. He wrote on the back of his insurance card, Live in the NOW and Be present.

  No. He closed his eyes and concentrated on what he’d felt only a few minutes before. If this was going to be anything, it had to be something original. Something he could sell. Infinity inside the finite, he wrote.

  Total garbage. He brought his forehead to the steering wheel and cried. It was a full-belly cry, overloaded with mucus and tears. He was supposed to be in class that morning. He was on academic probation. They were going to expel him for sure this time.

  He wiped his nose and looked to the water. The whitecaps were back, stretching all the way to the horizon.

  And that was when he heard it. His own voice, still and small, in a barely audible chant of the words that saved his life. “I will stop smoking pot,” he said to himself. “I will stop taking acid.”

  It’s a great story. It’s his origin story. He gave up drugs after failing to describe a transcendental experience and went on to build a company that turned the mystical, the raw data of human behavior, into actionable information. It’s how he opened his TED Talk on holistic entrepreneurship.

  The story wasn’t true, of course, not totally. But it made for a good TED Talk.

  He did give
up drugs for the first time when he was twenty. But that was because he crashed his dad’s BMW into a utility pole. The first thing he did after stumbling out of the car, bleeding from his forehead, was dig his key in a little baggie of coke. There was a homeless man across the street, staring, shaking his head at the sight of him.

  Harper knocks on his door. She pokes her head in. “Do you want to talk to the phone-bank kids?”

  He looks at his watch. Almost dinnertime on the East Coast.

  “Harper, you need to get me earlier for these.”

  “You told me not to get you before quarter of.”

  She glances behind him, to the back window, where his computer screen is reflected. Harper’s profile picture is still up. He walks to his desk and shuts his laptop. “Did you set up a whiteboard in the conference room?”

  Harper nods. He selects a dry-erase marker from his board, orange, the color of inspiration, and follows Harper down the hallway. Chloe straightens at her desk as they pass. He winks at her and crosses to the oversize conference room.

  The phone bankers are already wearing their headsets, ready for the coming blitz of robodials. Doug centers himself in front of them. He doesn’t need to be here. Anywhere else, the project manager or an outsourcing firm would brief the employees with a PowerPoint and wish them luck. But accessibility is Doug’s hallmark. Let people see you. Let them think your position is within their grasp.

  He writes on the whiteboard, Market Research.

  “What does this mean to you all?” he asks. The operators’ faces stay blank.

  “Everyone, take your headsets off,” Doug says. “This is real talk right now. I want to know something. Why do you think you’re here?” The pause lasts long enough to feel uncomfortable. Doug shrugs. “Why are we interrupting families at dinner?”

  A kid in the front, early twenties, with spotty facial hair, raises his hand.

  “You,” says Doug. “What’s your name?”

  “Xavier, sir.”

  “All right, Xavier Sir, what are we doing?”

  “We want to get people’s opinions on the new stadium?”

  “And why do we need that?”

  Xavier thinks. He draws out his words. “Because we want to figure out the best way to sell it to the public?”

  “Very good!”

  Doug writes DATA in large letters and turns back to the kids with an exaggerated slump, like he’s accepting defeat. “I gotta be honest with you. These types of surveys are on their way out. Everyone’s familiar with tracking cookies, right? A long time ago, I turned Beyond the Brand into a tech company, a big data broker, to survive. So why on earth, why now, would I have you contacting people by telephone?” Doug mimes dialing an old rotary phone. The kids laugh.

  The door at the rear of the conference room opens. It’s Chloe. She slinks into the back row, all supple and seductive. He raises his chin, giving her half a nod. Harper, in the front, glances back at Chloe and shoots Doug a worried look.

  Xavier raises his hand again. Doug spins back to the whiteboard. He writes High Touch and caps the dry-erase marker with a flourish. He turns to his audience. He looks directly at Chloe.

  “When you’re dealing with something controversial, there’s no replacement for the personal touch.” He points at Chloe with his marker. “That’s where you come in.”

  Chloe covers her mouth. Doug raises his arms like he’s about to burst into song. He addresses the crowd at large. “Think of yourselves not as data collectors but as ambassadors for the stadium.”

  The phone bankers are attentive, rapt. It’s incredible, energizing a whole room like this. It makes Doug wonder sometimes if his personality is too big for ordinary life, if there’s too damned much of him to go around.

  He glances up at Chloe again. She touches her neck. He should tell the crowd about his EEG. Even though it’s not ready yet. They finally got the prototype to work, but it’s not syncing with the app. But these kids should know that they’re at the start of something revolutionary. That they’re listening to the man who will usher in a new age in market research, gathering data directly from people’s brains.

  “How many of you know about the brain—”

  His phone vibrates against his leg. He clutches his pocket. The first notes of “The Imperial March” from Star Wars ring out.

  Jesus! This is why he never has his ringer on! Does she really expect him to be at her beck and call like this? Doug looks up to the last row. Chloe—sweet, pliant Chloe—runs a finger over her lips.

