And who’d trade that for a condo?
5.
Forrester Books occupied two floors of an office building on Hudson Street in downtown Manhattan. It was not one of New York’s biggest publishing houses, but it did have a sort of niche cachet in which its employees took solace. When Florence interviewed there, a senior editor had told her, “We don’t do commercial fiction,” as if it were a euphemism for child pornography. （There was a rumor that that same editor had turned down Mississippi Foxtrot when the manuscript came in, but that had never been substantiated.）
On the Monday after the holiday party, Florence walked through the lobby with a heightened sense of alertness. Her familiar routine—swiping her ID card, nodding to the security guard—took on an element of performance. She looked for Simon in the throng waiting for the elevators but didn’t see him.
Her desk was on the thirteenth floor, clustered with the printers, file cabinets, and other assistants in the bullpen. The editors’ offices lined the perimeter, blockading daylight. As she waited for her computer to wake up, it finally hit her: Nobody was watching. Her life would continue as if Friday night had never happened.
At eleven, Agatha hurried in and struggled violently out of her coat. She was a short, tightly wound woman in her early forties with prematurely graying hair and endless amounts of energy. She was also six months pregnant. Florence stood up to help.
“My god! I hate my doctor, I really do,” Agatha declared. “If it weren’t too late I’d switch.” She threw her tote bag on the floor by her door. It had a pin on it that said, “Be a nice person.”
“Oh, no. What did she do this time?”
Florence had quickly learned that what Agatha mostly wanted from an assistant was someone to commiserate with her struggles and validate her beliefs. In fact, Florence was oddly fascinated with Agatha, who seemed to have been built according to the exact specifications of what people back home suspected a New York liberal to be. She lived with her husband, an immigration lawyer, in Park Slope. She marched. She resisted. She called movies films.
“I mean, she literally can’t wrap her head around the fact that I don’t want an epidural!” Agatha stomped into her cramped office and Florence followed, wheeling her desk chair into the doorway.
“You don’t want an epidural? Why not?”
Agatha settled down at her desk and regarded her assistant seriously. She often referred to herself as Florence’s mentor but less frequently behaved as such. “Florence, pain has been a prerequisite to motherhood for millennia. It’s a rite of passage. It’s like, you know, the boys in those African tribes who have to scar themselves before they’re considered men.”
“Which tribes?”
“I mean, all of them, basically.”
“Right,” Florence said uncertainly.
“By taking away that sacred pain, the medical-industrial complex is effectively eroding the mother-child relationship. That pain bonds you. It’s an honor and a privilege to become a mother. You have to earn it.”
“I guess that makes sense,” said Florence. “You know, I read online somewhere that sea lice eat their way out of the womb when they’re ready to be born. They chew their way out of the uterus, through their mother’s organs and flesh and stuff and come right out of her mouth. She’s totally ripped apart. Dead.”
Agatha nodded approvingly. “Exactly, Florence. Exactly.”
Florence scooted back to her desk and decided to chalk that conversation up as a victory.
*
At a little past four, she went out to get a coffee at the Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner. As she stepped off the elevator, she finally caught sight of Simon. He was on the phone walking into the building. When he saw her he smiled and held up a finger for her to wait.
“Mm-hmm. Sure. I couldn’t agree more,” he said into the phone. He rolled his eyes at Florence. “Alright, Tim, I’ve got to cut out here. Talk soon.” He tucked his phone into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and gave Florence an aggrieved smile. “Sorry about that.” He looked around. “Here, let’s pop around the corner a sec.” He led her outside, halfway down a side street.
“Well. That was quite a night,” he said, forcing a laugh. “Listen, I just wanted to check in and make sure everything was alright here. That you felt fine about it. It’s not something I make a habit of, obviously, but I don’t know”—he let out a long breath and shook his head—“there’s something about you, Florence. I broke all my rules.”
Florence opened her mouth to respond but Simon charged ahead. “That said—。” He stopped and tried a different tone: “That said, it was a mistake. On my part. A hundred percent on my part. I take full responsibility. But it can’t happen again. I respect you too much to put you in that position.”
“Simon,” Florence said, “I’m not going to ‘MeToo’ you.”
Simon laughed a little too loudly. “Ha. Ha. Well, thank you, thank you for that. Ha. No, I don’t think it’s quite a ‘MeToo’ situation.”
He caught the eye of someone behind Florence and tossed off a nod and smile. “Right,” he said, turning his attention back to her. “Okay. Great. Thank you.”
Florence said nothing.
“So, we’re all good here then?”
“Everything’s fine, Simon.”
He gave her a pat on her shoulder. “Good, good. And everything’s fine upstairs? You’re enjoying working for Agatha?”
Florence said she was.
“Good, good,” he said again.
They parted ways at the corner. Simon went back into the building and Florence walked to the coffee shop. While waiting in line she replayed the conversation in her mind. She had told him the truth. She was fine. She had known Simon had a wife when she slept with him. She had known it would probably be a one-time thing. The sex hadn’t even been that great. He had touched her tenderly, accommodatingly, in a way she found slightly revolting. （How sad, she thought, that even in his infidelities he fucked like a married man.） But she had to admit that part of her felt a tug of regret. It wasn’t that she wanted his company, exactly. But she had liked the feeling of being in his orbit, even if for only a few hours. She’d liked the Bowery Hotel. She’d liked his collar stays. She’d liked attracting the attention of Ingrid Thorne’s husband.
6.
Florence did not go home for Christmas. She told her mother the flights were too expensive, though there were fares on JetBlue from seventy-nine dollars.
On Christmas day, she took the subway to the Bowery Hotel. The lobby—a large, open room that stretched back to a glassed-in terrace—doubled as the bar, but most of the tables were empty. She sat in an armchair upholstered in worn yellow velvet and ran her hands up and down the fabric. When the waitress arrived, she ordered a fourteen-dollar glass of Glenlivet.
She placed her book—Renata Adler’s Speedboat—and her notebook on the table in front of her but didn’t open either. Instead she studied her surroundings. The hotel had the air of an abandoned British outpost in some exotic colony: sooty paintings, terra-cotta floors, antique carpets. There were wreaths and garlands strung up for the season.