The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [83]
“White contact lenses,” he says. “Spooky.”
She nods.
“Run three hundred a pair. The dumbasses.”
She says nothing. They return their attention to the view, watching silently as a soccer ball soars over the edge of a nearby cliff and plummets down to land on the yellowish grass of Richard W. Held Park, where insectile workers in blue coveralls are cutting down the last of the thin trees.
“Ursula,” he says. “I want you and Javier working together again.”
“You do.”
“Yeah. I do. You’re a good influence on him. A stabilizing influence.”
“All finished with me, eh?” she says breezily. “Now you’re handing me back to Javier.”
He regards her with amusement. “ ‘Finished with’ you? I haven’t even begun with you.”
“Have you talked to him about this?”
“I’m too busy.” He rubs the back of his thick neck. “Besides,” he mutters, “he’s still not talking to me. And now he’s stopped coming into the office outright. No reports, no nothing.”
She laughs. “My God, Chas, you’re supposed to be the boss. If he doesn’t talk to you, why don’t you just fire him?”
“Javier may be a prima donna, but he’s also a goddamn walking zeitgeist barometer. I need him. And he’s onto something new. I want you working with him, keeping track of what he sees, what he says.”
“What’s he onto?” she asks.
“Something about tweens, he said. Something major. Couch bumped into him in an arcade in the South Slope Mall. He said that and wandered off.”
“ ‘Tweens’?”
“Preadolescents. Between childhood and teens. Eight-to-twelve-year-olds. Everybody’s going apeshit over tweens nowadays. Including the Gap Corporation. They want a fully illustrated report on postirony in tweens for their Old Navy brands. There’s a substantial bonus in it for us if we get it to them by the end of the month. So if Javier’s really onto something, I’d like to know about it.”
“He’s not talking to me, either, Chas. And I’m not talking to him. What makes you think I’ve got a better shot with him than you?”
Chas considers this. “Bigger tits,” he hazards.
She aims a look in the direction of the overdeveloped pectorals beneath his shirt. “Not by much.”
Chas doesn’t deign to reply. Behind him Ursula catches the stares of the invisigoths, all five sets of blanked-out eyes fixed on her. At least she thinks they’re fixed on her: it’s more of a feeling than a certainty, a quality of attention in their creepily cherubic faces. And maybe she’s imagining it, but she senses something accusatory in their stare. They are judging her, she thinks, and judging her guilty, but of what she isn’t sure. Are corporate climbers like her deplorable for being cynical or for being naive these days? She wonders which in fact she is, if either, or whether it’s possible she’s even both. It is possible—more than possible; in fact it’s probably the very paradessence of capitalism, now that she thinks of it: cynical idealism, self-interest for the common good. And the personal paradoxes don’t end there. In the last few weeks she’s thought of herself as both a capitalist tool and a saboteur, both a loyal sister and a betrayer, both a glamour monger and a utopian dreamer. She’s so many different people she can barely keep track of them all anymore. She wonders whether others feel like this as well. Life is like some frantic bingo game, she thinks, where players try to maximize their odds by tossing down chips on as many sheets as they can before the next number is called.
“So what are you so busy with, anyway?” she asks, moving slightly so Chas’s slab of a head blocks the bleached-out eyes from her view. “Is it those Lite Age counseling sessions you’ve been pushing?”
His jaw tightens; a single vein stands out at the corner of his eye. “They’re not biting,” he admits.
Ursula is shocked. She didn