“No. Of course not.” But she burned at being called out now.
“It seems to me,” said her mother, “and this is really outside my sphere of knowledge, since I’m not the one who’s been working at a feminist foundation. But here’s this person who gave up his plans when his family fell apart. He moves back in with his mother and takes care of her. Oh, and he cleans his own house, and the ones she used to clean. I don’t know. But I feel like Cory is kind of a big feminist, right?”
TWELVE
When Faith Frank emailed Emmett Shrader to invite him to her apartment, he thought about replying with a joke about how it had been forty-one years since he’d last been to her place, and that he thought she’d never ask. But somehow he knew from the terseness, even coldness, of her email that there was something wrong. She had to speak to him, and she wanted to do it out of the office. Even more peculiarly, this was to be arranged without the help of Connie and Deena, the usual gatekeepers. Though people always came to Emmett and never the other way around, he immediately agreed.
Here he was now, on a Sunday evening, in Faith’s large, butter-colored living room on Riverside Drive—a slightly faded place, he noted. The Hudson River glowed dark under the moon out the large window. There were vases placed around the room, and the occasional forgotten teacup. She didn’t even offer him a drink. This was serious.
He sat in an easy chair, and she sat across from him and said with formality, “I am furious with you.”
He looked hard at her. “You want to tell me why?”
“No, I want you to figure it out.”
He tried. Various scenarios passed before him in a loop of footage, none seeming accurate.
“Lupe Izurieta,” Faith finally said. “Ring any bells?”
“What?”
“Lupe Izurieta,” she repeated, unhelpfully.
“What are you talking about?” Emmett sat there in such confusion that he thought this might be what it was like to have a stroke. Loo-pay-a-zoo-ree-ate-er, he thought, turning the syllables over and over, but they made no sense.
“From Ecuador.”
Then the syllables re-formed themselves correctly, and he understood what she had said: Lupe Izurieta. Right, oh right. The girl they had brought over to speak in LA. One of the one hundred girls they had paid a lot of money to rescue.
“Oh,” he said.
“So the mentor program really doesn’t exist?”
He paused, thrown, trying to be careful. “It was supposed to have existed,” he tried. “We had every intention. Does that count for anything?”
“What happened?” she said. “Just tell me.”
“You won’t believe me, Faith. But when it got discussed upstairs, a lot got said. I’m ashamed to say this, but I wasn’t entirely paying attention at the time.”
People had always described Emmett Shrader’s attention span as pealike, flealike. Let them say that, he’d always thought; he didn’t care. But still he had to find a way to manage his boredom, and that could be difficult. Sometimes, in meetings with clients or with his board of directors, he found himself falling, as if off a cliff, down onto the shoals of boredom. He did whatever he could to avoid this. That might involve playing a dropping-bricks game on a phone that he discreetly held out of sight in his lap, or else noodling around with the wire widgets that sat on his broad black chunk of a desk for no other reason than that the interior decorator had bought them for him from a young artist in Barcelona “who works in wire,” she’d said excitedly.
He had barely noticed the widgets until he found himself idle in a meeting, and there they were, waiting to be toyed with. He could’ve kissed the interior decorator for having given him something to do with his hands at that moment. He remembered her as smelling candied, and having an excellent bosom. He loved the way women, clothed, had a bosom, a single entity, but when unclothed, it cleaved into two discrete parts, two breasts, like the way you could separate an orange into halves by hooking your thumbs into it.
When Emmett tired of the games on the phone and of the sculptural widgets, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He often let his thoughts take him far afield; he imagined sex with his decorator, or what Chef Brian might prepare for dinner that night, hoping it wasn’t halibut in parchment, because these days far too many things came in parchment, and unwrapping that virtuous little package was basically the opposite of being a child on Christmas morning.
Now he tried to remember the sequence of meetings about Ecuador that had ended in failure and then deceit. First Faith had come up with the idea of doing a special project that concerned sex trafficking there. Of course he wanted to please her, so he’d immediately turned it over to two associates. A contact in Quito had been secured and hired, and a two-pronged plan had been put in place. First there would be a rescue of one hundred girls who had been forced to work as prostitutes in Guayaquil. A local, fearless security team had been engaged for the job. And next, once the girls were rescued, they would be matched with older women who would serve as mentors and teach them a trade. Women learning from women, an admirable project.
“It’ll look great,” someone at ShraderCapital said. “We should be doing more things like this.”
It was all put in place and ready to go. But during a second or third meeting, when all the outstanding details were supposed to be worked out, Emmett was only half-listening. That was the meeting at which Doug Paulson, the COO, said he had something he needed to bring up. “I hate to insert this at the zero hour,” he said, “but when Brit and I took the kids to the Galápagos she met this woman, Trina Delgado, who organizes on behalf of charities in South America. Brit thinks she is the real deal. And when I told her about what we’ve been doing in Ecuador, she suggested it would be great if we could bring Trina in.”
“What do you mean, bring her in?” asked Monica Vendler, the lone woman at this high level at ShraderCapital.
“Well, I’m wondering if it’s too late to sideline the person Faith hired. It would mean a lot to my wife to be able to work with Trina.”
“If you think she’s good,” said Greg Stupack.
“I don’t know about this,” Monica said.
“Brit really likes this woman,” Doug repeated. “I thought helping other women was a central part of Loci’s mission.”
So the first woman had been swapped out for the second one, and everything proceeded. But when the rescue mission was days away, a meeting was suddenly called. Doug Paulson, slightly red-faced now, haltingly explained that Trina Delgado, to whom they had already paid an exorbitant and nonrefundable fee, turned out not to have been good with “follow-through.” The story quickly tumbled out of him. “She acts like she’s doing everything she can, but I think she’s a fucking grifter,” he finally said. “Brit feels horrible, and so do I.” Trina had never hired mentors, but had taken ShraderCapital’s money. Nothing was in place, absolutely nothing.
“Why am I not surprised?” asked Monica acidly. “So if we don’t have mentors, are we still going ahead with the rescue?”
“It’s a good outfit,” said Greg. “Highly rated. Plus, we prepaid.”
“What were they supposed to teach these girls, anyway?” asked Kim Russo, the COO’s pretty, blond, broad-shouldered young assistant.
“All kinds of things,” said one of the other assistants. “English. Computer skills. Also, a trade. Knitting. Weaving.”
This last remark propelled a side conversation that incorporated an even worse word, weavings. God, weavings! There was nothing duller to Emmett Shrader than textiles and fabrics. The thought of entering a fabric store or a crafts store made him delirious with horror.