A Thousand Pardons Page 4

“One child,” Helen said. “Yes.”

  Harvey beamed at her, as if she would want to share in his professional pride at having guessed these embarrassing facts about her. “Then you already know what we do,” he said, tilting his chair backwards. “We tell stories. We tell stories to the public, because stories are what people pay attention to, what they remember. Why? Because when they were little, they had devoted, beautiful mothers like you, who told them stories, and stories are how they first learned to make sense out of the whole big, confusing world.”

  “Stories,” Helen said indulgently, though the truth was that his mere invocation of Sara, whom he did not know, whose existence was no more than generic to him, had caused a little tightness in her throat that kept her from wanting to risk saying anything more. That kind of thing had happened to her a lot these last few weeks.

  “Now, because our services cost money, the protagonists of these stories tend to be people who are rich, or famous, or better yet rich and famous. But the stories themselves are everyman stories, familiar. Archetypal. Am I pronouncing that right? We put these figures in stories whose outcomes we’re already familiar with from childhood, so that way we know how the audience will judge them when we finish telling them. The stories lead the people to the judgment we want. Is all this making sense?”

  “Don’t they ever object?” Helen asked.

  “Who?”

  “The celebrities, the rich people. Do they ever resist being put into these everyman stories?”

  Harvey smiled, a little condescendingly, Helen thought. “They’re used to it. They live in publicity, it’s like their atmosphere, so they already know they’ll get judged, and it’s just a question of influencing how. Unlike the rest of us, they don’t really have the option of assuming there’s no one watching. Anyway, it’s what they pay us for. We don’t go to them, you understand; they come to us. Do you know any celebrities yourself?”

  Helen was, naturally, thinking of her husband, who had not long ago been on the front page of the New York Post, and whose name a man like Harvey would surely recognize in an instant. In Harvey’s world this association with the public realm might even have advanced Helen’s case; still, she just didn’t feel like getting into it with him. She shook her head.

  “Not at present,” she said.

  “Not at present?” He laughed. “I like you. What about at past, then?”

  Helen smiled shyly. “Well, if you want to go back a ways, I actually went to junior high with Hamilton Barth.”

  She was worried he would laugh at her, at the pathetic tenuousness of this connection, but he did not. Any point of contact with someone as famous as Hamilton Barth was worth cultivating, and respecting. His eyes grew wide. “No kidding,” he said. “Where was this?”

  “In a little town in northern New York,” said Helen, “where we both grew up.” “Little town” didn’t begin to describe it. They sat in the same Catholic school classroom every year from kindergarten through the eighth grade; Helen’s family moved from Malloy to Watertown the following year, but Hamilton made it through only two and a half years of high school anyway before dropping out and heading south to the city, and then west to L.A., to become an actor. Was there any hint, back then, of the deep, tortured, mercurially tempered, disarmingly handsome movie star he would later become? No, there was not, unless you counted the fact that he was short, as the great male movie stars tended to be for some reason, distilled and without excess, like bonsai trees. They weren’t close friends back then, but they knew a lot about each other, because you knew a lot about everybody your age in a town that small; and if you wanted to get technical, it had gone a little further than that. The two of them were once paired off in a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven, one Saturday night in the vacant apartment over Erin White’s parents’ garage. Even though Helen had to bend her knees slightly to kiss him, Hamilton was—and she probably would have remembered this just as vividly even had he not gone on to become a brooding object of desire all over the world—a fantastic kisser, relaxed and confident and patient, and she remembered her shock and curiosity about whom he’d been practicing with, even during the kiss itself. He tried to get under her skirt, just as they all did, but she only had to knock his hand away one time, which struck her as gentlemanly, almost romantic. “You have nice lips” was what he had said to her after; again, not much, except when considered in relation to the soulless things other eighth-grade boys usually had to say to you after you pushed their hands out from under your skirt. She and Hamilton were never alone together after that night, though, and four months later Helen’s father announced that they were moving. She’d stayed in touch for a few years with a couple of the old Malloy girls who were still in touch with Hamilton when he started to get famous, but she’d never laid eyes on him again, at least not without buying a ticket like everybody else. She’d made out with Hamilton Barth: it was a story Helen told only her closest friends, not because it was so private but because she worried how lame it would make her sound, this seven-minute brush with greatness from a quarter of a century ago. She certainly wasn’t going to trot it out for Harvey, whom she’d known for all of half an hour.

