The Professional (fiction) by Alexandra Ringe

Fiction: The Professional

“We teased her about being the humanitarian of our little group--it never occurred to us that we'd end up paying her for it.”

By Alexandra Ringe | Issue #24

Actually I have to tell you that I feel a little responsible for the whole thing. I should also tell you that whenever I say I feel responsible for the whole thing, Cam and Allison tell me to kindly shut up, they're sick of me taking blame for something that, first off, we all had some part in, and second, isn't even something that Sonia, my alleged victim, is feeling all that victimized about. Because of us, they say, she's more successful and more excited about her success than anyone we know, because of us she's on her way to becoming captain of a whole new industry--we should be proud. To their credit, the proud part is always said with a touch of sarcasm--you can't really be proud of what Sonia has become--but Cam and Allison are content to leave it at that, a slight acknowledgment of culpability in making the world a creepier place to live, and then they'll start right in on their husbands or their jobs, but it always takes me a minute to get back into it because I'm thinking about what Sonia is doing right then while all her best friends from college are having dinner without her.

But really, it's not all that different. Sonia is probably sitting across the table from a friend who could pass for one of us--same arch to the waxed eyebrow, same lapses into the "totallys" and "likes" of our youth, same expensive casual clothes that fit well but not so well that they could be called slutty, same worries about turning 28 or 30 or 32, or worries about being worried when it's time to turn 40. I bet Sonia's friend is telling some long, complicated story about work, just like Allison is doing to me and Cam. She's assuming that we remember all the players from previous installments, like that Rochelle used to work for Steve but now reports to her and that Rochelle has proven herself to be a nightmare but not yet a total nightmare. While I'm sitting there struck nearly dumb by my fuzziness on the details--it's all I can do to say "I know what you mean" in the right places--Sonia will have retained everything from her friend's saga and will even think to ask if Rochelle is still calling marketing when she should be calling publicity. Sonia's friend will feel listened to, comforted, and maybe even counseled, while Allison will finish her story to find that my one follow-up question is "So where did you get your jeans?" Then we split the check and have our faux debate over who gets the extra dollar, and that's it until next time around, maybe next week or next month depending on what our Palm Pilots will allow. Meanwhile Sonia's friend picks up the check knowing that she will do the same the following Wednesday, and then later she'll get a bill for Sonia's time, an hourly rate depending on whether she is one of Sonia's Good Friends, Really Close Friends, or Best Friend Evers.

But all that makes it sound like Sonia is only in it for the money, which isn't the case. She's had a superhuman amount of genuine interest in other people for as long as I can remember, way before she started charging for it. Like when the four of us were living together back in college, Sonia had this friend who wore huge floppy sweaters all the time and always looked like she was about to cry. The first time I walked past Sonia's room and saw them sitting on Sonia's futon and the friend was full-on crying, I felt sorry for her and assumed she was going through some horrible thing. But then the crying lasted all junior year and I couldn't help thinking that the horrible thing this woman was going through was her own personality. Sonia, on the other hand, was charming, funny, smart, sweet, and dry-eyed, but Cam, Allison, and I didn't see this desirability gap as proof that Sonia had bad taste in people--we just thought that she was nicer and more tolerant than we could ever be.

Sonia had to know that she was our friend first and we cared about her beyond the money and the convenience.

And it wasn't only the teary one with the bad sweaters. Sonia counted among her friends a pale, jittery guy who kept making her tapes of psychedelic speed metal (each of which she listened to, once), and a woman whose main complaint about our school was that there weren't enough people who wanted to talk about God. At parties Sonia would always get cornered by someone we thought she felt cornered by, only to find out later that she'd been interested or amused at various points in their two-hour conversation. Sometimes we teased her about being the humanitarian of our little group--it just never occurred to us that we'd end up paying her for it.

