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“Namaste, Esther. Sir, your coffee…”
“Coffee?” I looked to my grandfather. “Your doctor told you to cut caffeine.”
“It’s decaf.” Rafi tried to save him. “Plus it’s actually more milk than coffee so no doctors were bribed while I got this.”
“Shoo! Go, leave me, my coffee, and my assistant, in peace.”
I put my hand up and backed away causing Rafi to laugh as they walked into his massive, glass corner office. Inside, every award he’d won from the Oscars to the Tonys hung on the wall. Not to mention the signed first copies of all his authors, and the photos; him marching for Civil Rights when he was young as well as his filming awards he had won all over the world. Every time I stepped inside that office my grandfather disappeared and the gravitas of who he was—Alfred Benjamin Noëlle, the famed writer, filmmaker, producer, director, activist, philanthropist, and icon—truly hit me.
‘Bye.’ Rafi mouthed and clasped his hands together, nodding his head to me once before clicking the remote that caused the glass walls to frost over making it impossible to see into his office.
“You speak Hindi too?” Li-Mei rolled out from behind her desk in the center of the office. The hive we called it…because it was actually designed to look like a hive, thankful it wasn’t bright yellow, but made of glass.
“Hindi, Mandarin, Turkish, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian…keep in mind we’re still in Asia!” Howard smiled as he came over hand and handed me a bottle of iced tea.
“Wo de tian na!” (Oh my god!) Li-Mei exclaimed as her mouth dropped opened. “How did I not know that? Honestly, I’m kinda hurt. Impressed, but hurt.”
“Yizhong yuyán yongyuan bùgòu.” (One language is never enough.) I shrugged smiling as Howard looked at us, waiting for a translation but I simply drank my tea.
“Guys…what did you say?”
“Aren’t you part Chinese? How do you not know even the simplest Mandarin?” Li-Mei grinned and slid back behind her desk and popped a green cake pop from her Gwen Stefani Harajuku jar into her mouth.
“First of all, I’m half Japanese, half German. Secondly, I know neither languages because my parents were born and raised here in New York. Luckily, maybe my girlfriend will teach me,” he said proudly while I choked mid-swallow causing me to cough so hard I had to grip the edge of Li-Mei’s desk.
“You—”
“I’m fine,” I said quickly glaring at him. “Excuse us, Li-Mei.”
“Don’t mind me ,I’ll just be here pretending to not be interested,” she replied chewing the cake in her mouth.
Ignoring her, I walked towards the conference room we’d just left and over towards the window that overlooked the Brooklyn Bridge.
“You can’t go around saying that.” I hollered at him the moment he closed the door.
“Saying what? That you’re my girlfriend? Everyone knows, Esther—”
“That’s not the point. This is work.”
“Come on. How long are you going to play the ‘we’re at work’ card?”
“For as long as we’re at work!” I clasped my mouth shut trying not yell. “Everyone knows that I’m here because of my grandfather—”
“It’s been a year. Everyone can see you aren’t some entitled brat. The fact that there is now a foreign distribution floor and not a foreign rights desk is mostly because of you.”
“Exactly! There is more on my plate now. More I want to do—”
“And being my girlfriend impedes that how?”
I stopped unsure of how to reply. And so, like an idiot, I stared at Howard—the Yale grad, the golden boy from a good family, the Mr. Nice Guy who had been sweet, kind, and patient, who was allergic to cats but still left food out for his neighbor’s when it came over, the guy who was staring at me waiting for an answer that I owed him but was too much of a chicken to say.
“Esther, are we breaking up? Is that what’s happening?”
I put my hands behind my back and hung my head. “I don’t know…sorry no… I mean…I’m… yeah. I don’t want to move in. I don’t want to settle down. There are so many things I need to do and I need to do them in my own space.”
“I’m sorry too.” He sighed, walked over to me and wrapped me in his arms while I stood there. “I shouldn’t have rushed you. We’ll keep taking things slow, okay?”
When he pulled back I was too dumbfounded to speak so I just nodded.
