Impact 27: of Boss Bitch

For those who may be confused, who may wonder where Sarah & Claire have been all this time: after a long hiatus I began posting chapters again late last year, but over on Novels and Novellas - I did so because Sarah was remembering events from before she met Claire, but now our lovers are reunited in the glorious present and our story returns home...

And as always, when Sarah is alone, the story is in the past tense. When Claire and Sarah are together, the story is in the present tense.

Thanks to HaltWhoGoesThere for copy editing.

Impact of The BOSS BITCH

"Il Buco does take out?!?" I exclaimed.

"They do for

me!"

she cries, preening, arms outstretched. She's loaded down with a very full-looking tote from Astor Wines and holding up half a dozen enormous white paper bags printed with the restaurant's word mark. I am beyond confused.

When Claire texted, saying she was on her way with dinner for me and the guys. She has been so excited to feed "the boys", I'd pictured giant slices of Times Square pizza or Hero Boy meatball sandwiches and riceballs, or some other boy-food.

When she told me she was close, that she would need help with "everything", I had come down to meet her cab, thinking she was bringing more of

her

things. I had expected to find her overloaded with luggage and junk food, sweaty from an afternoon of lugging her shit from TriBeCa to Hell's Kitchen, not dressed in office drag, bearing wine and gourmet takeout.

"But how?!" I ask, beyond confused. She kisses me and lets me take two of the bags from her.

"What happened to moving in tonight?"

"Change of plan!" she says, grimacing.

Claire is in a beautiful gray sleeveless dress and heels, her face and hair are perfect. She clearly

just

freshened her lipstick in the cab.

"Il Buco is all the way..." I was trying to picture, by what route, Claire could have taken - leaving work in Chelsea, moving her things from Tribeca to my place in Hell's Kitchen, and then going back down to NoHo... in her work clothes, without breaking a sweat. Not possible.

"What happened to the plan?"

"OhmyGodSarah, It's been such a shitty week!

"Shitty?" I pipe.

'Have I been

that

bad?' I wonder, panicking inside. "Did I fucking ruin Claire's week?'

All evening I had been preparing my apologies, trying to think of ways of explaining how absent and weird I've been all week - why I've been such a bad friend. I've even considered breaking the embargo and telling her the news about the new job in order to paper over how badly I've behaved. But I'd decided there's no way Claire could keep her cool. I can't risk Keith realizing...

'Jesus, has she changed her mind about staying with me?' I wonder, my stomach dropping at the thought. It's all I've been looking forward to...

I don't want to know, I am certain I already know, but I have to ask. "Why shitty? What's happened?"

"It all started Monday," Claire admits glumly, looking away in exasperation. We are still on the sidewalk, which, even this late, is still full of commuters pouring towards Port Authority.

"Monday?"

That was the night I didn't want to be alone and asked her to come stay the night. I remember now how she had hesitated on the phone.

"You didn't say anything?"

"I didn't want to worry you," she admits, looking shame-faced. "You were already having such a hard time."

After begging Claire to come stay with me, I had night terrors - she said I'd kicked and hit her. I kiss her freshly painted lips.

"I'm sorry how I've been," I tell her.

"Don't, Sarah-"

I nod, wanting to hear what Claire has to say.

"Tell me," I beg, and brace myself for the disappointment.

"There is an important piece coming up, and Morris wants to buy it."

That is not at all what I had been braced to hear, and in fact, it makes no sense whatsoever.

Morris is Claire's stepfather, an American expat, wealthy enough to have flown Claire from Paris to Buffalo on a private jet so she could attend my father's funeral. I knew he collected art, I suppose, but had never given it much thought, and couldn't imagine how that could cause a problem for Claire - who sells art.

"Important?" I ask.

"Yes, a major new piece by a very famous Swiss-American artist. I'm not supposed to talk about it with anyone - not even you! No one is to know, but Morris somehow found out about it - I don't know how - and he contacted the artist to buy the work..."

The penny drops!

"She thinks

you

told him?!?"

"She's furious."

"Oh fuck!"

"I told her it wasn't me, and she

says

she believes me, but she's still angry, I can tell. I hate it. Only Morris can make it right, and he says it's nothing, he won't even tell me how he knows. He thinks the whole thing is fucking funny!"

