That evening, sitting alone in the hotel restaurant, Tiphany nursed her second beer and marveled at the world in which she’d found herself. A day had passed in which only four people had spoken to her: Mrs. Freeman, a fucked-up street kid, a mime, and finally her waiter. The first hated her. The second was barely conscious. About the third she could only guess. Judging by his neglect of her, the fourth seemed to have already decided Tiphany’s tip wasn’t worth the effort. For anyone else, she was sure, such encounters came easily. For anyone else, the trip would have been simple. A free vacation. A per diem. A break from Detroit’s endless winter.
When she got back to her room after dinner and found that Mrs. Freeman wasn’t there, Tiphany gave Sasha a call. The thing she wanted to talk about most was the mime.
“ ‘At least someone’s having a good time.’ That’s what he said.”
“If a mime’s going to speak,” Sasha said, yawning into the phone, “he must have something pretty important to say.”
“He was right. I don’t belong here,” Tiphany said. “And she’s probably going to fire me when we get back.”
“So you have to share a room,” he said. “She’s old. She probably won’t even remember.”
“You’re not helping.” It was always the same. He offered jokes when she was looking for comfort. The day after she’d told him she’d be going on this trip — the first business trip of her life — he’d gone to the thrift store and bought her a beat-up attaché case, which he monogrammed himself with a permanent marker.
She’d been planning to tell him about the landscape artist and his paintings, but now she just wasn’t in the mood.
Tiphany was getting ready for bed when Mrs. Freeman returned, stepping out of her shoes before even shutting the door.
“Would you mind making me a drink?” the old woman said, crumbling into the chair. She seemed to fall instantly asleep. But at the sound a moment later of the clinking ice beside her ear, Mrs. Freeman opened her eyes and gratefully took the glass. After a few sips, she’d recovered enough to sit up straight and answer Tiphany’s questions about her day.
“Buffoons,” she said, “blowhards, posses of chittering monkeys. They left their brains at home to save space for their golf clubs.”
“Some of the panels were interesting, I thought,” Tiphany said, hoping Mrs. Freeman wouldn’t ask for examples.
Mrs. Freeman rattled her ice and waited for the last drops of gin to reach her tongue. “I hadn’t realized you were so interested,” she said. “You should come with me tomorrow. Frankly, I wish you’d take my place.”
There was nothing Tiphany would have liked less. But as she unfolded her bed, she couldn’t help feeling she’d made some slight progress toward amends.
Having been unable to think of an excuse for backing out, Tiphany began the next day at Mrs. Freeman’s side, and there she remained up through lunch. There were six of them at the restaurant, the four men old friends and colleagues of Mrs. Freeman’s. Tiphany forgot their names the moment she was introduced.
They spent much of the meal discussing their favorite resorts. Mrs. Freeman seemed especially fond of a hotel in Haiti, of all places. Tiphany kept quiet, ashamed to admit the hotel she was in right now was the most exotic place she’d ever been. But as the conversation wore on, she kept feeling everyone was looking at her, waiting for her to say something, anything. Finally, in a moment of desperation, she choked down a gulp of frigid ice water and, turning to a ruddy-faced man who’d just concluded a long, boring story about a trip abroad, said, “I can’t remember — what part of France is Belize in?”
All at once, it seemed, everyone reached for their napkins, dabbing at their lips so as to have an excuse not to answer. After a moment Mrs. Freeman reached across the table to pat Tiphany’s arm. “I can hardly remember myself sometimes.”
After that Tiphany was sure every time she opened her mouth, she was making a fool of herself. But what could she do? They were smart and successful and sophisticated, and she was just a glorified secretary. She’d obviously embarrassed Mrs. Freeman as well, and that was why the old woman was so desperate to get rid of her when the meal was over, claiming she had business to attend to alone.
Despite having spent the day sitting down, at the end of it Tiphany was more exhausted than the day before, when she’d walked for miles. For the second night in a row, she had dinner and drinks in the hotel restaurant. Afterward, depressed and slightly drunk, she went upstairs and called Sasha.
“I miss you,” she said. “I wish you were here.”
“Me too,” he said without sincerity. She couldn’t blame him.
She told him about lunch, how she’d embarrassed Mrs. Freeman in front of her friends.
“Who cares?” he said, interrupting. “These people are animals. You should never have taken the job. I mean, it’s repulsive. They’re vile. A fucking military contractor. Spewing toxic waste all over the place. They’re a scourge.”
“A scourge?”
“It’s immoral,” he said. “Working there, you’re part of the problem.”
In the background his stereo was blasting his favorite band, the Chicken Tongues, and she just wanted to close her eyes and listen.
“We need the money.”
“Which is more important?”
It was his way, when he didn’t want to talk about something, often simply because talk bored him, to reduce it to the most simplistic of terms. Yes or no. Either or. The fewer the choices, the shorter the conversation. But what sort of job could she have taken that he wouldn’t find objectionable? Just about everybody sold something, and nearly all of it was garbage in one way or another. Yes, the company made weapons and drones. But it also built toasters and fetal heart monitors and solar-powered water filtration systems. She’d applied for the job in the first place for the same reason she’d applied for everything else: because it was there. She’d gone to the interview without even the faintest sense of optimism, not so much assuming she wouldn’t get the job as almost hoping she wouldn’t. She’d had a brief office internship in college, and the thought of spending her life doing something like that had filled her with something even more debilitating than dread.
And so it had come as a surprise to Tiphany that during the fifteen minutes the interview for the job had taken, Mrs. Freeman had voluntarily, without any provocation on Tiphany’s part, acknowledged each and every one of her fears. She had said the position Tiphany had applied for was tedious and unglamorous, that the people she’d work with would often be tiresome, that the company itself could be exasperating. But she’d added that she herself had fought her way up from the bottom, a woman in a man’s world, and that she’d come to HSI because she’d seen great potential, potential she saw still.
“We do good things,” she’d said, “but sometimes we do them badly.” And as far as Mrs. Freeman was concerned, there was no point getting up in the morning if there wasn’t something — and for her the company was that something — in one’s life worth struggling to make better.
“We get to be the conscience,” Mrs. Freeman had said that day, seeming to enjoy the idea of the two of them conspiring in her office. “These men need us, even if they don’t know it.”
And Tiphany had admired not just her honesty but the confidence with which Mrs. Freeman had voiced her convictions and her condemnations. Even before the fifteen minutes were up, Tiphany had decided that, if she was lucky enough to be offered the job, she would take it.
But she knew if she’d told Sasha any of this, he would’ve said she was a sellout. So she kept it to herself.