All four of us moved to the city within a year or so after graduation, and we all started out doing various kinds of drudge work--either it was something in our field, an internship or some other form of xeroxing, which was the first step towards "what I really want to do," or it was temping or some other job we didn't care too much about but paid for us to do "what I really want to do" or kept us eating while we figured out "what I really want to do." Back then, none of us had any doubt that the job that suited you in every way not only existed but was entirely attainable. Except for Sonia. She didn't seem to have a plan at all. When someone would ask her what she did, she'd say "I waitress." That was it, "I waitress"--no quick defense like "while I take the pre-med classes I stupidly didn't take in college" or "while I work on my documentary about cat ladies." Allison, who was working at the same restaurant Sonia was, wouldn't say "I waitress," she'd say, "I'm waitressing," which made it sound like a temporary condition rather than the only job she'd ever done or ever would do.

I don't mean to criticize waitressing here--I've heard that some people genuinely enjoy it and I say good for them, that is just fine. But that wasn't the case with Sonia, who was a terrible waitress, so bad that every shift a customer would ask if it was her first day. She would never lie, despite Allison's advice that she should go along with it for the tips and the sympathy. But Sonia still managed to stay on at each of her five restaurants far longer than she should have because her regulars loved her. She had the ideal waitress combination of being pretty but not so stunning as to be intimidating, plus she was chatty but not like she was trying out for a sitcom. When we'd go out, she never talked about the fact that she was about to get fired as if it were a problem for her, no mention of the word career. She'd tell a story about some customer, and that would be it, she'd want to know how I was doing, and I was only too happy to tell her, at length.

When Sonia was on her third bistro, Allison, Cam, and I were starting to get busy, really busy. If you called us at work, we'd say, "Things are really crazy right now, just insane," but we didn't sound too miserable about it because we now had just enough responsibility that some of this insanity revolved around us, we kept it at its normal, expected level of frenzy. Without us and our willingness to work late and weekends, the place would be really nuts.

So none of us had time for Cam's mom to get sick again, least of all Cam. But this time was much worse than before, and Cam immediately took a leave of absence from work and basically moved into the hospital. Allison and I tried to make it over there as often as we could, but our schedules weren't gelling with visiting hours. Sonia, being free in the morning, went almost every day. She wouldn't have had to if Cam's best friend from high school hadn't been living in Japan, or if Cam had been willing to let her work friends see her cry, or if Cam's future husband had introduced himself to her at the gym a year before instead of a year after her mother died, or if Cam's mother had had other kids before Cam's father divorced her and disappeared, or if Allison and I had been better people (Allison prefers "less busy").

The system of Sonia being with Cam all the time and Allison and I being there none of the time worked until the doctors scheduled Cam's mom's second operation during Sonia's shift at the restaurant. Cam called me at work about it, and I could see her in the barely beige hallway outside the waiting room even though I'd never been there, clutching the receiver of the pay phone with one hand--this was way before the cell--and a tissue wad in the other. She'd lost weight in all this, so much that the sleeves of her cardigan hung from her wrists like bangles.

I wanted to tell Cam, "Yes, yes, of course I'll be there," but I couldn't--right there on my computer screen were fifteen reasons why I couldn't. So I said, "I really wish I could go tomorrow but my deadlines, I've got--"

Cam interrupted by starting to cry. She was talking in those bursts between sobs. "I'm sorry--I understand--not that you can--tell that by my crying but--I'm sorry--it's all just--I'll be--I'll be OK."

My chest was starting to tighten in that pre-tears way. Somebody had to be there. I asked if Allison could do it--Cam said no. I asked if Sonia could trade shifts with someone--no. I asked if she would be willing to skip her shift--Sonia'd already offered but Cam didn't want her to because she knew that Sonia really needed the money.

Money! Cam had a trust fund and what better time to use it? I popped up out of my chair to shut my office door. "If Sonia needs money," I said a little too excitedly, "then why don't you reimburse her for whatever she would've made at the restaurant?"

