The Hazards of Hunting While Heartbroken (30 page)

Angela ponders this for a moment and says, “Yup. You’re being ridiculous. I don’t get that vibe from him at all. From what I’ve seen, he’s only got eyes for you.”

I stir the lemon slice around my Diet Coke with my straw. “I suppose I could always just ask him, ‘Oscar, are you screwing anyone else?’” I say, in a tone I’d use to ask my brother’s kids if they’re up to something naughty. “But seriously, we’ve never had lunch together, even though he’s across the street. Maybe he’s having nooners right under my nose.”

Angela laughs out loud. “Maybe you need to find a job that allows you to express more creativity. Clearly your imagination has been driven to desperation by the lack of stimulation in your workplace. But if you want to know for sure, why not dig around a little?”

“I went through his phone last night, or this morning, rather, when he was sleeping.” I’m embarrassed to admit it, even to my closest friend.

“And?” She looks annoyed I didn’t spill this crucial intelligence earlier.

“His phone log makes a compelling case that he has no time for anything but work and me. So why can’t I stop obsessing?”

Angela’s fork stops in midair. “Because you really like him. Which is why I think you should stop looking for drama. But if you can’t manage that, you should get a peek at his computer. You know, trust, but verify.” She sounds totally serious.

“Really?”

“Absolutely. You have this nagging feeling that something’s wrong. The seeds of doubt are going to keep sprouting, unless you do something about them. You’re just torturing yourself if you abandon your espionage without squashing your suspicions.”

“Oscar almost caught me this morning.”

“Then you’ll need to be more careful,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“So, to summarize: I need to have a potentially friendship-ending talk with Kevin, and then I need to gamble with this great thing I have with Oscar by snooping again.”

“Sounds right to me, except I’d rather you called it a friendship-
altering
talk, instead of a friendship-ending one. I don’t want our happy little threesome to dissolve. It would suck to have to see you guys separately. Just promise me you won’t put it off. You’ll talk to him soon. Like today.”

“I’m such a jackass.”

“Yes, you are. Now do you understand that you should have listened to me? But no. You thought I was nuts when I said good old O’Connor had the hots for you.”

“Fine, you were right.”

“Good. I’m so glad that’s resolved. Now on to the next event: Want to see what they have for dessert?”

We order a chocolate brownie, smothered in ice cream and hot fudge, ostensibly because Angela has decided to extend her birthday celebration. The waitress, a large woman with alarming orange lipstick and angry furrows in her forehead, takes some of the wind from our sails when she sniffs that it must be nice to be skinny girls who can eat dessert. Angela frowns and asks me if we should go for the fruit cup. I tell the waitress we’re sticking with the sundae, and mentally downgrade her tip while we watch her waddle away to fetch our ice cream.

As we dig into the gooey heap of calories with our sundae spoons, Angela says, “So enough about
your
dramas. I have a bombshell of my own.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s up?” Maybe she got that long-awaited promotion at the magazine. God knows she works her ass off for them. Or maybe she’s going to tell me she’s joining the ranks of the monogamous and officially boy-friending Claudio.

But her face suddenly looks more serious. She rests her spoon on the edge of the dish and looks over both shoulders, as if doublechecking we know nobody here.

“I think I’m pregnant.”

“Oh, Angela,” is all I can think to say. I reach across the table and touch her hand. “Talk about burying the lead. Are you sure?”

“I’m ten days late and I’m exhausted. I’ve been pushing the possibility out of my mind, but it’s seeming increasingly likely.”

I feel my eyes roll, involuntarily. “But have you taken a test?”

“Not yet. I can’t bring myself to buy one. I walk into the drug store, stand in that aisle for ten minutes, then buy something else, like soap or a toothbrush, and scurry out of there. I’ve repeated this exercise at least two dozen times this week. I’m set for toiletries for the next twenty years.”

“Do you want me to go buy one for you?”

“Can you just come with me?”

“Of course. We can go right now, if you want. I don’t know how you got through lunch, not to mention your party last night, acting as if nothing’s wrong. I’d be a basket case.”

“I guess I’ve got a talent for compartmentalizing my life.”

Angela suddenly looks smaller and meeker, somehow, than I’ve ever seen her. Underneath her perfectly applied façade, she looks like a scared teenager. I don’t know what else to say, so I push the now forgotten brownie sundae around with my spoon and flag down the waitress to bring us the check.

“How can this be happening?” Angela asks in a quieter voice than usual. “Infertility runs in our family to the point that I’m shocked we have a family. All three of my maternal cousins are killing themselves with that IVF thing.”

Well, I guess she knows about Niles and Susie. That answers one, suddenly trivial, question.

“My mom had three miscarriages before she had my sister.” She stares despondently at the mostly uneaten dessert.

“But then your sister got pregnant on her honeymoon.” I don’t mean to sound argumentative, but the sooner she knows if she is or isn’t, the sooner she can decide what she wants to do.

“I had blocked that out.” She puts her elbows on the table, rests her face in her hands and blows her bangs, a new and instantly regretted development, out of her eyes.

The put-upon looking waitress reappears and deposits our bill on the table. We both wait until she retreats again to say anything.

“Seriously, Angela, you’re getting ahead of yourself. Sometimes stress can throw your cycle.”

“Not when you’re on the pill.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do. And I also know I missed three pills when I went away for a weekend and forgot them on my bathroom counter. I’m such an idiot. I realized it five or six blocks from my place, but I didn’t bother to go back for them, because I thought the relevant window of time had passed for the month. I guess I was wrong.”

