“That’s sweet.”
“And true. Even now I’m asking myself that and thinking, wow! If someone with pretty dubious bookkeeping practices and a stockroom full of possibly stolen liquor, caviar, and linen napkins asked Olga for twenty percent off the top of her receipts for a year, what would Olga say? She would probably tell them to fuck off and then call Page Six. That’s definitely what Olga would do. Am I right?”
Olga laughed. She’d underestimated Meegan. She almost felt she owed her protégé an apology. Almost.
She sighed into the phone. “I’ve taught you well, then, Grasshopper. Okay. How about this? Take over the office lease, pay my health insurance for a year, and we’ll just call it a wash? In fact, I’ll thank you for taking this off my hands and not totally pissing these families off.”
“That,” Meegan said, the joy of conquest in her voice, “sounds reasonable.”
“Then it’s a deal. I’ll call my lawyer to make sure it’s all aboveboard.”
“Wait!” Meegan said just as Olga was about to hang up, “what about Laurel?”
Laurel Blumenthal had just requested a contract two days prior, but as Olga now informed Meegan, she had been the very first call Olga had received to inform her that she was sorry, but “it just wasn’t going to work out.” Olga had been surprised, given what a champion of liberal causes Laurel had claimed to be.
“Olga, I want you to know that I am fully with you in spirit,” Laurel had said over the phone, “but in practice you just are a little left of center for Carl’s taste and, at the end of the day…”
Olga told her not to worry, she completely understood. Laurel assured her that, to prove how much she was with her in spirit, she and Carl were stocking Bethenny Frankel’s plane with supplies to bring down. Olga thanked her for her generosity. She meant it.
* * *
HAPPY AS SHE was, Olga still had some highly practical problems on her plate, mainly, her lack of income. There was, of course, a simple solution available: give up the lease on her Fort Greene apartment and move back to Fifty-third Street, where she could live off her paltry savings, rent free, while she figured it out. But she had promised Christian, had gone to the mat with Prieto about it, had gotten Matteo to help her paint, and replaced the cabinets in the kitchen for him and everything. Her word should mean something, no?
Besides, no one in her family knew that her business had dissolved; her role was to be there for solutions, not to show up with problems. With the exception of her Tío Richie—who felt that she, and the rest of the Libs, needed to be more respectful of the president—her family thought that her outburst, and its virality, had been by turns “dope,” “fierce,” and, as her brother said, “absolutely necessary to cut through the noise of disaster platitudes.” Her cousins, aunts, and uncles saw the clip appear on The Shade Room, tweeted by Don Lemon, discussed on The Breakfast Club, and replayed with subtitles on ?Despierta América! and couldn’t see a downside. They didn’t see that there was a separate, shadow media universe where she’d been positioned as a villain, a traitor, a radical. She knew, with the exception of her brother, that none of them could ever conceive that truth telling could have negative consequences. They also didn’t understand how precarious her financial ecosystem was, how her personality and personal views only had room to exist so long as they were in service of her clients’ ideas and ideals.
The only one who did seem to understand the fiscal implications of the incident, despite being mildly amused as it played out in real time, was Matteo, whose occupation also involved the whims and desires of others.
“You’re the main story on Fox News!” he said that night at Olga’s place.
“Get out of here!” she said, walking to get closer to the TV.
And there it was: the host of one of the opinion shows playing her clip. Talking about how unhinged she was. How irresponsible it was of Good Morning, Later to air her crazy conspiracy theories. How, upon basic research, they discovered she’d made her living working with exactly the kinds of families she was now implicating in some kind of “plot” to destroy an island of people who had driven up their own debt, had proven unable to govern themselves, and were fully at the mercy of our American benevolence to rebuild their island. Then, he said that if Olga didn’t like the way they did things in America she should go back to Puerto Rico.
“Puerto Rico is America, you fucking dummies! And I’m from fucking Brooklyn! Jesus!” she screamed at the TV.