Cam didn't answer right away, just snuffled, then she put more coins into the phone. She was still crying but could now finish her sentences. "It's a good idea except I know she wouldn't take it, and she'll see how desperate I am, so she'll skip her shift anyway and not be able to pay her rent and it'll be all my fault."

Cam was clearly not in the proper emotional state to make a convincing argument to anyone. I asked, "What if I call Sonia and feel her out about it?"

"I guess that'd be OK. Just try not to make her feel like she has to."

"I won't, I promise."

I called Sonia at the restaurant and blurted it out. "Cam and I were just talking about the surgery tomorrow and I thought maybe you could be there if Cam reimburses you for whatever you'd make on your shift--?"

"Pay me? That's insane." She emphasized the word insane as if she meant it. "Of course she doesn't have to pay me, I'll just be there. It's at 5:30, right?"

"But think about it this way," I said, pulling out the guilt card, "Cam'll feel much more comfortable having you there if she knows you aren't sacrificing anything to do it."

"But it's really not a sacrifice--I'm not that poor."

"And Cam's not that rich."

"True, but that doesn't mean--shit, one of my orders just came up, I've gotta go--tell her I'll be there, but I'm not sure--don't say anything about the money yet."

A few weeks later when Sonia went part-time to help Cam deal with her mother's hospice, none of us thought it was tacky or weird--it just seemed logical, like paying a friend who's a starving artist to paint your apartment. Of course, Cam's family money didn't hurt. Allison and I couldn't have afforded her. But that, too, was changing. We were starting to have enough of an income cushion to dabble in the occasional manicure that became a weekly ritual. Menus with $15 entrees moved out of the untouchable category and into "This isn't expensive, let's try it." "Dry clean only" was no longer a curse. Backpacks gave way to leather backpacks. It all felt like a natural progression--we all wanted to grow up, get somewhere, and look good doing it, and paying someone else to do our nails seemed to be helping.

So when Allison got dumped by the guy she'd been with since we were sophomores--it had been six years--we didn't think twice about the nights she asked Sonia to skip the dinner shift and come over, first to help her rearrange the furniture in a non-Carl way, then to rearrange the condiments in a non-Carl way, but mainly to sit on the couch at its new angle and listen to a litany of reasons Allison should have dumped him and why she was really better off without him but still so goddamned sad. Sonia had time for all this if she was reimbursed, and Cam and I didn't, plus she seemed happy to do it. I'd check her for signs of resentment when we'd all go out--did she look pained by the 47th telling of the day Carl came to take his last box? Not in the least. Sonia was just as attentive and supportive as she'd been freshman year when Allison's boyfriend moved out of her dorm room.

Allison and Cam kept Sonia just about solvent during the period when she was still waitressing, but I only ended up using her services once. It wasn't that I didn't have the money for her, it was just that every time I was tempted to pay her for something, I realized that I didn't need her that much, I could handle it myself. It usually hit me on a Friday afternoon when I was facing a Friday night with no plans because Allison and Cam were both doing something with their boyfriends and it was too late to call any of my second-tier friends precisely because they were second-tier friends and therefore not close enough for me to impose last-minute social desperation on them. But no matter how much I dreaded the prospect of going straight to my apartment after work, I could never bring myself to tell Sonia, "Don't go to the restaurant tonight, it's on me." Instead I'd scurry through my neighborhood, eyes on the sidewalk without so much as a glance into the windows of bars or restaurants at the people who had plans for Friday night. I'd slink into my local video store hoping that the clerk wouldn't try to hit on me again, then scurry home to watch a romantic comedy followed by a thriller with a romantic comedy ending. I'd go to sleep full of movies and wake up ready for brunch.

Who would want to call attention to the fact that you're paying someone to hang out with you?

