“I’m afraid your wife’s on a video call with the Tokyo office, Mrs. Harper,” Dinah says meekly, fingers frozen in the air over her laptop keyboard, and Geneva Harper twitches as though she’s considering throwing the half-empty bottle of wine dangling from her hand at the bland corporate art on the wall.
“I’ll wait,” she growls instead, and flops into one of the stylish, uncomfortable chairs ranged outside the CEO’s office to make people wait in.
Dinah swallows.
“Can I get you anything, Mrs. Harper?” she says. “Tea, or—?”
Her boss’s wife narrows her eyes and swigs from the wine bottle in lieu of a spoken no.
Dinah has managed Libra Harper’s contact list, schedule, calls, appointments and sundry organisation for ten years. Sundry organisation includes knowing rather more about Libra’s wife, from a distance, than perhaps she really ought to. Having someone to remember your meetings for you is one thing; having someone remember your wife’s birthday, pick out a card she’ll like, get you to sign it along with the day’s paperwork, and remind you to take it home and hand it over every year is…well. And the less said about this annual occasion, about Libra’s attention to Valentine’s day, the better.
Whatever’s about to blow up, it’s not the first time, and if Dinah was allowed an opinion, she maybe wouldn’t call it unearned. Dinah is not, of course, allowed an opinion — for so many reasons.
She flexes her hands over the keys, attempts to refocus her attention on the spreadsheet she was looking over, and swallows again. Quietly gets up, instead, and unobtrusively slides out of sight into the adjoining nook with the gleaming machine for hot drinks. She thumbs the tap for boiling water on demand, spoons custom-blended tea into a stainless steel mesh infuser and slots it atop its porcelain cup, swirling faint colour into the steaming water.
“Thank you, Dinah,” her boss’s wife says, reflexive and grudging, scowling at the cup as Dinah quietly puts it on the little table by her elbow. Dinah murmurs some meaningless nothing, avoids her eyes, returns to her desk. Pretends to work.
There’s a strained silence.
“You know,” Libra’s wife says, tone wavering somewhere between sorrowful wallowing and murderous, “a few years ago, when she first—” and she hesitates and swigs wine again, seemingly steels herself; “when she first brought home a dog collar with my name on a little tag and a leash and — I thought it was a sign I’d been wrong. To doubt us. To doubt whether we were in this fucking marriage together. It was — almost too much, but good. Pushed out of my comfort zone, but in a way that made me feel seen, deeply fucking seen. How could I doubt someone who understood even the things I didn’t about me?” She waves the bottle in the direction of the closed office door. “I don’t understand how she could get me like that and now — act like some guy buying last-minute gas station flowers about it—”
Dinah chews her lip and worries futilely about having anything appropriate to say.
“She bought me one of those human-sized dog beds,” Libra’s wife says bitterly. “And I know she forgot to do anything until the last minute, because she somehow managed to pay to get it same-day fucking shipped, and who does that, and if she hadn’t forgotten until the last minute she’d have made you organise it, and then it wouldn’t have just turned up, it would have been planned weeks in advance and there would have been wrapping paper and probably rose petals and…” she trails off and punches the arm of the chair with her free hand, sloppy and angry.
“Please don’t do that, Mrs. Harper,” Dinah says in alarm. “You have that recital at the Philharmonic next week, and if you hurt your hand—”
Her boss’s wife cuts blazing, challenging eyes at her, drawing her hand back theatrically. “Call me Mrs. Harper again,” she says defiantly. “Go on, I dare you—”
Dinah can feel her mouth move, like a caught fish gaping at the air. “Geneva,” she says, feeling at once wildly perturbed and a million miles distant.
“Genie,” Geneva Harper taunts, refusing to lower her cocked fist.
“Please, Genie,” Dinah says, her own hands clenching and unclenching uselessly over her spreadsheet, and Geneva uncurls her fist and sprawls back in the chair, tipsily smug and preening. An almost-painful full-body clench that Dinah hadn’t realised she was holding gives suddenly, leaving her ribs aching.
“She doesn’t even remember she bought me the same thing last year,” Geneva says, waving the bottle in an expansive gesture, what’s left in it sloshing. “A goddamn person-sized dog bed. You’d remember buying that for someone, wouldn’t you?”
Dinah swallows around the fact that she does, in fact, remember ordering last year’s. And she’d booked this evening’s restaurant reservation, and ordered Libra’s flowers to her wife, and a delicately patterned hand-painted silk scarf; but someone, another executive, some one of the guys must have said something in passing that nettled Libra’s pride into a gesture. Any hint that anyone might perceive a shortfall in her behaviour, her image, and her first impulse is to translate it as a shortfall in how thoughtlessly and conspicuously she can be seen to fling money at the situation.
