Learning Curve (18 page)

F
ive hundred half-drunk employees and their mates combined with a live band made a lot of noise, especially in the glass amplifier of the Market Street Galleria. Alison stood on stage between the members of the Tokyo Police Club and shook a tambourine. She could feel the roar bouncing off the walls and hammering back at her like a staccato of explosions. When the band abruptly stopped, her ears continued to ring.

Someone handed her a microphone. The crowd was cheering now. “Happy holidays, everybody!” she shouted to a blast of feedback. Someone turned down the gain on the speaker. “Is everybody having fun? It's been a heckuva year, hasn't it?” The crowd roared with each question.

Alison introduced the band. She introduced the employee of the year. She introduced the vice-mayor of San Francisco, who—hoping for support on a new anti-fast food initiative—had agreed to represent the City at the event. With each introduction, the crowd cheered. Then she called up Reverend Cecil Williams, an aging black man in a dark suit and African scarf, to accept a $50,000 check for the Glide Memorial soup kitchen. Next, she reached into a goldfish bowl held by hipster-dressed Tipo and pulled out the name of the winner of the company's $150,000 employee raffle: a stunned young Pakistani woman who'd only been at eTernity for five weeks.

Finally, the big moment: the annual Christmas bonus. Alison played it like an Academy Award. A representative from Price Waterhouse in a suit and sunglasses appeared from the wings and delivered an envelope. She took it, opened it, peered inside… and then appeared to be on the brink of fainting. The crowd roared. Pretending to be frightened, she peeked into the envelope again. The crowd was shouting now. Then she smiled, pulled out the card and showed the number to the crowd. “One hundred twenty-seven percent!” she shouted.

Pandemonium. After a year in which most of the crowd had found a job at the hottest company in the industry, and in which they had been offered a future fortune in stock, now they were each to be awarded a bonus equal to more than their biweekly paycheck. There were high-fives, backs slapped, hugs, and kisses that lasted a little too long.

“One. Two. Three!” Alison shouted, and the band broke into “Nature of the Experiment.” Alison handed off the microphone and fled the stage.

It seemed to take forever to wend her way through the crowd; more than ever, everyone wanted to congratulate her, thank her, touch her. Exhausted and battered, she at last found the bar in the back of the hall. There were some small tables set up there, and though most were full, she saw Tony D. sitting alone nursing a martini. He stood and gestured for her to join him. “Saved it for you. I knew you'd need it.”

“It's nice to work with someone who's been through all of this before,” she said as she took a chair.

“Many times,” he said, “but not quite like this. I don't know if there's ever been anything quite like this.”

Alison shook a random congratulating hand. “And Happy Holidays to you,” she said, searching for the man's name, and failing. “Thanks for all that you've done.”

She turned back to Tony D. and shook her head. “I honestly don't know who that was. Is he an employee?”

Tony D. shrugged.

“You know, it's crazy,” she said. “Just a year ago there only a dozen of us. I knew everybody's name—their kids, their lovers, their hobbies, what kind of coffee they drank. Now we've got five hundred employees, and I'll bet I still don't know more than a dozen of them well… and half of them are survivors from the old days.”

Tony D. looked over the rim of his glass at her. “Well, get used to it. Hell, I'm in the business of knowing names. But long ago I learned that when in doubt you call all women ‘Honey' and all men ‘Champ.'”

“Sounds unpromising,” said Alison.
What a repulsive man.

“Whatever. All I know is that you'd better prepare yourself.” He waved his hand at the dancing crowd. “Because five years from now there may be ten thousand people out there you don't know. That's what happened at Validator.”

Alison's eyes narrowed. She leaned in his direction. “You know…
Tony
… you and I have never really talked about your days at Validator Software. Now that you've been here six months, I don't think we'll be violating any non-competition clauses to finally have a little conversation about the place.”

He winked at her.“What do you want to know, kid?”

She gave him a sexy smile. “Tell me about Cosmo Validator… No, tell me about Dan Crowen first. Tell me all about him.”

Tony made a great display of glancing about conspiratorially, then turned back to her with a lascivious look in his eyes. This was going to be fun.