But the one time I did pay for Sonia's company, I didn't hesitate. I'd been having a mild flirtation with this guy Brian at my office. At least I thought it was a flirtation--isn't it a flirtation if someone compliments you on your clothes, pats your arm at any opportunity, and forwards you non-work-related email about monkeys? But I didn't want to push it because we worked together--if he wasn't into it, it could become a daily dose of awkwardness. Despite my attempts at nonchalance, I was starting to think about him when I shouldn't and naturally was excited when he invited me to a party. He made a point of saying that no one else from the office was invited, which meant I couldn't bring any work friends. I couldn't go by myself, not to a party where I wouldn't know anyone except the guy I had a crush on who very well might have a girlfriend or no interest in me or both.

That night I got my money's worth, starting from the second Sonia and I arrived and Brian said, "I didn't think you'd come!" which instantly made me wonder why I did. But then he grabbed my arm--more than a pat!--and led me over to meet some of his friends and introduced me as "the only person I can stand at work," which was the closest thing to a declaration of affection I'd had from him. Sonia stayed out of the way, hovering around the drink table mixing gimlets for us, while Brian ushered me around to every corner of his one-bedroom. This all lasted long enough for me to settle into it and enjoy what seemed to be pre-girlfriend orientation. He was just telling me that he used to be a nerd in high school when keys turned in his front door and a woman came in with a bag that had French bread sticking out and she chirped, "Ohmigod Brian it took so much longer than I thought--hello, hello, everyone! Sorry I'm late," and as she said this, Brian swooped on her, taking the bag and giving her a kiss on the lips that was light but not at all perfunctory. Zoom--Sonia was right next to me just as my face started to radiate that heat of embarrassment, disappointment, sadness, and feeling like a total idiot. But of course we couldn't just leave as soon as the fiancée showed up--because that's what she turned out to be, the fiancée--so Sonia covered me, taking the lead as we blended with some of Brian's friends and struggled through normal getting-to-know-you-though-I'm-never-going-to-see-you-again party conversation. Then I told Brian, "I think we're going to take off," which is so much better than "I'd better go," and we went straight to a bar for a recovery drink or three. Before I could over-wallow, Sonia had built a persuasive case against Brian, which she topped off by reminding me that he was wearing a sweater vest. I wrote her a check on the spot.

It was Cam who first recommended Sonia to someone outside our immediate circle. Allison told me about it, and I have to say that I was a little bugged by the fact that Cam hadn't consulted me before taking such a big step when the whole thing had been my idea in the first place. I had to make sure Sonia was OK with it, I wanted her to know that she didn't have to do any of it, she could cut us all off if she wanted. So what if Allison had to find the perfect couch all by herself or if Cam had to find someone else to accompany her to her boss's poetry reading? Sonia had to know that she was our friend first and we cared about her beyond the money and the convenience, and that I was worried that an outsider wouldn't see it that way, that she'd treat Sonia as some kind of friend-slash-whore or whore-slash-friend.

That was pretty much the speech I gave her when I called, minus the part about the whore-friend (I think I said that this stranger might treat her "differently"). Sonia thanked me warmly for my concern but then told me that it was a little misplaced. "For one thing," she said, "she's not a total stranger. Her name is Marian, she's a friend of Cam's who just moved to the city and needs someone to help her get settled and show her around. And I've met her--Cam introduced us before she even mentioned anything to Marian about money to make sure I liked her, and I do, she reminds me of you, actually."

I wasn't reassured. "Just remember that you can always stop it if it starts to feel weird--Cam would totally understand."

"I know, but I don't think it will, but if it does, I'll get out of it, don't worry."

I still wasn't reassured. "OK, well, let me know how it goes."

"I will," which she didn't, but then again she didn't have to. I ran into her with Marian at a party a few weeks later, and Sonia was introducing her around, there was a lot of joking, and I immediately liked Marian--she was funny and smart and was treating Sonia like her buddy, not her employee, like she didn't seem to mind when Sonia left her to talk to someone else or go to the bathroom. Of course I shouldn't have been surprised that Marian was behaving as if she and Sonia had struck up a regular friendship in a regular way--who would want to call attention to the fact that you're paying someone to hang out with you? Plus you want to forget that you're paying--you want to think you're worthy of someone's company on the power of your own personality, which for Marian seemed to be the case. And soon she did become part of our little group, no problem.