"He has to tell her - doesn't he?"

"You don't know him! You probably think he just flies me around in private jets-"

"And lets you live rent-free in his loft," I add helpfully.

"Touche," she agrees hopelessly. "But Morris

can

be a total shit sometimes - like this week... anyway I was too scared to remind Paula I needed the afternoon off. I didn't get anything moved today, I'm really sorry."

I almost laugh, I'm so relieved.

"Don't be sorry! I'm the one who should be sorry, I had no idea! We'll move you in tomorrow night together and clean early Saturday morning instead of tomorrow night - no big deal. It's fine!"

"Even Mark is treating me like a piranha..." she pouts.

"Pariah."

Claire makes a face, waving off my correction, then shakes off her gloom and makes herself smile brightly.

"But come now!" Claire says. "I paid the cabbie a fat tip to speed the whole way here so the food would be hot - it was like something out of a movie! Let's go upstairs and feed the boys!"

As we walked through the lobby, I could see Claire's attention drawn to the grid of hundreds of small screens facing each other from either side of the high-ceilinged passage that leads from the outer lobby space to the inner lobby space. Each of the little LED screens is illuminated by animated text. I have been looking forward to showing her the artwork and explaining it to her.

"It's called

Movable Type,"

I tell her. "It's site-specific - I think? I mean, it was commissioned especially for this space, when the paper moved here from the old building."

"It's cool," she says doubtfully. "I want to check it out - but when we leave."

"Food first," I agree, a little disappointed. She doesn't like it, I really thought she would.

"Food first," she agrees, giving

Movable Type

one last disapproving look.

At the security desk, I get her signed in as a guest. Riding the elevator, I think of the Damien Hirst I saw this morning at Lever House, I wonder again what she thinks of it, if she likes it. I want to ask her to tell her about seeing it, but that opens a whole can of worms, about the interview and the new job - my stomach hurts thinking about Ben finding out.

'What will he think?'

I look over at Claire. She's looking up at the numbers as our elevator climbs. Her brow is furrowed and her jaw clenched. She's thinking about her own problems. She can't be in danger of losing her job, can she?

I'm suddenly very weary.

I had already been awake for two hours when I arrived for my 7AM meeting. The unapologetic green glass modernism of the

Lever House

corporate tower is something straight out of

Mad Men.

It was a pioneering structure in 1952. Manhattan's first glass and steel "curtain wall" construction. Like its neighbor, the

Seagram Building,

Lever House

is one of the great early instances of the International Style advanced by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, except that Lever tower was designed and built by a woman, Natalie de Blois - who I studied in my

Subjects and Sexuality

course. She was a feminist and a total badass.

Unlike the

Seagram Building,

which rises dramatically out of a raised plaza, standing on it like a stage, the Lever tower stands at street level, but it is surrounded by a mezzanine level slab floating on colonnade. This overhead space shades an open pedestrian approach to the tower, contiguous with the surrounding sidewalks. Set back from the street, hidden under the mezzanine, a courtyard was punched out of the glass and steel overstory. Open to the sky, but shielded from Park Avenue by the overhead structure rather than steps or walls or other impediments, the courtyard is entirely open to the street, but still charmingly private. There are benches and trees, and a sculpture garden. That's where I saw Hirst's thirty-five-foot-tall female nude titled, "Virgin Mother" - standing in that floating modernist glade - a monstrous giant poking her head above a green plate glass canopy.

Hirst's sculpture was essentially a massively enlarged anatomy model of a pregnant woman, she reminds me of the hyper-realistic Victorian wax medical studies one might find in a museum of curiosities. Half her body was flayed and carved in cutaways in order to expose her skull, layers of muscles, and viscera, as well as the fetus in her sectioned womb. It stood in Lever House's outer courtyard, looking out south towards the Grand Central Terminal.

I wondered how Damien Hirst would feel seeing a monstrously enlarged dissection of his sexual organs on public display. I found his sculpture grotesque and upsetting, although the idea that it was some sort of variation of the Virgin Mary intrigued me. I wondered if Hirst was Catholic, but doubted it.

I only knew the artist and the title because I was careful to stop and check the plate next to the sculpture. Claire would want to know who the artist was and the title, if she didn't know already. I recognized Damien Hirst's name and knew he was someone I

should

know, but was almost certain he didn't show with Paula Cooper, that Claire didn't work with him.

