It turned out to be Olga. I was so upset I had completely forgotten it was Wednesday. Olga is my one subordinate, a black woman of fifty from Haiti. She comes to our multimillionaire's little house four times a week. She changes the sheets, including mine, that being one of my privileges, and does the washing and ironing in the basement laundry room. She also cleans the house's bathtubs and toilets, polishes the silver, and wipes the dust from our surfaces, and does any other job that I, the housekeeper and therefore her immediate supervisor, ask her to do. I rarely ask her to do anything, however. I'm a shitty exploiter of other people's labor; I get embarrassed.
A well-defined morning routine was worked out years ago by Jenny, when she was still housekeeper before I took over, and it has been preserved during my time. I'm usually the first one to come down to the kitchen. I raise the window blinds, put the tea kettle on the huge restaurant-size gas stove, and wash out the grounds left over in the coffee maker from the night before. Olga usually arrives during that process. Then, sometime after nine, Linda arrives, the Great Gatsby's permanent secretary of eight years' standing. Just before or after Linda's arrival, the house echoes with the constant ringing of our four different phones.
I complained to Olga about our employer. Basically she agreed with me — after all, I'm her boss. I wasn't looking for any particular reaction, however; I just wanted somebody to complain to. Olga is a very kind woman, decent and hard-working. I inherited her from the above-mentioned Jenny, and I've never thought of replacing her. Olga shook her head at my story. She too thought that Gatsby had been in the wrong: if he hadn't wanted to send the gray pants to the cleaners, why had he put them on the chest with the other things?
"To hell with him! He thinks I need his job! I'll get another one. I'll work as a waiter in a restaurant where I won't have to put up with anybody else's hysterics. I'll work my eight hours and go home!" I told Olga, pacing back and forth in our immense kitchen. She stood leaning against one of the two long butcher-block counters that extend along its sides. I paced nervously, and she stood and listened. Then the phone rang. I picked it up.
"Hi, it's Steven," said the indistinct voice of the Great Gatsby. "I'm calling from the airport. Forgive me, Edward. Considering it logically, you were quite right to send the pants to the cleaners. They were in fact on the chest where we always put the things that are supposed to go out. Forgive me; I was just upset about my own problems and business. It wasn't directed at you personally."
I don't know why, but I let him off. Linda rebuked me for it later. "It's all right, Steven, I understand. Everybody's got problems. It's normal. It was my fault too; I should have asked."
"So long. I'll see you next week," he said. "Goodbye."
"Goodbye," I said.
"He apologized! That was him!" I told Olga in triumph. "He was calling from the airport."
Olga started smiling. She was glad it had all worked out so well, that Edward, who was already thinking about quitting his job, had managed to patch things up with Mr. Grey. I could understand her; from her point of view, I'm obviously a good person to work for. I frequently let her go home early, and I never tell her what to do, believing she knows what's expected of her, as in fact she does. If she sees that the carpet in the hall or in the solarium or in the living room on the third floor is dirty, she gets out the vacuum cleaner and cleans it.
Then Linda arrived, and I gave her my story. "It finally happened to me, Linda," I told her excitedly. "Steven jumped on me this morning. He finally did it!" I said. "I had heard him yelling at you so many times, I was pretty sure my own turn would come sooner or later."
"Only don't expect he'll always apologize, Edward," Linda said. "He only did this time because you're new here, and he's still kind of leery of you. With me he doesn't stand on ceremony that much; I'm lucky if he apologizes every other time. And there wasn't any reason for you to tell him it was your fault either. You should have let him know he was in the wrong, if only a little…"
Linda is brave enough with me in the kitchen whenever Gatsby's not around, but when he stays with us in New York, she trembles and worries. She's thirty-one years old, and she's worked for Gatsby for eight of those years. He has in that time trained her so well and gotten her so much under his thumb, that I'm sure that even at home in her nice, big apartment building in her not so nice neighborhood, she thinks about Gatsby's affairs. When she's in her light blue Victorian bedroom, or making love with her permanent boyfriend, David, or talking to her three cats, she remembers Gatsby. And Gatsby isn't all that reluctant to call her at home either — to use up her free time too.
Linda is the best possible secretary; otherwise Gatsby wouldn't have kept her for eight years. And the other businessmen too, Gatsby's friends and partners who come to our house, have told me more than once that Linda is very quick, reliable, and efficient.
She really is, as the piece of paper tacked to the cork wall of the clean anteroom where she sits surrounded by cigarette smoke puts it, "Able to raise buildings and walk beneath them. To derail locomotives. To catch bullets with her teeth and eat them. To freeze water with a single glance. SHE IS GOD." Next to this is written, "Linda."
Linda and her abilities are noted at the bottom of the list. At its top, by the name "Steven Grey," is the following: "Chairman of the Board of Directors. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. More powerful than a locomotive. Faster than a speeding bullet. Walks on water. Gives orders to God."
Steven has been giving orders to Linda for eight years. And shouting at her. Once he even tore a telephone book to shreds in a fury. Linda is expected to remember and know absolutely everything. Another time he lost his temper because she couldn't find the number of a girl he'd met on a plane a month or a month and a half before, according to him. "A month or a month and a half!" Linda said to me in an exasperated voice. "I found the number for him the next day. He had met her six months before, in November!" Everything that Steven doesn't remember, and as it turns out there isn't much that he does, Linda is required to remember for him — including the phone numbers of his girlfriends. She even classifies and files away the letters he gets from his mistresses.
I was completely enthralled, completely captivated by him when I was Jenny's "Russian boyfriend" and visiting the multimillionaire's little house. Even though Jenny complained to me about his hysterics, I always thought she was exaggerating. I was infatuated with him; he really did seem like a Great Gatsby to me — an overworked businessman, a living symbol of American efficiency and energy. I was delighted by his almost daily flights from city to city or coast to coast across the full extent of America, and from country to country. I was delighted too by the fact that whenever he flew to Europe, he always took that most fantastic of airplanes, the Concorde — and really, what else could he take! It seemed to me that for someone so contemporary, only the Concorde would do.
The corporations over which he presided as either Chairman or President were all very chic — businesses of only the most elegant kind. The extraordinarily expensive automobiles manufactured by one of his firms seemed then like automobiles of the future to me. That's how cars will look in the twenty-first century, I thought. The computers produced by another of his firms competed successfully with the best in the world, those made in Japan. Gatsby and his firm were involved in a real war with the Japanese over those computers and a tiny chip the size of your fingernail (the chip was capable of storing 60,000 bits of information). A secret war of industrial espionage and the theft of technical secrets and of bribery and buying and selling. Just like the high-tech films of James Bond.