Hardly Working (4 page)

Ida's voice burst in. “Code Blue advancing. Code Blue advancing…oh baby…”

We all pulled ourselves back into the room.

“So that's the big mucky-muck, eh? The new CEO. Like them apples,” said Lisa.

“It's him,” said Cleo. “And thank goodness for that. Can't have a morning's makeup wasted.”

Fran, the secretary, said, “He's had work. I'd put money on it.” Since her husband had dumped her and her three children for Silicon Chick, Fran had been wearing her forty-nine years, crow's feet, double chin, limp gray hair and extra hip-padding with pride. Her favorite game these days was Spot The Cosmetic Surgery. “He's a careful piece of work, I'll bet. Expensive work.”

“Fran.” Cleo laughed. “He's only in his thirties. Why would he need work?”

“Wake up, sister. This is the Age of Perfection. And perfection can be bought,” she snorted. “But I just want to add the footnote that I'd let this one warm my bed on a cold night, nose job and all, just as long as he's out of it by morning.”

I was reserving judgment. I got myself a cup of coffee and went back into my office to think about what I'd just seen. Ian Trutch was everything we were not. He was trouble in a fancy package. And it was going to be very bad for our
image to have a CEO who whizzed around town in a black Ferrari. But then the frisson of nervousness kicked in and for the next few minutes I fantasized about meeting the enemy halfway and riding around in a fast car with an even faster man. Something I'd never done.

The ringing phone interrupted my reverie. I picked it up and said, “Dinah Nichols.”

The voice on the other end was incoherent. It took me a minute to realize it was Joey. He was crying and stuttering.

I said, “Joey, Joey, calm down. I can't understand a word you're saying.”

All I could make out was “hoia…coy…hoia…glop…oodle” between the gasps and the tears.

I tried again. “What's happened? Get a grip on yourself.”

“It's too horrible….” sobbed Joey.

“Just take a few deep breaths then tell me slowly.”

There was a wet silence and then he started. “You know I walk dogs for Mrs. Pritchard-Wallace out near Point Grey?”

“Yeah?”

One of Joey's filler jobs.

“Not anymore.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Well, early this morning I was taking Jules and Pompadour, Mrs. PW's miniature poodles, for a walk along by the golf course, when this thing, this creature from Hell comes streaking out of nowhere, snatches Pompadour in its jaws then streaks away. Nothing left but Pompy's diamond collar. It was a wolf. I'm sure it was a wolf.”

“It was probably a coyote.”

“You're kidding me, Dinah.”

“Was it sort of a yellowish color?”

“Yes, my God, it was. How did you know?”

“Don't you read the news?”

“
Variety.
I read
Variety.
You know that. I haven't got time for global disaster.”

“Jeez, Joey. They figure there must be at least two thousand coyotes in and around town. They can't catch them because they're just too smart. I'd heard about them, I'd just never had a firsthand account. Wow.”

“Wow is right. Mrs. PW's going to have hysterics. She doesn't know yet. She's out getting her facade renovated.”

“Her what?”

“Getting her face stripped and varnished. A peeling and a facial, darling.”

“Oh.”

“And I'm shaking all over. I'm going to have a Scotch right now.”

“Joey. At nine forty-five in the morning?”

“It's not every day somebody's thousand-dollar poochie gets to be part of the urban wildlife food chain.”

“God, yeah. Listen, Joey, you don't want to get the coyotes used to a diet of expensive house pets. It might build their expectations. You know? Like potato chips? Once you've had one, you just can't stop. So don't encourage them…careful where you walk your dogs. Listen, speaking of predators and prey, the big boss from the East just blew in driving a Ferrari and I'm really worried, I've heard he's completely insensitive to people's feelings. He decimated the last office he was in and then some. And I'm told that there may be a total massacre in this office, too…”

It would have been better if I hadn't looked up at all.

“Ooops…gotta go.” I slammed down the phone.

He, Mr. Silent Shoe Soles, was standing in my open doorway, staring at me. The CEO. He was so luscious-looking in real life that I could hardly swallow.

