Power Play: A Novel (3 page)

Fiona had nothing to apologize for, but Harding was still blaming her for the affair twenty-five years later, despite her astounding career, seventeen-year marriage and consummately respectable life. If anything, it seemed ridiculous to her, and she couldn’t be bothered explaining it or defending it to him. She had been dismayed to find that Harding was the chairman of the board when she took the job as CEO of NTA in Palo Alto, and he hadn’t been pleased either, but there was no denying her remarkable skills, impressive work history, and sheer talent, so he voted her in. He would have looked like a fool if he didn’t. The entire board said they were lucky to get her, and he didn’t want to admit to his personal grudge against her. And Fiona had felt she could overlook his unpleasant style with her. She had, except for the headaches she got after every board meeting. She tossed back the two Advils and took a sip of water as soon as she got back to her desk. She had a thousand things to attend to that afternoon, and gave the green light for the investigation of the board. The firm they hired to handle it hoped to have the information about the source of the leak in six or eight weeks.

By the time Fiona walked to her car in the parking lot at six o’clock, she had had a full day. She stopped at the white Mercedes station wagon she drove, unlocked it, took off her suit jacket and laid it on the backseat, and rolled up the sleeves of her white silk shirt. Without thinking, her actions were the same as her male colleagues before they got in their cars to drive home. She was thinking
about everything she’d done that afternoon, and the board meeting, as she drove out of the parking lot and headed home. It was a beautiful May afternoon, the sun was still warm, and she could hardly wait to get home to Portola Valley, where she swam in the pool every day when she got home. She could have had a car and driver, and no one would have criticized her for it, but she preferred to drive herself. She had never been enamored with the superficial perks of the job. She used the corporate jet when she traveled around the country for meetings or to visit plants. But she had never wanted a chauffeur, and enjoyed the time to unwind on the way home. The time between office and home had been particularly useful to her while the kids were still at home. Now, for the past year, she came back to an empty house every night, which was painful, but she brought work with her, and more often than not, she was so exhausted by the time she finished her nightly reading that she fell asleep on her bed with the lights on, fully dressed. She worked hard, but she had always been there for her children, despite her demanding career.

She had always believed that you could have a family and career if you were willing to put in the time, and she had done it to her children’s satisfaction, even if not her husband’s, who had resented her career from the time she took her first serious job when her son Mark was three. The three years she spent at home with him had been her gift to her son, and she had worked full time, at important jobs, ever since. Both children had never seemed to suffer from it, and her relationship with them was strong even now. As witnessed by her call before the board meeting, Alyssa called her mother frequently, on any subject, for advice or just to chat. Fiona cherished the warm, open relationship she had with her, and her son Mark. Her dedication to family
and
her career had paid off. She had
managed to go to school plays, her son’s lacrosse and soccer games, had done Cub Scouts with him, had gone to Alyssa’s ballet recitals, helped with homework, and made Halloween costumes for them at two in the morning.

Alyssa was now a sophomore at Stanford, and wanted to go to Harvard Business School after she graduated, like her parents. Mark was in graduate school at the Columbia School of Social Work in New York. Unlike his sister and mother, who both had a passion for business, Fiona referred to her son as the family saint. All he wanted was to right the wrongs of the world. And as soon as he finished at Columbia, he wanted to spend time working in an underdeveloped country. He had no interest in business whatsoever. His girlfriend was a medical student, who had spent the previous summer working for Doctors Without Borders in Libya and Kenya, and shared his dreams and altruistic points of view. Fiona loved him for it and was proud of his goals, and Alyssa’s too.

