It was perfectly still in the office now. It occurred to Greer, as if it were a revelation, that she was lonely there, something she hadn’t exactly noticed before. Now it seemed so obvious. Across the big space, evening began to color the windows. Greer sat unmoving and suddenly vulnerable, and soon she heard a sound in the distance. Footsteps; maybe it was a straggler heading off to the bar with the others. The steps were heavy and male. Then there was whistling. Greer sat and listened. “Strangers in the Night,” she decided after a moment. The steps came close, then stopped. Greer looked up and was shocked to see Emmett Shrader peering down at her. She had met him only once, on Tuesday morning when he had come down to the twenty-sixth floor for an awkward meet-and-greet with the Loci staff. He had walked into the larger of the two conference rooms with his young assistants dancing around him like sprites, and an older assistant, homely and probably long-suffering, slightly behind him.
Shrader was seventy, lion-headed, with longish silver hair and, that morning, a dark, sleek suit and expensive tie. “Hello, hello!” he’d said to everyone with forced conviviality, and they’d introduced themselves to him one by one, including the support staff. But by the time they were halfway done, you could see he couldn’t bear to be detained any longer and that he was desperate to bolt. As a result, they all began saying their names at nervous, faster and faster clips, and soon they were through with the exercise and he was gone. Tonight he was in shirtsleeves, released from his suit and tie, but there was something slightly alarming about the sight of an important man in a moment of repose. Anything could happen.
“Which one are you?” he asked, actually entering Greer’s cubicle.
“Greer Kadetsky,” she said.
She looked around frantically at the trappings of her own little space. Her cheap plastic Goody hairbrush was on the desk; she’d used it earlier, and now she could see a few hairs flowing from it. She took in the scent of this very rich man and realized it was unambiguously exciting, or at least exotic, because it had nothing to do with men her own age, those hipsters or little boys who all smelled of smoke and cheese fries and Starbursts and macchiatos. Cory often smelled of the protein bars she gave him by the case, and a cheap shampoo he grabbed from the drugstore that was supposedly made with balsam, but to which he paid so little attention that he once referred to it as “my balsa wood shampoo.” She’d said, “You think you’re shampooing your hair with balsa wood? Like, what kites are made of?” He had shrugged and said he hadn’t ever thought about it.
But someone gave a lot of thought to the way Emmett Shrader smelled and dressed and presented himself. He had a look and smell of holdings and real estate and absolute certainty. In such close proximity to him, Greer felt she desperately needed to hide her ratty hairbrush. “So what do you do here?” Emmett Shrader asked, actually seeming curious.
“Booking.”
“What does that mean, you pick the speakers to tell their sob stories?”
“No, I just try to get them to come. Other people pick them.”
“Sounds fascinating. Why are you here so late?”
“You’re here late too,” she pointed out.
“I have an excuse,” he said. “I was hanging out with your boss-lady. She and I have a two-person soirée once in a while. If I didn’t get a chance to sit and talk with her after hours, then I don’t know what I’d do. I need that.”
“She’s wonderful,” said Greer, spontaneously, and her voice came out sounding so reverent that Shrader laughed.
“She is,” he agreed. He looked at her with a thoughtful new expression. “You’re a Faith Frank groupie, is that right?” he asked.
Greer hesitated uncomfortably. “Well, I don’t know about that. I admire what she does.”
“Oh come on, tell me. You look up to her, right? You think she can do no wrong. You want to please her and all that craperoo.”
“Okay, sure. But I really do admire what she does.”
“Well, me too,” Shrader said.
They were quiet and companionable for a moment. He reached down onto her desk and spun her hairbrush, probably because he just needed to do something with his hands. Greer had read that the founder of ShraderCapital was restless, often bored, with an extremely short attention span. Many years later, after Greer was well-known, someone at a dinner party in LA would ask her if she could name a quality common to successful women, and she thought about this for a second, then said, “I think a lot of them know how to talk to men who have ADD.” Everyone at the table had thought this was a very funny answer, but maybe it was actually true.