  He takes his phone from his pocket and waves it above his head. He shouts like an old-time stand-up comedian: “Sorry, folks! It’s my wife!”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHLOE

  Chloe stands on the balcony of Morel’s Steakhouse, overlooking the Grove Mall. Her castmates from Common Parlance are with her: Dylan, Sheralyn, and Howie. Their performance is scheduled to start in fifteen minutes. Chloe leans over the railing and peers down at the nearly empty cobblestone paths.

  “Careful,” says Dylan. He’s shorter than Chloe, with a closely shorn beard that tempers his vaguely elfin features. He touches her arm. She lets him guide her a step back from the railing.

  “Slow shopping day,” says Chloe.

  The fountain in the center sputters to life, and a dozen water spouts arch and sway to the tinny strains of a Frank Sinatra classic. A few patrons stop to watch. Chloe places her hands on the railing and swings her hips. “It’s not affecting anyone,” she says.

  “Sure it is,” says Howie. He’s the actor in the group. Everything about him is crisp and camera ready, from his square jaw to the clean-lined edges of his buzzed Afro. He gestures toward a family of four standing at the edge of the fountain. “See how they stopped to watch?”

  Sheralyn is on the other side of Howie, thick armed and tattooed, with an asymmetrical black bob. She leans in front of him and catches Chloe’s eye. Howie had a callback this week for an NBC pilot. Whenever he gets close to leaving them all behind, he contradicts everything they say.

  “Yes, but you’d think the fountain would make it more festive,” Sheralyn says. “The folks down there look passive.”

  Chloe is hit with resentment. What Sheralyn just said—that was the point Chloe was trying to make. People always do that to her, say what she wants to say more clearly.

  “There’s no sense of the public square in LA,” says Dylan. He checks his phone. Chloe peeks over his shoulder. No one has texted him. He looks up from his screen at her. She grants him a moment of sustained eye contact, a second of encouragement, before looking away. He has a crush on her. “We’ve got ten minutes,” he says.

  Chloe squints at the scattered shoppers, hoping for some patterns or murmurations to emerge. There’s enchantment in the way a mass of people moves. It’s outside words, almost outside consciousness. At the last Venice Beach performance, she improvised morphing into a skateboard and its rider all at once, gliding through the throngs of tourists and eccentrics, clearing a path with pure impulse.

  Chloe spies a couple in complementing plaid shorts across the walkway. They ponder a restaurant menu. The wife pivots to the mall at large, inspecting the movie theater’s art deco facade. She raises a hand and pauses before committing to a recognizable gesture. Chloe rolls her shoulders forward and imitates the woman’s airless indecision.

  She looks farther up the cobblestone and starts at a tiny patch of bald on an otherwise full head of hair. Doug! No, it’s not him. Doug is slimmer. He’d never wear a denim shirt.

  “I’ll stop by,” he said.

  Or maybe it was, “I’ll try to stop by.”

  She can remember him saying both as he hopped on the elevator with a private wave in her direction. Chloe sighs. It’s every time now. Every time he passes her desk, there’s some secret, charged exchange.

  Starting an affair is complicated, though. There are plans to be made, and she has to be alone with him to make them. Sometimes she worries she’s been imagining
it all. That maybe the bell-peal sounds of his voice down the hallway, on the phone, teasing, talking business, aren’t a telegraphing of desire for her but an overflow of charisma.

  If they could be by themselves for a minute! This is so tawdry, she’ll say when they’re finally together. Then he’ll kiss her and pay the bar tab. He’ll whisk her to a hotel room.

  Seduced. Chloe runs two fingers along her bottom lip. I’m being seduced.

  “What on earth are you thinking about?” asks Howie. He’s staring at her.

  Chloe smirks, savoring her tiny victory. Howie never shows interest in her. He’s too much of a careerist. She tilts her head in his direction and whispers, “Sex.”

  “I can tell.”

  Dylan claps his hands together. “Okay, five minutes, guys. Let’s spread out, cover the whole mall. And we’re agreed we’re not going to start acting like zombie-shopper people?”

  “But they’re all shopping!” Sheralyn bursts out. “And they’re all zombie-shopper people.”

  “It’s trite. They covered that in Dawn of the Dead. We’re not a bunch of communists.”

  “I’m a communist,” says Sheralyn.

  “Let’s not get hysterical,” says Howie.

  “But everyone looks unhappy,” says Chloe.

  “Y’all think consumerism is this country’s biggest problem, don’t you?” Howie waves an imaginary wand over their heads and speaks in a spell-casting monotone. “Look past the suburbs from whence you came. There is more to life than hating your parents.”

  “Screw off,” says Sheralyn.

  “Let’s move,” says Dylan. “Chloe, why don’t you head to the Gap?”

  Chloe starts off and sees Doug, finally, coming out of Nordstrom with a shopping bag. Of course he’s here. It’s not so much relief she feels but confirmation.

  She puts on her mask. It’s expressionless white neoprene and covers the top half of her face. Her body switches on as soon as it touches her skin. It gives her power, the mask. She’s a blank, with no history. No thoughts. She is only instinct.