L.A. Caveman (2 page)

"Didn't like the shape of your file?"
asked Michael. The stocky, pony-tailed art director was in his
early thirties, the same age as Jake. No one would’ve guessed.
There was something of the eternal youth attached to Michael, in a
flamboyant, suspiciously "arty" way. He paused in his stroll down
the hallway to flash his white teeth at Jake's
confusion.

"What? Oh." Jake looked down to see
the forest-green hanging file folder with the dirt on Stanna, now
crumpled almost to a ball. He smoothed it out, ruefully grinning
back at Michael. "I was just thinking about something."

"Just hope it wasn't me," Michael
tossed over his shoulder, along with a wink, and sauntered down the
hall. His untucked vibrant Hawaiian print shirt swayed gaily with
the movements of his hips. Jake stared after him for a moment or
two in mild suspicion, then shrugged his shoulders, amused. His new
employees were a varied bunch. But as long as they could do their
jobs the way he directed, he didn't care.

Which brought his thoughts back to
Stanna: What was he going to do with a feminist columnist on a
men’s magazine, when his program for success called for
male-bonding writing?

Fire her, of course, like he had the
previous editor. Like excising a tumor, he would cut out the bad
and also cut down on overhead. Beautiful simplicity. But it wasn't
to be that simple, he thought as he glared at the offending green
file, putting it back in the gray cabinet before he could maim it
further.

The 'Woman's Word' advice column would
have to stay. Stanna herself would have to stay. And he had nothing
to say about it -- yes, he did. Jake narrowed his eyes
thoughtfully. He couldn't fire her, it was true, but he did have
control over her. Over her writing, anyway. The editorial content
in his own magazine belonged to him. Stanna would just have to
write in a
Men's Weekly
way. Goodbye "Woman's Word,"
hello..."Stan Says." That had a nice ring to it.

The idea might be so repugnant to her
sensibilities. she might voluntarily give up the column in favor of
more appropriate duties. Maybe she'd even leave.

Jake realized that he was psyching
himself up as it were a ball game, justifying what he was about to
do. Which, if he were honest with himself, was to haunt her out of
the house. He had a moment's twinge of guilt, thinking of the
slender young girl in her cute pink sweater, waiting in his
office.

Then he remembered why she was
waiting. He shrugged the guilt off. He strode back down the hall
purposefully. Business was war.

Stanna looked up at her new boss
leaning against the cluttered desk and wanted to spit into his aqua
eyes. "You're telling me," she paused to get her breath because her
voice was hitching with fury, "I have to have a
guy
name?
That my column has to reflect your Neanderthal point of view?
Forget what's best for them, and just--"

"As the owner of the company, I decide
what's best for my readers. The column should not be Neanderthal,
though I'm not surprised to hear a
feminist
call it that."
He said the word as if it were vulgar. His mouth was a thin
contemptuous line, all traces of empathy gone. A purely ruthless
businessman. "I think, if you decide to continue as Stan the
columnist..." he paused, seeming to enjoy her discomfort, “you’ll
need more education on the subject of men's interest columns.
Specifically, what men are interested in. You might want to pick up
a copy of Robert Bly's
Iron John
. It's a book
about--"

"I know what that book's about,"
Stanna interrupted, barely holding onto her temper. She felt her
own lips compressed into a thin barrier against profanity. "It's
about a bunch of guys who wish they were born in a century where it
was still cool to carry a club and drag a woman by the hair." She
could see he wasn't going to respond to her words. In fact, this
time the interruption barely made him blink, though she could tell
it bugged him. He sat down leisurely, looking dangerously
expectant. She lowered her voice, trying to sound reasonable. She
had to convince him.

"Men don't want that sort of
old-fashioned philosophy anymore. They want to know about modern
men and women, modern solutions, how to deal with the latest
relationship issues of today. I've been educating them in the
column, giving them the tools they need to be sensitive
people."