I
an Trutch continued to stare at me. I tried to match his stare but I couldn't stop myself from taking inventory. My eyes went first to his face and then to the mahogany skin and black chest hair at the neck of his unbuttoned white shirt. I swallowed with difficulty. If I'd been another kind of girl, if I'd been Cleo, for example, I would have been tempted to climb down inside that crisp shirt and stay there. Maybe all day. Definitely all night. Little things, the length of his fingers, the way his cuffs circled his wrists, made me shiver.

He had eyes the color of swimming pool tile, surrounded by long, black, almost feminine lashes, and a little set of deep thinker creases between his eyebrows, reflecting his Harvard Business School prowess. His thick, silver-black, stylishly electro-shocked hair was just waiting for some girl's hands to give it a good running through, though I suspected he was the type who didn't like having his hair messed up. Ev
erything else about him was immaculate. He had a knowing, ever-so-slightly cruel mouth and a pirate's tan.

Sailing, sailing, sailing the bounding main…

It was a good thing I knew where the boundaries lay and wasn't the sort of girl who fell for that whole superficial gorgeous man thing. If I had been a real man-eater like Cleo, I would have considered pursuing him for his body alone. Like wanting a whole bottle of Grand Marnier for yourself, it would be a sweet, intoxicating blast, but ultimately bad for you.

I stopped staring at him. He definitely clashed with the office décor, the splodgy lemon custard walls, the burnt caramel Naugahyde furniture, the mangy, pockmarked beige wall-to-wall carpet. The big question kept nagging at me. Why was a glossy high-rise type like Ian Trutch playing CEO to a low-rise walk-up organization like ours?

Jake appeared behind him. “Dinah, this is Ian Trutch. Ian, this is Dinah Nichols, our PR and communications associate.”

He reached out his hand then clasped mine in both of his. They were warm and smooth. “Dinah. Very, very nice to meet you. I've heard a lot of good things about you.”

I swallowed. “You have?”

“You're the girl who goes after the donors. Jake's been telling me about you.”

“He has?”

Ian Trutch still had my hand prisoner. I knew I shouldn't fraternize with the enemy in any way, but when he let go of it, my whole body screamed indignantly, “More, more.”

He added, “Join us, won't you, Dinah? I'm just going to have a few words with the staff in the other room,” and then he touched my shoulder. I stood up and like a zombie, followed the two men out into the main room.

As soon as Penelope saw Ian Trutch, she bounced to her feet and went up to him. “Welcome to our branch, Mr. Trutch. Can I get you a coffee?”

Ian Trutch's face became delectable again. He said, “Yes, thank you…and you are?”

“Penelope.”

“Penelope. A classical name for a classical beauty. Don't wait too long for your Ulysses. I take my coffee black and steaming.”

Every woman in the room was staring, breathless, vacillating between envy and lust.

“Sit down, Mr. Trutch. I'll bring it to you,” said Penelope.

But Mr. Trutch didn't sit down. His tone became snappy. “There's going to be a meeting in the boardroom upstairs in exactly thirteen minutes. Ten o'clock sharp. Everyone should be present.” He took one sip of the coffee Penelope had brought him, put down the mug and walked toward the back door. On his way out, he winked at me and said so softly that only I could hear, “Get ready for the massacre, Dinah.”

A little laugh escaped me.

He'd recognized me for who I was.

The worthy adversary.

I was looking forward to the battle, to showing him that our branch of Green World International was a great team. Excluding Penelope, of course.

Jake looked slightly ill. He turned away and headed back into his office. I followed him in. He sat down heavily then looked up at me with his tired bloodhound eyes. His hand was already dipping into his bottom desk drawer. I had a microsecond of panic that he might have a bottle hidden in there but he pulled out a Bounty Bar, ripped it open, and finished it in two bites. Then, ignoring the little chocolate blob dangling from his moustache, he tore open an Oh Henry! and gestured to the drawer as if to say, “Help yourself.”