“So,” Shrader said. “You don’t like to go out with all the other people at the end of the week? Out for potato skins and the blooming onion, or whatever they eat to absorb all the alcohol?”
“No one invited me.” She heard the self-pitying sound to her words.
“No one had to invite you,” Emmett said. “Come.” He gestured for her to follow him, so she did, confused and cautious, walking behind him along the floor and down the hall and into Loci’s communal kitchen. There, above the coffee machine, was a handwritten and prominent sign: “FRIDAY DRINKS!” it read, followed by when and where to meet. Somehow, in her absorption, she hadn’t seen it.
“Friday afternoons are a thing,” said Emmett. “Everyone goes out. The people from my floor and yours.”
She understood that she had been doing everything wrong there, except for the work itself.
“You can still catch up with them,” Shrader said.
So Greer went back to her cubicle and pulled her jacket from its hook. Then she hurried down the street to the old brown fa?ade of the Woodshed with the leaded glass windows, and there they were in the back, most of the team from 26, as well as some young associates and administrators from 27. When Greer walked through the hot, full bar and arrived at the pushed-together tables, Helen Brand raised a hand in greeting and said, “Everyone, make room.” They all rearranged themselves, opening up a space for her, and she slipped in between Ben and Kim Russo from upstairs.
“Howdy,” said Kim. She raised a glass to Greer—“A Cosmo. So dated, I know,” she said, “but I need something at the end of another ratfuck week”—and drank. “Let’s get you something strong too,” she said.
“Sure, though I’m not sure I need something strong-strong. My job isn’t too stressful. I actually wish it was.”
“Did you hear that?” Kim said to the table. “Her job ‘isn’t too stressful’ but she wishes it was.”
“You’ll get there, Greer,” said Helen from down at the other end. “I came on only two weeks before you did. It accelerated quickly.”
“Well, your job is different. You have more to do.”
“If you want more to do,” said Kim, “then do more. That’s the rule of thumb in any workplace.”
“Good to know,” said Greer.
“Make yourself indispensable. I somehow made the COO think I had a deeper skill set than anyone else, and he bought it. Now he calls me on weekends to do extra work, and I can’t be like, ‘No thank you, Doug, I’d rather not.’ Anyway, I got a bonus this year.”
“There are no bonuses at a women’s foundation,” said Helen. “But I knew that going in.”
“The bonus,” said Ben, “is when Faith smiles at you. Then it’s like being smiled at by God.”
Greer took a sip of the cold drink that had appeared before her and said, “I would like to be smiled at by God.”
“If God is actually a man, maybe you’ll be winked at,” said Kim.
“Or murdered,” said Marcella. “Seriously, why do men hate women? There are so many words in the English language that men use to describe their hatred of women. Bitch. Whore. The C-word. It’s like the overused thing about Eskimos and snow. But we never discuss this—the actual why of it. Ben and Tad, I’m looking at you.”
“Come on, Marcella, I don’t hate women,” said Ben, holding up his hands. “Don’t look at me.”
“And don’t look at me either,” said Tad. “Most of the time I’m like, ‘Why do I have to share a gender with you, you piece of shit?’ It’s like when you have a bad relative who has the same last name.”
“Faith said men are scared of women,” said Bonnie. “And that’s the key to everything.”
“Right,” said Evelyn. “And she said it once on TV with that asshole novelist. Back in seventy-whatever.”
“Evelyn and I were both in the studio audience,” said Bonnie. “And afterward, we all went out for fondue. Most of you won’t know what I’m talking about, but it was the age of fondue.”
“There were used skewers wherever you looked,” said Evelyn. “I can’t remember exactly what she said men were scared of.”
“Whatever it was,” Ben said, “I’m sure she was right. Men know that women have our number. Like, women can see through us—”