  “How about that,” Harvey said softly. “Are you still friends with him?”

  “No,” Helen said. “I mean, it’s not that we’re not friends, or that we stopped being friends. I hope he’d still remember me fondly, if he ever even thinks about the old days at all, but we haven’t been in contact for a very long time.”

  Harvey’s ardor cooled visibly. “Well, in all honesty, he’d be kind of a big fish for a little operation like ours anyway. So, Helen, here’s the skinny, as we used to say around here. I’ve really enjoyed meeting you, and in all honesty I think you could learn to do this job just fine over time; but I have two more people coming in today who actually know how to do the job already. One of them used to be at Rogers and Cowan, for Pete’s sake. So I really wish I could help you, but honestly, at this moment it doesn’t look too good.”

  “I understand,” said Helen as she rose, and in fact she did understand. She saw how she looked—earnest, naïve, unremarkable—to this sweet older man, and to the whole world of prospective employers at large. He edged around his desk and escorted her to the door, still brushing at crumbs on his torso. “Thank you for your time,” Helen said. “That’s a sharp tie, by the way. A present from your wife?”

  He looked down at it, as if he’d forgotten he had it on, and smiled. “Yes it was,” he said. “That was our last birthday together. Of mine, I mean. She passed away that summer.”

  Here she was feeling so comfortable around him, Helen reflected two hours later on the train home, that she’d forgotten the cardinal virtue of knowing when to keep one’s idiot mouth shut. He still wore the ring, though, which was interesting, and excused her mistake a little bit, but did not excuse her opening up a subject like that when she knew nothing at all about him. No wonder the professional world seemed so closed to someone like her. The fourth interview had been so mortifying she was already having trouble remembering it. She was back in the house and in casual clothes ten minutes before Sara got home from school.

  The two of them ate dinner together, at opposite ends of the table. A chicken breast with a ham-and-cheese roll-up under the skin, some yellow rice and string beans. Sara had always hated eating dinner with her parents, and took no pains to disguise it. Like all of her contemporaries, she was restless when not doing at least two things at once, and the thought of eating—just eating, without the TV or her iPod on, without a phone in hand, without a book to read—struck her as not just wasteful but sentimental. She talked to her mother easily enough when the atmosphere was more relaxed and spontaneous, but at the table it felt quaint and enforced, all the more so now that the conceit that they were a Normal Family, one that Sat Down To Dinner Together, had been debunked forever. Nothing provoked a teenager like the whiff of hypocrisy.

  “What did you do today?” Helen asked tentatively.
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br />   Sara shrugged. “Same old,” she said. “Class, lunch, class, soccer.”

  “Weren’t you going to Sophia’s house after, to study?” Sara shrugged, which could have meant any number of things, but some of those things were so potentially heartbreaking—when seventh grade had ended, and everything was still outwardly normal, Sophia was Sara’s best friend—that Helen didn’t have the heart to pursue it any further. “How was soccer?” she said instead.

  Sara scowled. “The coach is so unfair,” she said.

  She was developing an acne problem already, just a few months after turning thirteen. One of the many revelations of adoption: whatever had happened to you at the age your daughter was now, good or bad, whatever changes you went through, early or late—it was irrelevant, it was of no value to anyone. Even the fact that Sara and her mother were of different races somehow hadn’t prepared Helen for the shock of her own uselessness in that regard. There were no genetic predictors. You were as surprised by what she became as she was.

