Hannah and I went to Two Pitchers on Wednesday and she told me about an old boss that was in love with her. She was 23, had just moved to New York, and needed a job. She had never worked in a gallery before, but it appealed to her, and within a few weeks she had applied, gotten an offer, and was working there.
Her boss was the gallery director, Zal, and he was in his early to mid-40s. I asked her if he was handsome. “Sort of, not really.” He had gotten married and divorced young, and had a daughter that was only a couple of years younger than Hannah, but that didn’t really faze her. He was also currently married, but made it known that they had “an arrangement,” which is a term that really fell out of fashion. An arrangement implies order and rules, and perhaps the rise of open and poly brought to light just how poorly arranged most of those relationships can be.
One night, Zal asked Hannah to dinner, vaguely under the pretense of discussing work-related topics, but she didn’t really need an excuse to accept a free meal. A nice one, too. They ordered food but Hannah remembers the wine — two $250 bottles. It was more than what she made in a week.
After the waiter cleared their plates, he started rubbing his finger on her forearm, scratching her with the same delicate back-and-forth motion you’d use on a cat’s nose. “What are we going to do?” he asked her. She was confused, and tipsy. They had flirted, sure, but Hannah’s an attractive girl, and a flirtatious, attractive girl at that. Hannah is the type of girl that has her arm around you within minutes of meeting, and looks at your lips when you talk. Still, she had understood the gallery as a mostly professional setting and acted accordingly. Their interactions were limited to friendly small talk, and he never did any of the cliché things that you might imagine he would do, like massage her shoulders, or threaten to kill himself if she didn’t sleep with him.
She had been working there for about six months at this point.
“I don’t know,” she said. “What are we going to do?” This made it sound like she knew exactly what he was talking about, and that she too, had been agonizing over what would happen next.
He told her that he was in love with her, and that really threw her.
“In love with me?” she had remembered thinking. “I am so out of your league.”
She said that she didn’t feel the same way, and he apologized profusely, making her promise not to tell anyone at the gallery. She agreed, and in exchange she got to take as much vacation as she wanted to.
When she tells this story to people, they apologize to her. “You poor thing,” they say. “Did you feel uncomfortable going into work after that?” Hannah didn’t understand the question, or the issue. She had an exquisite, free meal that ended in her being granted a vacation package that a European would be happy with, and ad infinitum. She was sad to leave the job, sad to leave that power behind.
Now, Hannah works in public health, and spends her days talking to drug addicts who only speak Spanish, and are in need of clean needles, which the clinic she works for provides.
“¿Cuánta heroína consumes al día?” she might say. “How much heroin do you consume in a day?” Her Spanish has gotten good enough that she can banter with her clients. She likes to pretend to scold them, and jokes with them that they should quit using in order to impress her.
“I love it,” she tells me. “And they love me.”