Who You Know (25 page)

“You didn't say anything to Lydia, did you?”

What a weasel. “No, Dan.”

“I didn't mean anything by it. I didn't mean to cheat on her. It got out of hand. I would get lonely sometimes when she was on the road, and I just wanted someone to talk to.”

My face grew hot with anger. I knew that Lydia hadn't been traveling as much in the past three months since Dan and I had started e-mailing each other, but even if she had—what kind of excuse was that?

“I mean nobody got hurt, right?” Dan's childish whine grated my nerves.

“No, Dan, somebody did get hurt. When I responded to a stranger's personal ad, I knew that I had to be careful, but somehow, I don't know, you managed to hurt me anyway. Watching you lie to your wife, watching you lie to me . . . God, when I think about how many personal things I told you about myself, I mean, it's just humiliating. I know you think these past few months have been harmless fun, but I think your behavior has been vile.”

I strode off in a fury. I didn't know whether I felt like crying or screaming. I nearly knocked Les over I was so blind with rage.

“God, Les, I'm so sorry.”

“I'm fine. Are you okay?”

I straightened up and saw that Tom was standing next to Les.

“I—not really, I just bumped into Dan.” I was just about to say that I was going to call it a night when Jen stumbled drunkenly toward us.

“You told him, didn' you?” Jen said to Les. She turned to Tom. “Tha's why you haven' called, isn' it? Les told you we slept together, but it was before you and I were goin' out. I was drunk, I was going through a rough time . . .”

“You slept with Les?” Tom said.

“You slept with Jen?” I said to Les.

“Are you a nymphomaniac or something?” Tom asked. “Is there anyone you won't sleep with?”

At once, I was annoyed with Les, sad for Jen, and mad at Tom.

Then Jen said, much too loudly, “I'm not a nymphomaniac!” Then she ran crying into the bathroom. I ran after her.

Mary from marketing was in the bathroom touching up her makeup. Jen and I stumbled past her. Jen pushed open a stall door and vomited into the toilet. I pushed my way in after her, closing the door behind me.

“It's okay, Jen,” I said.

“No, it's not okay, I really like Tom and I blew it.”

“No, Jen, you don't really like him. If you did, you wouldn't be dating Mike. Obviously neither of them is right for you.”

“I don' wanna be alone. I've never been alone before.”

“You're a strong woman; you're going to be fine. Hang on a second.” I opened the stall door and peeked out. I caught Mary looking directly at me. “Would you mind leaving us alone?” I asked nicely.

Her eyebrows rose, and she made this
eh
sound that indicated how very rude she thought me and how very put-out she felt, but she packed up her makeup and left.

I turned back to Jen. “When did you sleep with Les?” I asked.

“That night at Rios. Drank too much. He drove me home. I was lonely. I don' remember anything.”

With that, she retched violently again into the toilet.

When she was done, she rested her head on her arm on the toilet seat. She stayed there quietly for several minutes. I thought she'd passed out, but then she said, “I miss him. I really miss him.” It took me a second to figure out that “him” was Dave. Tears slid down her cheeks and in moments she was weeping in choking sobs that sounded so sad, so plaintive, I wanted to cry, too. “I know he wasn't good for me, but the way I felt about him was so strong, so intense. We didn't always have good times, but the good times were really, really good, you know? What if I never feel like that with anyone else again?”

I didn't have an answer for her. I just rubbed her back as she cried, feeling helpless to help her. Then I thought about Les. I couldn't believe what he'd done. He'd never struck me as the kind of guy who would take advantage of a woman who'd had too much to drink.

After a while, Jen's tears softened to a dull moan, and I finally noticed the disgusting stench of vomit and urine. I picked Jen off the floor. “Come on, let's get you home. We'll get a cab.” Jen nodded and tried to compose herself the best she could. She put her arm around me, and together, we walked awkwardly toward the entrance. Les was waiting outside the women's room for us.

“I'll grab my car,” he said.

“I think you've done enough,” I said.

But as I supported her right side, he took her left, and together, we managed to get her ambulatory enough to make it down the corridor to the parking lot.