“No thanks, Jake. I'll just sniff the wrappers. I'm counting calories.” I was always counting calories.
Four thousand, five thousand, six thousand…

He didn't come out and say, “Ian Trutch doesn't belong here,” but I knew he wanted to.

“Jeeee-susss,” sighed Jake, shaking his head. “I'm not sure I'm ready for this. I've got kind of a creepy feeling. A few years ago a feeling like this would have had me out of here and heading for the pub.”

I couldn't stand to see Jake depressed. “Well, let's think positively about this.”

He gave a sad little chuckle. “Ah…yeah, sure, Dinah. That would be the world's greatest female cynic talking to the world's greatest male cynic.”

“Well…there are some donors out there who respond better to the kind of image that Ian Trutch has. Maybe a little polish could attract more of the kind of donors we're always trying to attract.”

“Polish, Dinah? I don't know. I guess…”

I could see how troubled Jake was by all of it, by the suit that followed the lines of the perfect body perfectly, the chunky gold Rolex watch and sapphire signet ring, the aftershave that smelled like a leathery, wood-paneled library in an exclusive men's club.

I'd spent most of my dating life with Mike, who was gorgeous in a subtle downscale kind of way. But Mike was a man who had, maximum, three changes of clothes, the highlight of which were artfully faded jeans and a pair of expensive but battered Nikes. Formal for Mike was a clean T-shirt.

It was the first time I'd ever been monitored and streamlined by such chic management. When I stepped back out into the main part of the office, I realized that it was a first for all the other women, too. The female energy was radioactive, buzzing out of control. The other women in the office were primed, and when ten o'clock rolled around and we trooped up to the boardroom, they were all ready to convert to his religion, whatever it might be.

Ian Trutch strode into the room, stood at the end of the long table, looking around him as though he were checking out all the emergency exits, then he nailed each and every one of us with those blue eyes and said, “First of all, I know how you're feeling and I just want to reassure you all that my presence here does not represent what you think it represents.”

The tense expressions relaxed only slightly.

“I don't know what you've heard from the main branch, but I want it to be understood immediately that this branch and the main branch represent two situations and methodologies that are in no way analogous. Main branch is the administrative headquarters so it follows that it was getting top-heavy with administrative personnel.”

Top-heavy? According to Moira's version, it was the little guys who'd been axed back East. The people who did the legwork. The people like us.

“I've been told that this branch is known for its team-work.” He smiled. “But it needs to be stated that the individual player, for the sake of the team, will be rewarded for any private initiative taken in terms of information exchange. In the weeks that I'll be monitoring this office, I'll expect the maximum effort from everyone. It goes without saying that if there is deadwood here, then it will have to go. It's also possible that there will be no redundancies. I want it to be known that there will be no unnecessary suffering. So let me just finish by saying that I am looking forward to a fruitful collaboration.” He smiled radiantly.

There was an audible group gulp. We weren't sure whether we were praiseworthy or being judged guilty before the crime had even been committed.

And then he launched into his strategy. It was all in code of course, full of very businessy-sounding words that had little to do with the way Green World International operated. Best practices, upstream, downstream, outsourcing.
Somewhere around the word
input
I looked sideways at Cleo. She had obviously fallen into a fantasy involving Ian Trutch and a round of input, output, input, output…

Lisa Karlovsky was sitting on the other side of me. She elbowed me and scribbled on a pad, “You following this?”

I scribbled back, “Sort of. Don't trust him.”

She scribbled, “Don't care. Waiting for him to smile again. Catch those nice dimples.”

Cleo, who was on the other side of me, grabbed Lisa's pad and wrote, “Like to see all dimples. Not just head office dimples but branch office dimples too.”

For the rest of the meeting, I watched Lisa and Cleo watching him. The women were all working hard to understand as much as possible of Ian's talk, but also to keep a euphoric expression off their faces, their jaws from relaxing. Except for Penelope, the little priss. She was taking notes briskly.

When Ian had finally finished, Jake stood up and went over to corner him in private. Cleo, Lisa and I huddled together.

