Household Gods

Lucinda Jackson looked up from the keyboard of – of all things – an IBM Selectric. Not for her anything as newfangled as a computer. She was a light-skinned black woman, the exact shade of good coffee well lightened with cream. She might have been fifty or she might have been seventy. One thing Nicole did know: she’d been with Mr. Rosenthal forever.

“He still has the client in there, Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” she said. Her voice was cultured, soft, almost all traces of the Deep South excised as if by surgery. “Why don’t you sit down? He’ll see you as soon as he can.”

Nicole nodded and sank into a chair so plush, she had real doubts that she’d be able to climb out of it. Her eyes went to the magazines on the table next to it, but she didn’t take one. She didn’t want to have to slap it shut all of a sudden when she received the summons to the inner office.

Twenty minutes slid by. Nicole tried to look as if she didn’t mind that her life – not to mention her day’s work – had been put on hold. When she was a partner, she would be more careful of her schedule. She wouldn’t keep a fellow partner waiting.

At last, with an effect rather like the parting of the gates of heaven in a Fifties movie epic, the door to the inner office opened. Someone her mother had watched on TV came out. “Thanks a million, Shelly,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m glad it’s in good hands. Say hi to Ruth for me.” He waggled his fingers at Lucinda and walked past Nicole as if she’d been invisible.

She was almost too bemused to feel slighted. Shelly? She couldn’t imagine anyone calling Sheldon Rosenthal Shelly. Certainly no one in the firm did – not even the other senior partners.

“Go on in, Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” Lucinda said, at the same time as Rosenthal said, “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.”

“It’s all right,” Nicole said, carefully heaving herself up and out of that engulfing chair. It wasn’t all right, not really, but she told herself it was – the way hazing is, a kind of rite of passage. And after all, what could she do? Complain to his boss?

Rosenthal held the door open so that she could enter his sanctum. He looked like what he was: a Jewish lawyer – thin and thoughtful type, not fat and friendly – in his mid-sixties, out of the ordinary only in that he wore a neat gray chin beard. He waved her to a chair. “Please – make yourself comfortable.” Before she could sit down, however, he pointed to the Mr. Coffee on a table by the window. “Help yourself, if you like.”

The mug on his desk was half full. Nicole decided to take him up on his offer – a show of solidarity, as it were; her first cup of coffee as a partner in the firm. She filled one of the styrofoam cups by the coffee machine. When she tasted, her eyebrows leaped upward. “Is that Blue Mountain?” she asked.

“You’re close.” He smiled. “It’s Kalossi Celebes. A lot of people think it’s just as good, and you don’t have to rob a bank to buy it.”

As if you need to rob a bank, Nicole thought. Her office window looked out on the street, and on the office building across it. His offered a panorama of the hills that gave Woodland Hills its name. He had a mansion up in those hills; she’d been there for holiday parties. Serious money in the Valley lived south of Ventura Boulevard, the farther south, the more serious. Sheldon Rosenthal lived a long way south of Ventura.

He made a couple of minutes of small talk while she sipped the delicious coffee, then said, “The analysis you and Mr. Ogarkov prepared of the issues involved in the Butler Ranch project was an excellent piece of work.”

There. Now. Nicole armed herself to be polite, as polite as humanly possible. Memories of Indiana childhood, white gloves and patent-leather shoes (white only between Memorial Day and Labor Day, never either before or after), waylaid her for a moment. Out of them, she said in her best company voice, “Thank you very much.”

“An excellent piece of work,” Rosenthal repeated, as if she hadn’t spoken. “On the strength of it, I offered Mr. Ogarkov a partnership in the firm this morning, an offer he has accepted.”

“Yes. I know. I saw him downstairs when I was coming in.” Nicole wished she hadn’t said that; it reminded the founding partner how late she’d been. Her heart pounded. Now it’s my turn. Let me show what I can do, and two years from now Gary will be eating my dust.

Rosenthal’s long, skinny face grew longer and skinnier. “Ms. Gunther-Perrin, I very much regret to inform you that only one partnership was available. After consultation with the senior partners, I decided to offer it to Mr. Ogarkov.”