When we got to the entrance, Les said, “I'll pull around. I'll just be a second.”

I was furious with Les, but I couldn't very well stand there all night with Jen hanging on me, hoping a taxi would happen by, so, when Les pulled up, I reluctantly helped Jen in and climbed into the backseat myself.

It was a short drive to Jen's apartment, and I insisted that Les stay in the car while I helped her get to bed. I lingered after helping Jen to bed, but finally I couldn't avoid Les any longer.

He was waiting in the driveway. I slammed the passenger side door behind me. “Well, it looks like Jen is dating one less guy,” I said, not looking at him. “Now's your opportunity.”

“Jen isn't the woman I want,” he said softly into his lap.

“Oh really, who is your latest object of affection?”

“You.”

It wasn't until he said it that I realized it was the answer I was looking for.

JEN

I
f there is a better way to shoot your career in the foot than getting wildly drunk at an office Christmas party, I'd sure like to know about it. No, better not. I'm sure I'd try that, too. If it's something that can damage my career and utterly humiliate me, I can't seem to help myself, I have to do it.

Blackouts can be blessed things. All I remember of that cursed night are two images. In the first, I'm yelling at Les for telling Tom about how we'd slept together, and in the second, I'm draped over a toilet bowl and Avery is comforting me. Those brief frozen snapshots were all I remember of the entire night. I chose to believe that no other coworkers saw me in my inebriated state, nor did anyone hear my unfortunate confessions. Thus, by process of elimination, the only people I could never face again were Les, Tom, and Avery.

It was cruel and unfortunate that the holiday party had been on a weekday. It meant I had to go into the office the next day, pretending to be conscious while trying to recover from my losing battle with the shot glass the night before.

I didn't eat anything for fear of continuing my all-night puke marathon, but I was so exhausted I did something drastic: On my way to work I stopped and bought a nonfat double latte. I'd only had coffee once before, and I thought it tasted like nuclear waste. I put in three packages of Sweet'n Low and it still tasted rancid, but I sucked it down as penance.

When I got to work, I walked down the hallway to my office as fast as I could. I expected my coworkers to make snide comments, but they just smiled as if nothing unusual had happened the night before. Maybe only a couple people saw me and my little alcohol-induced temper tantrum.

Then I saw Mary. “Well, looks like you had fun last night! Feeling better? You were a riot!”

I smiled. Evil, evil, vile, cellulite-ridden bitch. May you get premature crow's-feet and may your husband go bald and impotent before he turns thirty.

“I'm fine,” I mumbled, continuing on to my office. I collapsed into my chair, booted up my computer, put my fingers on my keyboard and pointed my closed eyes in the direction of the computer screen to make it look like I was working while I napped.

“How are you doing?” Avery asked. I was extremely relieved to know Avery was still talking to me. It meant I couldn't have been
that
bad the night before.

“I feel like rat shit. Don't tell me anything I did last night. I don't want to know.”

“I'm here for you if you want to talk about anything.”

“Thanks, Avery, I'll be okay.”

I spent my day trying to avoid Tom and push memories of the night before out of my head. The image of me yelling at Les, Tom's disgust, and Les's expression of surprise and guilt kept popping into my mind. I groaned in embarrassment at the memory.

I could never face Tom again.

 

 

T
he stress of the Expert account splintered through the office. Just about everybody was rescheduling the days they'd planned to take off for the holidays. Everyone was putting in such long hours, no one had time to Christmas shop or decorate for the holidays. Tempers were short and the tension was a palpable buzz of negative energy.

Sharon let us know, in no uncertain terms, that we were expected to be in the office over the weekend to catch up on the Expert reports.

Saturday came and I dragged myself into the office, simmering with bitterness and self-pity. I spent a good portion of my day drawing stick figures of a very pregnant Lydia, the vile salesperson who sold all this to Expert and promised such unreasonable deadlines. There was exploding Lydia; Lydia impaled by a Zulu's spear; ebola Lydia, in which I did a particularly nice job rendering realistic oozing wounds; and AIDS Lydia, complete with lesions.

