Judith Tarr: Household Gods

Happy to retain you in your salaried position? Like any attorney with two brain cells to rub against each other, Nicole knew that was one of the all-time great lies, right up there with The check is in the mail and Of course I won’t come in your mouth, darling. If you weren’t on the way up, you were on the way out. She’d thought she was on the way up. Now -

She knew she had to say something. “Could you tell me why you chose Mr. Ogarkov” — formality helped, to some microscopic degree — ”instead of me, so that… so that I’ll be in a better position for the next opportunity?” Rosenthal hadn’t said anything about the next opportunity. She knew what that meant, too. It was written above the gates of hell. All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

He coughed once, and then again, as if the first time had taken him by surprise. Maybe he hadn’t expected her to ask that. After a pause that stretched a little longer than it should have, he said, “The senior partners were of the opinion that, with your other skills being more or less equal, Mr. Ogarkov’s very fluent writing style gives the firm an asset we would do well to retain.”

“But — ” Nothing Nicole could say would change Sheldon Rosenthal’s mind. That was as clear as the crystal decanter that stood on the sideboard in this baronial hall of an office. Nicole could do the mathematics of the firm, better maybe than anybody in it. She was five times the lawyer Gary Ogarkov would ever be — but Gary Ogarkov had ten times the chances. All it took was one little thing. One tiny fluke of nature. A Y chromosome.

They all had it, all the senior partners, every last one of them. Rosenthal, Gallagher, Kaplan, Jeter, Gonzalez Feng, and most of the junior partners, too. A precise handful of women rounded out the firm, just enough to keep people from raising awkward eyebrows. Not enough to mean anything, not where it counted.

Class action suit? Discrimination suit? Even as she thought of it, she looked into Sheldon Rosenthal’s eyes and knew. She could sue till she bankrupted herself, and it wouldn’t make the least bit of difference.

Men, she thought, too clear even to be bitter. They would not give a person her due, not if she was female: not as a woman, not as a partner, not as a professional. All they wanted to do was get on top and screw her, in bed or on the job. And they could. All too often, they could. In the United States at the end of the twentieth century, in spite of all the laws, the suits, the cases piled up from the bottom to the top of an enormous and tottering system, they still had the power.

Oh, they paid lip service to equality. They’d hired her, hadn’t they? They’d hired half a dozen other peons, and used most of them till they broke or left, the way they were using Nicole. Hypocrites, every last one of them.

“You wished to say something, Ms. Gunther-Perrin?” Rosenthal probably didn’t get into court once a year these days, but he knew how to size up a witness.

“I was just wondering” — Nicole chose her words with enormous care — “if you used anything besides the senior partners’ opinions to decide who would get the partnership.”

However careful she was, it wasn’t careful enough. Sheldon Rosenthal had been an attorney longer than she’d been alive. He knew what she was driving at. “Oh, yes,” he said blandly. “We studied performance assessments and annual evaluations most thoroughly, I assure you. The process is well documented.”

If you sue us, you’re toast, he meant.

Performance assessments written by men, Nicole thought. Annual evaluations written by men. She knew hers were good. She had no way of knowing what Gary’s said. If they were as good as hers… If they’re as good as mine, it’s because he’s got the old-boy network looking out for him. There’s no way he’s as good at this as I am.

But if Rosenthal said the process was well documented, you could take it to the bank. And you’d have to be crazy to take it to court.

“Is there anything else?” he asked. Smooth. Capable. Powerful.

“No.” Nicole had nothing else to say. She nodded to the man who’d ruined her life — the second man in the past couple of years who’d ruined her life — and left the office. Lucinda watched her go without the slightest show of sympathy. Woman she might be, and woman of color at that, but Lucinda had made her choice and sealed her bargain. She belonged to the system.

The stairway down to the sixth floor seemed to have twisted into an M.C. Escher travesty of itself. Going down felt like slogging uphill through thickening, choking air.

A couple of people she knew stood in the hallway, strategically positioned to congratulate her — news got around fast. But it was the wrong news. One look at her face must have told them the truth. They managed, rather suddenly, to find urgent business elsewhere.

Cyndi’s smile lit up the office. It froze as Nicole came in clear sight. “Oh, no!” she said, as honest as ever, and as inept at keeping her thoughts to herself.

“Oh, yes,” Nicole said. She almost felt sorry for her secretary. Poor Cyndi, all ready and set to be a partner’s assistant, and now she had to know she’d landed in a dead-end job. Just like Nicole. Just like every other woman who’d smacked into the glass ceiling. “They only had one slot open, and they decided to give it to Mr. Ogarkov.” She felt, and probably sounded, eerily calm, like someone who’d just been in a car wreck. Walking past Cyndi, she sat down behind her desk and stared at the papers there. She couldn’t make them mean anything.

After a couple of minutes, or maybe a week, or an hour, the phone rang. She picked it up. Her voice was flat. “Yes?”

“Mr. Ogarkov wants to talk to you,” Cyndi said in her ear. “He sounds upset.”

I’ll bet. Nicole thought. She could not make herself feel anything. “Tell him,” she said, “tell him thanks, but I really don’t want to talk to anyone right now. Maybe tomorrow.” Cyndi started to say something, but Nicole didn’t want to listen, either. Gently, she placed the handset in its cradle.

Nicole sat staring at the phone. After a while, when it didn’t ring, she picked it up. Work was a lost cause even if she’d given a damn. But the kids weren’t going to go away, the way her partnership had, and Josefina, and Frank, and most of the rest of her life. She had to do something about them, find someone to take care of them tomorrow.

She paused with the receiver in her hand, ignoring its monotone buzz.

No, she could not quit. She could not go tramping back upstairs and tell Sheldon Rosenthal to take his crummy little salaried job and shove it. She could not take the kids, the Honda, and the assets she didn’t have, and run back to Indianapolis. The world didn’t work that way. She didn’t work that way. She had to do it right. She’d hunker down, grit her teeth, and let them put it to her here, till she could find something else somewhere else. Never mind where.

Meanwhile, Josefina was off to Mexico tonight, and Kimberley and Justin weren’t going to take care of themselves. There wasn’t any help for it. She had to talk to Frank.

She dialed the UCLA number. She didn’t expect to get him, not right away. Frank had always despised phone calls. They interrupted. They disrupted. They interfered with the thinking of wise thoughts.

Horny thoughts, more likely, Nicole thought sourly. But he wasn’t too bad about answering his voice mail — when he got around to it.

She had the message all ready in her mind, set to give to the machine. But the phone cut off at the first ring, leaving her wondering briefly if she’d dialed a wrong number. Then Frank’s voice said cheerily, “Hi, Dawn, darlin’, how you doin?”