Robert’s attention diverted to his phone, and I realized the ice bucket I’d been holding too close had seeped a wet island across the front of my white button-down.
“I’ll be right back with fresh ice,” I said, and made my escape.
9
JASON DILLINGER and his wife, Kathryn, sat facing me in our cozy Metro-North four-seater, so that I was moving backward. Dillinger had brown hair, brown eyes, and the palest, most translucent skin you’ve ever seen. He was tall, with long legs (thankfully hidden beneath powder-blue summer chinos) that took up all of what little floor space there was between us. Nobody in the office worked harder or longer hours than Dillinger, hence the never-seeing-the-sun thing. He was only thirty-five, but his interoffice competition was already complaining about how he was most likely to be Robert’s successor.
“So this is your first one of these,” he said, making meaningless conversation.
I nodded. “You’ve been before?”
“Three times. But this is the first time I’m bringing Kathryn.”
Kathryn, who sat huddled against the window, was lost in her Kindle and gave no reaction to the sound of her own name. She was good-looking, I’ll give her that, like J.Crew-catalog-model good-looking. A surprising percentage of guys in the office had extremely attractive wives—wives who, as Emily would say, were not on an equal plane of hotness. It wasn’t that these Titan men were wealthy, because most of them weren’t, but working in media—news media especially—still maintained a certain cachet, in New York at least. Plus, nerdy guys were having a moment, weren’t they? It was simply the right time in history to be a pale dude who wore glasses and had a really big brain.
“I was blown away the first time,” said Dillinger, who at least had the decency to wear contact lenses. “You really get to see a new side of Barlow. Though, you probably know him better than any of us ever will.”
“Probably,” I said proudly, for this was the one thing I had on all the guys with hot wives in the office. My access to everything Robert.
“Got any good stories about him?”
Nice try, Dillinger. Of course I had good stories about him, but if I’d learned anything in my six years of servitude, it was discretion. Robert trusted me because I was good at keeping my mouth shut. (No ten-gallon mouths around here.)
However, I did keep in my conversational arsenal a few choice tidbits that I’d toss to the needy in moments such as these.
“Well, I do have one favorite story,” I said, leaning in and lowering my voice in such a way that even Kathryn stirred. “Did you know he once got into a fight with George Clooney on a golf course?”
This was a safe story to tell, because I knew Robert loved people to know about it.
“I heard that once.” Dillinger’s pallid face pinked. “Is it true?”
I nodded. “Apparently, Clooney left a bunker unraked after he’d bumbled his shot, and Robert is a real stickler for smoothing out the sand. So he marched right up to Clooney and told him to get back over there and get to raking—and don’t leave any furrows either.”
I should mention here that when I first started working for Robert, I would spend my nights searching the Internet, diligently looking up all the words, names, and places he’d thrown at me during the day that I didn’t understand. In time, I figured out how to talk about all the things Robert cared about. Golf, tennis, boating, Texas sports teams, luxury vacation spots, fine wines, and rare liquor. My knowledge was shallow, but it was enough to sound like I knew what I was talking about—which is all most people need anyway.
“So what happened?” Dillinger asked.
“What do you think happened?” This was the best part of the story. “Clooney got his ass over there and smoothed out the sand.”
Dillinger shook his head, rosy with admiration. “I could totally see that happening.”
“I know, it’s so Robert,” I said. “But obviously never repeat that.”
“No, no, of course not.” Dillinger leaned back, silently deciding who would be the first person he’d relay it to.
“You know,” he said, “I asked Robert yesterday, what should we do if it rains today, because the forecast was predicting a storm, and he answered, matter-of-factly, ‘It doesn’t rain when I have a barbecue.’ Then I remembered the last three times I came out were all beautiful days. And now look.”
Dillinger pointed past disinterested Kathryn, through the sunny train window, to the clear cerulean sky. On top of everything else, he now accepted as fact that Robert could control the weather.
When we arrived at the Poughkeepsie station, we took a ten-minute cab ride to the house—or the estate or whatever. To say it was vast would be an understatement along the lines of calling the Great Wall of China or Michael Fassbender’s penis “long.”