"Have you?" His hooded eyes sank over
her figure, deliberately roaming the front of her rose-shaded
sweater, then flicking back to her face. Heat mounted to her
cheeks, probably staining them the same color, she thought
furiously. She opened her mouth to really slam him. But he spoke
again in the same measured tone. "And is it your vast experience
with men that makes you such an expert?"

Her head fell forward slightly, her
eyes still locked on his. Had she heard him correctly? There really
was no way of misinterpreting that knowing gaze.

He was absolutely still, head tilted
slightly to one side as if in anticipation of her answer. She
didn't answer right away, offended into immobility and yet finding
it difficult to unlock her gaze from his. His tropical-ocean eyes
simmered with a strange heat as he added quietly, unsmiling,
“You’re an innocent, aren’t you? I should show you just how wrong
your assumptions are."

Her body's immediate reflex-reaction
to his soft words was to tingle warmly. His powerful, mesmerizing
eyes; his superbly conditioned body costumed in banker
business-wear; his shaggy hair; the controlled edges of his thin,
wide lips. The softly delivered sentence. She didn't blame her body
for responding the way it did. She only wished, in that moment, it
had selected any other man but the one in front of her who looked
so… ready.

First she tore her own eyes from his,
as they were no doubt telegraphing her inappropriate, ill-timed
desire. Inappropriate, she emphasized to herself. Bad timing, she
added. Calming down from her electric reaction, she wondered for
the second time in an hour if her imagination was playing tricks
with her.

She had to play it cooler than she
felt.

She tried to appear to seriously
consider his "show you” comment, raising her eyes to meet his. She
tried to look cool. Cold, even. No, she couldn’t sustain cold.
Instead, she promised him, "I'll show you a swift kick where it
hurts if you hit on me again."

The chilly smile Jake bestowed on her
trumped her heat. "Fair enough, Stanna, but you'll write what I
need written, or else I'll have to 'edit' your column extensively
every week. And by edit, I mean rewrite. I'd appreciate it if you'd
learn the new editorial policy and implement it
immediately."

"And if I don't?" Now, why was she
goading him? Stanna felt like kicking herself rather than Jake. She
had such trouble playing it cool.

Jake smiled, amused. She cared for
that sort of smile even less than the chilly one. How could such a
good-looking man be such a jerk? His heartbreakingly-shaped but
cruel mouth parted to deliver equally cruel words: "If you don't,
then you may find that this magazine becomes an unpleasant working
environment for you. Let me be frank. Due to the existence of that
contract, we both know that I can't fire you -- unfortunately for
the magazine. But I can make you want to leave. Or, you may
eventually choose to renegotiate your contract. For example, you
might have value as a receptionist."

Stanna felt her control strain. She
mentally listed all the things she could sue him for if she were
inclined to duke it out in court rather than at the office. Luckily
for him, that went against her own sense of fairness, like running
in to tell mommy and daddy that Rickie next door wasn't playing
nice. She'd had guy friends all her life, and she knew how to deal
with them. Jake was a guy like any other. Easy to handle. No sweat,
no lawyers, no complexity.

Well, maybe a bit of
complexity.

Jake watched her with his
predator-eyes, obviously relishing the thoughtful wariness she was
sure showed on her face.

A guy like any other.

Except…

It was one thing for him to say that
he had a problem with her work; it was another to engrave the line
so clearly between them. He must really dislike her. The feeling
was wholeheartedly returned, she decided.

Jake's condescending voice insinuated
itself again. "Consider broadening your horizons about the column.
You don't have the proper equipment to truly relate to men, in the
most basic physical ways. But there's always research." He smiled
lecherously, and she had no doubt about what kind of research he
referred to.

He pushed his chair back and stood.
"
Men's Weekly
won't support your female-cozy columns any
longer. Make 'Woman's Word' -- I mean, 'Stan Says' -- something of
interest to men." He paused, then added, speaking slowly and
gently, "Not all of us guys out there are cavemen, Neanderthal or
otherwise. We're just sick of all the overreacting feminists." He
walked to the door, opening it to indicate the conversation was
over.

