Household Gods by Judith Tarr Page A

caught several
breaks from judges and juries over the years because of it. Nicole could believe it. Not that she’d have cared to try it herself, but with his personality and his—well—attributes, he could carry it off.
    â€œSure did,” he said now. “Seems this gorgeous woman walked into a bar and asked the bartender for a six-pack of Budweiser. She …” From the very first line, Nicole hadn’t expected she’d care for the joke, but she hadn’t expected the disgust that swelled up in her as Tony Gallagher went on telling it. When he finished, he was grinning from ear to ear: “—and so she said, ‘No, give me a six-pack of Miller instead. All that Budweiser’s been making my crotch sore.’”
    He waited, chortling, for her to fall over laughing. No, she thought. Not even for a senior partner. “Mr. Gallagher,” she said with rigid deliberation, “that was the most sickening, sexist thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” She could have stopped there—should have, if she’d started at all. But something in her had snapped. “Nobody,” she said, shaking with the force of her disgust, “nobody should tell a joke like that, under any circumstances, to anybody. If that’s what it means to ‘cooperate,’ to be ‘one of the boys’—if I have to crawl down in the gutter with all the rest of you, guzzling pricey liquor and laughing at sick jokes—then frankly, Mr. Gallagher, I don’t want to play.”
    There was an enormous silence. Nicole knew with sick certainty that he’d erupt, that he’d blast her out of her—his—chair.
    He didn’t. His eyes went cold and hard, like green glass. He was, she realized with dismay, much less drunk than she’d thought. “Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” he said with perfect and completely unexpected precision, “one of the complaints leveled against you by your peers and by the senior partners was that you did not get along with people as well as you should. I took the contrary position. I see now that I was mistaken.”
    â€œWhat exactly do you mean, I don’t get along?” Nicole asked. Maybe he would give her enough rope to hang him.
    She should have known he wouldn’t. He was a lawyer,
wasn’t he? “I mean what I said,” he snapped. “No more, no less.” But even while he played the lawyer’s lawyer, his eyes slid down to her hemline again. Maybe—and that was worst of all—he didn’t even know he was doing it. He straightened in his chair. “Good afternoon, Ms. Gunther-Perrin.”
    â€œGood afternoon,” Nicole said, with the starch of generations of Midwestern schoolmarms in her voice and in her spine.
    She left with her head high. Oh, he wanted her to cooperate, no doubt about it—in bed and naked, or more likely wearing something vinyl and crotchless from Frederick’s of Hollywood.
    So now she’d offended not only the founding partner but the one senior partner who’d even pretended to be on her side. At least, she thought, she still had her self-respect. Unfortunately, it was the only thing she did have. She couldn’t eat it, put it in the gas tank, or pay the mortgage with it. She’d shot her chance for a partnership right between the eyes.
    On the other hand, if she’d read Sheldon Rosenthal right, she’d never been in line for a partnership. She’d been a blazing fool from start to finish.
    Â 
    â€œThank you so much, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” Josefina said when Nicole handed her a check that afternoon. “You are the last one. I got to cash this, then run for the airport.” Nicole’s nod was grim. She’d have to get a cash advance from her MasterCard to keep the check from bouncing. She was buying groceries, gasoline—everything—on plastic till she got paid again. The MasterCard was close to maxing out.