“It’s an opportunity, Alan,” she had said to me, standing behind her gargantuan desk deep within her office, just hours before she was leaving for the airport and her flight to Miami. “Don’t pass it up.”
“An opportunity?” I said, suspicious at Mary’s very use of the word. Based on previous experience, it had the portends of ulterior motives. “An opportunity for what?”
“An opportunity to bring people together,” she said, exactly as if she thought such a thing was a good idea. “To help communicate instructions and information, and to remind everyone they’re all on the same team and need to support each other.”
Now I knew she was up to something. “Mary,” I said evenly. “You’ve been to the Annual Conference before. You know it pulls everybody in a thousand different directions. Exactly when are you supposed to bring everyone together?”
Mary was rummaging through her handbag, a sleek, aerodynamic beast that doubled as her briefcase. “First thing in the morning,” she said cavalierly, as if it didn't matter to her in the least, obviously more occupied with the items going in and coming out of her bag. Slinging it over her shoulder she looked me dead in the eye and said with all seriousness, “Start the day out right.”
Indeed. Needless to say, I was not surprised when Mary failed to show up for any of these daily meetings. Staff morale and team building was my responsibility, after all, communicated throughout the company not so much by Mary’s words but by her actions—like not showing up for staff meetings. Such trifles were beneath her; her valuable time much better spent on important things like molly-coddling Board members and their voracious egos. But although she exempted herself from these functions, dreadful consequences awaited anyone with equal temerity. It was a nice formula. It pretty much prevented me from ever succeeding.
I tried to keep the staff meeting the morning after Club NOW on as much of an even keel as possible. It was five-thirty in the morning and everyone staggered in as if in a fog, reflexively shielding their eyes from the harsh artificial sun of the fluorescent lights, and immediately grabbing a danish from the small continental breakfast or pouring themselves a cup of coffee from the ten-gallon thermos provided by the hotel catering department. As I waited for everyone to caffeine up my thoughts were helplessly occupied by the cruel mathematics of the situation. Two dozen danish at thirty-two dollars a dozen and ten gallons of coffee at seventy-five dollars a gallon. All of it with eight percent tax and delivered with a twenty-three percent service charge.
I kept it brief. There were about twenty of us, standing in a rough circle in the tiny, out-of-the-way meeting room we used as a staff office. I thanked them. I reminded them of the twenty-five breakfast sessions that would be starting in an hour, the big plenary session that would happen after that, and then the grand opening of the exhibit hall. I asked for and received updates from the people running the registration desk and overseeing our interactions with our exhibit decorator and AV provider. I thanked them again. And I told them to stay in contact over the walkie-talkies we had rented, to call for help when they needed it, and to respond when others called for help. Then I clapped my hands, and they broke away like a losing football team leaving the huddle. They left behind their empty coffee cups and plates of half-eaten pastries, piling them up on a catering tray as they filed out the door. It was over. In ten seconds there was no one left but Bethany and Gerald and Angie and me.
“What was that all about?” Gerald asked.
“What?” I said, not understanding his meaning.
“That,” Gerald said with emphasis. “That little pep talk you just gave at the end. Is that supposed to make people forget about what happened last night?”
I traded a glance with Bethany, and her eyes looked worried, like Gerald was likely to reveal some deep family secret. I looked at Angie and met her bullet stare with as much feigned ignorance as I could.
I decided not to deny that anything had happened. “How do you know about what happened last night?”
“Everyone knows about it,” Gerald said testily. “My god, Alan. Caroline’s not here this morning. Did you think her absence would go unnoticed? The rumor mill is in full force.”
“And what is it saying?”
“That he raped her.”
It was Angie, her gruff voice slicing through the bluster Gerald had been pumping into the air. Bethany gasped, her hand coming up to cover her mouth, and then an oppressive silence descended, deep enough to hear the conditioned air rolling through the ductwork above the ceiling.
