Best Intentions by Emily Listfield

constant pitching and placating. As I hurry down the long corridor of open cubicles people look up, smile politely and self-consciously return to their work. I pretend not to notice the eBay and Style.com windows they rush to close as I pass. There was a time when mine was the office everyone gathered in to vent about boyfriends and bosses and failed diets or to debate whether black nail polish was hideously Goth or crazily chic. But that was two promotions ago. I miss it now, the easy camaraderie, the feeling of being in the trenches, and try to resurrect it with a smile, a gossipy interlude, though there is a strained note underneath. Frankly, it does annoy me when I see eBay up, when people wander in two hours late complaining of spats with lovers or bemoaning their hangovers and expect sympathy on my part.
    My assistant, Petra, looks up from her three-inch-thick September issue of W . “Morning.” She smiles broadly, anticipating approbation for being on time.
    I smile back but refuse on principle to compliment her on the mere fact of her presence.
    Twenty-four, with endless legs, no hips, a Russian accent and a brightly hennaed bob, Petra has a cheerful disposition, a father who imports God knows what from Russia—one month it’s cars; the next, baby grand pianos—and entrée to every nightclub in Manhattan and Miami. For the past couple of years, the city has been overflowing with Russian models, hungry young teens who come over with little more than a plane ticket and some names scribbled on a slip of paper, girls with such bad teeth they can’t smile in photographs, giving them a surly look that the uninitiated interpret as evidence of their dark Russian souls, though by the time they hit the bigger fashion magazines they are smiling broadly, either at their newsstand placement or simply because they can, having finally earned enough money to have their teeth fixed. Petra, on the other hand, has perfectly good teeth and lives in Short Hills with her family, though her father recently promised to buy her an apartment in Manhattan, which, she assures me, will help with her tardiness.
    I head into my office and shut the door.
    Deirdre is right. Why shouldn’t I just ask Sam who he’s meeting, or at least insist that he tell me what it is he wanted to talk to me about? I pick up the phone and am halfway through dialing his number when Petra buzzes me.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œCarol just called. She’s going to be late. She wants you to handle the Rita Mason meeting on your own. Rita and Barry are on their way up.”
    â€œAll right,” I reply, annoyed.
    Carol Steiner is in her early fifties, petite, well-preserved and given to low-cut tops beneath fitted jackets that display an impressive amount of ripe cleavage, which, on anyone else, would have been deemed inappropriate. Divorced, she has a daughter who was kicked out of Chapin for her starring role in a blow-job soiree that ended up on YouTube and is now safely ensconced in boarding school. Carol has a new boyfriend (is that the word at her age?) and has not been turning up in the office as much as she used to. Carol, who started the business from scratch in her living room fifteenyears ago and grew it, through hard work and relentless determination, to thirty-six employees, seems to have grown bored. Her newly laissez-faire attitude makes decisions hard to get signed off on but it also means that I, as her number two, am effectively running the firm most of the time. Unfortunately, no raise has gone along with this, but I am hopeful that will come. I’ve just been waiting for the right moment to bring it up.
    â€œShould I show them into your office?” Petra asks.
    â€œYes.” I hang up and hurriedly straighten up my desk. The phone call to Sam will have to wait.
    Rita Mason is one of our newer and more difficult clients, a cooking maven who started out on cable and now has her own network show five mornings a