You Don't Love This Man (25 page)

“Aren't those close to the same thing?”

When I explained to him that I didn't work with big businesses,
and that there were certainly plenty of people in Los Angeles who were actual CFOs, and who would possess much greater sophistication than me, he rubbed his forehead and looked out the window into the hazy sunshine. “I think I just want you to be yourself,” he said. “You can act however you think is appropriate.”

That meant nothing to me. “I'll do my best,” I said.

I slipped the pants and jacket on and looked at myself in the full-length mirror, trying to decide what knot the financial consultant of an industrial designer would use. Full Windsor, I decided. Grant was writing something on the hotel stationery—notes to himself, probably—while I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered why I was finding it so difficult to imagine being a suit-wearing financial advisor when I actually was a man who wore suits and advised people on their finances. And I was about to laugh at the idea of Grant dressing me as a prop when I suffered a brief temporal collapse. I was standing in a suit, in front of a mirror, and Grant was speaking to me. This was all just as it had been when he had helped me choose my very first suit at his tailor's, years ago. I had somehow completely forgotten about that.

Later, while he again negotiated the streets of Los Angeles, Grant drummed his fingers anxiously on the steering wheel and told me a bit more. “I just have a sense that I'm on the edge of things,” he said. “I've been working hard, and I feel like I have what it takes to work with these people, but I'm operating on a mix of intuition and bluffing. So all I can do is walk into a room and know that you're the financial guy wearing a dark suit and tie, and I'm the creative guy wearing a light suit open at the neck. It's a calculated effect, but that's just because effects are all I know how to calculate right now.”

“But that's what I meant before,” I said. “You don't want me to
be me. You need me to be a certain kind of character. And this is like a job interview for you, right?”

“Yes,” he said, “but only to the degree that
every
social interaction is a job interview. I don't want you to be a character, I want you to play a role. And you already are that role. You don't have to do anything more.”

After we parked in the lot of a large, square, glass building in Culver City half an hour later, Grant pulled something from his briefcase: a miniature bottle of Maker's Mark, no more than a couple ounces. He broke the seal on the plastic lid, closed his eyes, and drank the contents in one gulp. “That'll be good for the nerves,” he said.

“Do you have one for me?” I said.

“Sorry,” he said, “but listen, remember that you don't need to do or say anything in there. Just follow my lead and use one rule: never say more than one sentence at a time. If there are documents you need to say something about, keeping it to a sentence will make everything easier.”

“But what if things are more complex than one sentence?”

“We can talk about complexity later.”

We entered a lobby of highly polished marble, where a receptionist directed us to the seventh floor. Grant said nothing as an elevator paneled in honey-colored wood carried us upward, and I sensed that having prepared me, he was now preparing himself. I wondered what rules for himself he might be going over as the elevator doors slid open and another receptionist showed us to a conference room with a long, black glass table, upon which sat a silver tray with a crystal pitcher of ice water, and five glasses. Grant sat at the head of the table, propping his large black portfolio case against the side of his chair. I sat to his left, from where I could
look out a wall of windows that gave on to the parking lot, where hundreds of BMWs and Mercedes and SUVs glistened in the afternoon sunshine. These were the boom years of aggressive financing and acquisition, and I couldn't help but think how much interest was accruing on the car loans represented in that lot. As Grant wrote another little note on a pad of paper he had pulled from his portfolio, I wondered how aggressively he was financed. I knew he was living in an unfinished warehouse loft in a low-rent district, but I had always assumed that was by choice, for aesthetic rather than financial reasons. But here in Los Angeles, we were staying at a chic Sunset Boulevard hotel and driving a BMW. Was it usual for Grant to make these leaps from city to city and life to life? And how much did they cost him? I had, at some level, assumed that the way Grant lived was standard for his means. The idea that some—or many?—of his flourishes were achieved on credit hadn't occurred to me before.

“Any last questions?” he asked.

“No.”

He nodded. “We're going to do well,” he said. He didn't sound like himself when he said it, though. Or maybe I'd just never heard him speak that way: nervously.

Two people entered the conference room then: a man with a shaved head, who wore a sport coat and designer blue jeans, and a woman whose khakis and crisp white dress blouse seemed pulled straight from the company's catalog. The man introduced himself as Jeffrey and the woman as Lynn—her title indicated she was his superior. Grant introduced me as his financial manager, and then, as a series of seemingly benign comments about fax machines and freeways moved seamlessly into remarks about Grant's toaster, Lynn began to reference industry details and design terms I had
only a hazy understanding of, and I realized that the meeting was under way. Grant delivered some of his remarks directly to me, as if I were the appropriate audience for certain pieces of info, and each time he did this, he nodded as if what he was saying had ramifications between the two of us that didn't involve Lynn and Jeffrey. I tried to respond by nodding in an appropriately knowing way, which felt mechanical at first, but then the oddest thing happened: I found myself responding to a conversation the content of which was almost entirely meaningless to me. I noticed that although they were dressed more casually than Grant and me, both Jeffrey and Lynn were perhaps a decade older than us, and I began to feel that there actually were two distinct teams present here, and that though we weren't doing something as simple as playing a game, that was only because something real was at stake. When Jeffrey slid paperwork across the table to Grant at one point, Grant passed the copies to me without even a glancing at them, and I thought: Yes. Good move. And from then on, whenever a new piece of paperwork appeared, Jeffrey passed the paperwork to me while explaining aloud to Grant what it was. There were pages filled with statistical information regarding tensile strength, specifications for materials, for units of production, for manufacturing windows and production and distribution scenarios dependent on product sizes and availability dates. Organizing and studying this stack of paperwork gave me something to do, and I began to feel as if my role in the conversation was becoming more than ceremonial. Grant opened his portfolio and slid two large sheets of paper across to Jeffrey and Lynn, and I understood from the explanations between them that the figures and statistics I had in front of me referred to whatever it was Jeffrey and Lynn were looking at. Grant seemed possessed by an earnestness I had never seen in him
before. When listening, he did so with an abundance of attention, elbows on the table and knuckles laced beneath his chin. When speaking, he gazed thoughtfully out the window, or ran his hand through his hair, or grimaced as he chewed on his thumb—actions that made it seem his every response was requiring intense thought and introspection. At one point he turned to me and said, “Not all of this involves you, but you'll want to keep the paperwork anyway, because it's all related.”