Libra Harper outsources every possible aspect of thinking of her wife to Dinah, and when she doesn’t it’s to buy Being Seen To Buy Excellence At Wife.
Dinah is queasily certain that one day it will be the final straw, no matter how hard she tries at being outsourced wife, no matter how much thoughtfulness and care she puts into knowing what Geneva Harper likes and trying, as much as she can, to furnish it. One day it will not be enough to counterweight Geneva’s actual marriage to her actual wife, and Dinah’s silly little crepe-paper heart will be machine-gunned in the crossfire of their acrimonious type-A split.
“Oh,” Geneva drawls, looking at her face. “Oh, of course that’s why she doesn’t remember,” and Dinah’s face flames. “When she put me on a leash, did you have to think of that for her? Did you script her lines, when she called me a filthy little dog and told me no animals on the furniture?”
“Mrs. Harper—” Dinah says, strangled, and Geneva puts the nearly-empty bottle down on the little table, next to her cooling tea, very sharply. Holding Dinah’s eyes, she pointedly cracks her knuckles — “Genie! Genie. Your wife is — your marriage — I’m not—”
“When she fucked me on the floor calling me a bad puppy, was that you railing my tender psyche?”
Dinah stands, driven to her feet as if spring-loaded by nervous energy. “You’ve been drinking,” she says, light-headed from the way all her blood is turning her face red, “and I’m going to fetch you some water, Mrs. Harper,” and defuses anything Geneva might threaten by turning so she can’t see her and rabbiting away. She splashes her face in the chilly, palatial executive washroom, shivering; takes as long as she dares to fetch a refrigerated bottle of Libra’s preferred brand of water.
Her boss’s wife has subsided into a narrow-eyed simmer; looks past the bottle when Dinah holds it out, unmoving.
“She’s going to stay late tonight,” she says. “Just out of spite, because I came here. To teach me a lesson. If you’re that worried about what I might do here, you can drive me home.”
“I don’t think—” Dinah says.
Geneva smiles, like something toothy hunting in the dark, airing its teeth. “I’ll text my darling wife now,” she says. “She’ll prefer it to me making a scene here. You’ve driven me places before.”
True; though the other times had felt dangerous only to Dinah’s composure. “I’m supposed to be…” she begins feebly, knowing it’s futile.
”…Doing whatever she needs done,” Geneva cuts her off, and smirks.
Dinah wonders if she can demur on the grounds that her hands seem too unsteady to safely drive her boss’s wife. But she doesn’t think she wants to find out what the alternatives are.
The trip is quiet, which would be a relief if Dinah wasn’t ready to jump out of her skin. She does her best to concentrate on her driving, hands tight on the wheel. Geneva stares out of the window. Dinah half wants to turn on the radio, but doing anything to break the taut silence feels more dangerous than suffering it.
“Get out,” Geneva says, when Dinah parks in the driveway of her boss’s house, car still running.
“Mrs. Harper—”
“You’re going to get out of the car and come indoors,” Geneva says sharply, and Dinah kills the engine and gets out, shaking a little. Geneva slams the front door behind them when they’re inside and leans back on it, neat white teeth raking her bottom lip.
“Mrs. — Genie,” Dinah says. “Genie, really, I need to get back to the office now, I—”
“Somebody,” Geneva interrupts, lifting the hem of her cashmere sweater, “is going to pull my hair and call me a puppy and sit on my face in my big, lonely, person-sized dog bed. And since Mrs. Gasboss Gatelight hasn’t lifted a finger since the first six months of our marriage to girlkeep—” she pulls the sweater over her head and throws it carelessly aside.
“Geneva,” Dinah says helplessly, trying to keep her eyes away, “you’re — I’m Libra’s assistant—”
Geneva tosses her bra to the ground, too.
“Geneva, this can’t happen.”
Geneva unzips her skirt and lets it fall unceremoniously around her ankles. “So turn me down,” she says darkly.
“Geneva,” Dinah pleads, almost choking on her own spit, pooling in her mouth, and then her boss’s wife steps out of the puddled fabric of her skirt and walks precisely, still in heels, right up to spread a hot palm across Dinah’s abs through her shirt.
“Woof,” Geneva says, low in her throat, and dips to bite at Dinah’s shoulder, a silent triumphant laugh shaking her as Dinah, groaning, threads trembling fingers into her hair.