Forty-five minutes later, Angela pees on a stick in her bathroom and makes me stand in there and wait for the results, which the instructions say can take up to five minutes. She paces in her narrow hallway. Ernest and Algernon join her. They look surprisingly anxious, considering they normally don’t care about anything but the presence of Angela and canned food, and their feline brains can’t possibly process the present drama.

The little blue plus sign forms almost instantly. “I think you need to see this,” I say, tentatively.

Angela comes in, tears already welling, and confronts the evidence. She stares at the test stick on the counter for a moment, then picks it up and flings the offensive piece of medical technology into the trash.

“Are you going to tell him?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you think Claudio would say?”

“I have no idea. We’re not what you’d call a long-established couple. I don’t even know for sure if he’s seeing anyone else.” She lets out a little laugh and dabs at her eyes with her fingertips. Her eyeliner smudges downwards. “But at least I know he’s the only candidate. Some months in my not-so-distant past, I wouldn’t even have that.”

“Well, you don’t have to decide today. Whether to tell him, I mean. Or anything, actually.”

“Shouldn’t all the alcohol I’ve put away over the past few weeks make me miscarry?” Angela says, suddenly sounding hopeful.

“I doubt it. I think it just causes birth defects.”

“Thanks. That’s really comforting.” Her face is starting to turn white.

“Come here.” I open my arms and constantly composed Angela allows herself to fall into a big hug.

“Let’s keep this between us for now, okay?” she snuffles into my shoulder.

“Of course.”

Angela disentangles herself from me so that she can step back and look me in the eye. “That means don’t share with Oscar.”

“I would never. Don’t worry about that for one second. Your personal life is none of his business.”

Monday morning arrives with alarming punctuality, and without any progress on the mystery of my boyfriend’s true character, or Angela’s pregnancy dilemma, or my now-eclipsed drama with Kevin. I have to put all of it out of my head for the next few hours anyway, since Carol has decided to “reward” me for closing Niles Townsend by having me tag along with her and Marvin to a pitch meeting with Walker Smythe, the investment banker whose son she made me coach pro bono a few weeks back.

Honestly, I shouldn’t be so flip about this development. It means Carol believes I have a future here, which is more than a lot of her employees can say. It’s just that I’ve seen firsthand, how fast she can take away whatever she sees fit to give, which makes it difficult to put a lot of stock in my new favorite child status.

It’s only 8:30 in the morning, but Carol has whipped herself and Marvin into a frenzy. If all goes well today, my boss will get to bed Walker Smythe and, equally importantly, Silverblum Gatz will give Broadwick & Associates an assistant general counsel spot to fill. And if that happens, Marvin will become the point person for the account. Which means he will have to dazzle them with the quality of people he sends over, or Carol will never get another Silverblum assignment again.

Marvin fully understands the need to bring his A game. He’s even abandoned his traditional whimsical ties in favor of bold blue stripes, in honor of the occasion. Carol knows Marvin appreciates the importance of this meeting, but she can’t help herself. She appears hell bent on spending the time before we need to leave making him crazy. She’s standing over his desk, yelling at him to rearrange Power Point slides. She points at the screen and shouts cryptic instructions at him, even though she’s less than two feet from his ear. Every once in a while, she jabs at the screen with her index finger if he doesn’t move “this” or “that” fast enough.

Carol performs a similar futile exercise before every major meeting. She screams and yells that the presentation sucks, and this is somehow not only news to her, but also not her fault, even though she authored almost every word of every bullet point personally. Her normal
modus operandi
is to spend an hour tweaking the presentation, and then make one of us scramble, in the three minutes before we need to get out the door, to restore it to its original state. Carol developed Broadwick & Associates’ new client pitch over the course of several years, it works like a charm over ninety per cent of the time, and everyone, even New Girl, who has not yet been allowed to interact live with an actual client, knows it needs very little in the way of improvement.

Not until it’s twelve minutes before we absolutely have to be in a cab to have any hope of making it downtown on time, does Carol start shrieking at me to pull up the pitch presentation on my computer and, “Fucking fix the fucking cluster fuck Marvin has made.”

Because I knew this was coming, I have the file open on my screen already. I don’t have to fix anything, actually, since the changes she ordered Marvin to make are on his computer. Carol, for all her business acumen, holds only the weakest grasp on the workings of modern technology. She can’t fathom that if her presentation has been tampered with, the changes don’t automatically appear on all versions of the document. But I know better than to try to explain this to her. I move the mouse around for a moment and then pronounce the presentation “fixed.”

She barks at Marvin to print it out. I am not allowed to print anything. I stopped taking this personally when I learned that only Marvin holds this sacred privilege, and that he has to log every letter, file and document he puts to paper. This policy has nothing to do with conservation, but rather with Carol’s paranoia and previously noted lack of computer savvy. She thinks, by preventing her employees from printing anything, she’s insuring that we will never carry any confidential client information out of the office. Nobody in the history of the firm has had the male anatomy necessary to enlighten her that it would be really easy for any one of us—even useless New Girl—to email Carol’s entire proprietary database out of here in about two seconds.

While Marvin prints the original version of the presentation, I finally focus on Carol’s face. I can’t believe I didn’t check earlier. Maybe I didn’t want to risk eye contact, because her mood was so obviously manic and vile. And now, when we should be heading to the elevators, I wonder if I have a professional obligation to tell her that she’s applied her trademark blue eye shadow expertly over one eye, and slopped it garishly over the other. I’ve never seen this happen before, although Marvin once mentioned a sighting of the same phenomenon about six years ago. Never mind what incomprehensible statement her make-up makes about her mental state. We can’t possibly allow her to go to Silverblum Gatz looking like that, and I can’t believe Marvin hasn’t noticed, or more likely, is pretending not to have noticed. As the senior person, shouldn’t he be the one to tell her she needs to look in the mirror?