Page 25 of Babies for the Boss
I wait. She picks up her coffee, looks into it thoughtfully, then back at me with those calm brown eyes. “Operations,” she says, in a tone that manages to be both completely straightforward and entirely opaque at the same time. “The kind that don’t appear in any quarterly projections you will ever file, Molly.”
“What kind of operations?”
She’s quiet for a moment, and I watch her decide something. “The kind where the goal is that nothing happens,” she says carefully. “And when something does happen anyway, the goal becomes that it is contained. Quietly. Quickly.” She sets her coffee down. “Pavel is very good at containment. I was very good at helping him.”
I think about this. Outside the deli window, Forty-Third moves past in its usual indifferent stream of coats and cabs and peoplewith somewhere to be. “So the men who come in sometimes, the ones who aren’t clients…”
“Yes.”
“And the calls he takes in Russian that he never translates.”
“Also yes.”
“And the reason there’s always someone loitering near the building entrance who isn’t waiting for anyone.”
Vet looks at me with something that might, on a different face, be called impressed. On hers, it’s merely a slight elevation of one brow. “You are very observant for someone who files quarterly projections.”
I fold my napkin and wait for the small hairs on the back of my neck to simmer down. They don’t. “Why are you telling me this?”
She considers the question with the same unhurried thoroughness she brings to everything, tapping one finger against the side of her coffee cup. “Because you are smart enough to have already picked it up,” she says finally. “And smart people who have partial information make worse decisions than smart people who have more complete information. Also, I think you deserve to know who you are working for. Not as a warning. More as a…” She searches for the word. “Courtesy.”
“A courtesy,” I repeat.
“Da.” Then, briskly, as though the matter is settled. In a perfect American accent, she says, “Finish your sandwich, Molly. You have a two o’clock.”
I eat the rest of my sandwich and think about the wordoperations, and all the territory it covers. It looks like all the things I have been carefully not looking at directly for the past few years.
I think about it for the rest of the afternoon. On the subway home. While I lie on my couch with a glass of wine that I work through more purposefully than usual. Staring at the water stain duck and trying to lay what Vet described next to the man I know and find the shape that contains both of them.
I find that I can’t, not cleanly. The inability to do so is a problem I’m going to have to sit with for a while.
Vet said things without saying them, a particular skill she has. I know what she meant by those not-words. Pavel is capable of real darkness. I believe this now in a way I only notionally believed it before.
It’s not a comfortable thing to believe about someone whose hands you know. He is also, in that same low and inconvenient voice that lives in the honest part of my brain, the most careful person I have ever been with.
I fall asleep without resolving it, and I go to work the next morning without resolving it, and I’m professional and competent and fine, which I have a great deal of practice being. No one knows I’m having a romantic crisis, and I will keep it that way. My mask is impenetrable.
“What’s wrong?” Vet asks flatly.
Of course, Little Miss Operations would have X-ray glasses.
“Nothing,” I chirp brightly. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Not a thing, darling, but I am not the topic here.” She stares down her nose at me, which gives me the weird sensation of being judged by a nun. “You, however, are, and you are bothered by something. You’re doing that hyper-professional fake thing you do when you’re trying to cover?—”
“Can you not read me for once?”
She lifts a shoulder. “Professional hazard. My apologies.”
“Sorry. I shouldn’t snipe at you. You’re the only person who’s honest with me around here.”
“Ah.” Her tone says she already knows everything. “You feel betrayed, yes?”
“Just… like I’m standing on shakier ground than I thought.”
“That is the trick, no? Never stand on ground someone else owns.”
“That sounds like strikingly good life advice.”
