Griff had looked good. He had fourteen years’ experience at a comparable company called the Masterson Group, although with an unexpected, abrupt departure. He had attended the University of Maryland as an undergrad, then Wharton, and there had been a curious gap-when, he explained, he’d spent two years on the PGA tour. All of this was very good, including the gap-Harry Fry loved golfers, and Griff told a charmingly self-effacing story about rooming with Matt Kuchar and Steve Stricker and the hazing he’d had to endure. (They had made him drink warm beer that they’d run through the dishwasher.) Griff presented very well in person. The whole room was nodding at Griff, eating his words up. Harry had loved him, Bev had loved him, Margot had loved him.
Margot was known as a shrewd reader of résumés. In his first interview, she had said, “You mention here that you were homecoming king at Maryland?”
“Yeah,” Griff said. “I was.”
“That’s so cool,” Bev Callahan said. “Was that, like, voted on?”
“Voted on, yes,” Griff said. “Secret ballot. Juniors and seniors eligible, so chances were about one in eight thousand.”
“Wow!” Bev had said. Bev, Margot knew, had been on the kick line in high school, and although she was a very serious professional, she was prone to this kind of gushing.
Margot put a check mark next to “Homecoming King.” And after that first interview, she called Griff and told him to strike it from his résumé.
“It makes you sound shallow,” she said.
“I wasn’t sure,” Griff said. “I figured it would either be something fun to talk about in the interview, or it would make me look like a tool.”
“The latter,” Margot said. “Get rid of it.”
The other front-runner for the job was a man named Seth LeBreux, who came from New Orleans-Tulane, LSU Business School. Seth had a Cajun accent that everyone loved, and he’d been with BellSouth for a decade and had pulled New Orleans through post-Katrina hell. He left BellSouth in 2007, however, and invested in a trio of restaurants in the French Quarter that had failed. And so, he said, he decided it was time to give up the gumbo and go back to IT.
Seth LeBreux was Edge’s nephew.
Margot didn’t know this, however, until Edge took her to dinner at Picholine. At that dinner, she and Edge had been seated in an intimate, cozy corner of the restaurant. Immediately when they sat down, champagne appeared. He then ordered house-made burrata cheese with heirloom tomatoes, and a wild mushroom risotto. He knew his way around the menu; Terrance Brennan was a friend, he said.
When Edge had invited Margot to dinner a few days earlier, he’d told her that he wanted her to spend the night with him. She couldn’t believe it. She had checked back with him twice. You’re sure?
Of course, he said.
Margot had gotten Kitty, her afternoon babysitter, to spend the night with the kids.
During the first course of dinner, Edge held her hand. At one point, he leaned over and gave her a long, lingering kiss. In public! Every sexual and romantic cliché happened at once-Margot swooned, her stomach dropped, her knees turned to water.
It was more than an hour later-after several glasses of Malbec and entrées of day boat lobster for her and suckling pig for him-that Edge cleared his throat and brought up the subject of Seth LeBreux, his nephew, his sister’s only child, a good kid, a kid Edge had looked out for since his sister’s husband died in Vietnam in 1974. A kid who was like a son to Edge. And Seth had had such a hard time with his restaurant ventures, why he’d ever left BellSouth no one could say except that Seth had a dream of running a restaurant empire, maybe he’d watched too much Emeril, who knew, but it hadn’t worked out for him. He’d lost his shirt.
Edge had been the one to encourage Seth to come north. Start over in New York.
Seth LeBreux, Edge said again, in conclusion, as if Margot might have missed his name the first time.
Margot had held a bite of butter-poached lobster suspended over her plate.
She said, her voice barely a whisper, “Edge, you know I can’t…”
And he said, “Oh, I know, I know, I’m not asking you for anything. I would never do that. He just mentioned Miller-Sawtooth, and I wondered if he’d encountered you, and he said-”
“Yes,” Margot said. “Yes, that’s my placement. Tricom.”
“So,” Edge said.
Margot had set her food down, unable to eat anything else. Edge poured her another glass of Malbec. He said, “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I feel like an ass. Can we forget I mentioned it?”
Yes, Margot agreed this was for the best. She excused herself for the ladies’ room, where she spent a good, long time staring at herself in the mirror, trying to convince herself to walk right out of the restaurant. Fuck Edge Desvesnes. Margot wasn’t a moron; she saw what he was doing. Seth LeBreux had that Cajun accent-quite frankly, that was the best thing going for him, that and his tear-jerking stories about post-Katrina, which to Margot had sounded a bit too crafted. He was one of the top three candidates, but he was also, in Margot’s mind, the maverick. He’d been out of the industry for six years, and a string of failed restaurants didn’t say much about his management skills or his imaginative problem solving.
Walk out the door, Margot thought. She felt like a suckling pig, one that had been spit-roasted to Edge’s liking. He had set her up. Get in a cab, go home, change your phone number.
But she was too weak. She went back to the table, drank her wine and then a glass of port with the apricot tarte tatin that Edge ordered for them to share, and when she slid into the back of a taxi, it was with Edge. They sped uptown to his apartment, and there Edge took his time with her. It was, by far, the best lovemaking of their relationship; it was almost as if he hadn’t been trying before. Later, he brought her a robe and a glass of ice water, and he rubbed her back until she fell asleep.
In the morning, she was up and out, but she felt like the issue of Seth LeBreux needed addressing, so she said, as she kissed Edge good-bye at the door, “It’s in the client’s hands now, but I’ll see what I can do for Seth.”
“Thank you, Margot,” Edge said. “You don’t know what it would mean to me.”
Margot didn’t explain all of this to Griff, however. What she said was: “The guy I was dating, a man I thought I was falling in love with… his nephew was a competing candidate for that Tricom job.”
Griff stared at her levelly. She loved the complexity of his eyes, but she couldn’t let herself get distracted.
She said, “Tricom loved you, you know they loved you.”
“Yes,” he said. “I thought I was in. I thought it was fit and finish. I thought I was their guy. And then out of nowhere… I got signed off.”
Margot said, “I threw you under the bus so that Seth would get the job.”
Griff said, “You’re kidding.”
“Oh, God,” Margot said. “I wish I was.”
The final slate of three for the Tricom job had been Griff, Seth, and a woman named Nanette Kim. Nanette Kim was phenomenally brilliant (Georgetown, Harvard Business School, fifteen years at AT&T, she had a ten out of ten on her handshake, she was a woman, and she was Asian). Margot couldn’t not send her. But Margot also knew that Drew Carver, the CEO of Tricom, was as chauvinistic a human being as had ever been born, and Margot knew the new hire was going to be a man. It would be Griff or Seth.