Who You Know (7 page)

AVERY

I
had Jen and Rette over for dinner. I made grilled vegetables, polenta, and Gorgonzola cheese, building a vegetable pyramid of Portobello mushrooms and zucchini on top of the polenta and topping it with the cheese, and arranging the asparagus, grilled tomatoes, and peppers around it in a circle. I drizzled a rich cream sauce over it all.

“Avery, you are such a domestic goddess. It looks gorgeous,” Rette said.

I opened a bottle of red wine and poured each of us a glass. “Thanks.”

“So not like I'm going to get the job, but just in case, tell me everything about this great company of yours. Ave, you've been there the longest. What's the scoop?”

“The scoop. Well, the company is six years old now; I've been there for five years. It was founded by Morgan McKenna. He's a small, wiry man with a sort of . . . I think some people think of him as being kind of abrasive. He's super smart, and you know how sometimes really intelligent people don't always have the best people skills? He has a Ph.D. in psychology, which is kind of strange because he seems much more interested in statistics than people. Morgan is kind of . . . he's very particular. Everything has to be cleared through him.”

“Avery, sometimes you're so nice it's too annoying for words,” Jen said. “He's a micromanaging control freak. He still acts like it's a company of ten instead of a company of more than a hundred. Everything still has to go through him; it's ridiculous. It's a total bottleneck. You can't get anything done; it's impossible to get anything done by our deadlines, and Morgan never seems to notice that he's the one holding the project up for three weeks.”

“Even so, never, never send something out without his approval. A long time ago, more than four years ago, Sharon sent something to the printer without his approval. He'd seen the next-to-last draft—Sharon incorporated his changes and assumed it was good to go. But after it went to print, it turned out there was something Morgan didn't like, and he just went nuts, screaming and yelling. He was so furious; I thought Sharon might get fired. He kept ranting about how he'd already said that nothing could go out without his approval, didn't we respect him at all?”

“Any other characters I should watch out for?”

“There are eight VPs at McKenna, and they are all men, but you probably won't ever see any of them because we're not important enough,” Jen said. “On the McKenna Marketing food chain, we're like, swamp algae.”

“There are fourteen managers, three of whom are women: Eleanore, Sharon, and Pam,” I added. “They all report to Glenn, the VP of marketing. Pam is the one manager I really like. She's incredibly hard working and always puts in insane hours and she's just really nice and very competent.”

“The corporate mafia there,” Jen said, “are three close friends known as the M&M gang because their names are Marc with a
c,
Mark with a
k,
and Mary. Marc and Mark both worked in the IT department and are something managerial. Mary works in marketing and is about as genuine as a silicone implant. Mark with a
k
is also known as Killer Mark because he'll start screaming at you for like, no reason at all. The M&M gang are all really good-looking, but they basically have the IQs of rotted logs. God forbid you ever need to get the IT department to run stats for a report. Marc and Mark are all arrogant, like their department is the most important, and therefore they can't be bothered to help anyone else get their jobs done. And when they finally do do what you ask them to, they always get it wrong, and when you point out that what they gave you wasn't what you needed, Marc goes blank and Mark goes ballistic.”

“Sounds
great,”
Rette said.

“I know sometimes I think . . .” I started. “You want some more wine?”

“Please,” Jen said.

I poured her another glass. “Sometimes I think about my life and I just wonder, how did I get here? This was never how I expected my life would turn out. I went to a performing arts high school in New York, right? And then majored in dance in college, and I was never taught how to write a résumé or fix a toilet or balance a budget. I never worried about that stuff. I just thought about dancing and writing and pottery. I never even considered a future after dance. After I quit my job on the cruise ship, I came home, got the job at McKenna, and spent a year sort of picking up the pieces of my life after breaking up with Marcos, this guy I'd dated on the ship. McKenna was just this job I was going to have until I figured out what I was really going to do with my life. Then I met Gideon and put all my energy into that relationship, and I've been licking my wounds since the divorce. And now here I am, five years later, doing an eight-to-five job working in marketing, and I have no idea how I got here.”