  On Thursday Helen was filling out some parental-consent forms for school and watching CNN with the sound down, in case anything major happened somewhere in the world, when the phone rang. “Helen, it’s Harvey Aaron,” she heard. “Listen, I am very pleased to tell you that for various reasons those two other guys didn’t work out and so I’d like to offer you the job here, if you’re still available, that is. Probably rude of me just to assume that you’re still available. I’m sorry for that. So are you?”

  “Yes,” said Helen, amazed, hearing her own voice while watching the anchorwoman’s lips move silently on the TV. “I am available.”

  Harvey asked if she could start as soon as Monday, and she almost said no, but then she realized that there was nothing other than fear of the unknown that would prevent her starting two hours from right now, if it came to that. She hung up and, after a few moments, whooped with laughter. What the hell had she just done? Harvey himself seemed so chaotic, and the office so moribund, that it wouldn’t have surprised her if the whole operation went under before she cashed her first paycheck; she had to remind herself that the place had somehow stayed in business for thirty years. It was the first instance of good timing her life had seen in quite a while. She finished off the endless school forms—liability waivers, most of them—with a much lighter heart. That night at dinner, she told Sara what had happened, and what to expect in terms of the change in their routines.

  “They hired you? Really? A PR firm? No offense,” Sara said. “Well, it’s a good thing, I guess. I mean I’ve been wondering if we were just going to go broke or what.”

  “We’re not going to go broke,” Helen said quickly. “But it’s true, we do need some money coming in while your father’s not working.” It was so much more dire than that, but Helen was constitutionally averse to talking about money with her child. Besides, she didn’t really want to find out how much Sara already knew. “And now we’ll have it. So that’s great.”

  Sara looked thoughtful. “What time will you get home?” she said.

  “Six,” Helen said, though in truth she and Harvey hadn’t discussed it. She hadn’t even thought to ask him. “But you’ve got soccer until five most days anyway, and you can go to friends’ houses if you don’t want to be here alone, and you’ve got the cellphone if you need anything and the neighbors—”

  “Yeah, I think I can survive here for an hour or two all by myself,” Sara said acidly. “But I mean—”

  “What?” Helen said.

  “What about just moving to the city?”

  Helen blanched. It was something she had planned to wait at least a month before bringing up as a possibility, on the grounds that there was only so much change a child should be asked to accommodate in one shot. But Sara’s whole life was founded on upheaval. It was Helen, really, who had a limit on how much of a chance she was willing to take that life might improve if they just tried their luck somewhere else.

  “First things first,” she said. “Let’s bank a few paychecks and then see where we are. But that’s something you’d be willing to consider?”

  Sara snorted. “Consider? Try dream of,” she said. “These people are hicks. And now they all think they’re better than us. Plus I’m not saying I want to forget about Dad or anything but it would be kind of a relief to be able to look at something, or someone, that doesn’t remind me he’s not here. Is there dessert?”

  On Monday Helen took the earlier, more crowded train, full of tense faces and clubby nods of recognition, and showed up at work so far ahead of schedule she had to wait in the hallway for ten minutes until Mona arrived with a key to let her in. She expected some kind of formal orientation, but instead Mona just showed her how to set up Google news alerts for all nine of the business’s current clients, as well as twelve other names Harvey had identified as potential clients. When that was done, it was just a matter of waiting for these alerts to show up in her inbox; in the meantime she was handed a stack of gossip magazines and asked to scan them thoroughly for any mention of those same twenty-one names. Harvey came in around eleven; he looked surprised to see Helen sitting there at her desk but then nodded quickly in embarrassment, went into his office without a word to her and shut the door.

