The Notebook

By 1988 I had a list.

I kept it in the back pages of a steno notebook I bought with my own money at the drugstore on Fifth, the kind with a spiral binding and a marbled cardboard cover, because it felt important that it not look like anything belonging to the firm. Names, dates, the small details nobody else would think worth writing down: which junior women Harlan asked me to schedule "working dinners" with, which ones stopped coming to the Friday drinks after exactly one private meeting with him, which ones left mid-quarter with no notice and no forwarding address.

Eleven names by the end of that year.

I didn't confront him. I want to be honest about that, because the truth is more useful than the version of this story where I was brave from the beginning. I was twenty-eight, unmarried, supporting my mother on a secretary's salary, and Harlan Voss was on his way to becoming the most powerful man in a building full of powerful men. Confronting him would have ended my career and changed nothing else. I'd watched two women try it already. Both were gone within the month, their departures filed as "personal reasons," their desks cleared before lunch.

So instead I did the only thing available to a woman with a desk outside his office and control of his calendar: I made myself the wall.

I learned to reroute. A junior associate Harlan requested for a "late brief review" would find, by pure administrative coincidence, that the conference room was double-booked and the meeting had to move to a spot in full view of the bullpen. A new hire he asked me to seat near his office would discover her desk assignment had been "corrected" to the opposite end of the floor before she'd even unpacked her stapler. Business trips got reshuffled. Late nights got covered by someone else's calendar conflict, engineered by me a week in advance.

It worked, most of the time, in the quiet, deniable way that never shows up on anyone's performance review.

Then, in March of 1989, I opened my bottom desk drawer to find my steno notebook gone, and in its place, a single index card in Harlan's handwriting: I know you've been busy.