Looking up at the underside of the figure's half-flayed, swollen belly, I was struck by the realization that I had no idea if Claire would love it or hate it. I can never predict what she will or won't like, but I am always impressed by how she can win me over to whatever she believes. I don't like this Mother and Child, but I know if Claire does, she will explain it to me in a way that will make me love it too. That is her superpower, I suppose; one of them anyway.

"Sarah?" the hostess asked, squinting at me suspiciously and smiling.

"I am!" I said, surprised to be greeted by name.

"Henk told me you'd be coming."

"Are you on first-name basis with all your customers?"

"No, not at all!" she laughs, leading me down the Kubrick-esque passageway into the dining room and adding more quietly, "but Henk does make quite an... impression."

I got the impression she was being diplomatic, but couldn't tell for the good or bad. She could mean he was an outrageously big tipper or a total asshole... it was impossible to tell not knowing her.

While the

Lever House

exterior looks like something from

Mad Men,

the interior of

Casa Lever

does not, it's more like the set for a sci-fi movie - a super posh, super luxurious sci-fi movie,

Star Wars

with modernist cut-crystal chandeliers, maybe. The dining room was almost entirely empty this early. I had heard that the restaurant had changed hands since I came here with Keith, that the new management had made a splash with a new menu, but as it turned out, they had also hung LOTS of art. The architecture, the bar, the booths, and other custom elements remained the same. But the slightly inclined walls were now crowded with expensive-looking paintings.

I recognized the iconic Andy Warhol portraits, but otherwise, it was pretty esoteric stuff.

"The art is new," I said to the hostess.

"They change it pretty regularly, I think," the young hostess agreed. Maybe she was new, too.

Looking around, I decided to bring Claire there, that it would be fun to hear her talk about all these paintings.

'Maybe for a celebratory dinner!" I think, and then gently scold that part of me for getting ahead of myself.

Hank was sitting off by himself behind a row of two tops under a large white canvas covered by colorful, polka dots, arranged on a grid and evenly spaced, each as big as a dinner plate.

The Dutchman stood to greet me as the hostess led me to him. He was a shockingly large man, shaped like a huge carrot - wrapped in charcoal pinstripe. He was tall, with cartoonishly wide shoulders and a barrel chest that made him look perpetually puffed up like he had just taken a deep breath. On any other man, Henk's belly would have looked gigantic, but on him, it just looked... proportional.

Despite the weather, he wore a vest under his jacket. His suit was beautifully tailored and crisp. The effect was impressive, if extremely buttoned up. His complexion was bright pink. He might have once been a

proper

redhead, but now sported a dense bush of pale, almost white, orange hair. His thick neck and big fleshy head seemed to have been extruded from his perfectly starched collar, which presumably was held closed by a sturdy button because his fashionably wide Windsor knot was too beautiful to be functional.

By any measure, Henk was obese, but because he was so tall, so severely buttoned up, and carried himself with such authority, his flesh looked entirely powerful. He was an unstoppable force as he moved towards me, hand outstretched, an immovable object as I took his massive paw and tried to shake it. I felt like I should have taken him by one finger, tried shaking that. I couldn't move his hand at all. Henk just held my hand, enveloping it in his and squeezing it gently.

He made both Kwasi and Ben seem petite.

"I've heard wonderful things about you," he told me, his voice a deep, fleshy rumble, his Dutch accent and thick fishy lips making him sound like a Bond villain. "You are a formidable young woman!"

"Helen is too kind..."

"She's not your only booster," he said, lowering himself back into his chair as a waiter appeared, seemingly out of thin air, to seat me and hand me my napkin. "Your career tells me most of what I need to know, but you have earned a number of ardent admirers... but tell me, what has Helen told you about me?"

"Only that you have worked together for a long time, that you are a serious person," I say, smiling. "And that I should take you very seriously."

He seemed to like that.

The waiter was hovering.

"Will you have coffee?" Henk asked.

"Please."

The waiter poured me a cup from the service on the table, and then Henk told him, "Let's take a moment, please," he said, dismissing the man. "We'll have our order when you come back."

"Have you been here before?" he asked me.

"Only for lunch," I admit.