Despite all of my doodling, Avery and I did manage to get quite a bit of work done. By the end of the day, we were exhausted, the good kind of exhaustion you feel when you work hard and actually have something to show for it.

We got right back to work early Monday morning. At noon, Sharon and Morgan came into our office with the first draft of the report we'd sent to Morgan the week before for approval. Right away, Morgan began talking excitedly. “This report,” he said, brandishing the draft we'd given him, “just isn't acceptable. It's like any other research report. We're not just any market research company, we're McKenna Marketing. We need to go the extra mile. I had an idea about how we can stand out. I spoke with Jack Webb from Expert this morning and he loves the idea. We're going to give them more than just statistics and numbers. We are going to give them qualitative data as well as quantitative so the reports read like a story.”

“A story about the features people want in their dishwashers?” I asked, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

“Morgan,” Avery said, “we've been working on these reports for weeks. The teleresearchers' questions were geared to gather quantifiable data. We do have some qualitative comments, and we've incorporated those into our reports, but primarily our data are quantitative. Even if we had the data we needed . . . I'm concerned that if we make such a drastic change so late in the game we may not be able to meet our deadline.”

“We can do it and we will do it,” Morgan said.

What I wanted to know was, what exactly was he doing that permitted him to include himself in “we.” Avery and I, the teleresearchers, the programmers, and the marketing department were doing all the work; I don't remember him doing squat.

“It's imperative that all deadlines are met. There's never an excuse to miss a deadline,” Morgan continued. “We need to go the extra mile to give them the product they deserve. The deadline is December thirty-first. It's not a suggestion. The final product needs to be on their desk before the end of the year. That's what we've promised, and we're not going to go back on our word. Nothing else is acceptable.”

Sharon nodded in agreement.

Morgan launched into one of his “pep talks” about going the extra mile, which only succeeded in making me more bitter. When he left, I angrily began scribbling versions of malignant carcinoma Morgan and leper Morgan and torture chamber-victim Morgan.

While I doodled, Avery said, “He just negated weeks' worth of our work. Just about everything we've done for the last month, all of the hours of overtime, everything has just been scrapped.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, pausing mid-doodle and looking at Avery over my rendition of skin-cancer Morgan, “are you saying I worked on a Saturday for nothing?” I was glad I hadn't worked very hard until just the past couple weeks. At least I didn't have as much work to throw away.

“When you make huge changes at the last minute like this, you're just asking for mistakes and an inferior product,” Avery said. “The
research
on the dishwashers isn't even close to finished. There's no way we can even do the reports by the eighteenth, let alone get them to editing so they can get them to the printers, by”—she tore through the papers on her desk to find the sheet that contained all the deadlines—“oh my goodness, the twenty-first. What about Christmas? How will the printers be able to finish them all by the thirty-first?”

“The printer is charging us extra, so it's worth it to them to put in the hours over the holidays.”

“Worth it to whom? The boss or the people who actually have to work instead of spending time with their families?” Avery said.

“They probably get overtime so maybe they don't mind,” I said, without conviction.

Avery and I spent the next several minutes trying to figure out how we could possibly get this all done by the twenty-first. We decided to try not to show Morgan anything until the last second so he wouldn't be able to make any more “suggestions.” We'd give him everything at once so he couldn't go through any one report too closely. We divided up work: Avery was the better writer, so she would do the introductions and tell “The story.” I would work on the graphs and data that supported “The story.”

If we worked twenty-four hours a day, we still couldn't get everything finished, especially since the research on the dishwashers wasn't even close to done. Avery asked the teleresearchers when they would be finished with the calls, and they said that if a miracle happened, they might be able to get through the calls by the end of January.

“We're either going to have to convince Morgan it can't be done—I mean getting them one section of the report at a different time than the others shouldn't be a big deal,” Avery said.

“Or?” I asked.

“Or, we're going to have to make up information,” she said in a whisper.

Our office was silent except for the perpetual background buzz of typing and talking from other offices. “We'll deal with that later,” I said. “We'll just get done what we can get done and the teleresearchers will get done what they can get done.”

She nodded, as if we'd made a good plan.