Fiona considered her career as a mother to be as rewarding, important, and successful as her professional career. And the one area where she felt like a failure was in her marriage to David. Very early on, it had become obvious that it was a disaster, and she had stuck with it for seventeen years nonetheless. She had always wanted to make it work, but David wouldn’t let that happen. He had inherited a modest family business, and was a small-scale entrepreneur. Fiona’s interests had been in major corporations and the business world on a much broader scale. He had wanted her to help him run the family business with him part time once she wanted to go to work, and she had refused, convinced that it would be fertile ground for them to get into bitter battles, with each other and his family, and she was wise enough not to try. And she didn’t say it to him, but she
didn’t find his business interesting enough. She much preferred the harder challenges of big corporations and their impact on the world, and the problems they faced, and their far more engaging pursuits. And already with her first job, she had become aware of David’s acute resentment of her success. She came to be the epitome of everything he hated. Not unlike Harding Williams, David used her as an example of everything that was wrong with women in business, and often criticized her for not being at home with their kids, when in fact she was far more present with them than he had ever been. He spent every weekend and two days during the week playing golf with his friends, while she rushed home from meetings to be with her children.

Fiona had covered all the bases, and tried to be a good wife to David, and he criticized her nonetheless. And the final showdown had come when she was offered the job as CEO of NTA. She had been stunned when he demanded that she turn down the job or he would leave her. Alyssa had been thirteen and Mark sixteen then, and she realized that it had nothing to do with them, despite what David claimed. It was all about his ego, and a chance to deprive her of the realization of her ultimate dream. After lengthy debate and careful consideration, Fiona had taken the job and David moved out that week in a rage. She was sad about it at first, but in the six years since, she realized that it was the best thing that had happened to her. No one was criticizing her, battering her emotionally, putting her down, telling her what was wrong with her and what a bad wife and mother she was, or making her feel guilty for her success in the corporate world. She had never made a secret of her ambitions to him right from the beginning, but she had just gotten too big for him. Or maybe he was too small for her.

In the end, although she felt guilty about it, and didn’t say it to her children, it had been a relief when he left her. And it was lonely at times, especially now that the children were gone, although Alyssa dropped in often from Stanford, and Mark came home for school vacations, but she loved how peaceful her life had been for the last six years. Sometimes she thought it would be nice to have a man in her life, but so far that hadn’t happened, and she was happy with her work and her kids, happier than she’d ever been with David. She realized now how bitter he had been, and how angry, and how much he had resented her for most of their marriage. It was a comfort and refreshing not to be the target of his envy and rages anymore.

He had remarried two years after the divorce, to a very nice woman who suited him much better, but in spite of it, he was still furious with Fiona, and expressed it every chance he got, particularly to their children. David’s anger at her appeared to be an eternal flame. And his wife Jenny had the same negative feelings about the corporate world that he did. Her first husband had committed suicide when his career fell apart and he lost his job over an accounting scandal that could have been easily resolved. She married David within the year, made him a good home, had never worked, and hung on his every word. And although he was only four years older than Fiona, he had retired at fifty, a year after he remarried, and he and Jenny spent most of their time traveling the world, while Fiona continued working, loved what she was doing, and maintained her position in the stratosphere of the corporate world. As far as she could see, she and David were both happy now, which seemed like a vast improvement to her, and she was surprised and disappointed that he continued to refuse to forgive her for her failings, and be friends. He just didn’t have it in him. And their children were
disappointed about it too. It was almost impossible to have both their parents in one room, without their father making barbed comments about their mother, and saying something overtly nasty to her. Fiona refused to stoop to his level and get into his games, and usually chatted with Jenny instead about her latest creative project or their most recent trip. She thought Jenny was a good woman and perfect for him.

And Fiona’s own life was simple the way it was. She saw her kids whenever she could, worked hard at NTA, enjoyed friends occasionally when she had time, traveled for business though usually only on short trips, and had long since given up on blind dates arranged by her friends. She didn’t have the time or the inclination, and the people they chose for her were always laughable mismatches. She was also well aware that women with careers like hers were not in high demand on the dating market. They were much too scary to most men, and the assumption was always that if she was the CEO of a major corporation, she had to be a ballbuster or a bitch. She wasn’t, but few men were willing to find out. She didn’t have the energy for dating anyway. By the time she came home from work, she was exhausted, she brought too much work home with her, and it was hard to feel sexy and interested after running a major corporation all day, which had been one of David’s many complaints. He had accused her of no longer being a woman. He told her she dressed like a man, thought like one, and worked like one, and if she wasn’t reading quarterly reports, she was helping Mark with his science projects, which left too little time for sex or romance. His new wife Jenny had no children, which suited him just fine. He was the only focus of her world.

