Household Gods

She swiveled her chair to glare at the framed law degree on the wall. Indiana University Law School. In Indianapolis, it would have stamped her forever as second-rate: if you weren’t Ivy League, you weren’t anybody. In Los Angeles, she’d found, it was unusual, even exotic. That still bemused her, after half a dozen years.

“There ain’t no justice,” she said to the wall. The wall didn’t deign to answer.

Nicole was still sitting there, still glowering at the diploma, when Cyndi came into the office and plopped the day’s mail on the desk. “Doesn’t look like anything you have to handle right away,” she said. She was trying to sound normal – trying a little too hard.

Nicole didn’t snap at her for it. Much. “Good,” she said. “The way this day is going, I’m not up for handling much of anything anyway.”

Cyndi bit her lip. “I’m sorry,” she said, and hesitated, visibly wondering whether to go on. At last she decided to go for it: “It should have been you, Ms. Gunther-Perrin.”

“It wasn’t.” Nicole’s voice came out flat. “That’s all there is to it.”

Cyndi couldn’t say anything to that. She shook her head and left for the relative safety of her desk.

Nicole hardly noticed. Opening envelopes gave her hands something to do but let her mind stay disengaged: perfect. If she worked hard enough at it, she might just disconnect altogether. Once the envelopes were open, she shuffled the papers they’d held, looking busy without doing much till she could escape to lunch.

Yang Chow, over on Topanga Canyon, was hands down the best Chinese place in the west half of the San Fernando Valley. That wasn’t why Nicole drove there. The restaurant was also a couple of miles away from her Warner Center office building, far enough that, with luck, she’d be the only one from the firm there today. Shop talk and gossip were the last things she wanted.

She sat alone at a table in the casual elegance of the restaurant – no storefront fast-food ambience here – eating soup, drinking tea, and going after chili shrimp with chopsticks. Yang Chow’s were of hard, smooth plastic, and didn’t give as good a grip as the disposable wooden kind. She counted herself lucky not to end up with a shrimp in her lap.

That’s what my luck’s come down to, she thought, splashing soy sauce onto steamed rice: Idon’t spill food on myself. All around her, businessmen chattered happily in English, Chinese, Spanish, and some other language she didn’t recognize.

Why shouldn’t they be happy? They were men.

One of them caught her looking. She saw what she’d come to call The Progression: widened eyes, Who-Me? glance, broad come-hither grin. He was wearing a wedding ring, a broad gold band. He didn’t bother to hide it. Without that, she would simply have ignored him. As it was, the look she sent suggested he had a glob of snot in his mustache. He hastily went back to his pork chow mein.

Nicole took her time finishing her lunch. Going back to the office had all the appeal of a root canal. She stared out the window at the traffic whooshing past on Topanga. She was aware, rather remotely, of the busboy taking her dishes. Only after the waiter came by to ask for the third time, in increasingly pointed tones, whether she wanted anything else did she admit to herself that she couldn’t stay there all afternoon. She threw a five and a couple of singles on the table and walked out to her car.

When she drove into the lot, she had to park a long way from the building. She’d expected that; most people had been back from lunch for half an hour, maybe more. As she trudged wearily across the gray asphalt, someone called, “Nicole!”

She looked around a little wildly, wondering if she was having a flashback to the morning. But it wasn’t Gary Ogarkov this time, smoking his blasted cigar and blowing up her hopes till they couldn’t do anything but explode. Tony Gallagher, who’d just got out of his Lincoln Town Car a few spaces away from where she’d parked, waved and called her name again. When she paused, he caught up with her at a ponderous trot, belly lapping over the waistband of his slacks.

She didn’t have much gladness to spare for anyone, but, thanks to that Midwestern upbringing, she could still be polite. “Hello, Mr. Gallagher,” she said. Of all the senior partners, she liked him best – not that that said much right now. But Gallagher had more juice in him than the rest of them put together. He was a vigorous sixty, his hair dyed a red close to the color it must have been when he was younger. He’d probably grown his bushy muttonchops when they were cool, back about 1971, and then never bothered shaving them off. Whoever had made his jacket had killed and skinned a particularly repulsive plaid sofa for the fabric. Nicole doubted it had ever been cool, but Gallagher didn’t care. He wore it with panache.