“He didn’t rape her,” I said with as much confidence as I could muster. I knew he hadn’t, but in the face of Angie’s flat declaration, I couldn’t help but doubt even myself. Given who Wes was, and his checkered history with attractive young staff members, it was surprising how believable that rumor seemed.
“Then what did he do?” Gerald said immediately. “The staff has the right to know, especially the young women. He’s obviously done something inappropriate; maybe illegal. What’s being done to protect the others, to prevent him from doing it again?”
Maybe it was the look that came unconsciously to my face, the look that revealed the pale fluttering I suddenly felt in my belly.
“Oh, Alan,” Gerald said with aggrieved disappointment. “You haven’t done anything, have you? What happened? Did you think you could lock Caroline away in her hotel room for the rest of the conference and everything would just be fine?”
I found it really difficult to respond to that accusation. I didn’t want to admit he was right, even though I knew I would be hard pressed to prove anything else had been on my mind. I didn’t have a plan, and hadn’t realized I needed one until Gerald started pressing me to produce one.
“I’ve got a meeting to run here, Gerald.”
I thought I was being strong, but if I’d had some time to think about it, there probably wasn’t anything I could have said that would have been worse than that.
“Oh, Jesus, Alan. Fuck the goddamn meeting. Did anyone check on Caroline this morning? Are you sure she’s even still in that hotel room? Or that she isn’t lying in the bathtub with her wrists slit?”
“I did,” Bethany said quickly, rushing more to her own defense than to mine. “I stopped by before the staff meeting. I heard some water running so I called her on her cell phone. She said she was fine, but wasn’t up to facing people today.”
“Did you expect her to?”
“I wasn’t sure,” Bethany said. “Maybe.”
“Do you know what he did to her?”
“He didn’t rape her. To hear Caroline tell it, he just got a little fresh.”
Fresh. Another June Cleaver word. I smiled in spite of the circumstances.
“Do you think this is funny, Alan?”
“No, Gerald,” I said, turning overly serious. “I don’t think this is funny at all.”
“Does Mary know about this?”
Again, it was Angie, stabbing her words into the air like an assassin. If her use of the word ‘rape’ had charged the situation, her reference to ‘Mary’ had set it on fire.
I blanched. There was no other word for it.
“Oh, dear god, Alan. She doesn’t know? You didn’t think to tell her? She owns the fucking company—don’t you think she’d like a heads-up when one of her people is sexually harrassed?”
To be honest, it had never occurred to me, but I couldn’t very well admit that now. Hearing the shock and anger in Gerald’s voice, it was obvious that such a thing should have occurred to me, that as the most senior representative of the company present, such a thing should have been second nature to me, should have been as obvious as the need to get Caroline out of there.
“It was late,” I said lamely. “Too late to call her. I was planning to brief her this morning, as soon as I saw her.” And then, thinking I was clever, attempting to head the next question off at the pass, “This isn’t the kind of thing one wants to leave on someone’s voicemail.”
“Call her, Alan.” Gerald’s voice was stern, frustrated, I sensed, at having to school a supervisor less experienced than he. “She’s going to want to hear about this as soon as possible.”
“She’s at that VIP breakfast this morning,” I said, my tone unconsciously communicating that I knew she ordinarily wouldn’t want to be disturbed at such a function.
“Then go see her. And, whatever you do, don’t just bring her the problem. Bring her the solution.”
“What?”
“Oh, Christ, Alan, how old are you? A problem like this? If you bring it to her without a solution, she’s just going to blame you for it. Don’t you even know that? You have to come up with the solution. You have to tell her how you’re going to fix it before you even tell her what’s wrong. How’d you get as far as you have if you don’t even know that?”
I didn’t like his demeaning tone, even less so with Bethany and Angie standing there as silent witnesses, but he was right. If he hadn’t been so right I probably wouldn’t have allowed him to speak to me that way. But what he said was obviously right, so right that I couldn’t legitimately call him out for simply calling my attention to it. I’d look the even bigger fool than I already felt.
“You got real responsibilities here, Alan. And you’d better start seeing to them.”
+ + +
“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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