T
he wind and rain were blowing so hard that Dan seriously wondered if the ball he was about to putt might stop short of the cup… and then be blown right back to his putter. For the first time he fully understood the meaning of a ‘horizontal storm.'

Bandon Dunes was proving to be everything he had heard it would be, a classic Scottish Links on the Southern Oregon coast. On the sixteenth green he'd looked south through the driving rain to see the superstructure of a huge dredge rocking in the channel of the Coquille River, just yards from the famous little lighthouse. It was made perfect by what would be, Stevenson had said on the phone, “the worst fucking weather imaginable. You are going to be wet; you are going to be freezing ass cold; and you are going to have the greatest goddamn round of your life.”

Now, the four of them—all Dartmouth Class of 1981—stood around the eighteenth green, awaiting their putts, with the wind and rain turning their foul weather gear into pennants and the golfers in the clubhouse bar above them looking down in envy. Donnie Watters, who was out, bent over his putter. Suddenly he looked up and shouted, “Ain't this a hell of thing? Why don't we all just retire and do this forever?”

Now the rain had stopped, but not the wind, and as Dan walked up Bandon Beach, he reminded himself to head north up the beach into the wind on his way out the next time. That way he'd have the wind at his back on the tired walk back. As the foam boiled up the flat beach, and the low gray clouds streamed overhead, he trudged up the wet sand with his hands in his pockets, bent forward into the gusts.

The great rock monoliths on the beach and just out into the water—so familiar from television commercials and magazine ads—were taking a beating from winter storm waves. Up ahead at Strawberry Point, the great hump of Grave Rock, with its sinister cave openings, was hit so hard by a wave that Dan could feel the booming report. He watched a column of foam blast up the rock's flank fifty feet into the air, like a whale spouting.

Just before the point, he turned inland. The sand wasn't as wet here, and the going was slower. A phalanx of sandpipers skittered away across the dune at his approach. He searched the low sand cliff for the gap in the wall of yellow-flowered gorse that ran up the steep hillside. There.

He climbed the cliff at a point where it collapsed and disappeared into the wall of green stickers. He emerged, panting hard, a hundred feet up the hillside on a steep path that had been cut through a thick blackberry patch. The path of slick green grass was dotted with banana slugs, and he did his best to navigate around them.

At last he climbed a set of wooden stairs and found himself on level ground. A manicured carpet of lawn spread out before him, leading to a redwood deck and a two-story vacation home. Above him, behind a big sixteen-light balcony window, sat Annabelle, wrapped in a robe and sitting in a rocking chair. She had on her reading glasses and was knitting a scarf for Aidan. She saw him on the lawn below and waved. He saluted back.

Two hours later, the wind and clouds had disappeared, leaving an astonishingly quiet beach, clear skies, and a cold, crisp breeze. Dan and Annabelle bundled up in their down jackets, grabbed two chairs and a bottle of Willamette wine and two juice glasses, and went out on the patio to watch the sunset. As always on the Oregon coast, it promised to be spectacular—but also, as always, it was rarely actually visible.

As the sky banded orange, pink, and salmon, and the ball of the sun turned red—revealing a tiny line smear of fog on the distant horizon—they clicked glasses to their survival against all odds.

“I've been thinking,” Dan said.

“I noticed,” said Annabelle.

“You've always said that you'd love to take a cruise around the world.”

“I do remember saying that.”

He turned to look at her. “Then let's do it. We'll take a year. And we'll bring Aiden with us. Spend some time together.”

She stared at him, started to laugh, then caught herself, “You're serious.”

“Deadly so,” said Dan. “Just give me six months. From today.”

Annabelle looked out at the sunset for a long time. Then she reached over with her glass and tapped his. “Deal.”

I
t certainly is an elegant restaurant, Dan thought as he nursed an iced tea and picked at his half-eaten lunch. But then, he hadn't expected anything less. Empty, too. He turned around to a sea of empty tables. Not a single person had come in since he sat down. The very pretty young hostess, looking awkward in her long dress, slumped at the reservation desk. And there wasn't even the sound of clanging pots coming from the kitchen. He went back to reading his Napa Visitor's Guide.