But then Marian was Cam's friend to begin with. I've liked most of Sonia's clients she's met through Allison and Cam. It's the third or fourth level of connection that gets me--what I mean is that I go to one of these parties she's always having at bars now that she's a full-time friend, and I meet someone like this one woman Betsie who's going on and on about how she went home for her tenth high school reunion and she couldn't believe how fat everyone was: "You should have seen them running for the buffet." She keeps saying the word fat over and over in this horror-stricken voice, as if she fears for her life in the presence of anyone the least bit pudgy, as if she herself has never yielded to a single excessive impulse nor has ever had any such impulses, as if the absolute best thing about living in the city is not having to see fat people. When I break in and ask how she knows Sonia, she says, "Through Kiki" and I say "Who's Kiki?" and she points to a woman who really annoyed me at the last party by dropping names faster than I could catch them. It wasn't the mentioning of the famous and soon-to-be famous itself that bothered me, it was that this Kiki person's description of her job was such a rapid-fire catalogue of people I was supposed to find impressive that I found it impossible to stop her to ask who the people were whose names I didn't recognize or for juicy details about the ones I did. What's worse is that first Betsie and now Kiki are giving me this look that's meant to be a secret bonding thing: we both know we're paying to be here, aren't we somehow daring and cool and, though we hate to admit it, rich?

I want to inform her that not only will I not get billed for attending but I am also one of Sonia's real original friends, and among her real original friends, I'm the one who has only paid her once and it was for a particularly traumatic party, and if I chose to use her again it would be at the old rate which is practically symbolic compared to the deals she has going with people like Betsie. But I can't say any of it, because Sonia has asked us not to discuss the old fee structure with new clients. Then I think about Sonia's gaggle of misfits back in college and how they were all basically sweet and harmless if tedious--not so the Kikis and Betsies. In my most uncharitable moments I think these people don't deserve friends, that Sonia is aiding and abetting the most distasteful aspects of their personalities and setting humanity back a few steps--just because you find a service that people want, it doesn't mean you have to provide it. Especially when it sucks up your entire life--Sonia works seven days a week, nights, too. She never goes on vacation--that is, she'll go with friends on their vacations. She doesn't date anymore, on purpose--there was a close call with a male client who she obviously really liked and vice versa, but she found herself giving him more appointments than he was due in the regular schedule, and she couldn't have him affect her job like that, it would only get worse, so she cut him off despite his objections, mine too. It is true that Sonia's chastity has helped a lot of other people have sex. So far she and her parties have been responsible for fourteen matches that made it past dinner: eight straight, four gay, and two nerd.

If you happen to catch her on her cell--she'll never answer it when she's with a friend--she's either on her way to her third coffee date of the day or she's in the middle of updating the log on whomever she's just seen so she knows what to ask about the next time they get together. Since she's got so many friends these days, she can't keep up with everyone's office politics, let alone everyone's relationships that didn't pan out, values they think they have, foods they can't abide, childhoods they wish they'd had, or movies they want to rent.

After Sonia got to be busier than me, Cam, and Allison combined, the two of them gave up going to her parties--as Allison put it, "What's the point if you can't even talk to her for two seconds before some new friend horns in?"--and they stopped trying to squeeze themselves into her ridiculous schedule--said Cam, "I talked to her voice mail more than I talked to her." The same thing was happening to me, but I wasn't about to abandon Sonia to a life of Kikis and Betsies. I figured that she must need me more than ever, I was going to support her for a change with an old friendship that was absolutely free--no financial ties, just old jokes about college and new jokes about her paying friends. I'd let her choose which restaurant we'd go to or which movie we'd see, or we'd just hang out at one of our apartments doing nothing--she must want to do nothing when all of her friends seemed to have her running around doing something all the time.

