“No problem, I love a challenge.”

“It can be hectic,” they add.

“I hate to be bored,” we say.

“Are you okay doing menial tasks?”

“Trust me,” we say. “I have no ego.”

They tell us about the principals who will, if we’re lucky, become our bosses. The executive and his wife are both demanding, but in different ways. We read between the lines. He is intellectually rigorous. It is like walking a tightrope when you talk to him. There are many ways to fail and if you do, there is no recovery. He is like our father that way. She is moody, mercurial, jealous, but we have known women like this before, so many. We are sure that we can charm her with our steadfastness. We start to feel that we were made for this job. We will prove it to them. We will show everyone who ever thought we were too much of an idealist to take care of ourselves.

When the offer comes through, we divide those six figures into biweekly installments. After tax, it’s less than we thought, but still, we are little Stalins, making five-year plans, paying off this and that loan, saving for a down payment and retirement. We will be so responsible. We are giddy with responsibility.

On our first day, we look for the husband and wife but don’t see them anywhere. Not in the staff spaces, not in the kitchen, not in the master bedroom we’re whisked through between 10:00 and 10:15 a.m. Eventually we realize what’s going on. We’ve been deemed not ready yet. We’re given an empty workstation, an old desk hastily swept clear, and we spend the afternoon and all of the next day studying the staff manual. It is mind-numbingly arcane. There are rules for everything. How to format an email. How to put a call together. How to make a dinner reservation and put it into the shared calendar. How to enter or leave a room where the couple is present. How to water the plants, change the clocks, stock the refrigerator, fold the sheets. How to be invisible.

We’re too scared of the NDA we signed to talk about the job, but it’s so boring, who would care? We dodge when people ask. We tell them who we work for, but not what we do—or what we do, but not for whom. Nothing we say is exactly the truth (even now), but they get the gist. Or they don’t. “You do what?” they ask. “How many of you are there?” We aren’t sure. The staff list is so porous; people are always coming and going. We think of the guy whose job it is to rip the inserts out of magazines before the couple reads them.