There was a full moon that night, hanging over the ocean like a watching eye, but it didn’t cause me any self-consciousness. I loosened my tie and took off my suit coat, draping it over one shoulder like a GQ model. When our feet first touched the cool water, I reached out a hand and she took it, like it was the most natural thing in the world. We walked on in silence for a long time, not looking at each other and listening to the sounds of the surf.
“Are you still angry?” she asked me.
“Angry? Angry about what?”
“About what Mary did to the staff qualities?”
I looked inside myself and saw that I was still angry—angry that she had taken something so promising, so full of potential, and had turned it into another soul-sucking part of her operation, another cog in the machine that used people as its raw material and churned out only pettiness and perks for the elite. There was the anger, burning hot inside me like a thousand suns, but seeing it there, repressed and bottled as it was, it seemed small and trifling, an indulgence I neither desired nor could afford, and in a moment I let it go, spreading it out over the immensity of the sea and bidding it goodbye like the ashes of an abusive parent.
“No,” I said. “Fuck her.”
I don’t know if Bethany was surprised by my use of language, but I was. I never would have said such a thing back in the office or even at the hotel restaurant. But out there on the beach, it didn’t seem to matter as much. She didn’t sound surprised when she spoke.
“Well, I am,” she said. “We worked really hard on them and we were so close. They could have really changed things, and she torpedoed them. She clearly saw them as a threat to her power.”
“Don’t read too much into it,” I said. “Most of the time Mary acts out of instinct, not out of malicious intent.”
“I don’t care. She’s evil and I hate her. I used to look up to her, used to think I wanted to be like her, but not anymore.”
I looked at her, her hair partially hiding her face in the moonlight.
“Those are some strong words.”
“They’re true. I was a fool, looking up to that woman.”
I looked up the beach. A few dozen yards away was a little shack on wooden stilts, the kind of place where the hotels locked up their beach umbrellas and water jugs for the night. It had a little rickety staircase and a raised wooden platform facing the ocean.
“Let’s go sit down,” I said, tilting my head towards the structure.
We moved away from the waves, our wet feet seeking purchase in the warm sand as we struggled up a small rise. We were still holding hands but released so we could go up the steps single file, Bethany first, then me. I draped my jacket over the splintered railing, and we sat down on the edge of the platform, our legs dangling over the side and our crusty feet rocking back and forth in the breeze. We stared out at the ocean and in the far distance I could see the lights of one of those colossal cruise ships. There were people out there, I knew, thousands of people on that little patch of light, living, laughing, breathing, dying.
“David didn’t want me to come back to work after Parker was born.”
I didn’t know if this was related to our earlier conversation about Mary, but I didn’t question her. She began to remove her short business jacket and I helped her, her movements comprised of hooked elbows and stooped shoulders in the confined space, and as it came off I saw the thin stripe of perspiration down the back of her blouse.
“I thought he was trying to control me, to turn me into his mother.”
She stopped suddenly, as if she had much more to say, an avalanche of confessions, but stopped short, her toes on the edge of a precipice.
She looked at me.
“What?” I said.
Her eyes seemed more open than I had ever seen them before, pools large enough for me to drown in if I chose to do so, but her brow was furrowed, and her oddly-shaped nose wrinkled in concern.
“Bethany,” I said, taking her hand again. “What is it?”
She looked down at my hand, patted it softly, and then drew hers away. When she spoke she kept her face down, and her voice was resigned.
“I actually talked to that woman about it. Went to her and sought her advice.”
“Who?” I asked. “Mary?!”
“Yes, Mary,” she said bitterly, looking up but out at the ocean instead of at me. I sat quietly and watched the reflected moonlight dance across her face.
“Oh, I can’t believe how stupid I was!” she said, as if purging some dark secret. “Look at her, I told myself. She’s got two kids and she’s running this business. She’s a successful career woman with a family and an obedient husband, and that’s just what I want to be. She’ll help me. She’ll help me make this thing work.”
Mary’s husband Dan ran his own engineering consulting business out of their home in the northern suburbs. I didn’t know what Bethany meant by obedient, but I kept my mouth shut. Now that she got started, I knew, she wouldn’t want to be interrupted.
“But did she help me? No. Not one little bit. She made me feel like a fool, that’s what she did, made me feel like a child who couldn’t make up her mind when the truth was so obvious to grown-up women like her. I asked for some time on her calendar, told her I wanted her advice on a personal matter, but when I went to her office and shut the door it was like I was interrupting her or something.”
I could imagine. Especially given the subject matter. Mary had only one expectation when it came to female employees deciding to have babies. Given how many young women we had on staff and how many times it happened, it was shocking that no one had taken Bethany aside and counseled her. I was a man, but even I knew that Ruthie usually cautioned anyone Mary wanted to keep on how to handle the situation. The fact that she hadn’t made me wonder how long Bethany would be with the organization.
“You’re pregnant, aren’t you? That’s what she said to me—first words out of her mouth—like I was about to break water all over her Persian rug. I wasn’t even showing yet, and that’s what she says to me, as if the very thought made her ill. Ugh, you filthy cow, you’re pregnant, aren’t you?”
Bethany was crying now, not sobbing, but the tears were rolling down her face. I thought about rubbing her back, but kept my hands to myself.
“She called you that?”
“No,” she said, wiping a tear away with her finger while looking high into the sky, careful not to muss her mascara. “But she might as well have. The derision was certainly there in her voice.”
“What did you do?” Now that I had asked one question, the second was easier.
“Nothing, at first. I had gone there for advice, but being met with such hostility, I didn’t know what to do. Her next question took me just as much by surprise. You’re not going to stay home with it, are you? That’s what she said. It. Like it was a lizard or something growing inside me.”
“Well, even you didn’t know the baby’s gender at that point, did you?”
“Oh Christ, Alan, that’s not the point. You don’t call a baby an it. Even before she knows what the gender is, or if she decides not to find out, you never tell a pregnant woman she’s carrying an it. A baby isn’t an it. How can she not know that? She’s got two kids of her own and she doesn’t even know that?”
Bethany was crying again and now she slumped forward as if defeated. This time I did put a soft hand on her back, more fingertips than anything else, and traced gentle trails over the ridge of her shoulder blade.
She gave no outward sign of objecting to the touch of my hand. Lifting her head she stared out at the ocean, shaking her head dismissively. When she spoke it was as if she had firmly decided to stop crying.
“You know what makes me the most upset?”
I think the question was meant to be rhetorical, but in the pause that followed my cell phone rang, its shrill ring pulsing out into the night air. I took my hand off her back to fish the thing out of my pocket. Holding it up to see who was calling, the phone ringing even more loudly, Bethany became a fuzzy image in my far vision as I focused on the tiny screen.
It was Jenny.
I let it ring again, my mind empty apart from wondering why I had chosen such an annoying ringtone, and then looked past the phone and into Bethany’s wet eyes.
“Who is it?” she asked quietly.
“It’s my wife.”
BBRRIINNGGGGG!!!
“Do you want to answer it?”
No. “I probably should.”
BBRRIINNGGGGG!!!
“Go ahead,” she said, sighing, but not without understanding. “I’ll wait.”
I focused on the phone again, the digits of my home telephone number glowing back at me in the night air.
BBRRIINNGGGGG!!!
+ + +
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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