So I kept at her. I went to all her parties, where I endured serial conversations with Betsie, Kiki, and other Sonia clients who now considered me to be one of their friends who they only run into at parties but are always happy to see. No matter how long I had to wait, I made sure to give Sonia real hugs hello and goodbye with meaningful "Let's get together's" and "Call me's" instead of air kiss, air kiss. I sent her gift certificates for massages, kiwi wraps, anything I could think of to relieve her stress. I left her messages a couple of times a week, offering to get together whenever she had any time at all--during a weekday, a weeknight, a weekend--wherever she wanted.

She took me up on it about once a month and we'd meet for 20 minutes on a subway platform. We'd settle on a bench if one was free and I'd start, "So how are you?" to which she'd reply, "Incredibly busy, but fine, really fine, actually. How about you?" I'd say, "Fine, but really, how's it going?" Then she'd say something about her landlord or a cold she was getting over, but she never said anything about her friends. I blamed her schedule--how could she really relax and chat when she was worried about catching the express rather than the local so that she'd have time before her next appointment to check out a restaurant she thought might be suitable for the next baby shower? Then I'd leave her a message with strings of hopes like "I hope you're finished with that cough and that you're not too terribly busy and that we can get together sometime soon . . ."

It was never soon, so I decided she needed career advice. I started emailing her links to masters programs for social work with subject lines like "Something to consider." When she didn't respond, I forwarded her articles about people who'd started businesses as party planners, matchmakers, and personal shoppers. Still no reply. I looked up the home pages of some of her college misfits and sent the links under the heading "Where They Are Now." That was the only message she answered: "Thanks--I've actually been in touch with everyone but hadn't seen all their pages." I was stunned, then furious at myself for falling so far out of her loop that I didn't even know she was in contact with the people from school who'd been the source of our in-jokes.

I had to see her. Rather, I had to wait a month to see her. We got a bench on our usual platform, I looked right at her, no how-are-you's, and said what I never thought I'd say: "I want to start paying you, at the Best Friend Ever level, whatever the going rate is."

I was expecting a little bit of a fight, like we'd had when I first asked her to let Cam pay her, with the same outcome. Or maybe no struggle, just a "Yes, that's really the only way I can justify seeing you as much as I want to, thank you for understanding."

Sonia paused for a train rattling through the station. "I don't think you want to pay me."

Her firmness was unsettling, and I started to whine. "Why not--it's the only way I'll ever get to see you on street level."

"True," she said, "but see me for what?" Her tone in all this was 20 percent anger, 80 percent gentle concern.

"To see how you're doing, relax, hang out like we used to, have fun."

Sonia considered this, then said, "But when we were hanging out I was still waitressing and only doing stuff for Cam and Allison and you that one time, and you were fine with it, but now you're sending me emails about social work."

"Right, because I think there are other jobs out there that you'd like just as much as what you're doing."

"You're sure about that?"

"Yes," I said, although I was starting not to be.

"So then don't you see how stupid it would be for you to pay me when you think I shouldn't be doing this at all?"

She almost had me but I rebounded. "I hadn't really thought about it like that, and yes, it is stupid, but that doesn't mean that I couldn't deal with the stupidity if you could." I envisioned us joking around, her calling me her first pimp and me calling her an ungrateful ho. Then I said, "And I'll stop sending those emails."

Sonia was surprised though still hesitant. "Wow, hunh, I didn't know you felt so--I guess we could try it..." Then she started to get enthusiastic. "Actually, this could be great for Julie--I've been training her and if she could come along and observe when we're out--"

I didn't get it. "You mean you put your clients through training now?"

"No, no," said Sonia. "She'll do what I'm doing--in a few months she'll have her own friends."

All my loyalty and bravado and sentimental attachment disappeared. A southbound local was pulling in, I was headed north but I stood to get on it anyway. I told Sonia, "I'm sorry, I can't." We hugged and she wished me luck with everything and I wished it back even though I didn't want her to have luck with everything, only with her love life, her apartment, and finding a new job. Last I heard she'd opened a branch in midtown.