Lisa whispered to us, “So. What was it we were supposed to understand from all that razzmatazz business-speak?”

“Sorry, I drifted. I didn't follow it. He's so amazing to look at, to breathe in,” said Cleo.

“I'm not sure,” I offered. “It sounds good at first, like we're all supposed to be working together, but then you realize that what he's really saying is that we're all supposed to be spying on each other to see who the biggest slack-ass around here is and then go running to tell him about it.”

Lisa said, “I totally lost track. I was imagining what he'd be like naked and horizontal.”

“Don't do it to yourself, Lisa,” I said. “He's a complete vampire and will suck up all your goodness. I know because I called up Moira in the East and got a bit of dirt. Four empty desks, she said. No higher management. Just little guys. She couldn't talk but I'm going to call her back and get more on him. We need to know the enemy.”

Lisa looked woeful. “But main branch is much bigger, Dinah. He just said it himself. It's a whole different thing.”

“I'm immune to his charms. If I have to go down, I'm going down kicking.”

Cleo smiled. “You take men too seriously, Dinah.”

Lisa nodded.

I shook my head. “He belongs to a win-lose world. You either have to be beneath him, or above him, and if you are above him, he'll take you down. I know the type. The animal kingdom is full of them. There is no win-win here.”

But Cleo was not discouraged. She eyed him hungrily. If she continued at the rate she'd been going, her sexual odometer would soon be into the triple digits. She was a woman who was used to taking men at face value, but
taking
them.

“We're not the only ones lusting around here,” said Lisa, nodding toward Ash.

We all looked over at Ash who was watching Ian. She had a soft glazed-over look, never seen before that day.

I said, “She's got him where she wants him all week. He's going to be in her office going over the books.”

Cleo said. “She's going to have human contact? Somebody's actually going to talk to her
face-to-face?
It'll give her a nervous breakdown to have to look him in the eye.”

 

After work that day, Jake, Ida, Lisa, Cleo and I got together at our usual, Notte's Bon Ton, a pastry and coffee shop on Broadway, just a few blocks from our office, to save the world.

“Energy crisis? What we do is we exploit people power,” said Lisa. “Harness the energy of all those people who go to the gym to pump and cycle off all the fat the planet has labored so hard to supply to their necks and waistlines. We hook 'em up to generators. We don't tell 'em, though. So they're giving back some of the energy they stole from the grasslands when wheat was planted and the flour was ground up and baked into the donuts that they are right now stuff
ing into their mouths, right? Very cost efficient.” She punctuated this by sticking a cream-filled pastry into her mouth and wiping it broadly.

“Sure, Lisa,” I said.

“We go back to the horse and buggy,” said Jake. “Best natural fertilizer in the world, horse poop. And you drink one too many, your horse knows the way home.”

“Windmills,” I said. “The old-fashioned Dutch kind. They could do something arty with the sails, paint them. Stick them out in Delta. People could live in them. Wouldn't that be cool?”

“Trampoline generated power,” said Jake. “Kids love trampolines. You harness that bounce, you could light up the whole city. Or that thing they do when you're trying to drive across the country and they kick the back of your seat for thousands of miles. Man, if we could harness that…”

I shook my head. “We can't do that one, Jake, exploitation of minors.”

“I'm just glad I won't be around when the big food shortage hits,” said Ida. “And if I am, I'll be too tough and stringy for anybody's tastes.”

“Ida,” gasped Lisa, “you're not suggesting cannibalism, are you?”

Ida pontificated. “I figure it like this. With the agricultural society going at it with all those nitrogen fertilizers, it's going to be hard to return to being hunter/gatherers. What's going to be left for us to gather or to hunt? You can't even be a decent vegetarian anymore. I figure a nice roast brisket of fat arms dealer is a good place to start.”

“Here, here,” everybody agreed.

Cleo said, “Okay now, forget saving the world. I've got a headline.”

Now that we'd all given up pretending we didn't fritter time away surfing the Net during working hours, we called our surfing Headline Research. At the end of the day we'd
throw them at each other and play True or False. Losers paid for the pastries.