Game, set, and match to the man in the
khaki slacks. This time. Stanna rose, seeking her dignity. She
wasn't going to let him get away with this. She couldn't. 'Woman's
Word' was
her
column, her way to reach men like Tarzan,
here. To teach them what she was in such a perfect position to
know: what works with women, and what doesn't. She wasn't going to
freak out. She wasn't going to cry, or run away, or anything else
he expected. Thanks to her tomboy youth and guy friends, she
understood men better than Jake knew.

He would not eliminate her valuable
job like so much boot scraping. She controlled the stress-reaction
trembling of her mouth with supreme effort.

She mentally commended herself for the
easy way she glided to the door, keeping her expression carefully
neutral. It was hard to keep it that way, though, when he smugly
tossed the reminder after her, "Copy's due tomorrow," but she
managed. Barely.

Men's Weekly
took up an entire
floor in the five-story building, with its advertising department,
copy department, and separate dimly-lit and funkily-decorated art
department. The shoulder-high partition setup let the departments
communicate easily. It also allowed people to drape over them and
chit-chat. Stanna liked the friendly camaraderie and teamwork she
shared with her co-workers. Despite the separate groupings for
departments, everybody truly worked in synch with everybody else,
and her few previous post-college work experiences let her
appreciate the difference at
Men's Weekly
. How lucky she was
to work in the glamorous world of magazine publishing. It was a
good job she had, especially for a twenty-five-year-old, and she
knew it.

But at the moment she had a hard time
appreciating it. She hurried back to her cube directly, because she
didn't want to inadvertently take out her bad temper on anyone. She
seated herself in her cube and stared unseeingly at the computer
monitor, at her half-finished 'Woman's Word' column. She'd heard
the expression, "cross-eyed with anger" before, but she was
experiencing it firsthand. The text on the screen flip-flopped and
she figured her eyes were as crossed as they could get.

Bad enough that he’d fired Ian and
then dictated a column sex change. Worse, though, was that he’d
killed a dream: she had, with Ian's encouragement, coveted the
position of "Editor" for herself. Ian wasn't too many years from
retirement. It could’ve happened.

The grizzled old guy, a veteran of
dozens of publishing companies all over the country, could be a
little out of it, a little uninvolved, maybe. But he let her do
what she wanted. He used to look at her with a strange twinkle in
his pale gray eyes and talk about retiring early to bass-fish. He
would talk in his funny faux pirate accent and command her to "look
after the ship" after he left, as if he was some kind of boat
captain.

What changes she could have made in
Men's Weekly
! Big changes, moneymaking changes. Most of all,
educational changes. She’d fully planned on making
Men's
Weekly
a progressive, cultural 'zine that never, ever resorted
to woman bashing. But now, with Jake at the tip-top of the chain of
command, she wouldn't get the chance to make those big changes.
Instead, he was going full-throttle with his own.

"You don't have the proper
equipment to truly relate to men, in the most basic physical
ways."
That just wasn't true. Men and women were human beings
and basically the same, just with internal versus external
equipment. Why did some people make such a big deal out of the
plumbing? Those people were wrong.

People like Jake who perpetuated that
way of thinking were dangerous to the idea of basic equality. She'd
known the type before. Been friends with some, even. Which was the
reason she got hot under her cardigan over Jake's smug,
insufferable, arrogant attitude. It wasn't right to shovel females
into that limiting bucket o' bimbos. It wasn’t fair.

Maybe he thought his readers wanted a
James Bond/Larry Flynt combo, a column about the finer attributes
of women who were four feet tall with a flat head -- all the better
for setting your beer down, went the sexist joke. Or perhaps a
modern-style Conan critique of large versus small rear ends. She
could hear the locker-room laughter already. She couldn't bring
herself to write like that. And she shouldn't have to. 'Woman's
Word' was hers!