Read More: A brief Q&A with Seth Freeman
When she is at work, she has a thousand things to think about. She works for a legend, one of those creative advertising gurus who change the whole direction of the business with a fresh way of seeing, but he is the kind of boss who takes a lot of care and feeding. And care in feeding – because he has a severe allergy to peanuts, a condition which might sound almost comical to those not familiar with it, but which is in fact serious and not uncommon. In his case contact with only a few molecules of peanut causes intense distress, anaphylactic shock, swelling which closes off the windpipe causing suffocation. An attack could be lethal without a quick shot of adrenaline. So you have to get his appointments right and his materials organized or he goes ballistic, and you have to watch his lunch orders like a hawk.
She is a shy person, unsure of herself, although at some level she knows she is quite bright. Working for a genius, however, is not great for the self-esteem. And groups of people have always intimidated her. Mostly she avoids groups, crowds, public arenas. Sometimes the discomfort of being in a crowd can almost make her feel like she is suffocating.
She is a thoughtful person, imaginative, and she can’t help having ideas, as new accounts come in with their unique needs and challenges. Demurely, tentatively at first, she mentions her thoughts in passing, and the great man is actually encouraging. She opens up a bit more, offers more suggestions. Then she is present, taking notes, at the meeting where he floats her ideas, and when they meet with approval, she watches as he takes all the glory, not even in a small way acknowledging her contribution, nothing.
To make matters worse, he wants to celebrate “their” success, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he has baldly appropriated her ideas. His thirty-second floor office not only has a great city view; it is a virtual apartment, complete with kitchen and a sleeping alcove. He opens an expensive bottle
of wine, and feeling flushed and sexy with his triumph, makes an emphatic pass. She tries not to be insulting as she turns him down, but he isn’t in a mood to be denied. As she drinks the wine, she has a momentary realization that she has been drugged before she passes out.
She awakens in the building’s basement, her clothes off and scattered about, a used condom next to her on the cold and grimy cement floor.
In the following days he doesn’t mention the events of that evening. His attitude suggests they should be the best of friends, or beyond friends, the way he might behave if they had had a particularly enjoyable and successful date. In the creative meetings he continues to pitch the ideas she has suggested to him without giving her any credit in front of the group.
There are a lot of things she should do, and if she were a different kind of woman, she might make sure she does them. Report the son-of-a-bitch to top management, or the police. Confront him. Quit.
She talks to human resources, inventing a story about an incident she overheard being discussed in the rest room. She is told the person involved would be better off in the company not bringing such an incident up – although she has the right to. She is told that it would be a he said/she said kind of deal, her disgruntled credibility against a valued superior’s credibility, so it would probably go no further, could even lead to repercussions. They had seen it happen, the woman, not the man, the higher up, getting let go. Anyway, they hadn’t had any reports lately.
The police, it seemed, coming in from the outside, could do even less. Where’s the evidence? She picks up the phone to call the police, but hangs up when they answer. What exactly would she say?
She tries to get it out in the open with him, set some boundaries, make it clear that she, at least, has his number. She quickly sees that such a straightforward approach isn’t going to work, not with this guy, a genius, if nothing else, in denial, evasion, manipulation.
She tests the waters to see how hard it would be to get another job. It would be very hard. It’s a tough market. Her skill set is limited. She would need a
great recommendation from her previous employer (him, that is), and maybe he would feel he would need to do that, but he could also sabotage her chances – if she told him that she was looking, which would clearly be a mistake.
In the end, she does what many women do, have done, will do. She does nothing.
But her choice to soldier on, unsure of her position, unsure exactly what happened that night, down on herself, feeling violated and unworthy, leaves her damaged, full of doubt and self-loathing, eating poorly, distracted. Inevitably she gets sick, leaves a message on her boss’ voice mail, saying she’s home with a cold, she won’t be coming in.