A voice beside him said, “Dan Crowen. Damn if it isn't you. I thought I'd seen a ghost when you walked in.”

He looked up to see Armstrong Givens, late of eTernity, tanned and elegantly dressed in an open shirt and ascot. “Armstrong,” he said, standing and shaking the man's hand. “How long has it been?”

“Too long, Daniel,” said Givens. “What? Fifteen years? Back when you let me work out of the Validator booth at Comdex. Back before we became competitors to the death.”

“Well, I hope we're still friends. Join me.”

Armstrong sat down, leaned back, crossed both his arms and his legs, and studied Dan for a moment. “Just a chance visit?” he asked.

Dan smiled. “You do look good, Armstrong. How come I'm so much older and you never age a day?”

Armstrong gave him a shrewd look. “Because my Robert isn't as reasonable in his expectations as your Annabelle is.” He finally unfolded. Resting his arms on the table, he
leaned forward and confided, “Christ, Dan, I would love for once to act my age.” He glanced down at Dan's plate. “I see you've attempted today's special.”

“Yes,” said Dan. “Quite good.”

“Liar. The truth is that despite my many successful years in business, it never crossed my mind that it isn't enough to dream about opening a four star restaurant, or even to actually sink much of your fortune in that restaurant—but that you actually have to deliver a four star meal. And that, I'm afraid, is beyond the ability of my dear Robert.” Givens put a hand to his heart. “My only defense is that I was blinded by love.”

“So hire a top-notch chef. You've got the money. And you could probably find a half-dozen to steal in just this block alone.”

“True,” said Givens. “But keep in mind, the dream was for Robert to
be
a chef, not for Robert to
hire
a chef. I'm afraid my only choice now is between a fire sale and fire insurance. And given the state of the real estate market right now…”

“Do you miss the Valley?” Dan interrupted. “Do you miss the game?”

Armstrong looked away, out over the lonely restaurant. “My public position on that is that I am well out of it and contentedly enjoying my not-so hard-earned wealth. Privately—and I would only say this to you, Daniel—I miss it right down to the very core of my being. I thought this elegant thousand-dollar-cowboy-boot-in-a-1951-Chevy-pickup winemaking milieu perfectly fitted my sensibilities… and I could not have been more wrong. What I've learned about myself—and what, of course, you already knew about me, which is why you are here—is that I'm a killer at heart. And there's nothing I like more than a good fight-to-the-death business war.”

“Even against old friends?”

Armstrong turned back and looked Dan in the eyes. “I fought you, didn't I? And I daresay I won. So, could I be just as ruthless against a sweet little girl who used to bring me cough drops when I had a cold? Oh,
fuck
yes.”

Dan gave the tiniest of smiles. “Any possible conflicts? Stock? Options?”

“Well, happily—or unhappily, depending on your perspective—I liquidated all of my holdings in eTernity buying Robert's dream house just up the road. Most of the rest I poured down the grease trap here. And what few shares remained I sold off a couple months ago when I realized that eTernity was starting to stumble. Luckily the market hadn't noticed yet; it still hasn't. But it will. Do you agree?”

Dan nodded. “ETernity hasn't tried to lure you back?”

“No. But that isn't surprising. They're still in that phase where any of the pre-IPO founders are an affront to those who run the company now. But Daniel, you still haven't given me a good reason to take a job at Validator. If I wanted to spend my time with dinosaurs, I'd rent
Jurassic Park.”

“I'm not talking about Validator proper,” Dan replied. “I'm talking about a little independent side project.”

Armstrong stared at him for a moment, then clapped his hands and shouted. “A skunkworks! A bloody skunkworks!” The bored hostess looked up, and then went back to her daydreams. Givens chuckled, then grew serious. “Daniel, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't you currently have a small job running a multi-billion dollar public corporation… ?”

“True.”

“…and,
entre nous
, aren't we a little too old for that kind of thing?”

“Well,
I
am,” said Dan. “But look at you: you're still a young man.”

Now Armstrong really laughed.

“And besides…” Dan raised one eyebrow and pointed at the half-eaten food his plate.

“Ah, yes.”

“Robert might even like going home.”

Armstrong caught Dan's eye and winked. “I think I may just leave Robert here.”