"I am a regular, I'm afraid," he said, smiling widely and touching his great belly. "Please, don't feel hurried. Let us talk of shoes and ships and sealing-wax... We'll talk business once we've eaten..."

And we did.

"Who's hungry?!?" Claire called to the boys - literally her first words to my boss. She is fearless.

"Oh my God!" Ben cries. "What is all that?"

"Il Buco!"

"Il Buco does takeout?!" Ben shouts, clearly as astounded as I was.

Keith is the first one with the wherewithal to stand and offer a hand.

"You must be Claire!" he says, relieving her of the bags in her right hand.

"And you must be Keith!" Claire answers. "I've heard so much about you!"

"OK, Sarah told us you were a big deal," says Ben, standing to help with the bags. "But this!"

"Claire, this is Ben!" I laugh.

"I've heard so much about you as well, Ben - Sarah speaks very highly of you both!" Claire smiles as he takes the other bags from her. "Ah, merci beaucoup!"

It is decided we will eat in the glassed-in conference room that holds the antique desk that belonged to the paper's first publisher, Adolph Ochs, Pinch's great-grandfather, or some such. It's not a particularly nice piece of furniture, but eating on it feels vaguely blasphemous and almost certainly verboten, but Keith insists it's no big deal. Still, I've never seen anyone else eat in here, and every time someone passes by, I expect them to kick us out or yell at us. Instead, one after another, they all exclaim:

"Il Buco does take out?!"

As the bags are opened and we have a chance to see everything she ordered, we are all in agreement, Claire's Feast is the best dinner in the storied history of the InfoVis office meals.

"Are there many good ones?"

"This is the first," Keith admits.

Claire brought WAY too much food; the spread is obscene.

"Better too much, than too little!" she laughs in her defense.

Needless to say, dinner is a huge hit with the boys, and we even have enough to share with random passersby.

We toast Claire with plastic cups and a wonderful Italian red. Ben declares Claire, "the patron saint of InfoGraphics!"

Claire tells the guys the Boss Bitch story.

"Seriously, Sarah," Ben chides, "you are a disaster."

"I know!"

"Everyone loved it!" Claire says in my defense.

"That's how all great Sarah-disasters work!" Keith agrees.

We tell her about the fracas with Fact Checking.

"Because the series is interrelated, they need EVERYTHING checked before the landing goes live," I complain. "It's a nightmare."

"It's been...challenging," Keith agrees diplomatically. "But Sarah is doing a great job of keeping ahead of them."

"There are THREE teams!" I cry. "Three against one!"

"Three working

with

us," Keith gently corrects. Which makes Ben and me both roll our eyes, and Claire bursts out laughing.

When it's time for her to leave, I ride down with her to walk her out. Passing the security desk and exiting through

Movable Type,

Claire stops, gives it another look, and asks me to tell her about the artwork.

"I've never met Mark Hansen or Ben Rubin," I explain, pointing out the artist bios, and adding, "but Keith knows them - I think Keith was maybe involved in getting them the commission? He and Mark knew each other from school or something."

"Is this all generated from the Times?" she asks, watching the text change.

"All the news fit to print," I quote, which earns me a mocking smile. "There's a series of algorithms that pull from the text of the paper as it goes live online - so it's always current."

"It's like... weather."

"I think the first concept was for the screens to actually move, like flocking birds or blowing leaves or something?"

"A little too tricky by half," Claire says, not liking the idea. "This is better - oh! It's all questions now."

"Yeah, it's always changing..."

"When we came in, it was all factoids, like the number of tornadoes last year."

"Mmm, it groups things, like place names mentioned, or sentences ending in question marks, or sentences with a number in it - so factoids, like the number of tornadoes, and throws those things up. Living with it every day, sometimes it can be eerie, like it's reading your mind, reacting to something you were thinking or someone just said."

"Ha, like my iPod - it sometimes plays songs, like it knows where I am or what I'm doing!"

"Exactly!"

"Well, psychic powers aside, it's smart."

"You like it?"

"I do!"

It shouldn't please me so much - after all, it's not like I made it or own it - but walking out with her, I'm very happy to know she approves.

It's still light out, but the evening commute is pretty well over. The city is hot, and the sidewalks are full of people who are off work and out having a good time.