He calls. Cajoling, pleading, pressing all the buttons, using all his available gears. She has picked the worst day to bail on him. He has the biggest pitch of the quarter to pull together. All the temps are incompetent. He just needs a few hours of assistance from someone who really knows the drill.
She responds to the guilt trip. Nose running, pale, eyes watery, she comes in. He is, as it turns out, completely going with her suggestion on this pitch. It was her concept and now he needs her input on the details. Work goes into the evening. She has to order food for him (she has no appetite herself), even as he turns amorous in the intimacy of their working together, his mind turning to a one-thing-leading-to-another scenario. Her sniffling, drippy, fevered state is no inhibitor, maybe even a weird stimulus.
Under the pressure of the workload and very much off her game, with her condition getting worse by the hour, feeling like crap physically and foggy mentally, not thinking clearly, she has forgotten to say “no peanuts or peanut oil” when, with his yelling at her to hurry it up, she gave the order to the health food place down the street. She only realizes the mistake when, standing at the sink, she notices the bits of peanut on the veggie burger, just as she becomes aware of the fact that, in the doorway to the kitchenette, her boss has slipped his pants off. She douses the burger in ketchup and steak sauce as he walks up behind her and puts his hands on her hips. She is trying to think in her cloudy and weakened state how to avoid his violating her again. He turns her to him, playful guy, charmer, and he is pleasantly surprised by what seems a gesture of affection as she feeds him the burger with her hand.
The reaction is swift. He starts gasping for breath. He can’t speak. A hand goes to his throat. The other hand grabs her wrist. He slumps into a chair, dragging her down with him. While one hand is locked on her arm, the other points across the room to his pants, where his needle of adrenaline is.
She struggles to get free of his grip, but she is caught in a vice. She tries to move to the pants. He jerks her back down. She finally slaps his gripping hand on the floor and it releases. She staggers up, and trips over his kicking legs as she tries to get to his pants. She finally manages to reach them. As she grabs the pants, the needle falls out. She stoops to pick it up from the floor, but then pauses, her hand stopped two inches above the needle. She looks back at her boss.
His eyes bulge, staring at her in horror. The skin of his face is turning blue. His body becomes still.
She hurries to the phone. She dials 911. But when the emergency operator answers, she doesn’t speak. She simply lowers the receiver, lets it dangle. She turns back to the twisted form of her boss, his white legs protruding awkwardly from his boxer shorts, stained yellow and moist. He has urinated in them. She retrieves his pants and pulls them onto his legs, buckles the belt. Then she steps over the sprawling legs as she goes to the door, opens it and leaves, closing it behind her.
The office in subsequent days is in a state of shock. The cause of death is easily determined on autopsy, confirmed by the presence of peanuts on the remaining food. But there are questions. Apparently he was able to dial 911, and the 911 operator was able to reverse-trace the call and respond, but why then did he fumble the injection? And who ordered the meal? The health food place recalls that a woman gave the order. Who was with him that night?
She stays home the first day. Nobody had seen her enter or leave the day before, and management and the police heard her voice mail message saying she couldn’t come in. And if she had ordered the food, she certainly would have specified “no peanuts,” as she had so many times in the past. It means nothing that her fingerprints are found everywhere around the office and kitchenette, of course, as are those of others from the office staff.
The police interview her and others. There are things she could say and should say, but she doesn’t. Some of her answers are non-committal. The cops watch her carefully, the way cops do. […]
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Seth Freeman writes fiction and non-fiction and plays for the stage. He is writer/producer of television, for which he created the series Lincoln Heights. His short stories have been published in literary magazines and won awards. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Southern Theatre Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Stars and Stripes, The Hill, YaleGlobal, and numerous other periodicals. There have been over two hundred eighty productions and readings of his plays in the U.S. and around the world. His work in television has received multiple Emmys, Golden Globes, Writers Guild and other awards. He dedicates non-writing time to institutions devoted to health care, education, the empowerment of women, and human rights. In 2019 he graduated with a Master’s degree from UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Seth Freeman