  Mona and the other employee there, whose name was Nevaeh, spoke all day long to each other but never once to Helen, unless it was to answer some question they couldn’t pretend not to know the answer to, like where the ladies’ room was. At four forty-five they reapplied their makeup and left without a word to the boss or to Helen. The whole first week was like that. She didn’t mind the idleness, or the feeling of being ignored—this wasn’t some journey of personal growth or something, she was just looking to keep herself and her child out of the poorhouse—but so little happened around there that she didn’t see how any of their jobs could possibly last. She was relieved when Mona handed her her first paycheck and then relieved all over again when it cleared. When she mentioned to Harvey that she didn’t feel like she had that much to do, he looked embarrassed and said, “Hurry up and wait, as they used to tell us in the Army,” and went back into his office with a bag full of Chinese food and shut the door.

  “The guy who used to have your job quit to go back to school,” Mona finally told her. “He didn’t have nothing to do either. But if Harvey doesn’t hire someone to take his place, that’s like admitting that the business is shrinking.”

  Then one morning Harvey came in on time for once and called all three women into his office. “I think we may have something here,” he said. “I went out to Brooklyn last night to have dinner with my son, and the two of us ordered out for some Chinese. Any of you ever heard of Peking Grill?”

  Mona and Nevaeh nodded sagely. “There’s one up in the Heights,” Nevaeh said.

  “Right,” Harvey said, “there’s like eight of them. Anyway, we call and ask for a delivery, and they say no. No? They say no, we can’t, because our delivery guys are on strike. But you’re still open? I say. Sure. So Michael and I walk three blocks to Peking Grill, and we have to cross a god damn picket line to get in, and inside it’s empty except for one guy who’s sitting alone at a table and crying, for Pete’s sake. Sobbing. He’s the owner.”

  “Disgusting,” Mona said.

  Harvey glanced at her curiously but then went on. “So someone is apparently trying to unionize the deliverymen at all the Peking Grills, which I would think would be difficult because pretty much everyone who works there is illegal, but nevertheless. They are picketing the owner not only for a wage hike but for back wages for all the years they say they were underpaid. I ask him if he’s had any calls from the papers, and he says yes, just that day, from somebody at the Post. He hasn’t returned it yet.”

  He sat back in his chair. “So I sense an opening here,” he said. “For us. For us to intervene.”

  Mona and Nevaeh just went on nodding, but Helen, who couldn’t help herself, said, “On which side?”

  The two women shot her an angry look,
and all of a sudden Helen understood that they weren’t really following any of what Harvey said either but had just settled on nodding as the quickest way to get through these enthusiasms of his and back to their desks. Harvey, though, looked delighted and indulgently thoughtful, as if he were only pretending to think through a question for a student’s benefit, even though someone of his intelligence would have known the answer instinctively. “Well,” he said, “the deliverymen don’t really have much of a public image problem, do they? I mean, they risked their lives to get here, they’re being paid about two dollars an hour, they’re sleeping Christ knows where. Everybody already sympathizes with them. In New York, they do, at least. If we were somewhere in flyover country, they’d have a posse out for these guys, but hey, this is Manhattan. Whereas this owner, who came here in exactly the same circumstances but then had the temerity to actually succeed, to make himself a millionaire—his name is Chin, by the way—he’s being portrayed as the villain, he’s the one with the story that needs to get out. He’s the one in need of our expert services. Which is what I convinced him of last night while we ate some very delicious chow fun.”

  Helen Googled Chin and, sure enough, most of the references to him were scathing. She was printing out a few of them—Harvey disliked having links sent to him—when he opened his door and tried to beckon her into his office without the other two women noticing. “Mr. Chin and I are having lunch today at the Peking Grill up on Seventy-eighth Street,” he said when she came in. “I’d love it if you’d come along. You don’t have to do anything but take notes. But I think it would be useful if he saw that we’re, you know, an operation here, that he wouldn’t just be putting his business in the hands of one old Jew who likes Chinese food.”

  They arrived at 11:30, which seemed early for lunch but was probably scheduled with an eye toward minimizing the presence of picketers; indeed there was only one sullen young Chinese man sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk who lifted his head and glared at them as they walked past him and the row of locked, scarred bikes.