Fiona still felt guilty over some of the things he’d said. She knew
he was right that she hadn’t made enough time for romance between them, but bringing up two kids, while fighting her way through the minefields of corporate America, hadn’t left time for much else. And with the kids grown up and in college, it was no better now. She had no partner or distractions, worked even harder than before, and filled all her spare time with work. It was something she knew she did well, which was a lot more rewarding than being told what a failure she was as a wife. And she had no desire to repeat the experience again. She was sticking to what she was good at now, working and seeing her kids whenever she could. It worked for her.

She drove up the driveway of the large handsome home in Portola Valley, where they had lived for the past dozen years, and she smiled as she got out of the car. She missed seeing the kids when she got home at night, and having dinner with them, but it still felt good to come home to the house she loved at the end of the day.

She set her briefcase down in the front hall, and went to her dressing room to change. She had long since taken over all the closets. She couldn’t even imagine living there with a man anymore, and it was hard to remember when David was there with her. She lived a solitary life now, but one that suited her. In some ways, she had almost forgotten what it was like to be a woman, with a man she loved in her bed. But she had stopped loving David years before he left, just as he had stopped loving her. They had stayed together for the last years of their marriage out of habit and duty, and supposedly for the kids. And then she realized how much happier they all were when he left. Their life together as a couple had been bleak and stressful for years. And now her life was a familiar place, where she was comfortable and in control of her world.

She slid open the door to the patio, and walked out to the pool in
a black bikini that showed off her figure. She was long and lean and in good shape, and didn’t look her age, and feeling the last of the spring sunshine on her back at the end of the day, she walked down the steps and took off with long, clean strokes down the length of the pool. It felt wonderful after her long day, and suddenly her battles with Harding Williams, her concerns about the employees of the Larksberry plant, and all the big and little aggravations of the day seemed to fade, as she sliced through the cool water. She didn’t have everything she had once dreamed of when she married David and had high hopes for their future, but she had what she wanted and needed now: a career she loved, two kids she adored, and a peaceful house to come home to. To Fiona, it was a perfect life.

Marshall Weston drove home to Marin County a little too quickly from Palo Alto, as he always did, in the Aston Martin that was his favorite toy. He worked in Silicon Valley, and was the CEO of UPI, United Paper International, the second-largest corporation in the country, and he and his wife Liz loved living in Ross. It was beautiful, and they had built their home there ten years before, when their kids were younger. The schools were great, and he liked living a little farther from his office. It allowed him to clear his head on the drive home at night, and he liked Marin County better than the peninsula. It was worth the commute to him.

Marshall was fifty-one years old, and had worked for UPI for fifteen years, and come up through the ranks in stellar fashion. He had run the company as CEO for ten years now, and made a fortune with them, in UPI stock, and his other investments had done well. UPI had been good to him, and he loved everything about his job. If anyone had asked him, he would have said he had a perfect life. His career was all-important to him, and Liz was the ideal wife for his needs. They had been married for twenty-seven years, and she had
turned fifty in March and was still beautiful. She took good care of herself, played a lot of tennis, and exercised every day. She took Pilates classes, and swam in their pool, and she loved their life as much as he did. They had three wonderful children, and Marshall had provided for them beyond her wildest dreams. She had never expected him to make the fortune he had at UPI. She thought he would do well when they married, he had been hardworking and ambitious, even in college, but his success had been exceptional for several years. All their dreams had come true.