“He's just here to look at the numbers that represent money, right?” Jeffrey said. There were smiles all around at that.

“Those are the only ones that will make sense to me,” I said.

Everyone laughed.

We moved on. And I was so taken with the way in which Grant was soliciting Lynn and Jeffrey's attention through the manner of his delivery that I didn't even realize Grant had begun talking about Sandra until well after he'd already started. She wasn't a housewife, he was telling Lynn and Jeffrey, but neither did she reject the role of the housewife, and it was important to remember we were designing for a consumer who played multiple roles, and where, for instance, did Sandra get her thrills?

It was only when Grant didn't answer the question himself that I realized he was actually asking me. “What?” I said.

“Where does she transgress?” he said. “Where does she rebel? What makes her feel guilty in a way she enjoys?”

I was baffled. No one seemed to be breathing. “She only mentions guilt about shopping.”

“For what kinds of things? Not the groceries, right?”

“No. She says she buys bedding too often.” I was about to explain that we had seasonal bedding now in our home, and that I didn't understand why we needed a different comforter every
three months, but hemmed in by Grant's one-sentence rule, I bit my tongue.

“Is it
our
bedding?” Jeffrey asked.

“Sometimes,” I said.

“If sometimes means less than thirty percent of the time, then there's work we need to do,” Lynn said.

“Exactly,” Grant said, and then went on to tell Lynn and Jeffrey that he knew they found his work a bit extreme, but that people wanted something extreme in their lives, because having or doing something extreme is what made them feel like individuals. But most people didn't want their extreme experience to be financial or emotional, he explained—they would rather scream at a football game on television, or listen to loud music in their car, or try a spicy new recipe in their nice kitchen, or whatever it took to make an extreme experience perfectly safe and normal. As Grant continued to make what I knew was a perfectly coherent and standard analysis of the company's demographic, though, I lost my feeling of relaxation, and found it replaced by a strange sense of terror. My mouth dried up; the room seemed to recede. I wasn't frightened by anyone there, or by anything in particular that was happening, but I felt the urge to leave, immediately. I did not want them talking about Sandra. It wasn't making me angry, so much as confused. Because how—there, on that day, in that conference room—had Sandra become a standard example? She was not a test case, or I didn't want her to be. And she and I were not typical examples of predictable behavior. Or I did not want us to be.

“So by making basic products a bit extreme, your customers can have that sense of transgression,” Grant was saying. “The products will be mass-produced, of course, but extreme appearance comes across as uniqueness to most people, and because these
products are also inexpensive and functional, they're the very products you should start with. You'll be giving your customers an opportunity to overpay and luxuriate in the sense of having made a decadent decision, but at a price below ten dollars, which is incredibly low for the privilege of feeling that they've not only indulged in the crazy impracticality of art, but then also got to feel pleasantly guilty about having supported the insanity of it all.”

“I understand that,” Lynn said, “and of course our customers want nice-looking things. But I don't know that they're interested in design theory to that extent.”

“Your
company
, though, needs to have a coherent design theory,” Grant said, “or else you'll continue to fill your shelves with products whose design is just dumbed-down or absent, and that won't work. Because even though your customers might not think about design theory overtly, their instincts are sharp, and they know cheapness and emptiness when they see it. Just think of all the products you've put out that end up in the dollar bin.”

It seemed to me that Grant had just insulted the very people he was talking to, and yet his tone was energetic and upbeat. Trying to escape my own state, I tried to study Lynn and Jeffrey, but I didn't detect any change in their demeanor. And when Lynn agreed that no, the customers weren't dumb, Grant stood and began pacing at the front of the room, gazing at the carpet or out the windows while he continued speaking about how manufacturing advances meant that even cheap products could be perfectly durable and wouldn't necessarily break any time soon, and so their company could probably only differentiate themselves from other companies either ethically or aesthetically. If they wanted to differentiate ethically, he said, they would have to be willing to try to prove that their company was somehow ethically clean.

“We're not at all interested in that kind of positioning,” Lynn said. “Not just because in an industry that relies on mass production it's pretty much impossible, but also because it's an ugly stance, and quite frankly, kind of boring.”

“Right,” Grant said. “It's Pollyanna-ish, so neither fun nor sexy. And that's not what people go to the store for. What you really want to do is differentiate aesthetically, and the way you do that is to have products that work just as well as anything carried at Wal-Mart, but that look completely different.”

“So our toasters look like melting butter,” Jeffrey said.

Grant smiled. “I've been saying ice cream, but I like that. So yes, like butter.”

“But this has been done,” Jeffrey said. “The competition just copies our designs. Jesus, we copy
other people's
designs. You can't differentiate for more than a month.”

“Sure,” Grant said, “but we want to set the terms. When they copy us, we'll change. And when they copy us again, we'll change again. And in that dynamic, where they're mimicking us, we'll be in control of each change. And therefore in control of the market.”

Jeffrey smiled as if Grant had delivered an amusing but predictable punch line, while Lynn looked again at the pieces of paper Grant had given her. “Well, we're obviously interested in what you've shown us here,” she said, “and you're right that I find it a bit extreme. But you're also right that it doesn't look like Wal-Mart.”