In the Drink Read Online Free PDF

much enthusiasm that she’d send the books. This was the day’s sole achievement. At five o’clock I found Jackie on the phone at her desk in the sitting room. I stood in the doorway until she hung up. When she asked what I’d accomplished that day I said apologetically, “Well, I tried to figure everything out. I looked through the hard drive on the computer and went through some file drawers.”
    “That’s all you did, all day long?”
    “And I ordered the books you wanted.”
    She gave me a look I would come to know very well, a wide-eyed vacuum of a stare that sucked me in and immobilized me. “You didn’t do anything ,” she said finally.
    What could I say? She had been expecting a real secretary, someone who would bustle in and take charge. I wasn’t capable of taking care of myself, let alone someone else. I folded up my desk and wheeled my computer table into the pantry under her direction (“Make sure you put it away every night, Claudia,I don’t want visitors to see my dining room looking like a common workplace”). Then I put on my coat, said a meek good night and stomped home. I sat at my table and devoured the contents of a white carton, a glutinous mess of miniature corn ears and crunchy beige disks left over from the night before, not at all improved with age. After dinner, I looked through my closet and despaired at the lack of suitable outfits, Jackie’s Chanel suit hanging miragelike before me. Finally I gave up and went to bed, where I lay awake, my thoughts revolving without going anywhere, for several hours.
    I wanted to succeed at this job. I had spent my entire youth in a small town in the Arizona desert, then escaped to an even smaller liberal-arts college where everyone was similar in many ways to everyone else. Although I had lived in New York for six years when I met Jackie, I had managed to remain astonishingly unworldly; I’d confined myself mostly to East Village dive bars, midtown office buildings, and the shabbier areas of the Upper West Side. I had never left the States. I had never encountered anyone remotely like Jackie, except in books and movies. I knew, intuitively, that I needed to be slapped awake, and she had struck me right away as just the person who could do it. She was a die-hard Republican, a lapsed Catholic, a European aristocrat and an American celebrity. Her picture appeared in magazines and the society pages of newspapers; she was a guest on talk shows. Her tables and desktops were crowded with gold-framed pictures of herself with movie stars, bullfighters, jockeys, politicians, her handsome late ex-husband, her playboy sons.
    I spent the first few weeks in a blur of confounded agony, teeth gritted, shoulders hunched as if I were bracing myself against a gale-force wind. Everything Margot had predicted came to pass. I was not in fact tougher than Margot, and Jackie was not in fact an old bat, she was a terrifying, glamorous semi-lunaticwho had it in for me for reasons I couldn’t fathom. Nor could I entirely grasp the reason for my presence in her apartment. The logic behind her requests was as inscrutable and unfamiliar as her handwriting. Who was the Countess Robles and why was I calling to tell her that “the dress wasn’t long enough”? What exactly did I mean when I called the travel agent to ask about the Florida tickets and make sure they were “the right flight”? I tried to improvise around the bits of information Jackie gave me; I felt too cowardly to risk asking for explanations and being pinned to the wall by her exasperated stare.
    In most of my other jobs, I had been just another bored nobody playing computer games and sending faxes, leaving at five without a backward glance, the time colorlessly subtracted from my life like money from the bank. Being alone with Jackie all day in those airless, cloistered rooms transformed me in my own imagination into the heroine of various archetypal dramas, all sharing the common thread of subjugation and