“So if you could be anything, what would it be?” Rette asked.

“Really, I don't know, that's part of the problem. Something creative. I was thinking I could see if I could work for Pam doing some writing.”

“Have you ever thought about getting a job somewhere else?”

“I've thought about it fleetingly sometimes, but never very seriously,” I said. “I'm just too loyal. My mom's like that too. That's why we stay with guys who cheat on us. We just keep thinking things will get better if we work hard enough. Anyway, I'm not really sure what other kind of job I'd want. It's a little bit pathetic when you think about it—I'm thirty years old and I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up.”

“I majored in marketing, and
this
is
not
what I signed up for,” Jen said.

“Well, you guys have cheered me right up. Ave, could you pass me the wine and maybe some arsenic while you're at it?”

 

 

I
t was only about nine in the morning when I heard Jen's machine shutting down. “Not again, Jen,” I said. She stuck her tongue out at me and called down to IT.

A few minutes later, another guy from IT, Les, knocked on our office door. Jen was obviously disappointed. Les was a little overweight and had oversized eyeglasses and a shaggy, recklessly unfashionable haircut, but Les was, after all, a man, and Jen never let an opportunity to flirt pass her by, so she recovered quickly, smiling brightly.

“Hi, Les. Are you coming to Rios with us tonight?”

Les beamed and looked at Jen adoringly. “I'd love to come.”

“All you guys in IT are invited. I think Tom said he was going. You might just want to remind him he's invited. We'll be there right after work, around 5:30.”

She explained what had happened and he told her some possible problems. “So what do you think is wrong with my computer?” He told her a few possibilities. She oohed and aahed at his techy language. He practically glowed from the attention.

I shook my head, envying Jen's talent to make every man think he was irresistible, and I returned to the chore of going through my e-mail.

I'd spent half my morning hitting
CONTROL D
to delete e-mails from Lydia. They were supposed to contain funny e-mails to brighten our day. One out of every twenty of Lydia's e-mails might elicit a
huh
—not a full-blown
ha
and certainly not a full-fledged laugh—but an occasional
huh
was not worth struggling through the e-mail jokes that dragged on for an eternity and had a punchline that wasn't worth the time it took to focus my eyes on the screen, let alone wade through a Russian novel-length epistle.

Lydia never stopped smiling. She clearly spent years and years as a cheerleader. But beneath her dumb exterior lurked a killer closer, someone who could get companies to buy ten times the service they wanted or needed from us and got them to pay ten times more than what they wanted to pay. And after they signed on the dotted line, they would thank her for her help.

She was the one who had sold the Expert account and promised this outrageous deadline, so even though we'd maintained a superficial friendship for these past few years, when I saw her in the halls, I wanted to lash out in violent, entirely unprofessional ways to express just how much she'd ruined my life.

At last I finished going through my office e-mail and went to my personal e-mail account to check on Art.

I felt it was rather brave of me to admit these things, particularly that I wasn't a fan of action/adventure movies. But I wasn't going to lie to myself or anyone ever again. If he didn't love me for who I was, forget it. Being alone just wasn't that bad.

I hope I didn't sound desperate, but running into Les had been such a jarring experience, and I wanted to share my feelings about it with someone. It was nice to have a someone I could tell these random thoughts to.

We usually restrained ourselves to writing each other once a day, but he must have been online because he wrote back within minutes.

Smiling, I printed off his e-mail and put the print out in my purse to take home and save with the others. He'd echoed my thoughts exactly. Maybe meeting online first was actually better than meeting in person. We were free from the prejudice of outward appearance and could focus on each other's personality. I definitely liked his personality. I loved how he was there for his brother, helping him through this difficult time. He was so sweet, so sensitive, so articulate, so funny.