him he’d been downsized. Instead, a second book from M. M. Banning. Good, bad, or indifferent, it would be a best seller. His career was saved, at least for now. And to think she’d called him looking for salvation! Mimi didn’t know it yet, but she’d thrown all of us a lifeline.
“So, how far along are you?” he asked. I thought Mr. Vargas was talking to somebody newly pregnant.
“I don’t have a word on paper yet,” he told me she answered. “But I have the beginning and the middle in my head.”
M. M. Banning did have two very specific demands: a huge advance and an assistant, bankrolled by the publisher and hand-selected by Mr. Vargas because, she told him, “I’m a lousy judge of character. As you so delicately put it once.”
“What happened to her could have happened to anybody,” Mr. Vargas told me.
Not to me, I couldn’t help thinking. Never to me. I’m too careful. Some people in my college dorm might have said boring, but they were glad to call me to come bail them out of jail so their parents wouldn’t know where a night of carousing had landed them. The careless ones knew I’d be awake, sober, and studying. Boring saved their bacon more times than I could count.
Mr. Vargas scribbled out the qualifications Mimi listed for the ideal assistant:
• No Ivy Leaguers or English majors.
• Drives. Cooks. Tidies.
• Computer whiz.
• Good with kids.
• Quiet. Discreet. Sane.
Before I worked for him I’d had a string of fresh-off-the-Greyhound jobs, the kind people my age go for when they’re not quite ready to settle into the practical careers they may have been wise enough to train for while they were in college. I had an accounting degree but hadn’t quite been able to bring myself to use it yet. I’d worked as a pet groomer, leaflet distributor, barista, sketcher of tourists in Central Park, black-shirted-to-blend-in catering staff, kindergarten assistant. When we met, I was working weekends at a computer store because my salary as a private school math teacher wouldn’t cover rent and food and insurance. At the store I had to wear a piece of plastic over my heart that read HI! I’M A GENIUS! ASK ME ANYTHING! After an hour of demonstrating shortcuts for managing his flow of information, Mr. Vargas told me I deserved every exclamation point on my name tag and asked me if I’d like to come work for him. “Does this job you’re offering me provide insurance and sick days?” I asked, though I had never missed a day of work in my life. It did. In those days when acquiring your own insurance was both astronomically expensive and hard to come by, a paying job that sounded glamorous and provided benefits sounded like a dream come true. The job came with insurance, sick days, and two weeks of vacation annually. Mr. Vargas didn’t have to ask me twice. I took it.
Which is how I’d landed on M. M. Banning’s welcome mat being chewed out by one of the premiere voices of this or any generation. I pulled myself together before she called the cops and said, “I am the girl Mr. Vargas sent.”
She put the phone in her cardigan pocket. “Well then,” she said. “If you’re done staring at me, I guess you can come inside.”
( 2 )
HIS NAME IS Frank.”
M. M. Banning and I were seated on the living room couch, watching her son playing outside in the hot, bright sun. The kid, dressed in a tattered tailcoat and morning pants accessorized with bare feet and a grubby face, looked like some fictional refugee from the pages of Oliver Twist, one who’d walked all the way to Los Angeles from Dickens’s London and had slept in ditches at night along the way.
When I say Frank was “playing” what I mean is that he was assaulting a peach tree with a yellow plastic baseball bat, scattering the green midsummer fruit as if the future of the human race depended on it.
“Does he always dress like that?” I asked.
“Some version of it.”
“That’s fantastic. Most kids don’t care about their clothes that much. They’re just as happy wearing T-shirts and a pair of shorts.” My mother always said that the best way to connect with anybody who was a mother was to find a way to compliment her child. An approach that served me well when I taught at the private school, even the times when it had been a stretch to come